The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.Īnd return to men the Shards they once bore. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan’s motives are less than pure. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.Īcross the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s niece, Jasnah.

Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings.

In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.īrightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. Wars were fought for them, and won by them. It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors.

Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, Book One of the Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion.

The way of kings series order