Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [395]
He was right about it being an army. He was wrong about it being made up of men.
“By the forgotten gods…” Sazed whispered, so shocked that he nearly lost his grip. The army was organized in only the most simplistic and primitive way. There were no tents, no vehicles, no horses. Just hundreds of large cooking fires, each ringed with figures.
And those figures were of a deep blue. They varied greatly in size; some were just five feet tall, others were lumbering hulks of ten feet or more. They were both the same species, Sazed knew. Koloss. The creatures—though similar to men in base form—never stopped growing. They simply continued to get bigger as they aged, growing until their hearts could no longer support them. Then they died, killed by their body’s own growth imperative.
Before they died, however, they got very large. And very dangerous.
Sazed dropped from the tree, making his body light enough that he hit the ground softly. He hurriedly searched through his copperminds. When he found the one he wanted, he strapped it to his upper left arm, then climbed back up the tree.
He searched an index quickly. Somewhere, he’d taken notes on a book about the koloss—he’d studied it trying to decide if the creatures had a religion. He’d had someone repeat the notes back to him, so he could store them in the coppermind. He had the book memorized, too, of course, but placing so much information directly in his mind would ruin the—
There, he thought, recovering the notes. He tapped them from the coppermind, filling his mind with knowledge.
Most koloss bodies gave out before they reached twenty years of age. The more “ancient” creatures were often a massive twelve feet in height, with stocky, powerful bodies. However, few koloss lived that long—and not just because of heart failure. Their society—if it could be called that—was extremely violent.
Excitement suddenly overcoming apprehension, Sazed tapped tin for vision again, searching through the thousands of blue humanoids, trying to get visual proof of what he’d read. It wasn’t hard to find fights. Scuffles around the fires seemed common, and, interestingly, they were always between koloss of nearly the same size. Sazed magnified his view even further—gripping the tree tightly to overcome the nausea—and got his first good look at a koloss.
It was a creature of smaller size—perhaps six feet tall. It was man-shaped, with two arms and legs, though its neck was hard to distinguish. It was completely bald. The oddest feature, however, was its blue skin, which hung loose and folded. The creature looked like a fat man might, had all his fat been drained away, leaving the stretched skin behind.
And…the skin didn’t seem to be connected very well. Around the creature’s red, blood-drop eyes, the skin sagged, revealing the facial muscles. The same was true around the mouth: the skin sagged a few inches below the chin, the lower teeth and jaw completely exposed.
It was a stomach-turning sight, especially for a man who was already nauseated. The creature’s ears hung low, flopping down beside its jawline. Its nose was formless and loose, with no cartilage supporting it. Skin hung baggily from the creature’s arms and legs, and its only clothing was a crude loincloth.
Sazed turned, selecting a larger creature—one perhaps eight feet tall—to study. The skin on this beast wasn’t as loose, but it still didn’t seem to fit quite right. Its nose twisted at a crooked angle, pulled flat against the face by an enlarged head that sat on a stumpy neck. The creature turned to leer at a companion, and again, the skin around its mouth didn’t quite fit: the lips didn’t close completely, and the holes around the eyes were too big, so they exposed the muscles beneath.
Like…a person wearing a mask made of skin, Sazed thought, trying to push away his disgust. So…their body continues to grow, but their skin doesn’t?
His thought was confirmed as a massive, ten-foot-tall beast of