Marsh || Steel Inquisitor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myironeyes) wrote2012-06-04 03:04 pm
myironeyes) wrote2012-06-04 03:04 pm
TLV Application
User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: na
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr, the Risen Emperor
Character Name: Marsh
Series: Mistborn
Age: early forties
From When?: A few years after the end of Hero of Ages
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Despite the awful things Marsh has done while being used by Ruin (a god of pure destruction with a direct line to Marsh’s brain), when he is in control of his own mind and actions, he is a man of solemn convictions and incredible sacrifice, who has not allowed the horrors of injustice that he fights to make him into a zealot. He knows what it is to be used, to struggle to survive, and to give up – and then to resolve anew that others are worth fighting for. He understands profoundly what it is to feel like a monster, and he knows that doesn’t preclude someone from doing the right thing. Because of his own loss of free will, he won’t let an inmate get away with denying responsibility for their own actions. He raised Kelsier on his own, on the streets, on the run, as a kid, insoviet nazi mordor the Final Empire, and Kel turned out okay, so Marsh has to be doing something right. He’ll be kind of gruff and grim, but I think with the right inmate he could do a lot of good.
Item: A sheet of steel, the same sort as Spook's message to Vin about hemalurgic spikes.
Abilities/Powers: There are three basic branches of powers in Mistborn, and regrettably Marsh’s powers involve all of them.
Allomancy – an allomancer gains power by burning metals as fuel, granting them extraordinary abilities. Metals can be flared high (and run out more quickly) or burned in a single burst when used in conjunction with duralumin, but generally there is a maximum amount of power in the metal itself that cannot be exceeded. A mistborn can use all of the metals, while a misting can only use one. The allomantic metals come in pairs of an element and an alloy. Notable metals include:
Iron/Steel – Iron physically pushes against sources of metal, and steel pulls them toward the user. Both apply only in straight lines to the user’s center of gravity, and obey the laws of Newtonian physics. Both metals induce blue sight-lines to all nearby metal sources. Sight-lines through a solid wooden door are weaker. (Inquisitors actually use a variation on this to see, since their eyeballs have been replaced with spikes. They can detect various subtle differences in chemical composition of things, up to and including colors, which are generally the result of different impurities. Their sight is completely unchanged in darkness.)
Tin/Pewter – Tin enhances all the senses at once. Pewter enhances the body’s strength, speed, balance, and resilience.
Zinc/Brass – Zinc increases another person’s emotions, while brass reduces them. Neither metal provides the user any information about the target’s thoughts or feelings. Specific emotions can be selected in both cases, but the target is perfectly capable of noticing uncharacteristic emotions in themselves if the user is not subtle. (Marsh is not subtle.)
Copper/Bronze – Copper provides a shield against the use of Zinc and Brass, and prevents alomancy within a certain radius from being detected. Bronze detects the use of allomancy not protected by a copper cloud. (Marsh is unusually talented with Bronze, as it was originally his only power, and able to detect not only which metals another allomancer is using, but subtleties like which emotions a zinc or brass burner is targeting, and when another allomancer’s metals are running low. Marsh can also pierce copper clouds; this is explained below.)
Aluminum/Duralumin – Aluminum wipes out all other metal reserves without burning them, while duralumin uses up the entire store of any metal burned with it in a single intense flare.
Atium – allows one to see a few seconds into the future and process all that information in time to react to it. This is not deterministic – someone can change what they were about to do based on pre-reactions of an atium burner, but it’s very difficult and results in two future-shadows. Two atium burners facing each other will see a multitude of possibilities as they can each react to the other’s shadows, giving neither the advantage.
There are other Allomantic metals, but they aren’t really important here.
Feruchemy – a feruchemist uses metal as a storage device for various physical or mental abilities. Power is neither gained nor lost. In order to be twice as strong for ten minutes, a feruchemist must be very weak for a proportional but longer amount of time (because it is impossible to be at strength zero), storing up that strength for later. Feruchemical stores can be amassed for long periods and then used very quickly in order to multiply the effects. Feruchemy can physically change the size and shape of the body. A feruchemist storing strength will actually lose muscle mass, while a feruchemist drawing on their strength will gain it. Notable metals include:
Iron – weight/density, Steel – physical speed, Tin – acuity of individual senses, Pewter – strength, Copper – memories (to be recalled perfectly later), Zinc – mental speed, Bronze – wakefulness, Gold – health, Atium - age
Hemalurgy – Hemalurgy requires driving a metal spike into someone’s heart and killing them, then hammering that spike into a specific bind point on a second person, conferring a physical, mental, spiritual, allomantic, or feruchemical attribute of the first person to the second. Some power is always lost in the transfer (think the friction of evil blood magic), but it can be mitigated by pounding the spike straight from the victim into the recipient. Only one attribute can be taken from each death, and all others are lost. There are over 300 bind points on humans and different configurations of spikes produce wildly different creatures.
Inquisitors are made by using hemalurgy to give an allomancer a bunch of extra powers to turn them into the Final Empire’s most terrifying enforcers. Regular Inquisitors can use all eight basic metals and atium, they heal incredibly rapidly from even major wounds (not instantly, but over the course of minutes or hours), and they are stronger and faster than a normal allomancer burning pewter. Because Marsh was a bronze burner before he became an Inquisitor, he effectively has a double dose of that ability, allowing him to pierce copper clouds that would normally veil the use of allomancy from detection. This does not have any impact on the efficacy of copper cloud shielding against emotional allomancy. Normal inquisitors can be killed by removing both of their eye-spikes, removing the linchpin in their back, or by decapitation.
After the Lord Ruler’s death, Ruin directed the surviving Inquisitors to give themselves additional spikes. While the Lord Ruler kept some secrets and powers away from the Inquisitors, Ruin wanted them to be able to do as much damage as possible. Marsh received the most new spikes, for a total of twenty-one, including a spike that granted him the use of duralumin, and spikes granting him some ferumchemical abilities, paving the way for compounding.
Compounding requires someone to have the use of both allomancy and feruchemy. The person makes a feruchemical store of a certain trait, for example, age: they spend a little time older than they really are, storing excess age in an atium metalmind. Then, they burn the store of their own age as though it were allomantic fuel, releasing approximately ten times the amount they originally stored, most of which can be diverted into a new metalmind. This is how the Lord Ruler and Marsh each survive for centuries beyond their normal lifespans.
Aside from the linchpin spike, Inquisitors have one other key weakness. The process of hemalurgy damages the integrity of the user’s mind, leaving it highly vulnerable to psychic/mental/telepathic influence and control in general, not only Ruin’s. Hemalurgy is effectively ripping out a useful piece of someone’s soul and staple gunning it to the Inquisitor’s. Consequently, the normal boundaries of the mind are wounded and permeable.
Personality: The first word Vin uses to describe Marsh is ‘stern,’ and it is 100% accurate on all levels. He’s an incredibly good person, but that doesn’t translate into joy or any sort of open affection, not even for people he cares about quite a lot. His mother is taken and killed when he was very young, and the responsibility of keeping himself and his little brother alive while they were hunted by steel inquisitors leaves him perpetually somber and severe, meticulous about safety, and quick to chastise anything he sees as frivolous or careless. For most of his life, he held himself to very exacting ideals, devoting years of his life to the endless, scrabbling struggle of the skaa resistance. While he has sympathy for people who make terrible choices to survive in the harsh world of the Final Empire (he reminds Kelsier that skaa guards who work for nobles are just men, trying to provide for their families), he tends to hold those closest to him to similar standards.
More than this, Marsh is never happy, not even before he is turned into the puppet of an evil god and used to destroy everything he once fought so hard to bring about. His losses – his mother, Mare, Kelsier twice – weigh heavily on him, and so does the life he has lived, always looking over his shoulder, always fighting to save one more person when there are always so many that he can’t. Marsh is a harsh pragmatist, and he lives within his own limitations, the limits of his world. He accepts them in a way Kelsier refuses to, and this acceptance drains his ability to take much comfort in small victories. This combines with his self-sacrificial streak such that he lives a little bit vicariously through the happiness of others. He suffers to make the world slightly better, and others can be happy. In his mind, that’s all right, that’s enough. When he looses Kelsier and Mare to the Pits of Hathsin, the two people he cared most about and two of the people who found the most joy in a horrible world, Marsh lost the will to continue fighting. He’s principled, but his principles are not enough to keep him going on their own.
Marsh is often defined in the series and in his own mind as ‘the one who gives up’, in contrast to Kelsier, and while that’s true, it gives a skewed picture of him, considering that every time he gives up, when he sees a way to make a difference – always for the sake of others, rather than himself – he ends up trying again. Marsh is unbelievably strong-willed. Every hemalurgic spike gives Ruin – a god of pure destruction – direct access to influence and control someone’s mind. Ruin is capable of taking total physical and mental control over Koloss, with only four spikes, and if given a moment of hesitation, he can take over Kandra, who possess only two. By the end of the series, Marsh has twenty-one spikes, but he manages to conserve a small part of his own mind away from Ruin’s delight and brutality, and is able to break free and defy him for a crucial moment. Marsh is stubborn and patient and although he is very prone to despair, in the end he refuses to allow it consume him, despite overwhelming reasons that it should.
In spite of all this, Marsh isn’t just a just martyr. He’s got a tendency towards petty jealousy that doesn’t ever prompt him to do worse than make bitchy comments, but is definitely an important part of who he is. When he hears that Kelsier is planning to overthrow the final empire – what was once Marsh’s life’s work – he responds with anger and derision, switching tactics as quickly as Kelsier answers him until he’s convinced of Kelsier’s sincerity. (Even then, he doesn’t imagine the plan will succeed, still a practical pessimist through and through; but he still willingly chooses an incredibly dangerous assignment spying on the Lord Ruler’s bureaucracy in hopes of providing information that will help the resistance for years to come.) He even gets slightly pissy over how precocious Vin is with her use of bronze, Marsh’s own specialty, although it’s worth noting that in that case, his vitriol is not directed at her.
Furthermore, although he’s displeased and severe when she manipulates his emotions with allomancy and prompts him to discuss his childhood tragedies, he doesn’t lose his temper with her or punish her beyond a warning not to repeat it. Even though Marsh can be cranky and peevish to others out of envy, he is not deliberately cruel. The only instance that qualifies is during a fight with Kelsier who – as his brother – is something of a personal weak spot. When Kelsier dies the second time, however, he promptly goes completely on the warpath, killing all the other Inquisitors in the city and helping Vin kill the Lord Ruler. Although they can be horrible to each other, it’s the sort of viciousness that is reserved for family, even family that love each other deeply.
Marsh’s cameo in Alloy of Law tells us a lot about what is and isn’t important to him. He uses the Lord Ruler’s compounding trick to live for three hundred years and counting, but he obviously doesn’t care about power – he completely ignores the religion devoted to him and hides in the shadows, doing what he thinks Kelsier would approve of. His self-admitted clumsiness with the emotional metals shows that he doesn’t even bothered to hone allomantic skills he’s had for centuries. He has more than enough power to help here and there from the background, and he doesn’t want or need more.
He cares about his own freedom of mind and action, as expressed through his wry defiance of Sazed’s divine preferences. He gives Marasi information to help Wax because “he does my brother’s work.” Although he has lightened up a little in the much-brighter world after the trilogy, Marsh still doesn’t think of justice or heroics as something he himself is a part of, and instead continues to use someone else as his external taslisman of morality and worthwhile purpose. He doesn’t have anyone left he cares about, but he sticks around out of a deep and perpetual sense of responsibility.
Barge Reactions: Marsh is going to react to the barge with exactly the sort of unflappable stoicism you would expect of someone who has survived having large steel spikes literally hammered through their eye sockets. Aliens, gods, other universes, terrifying situations, plumbing, superpowers, libraries that defy physical laws – none of it is going to phase him at all. He’ll be highly perturbed by floods at first, given what happened the last time he lost control of his own mind, but he’ll soldier through. He’ll also pretty thrown by Kelsier’s presence, but once he gets over his shock and self-loathing, he’ll be grateful for it.
Path to Redemption:
History: Marsh spends the first years of his life in relative comfort, compared to the terrible conditions of most skaa (an oppressed, serf-like class) in the Final Empire. His mother was a clever, resourceful woman who managed to escape whatever estate she was born onto and pass herself off as a noblewoman from a family that had fallen on hard times. With this ruse, she was able to support herself fairly well as the mistress of a minor nobleman. Although Marsh and his brother were bastards, they were still presumed to be nobles and decently cared for. Tragically, when Marsh was still a child, obligators discovered or suspected the truth and dragged their mother away.
Marsh must have known enough, even then, to take his younger brother Kelsier and escape before Inquisitors came to kill them; as half-breeds, their lives were automatically forfeit. Under the stress of his fear and grief, Marsh ‘snapped’, an activation of allomantic powers that occurs only when someone faces the brink of death. Marsh became a Seeker, a kind of misting that can burn bronze to hear when others are using allomancy nearby. Very little is known in canon about the time they spent on the run, only that it must have been very difficult for them to survive.
The experience left Marsh with an obsessive hatred of the obligators and Inquisitors who administered and enforced the Lord Ruler’s regime. He not only survives but finds ways to educate himself, devoting himself to studying the steel ministry meticulous. He joins and eventually becomes the highest leader of the skaa rebellion, fighting in the shadows to improve the lives of those crushed beneath the Empire’s tyranny. He and Kelsier – now a thief and a dandy in Luthadel’s criminal underworld – both fall in love with the same woman, Mare, who chooses Kelsier. Marsh is bitter about it but doesn’t let his personal disappointment interfere with his self-appointed duties until both of the are caught trying to steal from the Lord Ruler himself.
When Kelsier and Mare are sent to the Pits of Hathsin (deadly mines from which no one had ever escaped), Marsh just gives up. He quits the rebellion, retires, and becomes a reticent independent craftsman, although he still keeps an eye out for skaa mistings and mistborn on the streets, and stays in contact with a few of Kelsier’s old thieving crew.
Naturally, Mare dies, prompting Kelsier to snap as a full Mistborn, escape the Pits, and hatch an elaborate scheme to use a thieving crew of mistings to overthrow the Lord Ruler once and for all. Despite being completely unable to talk to his miraculously living brother like a well-adjusted adult, Marsh grudgingly agrees to play one of the most dangerous roles roles in Kelsier’s plan: using his lifetime of study to infiltrate and spy on the steel ministry. In his efforts not to be exposed as a skaa fraud, he accidentally distinguishes himself as an exemplary acolyte.
He sends Kelsier and his crew information that turns out to be critical to the plot’s success despite his fears that he drew too much attention to himself. When Kelsier arrives at a meeting to find the room trashed, soaked in blood, containing only the crumpled remains of an unidentifiable corpse, he assumes Marsh was caught, tortured for information until he broke, and then killed. Kelsier immediately launches the remaining segments of the plan, deliberately getting himself martyred in the process. However, Marsh was actually not exposed but ‘promoted’, transformed into an Inquisitor by a terrible bloody ritual involving several other deaths, but not his own. He learns their key weakness in the process, murders all the other Inquisitors in the city, and returns in time to help Vin survive long enough to assassinate the Lord Ruler.
As the only remaining available Inquisitor, Marsh technically becomes head of the Lord Ruler’s church, and after his death Marsh helps persuade a large swathe of obligators fulfilling important logistical, economic, and archival roles to cooperate with the fledging rebellion government. All too soon, however, he abandons them, struggling with the growing influence of Ruin in his mind.
When Marsh brings Sazed to the conventical of Seran a year later, he still believes consciously that he is seeking information to use against the remaining Inquisitors and those loyal to the Lord Ruler, while actually serving Ruin’s purposes disseminating a warped version of the Terris prophecies. The next time we see him, Marsh attacks Sazed to prevent him from reaching Vin in time to keep Ruin contained in the Well of Ascension. He’s clearly still in possession of his own faculties and distraught about doing it, and yet unable to overcome Ruin’s will.
Throughout the last book, Marsh is literally reduced to Ruin’s puppet in both body and mind. Ruin’s intelligence and a great deal of his power are free to control his servants more directly, and Marsh receives ten additional spikes, more than any other Inquisitor. This makes him both a more powerful/useful tool, and puts him even deeper in Ruin’s thrall. When Ruin’s attention is on him, even Marsh’s emotions are not his own, completely overwhelmed by Ruin’s sadistic delight in destruction. When Ruin is otherwise occupied, Marsh is free to reflect on his own guilt, helplessness, and despair, but even the faintest attempt to wrest any control of his own body back draws Ruin’s attention again.
He eventually resolves to bide his time and preserve a sliver of independent througt without otherwise struggling. He allows Ruin to think he has given up in the hopes of being able to seize control with the element of surprise and commit suicide, depriving Ruin’s plans of his participation at some critical moment. Until then, however, he becomes nothing more than a monstrous vessel for Ruin’s errands. He tracks down mistings and kills them to make new spikes for Inquisitors and simply to bring key players under Ruin’s influence. He arrives in Fadrex expecting to seize the atium cache Ruin believes is there, fights with Vin, and commands Yomen’s forces to attack and provoke Elend’s koloss in an attempt to induce the utter massacre of the city. He intercepts a vital message about the nature of hemalurgic spikes from Spook to Vin, slaughtering the messenger.
When Marsh and the remaining dozen Inquisitors converge on Vin to kill her, Marsh is as brutal as the rest of them. Before he can strike the final blow, however, he remembers the dispatch and wrests a single moment of free movement from the midst of Ruin’s bloodlust, and rips out Vin’s hemalurgic earring. This allows her to take in the mists, the power of Ruin’s opposite deity Preservation, destroy the other Inquisitors, and do battle with Ruin directly. Immediately re-submerged into Ruin’s control, Marsh fights and kills Elend, after which Vin sacrifices herself to annihilate Ruin through mutual destruction. Abruptly freed, Marsh flees, successfully reaching one of the subterranean shelters before Sazed assumes the powers of both Ruin and Preservation, and uses them to remake the world as it was before the Lord Ruler’s Ascension. I will be taking Marsh from a few years after this, when the new society is somewhat established but before Marsh has really had time to deal with everything that happened to him and everything he did under Ruin’s sway.
Sample Journal Entry: First Person Thread
Sample RP: Third Person Thread
Special Notes: NO I THINK I'M DONE
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: na
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr, the Risen Emperor
Character Name: Marsh
Series: Mistborn
Age: early forties
From When?: A few years after the end of Hero of Ages
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Despite the awful things Marsh has done while being used by Ruin (a god of pure destruction with a direct line to Marsh’s brain), when he is in control of his own mind and actions, he is a man of solemn convictions and incredible sacrifice, who has not allowed the horrors of injustice that he fights to make him into a zealot. He knows what it is to be used, to struggle to survive, and to give up – and then to resolve anew that others are worth fighting for. He understands profoundly what it is to feel like a monster, and he knows that doesn’t preclude someone from doing the right thing. Because of his own loss of free will, he won’t let an inmate get away with denying responsibility for their own actions. He raised Kelsier on his own, on the streets, on the run, as a kid, in
Item: A sheet of steel, the same sort as Spook's message to Vin about hemalurgic spikes.
Abilities/Powers: There are three basic branches of powers in Mistborn, and regrettably Marsh’s powers involve all of them.
Allomancy – an allomancer gains power by burning metals as fuel, granting them extraordinary abilities. Metals can be flared high (and run out more quickly) or burned in a single burst when used in conjunction with duralumin, but generally there is a maximum amount of power in the metal itself that cannot be exceeded. A mistborn can use all of the metals, while a misting can only use one. The allomantic metals come in pairs of an element and an alloy. Notable metals include:
Iron/Steel – Iron physically pushes against sources of metal, and steel pulls them toward the user. Both apply only in straight lines to the user’s center of gravity, and obey the laws of Newtonian physics. Both metals induce blue sight-lines to all nearby metal sources. Sight-lines through a solid wooden door are weaker. (Inquisitors actually use a variation on this to see, since their eyeballs have been replaced with spikes. They can detect various subtle differences in chemical composition of things, up to and including colors, which are generally the result of different impurities. Their sight is completely unchanged in darkness.)
Tin/Pewter – Tin enhances all the senses at once. Pewter enhances the body’s strength, speed, balance, and resilience.
Zinc/Brass – Zinc increases another person’s emotions, while brass reduces them. Neither metal provides the user any information about the target’s thoughts or feelings. Specific emotions can be selected in both cases, but the target is perfectly capable of noticing uncharacteristic emotions in themselves if the user is not subtle. (Marsh is not subtle.)
Copper/Bronze – Copper provides a shield against the use of Zinc and Brass, and prevents alomancy within a certain radius from being detected. Bronze detects the use of allomancy not protected by a copper cloud. (Marsh is unusually talented with Bronze, as it was originally his only power, and able to detect not only which metals another allomancer is using, but subtleties like which emotions a zinc or brass burner is targeting, and when another allomancer’s metals are running low. Marsh can also pierce copper clouds; this is explained below.)
Aluminum/Duralumin – Aluminum wipes out all other metal reserves without burning them, while duralumin uses up the entire store of any metal burned with it in a single intense flare.
Atium – allows one to see a few seconds into the future and process all that information in time to react to it. This is not deterministic – someone can change what they were about to do based on pre-reactions of an atium burner, but it’s very difficult and results in two future-shadows. Two atium burners facing each other will see a multitude of possibilities as they can each react to the other’s shadows, giving neither the advantage.
There are other Allomantic metals, but they aren’t really important here.
Feruchemy – a feruchemist uses metal as a storage device for various physical or mental abilities. Power is neither gained nor lost. In order to be twice as strong for ten minutes, a feruchemist must be very weak for a proportional but longer amount of time (because it is impossible to be at strength zero), storing up that strength for later. Feruchemical stores can be amassed for long periods and then used very quickly in order to multiply the effects. Feruchemy can physically change the size and shape of the body. A feruchemist storing strength will actually lose muscle mass, while a feruchemist drawing on their strength will gain it. Notable metals include:
Iron – weight/density, Steel – physical speed, Tin – acuity of individual senses, Pewter – strength, Copper – memories (to be recalled perfectly later), Zinc – mental speed, Bronze – wakefulness, Gold – health, Atium - age
Hemalurgy – Hemalurgy requires driving a metal spike into someone’s heart and killing them, then hammering that spike into a specific bind point on a second person, conferring a physical, mental, spiritual, allomantic, or feruchemical attribute of the first person to the second. Some power is always lost in the transfer (think the friction of evil blood magic), but it can be mitigated by pounding the spike straight from the victim into the recipient. Only one attribute can be taken from each death, and all others are lost. There are over 300 bind points on humans and different configurations of spikes produce wildly different creatures.
Inquisitors are made by using hemalurgy to give an allomancer a bunch of extra powers to turn them into the Final Empire’s most terrifying enforcers. Regular Inquisitors can use all eight basic metals and atium, they heal incredibly rapidly from even major wounds (not instantly, but over the course of minutes or hours), and they are stronger and faster than a normal allomancer burning pewter. Because Marsh was a bronze burner before he became an Inquisitor, he effectively has a double dose of that ability, allowing him to pierce copper clouds that would normally veil the use of allomancy from detection. This does not have any impact on the efficacy of copper cloud shielding against emotional allomancy. Normal inquisitors can be killed by removing both of their eye-spikes, removing the linchpin in their back, or by decapitation.
After the Lord Ruler’s death, Ruin directed the surviving Inquisitors to give themselves additional spikes. While the Lord Ruler kept some secrets and powers away from the Inquisitors, Ruin wanted them to be able to do as much damage as possible. Marsh received the most new spikes, for a total of twenty-one, including a spike that granted him the use of duralumin, and spikes granting him some ferumchemical abilities, paving the way for compounding.
Compounding requires someone to have the use of both allomancy and feruchemy. The person makes a feruchemical store of a certain trait, for example, age: they spend a little time older than they really are, storing excess age in an atium metalmind. Then, they burn the store of their own age as though it were allomantic fuel, releasing approximately ten times the amount they originally stored, most of which can be diverted into a new metalmind. This is how the Lord Ruler and Marsh each survive for centuries beyond their normal lifespans.
Aside from the linchpin spike, Inquisitors have one other key weakness. The process of hemalurgy damages the integrity of the user’s mind, leaving it highly vulnerable to psychic/mental/telepathic influence and control in general, not only Ruin’s. Hemalurgy is effectively ripping out a useful piece of someone’s soul and staple gunning it to the Inquisitor’s. Consequently, the normal boundaries of the mind are wounded and permeable.
Personality: The first word Vin uses to describe Marsh is ‘stern,’ and it is 100% accurate on all levels. He’s an incredibly good person, but that doesn’t translate into joy or any sort of open affection, not even for people he cares about quite a lot. His mother is taken and killed when he was very young, and the responsibility of keeping himself and his little brother alive while they were hunted by steel inquisitors leaves him perpetually somber and severe, meticulous about safety, and quick to chastise anything he sees as frivolous or careless. For most of his life, he held himself to very exacting ideals, devoting years of his life to the endless, scrabbling struggle of the skaa resistance. While he has sympathy for people who make terrible choices to survive in the harsh world of the Final Empire (he reminds Kelsier that skaa guards who work for nobles are just men, trying to provide for their families), he tends to hold those closest to him to similar standards.
More than this, Marsh is never happy, not even before he is turned into the puppet of an evil god and used to destroy everything he once fought so hard to bring about. His losses – his mother, Mare, Kelsier twice – weigh heavily on him, and so does the life he has lived, always looking over his shoulder, always fighting to save one more person when there are always so many that he can’t. Marsh is a harsh pragmatist, and he lives within his own limitations, the limits of his world. He accepts them in a way Kelsier refuses to, and this acceptance drains his ability to take much comfort in small victories. This combines with his self-sacrificial streak such that he lives a little bit vicariously through the happiness of others. He suffers to make the world slightly better, and others can be happy. In his mind, that’s all right, that’s enough. When he looses Kelsier and Mare to the Pits of Hathsin, the two people he cared most about and two of the people who found the most joy in a horrible world, Marsh lost the will to continue fighting. He’s principled, but his principles are not enough to keep him going on their own.
Marsh is often defined in the series and in his own mind as ‘the one who gives up’, in contrast to Kelsier, and while that’s true, it gives a skewed picture of him, considering that every time he gives up, when he sees a way to make a difference – always for the sake of others, rather than himself – he ends up trying again. Marsh is unbelievably strong-willed. Every hemalurgic spike gives Ruin – a god of pure destruction – direct access to influence and control someone’s mind. Ruin is capable of taking total physical and mental control over Koloss, with only four spikes, and if given a moment of hesitation, he can take over Kandra, who possess only two. By the end of the series, Marsh has twenty-one spikes, but he manages to conserve a small part of his own mind away from Ruin’s delight and brutality, and is able to break free and defy him for a crucial moment. Marsh is stubborn and patient and although he is very prone to despair, in the end he refuses to allow it consume him, despite overwhelming reasons that it should.
In spite of all this, Marsh isn’t just a just martyr. He’s got a tendency towards petty jealousy that doesn’t ever prompt him to do worse than make bitchy comments, but is definitely an important part of who he is. When he hears that Kelsier is planning to overthrow the final empire – what was once Marsh’s life’s work – he responds with anger and derision, switching tactics as quickly as Kelsier answers him until he’s convinced of Kelsier’s sincerity. (Even then, he doesn’t imagine the plan will succeed, still a practical pessimist through and through; but he still willingly chooses an incredibly dangerous assignment spying on the Lord Ruler’s bureaucracy in hopes of providing information that will help the resistance for years to come.) He even gets slightly pissy over how precocious Vin is with her use of bronze, Marsh’s own specialty, although it’s worth noting that in that case, his vitriol is not directed at her.
Furthermore, although he’s displeased and severe when she manipulates his emotions with allomancy and prompts him to discuss his childhood tragedies, he doesn’t lose his temper with her or punish her beyond a warning not to repeat it. Even though Marsh can be cranky and peevish to others out of envy, he is not deliberately cruel. The only instance that qualifies is during a fight with Kelsier who – as his brother – is something of a personal weak spot. When Kelsier dies the second time, however, he promptly goes completely on the warpath, killing all the other Inquisitors in the city and helping Vin kill the Lord Ruler. Although they can be horrible to each other, it’s the sort of viciousness that is reserved for family, even family that love each other deeply.
Marsh’s cameo in Alloy of Law tells us a lot about what is and isn’t important to him. He uses the Lord Ruler’s compounding trick to live for three hundred years and counting, but he obviously doesn’t care about power – he completely ignores the religion devoted to him and hides in the shadows, doing what he thinks Kelsier would approve of. His self-admitted clumsiness with the emotional metals shows that he doesn’t even bothered to hone allomantic skills he’s had for centuries. He has more than enough power to help here and there from the background, and he doesn’t want or need more.
He cares about his own freedom of mind and action, as expressed through his wry defiance of Sazed’s divine preferences. He gives Marasi information to help Wax because “he does my brother’s work.” Although he has lightened up a little in the much-brighter world after the trilogy, Marsh still doesn’t think of justice or heroics as something he himself is a part of, and instead continues to use someone else as his external taslisman of morality and worthwhile purpose. He doesn’t have anyone left he cares about, but he sticks around out of a deep and perpetual sense of responsibility.
Barge Reactions: Marsh is going to react to the barge with exactly the sort of unflappable stoicism you would expect of someone who has survived having large steel spikes literally hammered through their eye sockets. Aliens, gods, other universes, terrifying situations, plumbing, superpowers, libraries that defy physical laws – none of it is going to phase him at all. He’ll be highly perturbed by floods at first, given what happened the last time he lost control of his own mind, but he’ll soldier through. He’ll also pretty thrown by Kelsier’s presence, but once he gets over his shock and self-loathing, he’ll be grateful for it.
History: Marsh spends the first years of his life in relative comfort, compared to the terrible conditions of most skaa (an oppressed, serf-like class) in the Final Empire. His mother was a clever, resourceful woman who managed to escape whatever estate she was born onto and pass herself off as a noblewoman from a family that had fallen on hard times. With this ruse, she was able to support herself fairly well as the mistress of a minor nobleman. Although Marsh and his brother were bastards, they were still presumed to be nobles and decently cared for. Tragically, when Marsh was still a child, obligators discovered or suspected the truth and dragged their mother away.
Marsh must have known enough, even then, to take his younger brother Kelsier and escape before Inquisitors came to kill them; as half-breeds, their lives were automatically forfeit. Under the stress of his fear and grief, Marsh ‘snapped’, an activation of allomantic powers that occurs only when someone faces the brink of death. Marsh became a Seeker, a kind of misting that can burn bronze to hear when others are using allomancy nearby. Very little is known in canon about the time they spent on the run, only that it must have been very difficult for them to survive.
The experience left Marsh with an obsessive hatred of the obligators and Inquisitors who administered and enforced the Lord Ruler’s regime. He not only survives but finds ways to educate himself, devoting himself to studying the steel ministry meticulous. He joins and eventually becomes the highest leader of the skaa rebellion, fighting in the shadows to improve the lives of those crushed beneath the Empire’s tyranny. He and Kelsier – now a thief and a dandy in Luthadel’s criminal underworld – both fall in love with the same woman, Mare, who chooses Kelsier. Marsh is bitter about it but doesn’t let his personal disappointment interfere with his self-appointed duties until both of the are caught trying to steal from the Lord Ruler himself.
When Kelsier and Mare are sent to the Pits of Hathsin (deadly mines from which no one had ever escaped), Marsh just gives up. He quits the rebellion, retires, and becomes a reticent independent craftsman, although he still keeps an eye out for skaa mistings and mistborn on the streets, and stays in contact with a few of Kelsier’s old thieving crew.
Naturally, Mare dies, prompting Kelsier to snap as a full Mistborn, escape the Pits, and hatch an elaborate scheme to use a thieving crew of mistings to overthrow the Lord Ruler once and for all. Despite being completely unable to talk to his miraculously living brother like a well-adjusted adult, Marsh grudgingly agrees to play one of the most dangerous roles roles in Kelsier’s plan: using his lifetime of study to infiltrate and spy on the steel ministry. In his efforts not to be exposed as a skaa fraud, he accidentally distinguishes himself as an exemplary acolyte.
He sends Kelsier and his crew information that turns out to be critical to the plot’s success despite his fears that he drew too much attention to himself. When Kelsier arrives at a meeting to find the room trashed, soaked in blood, containing only the crumpled remains of an unidentifiable corpse, he assumes Marsh was caught, tortured for information until he broke, and then killed. Kelsier immediately launches the remaining segments of the plan, deliberately getting himself martyred in the process. However, Marsh was actually not exposed but ‘promoted’, transformed into an Inquisitor by a terrible bloody ritual involving several other deaths, but not his own. He learns their key weakness in the process, murders all the other Inquisitors in the city, and returns in time to help Vin survive long enough to assassinate the Lord Ruler.
As the only remaining available Inquisitor, Marsh technically becomes head of the Lord Ruler’s church, and after his death Marsh helps persuade a large swathe of obligators fulfilling important logistical, economic, and archival roles to cooperate with the fledging rebellion government. All too soon, however, he abandons them, struggling with the growing influence of Ruin in his mind.
When Marsh brings Sazed to the conventical of Seran a year later, he still believes consciously that he is seeking information to use against the remaining Inquisitors and those loyal to the Lord Ruler, while actually serving Ruin’s purposes disseminating a warped version of the Terris prophecies. The next time we see him, Marsh attacks Sazed to prevent him from reaching Vin in time to keep Ruin contained in the Well of Ascension. He’s clearly still in possession of his own faculties and distraught about doing it, and yet unable to overcome Ruin’s will.
Throughout the last book, Marsh is literally reduced to Ruin’s puppet in both body and mind. Ruin’s intelligence and a great deal of his power are free to control his servants more directly, and Marsh receives ten additional spikes, more than any other Inquisitor. This makes him both a more powerful/useful tool, and puts him even deeper in Ruin’s thrall. When Ruin’s attention is on him, even Marsh’s emotions are not his own, completely overwhelmed by Ruin’s sadistic delight in destruction. When Ruin is otherwise occupied, Marsh is free to reflect on his own guilt, helplessness, and despair, but even the faintest attempt to wrest any control of his own body back draws Ruin’s attention again.
He eventually resolves to bide his time and preserve a sliver of independent througt without otherwise struggling. He allows Ruin to think he has given up in the hopes of being able to seize control with the element of surprise and commit suicide, depriving Ruin’s plans of his participation at some critical moment. Until then, however, he becomes nothing more than a monstrous vessel for Ruin’s errands. He tracks down mistings and kills them to make new spikes for Inquisitors and simply to bring key players under Ruin’s influence. He arrives in Fadrex expecting to seize the atium cache Ruin believes is there, fights with Vin, and commands Yomen’s forces to attack and provoke Elend’s koloss in an attempt to induce the utter massacre of the city. He intercepts a vital message about the nature of hemalurgic spikes from Spook to Vin, slaughtering the messenger.
When Marsh and the remaining dozen Inquisitors converge on Vin to kill her, Marsh is as brutal as the rest of them. Before he can strike the final blow, however, he remembers the dispatch and wrests a single moment of free movement from the midst of Ruin’s bloodlust, and rips out Vin’s hemalurgic earring. This allows her to take in the mists, the power of Ruin’s opposite deity Preservation, destroy the other Inquisitors, and do battle with Ruin directly. Immediately re-submerged into Ruin’s control, Marsh fights and kills Elend, after which Vin sacrifices herself to annihilate Ruin through mutual destruction. Abruptly freed, Marsh flees, successfully reaching one of the subterranean shelters before Sazed assumes the powers of both Ruin and Preservation, and uses them to remake the world as it was before the Lord Ruler’s Ascension. I will be taking Marsh from a few years after this, when the new society is somewhat established but before Marsh has really had time to deal with everything that happened to him and everything he did under Ruin’s sway.
Sample Journal Entry: First Person Thread
Sample RP: Third Person Thread
Special Notes: NO I THINK I'M DONE