We hear a lot in The Final Empire about various titles and such in the Steel Ministry. Can you give a little as to their actual structure and what they do?
Yeah I can talk about this. [They only thing you can’t is the ranks] So the Steel Ministry, in the Mistborn books. The interesting thing I considered when I was writing was “What is the purpose of the priesthood when god is there in the palace and everyone knows it? And if you disobey you just get your head cut off.” So I made the Steel Ministry more government, like the post office is run by priests. A lot of what priests do is witness official business, take your money in doing so and give you a stamp that “Yes I witnessed this” but they also run all the public works. It’s not like they’re cleaning the sewers themselves but overseeing the sewers, overseeing engineers, most of the engineers who designed the cities would be obligators. Which by the way you named didn’t you? There he is [???] who was in my writing group for many years. We were driving to writing group once and I wanted a cool word for a priest, because I was just using priests in the original version of Mistborn. I’m like “I need a great word” and he–
How did you come up with that word?
You really want to know?
Yeah.
Thesaurus. So you can congratulate [Nate?] for coming up with obligator, and was it you that came up with Conventicle or was that Peter? It was Peter.
Brandon on writing
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