Everything we know about Isaac Stewart's Mistborn spin-off novel

[Atlas333]

While we've still got a decent ways out I've very interested to see what Isaac does with Scadrial. My goal is to do two things: 1. Compile everything we know about the book so far and 2. Theorize what we might get to see.

Get ready for a lot of WoBs; I've bolded the relevant parts to hopefully make this massive post easier to navigate. Here's what we know:

1. The book will be set on Scadrial around era 2 featuring a character named Nicelle Sauvage (Aka Nicki Savage). She is a leecher and a noblewoman who has had contact with both Naz and Allomancer Jak.  https://coppermind.net/wiki/Nicelle_Sauvage

2. The blurb could be summarized as "A woman with a strange magical power journey to an island to find a mythical book that might raise the dead." This book has several interesting implications. It could be connected to threnody, hemalurgy or potentially even awakening (although I think hemalurgy is the most likely which I'll get into later)

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Isaac Stewart

The TV Guide description of the book: An adventurous woman with erratic magical powers travels with an expedition to an island to find a legendary book with the power to raise an undead army.

This has been a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone for letting me be along for the ride!

Footnote: The story Isaac was working on at the time is the Nicki Savage novel.
General Reddit 2021 (Dec. 1, 2021)

3. The book was originally called boatload of mummies and was inspired by a lego set Isaac had as a kid where he used his surplus of mummy figures to crew a ship. This could be an event that happens in the book or just a point of inspiration. 

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Isaac Stewart

I've had a bunch of stories in my head that I'd wanted to tell for a really long time, and I realize that a lot of the underpinnings of magic and things that are in my stories are similar, or maybe have been influenced by Brandon. Because at this point in my life, my fantasy writing is just influenced by what Brandon has already done because I'm just exposed to it all the time. So we started talking about the idea of porting some of the ideas that I had into Cosmere worlds. And one of these was Boatload of Mummies, which was actually inspired by a Lego set. I had this big giant ship that my brother and sister-in-law had given me one year for Christmas, and that sort of spurred me on to starting to get more Lego sets again, because I loved them when I was a child. But somehow, we also had all of these Egyptian Lego sets, and I had tons of mummies. And I'm like, "What am I gonna do with these mummies?" So I put them all on the boat, fighting the British Empire on this boat. And I'm like, "Huh, this is really interesting. I kinda want to see what that story is. It's kind of like Snakes on a Plane, but it's Mummies on a Boat." So that inspired that, and I started writing that set in our world. And I didn't get very far before I had to do other things; I usually am always working on a fiction project, and that's probably about the time that I was working on Jacob's Journal of Doom, and some of these other things. So I put it on the back burner. But Brandon and I decided that that story was a lot of fun, and how could that work in the Cosmere? And so we started brainstorming some ideas. We already had this character, Nicelle Sauvage (which Allomancer Jack calls Nicki Savage.) I already had this character that I had sort of started developing in the Mistborn world, and we'd seen her through the broadsheets. And so we thought, "What if she was the main character of Boatload of Mummies?" And then, where would this book be set time-wise, and what are the events, the Cosmere underpinnings that are going on there?

Isaac Stewart Interview (May 16, 2022)

4. The book will unsurprisingly feature mummies, but where are these mummies coming from? I doubt they're from the basin so maybe southern scadrial? 

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Atfer I finished that [the White Sand omnibus], I'm like, "Okay, Boatload of Mummies. Let's do that, now." So that's where we're at right now. How do we make a mummy in the cosmere? That's a question, right? What are they doing, why are they there?H All these questions come together, and we're forming a story around that. I'm about 90,000 words into it. I massively overwrite, so it'll probably be a fairly long book that we'll then trim down to around 100,000 words. And then we'll see; we'll run it through betas, we'll run it through groups here at work. We'll see if it's something that's good enough to publish. I'm interested in seeing if I can whip it into shape.

Isaac Stewart Interview (May 16, 2022)

5. The plot can be described as beginning like king kong (just getting on a boat, no giant monkey most likely), continuing like death on the nile and finally is comparable to the mummy while also being like raiders of the lost ark. Interestingly he also cites Venom as a "healthy dose". Makes me wonder if Nicki will be teaming up with some kind of cognitive entity, potentially unwillingly.

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Cheyenne Sedai

I'm really curious about Boatload of Mummies because Brandon did mention on his updates that you'd worked on it for NaNoWriMo for the past couple of years which is really cool. And the title is incredible. I don't know if that's gonna be the final title, but that's what it's always been referred to. How have you been doing with that?

Isaac Stewart

Thanks for asking us. It's a project that I love. So I finished it. Finished a draft in September of last year. It's rough. It's a really rough draft. There's a lot of things that I'm still working through. I'm trying to narrow down the shape of the plot in a way because there's a little bit of--it wasn't inspired necessarily by these things, but it was after the fact that I realized, "Oh, it's part this, part that." It's sort of begins King Kong, if you imagined getting people on a boat. And then it continues as Death on the Nile. Then you get to a portion on an island. And then it ends The Mummy. And throw in a healthy dose of Venom. So it's like, "Okay, am I doing too much here?" And that's kind of where I'm at. You know, is this even a thing? Have I thrown too much in? Is this too much of a storyline? And i don't think it is. It really is in the end kind of a Raiders of the Lost Arc sort of story. You could pull out those some of those same elements and say, "Raiders of the Lost Arc starts out King Kong." But the basic plot line is there. There's going to be scenes in the current draft that are basically finished. I don't think they're going to change too much from the version that it is right now to the end.

Miscellaneous 2023 (May 28, 2023)

6. The title might be changed to "The Book of Nails" implying hemalurgy will be a big focus. Interestingly, he says this could also be a series title if there is enough interest which implies the sequels would also be about this book and potentially hemalurgy.

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Will it be called Boatload of Mummies? Probably not. I can't see that as a title of a Cosmere book, right? But we can affectionately call it Boatload of Mummies as long as we want. The working title is Book of Nails. And whether there's a series title or not, we'll have to figure that out if it's a story that people want to continue learning about.

Miscellaneous 2023 (May 28, 2023)

7. Naz could potentially be a major side character. It's been hinted at that we may get more on their relationship and how it's evolved.

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heynoswearing

So Haunted Man is Nazh right?

Yoitsthew

That’s what I’m thinking so I hope one day we get some context as to how he went from an antagonist to someone [Nicelle Sauvage] is galavanting around with! Maybe when u/Izykstewart finishes Boatload of Mummies we’ll know a little bit more about the in between??

Isaac Stewart

Maybe someday there will be more context to that.

General Reddit 2022 (Sept. 28, 2022)

8. The first draft is currently at 118K words and sound like its in the revision stage as of December 2023. I don't know anything about how long it takes to produce a book so I can't even guess when we might get it but I would love to hear other people's predictions.

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Brandon Sanderson

Part Seven: News from My Company

Isaac Stewart

Many of you have asked how the Nicki Savage novel has been coming along, so here’s an update. The first draft is finished, clocking in at 118k words, about the same length as Shadows of Self. It needs a lot of revision before I show it to Brandon—he and I have discussed the story, but he hasn’t seen the manuscript yet—so getting it ready for him to read is my next step. As we build out Dragonsteel’s Creative Development department, I foresee more time to work on the revision.

State of the Sanderson 2023 (Dec. 19, 2023)

I'm sure there are things I missed so let me know what you think.

Edited May 25, 2024 by Atlas333
Added current production status.

[Isilel]

@Atlas333, thank you for this exhaustive compilation of quotes! Sadly, I have nothing informative to add, just that I am also excited for this book. I really want to read an "Age of Exploration" fantasy story and Scadrial would fit so  perfectly, what with most of the world being unknown to Northern Scadrians. Frankly, I was rather disappointed that in TLM the Set base wasn't hidden somewhere in unexplored territories beyond the Roughs. Anyway, here is to hoping that this Nicki Savage adventure is finished and made available to us in foreseeable future! 

[Elite01]

I agree that awakening is unlikely cause if it was why not set it on nalthis,

the only idea I can think of for an undead army via hemalurgy is a new hemalurgic construct we haven’t seen. Maybe it requires three spikes and can go into a coma state until awoken again. 
 

Another interesting tidbit is that kolos elders cover themselves in bandages when they outgrow their skin. I don’t think it’s realistic to have a crew of kolos elders manage a ship but it is interesting. 
 

I was also thinking of the detail about how it involves going to an island. I imagine this isn’t the malwish/southern continent because it’s technically one continent. I pulled up the era 2 map and there is a location called the shrouded isle, they could invent new islands for this book but with our current information I would put money that they travel to that island.

 

Edited May 26, 2024 by Elite01

[Argenti he/him]

I mean, a good way to make an undead is spiking a cognitive shadow into a body? Probably a shade, or shade-like, since most shadows have to much personality to make a good army. Maybe this book is about how the night brigade controls their shades.

[Aredor]

Isles of the Emberdark spoilers

Spoiler

Maybe this book would explain how Nazh got to be a cognitive shadow? Nazh is Isaac's character, after all. It seems fitting that he would get the say on how he dies, after all. 

 

[Atlas333]

On 5/26/2024 at 1:27 PM, Elite01 said:

Another interesting tidbit is that kolos elders cover themselves in bandages when they outgrow their skin. I don’t think it’s realistic to have a crew of kolos elders manage a ship but it is interesting. 
 

Just wanted to revisit this topic after Dragonsteel 2025. While we didn't get any updates on the book (as far as I'm aware), we did get this image from the Cosmere RPG panel. They briefly mentioned that when developing the culture of the Koloss in Era 2, they went with these wrappings that have their language on them. I think it's fairly likely the mummies will be koloss in origin. 
Image taken from this video.

 

Edited December 29, 2025 by Atlas333
Added source for image