robardin

I thought the same thing - that it can't be a coincidence that he is getting closer to reviving his dead Shardblade than anybody in Rosharan history, while exhibiting the very ideals the Blade was originally meant to further. I will remember those who have been forgotten... I will listen to those who have been ignored.

Also Syl was (last) bonded with Kaladin; part of her "soul" had been used as spiritual caulk for Kaladin, so to speak. It'd be hard for Maya to fully revive without having the KR who killed her around to restore the bits she'd lost due to the Recreance. The WoB is interesting, though - it strongly suggests, without saying so in so many words, that Syl "would have turned into a Shardblade" had Kaladin broken his oaths after the Third Ideal means that she would have formed into a "deadeye" Shardblade like Maya and all the others, but doesn't actually say she'd take that physical form even if she hadn't been summoned as a Blade first. That's really the crux of the "spren were in on it" question, isn't it? Did the vision of the Recreance imply a willful act to create a repository of unrestricted Shardblades? I guess it's moot, actually. Such a mass gathering of Radiants, summoning their Blades and then oathbreaking en masse, had to have been a conscious group effort to gather and then to leave the Shards all in one place - instead of simply doing an "everybody go rogue wherever you happen to be" type of thing, where the Blades might physically form (even unsummoned, due to the oathbreaking, if that would happen) in a more distributed way. And no doubt, it was a very dramatic gesture.

I thought this was an oddly detailed description of what a double cadmium Twinborn could do - never mind why ease of faking one's death would be "legit" - and then I saw your username... Harmony's bands, you've thought about this, haven't you?

Dang, I skimmed a bunch of WoBs a few months back, and these somehow didn't stick in my head. Great stuff. So Szeth was made Truthless BEFORE Taravangian's brainbending blitz? Then what was all the musing about in the Diagram about CanWeMakeToUseATruthless and CanWeCraftAWeapon, especially in connection with musing about strongly appears to be the Honorblades? I mean, he sent a Diagramite (just what is the proper term for one of them?) to get Szeth's oathstone, who eventually found him, so he definitely did know Szeth was the Assassin in White, a Shin Truthless with the Windrunner Honorblade. I could see how Brainiac-T could easily realize that from what he already knew about Shin, Truthless, and how Gavilar died (if that happened before his Day of Briliance), plus his deductions about the Honorblades... So he was musing about "making to use" an extant Truthless, "crafting a weapon" meaning to transpose him from being a menial servant and sometime sideshow into, well, the Assassin In White?

Which also implies that (a) Truthless Shin are always given an Honorblade, if not the Windrunner one, and (b) there must have been such Truthless before, for Taravangian to know about it (he is educated enough to speak Shin and know some of their proverbs, so it may not be widely known, but still something that has precedence, or at the very least, is documented somewhere as A Thing That Would Happen To A Shin). Also that (c) Taravangian engineered Szeth's becoming a Truthless, which has to do with some kind of "blasphemy" about the return of the Radiants and the Voidbringers. Whether or not the Shin are custodians of a massive hoard of Shardblades and Shardplate, I think one must exist somewhere. I have also wondered why the KRs in Dalinar's vision of the Recreance forswore their oaths in the way that they did, by summoning their Blades before breaking their oaths. When Kaladin "killed" Syl in Words of Radiance, she just kind of faded away and got locked, broken-minded, in the Cognitive Realm. Combined with Dalinar's vision, I always thought that implied the Radiants of the Recreance intentionally left their Shards behind for anyone to grab, summoning them as Blades in the Physical Realm and THEN killing them, instead of just leaving them broken in the Cognitive Realm.... Like they WANTED to unleash unbounded Shardblades on the world. On the other hand, Kal hadn't advanced enough yet to summon her as a Blade. Maybe it's just something that would happen to a spren whose Radiant is past the Third Ideal and breaks their vows.

Compounding anything is like having an infinite feruchemical attribute, so long as you have access to the metal, so gold is obviously the most critical one to try for, even if gold is expensive to obtain (with infinite health, I suppose a lot of things become fairly easy to obtain). We don't know what feruchemical "luck" is like yet, except for a WoB that it's not what you might think based on other works of fiction (like Coinspinner in The Book of Swords), so while it certainly sounds attractive, we don't really know what it would mean. Double steel = infinite speed + being a Coinshot, plus steel is cheap and easy to get, is probably next; double pewter (Hulk smash!) and double zinc would be next, though having nigh infinite time to think anything over is only as useful as you can actually think something through to the end at all, from an ability standpoint, or would have the mental stamina to stick with it (I mean, if you had infinite mental time, would you do everybody's tax returns? Probably not.) And don't overlook double brass. Not only are you a Soother, but infinite body heat, combined with an exoskeletal suit that siphoned off your excess body heat into an efficient sink and an array of thermocouples, would make you a walking dynamo of infinite electrical power.

Actually, giving Wayne an allomantic grenade would mean he could square his time bubble, right? Rust and Ruin, but that'd be amazing. And imagine a Steelrunner inside a Wayne-squared speedup bubble!

I'm not sure if he's working "for" Harmony, in the way that the kandra are at least, since he passed along that book about Hemalurgy to Wax that Harmony disapproved of. And even if he is surviving on F-atium, that's still a lonely existence - he has no way to blend into society, or age peers to hang out with as friends.

What happened to Marsh after the Catacendre? Even with his role in aiding Vin against the Lord Ruler and defying Ruin's control to remove her earring at the critical moment, it would seem he wasn't embraced by the other "Originators" like Spook, Ham, and Breeze, given his legendary status at a symbol of death. Probably he didn't try to reintegrate himself in the first place. When we see him interacting with Marasi in Era 2, he has access to steel and zinc to do allomancy, but he can't just stroll into a shop and buy it, can he? For that matter, don't Inquisitors still need to eat, to fuel the physical bodies that still do age and die and need to rest? Looking as he does, Marsh can't exactly visit restaurants and markets. Perhaps the high priests of Sliverism are tasked with his upkeep?

Funny you should put it that way. I was re-reading "The Alloy of Law" recently and had the same thought about Marasi's ability - it could be used in a similar fashion to the way people in Orson Scott Car's "Worthing Saga" could skim through time by "sleeping" significant portions of their life with technology. Marasi admitted to having used her Allomantic ability to skip past boring stretches of time to reach an anticipated event sooner. So imagine if one Pulsed away an entire day, every other day! You'd function fairly normally in society - you'd be in touch with current events, cultural developments, etc., - but you'd effectively live twice as long, with all the benefits (long term inve$tment$!) and drawbacks thereof (your non-Pulser friends and family would age and die twice as quickly, with respect to you). Actually it'd be pretty tough for an allomancer to Pulse away an entire day at a time, even if Marasi says that cadmium burns "at a much slower rate and with larger bubbles" than bendalloy, as we do get a precise description of the limits of Slider allomancy: "with one nugget [of bendalloy] worth about five hundred notes, Wayne can compress about two minutes (of burning time) into fifteen external seconds", which is an 8:1 ratio. It stands to reason that even if it burned more slowly, it'd still affect time at an 8:1 ratio - so that her trap for Miles at the end of Alloy of Law resulted in the 4 minutes or so of time it took for Wax to have a one-sided fistfight and monologue prompting session with him resulted in 32 minutes outside the bubble, for Wayne to go find and bring the posse to the Vanishers' secret location. To Pulse away 24 hours would require burning for 3 hours straight while sitting in your own bubble. Now, what about nicrobursting (or some way to use duralumin - either a Mistborn or a Pulser with a spike for A-duralumin)? I'm going to guess that that brings us to the absolute maximum of a 16:1 ratio, just because that 8:1 ratio looks very suspicious from what we know of Allomancy. So a Pulser with enough cadmium to burn for 90 minutes straight, with a nicroboost and a flare, might be able to leap forward a day in time in one blast. Holy moly. Nesting time bubbles would compound? I guess that makes sense, from a relativistic POV, but that has the potential for some serious mayhem. The first example that comes to mind is that Marasi's trap for Miles at the end of Alloy of Law could be devastatingly effective on another Pulser. It'd be kind of like the "Limbo" thing in the movie Inception. Or a reverse Weeping Angel thing from Doctor Who, if you know what that is. Fill a few of the the allomantic "grenades" we see in Bands of Mourning with Pulsing, and you could set off a chain of 3 or 4 of these Pulser bombs and effectively exile someone far into the future. Bye!

Yes, because atium only lets you look so far into the future - even with a godlike ability to process what you see there, if the ability to escape an deadly event is beyond that time window, it's game over. Like rigging a building full of aluminum shrapnel bombs and luring the Seer/Mistborn deep into its depths. Oops, it appeared I've contributed to the resurrection of a zombie thread. Sorry! I was right to feel like I'd thought about this topic before

OK, so the goldmind that Wayne picks up from the Set is "unkeyed", in that he (as a Bloodmaker Ferring) can tap it, sure. I get that. But every nicrosilmind we've seen so far in Era 2 has been "unsealed", then. We haven't seen a single known Soulbearer Ferring, yet all the medallions and the coppermind coin are examples of "realize what it is, and you suddenly gain the ability stored in it via auto-tap".

Me too. My point was that that implies he wasn't the sole creator, i.e., my theory that a Revived Kelsier still needed access to a Full Feruchemist to make the Bands, not being one himself, has a shade of support in a WoB. Though come to think of it, even a Revived Mistborn Kelsier in tandem with a Full Feruchemist doesn't fully explain how the Bands we see as wielded by Marasi and Wax can grant such strong Allomancy - they think of it as "ancient Allomancy, from the time of the Lord Ruler", but it's at least as strong as Elend level Allomancy (Gen 1 Lerasium Mistborn), for Marasi to be able to Push off of trace metals, for Wax to push on hemalurgic spikes embedded in Telsin and Suit, and for mist to appear while doing so. Whatever Allomantic abilities are stored in the Bands as discovered at the temple, are far stronger than those Kelsier possessed in life. If that means Revived Kelsier is now a Super Mistborn, well, that seems pretty OP, but we'll find out in due time, won't we? I don't quite follow the distinction here between "unkeyed" and "unsealed" metalminds. As I understood it, "unkeyed" means "a metalmind with no Identity component", such as the goldmind that Wayne picked up from the Set that he was amazed to find he could tap, even though he hadn't filled it. That's because it was filled with "Identity-free" health, which I'm really curious how the Set managed to create without the Excisor technology that allows the Southerners to create medallions, since the Set didn't know such things were possible. In any case, it surely involves "shunting" Identity into an aluminummind at the same time as filling the metalmind in question. The medallions, or the coppermind coin that Hoid gives to (throws at) Wax, have a nicrosil ring that is a nicrosilmind granting a Feruchemical (or possibly an Allomantic) power. For this to work, it has to be "Identity-free", or else only the Feruchemist who filled the nicrosilmind could tap it, which is rather pointless. Since the medallions work for anybody as long as they know the medallion contains a nicrosilmind of the proper type (easy to guess when you can see the other metals, as long as you know what they do), they can indeed be "tapped by anybody".

The Sovereign "was involved", eh? That's a rather specific way of not saying that "The Sovereign made the Bands of Mourning".

Mirror image? But Marsh has both of his eye spikes at the end of The Alloy of Law. Is that a hint that whenever it is that Kelsier regains physical form as The Sovereign, some time within 10-12 years of the Catacendre, Marsh still has only the one eye spike? Is the fact that it'd be an opposite socket relevant, or a coincidence? EDIT: Brandon himself says "it's not particularly relevant", but still, it seems to suggest that Marsh did not immediately replace his missing eye spike. Not sure how that goes, too, if he has to find his original eye spike, or can just use any leftover Inquisitor eye spike, given that using a hemalurgic spike seems to "imprint".

Well, the medallions are crafted in such a way as to grant the Feruchemical ability (in a nicrosilmind) along with the unkeyed metalmind for that F-ability to tap, right? Like the coppermind coin - it's a copper coin (the unkeyed coppermind with a memory in it) with a nicrosil ring that, only once the person holding it realizes it's a nicrosilmind, can be tapped (is automatically tapped, it seems) to F-copper, making the person an Archivist for as long as the nicrosilmind doesn't run out. And unlike creating a medallion granting an Allomantic ability like Steelpushing (to make the airships take off), creating such a medallion/coin could be made by a full Feruchemist who knew about nicrosil (to store Ferring-ness) and aluminum (to remove Identity by filling the aluminummind at the same time), all on his/her own. So even without setting up the Excisors, however it is they actually functiion, Kelsier could get a Full Feruchemist to create him 16 nicrosilminds, banded with 16 metalminds, one of each metal, granting him temporary access to all the Feruchemical abilities (as long as the nicrosilminds didn't run out). Call this his "F-Bands". But, once he had that access, as a Mistborn with all Allomantic metals, he could Compound any of the 16 metals to leverage up the Feruchemical store, put some of the "excess" back into the F-Bands to recharge it, and go do some badass stuff, including using that Feruchemy to then create nicrosilminds for the Allomantic powers. And we know (leaving someone else to dig up the appropriate WoB, for now) that a metalmind can be "overloaded" or "partitioned" with different flavors of the same ability, e.g., single tinmind can store both sight and hearing, as well as a single block of tin function as a tinmind for two different Feruchemists (who'd use different portions of the block). So the actual Bands of Mourning, described as "an oversized spearhead crafted from sixteen different metals melded together", are the sixteen metalminds for the 16 Feruchemical abilities - stores of strength, speed, etc., - and a core block of nicrosil that is "overloaded" 32 times, with stores granting 16x Feruchemical and 16x Allomantic powers. To refill the bands would require a Mistborn, or 16 Mistings working together and passing it around, before the Feruchemical nicrosilminds ran out, so they could Compound and refill the Bands without a loss. And it would seem a Nicroburst would the be most key Misting of all, to Compound and replenish the raw F-nicrosil ability needed to drive the whole thing. Kelsier had the knowledge that a Full Feruchemist could do this with access to the as-yet unknown metal of nicrosil, and needed to find or produce one to make him a "Bands 16F" unkeyed mega-melded-metalmind, which he could (as a Mistborn) then augment to a "16x2FA" model by adding Allomancy to it. Except we don't know of any FF's as of the end of Secret History. And yes, my pet theory is that they somehow re-humanized the First Generation for this purpose, or at least, re-Feruchemized one.

#1 and #2 seem too Deus Ex Machina for Sanderson, who usually seeds the Big Reveals in advance, if subtly. Until I thought of the "First Generation kandra are involved" angle - a wild idea, I admit - and looked for hints about it in a re-read of Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning, I assumed it was something like #6, "hemalurgical mechanics to be revealed". But that doesn't quite fit the timeline: if Kelsier was the Sovereign yet as of the end of Secret History professed having to "discover" how it works, with Spook's aid in the Physical realm at that, they worked pretty fast with no guide to go on, eh? On the other hand, if the Excisors only require detailed Kelsier's Ascended-level understanding of Allomancy, Feruchemy, all 16 metals for them, and how the powers work together, he could probably tell Spook how and where to find or make these new metals, and what to do with them. The trick is, again, where to get the 16 source abilities for Feruchemy. Unless hemalurgy can be modified to turn one F-spike into another, like taking a spike for F-pewter from a former Inquisitor to become F-nicrosil? But the spike metal would have to change from pewter to ... something else, whatever would be the metal for stealing F-nicro or F-aluminum, and we know from this Reddit post by Brandon that adding carbon and forging an ironmind (with weight stored in it) into steel would not result in a steelmind (now containing speed), just a scrambled-up ironmind (albeit one that could, with great difficulty, be restored to a working ironmind).

Here's another thought, centered around the question, why would someone like Kelsier go to the trouble of giving himself Feruchemy and Compounding via the Bands, then leave them for hundreds of years in a booby-trapped temple while he went off doing Something Else? He didn't create the Bands just to save the Southerners from freezing - that he did by given them the Excisors, plus "beginning the Firefathers and Firemothers" who are at least Firesoul Ferrings if not full Feruchemists, which he did before leaving them to "figure out the rest". The Bands was more like something he flashed at them like a prize, before disappearing with them and sending back word that he'd hidden them in frozen mountains that were particularly deadly for them. And, it seems he went out of his way to cause any Northerners who'd learn about his actions to assume he was actually The Lord Ruler, not Kelsier. It's almost as if he wanted the Bands to be the centerpiece of events when North finally met up with South on Scadrial. As if he foresaw that the Bands would be needed when that happened. He, or... Someone foresaw it. Perhaps the necessary Feruchemy aid in making the Bands in the first place came at a bargained price, part of which was to leave them behind.

That's completely a pet theory of mine - I admit it's a total stretch. But note that (a) all living Feruchemists were turned into mistwraiths, and (b) mistwraiths becoming a species that bred true, does not imply that all mistwraiths are Feruchemists in potentia. After all, not all Allomancers have Allomancer children, even if the probability is higher, and it stands to reason that Feruchemy is similar. As for the "changed spiritually into a different species", I don't think that's a given, either. We see in Secret History that killed koloss arrive in the Cognitive Realm as humans again, even though it took four spikes plus a base human to make a koloss - unless we saw all five arrive in the CR as a result of each koloss death? If an obligator turned into a koloss has the time to complain to Kelsier about how "the beasts should have known better than to make me a koloss", that means that "inside" the physical koloss was still the original person's spirit. And the First Generation actually took on their original human bones for skeletons, suggesting they still "saw themselves" as human, which later generations of kandra would not. It's just that the Feruchemy apparently needed for making the Excisors and for the Bands had to come from somewhere. Logically, at least one full Feruchemist got involved with Kelsier. Hemalurgy doesn't seem like the answer - why would there have been spikes for F-nicrosil or F-aluminum made in the first place from Ruin's assault on the Synod? - and The Sovereign seems to have just the one spike in the eye, not 16 spikes for 16 Feruchemical powers (which also would had to have been made from 16 Feruchemists or Ferrings that didn't seem to exist 10 years after the Catacendre). And I don't see Harmony just granting a re-embodied Mistborn like Kelsier Feruchemy as well.

Wow, I missed that somehow. Thanks!

This post isn't about the Sovereign's identity, which I'm pretty sure is Kelsier, nor how he is attached to whatever body it is he's got, or what the eye-spike has got to do with it all. Nor how medallions or the Bands or the Excisors work. It's about when the Bands were created. A little bit of how, but mostly I'm thinking about the interesting open questions implied by the events in Bands of Mourning, which I just re-read. Allik says that the Sovereign teaches the Southerners about the Metalborn "being pieces of God, though we didn't have any of those at first". So the Sovereign either introduces or reveals Feruchemy and Allomancy to their populations. Allik also says: "He gave us devices [the Excisors], and started the Firefathers and Firemothers... After he left, we used his gifts to figure out the rest, like these that make us fly." Which required Steelpushing, at a minimum, as well as Feruchemical stores for Connection and Weight. (We don't see "emergency medi-medallions" of unkeyed goldminds, which you'd think would be really useful on an airship.) The Sovereign had "all 16 powers" for both Allomancy and Feruchemy, at least by reputation (perhaps he just had most of them, and who's going to call him out?), and created the Bands of Mourning BEFORE leaving the South to create the temple in the mountains. As Allik says, "When the Sovereign left us, he took them [the Bands] with him, along with his priests, his closest servants..." So the Bands are something that, in their lore at least (if not recorded history), was something the Sovereign possessed already during his time with them. And yet, the Southerners also thought the "Bands" were in the form of arm bracers, rather than a big chunk of banded metal fashioned like a spearhead. That's why al the blind leads at the templ - the room with the murals of a pedestal with armbands on them, murals of the Sovereign wearing them, the empty pedestal, and then the underground chamber with dead priests in it with armbands on a "secret" pedestal - were effective. So the Southerners never saw the Bands in reality, or never realized what they were. But they DO know of their existence and what they're capable of doing, and the Sovereign's plan included priests returning to the Southerners and telling them he'd hidden them somewhere for him to come back for later - maybe an implied challenge to them to find it for themselves. "A test sent by the Sovereign? He was fond of those." (So he did this kind of thing with them all the time). Anyway, most likely in conjunction with Spook, Kelsier learned or figured out about the technology behind Excisors, which must involve nicrosil and aluminum (both highly rare or completely unknown metals to the Final Empire), within 12 years of the Catacendre... Yet only brought that technology to the South, not revealing it to the Northerners. Does that imply that Spook didn't know about it? Kelsier surely knew the F- and A- properties of all sixteen metals from his time holding Preservation, missing only some information about hemalurgy. In Secret History, he tells Spook, "My mind expanded, and I learned some things. My focus wasn't on these spikes; I think I could have worked it all out, if it had been. I still learned enough to be dangerous, and the two of us are going to figure the rest out." The rest = hemalurgy, so it seems he learned most or all about the other two Metallic Arts, minus hemalurgy. So I believe Kelsier created the Bands FIRST, before going south, eyespiked new body and all. I think it's very possible Kelsier was never and is not become a Fullborn, but is "only" a reborn Mistborn who relied on the Bands to gain "all 16 powers" for Feruchemy, using Compounding to refill the metalminds in it as needed (but being Mistborn, could fill the nicrosilminds needed to store Allomantic abilities). He wore arm bracers, like TLR did, but either those were dummies, or they were ordinary metalminds he filled with the Bands (and left drained on the secret pedestal in the temple). And carried the spear around in a way that Survivorists would associate with Kelsier, but the Southerners would simply associate as something iconic of the Sovereign. But whence came the Feruchemical abilities stored in the Bands, then? Especially if Harmony was not in cahoots with Kelsier in creating the Bands - which it sounds like he was not, as he did not approve of Kelsier seeking to return to the Physical realm at the end of Secret History, nor of Spook exploring hemalurgy. I suspect the disappearance of the First Generation of kandra is tied to this, as unlike all other kandra, they were originally born human as full Feruchemists, and their Spiritweb would still contain the "sDNA" for Feruchemy. And when discussing kandra suicide in Shadows of Self, only the Second Generation is specifically mentioned as having widely availed themselves of that escape hatch, at the same time as TenSoon mentions how the Third Generation is now the senior one among the kandra. And hey: what's up with the belt on the statue of The Sovereign? After initially identifying the spearhead on the statue as aluminum due to the lack of Allomantic steelsight lines to it, Wax adds, "Looks like some on his belt, too." Wayne removes the spearhead, and later, Marasi realizes it must be the true BoM. But they never went back to see if the belt, too, was more than it seemed - if nothing else, it'd be a big piece of extremely valuable aluminum, yeah? Like what caused Wayne to detach the spearhead in the first place. Why doesn't the Northern Hemisphere folk have Excisor technology, if Kelsier figured it out with Spook's help, and brought it South only 10-12 years after the Catacendre? Did he hold back on information he shared with Spook? Why would he do that? As The Lord Mistborn, leading Elendel for the next 90 years or so, you'd think technology like that would have been massively useful to him. Finally, there's the WoB about how Hoid giving Wax the coppermind coin that revealed that The Sovereign and Kelsier/The Survivor were one and the same was something that Kelsier would have wanted to keep secret, "to correct a lie that was being perpetrated" (presumably, that The Sovereign was originally TLR). But why would Kelsier have created that coppermind in the first place, then? To forget that event? Evidently not to spread its knowledge. Hopefully we find out.

In re-reading The Bands of Mourning, in the part in Chapter 3 where VenDell explains how special and different kandra Blessings are from other hemalurgic spikes, and that they do not have them 'lying around', I noticed MeLaan commenting, "If that worked, we'd have already used all those spikes to make new children. We can't." So while mistwraiths have not been seen - by Northerners, anyway - in so long a time as to be considered extinct, the kandra consider only the lack of new Blessings as a reason there are no new kandra, i.e., there are indeed mistwraiths still around.

"I got stuck in Book Ten" (said Kelsier to Moiraine....) OH NO HE DIDN'T!!!!

Ah, that's true, the Southerners certainly looked like they'd been struggling for a long time to survive under their new, harsher (to them) conditions, but not one hundred years long. On the other hand, it is clear the Sovereign must have had F-nicrosil and F-aluminum to make the Bands, which means either he started life as a full Feruchemist (of which Sazed was thought to be the last one at the end of HoA), or had hemalurgic spikes from Feruchemists/Ferrings for that metal... Which couldn't have been possible for quite a while after the Catacendre. Nicrosil in particular was unknown in the Final Empire, and 12 years doesn't seem to be enough time (a) to discover the metal's existence, (b) to discover its Feruchemical use when there were no more Feruchemists (and at the very best, 12 year old Ferrings, and for an as yet unknown metal!), and then (c) to make hemalurgic spikes from those Feruchemists (I just don't see Spook or even Kelsier On A Mission spiking a child!). There's also the possibility that they discovered existing leftover spikes for F-nicrosil and F-aluminum in the pile of Inquisitor spikes from The Place Formerly Known As Kredik Shaw, but not only would they be significantly weakened due to being out of a body/blood coated for so long, there seems to be no purpose for Ati/Ruin to have created spikes for those metals in his endgame in Hero of Ages.

Also note that he specifically talked about the Second Generation that way. Not the First. But elsewhere, MeLaan mentions the Third Generation as being the oldest among them. I think something happened to the First Generation. Perhaps - and this is a bit chilling to think of - they were restored to humanity, as unlike the other kandra they were originally human, as full Feruchemists... Who were over a thousand years old... Which would be almost immediately fatal... But a perfect candidate for Spook's program of harvesting the Metalborn on death's door for a hemalurgic spike. Ten F-spikes, yeah, that would be pretty darn handy. It sure would explain how "The Lord Ruler" ended up going to the Southern Hemisphere, able to create unkeyed metalminds, speaking of having ruled in the Northern Hemisphere. It was the Lord Mistborn with a large complement of F-spikes. It was Spook. With Kelsier stapled to him somehow, and who didn't die so much as "step down" after 100 years. That's 100 years that included discovering nicrosil, as well as the feruchemical use of aluminum (despite having no Feruchemists at hand for a while). Not sure about how the scars on the arms in the coppermind coin's memory would fit in with that, though. Plus Brandon mentioned in the Afterword to Mistborn: Secret History how one could figure out "what Kelsier is up to" in the Era 2 books. "Is", not "was".