How does The Final Empire end?
Vin confronts the Lord Ruler in his throne room at Kredik Shaw, where her ordinary Allomancy cannot beat him. The mists pour into her and power her from outside her own body, letting her tear the Feruchemical metalminds from the Lord Ruler's wrists; robbed of his stored youth, he withers, and she kills him with a plain wooden spear. The skaa revolution sparked by Kelsier's public death topples the empire, and Elend is named ruler of Luthadel. Vin, who has spent her whole life ready to run, chooses at last to stay.
How does Vin kill the Lord Ruler at the end of The Final Empire?
Her normal Allomancy fails, and atium is useless because the Lord Ruler is burning atium too. As her body gives out, the mists flow into Vin and fuel her power from outside, something never before done in the Final Empire. With that strength she grabs his wrists and rips off the two thick metal bracelets she had assumed were ornamental — his Feruchemical metalminds, the secret of his thousand years of life. He ages catastrophically in moments, and Vin finishes him with an ordinary wooden spear.
Does Kelsier die in The Final Empire?
Yes. Kelsier deliberately stages a confrontation at the mass execution outside Kredik Shaw, kills an Inquisitor in single combat, and lets the Lord Ruler strike him down in front of the watching skaa. His martyrdom was always part of the plan: it turns him into a myth, and the kandra OreSeur later appears wearing Kelsier's bones so the skaa believe their Survivor cannot be killed. The spectacle ignites the uprising that brings down the empire.
Who is the Lord Ruler really in The Final Empire?
He is Rashek, the Terris packman who guided Alendi — the man the prophecies actually identified as the Hero of Ages — a thousand years earlier. Rashek murdered Alendi at the Well of Ascension, claimed the power that should have been the Hero's, and rebuilt the world in his own image. The journal quoted in every chapter epigraph turns out to be Alendi's logbook, not the Lord Ruler's. Rashek was at once a Mistborn and a Feruchemist, a pairing that let him rule as an immortal god.
What happens to Sazed, Marsh, and Elend at the end of The Final Empire?
Sazed, disguised as an obligator through a Feruchemical face-stretching trick, breaks Vin out of her cell alone. Marsh turns up alive in the throne room, forcibly remade into a Steel Inquisitor yet still his own man at the decisive moment. Elend survives the chaos, reunites with Vin when she drops through the skylight of his rooms, and becomes the new ruler of Luthadel — leaving the crew terrified about actually governing a fallen empire.
What does the ending of The Final Empire set up for The Well of Ascension?
With his final breath the Lord Ruler warns Vin that she has no idea what she has just set loose. Vin has also felt a strange distant pulsing beneath the city — the Well of Ascension, the sleeping power that gives the second book its title. Meanwhile OreSeur's kandra Contract has passed to Vin, and the crew must learn to rule the wreckage the Lord Ruler left behind.