Mistborn Trilogy: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages.

The Mistborn Trilogy — comprising The Final Empire (2006), The Well of Ascension (2007), and The Hero of Ages (2008), all published by Tor Books — is the foundational work of Brandon Sanderson, the American fantasy author and creative writing professor at Brigham Young University who has become one of the dominant figures in contemporary epic fantasy. The trilogy is set on the ash-covered world of Scadrial, where a tyrannical immortal emperor known as the Lord Ruler has ruled for a thousand years following the failure of a prophesied hero — a premise Sanderson conceived as a deliberate inversion of the standard fantasy narrative, asking what happens in a world where the dark lord won. At its center is a heist story driven by a brilliant criminal mastermind and an unlikely heroine named Vin, a half-skaa street orphan who discovers she possesses the rare and powerful abilities of a Mistborn — one who can ingest and internally "burn" metals to wield extraordinary physical and perceptual powers, a magic system of exceptional internal consistency and ingenuity that Sanderson has described as his first fully realized example of what he calls "hard magic." The trilogy was voted onto NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list and established Sanderson as a New York Times bestselling author, with his works collectively topping bestseller lists seven times within the first decade of his career. The success of the original trilogy led directly to Sanderson being selected to complete Robert Jordan's unfinished Wheel of Time sequence following Jordan's death in 2007, and it launched the broader Cosmere — Sanderson's ambitious interconnected fictional universe that now encompasses dozens of novels and novellas and has made him one of the most commercially successful fantasy authors of his generation.