Unit 3: Dreams and Opportunity — Hero of Ages

• Conduct structured research from a guiding question about hope through source selection, synthesis, and argumentative essay, reading Hero of Ages alongside philosophical and historical texts about how communities sustain hope.

• Build an argumentative essay with a controlling claim about what Hero of Ages argues regarding hope and survival, organizing evidence-based body paragraphs and writing conclusions that establish stakes.

• Understand how to build and sustain an argumentative essay across multiple paragraphs, using evidence from Hero of Ages and supplementary sources.

• Identify and address counterclaims — including the novel's own most despairing passages — and use transitions that signal the logical relationships between evidence and claim.

• What does Sazed's crisis of faith — he has studied hundreds of religions and believes in none of them — reveal about the relationship between hope, belief, and survival?

• How does Sanderson use Ruin versus Preservation as opposing Shards to argue about what it means for civilization to dream of continuity rather than entropy?

This research unit examines the nature of dreams, hope, and the will to rebuild after catastrophe through Hero of Ages, the conclusion of Sanderson's original Mistborn trilogy. Ash falls from a sky that has never been blue. The mists now kill. Koloss armies march. Vin and Elend race across a dying world trying to find the power that can stop Ruin — the Shard of entropy and destruction — before everything ends. Meanwhile, Sazed, a Terrisman Keeper who has spent his life preserving the records of dead religions, finds himself unable to believe in any of them when he needs faith most. Students investigate how Sanderson uses Sazed's journey as an argument about hope: what it is for, what it costs, and what it can build when it finally finds something worth believing.