The Emperor's Soul

When Shai is caught replacing the Moon Scepter with her nearly flawless forgery, she must bargain for her life. An assassin has left the Emperor Ashravan without consciousness, a circumstance concealed only by the death of his wife. If the emperor does not emerge after his hundred-day mourning period, the rule of the Heritage Faction will be forfeit and the empire will fall into chaos. Shai is given an impossible task: to create—to Forge—a new soul for the emperor in less than one hundred days. But her soul-Forgery is considered an abomination by her captors. She is confined to a tiny, dirty chamber, guarded by a man who hates her, spied upon by politicians, and trapped behind a door sealed in her own blood. Shai's only possible ally is the emperor's most loyal counselor, Gaotona, who struggles to understand her true talent. Time is running out for Shai. Forging, while deducing the motivations of her captors, she needs a perfect plan to escape... Winner, 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novella! Nominee, 2013 World Fantasy Award for Novella! Brandon Sanderson says "I’m extremely proud of this novella. I think it’s my best piece of short fiction to date, and stands as one of the best complete works I’ve done of any length. It reads more like a short novel than it does a long short story, and does a lot of what I do in my longer fiction—it has a great magic system and cool characters. So what is The Emperor’s Soul? It takes place in the same world as Elantris, though in a very different region, with only a few ties to Elantris. So you definitely don’t have to have read Elantris to appreciate it. (Though if you have, you should be able to see some fun ties between the magic systems.) It tells the story of a woman named Shai, a thief and a Forger—a person capable of rewriting the pasts of objects in order to change their present."