Seeds of a story started to grow in my mind from this visit. What stood out most to me were the stamps. We sometimes call them “chops” in English, but I’ve always called them by their Korean name of tojang. In Mandarin, they’re called yìnjiàn. These intricately carved stone stamps are used as signatures in many different Asian cultures.

During my visit to the museum, I noticed many of the familiar red stamps. Some were, of course, the stamps of the artists—but there were others. One piece of calligraphy was covered in them. Lucie and Sherry explained: Ancient Chinese scholars and nobility, if they liked a work of art, would sometimes stamp it with their stamp too. One emperor in particular loved to do this, and would take beautiful sculptures or pieces of jade—centuries old—and have his stamp and perhaps some lines of his poetry carved into them.

What a fascinating mind-set. Imagine being a king, deciding that you particularly liked Michelangelo’s David, and so having your signature carved across the chest. That’s essentially what this was.

The concept was so striking, I began playing with a stamp magic in my head. Soulstamps, capable of rewriting the nature of an object’s existence. I didn’t want to stray too close to Soulcasting from the Stormlight world, and so instead I used the inspiration of the museum—of history—to devise a magic that allowed rewriting an object’s past.

The story grew from that starting place. As the magic aligned a great deal with a system I’d been developing for Sel, the world where Elantris takes place, I set the story there. (I also had based several cultures there on our-world Asian cultures, so it fit wonderfully.)

You can’t always write what you know—not exactly what you know. You can, however, write what you see.

BRANDON SANDERSON

Deleted Prologue

The Imperial Fool

SHAI pressed her fingernail into one of the stone blocks of her prison cell. The stone gave way slightly. She rubbed the dust between her fingers, frowning. “Limestone?” she asked softly. “Who makes a cell out of limestone?”

Of course, the whole cell wasn’t of limestone, merely that single block. Shai had counted twenty-seven different kinds of stone so far, including several she didn’t know the names of. That would make escape tough. Very tough.

This was a cell that had been designed to hold a Forger. She knelt down beside her bunk, using a fork—she’d bent back all of the tines but one—to carve notes into the wood of one leg. She’d engraved a crosswork pattern on another side, with numbers representing the stones of the back wall of her cell. Without her spectacles, she had to squint to see what she’d carved there.

She wrote out, with some difficulty, the word limestone in the key representing the stone block she’d just identified. “Honestly,” she growled as she worked. “They sentence a girl to death. They could at least give her a sheet of paper.”