Susebron

Susebron, also known as Susebron the Fifth, is the God King of Hallandren on Nalthis around 300 years after the Manywar. He is a Returned and is given two or more Breaths every week by his subjects in order to keep him alive. He is the fifth God King in the three hundred years since the Manywar.
==Appearance & Personality==
As a Returned, Susebron looks about twenty, much younger than his fifty years. He is described as having dark hair, black eyes, and pale skin, though it is revealed later that he can learn to change his appearance at will.
He is naive, having grown up in a virtual prison imposed upon him by his priests. He is highly trusting of them, and refuses to believe that they may wish him harm (though it is worth noting that his faith in them turns out to be well-placed). His main source of knowledge about morality is a book of stories that once belonged to his mother, the morals of which he follows from memory. Later, he begins to figure some things out for himself, though he continues to hold to the book's rules, making him honest to a fault. Susebron is highly devoted to the people he trusts, including Siri and the priests, and refuses to abandon either of them. Nonetheless, he can be realistic in his assessment of others and is keenly aware of his own shortcomings as a ruler.
He is very fond of sweets and justifies eating a lot of them by saying that as a Returned, he can't gain any weight.
== Attributes and Abilities ==
Throughout most of his life, Susebron was mute and unable to read or write using the common alphabet. He did, however, understand the color-coded Hallendren artisan's script, which provided the only means of communication between Susebron and his priests. Because he wasn't taught how to Awaken mentally, he was unable to use his Breath to Awaken. He eventually manages to learn how to read and write from Siri, and has his tongue restored by Lightsong, immediately gaining the ability to speak.
He has been gifted with Peacegiver's Treasure, a sum of approximately fifty thousand Breaths. Additionally, he receives two to three Breaths every week which causes his hoard of Breath to grow steadily over time. This grants him the Tenth Heightening and all the abilities of the Heightenings beneath it, including:
* Aura Recognition - allows him to assess the number of Breaths a person possesses. 
* Perfect Pitch
* Perfect Color Recognition - allows him to instantly and instinctively determine exact shades of colors and their hue harmonics.
* Perfect Life Sense - allows him to sense people around him.
* Agelessness - makes him immune to most toxins and physical ailments, as well as making him functionally immortal. 
* Instinctive Awakening - allows him to know commands necessary for what he desires to do without learning them beforehand.
* Invested Breath Recognition - allows him to recognize the auras of objects, and can tell when something has been Invested with Breath via Awakening.
* Command Breaking - allows him to instinctively override Commands in other Invested objects, including Lifeless. This requires concentration and will leave him exhausted.
* Greater Awakening - allows him to Awaken stone and steel objects.
* Audible Command - allows him to Awaken objects that he is not physically touching, but that are within the sound of his voice.
* Color Distortion - Wherever Susebron goes, white objects in his vicinity break up their colors like a prism, creating further colors. To show this off, he's usually dressed in white for public functions, although he wears black in private, as it is a more powerful color from an Awakening standpoint.
* Perfect Invocation - when Awakening he drains objects to white instead of grey.
* Mental Command - this ability, which is difficult to learn, allows him to give Commands and Awaken mentally. Susebron would have been able to Awaken through this ability before having his tongue healed, but was never taught how to do so.
* There are rumors of other powers granted by the Tenth Heightening which are not understood or have not been made known by the God Kings, who have been the only ones to achieve it.
The Peacegiver's Treasure makes Susebron effectively immortal, and even if he were to suddenly be cut off from his weekly supply, he could still live for over nine hundred years feeding off it. This amount of Breath might also make him immune to emotional Allomancy. In addition, as the God-King, he's capable of using his divine Breath to heal multiple people instead of just one. Whether this is because he was Returned young or some side-effect of holding Peacegiver's Treasure is uncertain.
Though little has been shown of Susebron's Awakening abilities, he is naturally extremely powerful by the virtue of the sheer number of Breaths he possesses. Shortly after regaining his tongue, he was capable of controlling hundreds of individual Awakened objects simultaneously.
Though he is a king, it's uncertain how much in the way of political skill he has, as until very recently, he's been little more than a figurehead of the priesthood.
== History ==
=== Childhood and Early Life ===
Susebron was an infant Returned fifty years before the Pahn Kahl rebellion. He was born to a poor family living far to the north in Hallandren, to a merchant and his wife. At the time of his Return, the current God King was unable to produce a child, and so the infant Susebron was given Peacegiver's Treasure and made the new God King after his predecessor gave up his divine Breath to cure a plague. At some point either before or after his crowning, his tongue was removed so that he would be unable to use the wealth of Breaths that had been bestowed on him. His mother raised him in the palace, though eventually she was "taken away". Through the years he managed to retain a storybook she used to read him; he had heard the stories so many times and looked at it over the years that he had memorized each symbol, and the morals of the stories in the book were in part the code by which he lived.
Throughout most of his life, Susebron resided mostly alone in the black palace of the God Kings in T'Telir. Despite being the official ruler of Hallandren, he was kept away from its people and other Returned, only coming out briefly on special occasions in order to hide the fact that he was mute. At the time, he had not been taught to Awaken by thought.
=== Marriage to Siri ===
To forestall a war between Idris and Hallandren, Susebron was promised the hand of king Dedelin's daughter, Vivenna. At the last moment, however, she was swapped for her sister, Sisirinah, and Susebron ended up marrying Siri. For a long time, Susebron and Siri met only at night, as the priests wanted them to make a child, but neither acted, as Siri was awaiting Susebron's first move while Susebron had no idea what was expected of him. Initially, he did not understand Siri, uncertain as to why she spent her nights waiting, naked, on his floor. After a nearly a week of this routine, Siri approached him and berated him for doing nothing but watch throughout all the previous week. When Susebron approaches, it is revealed that he has no tongue. Siri, to convince his priests that they were trying for a baby, began moaning and bouncing on the bed every day, mimicking what she thought sex sounded like. After she began to perform her moaning and screaming routine for the priests, he approached her with a book, hoping to start some communication.
Siri taught Susebron to read and write using his mother's storybook, and they started to converse, him writing on a board, and her speaking. As he and Siri planned how to reveal to the other gods that he had no tongue, the two began to fall in love. He would spend long hours with her, learning about things like sarcasm and mockery, about places such as Idris, and about Siri's life growing up. During one of these conversations, Susebron expressed an interest in meeting Austre. Eventually, he and Siri consummated their marriage.
=== The Pahn Kahl Rebellion ===
After much convincing from Siri, Susebron decided to finally reveal his true function in the court to the other gods, with the plan for failure being to flee with Siri and Bluefingers. However, before either could happen, Siri was taken away by the priests under the guise of her pregnancy forcing her to stay in seclusion. Almost immediately afterwards, the Pahn Kahl attacked the Court of Gods, and imprisoned both Siri and Susebron.
The latter found himself in a cell next to Lightsong, who sacrificed his own divine Breath to heal him, restoring his tongue. Now able to speak, and armed with enough Breaths to let him instinctively Awaken, Susebron freed his palace from the Pahn Kahl invaders and saved Siri.
Soon after the rebellion was quenched, Susebron was approached by Vasher, who gave him the command to the Kalad's Phantoms strewn about the city. He used it to send the statues after the Lifeless army, which was bearing down on Idris. He himself remained in T'Telir along with Siri, now with far more influence on Hallandren politics.
== Relationships ==
=== Siri ===
Siri and Susebron are married. Though the purpose of their marriage is to solidify political alliances and to fulfill the agreement between Hallandren and Idris set up two decades previously, they come to love each other deeply. Siri is not initially meant to be Susebron's wife through the agreement; instead, her older sister Vivenna is groomed her whole life to marry the God King. However, when Vivenna turns twenty-two and the time comes that she must travel to Hallandren to wed Susebron, her father, King Dedelin, decides to send Siri in her place. Despite Siri's initial terror at the prospect her marriage to Susebron, the two strike up a friendship which turns quickly to love.
== Development ==
Siri, Vivenna and Susebron were developed together. Originally, they were all characters from Mythwalker, Brandon's ninth, unpublished novel. Susebron was unnamed in Mythwalker, going only by the name of the Emperor, but was likewise going to marry Vivenna (Vvenna in Mythwalker) before marrying Siri instead.
The Emperor in Mythwalker retains the same divine status Susebron has, but the details are slightly different: he's significantly younger, has been crowned at the age of ten rather than shortly after his birth, and wears black rather than white in court. He's also not a Returned, as Awakening did not yet exist in its current form.
Though the Emperor is present for Siri's marriage to him (in contrast to Susebron), his early meetings with her go much the same as they do in Warbreaker. However, as the Siri in Mythwalker possesses powers that would allow her to regrow his tongue, the plot requires the two to remain in that initial state of non-communication for far longer than they do now.
Though Brandon never finished Mythwalker, the budding relationship between Siri and the Emperor was one of his favorite parts of the story, which is why he revisited it in Warbreaker. Though their plot was re-written significantly to improve the pacing, the Emperor's personality did not change when he became Susebron.
== Trivia ==
* Several people emailed Brandon saying that lacking a tongue, Susebron shouldn't have the sense of taste. However, this is a misconception born out of a common urban legend that the taste buds are segregated by taste on a person's tongue, while in reality, the roof of the mouth also has them.
* Though Susebron believes that he has hidden his book of stories from the priests, they are aware of it, though they decided to let him keep it as a memento.
* According to Brandon, Susebron might not make a good God-King, but he will certainly make an earnest one. It's possible that Llarimar will become his high priest.
* Though Susebron might appear in Nightblood, he will not be the focus of the story.
== Notes ==