8 stories from Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere we need adapted onscreen

Warbreaker

Warbreaker is somewhat unique in Sanderson’s catalog. It began life as a standalone novel meant to fill out the backstory of a character from The Stormlight Archive, but at this point it’s basically an essential piece of the Stormlight experience.

Warbreaker is about a young girl named Siri who is betrothed to the God King of the city of T’Telir. When she arrives there, she finds him not at all like she expected. At the same time, Siri’s sister Vivenna — the one who was supposed to marry the God King before things took a turn — sets out to rescue her sister. Her path crosses with a mysterious man named Vasher, who wields a sentient sword with a great love for eradicating evil, often to the detriment of its wielder.

As with all Sanderson’s stories, there’s plenty of interesting magical elements in Warbreaker. This time it involves people who are elevated to godhood, recalling Elantris. However, in order to sustain their godhood, these new deities must be sustained by sacrifices of “Breath” — life force, essentially — from their subjects. Those Breaths can then be used to endow objects with a limited amount of sentience to follow magical Commands.

As objects are “awakened” by Breaths, it drains the colors out of their surroundings. This could look very cool onscreen if done right, possibly in animation. If we got a live-action Stormlight Archive show or movie series, a spinoff Warbreaker anime would be a great idea.

Sanderson has had plans to write a sequel to Warbreaker for a while now, so we know that there’s more to the story; very likely, it will end up even more closely tied to The Stormlight Archive. That said, Warbreaker is still great as a standalone tale. Even if you never picked up a Stormlight book, it’s fully satisfying and could easily stand on its own onscreen.