The following is commentary, written by Brandon, about one of the chapters of MISTBORN: THE WELL OF ASCENSION. If you haven’t read this book, know that the following will contain major spoilers. We suggest reading the sample chapters from book one instead. You can also go to this book’s introduction or go to the main annotations page to access all annotations for all books. For those who have read some of MISTBORN 2, any spoilers for the ending of this book will be hidden, so as long as you’ve read up to this chapter, you should be all right.

Chapter Fifty-six

Elend in the Mists after Vin Leaves

 

I wanted to include a reference to mistwraiths in this book. They’re a minor world element, but aspects of their origins are a piece of the puzzle that gets explained further. . .in book three.

The mists are indeed coming earlier in the day, and they are staying later in the mornings. They’re getting stronger, you might say. Elend doesn’t know this, but some of the very outer parts of the empire already have mists lingering almost to the afternoon. The answers to why are coming. . .in book three.

The mist spirit doesn’t want Elend to go to Luthadel. And yes, it was using Allomancy on him. (Influencing his emotions, as it’s done several places through this book.) It doesn’t work very well. The thing doesn’t have much of a mind remaining. The answer to why. . .yes, you guessed it. Book three.

As you can tell, I’m using this last section of the book to set up THE HERO OF AGES. I didn’t want to do this–I wanted all three books to stand well on their own. However, the events in the third book are just too large to deal with in one novel, so they spilled over into the end of this one. I actually began foreshadowing a lot of these things in book one–they were just easier to hide then.

By the way, the scene where Elend stands there, looking into the darkness, hearing leaves rustle and thinking how frightening it is. . .well, that’s a scene from my life. Nothing big, but one night I was just walking past a darkened backyard and I heard rustling like that. I stood for a while, looking into that darkness, realizing just how creepy it was to stand in shadowed light and stare into the void without knowing what was back there. I had to put that in a book.

Elend Runs into the Terris Refugees.

The point of the Terris refugees here is to show us that there is more to the world than just Luthadel. I wanted to hint at politics going on behind the scenes. That’s been hard in this series, since so much of the book is focused in a certain geographic location.

In this case, we get wind of what the Inquisitors have been doing. Their strike was intended to kill the Terris leadership–but not just that. Hinted at in the very beginning of the next volume that the Inquisitors captured a large number of Keepers to use for drawing out their powers.

There is also a lot of foreshadowing going on here with Spook. I wanted to lay the groundwork here for him becoming a viewpoint character in the third book. Burning tin as strongly as he does as consistently as he does is not good for his body, and he’s doing serious damage to it. But he’s grief-stricken and confused, and he fells like he’s been sent away from important events because he’s useless. Reminding himself of his Allomantic power is one of the ways he’s dealing (poorly) with his uncle’s death.