The following is commentary, written by Brandon, about one of the chapters of MISTBORN: THE HERO OF AGES. 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 of Brandon’s books. For those who have read some of MISTBORN 3, 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.

TenSoon Escapes

TenSoon’s escape shocked the other kandra. They probably should have taken more precautions, but they thought they’d done all they needed to. The two soldiers with the Blessing of Presence should have been enough to keep him from running, and the blocked doorway out was—in the minds of the Seconds—a major obstacle. Mix that with the fact that TenSoon had shown no resistance, and had come to his fate willingly, and you have a group of Seconds who had a false sense of security.

I worry that TenSoon’s plotline isn’t connected enough to the others. Truth be told, I worry that all three plots are too separated. They do interweave at the end, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to justify having all three take place in such different locations. I’ll be curious to see what the reviews say.

Kandra Blessings

The Blessings are still a little confusing, I fear. Originally I designed a Blessing as a single bit of metal in each kandra’s shoulder. Eventually, however, I realized that I needed to change this for magic system cohesion reasons. I changed it to be two bits of metal, one in each shoulder. So, each kandra has one Blessing, but that Blessing consists of two bits of metal.

Each kandra only gets one Blessing from among the different types. There will be more on this in the book later, of course.