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 Twenty

Elend is already progressing nicely as a king. There’s a lot more time passing in here than I’m showing–lots of training and lessons. One of my worries is that Elend will develop too quickly. However, considering the situation he’s in, I suspect that he knows he has to either adapt quickly or be destroyed. A few tense months can really change a person a lot.

Also, we get to see here that Zane already has his fingers on Vin’s emotions. She’s beginning to question and doubt. This, however, isn’t a quick change–you should realize that all of these questions were already there inside of her. Not only is she a teenage girl, and living during an emotionally volatile part of her life, but she grew up learning to distrust and fear betrayal. Though she’s getting better, the old worries are all still there, and even a little bit of scratching at them reveals them again.

She never really had to confront these things. Falling in with the crew, learning to trust, was actually easy in the last book. Kelsier was there to make everything work out all right, and Vin was always underneath the watchful care of Sazed.

This book is about making her face these things directly.

We get to see a bit of depth from both Breeze and Tindwyl in this chapter. As I said earlier, I can’t really spend the time to round out everyone on the crew, so I have to pick carefully. Breeze is one of my favorites, so I decided to work a bit with him in this book. As you’ll find out later in the book (when we get a few Breeze viewpoints) he’s actually a full-blooded nobleman. It’s not really that important to the story; it’s just part of who he is.

Breeze has made a life and a reputation out of hiding his feelings behind his attitude. I likes looking like a scoundrel–not only does it let him get away with a lot of random things, but it also keeps people from poking too far into his past. There are a lot of skaa thieves who would react very poorly if they discovered that Breeze wasn’t really one of them, but a nobleman who was forced to seek refuge in the underground.

I think Tindwyl has a lot of good points in her training. Some people rebel against the things she says, but I think that she has a good idea of what makes a leader. Or, at least, one kind of leader.

The problem is, that isn’t the only kind of leader that works. Still, in my mind, she knows that she HAS to be like that in order to react against Elend’s frivolousness.