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.

Ham

I’ve expressed before that I wish I could have done more with Ham. Of the main crew, he’s the only one other than Clubs who never got even a token viewpoint in the series.

I just didn’t have the time for everyone. Perhaps, as I write more and more, I’ll get better at covering more ground with fewer pages. That will let me branch out into studying more of the lesser characters and rounding them out. However, for this series, I had to pick and choose carefully. Ham’s story didn’t have enough conflict, tension, or growth in it. So, I went with Spook and TenSoon instead.

Vin Observes the Mists

There’s a lot going on in this chapter, even though it seems to basically be filler. Again, the setup in my books can be rather extensive. I apologize if you find this sort of thing slow, but it’s how I work. Maybe if I point out some of the important factors of the chapter, it will highlight what I’m trying to do.

First off, we have Vin pointing out to the reader that the mists are definitely supernatural. Included in this are the fact that they don’t go indoors, the way they pull away from Vin but spin around other Allomancers, and the way they vanish too quickly before the sun. Added to that is the part where Human says he can sense a hatred from the mists.

These things are all related and connected to Vin in ways that—if you’ve read the book already—you should be able to pick out on your own.