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-One

The truth is that yes, indeed, Cett caught Breeze in bed with his daughter. In Breeze’s defense, she kind of snuck in herself while he was sleeping and snuggled up to him. However, that wasn’t why Cett chased Breeze out of the camp. You’ll find out more about that later.

I couldn’t resist throwing in the ending of the last chapter, mixed with the beginning of this one. Ham’s wisecrack about Cett catching Breeze with his daughter was just too good to not make true. The thing is, Breeze is always so controlled and self-important that it’s good to throw him out of his element every once in a while.

This is a short scene, but one of the more important ones to show off a little character development in Elend. He is beginning to see some of the truth in Tindwyl’s words.

Pulling off a transformation like his was one of the great challenges of this book. Actually, the plot was pretty easy–but getting Elend and Vin’s relationship down, along with the development of both of their characters, was much more difficult. It takes a subtle hand to make Elend learn to be a king without having him progress too quickly, and I’m not sure how well I did it.

Vin’s development–showing off her inner distrust without making her seem paranoid or making their relationship seem shallow–was even tougher.