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.

Fadrex

Fadrex was originally named Fadex. However, nobody—not my editor, my agent, or my writing group—liked that name. I added one letter, and suddenly it was okay. Go figure.

This city, as I mentioned earlier, was very tough for me to figure out how to describe. I can picture it quite distinctly in my head. Of course, I’ve spent a lot of time in southern Utah, where rock formations like this are plentiful. If you Google “Cathedral Valley” you can get an idea of what this area might look like—except that the formations in Cathedral Valley are a little bit higher and more spread out than what I imagine for Fadrex.

Sometimes I wish I could crawl inside the heads of my readers while they experience these stories and see what they imagine the places to look like. I’ve said before that I like how fiction is participatory—that each person who reads my books imagines slightly different things; each person gets different images for places and characters. I’d like to know what they see, just for curiosity’s sake. There’s no wrong way to imagine these people, just like there isn’t a right or a wrong way to pronounce the names. It’s all up to you.

Assassinating King Yomen?

The assassination card is one that I’m always very hesitant to play. Perhaps it’s old-fashioned morals on my part, though I think it’s more that I’m saving up the “guilt from assassinating so many people” character conflict for a different book sometime. I’d like it to be a major theme sometime as I work out what it does to a person to kill in such a way.

However, the lack of assassinations in book two is, I think, one of the weak parts of the novel. To be honest, despite my own explanations and rationalizations, I think there probably should have been more of an attempt by the good guys to simply kill Straff and Cett.

I try to do a better job in this book, mostly by doing what I probably should have done in book two—I pointed out the danger of assassinating a man who, himself, had a Mistborn who could reach those you love. As soon as the game gets personal and knives start stabbing in the night, things get very dangerous for the leadership on both sides. I think that people would want to put that off as long as possible while they pursued other possibilities.

Felt

Oh, and Felt gets a mention here. I don’t know if you remember him from book one, but he was the spy who Elend sent to tail Vin one night and figure out who she truly was. He was loyal to house Venture, and Elend inherited Felt from his father when Straff fled Luthadel and left behind most of his servants and men.

A third son of a very minor nobleman, Felt is used to working for a living—something that does happen to a lot of nobility in this world, even if the ones you see most of the time are either too busy ruling, stealing, or going to war to bother with things like that. 😉