The Well of Ascension
Chapters - Brandon Sanderson
Prologue
A year after the Lord Ruler's death, the world he held together has begun to fracture. The mists seem wrong, the political vacuum has drawn warlords toward Luthadel, and the crew that toppled a god now finds itself trying to govern in his absence. The prologue establishes the central tension of the novel: destroying a tyrant was the easy part. What follows is harder.
POV: TenSoon·On page: Ruin, Preservation
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 1
Elend and Hammond survey Straff Venture's army from the city walls - fifty thousand soldiers camped outside Luthadel, and the Assembly threatening to surrender rather than fight. Vin prowls the streets below with OreSeur, her instincts telling her she is being watched. She is right. A volley of steel-pushed coins announces the first assassination attempt. The siege has not yet begun, but the novel opens with the crew already besieged from within and without.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: Hammond, OreSeur·Mentioned: Kelsier, Straff Venture, Dockson, Spook, Breeze
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 2
Vin is ambushed by eight Allomancers, including a Mistborn, and defeats them with minimal help from a mysterious figure she calls the Watcher. She burns her last bead of atium in the fight. OreSeur is badly injured but Vin refuses to let him consume one of the fallen bodies, a decision that reveals her discomfort with the kandra's nature even as she depends on his service. The chapter establishes that Luthadel's enemies are already inside the walls, and that Vin's resources are dangerously finite.
POV: Vin·On page: Zane, OreSeur·Mentioned: Straff Venture, Elend Venture, Kelsier
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 3
Elend drafts a proposal to restrain the Assembly from capitulating to Straff before he can negotiate. Vin watches from outside, guarding him, when she senses Allomantic pulses that should not exist - distant yet close, emanating from a figure made of mist that stands near her on the rooftop before vanishing when struck. The mist spirit is introduced not as folklore but as something present, watching, and connected to Allomancy in ways Vin cannot yet explain. Hammond arrives with news: the assassins Vin killed were sent by Ashweather Cett, king of the Western Dominance. Luthadel faces more enemies than it knew.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: Zane, Hammond·Mentioned: Straff Venture, Clubs, Kelsier, Marsh, Ashweather Cett
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 4
Sazed examines a dead skaa in the Eastern Dominance. A villager named Teur describes witnessing mist appear during the day - and watching a man named Jed convulse and die inside it. Sazed searches his copperminds for medical explanations and settles, reluctantly, on disease. He buries Jed according to the HaDah rites and stays to teach the village self-sufficiency. The chapter introduces the novel's second existential threat: the mists are changing, appearing when they should not, and they are killing people. Sazed notices but does not yet understand.
POV: Sazed
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 5
Vin walks through Luthadel's markets and is recognised by members of the Church of the Survivor, who call her the Lady Heir and ask for blessings. She is deeply uncomfortable with their reverence and flees to find solitude. She purchases a wolfhound for OreSeur's new body - a deliberate choice to deny him a human form, which he resents. A shipment of duralumin arrives from a metallurgist, and Vin burns some experimentally but cannot determine its Allomantic use. The chapter maps Vin's isolation: she is revered by strangers, distrusted by her own kandra, and still searching for weapons she does not yet understand.
POV: Vin·On page: Elend Venture, OreSeur, Dockson, Hammond·Mentioned: Kelsier, Sazed, Spook, Breeze, Clubs, Straff Venture
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 6
Vin duels Hammond with staves, burning only pewter, while Elend, Clubs, and Spook watch and wager on the outcome. The spectators discuss the siege and rumours of an atium cache hidden in Luthadel - a rumour that is shaping the political calculus of every army at the gates. Vin wins through dexterity rather than brute strength. Afterward she finds OreSeur has completed his wolfhound body and takes him out. The sparring match is trivial; the atium rumour is not. It will drive every major decision in the chapters ahead.
POV: Elend Venture, Vin·On page: Hammond, Clubs, Spook, TenSoon·Mentioned: Breeze, Dockson, Straff Venture, Kelsier
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 7
Sazed teaches rural skaa writing, farming, and governance at the Synod's direction, but feels restless - sensing there are deeper mysteries to pursue after the Lord Ruler's fall. Marsh arrives unexpectedly and urges Sazed to accompany him to the Conventical of Seran, a Steel Ministry stronghold now abandoned, where its archives might contain vital information. Marsh confirms the reports of daytime mists. Sazed agrees to go. The chapter redirects Sazed from teacher to scholar, and pairs him with the one person whose transformation by the Inquisitors makes him both invaluable and unsettling.
POV: Sazed·On page: Marsh·Mentioned: Vin, Elend Venture, Kelsier
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 8
Vin discovers duralumin's true power by accident, burning it alongside tin during a chase and nearly destroying herself with amplified senses. The Watcher catches up to her and speaks for the first time, asking why she killed the Lord Ruler and why she stays with Elend's court. He calls himself an insane enemy and leaves. OreSeur is disgusted that Vin let a threat walk away. The chapter gives Vin a devastating new weapon - duralumin-enhanced Allomancy - but frames the discovery as loss of control rather than gain of power.
POV: Vin·On page: TenSoon, Zane·Mentioned: Elend Venture, Straff Venture, Breeze, Hammond, Kelsier, Ashweather Cett, Sazed
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 9
Sazed and Marsh travel to the Conventical of Seran. Marsh insists that Sazed belongs in Luthadel helping Elend and Vin, that spreading knowledge to rural villages is less urgent than the political crisis at the capital. Sazed admits he already sent help but privately agrees it is not enough. The journey is quiet but the argument cuts to one of Sazed's central tensions: his duty as a Keeper to preserve and teach versus the immediate demands of people he cares about.
POV: Sazed·On page: Marsh·Mentioned: Spook, Kelsier
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 10
Elend addresses the Assembly for the first time under siege, arguing that negotiations with Straff should precede any vote on the city's fate. The motion passes. Vin notices a Terriswoman in the audience whom she has never met - unusual, since every other Terris visitor has sought Vin out to thank her for overthrowing the Lord Ruler. Before the implications can settle, a messenger arrives: a second army has appeared outside Luthadel. The siege has doubled, and the political ground beneath Elend has begun to shift.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: Hammond, Ferson Penrod, Tindwyl·Mentioned: Clubs, Kelsier, Straff Venture
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 11
Elend, Clubs, Vin, and OreSeur watch from the walls as Cett's army settles in. A lone rider breaks from the enemy camp - Breeze, pursued by archers, making a desperate run for the city gates. Vin uses duralumin-enhanced steel pushes to scatter his pursuers, revealing the terrifying scale of her amplified power. Breeze explains that he was embedded as one of Cett's advisors and manipulated the warlord into marching on Luthadel, engineering a standoff between the two besieging armies to improve Elend's position. Then palace guards discover two skeletons - one freshly stripped - left behind by kandra. A spy has already replaced someone in Elend's inner circle.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: Clubs, TenSoon, Breeze, Hammond, Spook, Demoux·Mentioned: Ashweather Cett, Straff Venture, Kelsier, Dockson
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 12
Sazed and Marsh explore the Conventical of Seran, a massive Steel Ministry fortress bearing the evidence of a massacre. Marsh retreats to the Inquisitor quarters while Sazed descends alone, finding first a chamber used to create new Inquisitors, then a steel plate engraved in an old Terris dialect. The text was written by a Worldbringer named Kwaan, who proclaims himself the man who discovered and championed Alendi as the Hero of Ages - and then tried to stop him. Sazed takes charcoal rubbings. The chapter epigraphs throughout the novel are this text; here, Sazed discovers their physical source.
POV: Sazed·On page: Marsh·Mentioned: Kelsier
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 13
Vin notices the mists arriving earlier each evening. She questions OreSeur about kandra society and learns that the infiltrator is operating under a legitimate Contract, that no kandra enters human society without one, and that kandra are immune to emotional Allomancy. OreSeur refuses to explain why kandra must be kept from Inquisitors. Later, Vin confronts the mist spirit directly, finding it perched with a vantage over her earlier conversation. When she shouts at it, it steps forward and something cold grabs her arm, sending pain through her earring into her mind. She falls from a window. The mists, once her domain, have become something she fears.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: TenSoon, Breeze, Hammond, Spook, Dockson, Clubs, Demoux, Tindwyl·Mentioned: Sazed, Kelsier, Ashweather Cett, Straff Venture
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 14
The Terriswoman from the Assembly meeting is Tindwyl, an acquaintance of Sazed whose coppermind speciality is the biographies of great leaders. She has come to tutor Elend in how to be a king - not by philosophy but by presence, bearing, and the accumulated wisdom of rulers throughout history. Vin distrusts her immediately. Tindwyl's arrival introduces a counterweight to Elend's bookish idealism: the argument that leadership is performance as much as principle.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: Hammond, Tindwyl·Mentioned: Sazed, Kelsier, TenSoon, Spook, Demoux
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 15
Sazed finds himself alone eight days after leaving the Conventical. At the village of Urbene, he discovers the population dead from starvation and dehydration - too terrified to go outside because mist has appeared during the day. The few who ventured out suffered violent seizures; some survived, some did not. One living man has resorted to eating corpses. Sazed carries him outside using a pewtermind and the man flees. Sazed retrieves a steelmind and uses its stored speed to race toward Luthadel. The daytime mists are no longer a curiosity. They are a plague, and entire communities are dying from fear of them.
POV: Sazed·Mentioned: Vin, Elend Venture, Marsh
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 16
Vin dissects Alendi's logbook searching for references to the mist spirit and the Deepness, finding that the same creature followed the Hero of Ages centuries earlier. The logbook yields little else. Meanwhile, Tindwyl reshapes Elend's appearance: a military uniform, a crown, a sharp haircut. He is to wear nothing else until the siege ends. The transformation is superficial and deliberate - Tindwyl's argument that a king must look like a king before he can act like one. Captain Demoux arrives with word that Straff Venture has sent a messenger.
POV: Vin, Elend Venture·On page: Clubs, Tindwyl, TenSoon, Demoux·Mentioned: Sazed, Hammond, Kelsier, Ashweather Cett, Straff Venture
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 17
Straff's messenger turns out to be the Watcher, who identifies himself as Zane and invites Elend to parlay at Straff's camp. Vin and OreSeur patrol afterward, and Vin admits she has been sparring with Zane without telling Elend - withholding the relationship to avoid worrying him, though she did reveal that Zane is Mistborn. Zane finds Vin at Keep Hasting and tells her that Mistborn belong in the mists, not in noble courts. Vin privately wonders whether she could turn Zane against his father. The chapter names the Watcher and establishes him as Straff's weapon, Elend's half-brother, and a growing complication in Vin's loyalties.
POV: Vin·On page: Elend Venture, Zane, TenSoon·Mentioned: Tindwyl, Straff Venture, Ashweather Cett, Kelsier
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 18
The perspective shifts to Zane, who watches Elend in secret while a voice in his head tells him to kill his half-brother. He ignores it. Zane reports to Straff that he is gaining Vin's trust but cannot confirm whether she has atium. A serving girl tries to poison Straff's tea and fails; she is killed, and Straff drinks the tea anyway, privately obtaining an antidote from a mistress afterward. The chapter reveals the Venture household as a nest of paranoia and attempted murder, and Zane as a man who hears a god's voice and chooses, for now, not to obey it.
POV: Zane, Straff Venture·Mentioned: Vin, Elend Venture, Kelsier, Ashweather Cett
Source: Coppermind
Chapter 19
Sazed discards an exhausted steelmind and estimates a week of walking to Luthadel, but stumbles upon a koloss army. Captured by a patrol, he is brought before the army's leader: Jastes Lekal, an old university friend of Elend's, who has somehow placed himself in command of twenty thousand koloss. Jastes offers Sazed a position and, when refused, sends a message through him - that he will ally with Elend and coexist peacefully in Luthadel. The proposition is absurd and everyone in the scene seems to know it. A third army now threatens the city, and this one is led by a man who does not understand what he commands.
POV: Sazed·On page: Jastes Lekal·Mentioned: Elend Venture, Ashweather Cett, Straff Venture
Source: Coppermind