The Well of Ascension

The Well of Ascension was published by Tor in 2007 and is the second of the three novels in Brandon Sanderson's first Mistborn trilogy. Sanderson had sold the series on the strength of its magic system, in which the nobility burn metals to gain specific physical and mental abilities, and the second book spends its time exploring the consequences of that system rather than adding to it: what it costs to use, who has access, and what happens when the records that describe it turn out to be incomplete.

The novel is structured as a siege. Elend has been made king of a city that does not yet believe in him, and his attempts to govern by argument are set against the arrival of armies that answer only to force. Vin is the one member of the new government who can fight, and much of her story in this volume is about a power that is still being defined by an enemy who understands it better than she does. The kandra, the Feruchemists and the history of the Terris people all move from background detail to plot in this book.

Sanderson wrote the trilogy quickly and published all three novels between 2006 and 2008, and the series later grew into a second era set centuries afterwards, with a further sequence planned beyond that. The Well of Ascension is the middle volume, which means it ends by opening more than it closes, and it assumes the reader has come through The Final Empire first. The Tor hardcover was followed by a leather-bound edition and an audiobook, and the trilogy is now sold as a boxed set.