The Well of Ascension

Sazed manages city matters while Vin recovers from the exhaustion that comes with burning pewter. Penrod, Cett, and Janarle are now the city leaders under Elend’s authority as emperor, and they debate what they should do. Elend arrives to find himself emperor, and he learns to accept that mantel without quite so many misgivings about himself and his abilities.

Sazed reviews his notes from studying with Tindwyl and realizes that something isn’t right. When the skaa called him the Holy First Witness, the title reminded him of something from the logbook. Vin awakes and informs Sazed of her suspicion that the Well is in Luthadel, arguing that when the Lord Ruler took the power, he changed the world so that the Well of Ascension, located beneath the original Terris homeland, was now in the flatter land they knew as Luthadel. Sazed begins to see contradictions in what his notes and the logbook say.

Vin and Elend take Spook and Ham to find the Well of Ascension under Kredik Shaw, the Lord Ruler’s seat of power. The Well pulses more powerfully, and the mists pull away from Vin. Using her Allomancy, she finds a secret door. The narrative returns to Sazed, to whom the mist spirit appears. It points to the center of the city, and Sazed realizes that it might be telling him that Vin should not find the Well. He heads for Kredik Shaw and hears people screaming.

Vin and her companions find a massive storage facility with food and a map of the Final Empire etched in metal. The map has a circle around Statlin City, which they do not understand. They continue through the hidden area to find the Well.

Sazed finds a skaa killed by the mist, but the spirit, which has followed Sazed, denies killing the skaa. When Sazed enters Kredik Shaw, he is stopped by Marsh. Despite having been his ally for so long, Marsh now fights Sazed to keep him from stopping Vin.

Marsh gravely injures Sazed and pushes Sazed’s pouch of metal jewelry into his body until the metals are embedded. Sazed, to his surprise, is able to tap those metalminds to heal and continue to fight Marsh.

Vin and Elend follow a light in the cavern to find a glowing, white pool. When Vin hesitates, questioning whether she will use the power well or become a tyrant like the Lord Ruler, Elend reassures her and supports her with his trust. They find a piece of metal in a disk of clay but ignore it.

Marsh nearly defeats Sazed, but Ham knocks Marsh out with a pewter-strengthened hit to the head to save Sazed. They rush to find Vin and stop her. When Vin steps toward the Well to take the power, the mist spirit stabs Elend in the gut. As he lies dying, Vin sees in his eyes that he would want her to save their people by releasing the Well’s power rather than using it to save his life. She takes the power before releasing it, but as she does so, a voice says that the Deepness has returned, crying that it is free.

As Vin holds Elend, despairing over what she has done to him and to their world, the mist spirit urges her to pick up the metal bead in the clay disk. He gestures toward Elend, and she realizes that the mist spirit wants her to have Elend ingest it. She helps Elend do so, and the bead restores Elend to full health as he burns pewter, despite never having been an Allomancer before.

Sazed has traveled back to the Conventical of Seran, where he compares his rubbing of Kwaan’s message to the original, metal-etched one. The two do not match; whereas the non-metal notes said that Alendi must not be allowed to take the Well’s power, the metal-etched version says that he must not be allowed to release the thing imprisoned in the Well. It also references prophecies being manipulated and altered by this same “thing,” leading to all the misunderstandings and decisions that caused Alendi’s journey and Rashek’s taking of the power in his stead. On learning this, Sazed loses his remaining faith, finding no hope for the future. Vin struggles with having released the power, worried that they face something worse than the Lord Ruler, but Elend assures her that they will survive.