The Well of Ascension characters

Also known as The Heir of the Survivor

Appears from the start

The Mistborn who killed the Lord Ruler, now about a year older and deeply uncomfortable with what that has made her. The skaa of Luthadel have built a religion around Kelsier and treat her as his heir, which she resents and cannot escape. She spends her nights in the mists hunting for an assassin who has been stalking Elend, trusts almost nobody with anything that matters, and is quietly certain that she is either a street thief pretending to be a noblewoman or a noblewoman pretending to be a knife, and that she is failing at both.

Appears from the start

King of the Central Dominance and the city of Luthadel, a scholar who wrote his own limits into law and created an Assembly with the power to remove him. He is idealistic, badly dressed, and constantly talked over by people who have been governing far longer than he has. He is trying to keep a starving city fed, keep his noble houses from fracturing, and prove that a government founded on argument rather than fear can survive its first year.

First appears in chapter 3

The Terris Keeper who taught Vin to pass as a noblewoman, now working out in the villages of the Central Dominance, teaching farming and medicine and offering the old religions to anyone who will hear them. He returns to Luthadel with disturbing news out of the countryside and with a scholar's interest in the Lord Ruler's records, the prophecies of the Hero of Ages, and the ancient threat called the Deepness. He is gentle, endlessly courteous, and stubborn about the truth.

First appears in chapter 3

The crew's Soother, now an unlikely statesman, using his talent for shaping a room's emotions on Elend's behalf in the Assembly and in negotiations. He complains about the work, the weather, the wine, and the company, and does the work anyway.

Also known as Hammond

First appears in chapter 3

The crew's Thug, serving as a captain in Luthadel's improvised defenses and as one of Elend's few genuinely trusted advisors. He is still cheerful, still spoiling for a philosophical argument, and increasingly worried about a city that cannot possibly hold against what is gathering outside it.

Also known as Dox

First appears in chapter 3

Kelsier's old partner, now running the practical machinery of Elend's government: supplies, records, appointments, and the food stores of a besieged city. He is competent, unsentimental, and less at ease with the nobility than his position requires.

Also known as Cladent

First appears in chapter 3

The crew's Smoker, now general of Luthadel's defenses, a sour old soldier who never wanted the post and is frank about the city's chances. His scowl has not improved with promotion.

Also known as Lestibournes

First appears in chapter 5

Clubs's nephew, a Tineye used as a scout and messenger, still treated as the crew's boy despite a year of war work. He is desperate to matter and quietly furious that nobody will let him.

First appears in chapter 8

Kelsier's brother, alive as a Steel Inquisitor and using that body against the Ministry that made it. He travels alone, hunting the remnants of the old priesthood and searching the Canton records for what the Lord Ruler knew. He is colder and less human every time the crew sees him.

First appears in chapter 3

A kandra bound to Vin by a formal Contract, one of a secretive people who can digest a corpse, take its bones into their own gelatinous bodies, and wear its shape and face perfectly. He has been serving in the guise of a man Vin once knew, keeps to the letter of his Contract and not an inch beyond it, and finds her manners and her habits contemptible. She finds him no easier.

First appears in chapter 5

Elend's father, lord of House Venture, who fled Luthadel when the empire fell and has spent the year since building an army in the north. He is brutal, vain, and shrewd, keeps a household of mistresses, and regards his son as a soft embarrassment. He brings his army to Luthadel's walls intending to take the city, and is held back only by his fear of what waits inside it.

First appears in chapter 10

A young noblewoman in Luthadel, bright, forward, and given to dramatics, who has decided that Breeze is the most interesting man in the city and pursues him with a persistence he finds alarming. She has a good deal more nerve and rather more political weight than her manner suggests.

First appears in chapter 8

A skaa soldier who rose through the rebellion and now captains part of Luthadel's garrison. He is a devout member of the Church of the Survivor and treats Vin with an awe she finds unbearable, but he is steady, disciplined, and among the most reliable men on the walls.

First appears in chapter 12

A Mistborn who begins seeking Vin out in the mists above Luthadel, calm, scarred, and unnervingly skilled. He is Straff Venture's son, kept and used as an assassin, and he speaks to Vin as the only other person alive who understands what she is. He tells her that the people she serves are wasting her, and that she is being kept on a leash by friends who fear her.

First appears in chapter 14

A Terris Keeper, one of the few women among them, who arrives in Luthadel and takes charge of turning Elend into a king: how to stand, how to dress, how to be obeyed. She is blunt to the point of cruelty, impatient with excuses, and an old acquaintance of Sazed's, whom she criticizes more sharply than she does anyone else. She has spent her life studying rulers and the records of the Lord Ruler's rise.

First appears in chapter 24

A warlord out of the Western Dominance who has carved himself a kingdom from the empire's collapse and brings his army east to Luthadel. He is crude, direct, crippled in the legs and carried everywhere, and he despises Allomancers on principle. He has come for the same thing Straff Venture has, and neither of them wants to be the one who attacks first.