The Well of Ascension recap

A year after the Lord Ruler's death, Elend Venture rules Luthadel as an elected king over a starving city, and three armies converge on it: his father Straff's, the warlord Cett's, and twenty thousand koloss. Vin, worshipped by the skaa as the Survivor's heir and courted in the mists by Straff's Mistborn son Zane, hunts an assassin and doubts everything about herself. Sazed and the Keeper Tindwyl dig through the old records and conclude that the prophecies of the Hero of Ages have been tampered with. Elend is deposed by his own Assembly and keeps leading anyway. When the koloss break into the city, Clubs, Dockson, and Tindwyl die in the defense; Vin kills Zane, takes control of the koloss by raw Allomancy, and ends the siege. She then finds the Well of Ascension beneath the palace, uses its power to heal the dying Elend, making him a Mistborn, and releases the power as the inscription instructs. The inscription was altered. Releasing the power frees Ruin, a god that has spent a thousand years waiting for exactly that.

Previously: for a thousand years the Final Empire stood under the immortal Lord Ruler, with ash falling from the sky, mists rising each night, and the skaa held as property by the nobility. Kelsier, a half-skaa thief who survived the Lord Ruler's prison mine and emerged from it a Mistborn, assembled a crew of Allomancers to bring the empire down. He recruited Vin, a distrustful street thief who did not know she was Mistborn, trained her, and sent her into noble society under a false name, where she met and fell in love with Elend Venture, the bookish heir of a great house. The crew's secret skaa army was destroyed and their plan collapsed. Kelsier raised Luthadel in revolt instead and let the Lord Ruler kill him publicly, becoming a martyr whose legend finished what his army could not. Vin discovered from the Lord Ruler's own journal that he was not the prophesied hero but Rashek, the servant who had murdered that hero and taken the power at the Well of Ascension for himself, and that his immortality was carried in metal driven through his arms. She tore it away and killed him. Luthadel fell to the skaa, Elend was made king, and Kelsier's surviving crew, including Sazed, Breeze, Ham, Dockson, Clubs, and Spook, became his government. Marsh, Kelsier's brother, survived his capture by being made into a Steel Inquisitor.

A year after the Lord Ruler's death, Elend Venture rules Luthadel as king, having written an Assembly of nobles, merchants, and skaa into law with the power to remove him. The city is hungry, the surrounding dominances are fragmenting into warlords, and the skaa have built a religion around Kelsier, treating Vin as the Survivor's heir, a role she despises. Vin spends her nights in the mists hunting an assassin who has been stalking Elend and killing his guards, and is followed everywhere by OreSeur, a kandra shapeshifter bound to her by Contract whom she neither likes nor trusts. Sazed returns from the villages with news he cannot explain: the mists, which have always been harmless, have begun killing people. Then Straff Venture, Elend's estranged father, arrives at the walls with an army out of the north, intending to take the city he abandoned. Elend, who has never fought anyone in his life, has to find a way to keep a starving capital from being taken by his own family.

A second army arrives: Lord Cett out of the west, who has carved a kingdom from the empire's ruins and wants Luthadel and the atium supply believed to be hidden under it. Neither besieger will attack first, since whoever assaults the walls will be destroyed by the other, and Elend's survival depends entirely on keeping that balance. Tindwyl, a Terris Keeper, arrives and begins remaking Elend into something the city will actually obey, drilling him in bearing, decisiveness, and the history of rulers, while criticizing Sazed sharply for wasting himself on politics. Vin encounters the Mistborn who has been stalking the palace and learns his name is Zane; instead of fighting her, he begins meeting her in the mists, telling her she is being used as a tool by people who fear her. The Assembly grows restive, and Elend discovers that the law he wrote himself can be turned against him.

Elend rides out to negotiate with Cett, taking Vin as escort; when the meeting turns hostile Vin cuts through Cett's guards and Mistborn protection almost casually, and the city's reputation for having a monster in it is what keeps both armies where they are. Zane presses his case with Vin, training with her, feeding her doubts about Elend and the crew, and insisting she is capable of ending the siege by herself if she stopped asking permission. Straff, terrified of Vin, is pushed toward rash decisions by his son. Allrianne, a noblewoman who has attached herself to Breeze, leaves the city on her own errand. Meanwhile Sazed and Tindwyl work through the Lord Ruler's records and the prophecies of the Hero of Ages, and Sazed becomes convinced that a rubbing he has of the ancient Well of Ascension inscription does not say what the surviving copies say: someone has altered the prophecy.

The Assembly removes Elend from the throne and elects Lord Penrod in his place. Stripped of the crown, and finally acting like the king Tindwyl trained him to be, Elend keeps working to save the city anyway. Cett is maneuvered into taking shelter inside Luthadel, which changes the balance outside it. Vin, increasingly convinced that the mist spirit she has glimpsed since Kelsier's day is real and that the prophecies of the Hero of Ages point at her, begins to suspect that someone close to the crew is passing information to their enemies, and that a kandra could be wearing the face of anyone she knows. Sazed and Tindwyl conclude that the altered inscription is not vandalism but a deliberate campaign of forgery reaching back a thousand years, carried out by something with the patience and the reach to edit written words themselves.

Vin takes the fight to Straff's camp, cutting through his defenses to reach him personally and leaving him convinced that she will kill him if he does not withdraw. The reprieve is brief. A third force appears: an army of twenty thousand koloss, the Lord Ruler's brutal, half-mad war creatures, brought south by Jastes Lekal, who has been buying their obedience with counterfeit coin that is beginning to fail. Luthadel cannot survive them. Vin's relationship with Zane comes to a head and she is forced to fight him; she kills him. In the aftermath, the kandra serving her confesses what he is: not the servant she believed, but an impostor who took that identity, sent to spy on her and ultimately to replace her. He refuses the last of his orders and tells her the truth instead, including the secret his people guard most closely, that a kandra can be controlled through the spikes driven into its body.

With the koloss army coming and no chance of holding the walls, Elend and the crew prepare for a siege they expect to lose. Sazed marries Elend and Vin. Vin, working through Sazed's research and the Lord Ruler's own account, realizes that the Well of Ascension is not in the distant northern mountains where every legend places it: the Lord Ruler built his palace on top of it, and it has been beneath Kredik Shaw the whole time. She also understands that the power gathering there is not infinite and will not wait, and that whatever wrote the false prophecies wants someone to reach it. The koloss break into Luthadel. The defense is desperate and the losses are heavy: Clubs and Dockson are killed in the fighting, and Tindwyl dies with them, leaving Sazed shattered. Elend is gravely wounded holding the line.

In the middle of the battle Vin draws power from the mists themselves, something no Allomancer is supposed to be able to do, and uses it to seize control of the koloss army outright, turning it against the forces besieging the city. Straff Venture is killed in the confrontation that follows and his army passes to Elend, who now commands the largest force in the Central Dominance despite having been voted out of his own throne. Luthadel holds. Carrying the dying Elend, Vin descends beneath the palace to the Well of Ascension and finds the power waiting for her exactly as the histories promised.

At the Well, Vin takes hold of the power and uses a fraction of it to heal Elend's wounds, which snaps him into Allomancy and leaves him a Mistborn. Then, as the inscription instructs and as Sazed's research seemed to confirm, she gives the power up rather than using it, believing that this is what the Hero of Ages is supposed to do. It is the one thing she should not have done. The prophecies were forged for precisely this purpose: the power at the Well was a prison, and releasing it frees Ruin, a god that has spent a thousand years altering every written record in the world to arrange its own escape. In the aftermath, Elend is crowned emperor and Penrod submits to him, Vin is hailed as the Hero of Ages by people who do not know what she has done, and Marsh, spiked through the body as all Inquisitors are, is no longer his own man. The kandra who served Vin returns to his people to answer for breaking his Contract. The ash falls more heavily than it has in living memory.

Luthadel survives, at a cost. The koloss break into the city, and Clubs and Dockson are killed in the fighting, along with Tindwyl. Vin, drawing on the mists in a way no Allomancer is supposed to be able to, seizes control of the koloss army by force of Allomancy and turns it. Straff Venture is killed in the confrontation that follows, and his army passes to his son, leaving Elend with the largest force in the region and a city that has voted him out of office but has nobody else left to follow. Vin, having worked out that the Well of Ascension was never in the northern mountains but directly beneath the imperial palace, descends to it with the dying Elend. She finds the power waiting there, immense and offered, and uses a fraction of it to heal Elend's wounds, which snaps him into Allomancy and leaves him a Mistborn. Then, as the ancient inscription instructs, she gives the power up rather than taking it. The inscription was a forgery. What was held prisoner at the Well is a god called Ruin, and Vin has just released it. The book closes with Elend crowned emperor and hailed alongside Vin as the Hero of Ages, with Marsh no longer his own, with the ash falling more heavily than before, and with something old and patient loose in the world.