The Hope of Elantris

Matisse is a young orphan in New Elantris who has taken on the job of looking after the other children. When Fjordell soldiers attack, the seon Ashe gives her warning. The children are sent into hiding while Dashe, her adoptive father, tries to lure the soldiers away from them.

The events fall during the siege that forms the climax of the novel Elantris, and the story fills in a gap left in that book's manuscript by following the children rather than the main players. What happens next depends on the strange magic of Elantris itself.

This is a short story, a companion piece to the novel, and it takes about fifteen minutes to read. Brandon Sanderson wrote it in January 2006 to thank a young fan for a book report about the novel. It was first sold on Amazon, then posted free on his website with his own annotation about why he wrote it, and later gathered into the collection Arcanum Unbounded.

Because it reveals how Elantris ends, the novel should be read first. Tense and small in scale, the story stays with a few characters during a single dangerous attack.