I foolishly paid 49 cents to download this from Amazon when I could have read it for free on the author's website. Still, it was worth 49 cents. It doesn't answer all the questions left about Elantris, but it does explain what happened in one crucial part of the story when the narrative follows the protagonists elsewhere. My guess is that the events in this story were originally part of Elantris but interrupted the flow of that novel so much that Sanderson removed it from the novel and added a flashback frame to make it a stand-alone. ( )