TenSoon
also known as Constable Gorglen
A lanky young constable with a long neck and freckles attached to Constable-General Reddi's staff, brought into the governor's council as a record keeper. So unassuming as to be almost invisible — and, Steris is quietly certain, not himself. MB2:TLM:Ch 38
The kandra under contract to House Venture — present in Straff Venture's study at all hours and currently wearing the bones of a Hasting servant. Elend finds the creature's most recent body unsettling. MB1:TFE:Ch 28 superseded at MB2:TLM:Ch 38
Known facts
- replaced-oreseur-the-day-vin-gave-the-wolfhound-bodyTenSoon killed the real OreSeur the day Vin gave him the wolfhound's body and took his place — so she never saw the original OreSeur in the wolfhound skin. The later "fresh bones" he led her to in the palace were a deflection: he was the kandra spy beside her the whole time.MB1:WoA:Ch 47
- contract-voided-and-returns-to-his-peopleWith Zane dead, TenSoon's Contract is void, and he tells Vin he must return to his people for reassignment. He warns her that she now knows the secret his people have kept sacred for a thousand years.MB1:WoA:Ch 47
- imprisoned-for-revealing-kandra-secretAfter his return to the homeland, TenSoon was tried in closed session before the Second Generation for breaking his Contract and confessed under questioning to a further offence — that he had betrayed something held in deep secret by his people. He has been kept since in a small grated pit, fed by drop and washed by sluice, without a skull and so without the means to make a body, while the Second Generation tries to discover who he told.MB1:HoA:Ch 2
- invokes-judgment-under-first-contractDragged out of his pit, doused with gold-lined acid, and given a skull as the First Contract requires — but with the executioners under orders to kill him before he can speak — TenSoon forms a rudimentary mouth in seconds and croaks the single word "Judgment." He keeps the word coming as the acid eats his body, knowing that a public trial will damn him eternally rather than allow him a quiet death, and demanding it anyway for reasons of his own.MB1:HoA:Ch 2
- never-killed-a-manTenSoon has, over centuries of Contracts, eaten and digested human corpses to learn how to build bodies around their bones — but he has never killed a man. The Contract forbids it.MB1:HoA:Ch 7
- fast-body-formingTenSoon can build a convincing human body around an unfamiliar skeleton in minutes — fast enough that his Fifth Generation guards arrive expecting to wait hours for him to finish and find him already standing. He attributes this to the long years he has spent on Contract outside the Homeland, compared to the Seconds who have not left the caves.MB1:HoA:Ch 7
- trial-strategy-for-the-youngTenSoon's decision to force a public trial is not, in his own mind, about saving himself — he expects to be condemned. He insists on it so the truth of what he did and why he did it will be heard by the younger kandra Generations seated in the Trustwarren benches, in the hope that someone among them will act on what he cannot.MB1:HoA:Ch 9
- killed-oreseur-on-zanes-orderTenSoon killed and impersonated his generation brother OreSeur — a kandra he had known for seven hundred years — on order of his Contract-holder Zane, who in turn had been given TenSoon's Contract by his father Straff Venture. The impersonation let TenSoon spy on Vin inside her own household without her suspecting. At his judgment, TenSoon notes the brilliance of the device even as he hates it: this is the first time in kandra history that one of them has been used to impersonate another.MB1:HoA:Ch 11
- declares-vin-first-contract-motherAt his judgment, TenSoon declares his guiding loyalty: with the Father dead, the First Contract did not die with him — it passed to the one who took his place. That is Vin, the Heir of the Survivor, who killed the Lord Ruler and inherited everything that was his. TenSoon calls her, in front of the gathered Generations, the kandra people's new Mother — and so casts his help to her at the Well as Contract-keeping, not Contract-breaking.MB1:HoA:Ch 11
- told-vin-the-secretTenSoon admits openly in the Trustwarren that he told Vin the kandra Secret — that an Allomancer can take complete control of a kandra's body — and that she then used the Flaw on him, taking him over to make him fight Zane. He frames this as the real charge against him, the one KanPaar would prefer not to ask about: he gave the people's deepest secret to a human, and certainly she has told others.MB1:HoA:Ch 11
- caged-as-living-display-by-the-secondsThe Second Generation hold TenSoon in an iron-and-steel cage with wire mesh stretched across each face — built specifically to keep him from dissolving to base muscle and slipping through — and have erected it in one of the great caverns of the Homeland so other kandra can come and gawk at him in the long delay before his sentencing. No kandra has ever been treated this way before, and his name is to be remembered as a byword of shame.MB1:HoA:Ch 20
- inherited-blessing-of-potency-from-oreseurWhen TenSoon killed and replaced OreSeur at Vin's side he took OreSeur's Blessing — Potency — into his own body. The Seconds did not find it on him when they took him at the Trustwarren; he has hidden it. MeLaan offers to fetch it for him so he can fight; he refuses.MB1:HoA:Ch 20
- chooses-to-escape-against-his-traditionAfter days in the cage and a single conversation with MeLaan, TenSoon decides — against every instinct of his generation — that he will not accept the Seconds' sentence. He has manipulated VarSell into delivering him the very wolfhound bones he had abandoned, with no idea they were what TenSoon needed to escape.MB1:HoA:Ch 24
- escapes-trustwarren-as-wolfhoundTenSoon escapes the Trustwarren mid-sentence by leveraging the wolfhound body the Seconds gave him back as a humiliation. He shatters KanPaar's crystal True Body with a flying tackle, leaps the dense crowd of kandra blocking the doorway, and outruns the pursuit down the corridors of the Homeland on four legs faster than anything bipedal can chase. His parting thought is the closing of a door behind him: farewell to the home he is leaving, and to whatever honour the kandra would still have granted him for accepting the sentence.MB1:HoA:Ch 33
- recovers-oreseurs-blessing-of-potency-spikesTenSoon returns to a hollow in the rocks east of the Homeland, one he had cached a year before on his way home from Luthadel, and retrieves the two polished iron spikes he had buried there — OreSeur's Blessing of Potency, taken from the body of OreSeur at the end of his service to Vin. He absorbs them through the parted skin of his wolfhound shoulder, dissolves and re-forms organs around them, and feels the Blessing's added innate strength settle into his muscle. He carries four spikes and two Blessings now — Presence and Potency — placing him among the strongest kandra currently walking.MB1:HoA:Ch 39
- goes-to-find-vin-as-the-next-best-substitute-for-the-fatherUnable to obey the First Contract's direct instruction to seek out the Father when Ruin returns — the Father is dead — TenSoon sets out east to find Vin instead. He has decided that the woman who killed the Lord Ruler, and to whom he gave a year of his service as OreSeur, is the closest the First Contract is going to get.MB1:HoA:Ch 39
- recovers-kelsiers-bones-from-behind-the-warehouse-shrineTenSoon returns to Luthadel in a wolfhound's body and uses OreSeur's dying confession — preserved in the Blessing of Presence — to find the spot behind the old Survivor's weapon-cache warehouse where OreSeur had buried Kelsier's real bones. He digs them up, hides them in a sack, and carries them with him out of the city.MB1:HoA:Ch 52
- impersonates-the-survivor-to-prime-the-faithful-to-flee-luthadelUsing Kelsier's recovered bones, TenSoon takes on the Survivor's body and uses it twice — once at the gates of Keep Venture to question the guards and tell them to seek shelter underground when the mists leave, and once outside the warehouse shrine itself, where the faithful living inside hail him as the returned Survivor. He warns them that Penrod has been corrupted by Ruin and that they must gather the faithful and escape the city before Penrod kills them all.MB1:HoA:Ch 52
- first-kandra-outside-the-homeland-without-a-contract-in-seven-hundred-yearsAs TenSoon walks into the Ministry office in Urteau and openly tells the guard he belongs to no man, he notes — to himself — that he is, by his reckoning, the first kandra to walk outside the Homeland without a Contract in seven hundred years. He finds it oddly satisfying.MB1:HoA:Ch 59
- tensoon-rescues-sazed-with-the-thirdsTenSoon returns to the Homeland, openly known and hunted by the Seconds as a Contract-breaker, and with a handful of sympathetic younger kandra — including MeLaan in a willowy wooden True Body — breaks Sazed out of the Fifths' prison-pit. He has come to take the Trustwarren back from KanPaar.MB1:HoA:Ch 78
- tensoon-can-impersonate-another-kandraBefore he leaves Sazed to wait for the Firsts to grow new bodies, TenSoon does a thing he learned from Zane — he takes the granite bones and shape of the captured Fifth FhorKood and walks out to play him for the Seconds. No one expects a kandra to impostor another kandra; the trick should buy hours.MB1:HoA:Ch 78
- homeland-prison-roomWill not set foot inside the small worked chamber at the centre of the Homeland where Paalm dumped her ripped-out pages of the Words of Founding — it is the room in which he himself was once locked away without bones, awaiting execution by his own people, during the final days of the Lord Ruler's reign.MB2:SoS:Ch 20
- his-preservationNames his own place in Harmony's order, standing over the things he and Wax have just killed in the Homeland tunnels: *you are his Ruin; I am his Preservation.* Wax takes it badly. TenSoon does not appear to notice.MB2:SoS:Ch 21
- harmonys-witness-elendel-councilSent into Elendel's political apparatus by Harmony as Constable Gorglen on Constable-General Reddi's staff. At Steris's cue at the Bilming-crisis council he makes his skin transparent, reveals himself, and tells the governor that the Set is real, that they plan to annihilate Elendel, and that Harmony himself is working blind.MB2:TLM:Ch 38
- fetches-bands-by-harmony-leaveAsked by the governor what Harmony would have him do given the choice between Elendel's survival and the Malwish trust, TenSoon answers in his deep growl: *I will fetch the Bands.* He also seeds the room with a hint that the Bands may, in concert with Harmony's interactions of power, be able to *send the bomb away* — even though he holds only hints, not certainties.MB2:TLM:Ch 43
- admits-losing-bandsAt Elendel's central station, TenSoon — still wearing the body of the dead constable from the senate chamber — tells Steris that Daal and the other senators have fled the city and taken the Bands with them. He blames himself for bringing the artefact to the chamber in the first place, says he has been away from human politics too long, and admits he didn't know the Bands had been drained — that he was, somehow, played.MB2:TLM:Ch 67
Events
- MB1:TFE:Ch 28 Sits with Straff late into the night, wearing the bones of a former Hasting servant; withdraws quietly from the study when Elend arrives.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 62 On his way south to find Vin when he addresses Sazed as the Announcer, then reveals to him the origin of the First Generation and asks him to make the journey to the Homeland with him.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 66 Carries Sazed south to the Homeland in the body of a hog-and-horse-fed horse with enhanced muscle, explains kandra origins, the Blessing mechanism, and his and Sazed's respective parts in what is coming, then peels off in the ash on his own errand once Sazed is at the Homeland's entrance.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 78 Returns to the Homeland as a wolfhound, breaks Sazed out of the Fifths' prison, fights and subdues the guards, then takes the captured FhorKood's bones to walk out as him.
- MB1:WoA:Ch 47 Stands beside Zane when his identity is revealed, gives Vin the verbal hint about the kandra secret, is broken across the room by Zane and then yields the atium bead from his shoulder; survives the fight and tells Vin he must leave for his people.
- MB2:TLM:Ch 38 Stands at Steris's cue, makes his skin transparent, and delivers Harmony's message to the Bilming-crisis council: the Set is real, Elendel is the target, and the god is working blind.
- MB2:TLM:Ch 43 Speaks first to validate Wax's message — Harmony has long expected this; then hints, in the Bands debate, that they may be able to *send the bomb away*; closes the chapter agreeing to fetch them.
- MB2:TLM:Ch 48 Returns to the senators' chamber carrying the Bands of Mourning; agrees to the Malwish compromise on Harmony's behalf; opens the case and discovers the relic has been drained; lets Daal walk out with it because the senate already swore the deal.
- MB2:TLM:Ch 67 Still wearing the dead constable's body; brings news that Daal and the senators have fled with the Bands.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 20 Meets Wax just inside the hidden door in the wolfhound body he has favoured since the Catacendre — mottled grey, on all fours, half-human growl — and walks him through the Homeland toward something he says Wax needs to see.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 20 Sits on his haunches in the doorway of the small worked chamber, unwilling to enter — this was the room in which he was kept without bones to await execution — and tells Wax what he knows of Paalm and what the Ascendant Warrior, her last master, was like.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 21 Pads back through the Homeland tunnels beside Wax, passing word to his people through Harmony and naming Paalm's aim — to deafen God by killing his ears.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 21 Sloughs out of the wolfhound shape into a short hammer-armed wrestler's body, holds the doorway against the pack, rips one of them in half, and after the fight pries a single spike out of one corpse to confirm how she is keeping them just under Harmony's grasp.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 21 Goes up the crack in the Pits as a sliding sack of muscles, pushing on both walls and carrying his wolfhound bones up in a stomach-like bag, then reforms in the sewer above.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 26 Lopes out of the mist on four legs an hour after the killing, sits on his haunches beside Wax and the body, and tells him the truth: the woman he knew as Lessie was always one of the kandra.
- MB2:TLM:Ch 38 Sits silently as record keeper on Reddi's staff; meets Steris's eyes when she calls him out, then stands and reveals himself as TenSoon.
Backreferences
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 3
- factReLuur's Spike
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 19
- factMeLaan
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 28
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 2
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factFirst Generation
- factSecond Generation
- factThird Generation
- factFirst Contract
- factFirst Contract
- factBlessing of Presence
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 7
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factVarSell
- factFifth Generation
- factThe Trustwarren
- factBlessing of Potency
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 9
- factTenSoon
- factMeLaan
- factKanPaar
- factSeventh Generation
- factThe Trust
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 11
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factSecond Generation
- factFirst Contract
- factHunFoor
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 20
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factSecond Generation
- factFirst Generation
- factBlessing of Awareness
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 24
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 33
- factTenSoon
- factFirst Generation
- factKanPaar
- factRitual Imprisonment of ChanGaar
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 39
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factFirst Contract
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 40
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 45
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 52
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 59
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 62
- factRashek
- factFirst Generation
- factTerris Religion
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 66
- factkandra
- factBlessing
- factBlessing
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 68
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 71
- factThe Ashmounts
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 73
- factThe Mist
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 75
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 78
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 79
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 12
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 13
- factGod Metal
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 23
- factVenDell
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 28
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 38
- factHarmony
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 43
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 48
- factThe Bands of Mourning
- factThe Bands of Mourning
- factAdmiral Daal
- factConflux Transport Theory
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 67
- factTenSoon
- factMeLaan
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 13
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 19
- factkandra
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 20
- factkandra
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 21
- factThe Pits of Hathsin
- factTenSoon
- factBleeder
- factPaalm's Hemalurgic Canines
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 23
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 26
- factBleeder
- factBleeder
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 47
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 54
- factVin
- factAllomantic control of koloss