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On a slum rooftop the evening after the Lord Ruler's death, Vin sits with her splinted leg dangling over the edge while Sazed explains the puzzle to Marsh. The Lord Ruler was both Allomancer and Feruchemist. Feruchemy lets you store and spend bits of your own body — including age — but it does so on a one-for-one basis and is therefore mostly useless as a longevity trick on its own. If, however, you are also Allomancy's match and can burn your own filled metalminds as Allomantic fuel, the return swells; you can burn a Feruchemical store of youth, dump the excess centuries into the next metalmind, draw on that one slowly, and pay only for short bursts of age in between. The pierced bracelets on his upper arms were the reservoir. When Vin tore them off him, his body began trying to snap back to whatever age he should already have been, and finished the trip in seconds.

Sazed thinks this is also why the Lord Ruler hunted Feruchemists so thoroughly and bred his own Terris people so carefully — any child born with both heredities could in time do what he had done. Marsh confirms the Inquisitor kill-spot: eleven spikes each, the spike between the shoulder-blades binds the others together, and pulling it kills the creature. He killed every other Luthadel Inquisitor in their sleep last night. He intends to take the Canton of Inquisition over by inheritance and gut the Ministry out from inside it slowly enough that the obligators do not notice what they have lost. He does not yet know how many Inquisitors are out there in the rest of the empire.

Marsh tells her, in passing, that the creature Kelsier used to wear Renoux is back in a new body, and that Kelsier had arranged for its kandra contract to transfer to her before he died. She does not want it near her after what it did with Kelsier's bones; Sazed warns her not to throw away a kandra already paid up in atium.

Sazed adds a darker note. The cleanest explanation he has does not actually answer what was at the Well of Ascension or what the man in the logbook was meant to defeat there. The Lord Ruler died with the answer. Vin keeps returning to his last words: that he had still been doing something for mankind, that ending him would end them with him — present tense, an ongoing task and not a completed one. There had been fear in his eyes when he said it, not pride. The Deepness from the logbook never came; perhaps that, she thinks, is what Rashek had been holding back the whole time. And there was no atium in the treasury Elend went to clear, either — the Lord Ruler's entire reserve is gone somewhere they cannot find.

She also keeps returning to Reen. Kar had told her in the cell that her brother died under Inquisitor torturers swearing his sister had already starved to death years ago. The brother who had spent her entire life promising he would betray her one day, and threatening it daily, had in the end chosen torture and death rather than name her. Marsh excuses himself to go represent the Ministry at the new king's negotiations — Elend, yesterday's heir of the wrong house, today's monarch of a country a day and a half old. Sazed tells her she should go see him.

She goes the Mistborn way. She crouches in the mist on the roof of Keep Venture above the same broken skylight she once kicked a wounded Thug through, splint and all, and watches Elend work below. Sazed had said the speech Elend gave the rebel mob — with Breeze working the edges of the crowd — was the thing that turned a slaughter into a coronation. He looks like a king down there at the desk, scribbling notes for the code of laws he has been wanting to draft since before she ever met him. Marsh has warned her, separately, that the nobility see him as a puppet and that factions are already forming among the skaa leadership; even so, he is going to be a good king, and a pile of soot would have been a good king after the man she killed this morning.

She nearly does not drop. She tells herself, in Reen's old voice, that the woman who could be his is an illusion, that she is still the child who grew up in the alleys, that this is the part she should walk away from. She turns to go. Then the other thing Kar told her catches up to her — Reen choosing torture and silence — and she hears Reen's voice in her head telling her, this once, to go back.

She does. She drops a coin through the broken skylight, lands inside on her good leg, gives Elend a deliberately silly opening line — that he reads too much in the presence of ladies — and lets him hold her.