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Marsh tries to kill himself, and cannot. Three years a Steel Inquisitor — three years walled up inside his own thoughts while another mind walks his body — he has long since given up on trying to break free of the spikes. What he attempts instead is smaller and more specific: he tries to make his own arm reach back between his shoulder blades and pull the linchpin spike free from his back, because pulling that one out will kill him. He has worked out enough about Inquisitor anatomy from inside to know which spike that is. The arm will not go. As soon as he forms the impulse the world shudders, then steadies and clears, and a smooth calm slides in and tells him he was never really trying to do anything at all, that everything is exactly the way it should be. He has been taken again.

He cannot see in any normal sense — the steel spikes that go point-first through his eyes and out the back of his skull have replaced sight — but through the spikes the room comes to him in blue Allomantic lines that pick out every nail and every piece of metal in every body. He is in a small chamber somewhere deep in stone with other spike-eyed Inquisitors standing in attendance. On a table at the centre of the room, a Keeper of Terris has been tied face up across the body of a second person, already strapped down underneath. The table is built for the work: its upper face is hollowed so that the recipient lies inside it, with the donor on top. There is no gag. The Terrisman talks, prays, begs, swears he has nothing more to give up about the Synod. Marsh picks up the brass spike from the rack at his elbow and weighs it in his hand. He lets the Terrisman's terror linger a moment, because part of him likes it.

Then he is back. The sweet edge in the air becomes the smell of blood and waste; his pleasure becomes horror. The man on the table is a Keeper, a man who has spent his life preserving knowledge for others, and what is about to happen will be a murder twice over — first of the Terrisman above, and then, through his body, of the prisoner laid in the well of the table below. Marsh strains again for the spike at his own back, trying to finish what he started a moment before. The arm gets a little way, and stalls. The thing using him is stronger than he is and it grips him again at once, with the offhand authority of a man taking a leash back from a child.

He has learned to feel it the way a prisoner feels his guard. It is free now, and exulting in being free, but the freedom is incomplete: there is a counter-force lying over the land like a shield that keeps it from acting on the world directly. So it works through hands instead — through the Inquisitors it can ride, whose spikes give it a place to take hold of their minds. The Well's release gave it the power to move and to speak through bodies like Marsh's, but not yet the power to finish what it began. For that it needs something else, something hidden, and Marsh is the one who is going to be sent looking for it. The thing names itself, in his own thoughts: Ruin. The master Vin set loose at the Well of Ascension.

Marsh smiles — his own face smiles, the smile is not his — and raises the brass spike. He sets the point against the chest of the weeping Terrisman over the heart, with the second body waiting beneath. The spike will need to pass through the donor and into the recipient below in one driving stroke; the art, named here for what it is, is called Hemalurgy, and it is messy work. That, his other self thinks happily, is what makes it fun. Marsh takes up the mallet and begins to pound.

A page break, and the prologue closes on a section title — Part One, "Legacy of the Survivor" — and an excerpt from the in-world treatise titled "the Hero of Ages," a single line in which the writer, in his own voice, names himself by that title with a regret that reads almost as apology.