POV: fatren
Summary
On a bulwark above his hometown of Vetitan, a soot-streaked Fatren watches black flakes fall straight from a red sun and asks his brother Druffel how long they have. About an hour, Druff thinks. The mists have stayed past noon again; sunlight no longer reaches the crops for long enough; the winter will be lean even before they think about the koloss army marching down on them. Druffel, who was once the brother who laughed, is now the brother who tells Fatren they will not last past nightfall.
Fatren inherited this town in the spirit of the way other men inherit furniture: the noble lord left, his garrison eventually walked off to join a passing army, and Fatren — a former servant — kept the skaa planting, bribed the press-gangs away, and drilled a thousand farmhands into something that could be called soldiers. Three months earlier the koloss sacked Garthwood, a larger city, and fewer than a hundred refugees made it down to him. Koloss do not take bribes. They simply kill.
A boy named Sev calls him to the gate. A single rider in a heavy cloak has come up to the wood doors alone. While Fatren watches, the rider leaps straight upward from his horse — soars to the top of the gate and lands balanced on it — and throws off the cloak. Under it is a brilliant white uniform. He is an Allomancer, probably Mistborn, in a town that has spent two years praying to be left out of the northern wars.
Druffel draws on him. The stranger Pulls the sword out of Druffel's hand without turning his head, inspects the steel, compliments the work, and offers the weapon back hilt-first. He gives his name as Elend Venture and announces — flatly, in the tone of a man who has stopped negotiating — that he is their emperor. Fatren has heard of him: the Luthadel king said to have killed his own father, taken the empire from rival claimants, and married the woman who killed the Lord Ruler. Whoever this man is, the Vetitan soldiers obey him without being asked twice.
Venture takes inventory in the time he has. He puts the town's children and old people in the southernmost houses, packed close, so that if the line falls the koloss will spend their frenzy hunting and then break for loot. He looks at Fatren's thousand peasant-soldiers and is openly impressed at how well-equipped they are; he tells Fatren there are ten thousand koloss coming. He offers, without quite calling it an offer, the bargain that will keep him: if they win, Fatren swears fealty. If Fatren refuses, Elend will take command anyway. He also tells Fatren — politely, but as a statement of fact — that Fatren is now a lord, surname later.
They walk back toward the gate together while Elend hammers the captains with everything he has learned about koloss from his own war years: that they fight individually, that two men should gang up on a small one and three or four on a big one, that the big ones drop if you cut them at the legs, that the small ones will trap a blade in their loose skin if you let them, that the murderous frenzy fades into looting after a while and the town's families may yet be left alone. He tells them, twice, that the koloss can be beaten — they have only to keep their heads and stay coordinated. The captains do not cheer, but they listen.
A shout from the wall: the koloss are in sight, setting up camp. Elend reads the situation in a moment and gives his second hard order of the day: not to defend the bulwark, but to attack. The fortification cannot be held along its full perimeter against creatures stronger and taller than a man; if they wait, the koloss will whip themselves to frenzy and roll over them. The militia must go now, while the enemy is tired from the march and distracted with its cookfires. Fatren gives the orders — there is no longer any other choice — and the orders run down the line. Then Elend lifts his sword on top of the bulwark, drops down the outer face at an inhuman pace, and runs alone toward the koloss camp. After a stunned moment Fatren grits his teeth and follows. The whole wall comes loose after them in a yell, Vetitan's entire army pouring out of its single gate behind the man who claims to be their emperor.
The chapter closes on an excerpt of the in-world treatise titled "the Hero of Ages," in which the writer describes holding the Well's power: the knowledge of how to move a planet through the sky came with the power itself, but not the wisdom of where to put it.