(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Elend Venture, second emperor of the Final Empire, leads Fatren's thousand farmhands out of Vetitan's gate into the koloss camp before the koloss are ready for them. He still finds it absurd, sometimes, that he is the man at the front of this charge — he had been raised to argue political theory in salons, not to do this — but Tindwyl had told him once that he would never be the kind of leader who led the charge, and he keeps coming back to that line and proving it wrong. Koloss are slow to react to the unexpected, and a sleeping camp full of them is unexpected enough that the militia kills several hundred before the frenzy starts.

Elend fights at the front. He has had a year to learn his Allomancy and is still mediocre at most of it, but pewter is straightforward and brass — Soothing his own men's fear away — is what he is actually good at. He kills the largest koloss he meets by Pulling on a neighbour's sword to throw himself out of the way, shearing the leg out from under the big one, and taking its head off as it falls. He notes again, with mild discomfort, that Vin is right about him — his Allomancy is unusually strong, presumably because of where his powers came from in the first place — and shouts the line back together as the koloss enter their blood frenzy.

The line begins to bend. Fatren, beside him and surprisingly still alive, finally cracks and accuses him of having led them all to die. Elend points at a speck in the falling ash. The first of the armies he promised.

Vin hits the centre of the koloss army out of the sky in a cloud of horseshoes. She is a different woman than she was at the Well — still small, still slight, still twenty years old, but settled now in a way she wasn't before. She has watched Elend nearly die in her arms and accepted that she does not get to keep him from risking his life; she is no longer a wife trying to save her husband, she is his knife. She works through the army on pewter and steel, lifts a fallen koloss sword out of the dirt and uses it on the koloss beside her, drops a thirteen-foot one with a duralumin-fed Push that scatters the creatures around her like ash, and then begins doing the trick Elend has been working further out — Pushing on a single koloss's emotions until it breaks, then commanding it to attack its own. Soon she has a hundred koloss fighting for her.

What she really wants is the controller. She gets him: a Steel Inquisitor she does not recognise comes through the army and drops to the hilltop with obsidian axes. The fight on the hill nearly goes badly. Vin is burning electrum — what they call "poor man's atium" — to keep the Inquisitor from reading her on atium, but two things go wrong: he takes one short burst of speed faster than anything Allomancy (even duralumin-fed pewter) should explain, and when she finally rips his robe and goes for the spike in his back she finds it shielded under a riveted breastplate, sleek as a turtle's shell. Pulling that spike free would normally kill an Inquisitor; she suspects the Lord Ruler would never have allowed the shield. He is wounded but not vulnerable, and the koloss are crowding the hill.

Elend arrives on a Steeljump and surprises the Inquisitor from behind with a fistful of coins. The Inquisitor tries a head-on Steelpush against him — assuming two near-equal weights will cancel — and is thrown across the hill by the sheer power of Elend's Push instead. They both close on him; he gets Vin off her feet and very nearly puts a spike from his own chest into Elend's back, but Vin catches the emotions of the nearest koloss and turns it around. The koloss swings its blunt iron sword sideways into the Inquisitor's head and crushes the skull. The body drops.

A shock runs through the koloss army. Elend burns duralumin and then brass and Soothes every koloss in the army at once — once, on the Lord Ruler's level, with raw strength rather than finesse. The koloss lower their swords. The battle is over.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer states his belief that the figure at the Well before him was Rashek, that Rashek tried to burn off the mists by shoving the planet closer to the sun, overshot, made the world too hot, and corrected by erupting the Ashmounts — the smoke and ash thickened the air, cooled the world, and reddened the sun.