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Elend kneels by the dead Inquisitor on the Vetitan hill while Vin joins him with a fresh cut on her forearm she has stopped noticing. The koloss army stands quiet around them, taken whole by Elend's earlier mass Soothing; he is still uncomfortable owning them. Vin cuts to the trouble: that flash of speed was not pewter and was not duralumin, no Allomancer should be able to move that quickly, and they need to look at the body.

She rips the robe off the Inquisitor over Elend's mild protest, and there are ten spikes in it. Two of steel through the eyes; one of steel through the shoulders; six through the ribs, two of steel and four of bronze; and a fresh spike driven straight through the heart from the front — pewter. The one he tried to use as a weapon against Elend was another long, sleeker steel spike than any Elend has seen before. Elend thinks aloud that, by analogy with Allomancy and Feruchemy, the metal must matter — that the Inquisitors are running on some third metal-driven power they have not yet named. They will cut the stomach open and check for atium later; none of the Inquisitors they have killed in two years has been carrying any.

Vin tells him, plainly, what she has been thinking. The thing she released at the Well is still active. It is directing the Inquisitors. It is steering the koloss against the same cities they go to. It can change what is written down and seed confusion. They are children playing a game whose rules their opponent designed. Elend gives her the answer he has settled on giving her in these moments — that they will find a way to beat it — and pulls her into an embrace. She has the embrace; she does not have the certainty.

Vin takes one of Elend's koloss for her own — a medium-large one that picks up the Inquisitor's corpse and the loose spike and follows them like a butler — and the three of them and Fatren walk back into the city. Elend makes Fatren address him as "my lord," tells him he is to be left in nominal charge of Vetitan under the empire, and walks him gently into accepting it. They have come for something specific. The boarded-up old Steel Ministry building at the city centre, which Fatren's people have already ransacked, contains in its wine cellar the fourth of the Lord Ruler's hidden caches — and the door to it is hidden behind a slab of mortared stone that will only open under simultaneous Allomantic Pulls from both sides at once.

The koloss tears the boards off; Vin finds the cellar; Elend and Vin together Pull the slab open and step into a cavern that extends into the dark, every shelf packed with canned food and water and cloth and medicine, enough to feed Vetitan for years. Fatren gasps. Elend tells him this belongs to the empire now, and that the town itself is going to have to abandon its homes and move back to Luthadel under the protection of the wall — they cannot survive out here once the mists take what is left of their daylight. He says it without Soothing Fatren, and Fatren yields.

Vin reads the plate at the back wall aloud. The Lord Ruler confesses he never understood what malatium — Kelsier's eleventh metal — actually does, only that it shows what someone might have been; warns whoever reads it that the mist is to be feared and not walked in; tells them that koloss and kandra can both be taken by several Soothers Pushing on their emotions at once — a built-in weakness he had designed into them. The reverse side carries the same kind of map the earlier caches did: their five-cache trail ends at Fadrex City in the Western Dominance, currently held against Elend by a former Steel Ministry obligator. Vin is sure the atium cache is there — the Lord Ruler kept almost all of it for centuries, and somewhere is somewhere — and sure that atium is the weapon that will let them fight what she set loose. Elend wants the cache for the food and for whatever the Lord Ruler put with it.

They argue gently about the rest. About the dying sun, the perpetual ash, the failing crops, the impossibility of fighting an enemy that is the mist itself; about Kelsier as the survivor who chose not to survive. Elend tells her he knows armies and he knows compromises and he does not know how to fight a mist. She tells him she did not mean to start a fight. They embrace again; he reminds her of his one-sentence creed — survive — and goes back toward the cavern door to organise the men coming in to catalogue what they have found.

Left alone, Vin runs her tin-burning fingertips across the plate's surface and finds the line. It is cut so small no naked eye would see it, at the very bottom: be careful what you speak. It can hear what you say. It can read what you write. Only your thoughts are safe. The Lord Ruler had known. He had meant to retake the power himself and finish what he started, and he had left this warning where no enemy of his would think to look: at the bottom of his own legacy. From this moment on, Vin decides, she will not speak any of what she is planning out loud — not to anyone.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." Rashek's power, the writer notes, burned away faster than he expected, because for all that it had felt limitless it was only a sliver of something much larger — a name Rashek himself, the writer thinks, knew well enough to take for his own title. The world he left behind has no flowers; its plants grow brown rather than green; ash falls from the sky.