POV: marsh
Summary
Marsh walks across a koloss camp under steady ashfall, his body not his own. Ruin has the reins; he is along for the ride, watching from inside, his attention skimming over the camp the way a passenger watches countryside from a coach. This is how he lives now. Three years a Steel Inquisitor and more than a year since the Well opened to release the thing he serves, he has long since worn the shape of the captivity smooth, and is honest enough with himself to name the truth of it: he is never getting out of his own head. There will be no clever moment of seizing the body back, no final defiant act, no death by his own hand. He has tried, and tried, and tried, and the trying always ends the same way.
A small thing happens as he walks. Ruin's attention slips off him — not entirely, but enough that he comes back into himself, the way a man wakes mid-sentence from a daydream and recognises what he was just saying. The lucid intervals come like this, when whatever else his master is working on draws its focus elsewhere. He has tested the edges of these intervals more times than he can count. He can shiver a finger. He can halt half a stride. He can think, with the whole of himself, about exactly what he means to do — pull the linchpin spike from his back, end the body, end the use being made of it — and the moment that intent crystalises Ruin is on him again, sliding back into the driver's seat without effort and without comment, and he is once more a watcher behind his own eyes.
It tells him two useful things, which he holds onto carefully because they are the only things he has. The first is that Ruin cannot, evidently, read his thoughts. If it could, his rebellions would not be allowed to assemble at all; they would be smoothed away before he ever raised them. As it is, he can think anything he likes within the lucid interval, and only the act gives him away. The second is that this matters, and might matter to someone else as well, if he could only find a way to tell them. He has no way. But he files the observation anyway, in the small clean part of his mind that is still his.
He thinks then, with the practicality he has always taken pride in, about madness. If he could simply lose his mind he would not have to suffer the seeing. When Ruin is on him the falling ash is beautiful and the dim red sun a triumph and the whole dying world an arrangement of pleasing things; when Ruin is off him the ash is a shroud and the world is what it has become. It is the lucid intervals, not the captivity, that are unbearable. He cannot make himself go mad either, though. The sort of mind that could be broken would have broken already.
He reaches the centre of the camp, where other Inquisitors are gathering, walking together with the same quiet of bodies that no one is troubling to speak through. None of them speaks. There is one mind in all of them, and it does not converse with itself. He looks at his brethren with his Allomantic sight and sees what he has helped do to them. Each carries the old spikes through eye and skull — the spikes the Lord Ruler used to make. Each carries the new set too, driven through chest and back, between the ribs, down through the shoulders. He has set many of these himself: hunted down Terrismen in the north and across the land, killed them, and pounded what they had into the body of an Inquisitor to fill in what the Lord Ruler had left out. He understands now what those missing spikes were. The Lord Ruler had built his Inquisitors to be powerful but not whole — withheld from them whatever the art might have given them, to make certain they could never threaten him. Ruin is filling in what was withheld.
He understands this. He also notices, with some distant alarm, that his own spikes excite him. He cannot say why. It is not just that they came through a death — he has come to terms with what deaths do for him. There is something else, something the spikes themselves carry, something pleased to be in his ribs and along his back that has nothing to do with the man who is being made to wear them. He does not look at it too closely. He cannot afford to know what is in him.
The lucid interval thins again. The ash flakes, lit copper-red, begin to look beautiful. He turns his face up to receive them, and the part of him that was still Marsh watches from the back of his own skull as the part of him that is not Marsh thinks how very fine the world has become.
The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer slips into the first-person plural, calling those who had been working to find and oppose Ruin "we," and observes that for all the unity of purpose, the world ended anyway — which the writer notes, almost in passing, is not necessarily a bad thing.