POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits on a rotting stump at the centre of the first night's camp out of Vetitan and watches the mists kill. They have come during the day for some months now, where once they only came at night — appearing in vines and tendrils across the sky, retreating a little later each evening, returning a little earlier — and in the year since Vin released what was in the Well they have begun to take people. About one in six of those caught in them falls into a seizure; a fraction of those die; the rest, if they survive, are afterwards immune. The empire's scholars have tried hoods, timing, indoor confinement, everything. Nothing prevents it. Animals are untouched. People are not.
She and Elend have done this to the people of Vetitan on purpose. They had no tents for five thousand townspeople and no other way to inoculate them; if the people had stayed in their dying town, the mists would soon enough have closed over it permanently and starved them inside their homes. Vin knows the reasoning. Knowing the reasoning does not stop her from sitting in the mist in the half-light, listening to families discover what has happened to their own, and thinking that she and her husband have murdered a hundred villagers in a single evening. The deaths themselves are quiet. The grief that follows is not.
The mists she sits inside have become a thing she can no longer recognise as the mists Kelsier taught her to love. They were once an ally, he had told her, a thing that would protect her and lend her power; now they hide shadows in their depths and reach for strangers in a crowd to select. The sun is still bright enough above them that she cannot burn much tin without blinding herself, and so she sits at the centre of a visibility no wider than a man can throw, listening to figures running and crying out and falling. There is a hatred building in her for what the mists have become. There is not yet any clear sense of who to direct it at.
Elend crosses to her in his second clean white uniform, his face set, Soothing the camp just enough to dull the immediate edge — he has settled, after a year of this work, on the conviction that taking the whole grief of someone's loved one from them is itself a kind of theft. Fatren follows, shaken, and stops at her stump. He asks aloud what kind of men they have become to do this. Elend answers him without softening: the kind they have to be. He sends Fatren to count the dead and promise the living that the mists will not come for them again, and tells Vin the koloss will bury the bodies before morning.
By the next afternoon they are on the road north toward the canal, five thousand tired townspeople and an army that does not feel like an escort. Vin walks rather than rides. She keeps her distance from the townsfolk — she does not want to look at the eyes that look at her — and so for company she keeps the single koloss she has taken under her own Allomantic control at her side. The presence of the beast is a wall: nobody approaches.
The koloss is large, scarred down one side of its face, blue skin torn from eye to mouth corner. She has never bothered to talk to one before — none of them have ever seemed worth talking to — but on this walk, in this stretched quiet, she does. He talks back. His voice is the slow, blunt cadence the others use, as if each word has to be thought through twice, but the words themselves have shape. She asks his name and he tells her, eventually, that his name is the thing he wants to be. She is to call him Human. He is old, he says, because he is big — bigger than most, smaller than only a few. New koloss, he tells her, come from existing ones, in a way he does not explain. There are no female koloss. There are no small ones, not as small as she is asking. He tells her, without prompting, that he hates her and would kill her if he could. He tells her that his kind will take the cities and become human in doing so. She walks beside him afterwards thinking that she has never heard a koloss reason before, and that whatever reasoning there is in them is the Lord Ruler's doing and not theirs, and that she does not know what to make of any of it.
The line ahead bunches up, and she coinshots ahead to find the cause: the canal, cutting unnaturally straight across the ash-blackened countryside, and beside it the camp of fifty thousand soldiers Elend has held in reserve along their supply line back to Luthadel. Elend arrives at the head of the townspeople's column with Fatren beside him, and is met by General Demoux — older now in his scarred leather and steel, a Survivor spear hung openly at his throat. Demoux greets Elend like family, and his deference toward Vin is so careful it embarrasses her. He has never quite been able to joke with her the way he does with Elend; her place in his church's doctrine — whether the spear on his collar represents the one that killed Kelsier or the one she herself used on the Lord Ruler — is a thing she has never asked him to clarify, and he has never volunteered.
Elend gives the orders he came to give. Demoux is to form two task forces of five hundred men each: one back to Vetitan with barges to transfer the storage cavern's contents upriver to Luthadel, the other north along the canal as escort for Fatren's refugees, with an introduction to Lord Penrod waiting at the other end. The rest of the army stays with the emperor. Elend tells Fatren that he is not being conscripted — that men compelled into an army are men who break in battle — but that any of his trained townsmen who wish to volunteer will be welcomed. He confirms aloud, for Demoux's benefit, what the cavern plate said: the final cache is in Fadrex in the Western Dominance, currently held against the empire by a former Steel Ministry obligator who used to be Cett's rival. He half-expects, he says drily, that the moment they retake the city for Cett he will decide he no longer needs them. Demoux doubts it.
Elend calls a meeting for the evening once Sazed and Breeze arrive — they are riding in from Lekal City and expected by nightfall — and when Demoux asks what to tell the others the agenda will be, Elend looks up at the ashen sky and says: conquering the world, or what is left of it. Vin sees, in that small drained moment, how tired her husband has become. A year of marriage has taught her, among other things, that she can love him for the man trying to do the right thing even on the days she thinks he has done the opposite of right.
The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer observes that Allomancy and the mists arrived together at the moment Rashek took the power, and notes the small inheritance the power gave him: among other things, an instinctive understanding that the nuggets of metal left in the Chamber of Ascension were fractions of the Well's own power, and that whoever ingested one would be made a Mistborn.