POV: sazed
Summary
Sazed rides north from Lekal City toward Elend's canal camp at the head of a hundred empire soldiers, with Breeze beside him under his own parasol. Across his saddle he has rigged his portfolio so that whichever paper he is reading is strapped to the front of it where the wind and the ash will not catch it, and today's paper is the Larsta religion — once professed, among the few people Sazed ever taught and converted, by Kelsier's wife Mare. The Larsta held that the divine is approached through art, that society does well to support a class of monks who paint and sculpt and write so that the rest may be elevated. The doctrine has the merit of being self-consistent. Sazed cannot find anything in it that contradicts itself. He is testing it against the world the Lord Ruler's death has left, and is not yet sure.
Breeze talks. The ash, he says, is amazing. It is also dreary, and lacks style: a competent evil force of doom would have used red, which would have made the rivers run like blood and given the dying world some flair. Green, he eventually allows, would have been better still — what Kelsier always used to talk about, the colour of plants before the Lord Ruler's Ascension, the colour of flowers. He suggests that perhaps Vin, in fulfilment of the Church's expectations, might bring them back to the land along with cleansing the sky and the mists. Sazed catches him in the line and tells him so. Breeze smiles and admits he overdid it. He had been, in his own way, trying to lift his old friend out of the silence the long ride had wrapped him in.
Sazed argues back as much for himself as for Breeze. Perhaps there is no shadowy doom behind any of this; perhaps the ashmounts have simply become more active and the world is colder for it and the mists linger because the daytime no longer drives them off. Breeze punctures the theory by pointing out that the mists used to retreat at dawn even in the coldest winter, and weather alone does not explain why they no longer do. Sazed has no answer to that. He has been, increasingly, wondering whether the religions on his pages can ever be measured against an enemy he is no longer sure exists.
His real reading is harsher than he lets Breeze see. The Larsta taught that art is the trace of the divine in the world. The world Sazed is riding through is not unimaginative: it is insipid. Black ash on black ground under a grey sky, day after day, with the foliage drooping under it and the horses unable to graze. If there is any divinity present in this landscape, then divinity is also bored. He writes "religion not true" at the bottom of the sheet, files it away in his portfolio, and is one paper closer to the end of the catalogue and no closer to belief. He notes Breeze watching out of the corner of his eye. Breeze loves a secret. Sazed does not feel like sharing this one.
Allrianne arrives in pink lace and brazen Rioting, galloping out from the army on her too-fast horse, and the air around Sazed suddenly feels much fonder of her than it had a moment before. He greets her with the courtesy her station requires, observes the small theatre of her deciding whether the ash on the ground is worth dismounting through to embrace Breeze, and is in the end touched, despite himself, by the way Breeze holds her once Captain Goradel hoists her up to share his saddle. Sazed reflects, as the column starts forward again, on how the social structures of marriage and contract are quietly failing along with everything else: there are no more obligators left to officiate, and the empire is martial improvisation rather than government, and the question of why anyone should bother to formalise anything has begun to fold under the weight of an end-of-the-world that nobody quite wants to name aloud.
Back at the canal camp, in his own tent, Sazed washes his face and prepares to shave his head after the fashion of a Terris steward he is no longer sure he counts as. Vin appears in the tent behind him, the way she now appears anywhere — barely rustling the canvas. She has come because Demoux told her Sazed had arrived, and because Demoux knew better than to let her sleep through it.
She presses him gently for the reason he still dresses as a steward, still shaves the head, still defers as a servant when he is the empire's chief ambassador. He tells her he is not sure what he is any more. She tells him what she thinks: that he is Sazed, a Keeper of Terris. He tells her he is a Keeper who has set aside his copperminds because the touch of them on his arms has become the touch of Tindwyl's memory and he cannot bear it. He tells her he knows that this paralysis is, by his own standards, weakness — and that he cannot help it. He tells her he believes he may be the very last Keeper left alive: the Inquisitor raid on Terris a year ago killed even the children, and no surviving sect of his order has been heard from since.
Vin tries to comfort him with logic — if he were as weak of will as he says, he would not be able to disagree with her about it — and he finds, briefly, that he can smile at her. The conversation moves to the cavern at Vetitan. She has had its wall plate copied for him onto a thin sheet of steel. She does not know if he will read it. He does not, either. But he asks her to send the copy to his tent, and promises that at least he will look.
She tells him, then, the thing she has come to tell him. She tells him about the Well — about holding all of that power, more than he could imagine, the power to destroy and remake worlds — and about seeing Elend mortally wounded, knowing that with the held power she could save him, and choosing instead to release the power and let him die. He had lived only because of a small overlooked nugget of Allomancy in the Well chamber that he reached on his own. The choice was hers. She made it because she looked into his eyes and knew that what he wanted of her was to release the power, and not to remake the world to save him. She tells Sazed he is the one who gave her the capacity for that choice: he taught her how to love Elend enough to let him die.
She leaves. Sazed sits a long moment, then returns to his shaving, and finds beside his basin a small folded paper she has left him. He opens it. It is the aged drawing of a flower — the one Mare had carried before she died, that Kelsier had carried after her, that Vin has carried since — and he holds it for a while without knowing exactly what she meant by leaving it, and then folds it carefully into his sleeve and goes back to the razor.
The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer turns to the origin of the First Contract — a set of self-government promises the First Generation drew up and took to the Lord Ruler for his approval, which he had cast into steel and signed — and notes that buried inside it is a provision which, if invoked, would require the mass suicide of the entire kandra people.