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Vin is up before Elend is — bathed, dressed, sitting cross-legged on the bedroll in their tent while he stands at the mirror buttoning the white uniform. The buttons are wooden, painted gold, cut deliberately too low in metal to be Allomantically Pushed; the cloth is special weave that scrubs clean of ash; the whole rig is image for the men who march for him. He worries about her working herself this hard now that he is Mistborn too and understands what pewter does and does not give. She tells him she is worried about Sazed. Not just Tindwyl's death — they have all lost people — but the loss of the one thing in Sazed none of the rest of them had: faith that something was watching over the world. Breeze, too, she says, is Soothing too hard and laughing too loud, in fear. The crew is, one by one, giving up. Elend looks for the king behind his eyes in the mirror, is unimpressed by what he finds, and admits the job is his. He will do something.

The conference tent is, an hour later, the same conversation conducted with a map on the wall. The scribes — led by Noorden — have timed the daily arrival and retreat of the mists across the empire and drawn three concentric circles on it. The outermost is the line beyond which the mists no longer leave at all. The middle is where four hours of daylight remain — the line that passes through Vetitan. The innermost is the area that, if the mists keep creeping inward at this rate, will get enough sunlight this summer to support a crop. The innermost is smaller than the Central Dominance; over ninety percent of the empire cannot be farmed this year, and by the following winter even that bubble will be gone.

Vin sits in her usual corner of the tent — close to the exit, in the shadows — watching the crew take in what they have just been shown. Cett, at the front with his quiet son Gneorndin at his side, swears at the map. Breeze and Allrianne sit as far from him as the tent allows, since Cett still occasionally throws knives. Ham suggests mushrooms, then shade-plants that animals can graze. Breeze floats the obvious option — try the Well — and Vin cuts it off: there is no power at the Well now, and if it ever returns it will not return in their lifetimes. Elend turns the table to the fifth and final storage cache: Vetitan's cache, beyond food and water, held large stores of the first eight Allomantic metals; whatever Rashek put at Fadrex may be exactly what they need. The decision lands: the main army will march west for Fadrex, where Cett's city is held against him by the obligator Yomen. Cett is pleased. The ground shakes through the floor of the tent — another small earthquake, one of an increasing number — and the chairs settle and the meeting continues. Vin thinks about atium without quite knowing why and says aloud that it will be at Fadrex; she does not know why; it has to be.

Elend turns to the question that has been hanging since the map went up: Fadrex is well outside the four-hour line. Marching the army means losing roughly fifteen percent of its men to the mists before they ever arrive. Sazed raises it from the side; Elend accepts it. He will inoculate the army in the mists the way they inoculated Vetitan. Cett proposes siege rather than assault — Fadrex is fortified, the army that holds it is hungry, the empire has the caches to outlast it. Elend agrees: diplomacy first, then siege.

Then he turns north on the map. Urteau cannot be left as a sore. Demoux reports Spook's sparse steel-inscribed messages from the city: the faction in power is a hardline skaa rebellion that hunts noble blood by genealogical survey and is harsh enough that Breeze will have to talk fast. Elend commits Breeze, Sazed, and Allrianne — with a few hundred soldiers as escort — to go north, bring the city in by negotiation if at all possible, secure the cache there, and send the seed grain south for a second planting in the Central Dominance before summer. Sazed asks quietly whether he might be excused; he has personal research. Elend declines, gently — there is no better ambassador in the empire than the Holy Witness of Terris — and Sazed accepts.

The last thing Elend asks of the room is the strangest. Tell me about Kelsier, he says — the man, not the rhetoric. He never met him. Ham says he was grand in everything: dreams, voice, plans. Breeze says he was not faking it. Vin says he was a man who made you become what he needed you to be. Sazed, surprising her, says Kelsier would have told them to laugh more. Elend makes that the favour he asks of them: smile in defiance, on the outside at least, if only to slap fate the way Kelsier used to. Even Sazed nods. Cett calls them all insane. The room breaks for preparations. They march tomorrow.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer names a third metals magic — Hemalurgy — and notes that the name derives from blood: death is always involved in the transfer of powers the art performs. The writer cites Marsh calling the process 'messy,' and finds the word inadequate.