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Marsh sits motionless on a stump in the koloss camp, slowly being dusted to a statue under steady ashfall. He has not moved in hours. Ruin's attention has been elsewhere for weeks, and during these intervals — when his master is busy somewhere across the dying world — he is, more or less, alone in his own head. He has stopped struggling for it: struggle brought the attention back. The bliss of being driven by Ruin is real, and false, and worse than the dread of sitting on the stump.

He turns the time to thought. The army around him is three hundred thousand strong and has not moved in weeks; its members are killing one another at random, eating dead plants beneath the ash to survive. He is in the north, near Terris — close enough to march on Luthadel. Why has Ruin left the army stagnating? Why has Ruin called the other Inquisitors away on tasks but left Marsh — the most heavily spiked of them, with ten new spikes planted at points across his body — sitting on a stump? He cannot solve it. Something is missing.

The thoughts drift, as they always do, toward Kelsier. There was a time when Marsh had run the skaa rebellion — thousands had looked to him. When Kelsier and Mare were captured and sent to the Pits of Hathsin, he had left it. He had reasoned, in his usual practical way, that if the Lord Ruler could catch the most brilliant thief of his age, the Lord Ruler would catch him too, eventually. That had not been fear, he tells himself. That had been realism. And then Kelsier had returned and done what a thousand years of skaa had not managed.

He thinks, bitterly: that should have been me. He thinks, more bitterly: I am doing it again. Both he and Kelsier had loved Mare before the Pits; she had chosen Kelsier. When she died, Marsh had given her death to despair. Kelsier had given hers to overthrowing an empire as a kind of penance for letting her die thinking he hated her, and had carried with him the little picture of a flower that was her dream of how the world had been before Rashek. Of the two of them, Mare had chosen rightly. Kelsier is the one who made her dream come true — or tried.

But Kelsier is dead now, and the dream has not come true: the Lord Ruler is gone and the world is worse for it. Marsh is not dead. Not yet. How can he fight, when even shifting his finger draws Ruin's eye back to him?

The answer, when it comes, has the cold elegance he used to be proud of. The only way to act is to stop acting altogether — let his master grow used to his stillness — and when the moment comes that he is truly needed, take it in one stroke. He knows already what the stroke will be. Ruin's most useful tool is Marsh himself. He will pull the linchpin spike from his back and end it: not from frustration, not from despair, but because removing himself at the right moment may give the people fighting for the world the chance they need. It is all he has left to give. Kelsier killed himself in Luthadel to win the skaa their freedom. Marsh will do the same — and hope it helps save the world from ending.

The ash keeps falling. The koloss grunt and, somewhere, kill one another. Marsh sits a little straighter on his stump, in his head, where it cannot be seen.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer — now well into Part Two, "Cloth and Glass" — notes that Ruin had been mostly impotent while trapped by the Well of Ascension, and that the night the writer's company first reached the Well, they found something none of them recognised: a black smoke filling one of the chambers. They had no way of knowing it was the body of a god — that Ruin and Preservation inhabit power the way a person inhabits flesh.