POV: vin
Summary
Vin stands alone at the head of camp as the day's mists burn off. The red sun is high; the canal beside her is motionless; the camp is silent inside its tents, Elend's standing order keeping the soldiers indoors against the morning. The mists dance around her in their usual shifting streams, but the dance, today, feels wrong — they begin to quiver, vibrate, and as the sun heats them they retreat all at once, like a thing fleeing safety. Their disappearance feels to her like an echoing scream. The all-clear sounds and the camp wakes around her, men striking tents with the practised urgency of an army on a tight march.
She has asked Sazed and Elend what they think the mists are. Both gave her the theories of careful scholars. Sazed eventually came down on the side of natural — even the mist sickness could be explained, he had said, the way wasp stings kill some and barely bother others. Vin is not satisfied by theory. Reen would have scoffed at every supernatural reading of the mists; she had spent most of her life thinking of them as another weather pattern. But she has been an Allomancer for years now, and since the day she touched the Well of Ascension's power her sense of the mists has deepened into something almost a feeling. They retreat too quickly. They stay out of buildings. They kill at random. And when she burns metal they pull back from her, like a wild beast shying away from a bright light.
She walks back into camp. Some men salute her, some bow, some glance away. She is, technically, the empire's empress; to many of them she is the Heir of the Survivor of the Church. She wants neither title. Burning tin she catches Elend and Ham outside the imperial tent in a careful quarrel: Elend insists they cannot keep losing the mornings to the mists now that they are penetrating the Western Dominance; Ham cannot bear the thought of marching soldiers into casualties he could otherwise spare. Vin takes Elend's side and tells Ham so. Ham frowns and goes off to help strike a soldier's tent, laughing with the men as he works.
She watches him go and tells Elend that Kelsier had picked wrong for him — Breeze for ambassador, Dockson for bureaucrat, fine, but Ham for general was an error. Ham knows every man he commands and grows attached. Elend agrees, and then turns the same line on himself — perhaps it would be better to grow attached, perhaps then he would be slower to order people to their deaths. He covers the bitterness with a smile she can see through, kisses her, and goes to check the barges.
She crosses the perimeter and finds Human sitting at the edge of camp, eleven feet of blue muscle drifted with ash, the rip from his eye to his mouth still slowly bleeding. He has been frightening the soldiers again. She tells him so, and tells him to stay with the koloss army. He turns toward the human tents with what she almost reads as longing and asks why. Because you make them uncomfortable, she says. Then they should attack me, he answers. That, she tells him, is why he is not human: humans do not attack things just because they make them uncomfortable. He thinks for a moment and then replies that no, they make the koloss kill them instead. She has no answer.
He looks at her with his beady red eyes and tells her she is one of them — not like the people in the camp. Why, she asks. Mist, he says. He does not elaborate. She asks instead what he thinks of the mists; he tells her, with passable logic, that swords kill, and rain does not, and ash does not, and mist does not. Then, after a pause: I hate it. I hate it because it hates me. You feel it. Yes, Vin hears herself say. I do.
She walks away shaken. She tries to tell herself the mist is not alive; it cannot hate her; she is imagining things. But she remembers the night she fought the Lord Ruler and somehow drew on the mists themselves as fuel for Allomancy in place of metal — a thing she has tried and failed to replicate ever since. She remembers the mist spirit, which once tried to kill Elend and then showed her how to save him by making him an Allomancer. She remembers how the mists retreat from her, stay out of buildings, kill at random. She finally says aloud, to herself, the thing she has been refusing to acknowledge: the mists are her enemy.
The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer names the Allomantic savants — those whose bodies are changed by flaring a single metal too hard, too long — describes the unobtrusive bronze savant and the lethal cost of attempting pewter, and lingers on tin savants as something special: senses past human range, useful in the field, slaves to what they touch and hear. The writer wonders aloud whether a savant — like an Inquisitor transformed by a Hemalurgic spike — is even human any more.