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Sazed sits in one of the better surviving buildings at the Pits of Hathsin — a converted guardhouse — with a mug of tea, a small stove, and a half-circle of Terris elders sitting before him in chairs. Beyond the glass he can see the fenced-off cracks in the ground where the Lord Ruler's condemned were once driven down to dig for atium geodes; before Kelsier shattered the crystals each slave who failed to bring up a geode in a week was executed, and likely hundreds of bodies still lie unrecovered in the deep caverns below. The next morning Sazed will leave to catch Goradel and Breeze on their road to Urteau.

The elders have brought their ledgers. He reminds them, again, to keep the important figures inscribed in metal as well as in ink — Ruin can alter what is written — and they confirm that they copy the key totals onto metal sheets each evening and check them weekly. He runs through stores, sanitation, latrines for refugees that have not yet come; he asks them to be ready for more mouths than they presently have. He emphasises that these are suggestions rather than orders, that he claims no authority over them. The elders exchange looks. Eventually one asks, gently, how long he will stay.

He must leave in the morning, he says. He came only to see they had what they needed; these are bad days, and it is easy for those in Luthadel to forget those who live on the edge of the world. They thank him, then ask, again — would he not reconsider? They are not short of land, food, or shelter. They are short of a leader. Sazed tells them their people were oppressed for a thousand years; they need no new tyrant king. *Not a tyrant,* one of them says. *One of our own.* He answers, quietly, that the Lord Ruler was one of their own, and the room falls silent at the shame of it — that Rashek had been Terris is a wound none of them have learned how to dress. They point out that under the Lord Ruler the Terris had not looked to him for leadership; they had looked to the Keeper Synod in secret.

Master Vedlew, senior of the elders, raises a smaller point that lands like a larger one: Sazed is not wearing his copperminds. He has them in his pack, he answers. Vedlew tells him that it seems strange — that during the Lord Ruler's day Sazed had risked his life to wear them, and now in freedom he carries them like baggage. Sazed tells them, gently, that he cannot be the man they want him to be; not now. *You are a Keeper,* one says. *I was the lowest of them,* Sazed answers. They cast him out. The last time he left Tathingdwen he did so in disgrace and the common people cursed him in their homes. *Now they bless you,* one of the elders replies. *I do not deserve those blessings.* *Deserve or not, you are all we have left.* He answers, in a voice the room cannot quite hear, that if that is true then they are a sorrier people than they appear.

The silence after that is its own answer. Sazed sets the ledger aside and tries the other reason he has come. Have any of their people died, lately, in strange ways? The elders look at him blankly. Sazed explains — men struck down by walking out into the day mists. One of the elders scoffs that this is a skaa story; the mists are not dangerous. *Do you send your people out to work in them, then, during the daylight hours?* Of course they do, says the younger of the elders; it would be foolish to throw away that much working time. Sazed tries not to let his scholar's interest show. The Terris are not taken by the mist sickness. He does not know why.

He cannot get the energy for the question. The crisis in him pulls him to lie down somewhere quiet and stop being asked to fix the world. But a small spark of who he used to be refuses to let him give up entirely — he will, at least, carry on the research, and he will do what Vin and Elend need of him. It is not everything; it will not satisfy the elders looking at him with their needful expressions. But to remain at the Pits would be to surrender, he knows; he needs to keep moving. *I am sorry,* he tells them, gathering up the ledger again. *But this is how it must be.*