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TenSoon is led from his display cage to the Trustwarren for the second time, this time to be sentenced. He walks the corridor on four legs in the wolfhound's body the Second Generation returned to him as a public humiliation. The display year has done its work: where the first proceedings drew curiosity, this audience is openly disgusted. He bears the stares with his head up. The bones feel like home — better, even, than the Homeland had a year ago — because they are the body Vin put him in, and she is the Hero of Ages. He has to believe that, or what he is about to do is a very large mistake.

The chamber is over capacity for the sentencing. Anyone below the Seventh Generation has been kept out and crowds the doorway from the corridor. The First Generation sit silent in their lump-shadowed alcoves above, back-lit faintly in blue. KanPaar approaches his lectern with the satisfaction of a man whose victory is complete, and asks whether TenSoon is ready to bear the sentence of his judgment. TenSoon tells him there will be no judgment. He did not come to be judged; he came to give information. He turns away from KanPaar and addresses the alcoves above him: how long will the First Generation hide behind their walls and pretend the surface does not exist? The mist days have come. The ash never stops. The earth shakes. They may condemn him, but they cannot ignore what he came to say — the world is going to die, and if the kandra people are to survive, the Firsts may soon need to call the Resolution.

The chamber goes still in a way kandra do not normally allow themselves. A few of the alcove shadows shift. Then a voice from above — soft, scratchy, tired — tells KanPaar to proceed. The audience gasps; the Firsts never speak before lessers. TenSoon is not awed. He has known them long enough to remember when they would talk; he is only disappointed. He says, mostly to himself, that his faith in them was misplaced and he should not have come back.

KanPaar reads the sentence into the chamber: the ritual imprisonment of ChanGaar, the punishment the kandra have not invoked in a thousand years. TenSoon is to be beaten until the True Body bones fracture, bricked into a pit with a single feeding hole, kept alive there for ten generations, and then executed by starvation. His greatest sin, KanPaar tells the audience, was rebellion — straying from the wisdom of the Seconds and so endangering the Trust. The guards beside him raise their hammers. TenSoon sits patiently on his haunches and remarks, conversationally, that he has learned a few interesting things while wearing these bones — that humans are not built for speed, and dogs are.

The hammers fall. He is already moving. He has spent a year following Vin across the empire in this body, training under one of the most talented Allomancers alive, and he has the muscle and craft of a member of the Third Generation packed into a hundred pounds of wolfhound. He clears ten feet in one leap, lands running, and instead of bolting for the door turns directly at KanPaar. The crystal of KanPaar's True Body shatters audibly under the impact. The Senior screams in a sound no one in the room has ever heard a kandra make. TenSoon shoves through the bench of Seconds — vain enough, he thinks, to have worn crystal — and aims for the door, where his pursuers expect the choke of the crowd to slow him.

He jumps it instead. The leap is nothing like what he did for Vin when he carried the Blessing of Potency he stole from OreSeur — that Blessing has been removed from him — but it is enough to clear the heads of the watching kandra outside the doors. He lands in a pocket of open space and leaps again into the cavern beyond, then takes off down a corridor at a wolfhound's gallop. The two guards meant to break him have turned aside to attend to KanPaar — filial duty overriding their duty to stop the escape. He hears the cry to chase him echo from the Trustwarren, but he runs faster than anything bipedal can follow him, and the Homeland falls away behind. Goodbye to home, he thinks as the main cavern recedes — and goodbye to whatever sliver of honour he had left.