POV: vin
Summary
Vin aborts her attack in midair and lands tense and suspicious. The figure backlit by the dying lantern is Reen — the older, broader version she might have extrapolated from the boy who beat her and dragged her city to city. Memories surface: blows, harsh corrections, the constant moving. Tempered now by something older — four years on, she can see the fear in everything he did, that his half-breed Allomancer sister would be caught by the Steel Inquisitors. He had beaten her when she stood out, scolded her when she was competent, moved her on whenever he had thought the Canton of Inquisition was close. He had died protecting her. He had loved her. And the face in front of her, looking back, does not have his eyes.
She demands the figure identify itself. It answers in Reen's voice — claims to be her brother, complains that she has grown careless, scolds her for not knowing him. She has learned detection from two masters in her life — Reen first and Breeze after him — and she would recognise Reen. She asks instead about the bones, about how the face was copied so well; she had thought a kandra needed to digest a body for that. The figure dismisses the question and insists it is no kandra. She tries the test: a duralumin-fuelled emotional Allomancy burst, enough to bring a kandra or a koloss under her control. The figure does not even shift. It is not a kandra either.
She tries asking it for word of TenSoon — she has been hoping to hear what happened at his trial. The figure brushes the request off and circles back to denying it is kandra at all. She attacks experimentally, looking for what it is. It is too light on its feet — almost certainly on pewter — and although she can feel its Allomantic pulses she cannot pin down which metals are sounding. She notes what it does not do as carefully as what it does: no coins under it when it jumps, no Steel-push she can sense; it must have tin because it always hears her coming, even when she is silent. She knocks over a storage shelf and attacks under the cover of the crash. It still evades her without trying.
She stops. The lantern goes out. She dropped her coin pouch at the start so the figure could not feel her metal; she can still feel its pulses through her own bronze. Something in them is familiar. When she first sensed this presence weeks ago in Fadrex, she had taken it for the mist spirit. Without Reen's face to distract her she suddenly knows what it is. She has felt these pulses before — a year ago, drawing her to the Well of Ascension. They are the same pulses. She asks the dark, quietly, why it has come.
Laughter answers her, free and unbounded, ringing through the cavern. The pulses swell — no longer bounded by the walls, washing through her, through stone, through everything living and dead. The voice that speaks now speaks inside her head, kindly, almost fatherly. It tells her it had not expected to fool her for long. It reminds her she has known its desire from the moment she touched it at the Well: a single, simple intention, that the world should reach its end. She tells it she will stop it, knowing how absurd that sounds said to a thing older than worlds.
The voice — Ruin — answers her almost gently. It objects to being called her enemy. It puts to her the argument it will make all the way through this book: that endings are inherent to all things, that without them nothing could grow, that it is therefore not death but life. She refuses: there is no need to hasten the ending. The presence flows around her, wet and delicate against her skin like mist, and tells her not to mourn — every world's last day was fixed on its first. There is, Ruin tells her, beauty in completion, and nothing is truly complete until it is unmade.
She snaps at it to stop, and asks again why it has come now. The voice answers that it has not come anywhere — it has never left her. It has been with her since she was very small. And in the back of her mind a voice she has heard so often that she has long taken it for her own conscience — the Reen-voice that has whispered her not to trust, ever, anyone — slides slowly out of Reen's cadence into Ruin's. Ruin tells her again, plainly, that it has been the voice in her mind since her first years of life.