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Vin is alone in the dark of the Fadrex cache. She has been alone there with Ruin for three or four days, by the rhythm of her sleep; she has lost the lantern she knocked over the night Ruin revealed itself, and her last vial of pewter is nearly out. She has stopped flinching at Ruin's presence pulsing past her in the dark — *like some fascinated patron at a carnival show* — but she has not made peace with it. When the pulses vanish she still hears it: Reen's voice in her head telling her, kindly, that it has not left.

She works through what she now knows. She has to trust the Lord Ruler's reassurance that Ruin cannot read her mind — without it she would have to give up — and so she reasons that Ruin's uncanny responses to her thinking must be guesses from what she does and what she says, not from what she thinks. Walls mean nothing to it. Distance means nothing either: in the days of its imprisonment it had still reached her, all her life, just less strongly. So Zane, who had heard a voice in his head and let it drive him toward the same Allomantic pulses that later drew her to the Well, may well have been hearing Ruin too. The fit is too close to dismiss.

She gnaws at the larger question. Ruin wants the world ended; if it has not ended the world yet, that means it cannot — that it is hindered, limited to falling ash and the light-stealing day mists and gradual death. So *what* hinders it. Ruin was imprisoned before; it can be imprisoned again. By what? She had assumed the Lord Ruler had been the one to do it, but the Lord Ruler himself had gone to the Well in Rashek's day to stop Alendi from doing what she herself eventually did — release Ruin — and that means Ruin had already been a prisoner before Rashek's climb. The Deepness cannot be Ruin in any simple way either; the day mists and the mistsickness began as much as a year before she freed it. Something else, then, imprisoned Ruin in the first place, and that something might still be findable.

She gets up to keep from thinking in circles, and feels her way along the wall of the cavern. The space is vast — she has spent a day on each scout — and she has confirmed what she had begun to fear at the start: Yomen removed all of the water barrels before he sealed her in. The food cans are still there, but he took the tools as well, so opening even one is an hour of pewter and a rock. She picks up the one half-eaten can of stew at her shelf and rations herself another mouthful. The stew does little for her thirst. She has been hungry as a child for most of her life. She can do this part again. It is the thirst that will kill her, in days.

She works her way along the wall to the only other thing of interest in the cache — the steel plate set into it. Like the plates in the previous caches it carries a small carved diagram (here, only a circle around a single dot) and a body of text she has read so many times by feel that she has memorised it. The Lord Ruler wrote it in his own voice, and the voice slips back and forth between contrition and an arrogance that startles her. *I have failed you*, it opens. He had hoped these caverns might hold an answer, and they had not. He has no plan for defeating the thing whose voice has whispered at him through eight hundred years. The best he can manage is to take the Well's power again when it returns, and so hold the thing at bay another generation. He admits, plainly, that he is not sure how much of what he has done has been his own intention and how much the voice's. He claims, in the same breath, that he is a god and needs no justification. He claims, also, that the title Hero of Ages must mean *a hero who lives through the ages, as I do*.

Then the last line. *Know that the thing's power is not complete. I have hidden his body well.*

The plate ends there. Vin taps it in frustration. The Lord Ruler had a thousand years to think this through and the best he could offer was *I am dead, I doubt that I should care*. But that last line — *I have hidden his body well* — is something. Ruin has a body. The Lord Ruler has hidden it. That is a foothold.

She is leaning into the dark, trying to reach for the rest of it, when she hears stone grinding against stone. She turns, tense, hand on her last vial. The cache door is opening.