POV: elend-venture
Summary
Elend crosses the ash-buried hills northeast of Fadrex alone, steel-pushing himself between hilltops with a bag of copper clips. He cannot manage the horseshoe-cyclone trick Vin worked out for herself; he leaps and lands, leaps and lands, his pushes carrying him farther than they should — a quiet reminder that he is stronger than other Mistborn for reasons no one has yet explained. He wears dark clothing instead of his white uniform and a mistcloak he had never really earned, having spent the entirety of his life as a Mistborn at war. For a few breaths between leaps it feels free, intoxicating, the way Vin has always described the mists. Then he hits a drift of thigh-deep ash and remembers: Vin is in Yomen's hands, the empire is failing, his people are starving. He runs on.
He had left the camp because diplomacy was finished. He cannot assassinate Yomen after the atium-bead trap, and he cannot just sit while Yomen holds his wife. So he goes hunting for the wandering koloss band his scouts have been tracking — thirty thousand, by report. He needs leverage, and nothing batters a city like koloss.
He smells the smoke before he sees the village. He drops a coin, vaults over the rooftops, and finds the place already burning. Koloss crash through the streets; villagers huddle in doorways. He picks the nearest beast, Pulls on its weapon, and — since the creature is barely heavier than he is — yanks the koloss up into the air on one arm while spraying it with coins. He lands in front of a knot of skaa, shears the legs out from under another beast, takes the arm off a third, drives his stolen sword through a fourth's chest. He has rarely felt so simply useful.
The fight gets uglier. The koloss turn on him in frenzy, blood-red eyes catching the firelight. He cannot Soothe them under control — usually he has to frighten a band of koloss before he can take it, and these will not be frightened. He fights on without an Inquisitor in sight, which worries him as much as the fighting: a band this big should have one. As he kills, he turns the question over in his head — the Lord Ruler made koloss somehow, and Elend has begun to suspect that "somehow" means he made them out of people. The thought does not slow him.
A twelve-foot koloss meets him sword to sword and is dumbfounded to find a man matching his strength. Elend hews it apart, just to prove that he can, and the question that has been hovering at the back of his mind finally surfaces with the cut: why can he be this strong and still not protect a single village? He has thrown armies, deposed tyrants, rewritten laws, scavenged supplies — and none of it adds up to enough. He has never wanted power; he has been a scholar pretending to be an emperor. Now, watching women and children die three streets over while he kills koloss one at a time, he understands for the first time why a man might lust after godhood. Power to protect.
He turns the bag of coins into a cloud of shrapnel to save a young woman from being dragged away by a koloss. Coins are usually wasted on the brutes, but he flares more, and more, until the creature's back glistens red and it slumps. Villagers begin to rally around him; their pleading eyes drive him on. He fights as he had never understood Vin for fighting two years ago at the siege of Luthadel, when she had slaughtered three hundred of Cett's soldiers in a single night. He understands now.
Still no Inquisitor. Frustrated, he disengages, extinguishes his metals, then burns duralumin and zinc and Pulls. The village goes silent. Thousands of koloss stand patiently around him, suddenly his. He had never controlled a group anywhere near that size; he should not have been able to. The simplest explanation is that no one else had been holding them.
The survivors gather in the street, staring at him through the falling ash. He has saved almost no one — most of the village is on fire — and the victory tastes like failure. An old man whispers that he looks like the Lord Ruler. Elend, black-uniformed and blood-slick under his mistcloak, does not argue. He turns east, toward his camp many miles away, where his army is waiting for him to come back with the koloss force he had gone to find. Somewhere on the leap home, he stops pretending he is going to talk Yomen down. The killing has not ended at all. It is only beginning.