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Elend takes longer to get back from the village than he had taken getting out to it. He left a great deal of his coin behind with the villagers — useful, perhaps, useless if there is nothing left to buy — and he is walking with his new koloss army instead of bounding ahead of it, in case the missing Inquisitor turns up to steal them back. He cannot, however, quite shake the strangeness of an unshepherded band that big, and turns the puzzle over in his head as he slogs through thigh-deep ash.

He had attacked a thirty-thousand-strong koloss army alone, ready to fight an Inquisitor by himself; Kelsier had barely managed that once, and Vin has done it three times now while he watched. He does not begrudge her her skill. He envies it, sometimes, now that he is a Mistborn himself. And Vin, for all that skill, has been captured. He has stayed alive, free, useless to her. Nothing is in the right place.

The third reason he is walking instead of leaping is that he needs to think. He had always understood their work was dangerous, but he had never quite let himself imagine actually losing her. She was Vin. She always got out. He had always been the vulnerable one — the scholar who needed her cover. They had stayed close enough through the war that he had not had to think about a world that survived without her. Now he has to.

The ashfall keeps getting worse. He had spent a day at the village having his koloss clear streets and rebuild what they had burned, and even so the mists and the loose koloss feel like secondary problems. The ash alone will kill them. It is up to his waist in places, and through the evening haze ahead of him he can see a red glow east — fire and lava rising out of the ashmounts. What does he do about a dying sky? So far, by letting Vin worry about it. He admits to himself, in the quiet of the falling ash, that this is the deeper terror — not losing the woman he loves, but losing the one he had trusted to fix all of this.

He stops in the dark. He has been thinking, distantly, that he wants help — meaning some god of the sort Sazed used to preach about, in a world where no one but the Lord Ruler has been a god in living memory. He looks up at the falling ash and tells himself, gently rather than with despair, that they are doomed. The thought is not a blow; it is a candle going out. He sinks to his knees. The koloss line stops behind him and waits. For the first time he simply gives up.

Someone kneels beside him.

He flares pewter and jumps back — and then sees it, by tin and squinting, in the patterns of moving mist. The mist spirit. The one Vin had seen years before in the wilds of the Northern Dominance, the one that had stabbed him so that Vin would heal him at the Well of Ascension, the one that — by Vin's account — had led her to the bit of metal that made him a Mistborn in the first place. It points northeast, as it had done the first time, and as before Elend does not understand. He asks it to write its message instead. To his surprise it kneels and scratches words into the ash with a hand of mist. The words read *I will kill you. Death, death, death.* The spirit slumps. Elend works it out: the other power is here, and is rewriting the letters as they form, the same way it rewrites ink on a page. The torn corners of Sazed's papers, months ago, were the same problem from the other side.

He switches to yes-or-no. The spirit confirms it: Ruin is here in the field with them, indistinct in the moving mist. It is much weaker than Ruin. It is fading further as the world ends — it is harder to see than the last time. Ruin is the one driving the ashfalls; the daytime mists are not quite Ruin's doing — the spirit itself bears some hesitating responsibility for those. Elend presses where it matters: are the mists killing his men? No. He has seen them fall dead. The spirit steps forward urgently. It points at his coin sash. He pulls out a vial of metals. Yes. It waves and waves at the vial, then fades further; he does not have time to chase the answer. He asks it not to want him to attack Fadrex and it waves vigorously. He asks if they can survive at all. After a long stillness it gives him one small, uncertain wave, and is gone.

Elend stands in the dark. The koloss wait like a row of dead trees behind him. He turns and starts back toward Fadrex in the ash. The spirit had not really given him an answer; it had mostly confirmed what he had already begun to guess. But there were things in the world he did not understand, which meant there were possibilities he could not see — and that is enough, for the night, to make him keep moving. To make him jump the chasm even when the logic says he should not.