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Elend walks the canal road south toward Luthadel in the night mist, a pack over his shoulder and a sword he is not very good with at his hip. The road has melted clear in patches and the mist eats his breath as he exhales. He and Spook had to give up the horses in a village a few days back — Spook judged that keeping the animals fed through the last leg was not worth the effort — and now travel only at night, partly because Vin told him to and partly because Spook insists most bandits do not watch the roadways through the mists. Spook prowls ahead with his Tineye senses, leaving Elend alone in the dark, half-envious that the Allomantic tradition his father resented him for never having would let a person see through this.

Something rustles in the trees. Spook returns, scouts the noise, and dismisses it as a mistwraith following them for scraps. He reports watchfires further down the road, asks Elend to wait behind in case it is a scout post, and goes ahead again. Left standing, Elend watches the mist linger an hour past sunrise — every morning now — and turns over Vin's argument that the Deepness of Terris lore might be nothing more than the mists themselves: a subtler, slower destroyer than the monster the historians describe, one that could kill crops and possibly people, as Sazed has been quietly suggesting from his village reports.

While he is watching the mist play tricks on his eye, a shape in front of him steps forward. A vague human form made of mist itself — the figure Vin has been describing for months and that Elend has been quietly humouring. It raises an arm and points north, away from Luthadel. Elend, hand on his useless sword, asks aloud what it wants of him; it only points more insistently. He feels an unnatural calm coming off it that he takes for an Allomantic Pull on his emotions. When Spook returns out of the mist, the figure dissolves; Elend tells Spook nothing happened. Spook only says he should come see what is up ahead — not an army. Refugees.

What Spook has found is nearly a thousand Terrismen camped in the cold with large defiant fires burning against the mist. Most are elderly; many are eunuch stewards in clean robes, walking with the smooth controlled grace of a thousand years of imperial service that even their newly declared independence has not erased. An old steward receives Elend over half-cups of warm tea — a precaution against the chronic shake in his hands — and tells him the Keepers are dead or captured. The Synod had revealed itself the moment the empire fell, perhaps too soon. Dozens of Steel Inquisitors descended on the Terris capital with a koloss army; the brutes kept the Terris defenders fighting while the Inquisitors themselves struck the Keepers directly, killing or capturing them and carrying off the bodies. So that is where the Inquisitors have been all this time.

The refugees are going south to seek "King Venture" and the Keeper in residence at his court, Lady Tindwyl — by their reckoning the senior surviving member of the Synod now that no one out of the capital has been heard from. Elend tells the old man quietly that the koloss hit Luthadel a little over a week back, and that for all he knows the city has fallen — he is a refugee himself, traveling back to see. He confirms that Tindwyl was still in the city when he left. He also quietly weighs whether the book Sazed told him to hand to the Synod should be passed to these men, or kept.

Standing with Spook in the mist outside the camp, Elend watches a passing squad of Terris "soldiers" — stewards whose posture is excellent and whose grip on a sword would be useless — and accepts that no force in Terris is going to be marching south to help. Spook mutters that they cannot gather in Terris either, not with the Inquisitors up there, and that the whole world is falling apart. Elend cuts him off — Luthadel has not been destroyed; Vin will have found a way; they will keep going and rebuild whatever is lost. The certainty in his voice eases Spook visibly. Elend hands over his tea and keeps to himself the worse worry — the Deepness returning, a ghost in the mist, Inquisitors in the open on Terris — and wonders what else he has been ignoring.