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Vin and Elend leave Ham and Spook behind among the shelves of the storage cavern and walk on through a long natural tunnel into a second cavern, this one clogged with a thick black smoke that does not seep outward but churns upon itself. She walks confidently through it; it does not choke her. Elend's lantern dims as if the smoke is drinking the light. He is, at last, frightened — not of the dark, but of how completely a thing this far outside scholarship and reason refuses to fit any framework he has been trained in. He follows her anyway.

Above, in Kredik Shaw's audience chamber, Sazed has been thrown into the wall by Marsh and crawls, ribs cracked, across the marble. Marsh Pushes him into the opposite wall; his arm snaps audibly. The Inquisitor picks up a small pouch from the floor — thinking it a coin purse — and Pushes it across the room. Metal tears into Sazed's flesh and stays there. As he is dying, the voice he has been listening to all year reminds him those were not coins: they were the ten ring metalminds he prepared for the siege and never used. He taps gold from within and his organs reknit in a flash; the wound seals around the embedded rings.

He rises. He cannot wear them but he is touching them, and so he can tap them — eight different attributes from within his own body, for as long as the small rings hold their charge. Marsh Pushes again on his bracers; Sazed taps his ironmind for weight and the Inquisitor is thrown backward by his own Push. He catches a Pulled lamp with steel-speed, taps pewter for strength, and swings the lamp into Marsh's face, driving an eye-spike back into the socket. They trade Push-against-weight standoffs and counter-strikes; he spins around to try to pull the linchpin spike between Marsh's shoulder blades — the Lord Ruler's built-in weakness — but his steelmind runs dry mid-swing. Marsh knocks his arm aside, drops him, and looms over him with the bent lamp raised, telling him he was wrong before — he has been killing for two years now. A dueling cane crashes into the back of Marsh's head. Ham stands over him, one-armed and looking pleased with himself, and pulls Sazed to his feet.

Beyond the smoke, Vin and Elend enter a third, smaller chamber pillared with too-evenly spaced stalactites. At its far end burns a steady, wrong-coloured light: a glowing liquid-metal pool only a few feet across, set down in a depression in the rock. She tells him: this is the Well of Ascension, beating in her head, and she is afraid of what taking it will do — afraid of becoming like the Lord Ruler. Elend holds her face and tells her her eyes are beautiful, that part of that beauty is her sincerity, and that she will know what to do; he trusts her. On a ledge near the doorway she notices broken pottery — disks with a bead of unfamiliar metal at the centre of each, all shattered, except for one. Elend picks the unbroken disk up and holds it; the colour of the bead is wrong for atium.

The figure of mist is standing beside the pool when she turns to look — its first appearance outside the open mist. She draws a dagger; Elend stops her, says it visited him too on the road, and walks toward it unarmed, asking what it wants. It raises an arm. Something flashes. It cuts him open across the gut. He falls. Vin crouches over him, rips open his jacket with pewter flared, sees with her own enhanced eyes how deep the wound is, and goes numb. The cut is deadly. She cradles him in her arms while the spirit retreats, his blood on its incorporeal form.

She turns, half-aware, and sees the pool glowing just inches from where he lies. She can save him. The power of creation is right there. She rolls her coat under his head, walks up to the pool, steps onto it, and lets it absorb her in. The liquid forces itself in through her pores and her mouth; her earring burns and she rips it free and drops her vials away. Then she starts to burn — body, muscle, bone — and finds she is burning the Well's power itself, like Allomancy from inside her entire frame. The cavern goes translucent in her mind. She sees the curve of the world, the narrow polar belt where life can exist, the mist killing people across the city and across the land — the Deepness arriving, the skaa who trusted Kelsier's reassurances dying in the streets they were told were safe. She could roll the mists back, feed millions, punish evil-doers, mend Elend's sliced organs in a heartbeat.

An aged, kindly Voice tells her she must not. She knows what she must do. It shows her Rashek's Ascension and the disasters that came of it. It tells her she must defeat the Deepness — and that if she tries to stop the mists herself, with this power, she will ruin the world as Rashek did. The power is all or nothing. Burn it now and remake what she pleases for a few moments, or give it up. She remembers Sazed's words about loving Elend enough to trust his wishes — not what she assumes is best — and Elend's own words minutes ago: you'll know what to do, I trust you. She knows what he wants. He wants his people to live more than he wants to live. So she gives the power up. Holding the capacity to remake herself as a god, and lets it go into the waiting void. She gives up him.

The cavern shakes. The power is ripped from her, soaked greedily by the void. She falls into the now empty pool, head knocking against rock. As she falls, a single sentence — not the kindly Voice from before — rings in her mind: I am free. Above her, Sazed is on Ham's hand and hurrying down the cavern stairs, ignoring Spook's confused questions at the landing, candle quivering. He feels the small tremor in the rock and knows somehow that he is already too late.