(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Sazed looks in on Spook, still wrapped in casts and bandages and unconscious in a borrowed mansion room. Beldre sits at the bedside; she has been there every day, more often than she visits her brother. Sazed checks the bandages against the medical notes in his copperminds and finds nothing he can do that he is not already doing. Spook is not a Thug — he gave him a vial of pewter just in case, and it changed nothing — and Sazed notes that this confirmation, of all the things to comfort him today, is the one that does: the world has rules and they hold.

Beldre tells him, quietly, that Spook will recover. She says it because she believes it. She loves the boy she has known for a few weeks. Watching her, Sazed is struck that two years ago he might have understood her — that he himself had loved Tindwyl after only a few precious days. He turns and walks out, ashamed that his first instinct on seeing Spook was relief over a metaphysical question rather than worry for the boy.

In his own quarters Sazed sits down at the portfolio he has carried across the empire for a year — pages on his left, pages on his right, ten still on the right. By the next morning the right stack is empty. Every religion in his catalogue has been weighed, examined, and dismissed. Most claim final authority. Most teach an afterlife they cannot prove. All are riddled, by his reading, with contradictions; none can answer why a self-made god named Rashek was permitted by their own deities to enslave, brand, and slaughter their faithful for a thousand years. There is nothing left. The portfolio was his last line of defence, and it is gone, and the grief he has been carrying since Tindwyl died at the gates of Luthadel hits him at last. It feels, he thinks, like wire wound around the chest, with nothing he can do about it.

He reaches under his desk — not for a metalmind, the thing his hand still goes to in moments like this — and pulls out the thick journal he and Tindwyl compiled together, the one in two handwritings, the one in which they pieced together what little they had recovered of the original Terris religion and the Hero of Ages prophecies. The slip of paper Vin gave him — the picture of Mare's flower — falls out from between the pages. Sunlight, slanted red through the window, lies across the ceiling. *Why?* Sazed asks it. He studied five hundred faiths so that he could teach the next age when this one ended. Why has he, of all men, been left with nothing? *Better to trust and be betrayed,* he hears Kelsier say in his memory; *better to love and be hurt.* The book in his hands is what he was before. He turns toward the hearth. He will burn it.

Outside in the hall he hears Breeze saying goodbye to TenSoon — and TenSoon, turning to leave, says: *Farewell, Soother. Give my regards to the Announcer.* Sazed freezes. *Announcer* is not the word TenSoon means; the word in the prophecies, as he and Tindwyl copied it, is *Holy Witness.* He throws the door open. Breeze jumps. TenSoon turns. *What did you call me?* TenSoon, politely, repeats himself: he is, is he not, the one who pointed at Lady Vin as the Hero of Ages? That is his title.

Sazed drops to his knees in the hall with the journal open in front of him, finds the line in Kwaan's writings — *I thought myself the Holy Witness* — and tells Breeze flatly that this is one of the lines Ruin has been rewriting. The Urteau skaa took to calling Sazed the Holy Witness; Ruin reached back into the metal plate and retro-fitted the prophecy to point at him. The genuine word was *Announcer*. And TenSoon knows the genuine word.

How? TenSoon sits back on his haunches and asks a question of his own. *What happened to the packmen who climbed to the Well of Ascension with Alendi and Rashek?* Breeze gives the textbook answer — they were Rashek's friends, raised to nobles when he took the throne in Khlennium, and the pampered houses of the Final Empire are their descendants. Sazed sees, with a wrench, that this cannot be true. The houses gained Allomancy from Preservation's beads at the founding; Rashek's friends were Terris Feruchemists. To grant them both would have been to make them what he was, his only true rivals, the one combination he then spent ten centuries breeding out of the Terris population. He would have had to sequester them, or kill them.

*No,* TenSoon says. *He did not kill them.* The Father was many things but he was not the man who would murder his oldest friends. While he held the power at the Well he spoke directly into their minds, and he offered them a bargain. Immortality, in exchange for their Feruchemy — and for something more. Sazed understands before TenSoon finishes the sentence. *Their humanity.* TenSoon nods. The bulk of the living Terris Feruchemists he turned into mistwraiths then and there, founding that species; his actual companions he restored to sentience afterward by driving Hemalurgic spikes into them. *We call them the First Generation,* TenSoon says. *The founders of the kandra people.* They are still alive.

And the Terris religion, the thing Sazed has been mourning for a year — the thing his entire sect dedicated lifetimes to reconstructing from corrupted fragments — is not gone. It lives in the heads of the people who actually practised it before Rashek took the Well. *That,* Sazed tells Breeze, *means hope.* He throws clothes into a travel pack. TenSoon tells him to be quick: he was prepared to leave without him, since everyone had agreed Sazed had stopped caring about such things, but if Sazed will come, the road to the Homeland runs the same direction as the road to Vin, and the First Generation need to be convinced of the one thing TenSoon has not been able to convince them of. *Which is?* *That the end has arrived.*