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Elend stands on a stone shelf above his army, watching the koloss stomp a pathway through the ash for his men to follow. He is wearing white. He has the numerical advantage; Yomen's soldiers have never fought koloss and probably will not need to be engaged at all. He asks Ham whether this is right and gets the usual half-answer about logic problems — and then, unexpectedly, a straight one. *No.* Ham does not bother to argue why. Elend thinks of Vin after Cett's tower — curled in a corner, weeping — and tells Ham to sound the retreat. He will not conquer this city, even for her sake. They will find another way.

In the audience chamber above Fadrex, Vin sighs in relief as the report comes that Elend's men are pulling back. Ruin frowns, intrigued by the wrong outcome. Vin gambles. She tells him, quietly, that he has been played from the start — that Elend and she always knew he was hunting for atium, because his koloss always closed on the next city *only after* they themselves had located its cache. They have been leading him through false discoveries; the actual atium he never saw, because metal blinds him. *Impossible,* Ruin whispers. Marsh grabs her, lifts her, shakes her, demanding the location. She laughs and reaches for his sash.

He throws her aside. Ruin kneels beside her — patient, condescending — and tells Marsh to make Yomen order a charge of the city's full force against Elend's koloss line. Yomen pales. He asks why his lord wants his men to abandon their fortifications and run into a koloss horde, then turns to his captains and gives the order, telling them the Lord Ruler will protect them. Vin sees, with horror, that Yomen's faith will carry his soldiers out of the city to die.

Outside, Elend watches Yomen's men flood through the gate into the ash. *Throwing an inferior force at a koloss army?* Ham asks, baffled — and then Elend remembers his own bait charge outside Vetitan and orders the camp abandoned at the run. His koloss can clear the path; his men will follow in the wake of that. Ham mutters that it is the strangest retreat he has ever conducted. Elend does not answer; the strangeness has stopped being his problem, and the city has.

In the chamber, Yomen is crying small quiet tears. He has, he tells Vin when she comes to him, given an order he expects to kill his men, and is taking it on faith that the Lord Ruler's Inquisitor has reason. Vin walks past him to Marsh's back. Marsh grabs her again — and she goes for his sash a second time. *You think you have won?* Ruin asks. *You don't even know what the atium is. Do you know who the koloss who follow you serve? They draw their strength from my power. I let you control them because in the end, I gain by it.* And Vin feels the chill of a thing snapping into focus —

— and out in the ash Elend feels something tear out of him, like an organ ripped loose. He stops Pushing on his coin, falls awkwardly to a rock shelf, gasps; he cannot feel the koloss any more. In the distance, the blue giants stop running away from Fadrex, turn, and charge his men.

Marsh holds Vin in mid-air. *Hemalurgy is his power, Vin!* he says. *The Lord Ruler used it unknowingly. Every Inquisitor he made, every koloss, every kandra — he was building Ruin's army. He waited a thousand years for it.* From a side window Yomen sees Vin's thousand koloss turn on the rest of Elend's horde; he calls it confirmation that the koloss have been delivered into his hands. *They'll come for your men next,* Vin tells him, dizzily. *Then they'll take your city.*

Marsh raises his fist. Vin flips out the vial of metals she has finally pulled from his sash and downs it; flared pewter floods her back into her body. She pulls free, yanks her mother's earring out, and duralumin-Pushes it like a steel needle through Marsh's forehead. The tiny bit of metal punches a hole clean through his skull and blows her backward into the wall.

Ruin has gone — out, she thinks, to drive the koloss. She tells Yomen to bring his men back and fortify; he refuses, still clinging to his test of faith. She crosses to Marsh's body, takes his second vial — her duralumin burn has stripped her of metals — and downs it, then leaps to the window. Below, Elend's line is fraying under koloss from one side and pinned against Yomen's soldiers on the other. The sun is going down; the mists come earlier each day.

She notices, ignored by Elend, by Yomen, and by Ruin himself, a small clump of a thousand koloss standing partway buried in the ash: her koloss, the ones Elend gave her before her capture, with Human at their head. She orders them forward. To attack Yomen's soldiers. Then she walks back into the chamber, tells Yomen flatly that koloss do not care which uniform their target wears and will kill anything — and that the creature who came to him just admitted that the Lord Ruler is dead. Yomen curses at his window as he sees her koloss hit his men, and she feels them seized back from her. The damage is done. Yomen orders retreat into the city — and gives orders that Elend's men be allowed in too.

Then Marsh climbs back to his knees. The hole through his brain reknits as she watches — Inquisitor regeneration handles even *that*. He stands. *You fool,* he says. *Even if Yomen turns from me, I can kill him, and his soldiers will follow me by right of inheritance from his god.* Vin tries duralumin-Soothing him. She feels a wall — the same wall she felt the first time she tried to take a kandra under control — and on a single vial cannot push through it. He grabs her by the throat. He starts to grow in her hand: a Feruchemist's body, tapping strength. *I'm in serious trouble,* Vin thinks.

And the mists come for her again. As they did the night she killed the Lord Ruler in his throne room — and only that once, the day she has been trying to repeat ever since — she draws them in, fills her body with their Allomantic surge, and Pushes on Marsh's emotions. The wall in him cracks and bursts. For a single instant of vertigo she is inside him — feels his love of destruction, his hatred of himself, and through him glimpses a hateful thing wearing a mask of civility behind it. *Ruin is not the same thing as the mists.* Marsh screams, drops her, and Pushes himself out the window into the rising mist.

Vin picks herself up coughing. She does not know why the mists came tonight after years of refusing; she has no time to think about it. She tells Yomen to keep the retreat going, and leaps into the open air.

Elend, blood-spattered in the half-disassembled camp, has been pulled back to its original ash-walled perimeter with his ten Coinshots, his archers, his Lurchers picking koloss weapons out of the air for his line. Cett sits at the camp table snorting about going down in battle rather than starving. The sky is nearly black. A figure lands on Cett's map. *Elend,* Vin says. *Retreat to the city. Yomen will let you in.* He smiles up at her. *What took you so long?* *Got delayed by an Inquisitor and a dark god,* she tells him, and goes back out into the mist to keep some of the koloss off his back.