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Sazed rides south on the strangest mount of his life — a horse-shaped TenSoon who, before they left, swallowed a hog for mass and then molded his gel-flesh around an actual horse to digest it, leaving him able to wear the animal's form with reinforced muscle. They have not stopped running. The ash falls like a winter storm and lies feet deep across the dead land, and a real animal would have foundered hours back; TenSoon's borrowed body shoulders through it without slowing. Sazed keeps himself awake by tapping a year-old metalmind of wakefulness he laid down after the siege of Luthadel.

He is ashamed. He has spent the last year refusing to teach the religions he no longer believed, and the world needed someone to give it hope at exactly that moment, and he was not there. Tindwyl would have done it. She had thought religion was lies that made people feel better; he could never bring himself to that. But now — now — he has hope of his own. The Terris religion is the one faith his catalogue could not dismiss, the one that named the Hero of Ages in the first place, and the First Generation are still alive inside it. He needs to reach them.

He has also, he realises with another wince, spent days riding a creature whose abilities he has not bothered to interrogate. He asks. TenSoon explains as he runs: his people were made third and last, when the Lord Ruler's power was waning. They come from mistwraiths — the species Rashek founded by transforming the living Terris Feruchemists — which thereafter bred true on its own. A mistwraith with a Blessing driven into it — two small metal spikes — wakes as a kandra. They are made the same way as Inquisitors and koloss, but more subtly. Fewer spikes; more self left over. An Allomancer can still seize them, but in ordinary moments they keep their own minds — unlike koloss and Inquisitors, who are nudged by Ruin even when he isn't actively driving them. *Have you never wondered,* he asks, *why both of them are so eager to kill?* The Blessing also grants strength — a steady, modest version of the burst an Allomancer or Feruchemist can produce — that, combined with his shaped body, lets him run like this without tiring.

There isn't much time, TenSoon adds, more quietly. This is the only window in which they can succeed; they must be ready when the Hero comes. *Comes?* Sazed asks. She will lead an army of Allomancers to the Homeland, TenSoon says, and there save all of them — kandra, human, koloss, and Inquisitor alike. Sazed's part is the Firsts: he must convince them how dire things have become, because there is something they must be prepared to do, something they will resist, and perhaps an outsider can move them where TenSoon could not.

The horse stops in the ash. Sazed climbs down to stretch, and TenSoon tells him to look at the land. He does not recognise it; days of falling ash have blotted out every landmark. *That ridge,* TenSoon says, is the Terris refugee camp. The depression at his feet is the entrance to the Homeland — which, Sazed realises with a shock, sits in the cave network beneath the Pits of Hathsin, where Kelsier once trained his original skaa army. The Homeland abuts the Pits but does not grow atium; some of its passages had to be sealed against workers who might break through. TenSoon cannot enter with him — he has his own duties — and the great horse turns to go. Sazed raises a hand. *May our god preserve you.* TenSoon gives him an odd, equine smile and gallops off into the ash.

Sazed hefts his pack — metalminds and a single book — and digs down into the depression. The hole opens into a half-pit, half-cave passage sloping into the dark. He pulls a tinmind and taps eyesight; a tinmind is good for distance, less good for low light, and within a few yards he is groping along the wall. Then light. A voice calls, *Halt — who returns from Contract?* Sazed keeps walking. He is afraid, and he is also curious. He knows the one fact that matters: kandra cannot kill humans.

He steps into the light. Two kandra guards block him, naked of clothing and transparent of skin, with bones they have carved from rock. Sazed thinks: *they make their own bones — a whole new culture to learn,* and for an instant the end of the world feels small beside it. The guards demand his name and whose bones he wears. He answers gently: he is not kandra at all. He is Sazed, Keeper of Terris, and he has come to speak to the First Generation. The guards start. *You don't have to let me pass,* he tells them mildly — *but if you don't, I will go back out and tell everyone on the surface where this place is.* They look at each other. *Come with us,* one of them finally says.