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Sazed, escorted into the kandra Homeland by his guards, walks in open wonder. The kandra he passes are nothing like one another — tall and willow-thin with bones of pale wood, squat with bones thicker than any human's, every body shaped to its wearer's preference and most of them shying away from him in fear. He has to keep reminding himself that they were once human, or at least their forebears were. The caverns are old; the paths polished, the cavern-mouths curtained, the carved fungus-light poles and even the bones around him crafted in a restrained aesthetic of smoothed lines and broad shapes rather than carved ornament. A whole society he has never read of. A whole catalogue he has never opened.

His guards walk him to a steel door in a great cavern wall. Their shoulders glint — two small spikes apiece, a Blessing smaller than an Inquisitor's but unmistakable. He asks the remaining guard, mildly, what would happen if he ran. The guard hesitates. *We follow the First Contract,* he says — implying, but not stating, that to harm or kill a human is forbidden. The Contract was made with the Father — the Lord Ruler — who is dead; whether it still binds them, the guard does not know. Sazed notes that not every kandra has the steel of personality of TenSoon even when he was playing a wolfhound.

The doors open on a metal-plated chamber: a low pedestal in the centre, stone lecterns at the back. Two tall, fine-featured kandra stand at lecterns; Sazed recognises the type without a word — aristocrats are a species he has identified in every culture he has ever studied. The guards gesture for him to stand before the lecterns; instead he walks a circle around the room, his hands unimpeded by guards who do not know whether they may touch him. The metal plating around the chamber, he notes aloud. Function or decoration? *We will be the ones asking the questions, Terrisman!* one of the Seconds snaps. *No,* says Sazed quietly. *You will not.* He is not an outsider. He is Terris as they are. He knows their origin. He knows what they carry. And in their own doctrine he has a name. *Holy Announcer.*

He walks to the lecterns and announces it formally: he has found the Hero, lived and worked alongside her, watched her overthrow a god and command kings and koloss armies, and has come now to tell them so that they may make themselves ready. *For the end is here.* One of the Seconds tells the guards to fetch the rest. Within minutes the Second Generation has swelled to twelve, twenty attendants in all, anxious whispering filling the chamber. Sazed asks for a table and chair and something to write with; the attendants comply, even bringing thin sheets of soft writing-metal and a steel scribing pen. He pushes up his sleeves and clasps on his copperminds — two on each arm — and sets down the book he and Tindwyl compiled. They have, very deliberately, given him exactly what a Keeper needs to work.

The lead Second, KanPaar, snorts that being able to gather them does not mean Sazed has them. He blasphemes — accurately, KanPaar allows — but he is not the Announcer and this is not the end. Sazed asks if the ash above has stopped up the entrances so completely that no kandra has been able to see the world dying. He asks if they have, perhaps, seen the Lord Ruler die before as well. Some of them flinch; KanPaar does not. Did TenSoon send him? Yes. Then he has nothing new to say.

Sazed taps the book under his hand. The Keepers of Terris, he reminds KanPaar, were divided into specialists so that when the Lord Ruler finally fell they could teach the world from what they had preserved. His specialty was religion. Of the five-hundred-odd faiths the Keepers catalogued before the Ascension — three hundred odd, if one consolidates sects — exactly one has survived to the present day. Theirs. The Terris religion. The one that foretells this exact day. He thinks that is not a coincidence.

KanPaar is unmoved: so his religion is the real one. So what? *Then perhaps,* Sazed says, *you should listen to the members of your faith who arrive bringing news.* And then he sets out his actual proposition. The reconstructed Hero of Ages doctrine the Keepers have spent generations compiling, the doctrine he holds in this book, is corrupted — Ruin tampered with it in the years before Vin freed him from the Well in order to bait her there. So Sazed's tome is untrustworthy on its face. But the First Generation holds the prophecy in their living memory, intact and unaltered. Compared against each other — original against corrupted — every discrepancy is a place where Ruin pointed his finger. The shape of his plan is implied by every line he chose to rewrite.

The room falls silent. *Well,* KanPaar begins, *I —*

*That will be enough, KanPaar,* says a voice from the back of the chamber, one Sazed cannot place. *You may leave, Seconds.* A protest: *Leave you with this outsider?* *A descendant. A Worldbringer. We will hear him.* The Seconds file out, badly rattled; guards push the doors shut behind them. A scraping sound. A door at the back of the chamber opens, and the First Generation shuffles in for the first time in any reader's memory. They look ancient — kandra flesh hanging from them like translucent moss off branches — and they walk with canes. Their bones are not True Bodies; they are white, ordinary human skeletons. *Our own bones,* one of them murmurs, when Sazed asks. They had not the skill or art to make True Bodies when the Lord Ruler first gave them flesh; he returned to each of them the bones of their original Terris body, and they have worn them ever since.

There are only ten. Sazed counts them as they settle on the benches — the ten old Terris companions Rashek climbed to the Well with, all that is left of his packmen, now the elders of a species — and out of respect he turns his table to face them, the presenter before his audience. He raises his metal scribing pen. *Now,* he says. *Let us begin — we have much work to do.*