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Marsh kneels alone in a drift of ash, hating himself and the world, while more ash falls on his back and slowly covers him. He has been set aside by his god — left in the yard like a forgotten tool — since the moment in the Fadrex chamber when Vin nearly reached through him into Ruin himself. In that moment, Ruin was afraid; that fear is the one thread of hope Marsh has left. The rest is despair. His private plan — wait, keep his small inner sliver of will hidden, and at the right instant pull out his own back spike and end himself — is starting to look like a fantasy. He could not seize even a fraction of his body when his master was distracted.

*Stand.* The command arrives wordlessly. Marsh's body obeys before he has formed a thought. He drops coins and Pushes off them through the air, reusing each — coins instead of Vin's horseshoes, less metal per Push, more frequent landings — and tries to keep some private corner of his mind quiet so Ruin does not notice it watching the ashy red sky as something terribly beautiful.

After night has fallen Ruin sets him down on a hill of packed ash, waist-deep. Below, a single figure ploughs through chest-high ash — a soldier with a square face, balding, days unshaven, uniform and skin equally blackened — leading an exhausted horse on a long determined course of his own. Few would brave the mists and ash alone. Marsh's own thought, before the bloodlust closes over it: *beautiful.*

He Pushes off the hill and lands on the horse's back. The animal screams; Marsh vaults over it, lands ahead of the man, draws his obsidian axe. The soldier clears his sword and circles in the trampled corridor of ash. Marsh turns and shears the horse's forelegs off — the animal goes down screaming — then takes the man's first attack on a sword that catches a spike in his back instead of his spine. Marsh taps healing to stay on his feet, then taps speed and dances out of a hamstring slice meant to put him on the ground. He kicks the soldier in the chest and breaks ribs. The man goes down in the ash, coughing blood, reaching weakly for his pocket — another dagger? — and pulls out instead a folded sheet of *metal.*

Marsh feels a sudden urgent need to seize that sheet. The soldier tries with his dying strength to crumple it into ruin. Marsh screams and brings the axe down on the arm holding it, then through the man's neck — and then keeps swinging, frenzy taking him, Ruin himself exulting in the death and at the same time frustrated, unable to pull Marsh off the corpse to recover the letter. *Couldn't be controlled,* the free sliver of Marsh thinks, in the eye of the blood. *Just like koloss. That's —* and then the moment passes and his body is Ruin's again.

Standing, blood dripping from his chin, Marsh is made to walk to the disembodied arm and pry the metal sheet loose. *Read it,* the command says — and then, more sharply: *Read it aloud.* That is new. Ruin rarely speaks to him directly; usually it just puppets him. The thought turns slowly in Marsh's private corner. Why does Ruin need him to read it? It can rewrite books. It is not illiterate. Then it must be the medium. *Metal.* Ruin cannot read text written on metal.

He has the flap unfolded; scratched lines run inside it. Marsh tries every way he can find to refuse — would rather grab the axe and finish himself than read the letter aloud — but Ruin works his emotions until he is sure that arguing with his god, his master, his self, is pointless. He flares tin and reads the message out into the dark. It is from Spook. He has seen the thing they fight. It got control of him through a single sliver of metal in his body — incomplete control, the way Vin controls koloss — and twisted his thoughts. It wore Kelsier's face. It did the same to the king in Urteau. It is clever and subtle. *Be careful, Vin. Don't trust anyone pierced by metal. Even the smallest bit can taint a man.*

Marsh, wholly his master's again, crumples the sheet until the scratches are illegible, then Pushes off the wreck of it into the air and points himself at Luthadel. He leaves the horse, the man, and the warning to be slowly buried in the ash — like forgotten tools.