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Sazed sits with the First Generation in their metal-walled holy chamber beneath the Homeland, writing on the thin sheets of metal paper that are the one surface Ruin cannot reach to alter. He has just finished comparing the Terris prophecies that survive in the Firsts' memory against the corrupted versions in the logbook. Most of the differences are small. Ruin has been making the slightest adjustments — enough, Sazed now sees, to make Vin look unambiguously like the Hero of Ages he wished freed. *Perhaps she was never the Hero,* one of the elders offers. Sazed disagrees. Even the unaltered lines describe one set apart from the Terris people, a king of men, a rebel caught between two worlds; Ruin only sharpened a portrait that was always there. The Firsts concede the point. They had only ever assumed the Hero would be a man because the assumption was easy — the prophecies themselves were written in gender-neutral Terris verbs, which was not an accident of grammar.

What unsettles Sazed is what comes next. The power Vin used at the Well of Ascension is gone, spent. *Then how is she to fight?* he asks. The Firsts do not entirely know — by the time they themselves lived as men, their gods had already passed from the world. They retell the story they were given: that Preservation and Ruin made the world together because neither could create alone — to preserve is not to create, and you cannot create through destruction only. Preservation wanted humanity. Ruin agreed to help, on the condition that he would one day be allowed to destroy what they had made. Preservation then sacrificed his own mind to lock Ruin away before the bargain could come due. The elders treat this as their faith. Sazed hears it the way he has heard a hundred other creation myths: martyr-god, dual-creator, destruction and order at the heart of the cosmos — clichés in every direction. The scholar in him recoils from how familiar the shape is.

Haddek reads the look on his face and asks what is wrong. Sazed admits it: he has spent years searching, and what he hoped would be his own religion is turning out to look like all the others. *That is what every religion teaches,* he says. *That it is the truth. And every one of them, looked at closely, asks me to leap.* Haddek answers gently. *You are looking for a religion that requires no faith of its believers.* Another of the elders adds that kandra faith is not actually in the Father; it is in something higher — in the trust that Preservation's desire to protect will outlast Ruin's desire to destroy, even though the Firsts cannot prove that to him. Sazed presses; the elders do not push back. Faith, Haddek says, is not a thing you reason your way into. Sazed sets the argument aside without conceding it and turns back to the cosmology.

*What was the power at the Well?* Preservation's mind passed, the elders say, but his power did not. It pooled in part at the Well; the rest is everywhere and elsewhere — diffuse, like the mists themselves. *And the dark smoke above the Homeland?* That, Haddek says, was Ruin — bound, watching, while he was a prisoner. Sazed points out that the smoke was vastly larger than the Well's pool. The elders correct his framing: the two were equally powerful — they are forces, not men, two faces of one coin — but Ruin's mind was focused at the prison and so his power coalesced there. *Most of it,* one of them adds with a faint laugh. *Not all.* And not all of Preservation's either.

A different elder cautions Haddek that he is straying into matters of the First Contract. Haddek studies Sazed, makes a decision, and explains. The kandra were given a charge at their making. The koloss were created to fight; the Inquisitors were created to preach; the kandra were created to gather a thing, and to hide it, and to hold it, against the day Ruin should escape his prison and come looking for his own body.

All the elders' eyes turn to the metal dais in the centre of the chamber. Sazed crosses to it and finds the seam and the coin-sized hole at the centre. He fetches a pewtermind he refilled long ago and never spent, taps strength, and shoves one half of the disk aside. The pit beneath glitters. Beads of atium. Thousands upon thousands of them.

*The Trust, we call it,* Haddek says. Most of the Father's atium never left the Pits of Hathsin at all. The cracking of the geodes was done in obligator-staffed metal rooms, never with Inquisitors present because Inquisitors could be corrupted. The empty geodes went on to Luthadel with the noble shipments, while the atium itself moved separately, disguised in Ministry coin convoys among acolytes. The kandra worked their Contracts in payment of atium; what nobles held in stockpile, what Mistborn did not burn away, the Father's taxes drew back in, and the bulk of it ended here.

Sazed stands over the pit, dumbstruck. The greatest stockpile in the empire — the thing factions have killed each other for, the thing Elend besieged Fadrex in search of — has been sitting unguarded in a cavern within a few days' ride of Luthadel all along. And he sees, sickly, what it actually is. Atium never fit with the other metals. Every other Allomantic metal can be mined or alloyed by natural means; atium alone came from one place by no process anyone understood, and it alone let an Allomancer do the one thing no other metal permitted — see the future. That is not the property of a metal. It is the property of a god. The Trust is condensed, concentrated power. It is what Ruin will be coming for.

East of the Homeland, the second scene: TenSoon, in the horse's True Body, pushes through ash that has grown deep enough that a wolfhound could no longer walk in it. The Blessing of Potency is keeping him moving but only just; he is angry at how slowly he is travelling. He crests the last hill before the eastern plain and freezes. The plain ahead of him is burning. Tyrian, closest of the ashmounts to Luthadel, has had half of its summit blown off, and the broad plain that used to hold villages and roads is now a slow river of red lava. The earth itself has cracked further out and more lava is welling from the cracks. He thinks of the First Contract. He thinks of detouring south, of trying to come at Fadrex from a different angle, and finds he does not have the will. It is too late.