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The chapter cuts between four observers as a single phenomenon — the mists flowing west — registers at every front of the war.

East of the Homeland, TenSoon is spent on the hill before Tyrian's lava field, the Blessing of Potency no longer carrying him the way it should. He looks up to clear his head and notices that the mists have stopped doing what mists do. Instead of swirling in their usual half-dozen contradicting currents, they are flowing — purposefully, in one direction, westward. He stands like a stone in a river. *Perhaps I'm not too late,* he thinks, and turns and gallops back toward Luthadel.

In Urteau, Breeze is up too late grumbling over a treaty he never wanted to write. Allrianne calls him to the window. The mists are accelerating past the glass like a tide going out. The door bangs open behind them: Spook, still in casts, half-collapsed against the frame. *Gather the people. Storage cavern. Now.* Breeze starts to ask what he is doing out of bed; the boy cuts him off in a voice that does not sound like the boy. They do not have much time.

At Fadrex, Elend is bleeding from a cut on his head and holding a rock outcropping at the city's edge with Ham. Too many koloss have grown tired of waiting and started up the cliffs to flank the line. The new Allomancers Elend just made — most of whom only learned of their powers that morning — are inexperienced; Cett is running tactics in the corridor below; Elend is the reserve, plugging holes by coinshot flight from outcrop to outcrop. He notices, briefly, the mists overhead pulling east as if dragged on strings. A messenger scrambles up: *They're retreating, my lord.* Elend drops a coin, shoots himself into the air, lands on a higher outcrop, and watches the entire koloss horde running off into the night at unnatural speed. He recognises the direction. *Luthadel.*

At Kredik Shaw, Vin catches Marsh's killing swing. Her bones are still broken; she has used up her last vial; and inside her something is burning hotter and brighter than any metal has ever burned. Every Steelpush she throws hits with the force of a duralumin flare and her reserves do not deplete — they grow vaster. Twelve Inquisitors still surround her. The thought of fighting twelve Inquisitors at once no longer feels impossible.

She rolls clear of Marsh, strikes a cobblestone hard enough to shatter it, and turns on the others. The mists dance around her arm as she punches an Inquisitor in the face hard enough to throw him backward; she catches a falling axe out of the air and shears another's arm off, then takes his head. *Two.* She bounds up onto a spire and the flock of robed creatures follows. She dives between them, grabs one by his eye-spikes, and rips them out as she falls past; she kicks off his corpse, Pushes back against the spikes still in his chest, and his body flips end over end into the rain below. *Three.* Mid-air she throws the stolen eye-spikes through another Inquisitor's chest and Pushes them; he slams into a flat roof so hard several of his own spikes pop loose. *Four.*

Eight remain. She raises her hands and Pushes all of them at once with a force that affects the spikes inside their bodies — like a duralumin-grade Steelpush, scaled to a god — and accidentally hits the spire beneath her too. The stone holding the spire detonates outward; the spire crushes the building beneath it; she is thrown up through the mist layer like a fish leaping from water, into open air she has never seen above the empire at night. The mist beneath her covers the world like a white sheet. Stars she has only ever seen with tin watch her like the eyes of the dead. A line of mist trails up from her body. The whole layer is rotating, slowly. She is at the centre of the whirlpool.

She falls back through it, drawing it after her, breathing it in, the mist now spinning in an empire-wide spiral toward her body. She lands by Kredik Shaw in front of eight Inquisitors (a ninth lies impaled on a fallen spike from her last throw — *five*) and they charge. She Pushes outward again, this time deliberately, with the spire-shattering power scaled wider — and Kredik Shaw itself explodes. Towers fall. Doors rip from frames. Stone bursts because even rock carries trace ore enough to be flung. The palace flattens to rubble outward from her like an impact crater. One Inquisitor climbs from the wreck without an eye-spike; she pulls the other free and the body collapses. *Six.* Another rushes her, raises a hand to Push back against the flying spike she has thrown at him; she Pushes back from behind to anchor herself and the spike continues forward through his face and into a wall. *Seven.*

The mists above her have formed a funnel; mist is leaking out of her skin and being pulled back into the spiral. She kicks the head off an Inquisitor under fallen masonry to be sure. *Eight.* Three more rush at once. She Pulls a fallen spire — a metal pillar the size of a building — into the air and swings it through them like a club. *Nine. Ten. Eleven.* She levers a marble disk off an Inquisitor huddled under it and pulls both his eye-spikes; he heals as she does it, Feruchemy working against her, and it makes no difference. *Twelve.*

Only Marsh is left. He is broken, missing a spike from his side, kneeling in a puddle. The funnel of mist above her spins tighter and tighter and then is gone, every last wisp drawn into her. The stars come out clearly across the empire for the first time in Vin's life — the night, suddenly mistless, looks unspeakably wrong. She is having trouble thinking through the power coursing through her. *This is not Marsh,* she thinks. *Kelsier's brother is long dead. This is Ruin.*

She kneels at his side and pulls the first eye-spike free. He screams, both in pain and in joy — he expected this, hoped for it. She reaches for the second. Her fingers touch it. She hesitates. She coughs. She shakes — and then she is gone, leaving only a mist-outlined silhouette of a young woman that drifts apart in the air. Marsh is alone in the wreckage of a palace, alive against his expectation, head splitting from the one missing spike. The chapter ends with him on his knees in the ash.