(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Elend stands on the rocks above Fadrex in the morning after the battle. The night has gone without mist — day, too — and the ground in front of the corridor leading into Fadrex is heaped with koloss corpses, far too many human bodies mixed in among the blue. The city has survived, but only because a few thousand new-Snapped Allomancers held the line until the koloss inexplicably broke off. He aches everywhere; he can still feel the bruise where a koloss caught him in the chest — a blow pewter kept from killing him.

Yomen climbs the steps to join him, immaculate in his obligator's robes, having not fought. They both notice it together: the mists are gone, day and night. Yomen mentions that the skaa who had finally accepted spending the night outdoors are now hiding again, because the absence of the thing they used to fear is even worse than its presence. Elend turns toward the wall. The ash is still falling, and falling hard — burying yesterday's dead — but the sun is hotter than it should be at this hour. It should be getting colder, with this much ash in the sky. Something is wrong, more wrong than before, and he does not know what.

He gives Yomen orders that mean he is not staying: pick the wounded out of the corpse field, evacuate everyone into the storage cavern, have the soldiers ready for something he cannot name. Yomen hears the absence in his voice. *You won't be here.* Elend shakes his head. Vin is somewhere east. Whatever made the koloss turn around, she figured it out, and Fadrex is alive because she did. He does not yet know where they will go from here — maybe find Sazed — but he cannot leave her alone.

Yomen catches his shoulder as he turns. *I was wrong about you, Venture.* The things he said were undeserved. Elend tells him simply that letting them into the city when Elend's own koloss were turning on him was enough. Yomen adds that, in his own faith, Elend's disbelief still counts: the Lord Ruler uses unbelievers and believers alike. He reaches up to his forehead and pulls the bead of atium from his brow. *My last bead. In case you need it.*

Elend rolls it between his fingers. He has never burned atium; his family used to mine it, but by the time he was Mistborn himself the family stocks were already gone or given to Vin for her to burn. He asks how Yomen manages the trick of looking like an Allomancer. *I am an Allomancer,* Yomen says. Not Mistborn: a Seer — an atium Misting. Elend had assumed that was impossible. Yomen smiles. Some of the Lord Ruler's secrets were guarded more carefully than others.

Elend's mind turns this over and turns it over again. If there are atium Mistings there must be gold Mistings and electrum Mistings too — and aluminium and duralumin Mistings who would never know what they were because they cannot burn the metals their bodies want without a second metal alongside. Yomen shrugs: atium was too valuable to spend on testing, and he has never found his own power especially useful anyway. How often does one have both atium and a reason to burn it down inside of a few heartbeats?

Elend takes the bead, gives Ham instructions on the way down, and shoots off east across the broken landscape, doing his best to fly with the horseshoes the way Vin taught him. He is going to find his wife.