(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Sazed sits in his cavern quarters at the Homeland organising the thin metal pages he has been writing on — annoying to handle, easily scratched, impossible to fold, but the one surface Ruin cannot read or alter. The First Generation have given him a surprisingly soft room for a cave; he wonders idly about kandra biology, since they identify by gender even though they breed by transforming mistwraiths and have no particular need for sex. He sets the trivia aside. The top sheet of his stack is his summary of what he has learned of the Terris religion so far. It looks, to him, depressingly like every other sheet in the portfolio he burned through in Luthadel.

The religion, as one might have guessed, was scholarly. Its holy people were the Worldbringers — what survived into the present as the Keepers — and the central name for their god was *Terr*, an old Terris word meaning *to preserve*. Its histories told of the long interaction between Terr and Ruin; its prophecies named the Hero of Ages as a successor of Preservation. Its ethics taught temperance, faith, understanding, and the priority of building over destruction. It had the usual rituals, codes, and offerings. None of it is original. He has read variations of all of it.

That, irrationally, depresses him. He expected — what? An astonishing doctrine that would prove a god to him at last? He feels foolish for the hope. He also feels betrayed. Was he supposed to believe this just because it was the religion his people had practised? There is no promise in any of it that Tindwyl still lives. He pulls source material from his copperminds — journals, letters, the small first-hand voices the Keepers had recovered from before Rashek — and dumps them into his head, intending to confirm that the believers were credulous and the doctrines were unsupportable.

The believers do not read like fools. What strikes him, this time, is not the doctrine but the voices around it. The faiths he has been weighing in the abstract cannot be lifted free of the people who actually held them. *Why did they believe?* Because they saw miracles in their lives — small ones, the ones a sceptic calls coincidence and a believer calls a sign. A loved one's recovery; a chance reunion; a business that turned. It was not the grand doctrine that made believers. It was the small, ordinary magic of being alive.

He remembers what Spook told him in the cavern beside the lake. *Faith is about trust.* Trusting that someone is watching, that someone will make it right in the end, even when it does not look as if it can ever be made right. To believe, you have to want to believe. He has spent two years asking for proof to force him into faith and refusing all answer because it was not coercive enough — and yet the believers in his head would say he has been answered already. He prayed, in despair, for a sign. He received one. TenSoon spoke a single off-word in the hallway, and the whole question of the Terris religion's survival opened in front of him. Was that chance, or providence? The honest answer, he sees, is that he is the one who has to decide which to call it.

He sits a long moment with that. *I do want to believe,* he thinks. *That is why I have spent so long searching. I can't have it both ways. I simply have to decide.* He returns the journals to his copperminds but keeps the feeling they left in him. He chooses. He will believe — not because anything has been proved past denying, but because he chooses it, the way Vin once chose to trust the crew. *You taught me too,* he tells Kelsier in memory. *Thank you.*

Settled, lightened, Sazed gathers his metal sheets and heads back to the Trustwarren to keep working through the First Contract with the Firsts — he is, as far as he knows, the only person other than the Lord Ruler himself to have read its words. He still notes, with some surprise, how lightly the Firsts handle the contract; to them the Father was a friend they once climbed a mountain with, not a god. He walks into the open Trustwarren doors and stops.

The Second Generation are at the lecterns, addressing a crowd of restless lesser kandra — uncharacteristically anxious, even for kandra. *What does it mean, KanPaar?* one is asking. *Ask the First Generation.* KanPaar is brushing them off: there is no reason for alarm, they are behaving like humans. Sazed catches a young kandra near the door. The issue, she tells him, is the mists. They are gone. A guard went out before dawn and found no mist at all in the night; others have gone out and confirmed it.

KanPaar is telling the room that rain sometimes disperses mist and that they are eternal and outwait everything when Haddek, from his hidden alcove, contradicts him in a quiet voice that silences the chamber: this is important, the Seconds have been wrong, the day of the Resolution may have come. Clear the Trustwarren; only the Keeper remains.

Once the doors close, the Firsts explain to Sazed what they have not told him yet. The Father, in addition to the First Contract, gave each kandra a charge: that one day they might be ordered to remove their Blessings — pull the spikes out of their bodies, revert to mistwraiths, which would be death in any meaningful sense. They call this the Resolution. Every kandra is told of it at birth and sworn to it. He said they would know when the day arrived. The mists are the body of Preservation. Now his body is gone, and the Firsts are very, very worried.

Sazed thinks past their fear. *If Preservation's body has disappeared,* he asks, *does that not mean he has returned?* Haddek calls it impossible; Preservation's mind was almost entirely destroyed when he imprisoned Ruin. *The sliver remains,* another adds — the shadow of his self. *Perhaps,* Sazed presses, *someone else has taken up the power. That which has been sundered must again begin to find its whole.* The room goes silent. *Vin,* Sazed thinks with sudden joy. This is what it means to be the Hero of Ages. He bends to his pen.

The doors of the Trustwarren crash open. KanPaar enters at the head of stone-built Fifth Generationers with hammers, and the rest of the Second Generation behind him. *Take them.* Sazed stands, recognising the tension in their bodies before KanPaar says the word. *It's a coup.* KanPaar declares the First Generation unfit to lead; he will not trust the future of his people to creatures who might, on a whim, order them to kill themselves. Haddek — voice surprisingly strong — invokes KanPaar's obedience as a Second and is gagged before he can speak the Resolution aloud. Sazed sees the timing: KanPaar had to strike now, before the Firsts could finish telling the common kandra anything that would make the Seconds redundant. He reaches for his pewtermind and a Fifth takes it before he can tap it. *You make the same argument as many revolutionaries,* he tells KanPaar as two more grip his arms. *I understand the prophecies now. Don't do this. Lock us in this room if you must, but —* *Gag him,* KanPaar says.

Sazed is dragged from the Trustwarren, the Firsts beside him, leaving the body of a god — the atium beneath the floor — in the hands of traitors.