POV: vin
Summary
Vin floats. She is not asleep, not exactly awake — disoriented enough that for a moment she does not know whether she is lying in the wreckage of Kredik Shaw, asleep in the narrowboat beside Elend, a child huddled in an alley after a beating from Reen. She reaches for her arms and legs and finds nothing to focus on. Slowly her vision clears as if through warped glass, and she realises she is not seeing through eyes at all. She is, she thinks, dead. Then more of her mind comes online, and she feels a power buzzing within her — strength of a kind that has nothing to do with limbs.
She turns, taking in Luthadel from above. Halfway around she comes face to face with a shifting patch of black smoke, near and far at once, more detailed than the city beneath it. Ruin no longer wears Reen's face. His voice is not Reen's either — guttural, a vibration that washes over her like an Allomantic pulse. *Welcome,* he says, *to godhood.*
Vin is silent. Understanding flows into her as it did at the Well, but vaster — staggeringly vast, enough to shock her mind into expanding to hold it. She rises above the city and feels the shape of what she is: a hub, a focus of power stretching across the entire world. She can be anywhere. A portion of her is everywhere already. The world unfolds to her and it is dying. Most of the plant life is dead. Animals will go next. A surprising fraction of the empire's people have already gone to ground in storage caverns — and only now does she understand what those caverns were always for. Not storage. Shelters, fortresses to hide in, built so the people might outlast a thousand-year-distant end.
She acts, electrified. She reaches into the ashmounts and plugs them, soothes them, smothers them. She wipes the ash and smoke from the sky like soot from a window. It takes perhaps five minutes of world-time. And the land begins to burn. The unfiltered sun is more powerful than she ever knew; she cries out and spins the planet so that the sun drops below the horizon. Night falls in a lurch. Weather patterns shatter from the spin. In the sea, an enormous wave swells and runs for the coast.
Vin reaches to stop it and is blocked. She turns and finds Ruin laughing — a thundercloud, an undulation. *You are so like the Lord Ruler,* he says. The power's memory opens to her, and she sees Rashek's own first hours: he tugged the planet too near the sun and burned it, pushed it back and froze it, pulled it again and overshot again. To save what was left, he opened the ashmounts and reddened the sky — the same act that killed the world also preserved it. *Impetuous,* Ruin tells her. He has held this kind of power for longer than she can imagine, and he knows what she does not: every push he makes she will pull against, and every pull he makes she must push. *For Ruin, there is Preservation.* When she dies, he says, she will still stop him; even now he can do nothing because she will not let him; and she can do nothing because he will not let her. Balance, he says. The curse of their existence.
The tsunami lands. Villages drown. Vin feels each death individually and begs to be allowed to save them. Ruin refuses with what he insists is kindness: *Everything you do serves me. Even if you reached out for them you would destroy more than you preserved.* She listens to the screaming, and a separate part of her — her mind is now wide enough to hold many thoughts at once — dissects what he has said. He claims everything destroys, yet complains about balance. He claims he prevents her destroying more, yet wants destruction. Both cannot be true. She knows herself to be his opposite. She could have saved those people; her aim was bad, but it was hers to refine. He stopped her precisely so that she would not learn — so that she would not, as Rashek eventually did, become competent with the power.
She turns from him and drifts back toward Luthadel. Her awareness keeps expanding, and now she notices something new. Bright points of light dot the landscape like signal flares, hard to look at directly. She draws close and recognises what they are above the wreck of Kredik Shaw: the spires. Metal. Metal is power — focused Preservation — which is why writing on metal is invisible to Ruin and now to her as well.
Ruin hangs at the edge of her attention, talking. He admits, with a faint curiosity, that he was surprised when Preservation said he wanted to create her kind — life ordered by nature is balanced, but Preservation wanted something deliberately unbalanced, a being that could choose preservation at one moment and ruin at another. He finds it odd that Preservation paid so dearly for it. The real sacrifice, he says, was not the binding — that only forestalled — but the much earlier choice to spend a portion of his own self to make humanity. From that day on, he was stronger. *He could not stop me. He could only slow me.*
Vin frowns — or feels herself frown, the body she no longer has remembering how. He says he is stronger. Yet they are clearly matched: she blocked him, he blocked her, neither could move the other. Looking back across the centuries with her vast new mind, she sees that Ruin does not lie; everything he says, he believes. He sees the whole world through the lens of destruction, and he genuinely thinks her every act serves him. So if he believes he is stronger, and they are nevertheless matched, then a piece of Ruin is missing. Preservation hid it.
What she had suspected before, she now knows. The atium is Ruin's body. The thousand-year hoard under the Trustwarren is the chunk Preservation siphoned from him at the binding, the missing weight that would otherwise have left him freely stronger than her. The moment he takes it back, the balance ends.
She spins in frustration, white aura sweeping across the world, and feels how huge a head start he has. He has made himself servants — koloss, Inquisitors — that can act without his direct hand, so she cannot simply block them. She sees the Lord Ruler in a memory, taking the power at the Well, and even there Ruin is at his ear, whispering the principles of Hemalurgy — Rashek obeying without ever knowing, building Ruin an army for the day he would walk free. She sees the koloss now, converging on Luthadel.
Ruin gives her, mockingly, his credit. *You destroyed my Inquisitors. All but one.* She has stopped listening with most of her mind. Something else has pulled her attention. A point of motion entering Luthadel, skipping along on burning lines of Allomancy.