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Elend stands in the rubble of Kredik Shaw and tries to make sense of what he is looking at. The thousand-year palace at the heart of the empire has been levelled; what is left looks like an impact crater, rubble flung blocks away, the spires snapped and scattered. He skids down into the bowl of it. *Lord Ruler*, he swears, and wonders if something at the Well of Ascension exploded. Beyond the wreckage, Luthadel — largest city in the empire, seat of his government — appears empty. A third of it is burned. He has come back from Fadrex looking for Vin, detouring south around the lava field crawling off Mount Tyrian, and what he finds shakes him.

He drops a coin, shoots into the air, and begins skipping across the rooftops toward Keep Venture. Each Allomantic bound kicks up ash. The fall has slowed — almost stopped — which is something, but the sun frightens him. A short while back its light flared with appalling intensity for a few moments and burned the skin of his face, and then the sun simply dropped below the horizon in the span of a heartbeat, the ground lurching under him as it did. By his clock and by the city's clocks it should be afternoon. It is night, and the stars are uncomfortably bright. Vin told him once that the mists would protect him. The mists are gone.

He lands at Keep Venture and finds the building he was raised in burned out. Guards in his brown livery lie decomposing on the cobbles. Through the gutted rooms he goes, looking for any clue to what happened, and finds none. Leaving through a top-floor window, he glimpses something below the patio canopy in the rear courtyard and drops to look. There, beneath a strip of cobble the canopy has kept clear of ash, lies a body in a fine suit. He rolls it over: Penrod. A sword has been driven through the man's belly in the posture of a self-killing, and his fingers are still on the hilt.

Beside the body, in charcoal on the patio floor, is a note. Drifted ash has half-buried it; Elend wipes it clear and smudges the letters as he goes. *I am sorry. Something has taken control of me — of this city. I am lucid only part of the time. Better to end myself than to do more harm. Look toward the Terris Dominance for your people.* He stares at it. The northern dominance is the last place a sensible refugee would have run; the Central Dominance is where the mists were always weakest.

*Ruin*, a voice seems to say at the edge of his hearing. *Lies.* Elend remembers what they know about Ruin: that he can alter written text, usually with small surgical edits to a note's plain meaning. *West*, the voice whispers. *Pits.* Elend looks again at the charcoal scrawl. Penrod most likely wrote *Terris people*, not *Terris Dominance* — the difference of a single noun. The Terris refugee camp on the plains by the Pits of Hathsin is exactly where a man would have sent the city. There is shelter there, herds and crops, a populace already organised for survival. He bids the corpse a silent farewell, wishing he had time to bury the old statesman, and drops a coin to push himself into the air. He turns west and goes, cloak snapping with each bound.

Above him — though he cannot see it — Vin is watching. The exchange has just taught her something. Holding the power of a god, she has felt for the first time the frustration that has been Ruin's for ages: she cannot simply speak to her husband. It took everything she had to push two words past Ruin's block, and she is not sure even now that Elend really heard them rather than guessed. She suspects what got the words through is what she knows of him — the same kind of conduit, narrowed by familiarity, that Ruin uses through Hemalurgic spikes to his Inquisitors. Near-impotence at the scale of a deity, she thinks, and burns with the rage of it. Ruin is pleased to have her understand. *Balance imprisoned me,* he spits. *Preservation's sacrifice was to siphon off the part of me that was stronger and lock it away — to leave me his equal again. For a time.* And what, he asks her, is time to creatures like them. Nothing.

Elend flies west under empty stars, with Vin above and Ruin between them, the air strangely transparent without mist in it.