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Sazed thinks it is the oddest dungeon he has ever been in. It is only the second prison he has known, but he has at least read of others, and this one is not a cage so much as a hole — a narrow pit in the floor of the kandra guard chamber, a heavy iron grate set across the top and locked with a fine steel lock. He is scrunched into it sideways, legs cramped, stripped of his metalminds. It was built for a kandra with no bones, he decides, which is the kind of thing a kandra would build. Hours have passed, perhaps days. They give him no food. A guard of the Third Generation pours water onto him from above; he sucks the dampness out of his robes between visits.

He should be furious that the world is ending and he is in a hole, and a part of him is. Another part is, surprisingly, at peace. In the cramped dark he has finished the work he started in the Trustwarren — he believes. Not because he has had proof, but because he would rather believe and have hope. The Hero is real. Vin is the Hero. She will come and preserve. He has known and walked with her for years; he has chronicled the Church of the Survivor from its first preaching; he and Tindwyl researched the prophecies together and he was the one who announced her as the Hero — but only here, in the dark, has he had faith in her. The decision has settled his mind enough that he can plan an escape.

He cannot move freely, but he can touch the grate above him and the lock holding it. Both are pure enough metal to take a Feruchemical charge. He reaches up and begins to fill them — weight into the iron grate, speed into the steel lock — even though it is an unorthodox choice; he is storing power into objects he cannot carry, and will have to leave behind everything he saves if he runs. He decides the time spent is better than the time wasted. Touching the iron, his body grows lighter; touching the steel, his every motion slows as if pushing through a thick substance. He sinks into the meditative trance he uses for filling many metalminds at once. When the guard comes with water he releases and feigns sleep; the moment the guard withdraws, he goes back to filling.

A canine face appears at the grate. *When I sent you back to save my people,* it growls, *this wasn't exactly what I had in mind.* Sazed pops his eyes open. TenSoon is in his wolfhound body — sensible, given the cavern's narrow corridors. Behind him another kandra steps forward: a willowy young woman with a wooden True Body, holding a ring of keys. MeLaan unlocks the grate and Sazed climbs free. Several more young kandra wait at the wall in deviant True Bodies; the prison guard lies bound and gagged in the corner.

TenSoon was spotted entering the Homeland, he warns; they have little time. *Why does KanPaar say the First Generation ordered you held?* Sazed gives him the truth: it was not the First Generation at all. The Seconds have taken the Firsts captive and seized the Trustwarren. MeLaan gasps that the Seconds would never. Sazed and TenSoon share a look that says, *all societies do this when power is involved*. TenSoon's companions, breathless with their own rebellion, call him a revolutionary for refusing the dog's body — they are throwing off the Seconds and their insistence that the kandra serve humans. Sazed notes the irony: TenSoon became a hero of his people by carrying out an order from Vin.

Then shadows fall on the corridor and Fifths with hammers pour in. TenSoon's companions cower; TenSoon does not. He charges, shouldering one over and clawing at another, fast and confident in his dog's body from his time fighting beside Vin. He is one against five; he is forced back. Sazed steps up onto the grate of his own former pit, bare feet on the iron and steel, and the fight tells him what he needs to know about the enemy. The wounds in their bodies close as they order them shut — that is why their jailers carry hammers. To kill a kandra you do not cut the flesh; you smash the bones.

The first Fifth charges him, and Sazed taps iron, becoming several times his own weight, grabs the guard by the arms and falls on him. The granite True Body gives, bones snapping under the weight, his own bones safe because increased density also reinforced them. Then he switches: releases the iron and instead fills it, becomes alarmingly light, touches a foot to the lock and taps speed. He moves in a blur. He scoops the fallen guard's hammer and brings it down on a shoulder while tapping iron again to add weight to the blow; the next Fifth's bones shatter. He pivots and breaks the knees of two more before his stored speed runs out. TenSoon sits on the last one. *I thought you were a scholar*, the dog observes drily, captive pinned beneath him. *I am,* Sazed says, and tosses the hammer aside.

While checking the other pits, Sazed notices something. The captives in the next cell are not the long-imprisoned kandra traitors he expects. The muscles are wrong — slightly different in colour, almost like hanging moss. He calls TenSoon over. They unlock the grate and find raw shapeless flesh, each pit holding a single kandra who has been forced out of any body. TenSoon understands at once: the Fifths killed the real prisoners and dropped the First Generation into their cells. From above, nobody would have noticed anything different — the guards kept feeding the pits, and only the colour of the muscle gives the swap away. The Firsts are alive. MeLaan is sent to find bones for them; they will need hours to grow new ones.

Sazed wants to push immediately for KanPaar. TenSoon talks him out of it: nothing they say will carry weight without the Firsts beside them to tell the story. *Sit and store more of your Feruchemy,* he tells Sazed; *we will need it.* Then he turns to the captive FhorKood and offers him two choices — give up the bones, or be digested as TenSoon did OreSeur. FhorKood liquefies, leaving the granite True Body for TenSoon to take. *Something Zane taught me,* the dog explains as his own canine hair falls out. Nobody expects a kandra to impersonate another kandra. In a few minutes he will be FhorKood walking back into the Seconds' hall to report that the traitor TenSoon has been captured. It should buy hours.

MeLaan returns with a sack of spare bones. TenSoon, wearing FhorKood's face, slips out on his mission. Sazed sits down with the steel lock in one hand and an iron hammer in the other and resumes filling — peace settled over the cavern, the Firsts regrowing their bodies in the cells beside him. There really is not a rush, he tells himself. He has the people he needs here; TenSoon will keep KanPaar distracted. It will not matter that the Seconds hold the chamber for a few hours more. What harm, after all, can they do.