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Vin, ascended, hovers high over the Central Dominance and watches the Pits camp evacuate. Demoux's men are awake; the Terrismen shepherd refugees down the ash-tracks toward the Homeland entrances. She knows, looking down, that she is too clumsy a god to do more — every move at this scale risks shattering what she means to save — but at least she has bought time. Beside her, the churning black cloud that is Ruin looks on, amused. He shows her, when she asks, that he has been quietly bringing his entire koloss force in from the Outer Dominances. Hundreds of thousands of them. He could have crushed her at any moment, and was not playing with her so much as fishing for the secret Preservation and the Lord Ruler had kept from him. She seethes; she throws herself at him with Preservation's power. He recoils, surprised — destruction is not a thing he expected of her — and reflexively shoves back. Their two selves grind together, opposite and exactly matched, and she is hurled back ragged. *Opposition,* he whispers. *Balance. You'll learn to hate it.*

Deep below in the Trustwarren, Elend rolls a bead of atium against the one Yomen had given him and listens to Sazed explain what it is. The hoard is not a fortune. It is a piece of Ruin's own body, the missing chunk he has searched for for a thousand years, and surrendering it would end the world in an instant. *She'll come,* Sazed keeps saying. Demoux reports the brutal arithmetic — fewer than a thousand fighters across four entrances, koloss minutes away, no Misting in the camp able to burn any of the basic metals he handed out. They are about to die. Elend turns away, frustrated. He has spent a year hunting storage caverns and a fortune in atium to buy his people safety, and now both are useless.

Then — too late, exactly the wrongness he has been ignoring all morning — he stops. None of the basic metals worked. Demoux's men were sick the longest of all the mistfallen: sixteen days, two hundred and eighty of them, one-in-sixteen of those who fell ill. One of sixteen Allomantic metals. Yomen proved that an atium Misting was a thing. Elend tosses Demoux a bead and tells him to eat it. Demoux swallows, stands a moment, and looks up wide-eyed. Elend smiles. He has an army of Seers and the largest hoard of atium in the world to feed them.

Vin hovers outside the cavern, weeping with no body to weep with, as the koloss wave crashes in. The slaughter is about to begin — and then a single figure in white walks out into the ash. Elend raises his sword and charges them alone. *Madness,* she thinks at him. Then he bursts with light. He cuts through the front rank with a grace she has never seen from him — every koloss blade falling a fraction too slow, every step exact. He fights better than she ever did. Behind him, Demoux's two hundred and eighty erupt from the cavern in their own glowing clouds of probability, and the blue corpses begin to mound up around them.

Elend is a god for a few hours. He has never burned atium before; he drinks bag after bag of it down at Sazed's hand. No one has ever burned this much of the metal — it had been hoarded since the world began — and he does not need to ration. He runs riot through the koloss with foreknowledge his enemies cannot read. They cannot even land a blow.

Sazed waits at the cavern mouth between assaults, looking out at Elend's silhouette against the rising sun. Other refugees, leaders, frightened children stand behind him. *Where is she, Master Terrisman?* asks one of the Church of the Survivor leaders crowded behind him. *The Hero will come,* Sazed tells him, holding the rock wall, the faith he lost a year ago suddenly the only thing left in him.

The sun climbs. The heat begins to burn. Elend's atium is running low; his basic metals run out from under him; Demoux's men start to die one by one as theirs run out too. Elend turns at a wrong shadow and finds Marsh behind him — wreathed in his own atium-shadows from a bead he tore off a fleeing kandra — with the powers of both Allomancy and Feruchemy in his ruined body and an obsidian axe in his hand. *We've killed your wife,* Marsh tells him. Elend does not believe it. Then Vin reaches down and *flares* basic metals he no longer has inside him — he sees her above him, white-haired, mist-winged, hands at his shoulders — and he drives Marsh back across the field with strikes too fast to read. At the last meeting he burns his last atium flared by duralumin and is hit, for one flash, with comprehension of everything beneath the world. *I see now,* he whispers as the vision fades. His sword is through Marsh's throat. Marsh's axe is in his chest.

Below in the Trustwarren, Human reaches the pit Ruin sent him for, shoulders past terrified humans, throws the doors open — and finds the floor of the chamber empty. Other koloss crowd up behind him, confused.

Above, lifted by his throat in Marsh's hand, Elend tells the Inquisitor the truth. The killing of all those koloss was never the point. *Where is the atium, Marsh?* he asks. His Seers have burned every bead of it across the long morning, fueling their fight from Ruin's own body. He is dead anyway, and the hoard is gone. *That,* he tells Marsh, *is why we win.* He thinks one last thing at Vin — *It's up to you* — and smiles. Marsh screams and takes his head.

Vin watches the body fall. The grief is not the panic she once feared; she let Elend go a year ago at the Well, and the time since has been a gift. Ruin floats above her, raging that he has ruined everything she loves, promising next to murder Sazed and Breeze and Ham and Spook in turn. She rises and gathers her power.

This time, when she drives into him and his counter-push tears at her, she does not pull back. *Preservation could never destroy you,* she tells him as the agony shreds her. *He could only protect — that is why he had to make us.* The thing he gave up at the Well and seeded into the mists was always meant to produce something that could protect *by* destroying. Humanity was his weapon. *You created the thing that can kill you, Ruin. And you shouldn't have killed Elend. He was the only reason I had left to live.* She forces Preservation's self completely into Ruin's; their minds touch and neither will let go. With the last of herself she pulls him into nothing with her. Two opposite gods evaporate like mist under a hot sun.

Above the smoking, ashen battlefield, in the silence that follows, the world is suddenly without either of its makers.