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Sazed stands at the mouth of the Homeland entrance and refuses to retreat. Inside, koloss are loose in the tunnels; outside, Elend's white-and-red body lies bright against the black ash on a small mountain of blue corpses; the heat is rising past anything a body can bear. The few elders and church-leaders who were standing with him have fled into the caves. Only Demoux, crawled back bloody from the fight and lacking a hand and most of one leg, remains a few steps inside the tunnel, half-conscious, waiting for the Terris woman who has been tending him to come back with bandages. *Vin will come,* Sazed keeps saying. *The Hero will come.* No one is left to answer him.

Two bodies fall out of nothing into the koloss carnage outside. Vin's is one. A red-haired stranger's is the other.

Sazed scrambles out into the heat, tapping steel from one of the ten rings he wore at the siege of Luthadel to dart past the confused koloss. He climbs the bodies, finds Vin, shakes her — *no pulse.* Her eyes are closed. She looks peaceful and very dead. He raises his face into the burning sky and shouts at it: *Your Hero is dead. The koloss can be turned loose, Ruin can be broken, but the world will still burn. Is this how you leave us?*

Then he notices the smoke. Vin's body is leaking it — a thin curl of white mist that streams upward into a vast white light he can barely make out. He reaches out and touches it, and feels through his fingers an awesome stability, the entire weight of Preservation. Beside her, the red-haired stranger leaks a different smoke — deep black, twisting on itself. He touches it with the other hand and feels its opposite — the violent power of change, Ruin. He kneels stunned between the bodies.

*The prophecies always used the gender-neutral,* he thinks. He had always assumed it was a convenience to allow for a male or a female. What if it had been because the Hero was not entirely either — what if the Hero would *bear* two opposite things? *The Hero would be rejected of his people. Not a warrior, though he would fight. Not born a king, but would become one anyway.* Every line is his own life. He looks up. *Is this what you planned all along?*

He flinches from the powers. He is a man. He has no training. He knows, in the brief glimpse, that if he tries to remake the world the way the Lord Ruler tried, he will only break it worse. *I am no Hero,* he whispers to the sky, arms still raised — and the sunlight catches on his bracered arms. Copper. His copperminds. The companions of his life. *Knowledge.*

*The prophecy says the Hero will bear the future of the world on his arms.* Not on his hands. Not on his shoulders. *On his arms.* By the forgotten gods.

He slams both forearms into the twin streams of mist and seizes the powers. They flow into him, and as they do — the moment his consciousness expands enough to hold them — he dumps the entire contents of his copperminds into the swelling mind beneath them. His flesh evaporates. The empty bracers drop into the corpses beside Vin and the red-haired body. Sazed opens eyes the size of the world.

Two powers in one mind. Opposites that should annihilate each other; held apart by a single will that knows exactly how it intends to use them. Used against each other, they destroy. Used together, they create. He understands at last that this is how the world was made the first time.

A thousand years of every faith mankind has ever held, every religion the Keepers memorised under the Lord Ruler's sword, becomes the blueprint. From the Bennett — the religion that called mapmaking a sacred duty, the one he had once preached to Kelsier — he takes the maps and restores continents, coasts, mountains, rivers. From the Nelazan — the star-worshippers whose faith he once offered to a young Vin in the crew hideout — he takes the star charts, finds where the planet was originally supposed to sit, and puts it back; not too hard this time, because for the first time someone has a frame of reference. From the Canzi — death-worshippers who left careful records of the human body — he fixes mankind, undoing what a thousand years of breathing ash and eating brown plants had warped, but gently, without warping anyone the way the Lord Ruler warped the Terris into kandra. From a religion of animals he restores the species that should have lived on the world. From the Dadradah — the last religion he had ever taught, told to Clubs before he died — he restores color: the blue sky, the green grass, every hue ash had killed. And from the Larsta — the religion Kelsier's wife Mare had quietly carried, whose priests wrote poems in meditation — he restores flowers, the beautiful, useless things the world had not seen in a thousand years.

*The religions in my portfolio weren't useless after all,* he thinks as the world reshapes beneath him. *Not all true. But all with truth in them.* He cradles the cavern complexes underground, moving them to keep the people safely sheltered as he reworks the tectonics. He exhales. The work is finished. He expects the power to leave him.

It does not.

Rashek and Vin only touched small pieces of the powers at the Well. He has something more. He has both, all of them, all the time. The two gods are gone. The two powers belong together, in fact — were always meant to belong together — and he can hold them so. Someone must watch over the world now. Someone must guard mankind across all of its lives and times.

Only at this moment, with the world remade beneath him and the powers still on his arms, does he finally understand what the prophecy actually meant. *Hero of Ages.* Not a hero who would come once in the ages — a hero who would *span* them. Neither Preservation nor Ruin but both. Held together. Watching.

God.

Below his expanding consciousness, beside Vin's body and Elend's and the shed body of Ruin, the empty copper rings glint in the new sun.