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Vin keeps her vigil on the top of Keep Hasting in the small hours near dawn, OreSeur curled beside her on the stone ledge yawning openly. It has been nearly a week since the parley with Straff and Zane has not come back. She is burning pewter to hold the exhaustion off — three or four hours of sleep is all she has been getting, and OreSeur tells her so flatly: no Mistborn, man, or kandra survives that schedule for long. She cannot quite explain it to him. The thumping she alone can hear from the north has been getting nearer, or louder; the watcher in the mist is still out there; the kingdom has been taken from Elend in everything but title. Echoes from the logbook sit over the night.

OreSeur says what he came up to say: he is not coming, and her fixation on him is disconcerting. Most kandra are good judges of character, and he does not like what he has seen of Zane — too pleased with himself, too deliberate in befriending her. Vin half agrees and half does not. She thinks OreSeur cannot understand what it is to soar on a Push of steel or to flare tin under the stars; he and Elend are alike in that.

She tries to give him back the freedom she has not before — they have a set of bones in the palace; he could leave the wolfhound, or take a criminal's body. He declines. He has grown used to these bones. It is frustrating to change forms often. He asks instead whether they are ever going back to the palace; he would like to eat. He has a piece of meat aging in his room, which the maids keep throwing away.

Mist begins to give way as the sun rises. From the wall Vin can see Straff's army sitting on the canal like a spider waiting for its moment. She thinks of Elend — of the speeches and legal arguments he has been spending all his time on, of how his world is books and papers and hers is mist and steel, of how perhaps he was right to let the Assembly do what they have done. OreSeur tells her so: the king kept his contract, which is the kandra view of doing right.

She picks him up to carry him down from the parapet — too high for a kandra wolfhound to jump — and pauses on the lip of the wall. The sun is fully up now, and there are still threads of mist resisting it, refusing to thin, holding on to the city. The connection lands without her looking for it. The Deepness — the calamity the Lord Ruler is said to have saved the world from at the Well of Ascension — was the mist itself. A mist that swallowed the sun would have killed everything that grew under it, and that is what the logbook keeps saying without naming: that armies were useless against it, that thousands died because of it rather than at its hands. She opens her mouth slightly and tells OreSeur, quietly, that she thinks she has just realised what the Deepness was.