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Sazed sits in his quarters in Keep Venture transcribing the rubbing he carried out of the Conventical of Seran. The voice that surfaces in his pages is the plate's writer — a Worldbringer of Terris named Kwaan, afraid for himself, afraid that his account will be lost, and afraid of what Alendi will become if he reaches the Well of Ascension. The plate is a confession: Kwaan was the man who first declared Alendi the Hero of Ages, was rebuffed by his own order, refused to give the claim up because his position as Announcer had become his identity, and now — too late — wishes he had. Sazed sits back from the work. The text could keep him studying for months; the document is, alone, a piece of writing in a Worldbringer's own hand. He gives himself one month before he turns it over to another Keeper.

The shutters rattle. He opens them and finds Vin crouched on the ledge in her mistcloak, not yet asleep. She admits she has not gone to bed and asks him to leave the latch open from now on — she has been breaking too many. He waves her in. She crosses to his desk and asks what he is working on, and when she sees that it mentions the Deepness, she settles in.

She tells him she thinks she knows what the Deepness was: not a beast and not a foreign army, but the mist itself, persistent through the day, swallowing the light and starving the land beneath it. Sazed tells her the theory has been proposed and lists the standard objections — that the Lord Ruler is supposed to have defeated it and the mist is still here, that the mist does not seem to do the kind of harm the old accounts insist on — and she takes the objections apart one at a time with quotes she has written out herself on a scrap of paper. The logbook does not say armies were defeated by it; it says swords were useless against it. The people did not die *at* it; they died *because of* it. Then she holds up the passage about a wispy figure made of dark fog following the Hero, and tells him she has seen it too: that every night in Luthadel it watches her, that she can feel it with Allomancy, and if she gets close enough she can see it. He sits quietly for a moment and is chilled.

He grants her her case but reserves the larger leap — the Hero himself wrote that the Deepness was sentient and evil, and a mist is none of those things. She pushes past it to her real conclusion. The original Hero failed; the power at the Well was taken by Rashek and kept; the mist is now killing again and walking in daylight; she thinks the Hero of Ages has to come back. She glances at him, half-embarrassed — both of them aware of what she is half-saying about herself and the figure in the mist. He does not call her wrong, but he does not call her right, either; he tells her, in his scholar's way, that the Keepers do not know enough of the old Anticipation prophecies to call anyone the Hero with confidence — that Kwaan himself, who lived in the tradition, got it wrong.

The conversation eases. Vin asks why Tindwyl dislikes him; he says she does not dislike him, she is disappointed in him, and is a member of the Synod he has been disobeying for years. Vin grants him no quarter on Tindwyl's account — she finds the woman hard on Elend — until Sazed tells her what Tindwyl was. A Terris mother: a Breeder, taken at fourteen and held in the program until the end of her childbearing years, twenty children by twenty fathers, the empire's system of distributing Feruchemy out of her bloodline quietly defied by the Synod putting her there in the first place. Vin takes it in quietly. She murmurs that she would have killed herself in Tindwyl's place; Sazed tells her Tindwyl bore it because she was doing a great service. Then he sends her to get a few hours of sleep, and is left alone again with the rubbing.