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Sazed and Tindwyl, a week deep into their unsleeping study of the plate, begin to draw the picture into focus. The Hero of Ages is not going to be a Terris figure, Tindwyl notes from Alendi's log; today she has found the actual prophecy quoted in the biography of one Helenntion, one of the last survivors of the Council of Khlennium — Khlennium called the same figure the Rabzeen, "he who is not of his people, yet fulfills all of their wishes." Sazed sees why this matters: the plate is functioning as a translation key, joining the Terris name to the Khlenni one and to other pre-imperial titles like the Anamnesor — without Kwaan's equivalences, the same prophecies hiding in Keeper records under other names look unrelated.

Tindwyl is, as ever, impatient with the soothsaying side of the work. She values the research, she tells him, because past plagues recur and ancient people knew things about this one; she does not believe in the prophecies themselves, and is blunt about being unwilling to perpetuate what she sees as dead lies. The last time someone took this kind of foretelling seriously, she reminds him, it produced the Lord Ruler and the Final Empire. Sazed argues, more gently than she does, that religions are a form of hope and that prophecies are extensions of them. She does not buy it.

Then she notices that one of the sheets in their stack of transcriptions has a torn corner. She lifts it; the missing chunk is the bottom right. She pulls another copy. The corner is missing. Same shape. They go through the rest. Four full transcriptions; each one missing the same corner, in tears so precisely identical that even pages stacked on top of one another could not have produced them. One sheet that holds only a partial transcription has a hole torn directly through the middle, removing the same passage. Sazed is moving before Tindwyl finishes asking; he unlocks the chest where he keeps his metalminds, pulls out the rubbing itself, and finds the same tear in it. The sentence stolen, every time, is the warning: Alendi must not reach the Well; he must not be allowed to take the power for himself. Someone has been in the room. Worse — someone has been in the locked chest. Whoever it is has the wrong idea of Keeper skill: Sazed still carries the full line, exact, in his coppermind.

Vin swings in through the window. Tindwyl reflexively flares pewter, half-startled — both Keepers go briefly to bulk — and they put the rubbing away. Sazed asks her to keep her eyes open for anyone unusual around his room. She climbs in and asks if she can talk to him; gracefully Tindwyl takes herself off to chase lunch, and Vin curls up in her chair.

She asks the question. How does anyone know when they are in love? Sazed protests his unqualification; she presses; he answers what he can. Yes, what she describes of how she feels around Elend is a good sign. But there is the other thing, she says. She is not good for him; he is afraid of her. Sazed tells her Elend was simply shaken by seeing a man die. She does not accept it cleanly; she wants to be the girl he needs and knows she is not. And then, almost too quietly to hear, she asks: what if there is someone else. Someone more like her. A man, she admits, who reminds her of Kelsier. Sazed sets aside his own rule against giving specific advice and tells her Elend is the best of men and that she has been happier with him than she has been at any other time he has known her. She thanks him and shoots back out the window.

Tindwyl comes in from the hall — admitting she was listening — long enough to praise the answer and to declare every teenage girl on principle unstable; she has raised fifteen daughters and would know. Then Elend knocks. He is back in his white uniform with a king's posture and sends Tindwyl out so he can ask Sazed the same question from the other side: she is warm one minute and stiff the next, and sometimes he thinks they are simply too different. Sazed disagrees; they think more alike than Elend sees, and as for the differences, the lock and the key look opposite to anyone who does not know they were made for the same purpose. Elend thanks him, asks about his research and the Deepness which Sazed now believes never left and simply became the mists, then excuses himself.

Alone with Tindwyl again, Sazed cannot make himself return to the pages. His mind keeps walking back to the two of them — to the fact that a man and a woman this useful to Luthadel should not be left in the city when it falls. And to one more thing he had been too cautious to say out loud: the Terris pronoun used through the entire Hero of Ages tradition is grammatically neuter — "it," not "he" — and translators have rendered every "he" in his draft book where they could as easily have written "she." If Vin is the Hero of Ages, he needs them both out of Luthadel now. He sets his notes aside and starts to write letters.