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Vin holds Steel Gate Square alone while Sazed and the skaa escape the city — or try to. She started the fight already tired from her pewter drag and her improvised horseshoe spikeway, and only the last of her pewter keeps her upright. She kills koloss after koloss on a pile of their own dead, finding for the first time that the killing feels right — she fights now to defend those who cannot defend themselves, not for shock or retribution as Kelsier had. But she is one person against an army, and she knows it.

Outside Keep Hasting with several thousand refugees, Sazed calls up to Lord Penrod for sanctuary or to lead a breakout north. A messenger arrives with word that Keep Venture has fallen and Dockson is dead. Penrod appears immaculate on the wall in Elend's thin crown and refuses — his Tineye has watched the koloss kill the group Sazed sent out the northern gate. There will be no flight north, no room in the keep, no hope. He admits oddly that by taking the Venture boy's throne he saved his life and ended his own, and walks away from the wall. The sun is setting; the mists are coming; the koloss are coming.

Vin disengages and leaps to a rooftop, then to one of the spires atop the Hill of a Thousand Spires — silent and untouched, ignored by looters of both races. From there she sees the city burning, hears with flared tin the creatures killing through the streets, and cannot find the Well even now — its thumpings are so close they have no direction. She drops into the palace courtyard, her pewter runs out, and exhaustion nearly takes her under. The cries of dying people pull her back to her feet.

She catches a koloss raiding party murdering an old man and smashing a child against a wall, cuts back one creature's leg in a slide, puts a dagger in another's eye, snatches the little girl, and runs — but the skaa she has already rescued have run into another koloss group beyond her. As they begin to die, she throws a duralumin-flared Soothing at the creatures — the same trick she had used against TenSoon in her quarters. Her mind slams into a Something and that Something shatters. The koloss freeze in mid-kill. She feels herself inside their minds, an extension of her own body. The Lord Ruler built the koloss with the same weakness he built into the kandra — the way he controlled them all those long years. She understands now.

Back outside Keep Hasting Sazed stands half-naked in the snow with the last minutes of stored attribute sparkling on his fingers as silent koloss gather from the alleys. They do not attack; they part. Vin walks through them, exhausted. She confronts him in a single line — *you lied to me about the Well of Ascension* — and lets it go, then shouts up at Penrod to open the gates. A koloss picks her up to wall-top so the soldiers can see her face; Penrod, immaculate again on the wall, obeys without argument. The surviving two hundred garrison will fan out and protect the population from creatures still pillaging, not attack them; messengers will call her to deal with each band; she will take care of the koloss, starting with reclaiming Keep Venture for its store of metals. Sazed reports that Clubs and Dockson are dead, Ham badly wounded, Breeze shocked into silence. She asks for pewter; Ham tosses up his last vial; she downs it and walks off into the mist toward Keep Venture, her koloss guards tromping after her. There is still an army outside the wall.

Sazed asks to be excused from her orders, and works through the night turning frozen corpses over by lantern light, starting at Tin Gate. He finds Tindwyl's body in a snowbank near morning, iced through, killed leading her soldiers toward Keep Venture after her gate fell. He releases his brassmind and lets the cold come in. He cannot think what to do or what to say. Every prayer in the three hundred religions he carries goes hollow in his hands. He had given Clubs the Dadradah and it had not saved him; the Survivor had not come for the thousands who died in the streets; if so many people believe so many different things, none can be true. The skaa call him holy. He understands at last that he is the most profane of men — a man who knows three hundred religions and has faith in none of them. His life, he thinks over her body, has been a sham.