POV: vin
Summary
Straff wakes in the cold morning, takes a leaf of Black Frayn, and is up and saddled in minutes — he has begun to see the benefits of his addiction. Janarle meets him outside the tent with the report that the city's fires are out and the scouts say it looks like a graveyard. Straff is cheerful — all his enemies dead, the capital and its atium his, no skaa to worry about — until the koloss pour out of the western gate and form up in the ash-stained snow. There are fewer than yesterday but still many. Then several thousand human soldiers form up in organised ranks behind them. The creatures charge. Straff begins to think he should not be at the front and notices something fall out of the sky — too big for an arrow, too organised for a rock. A person with a flapping mistcloak. He cries out that she is supposed to be gone.
Vin comes down out of a duralumin-fueled Steeljump with a massive koloss sword in her hands, hits Straff square in the head, and cleaves rider and horse alike on her way to the ground. She Pushes outward with a duralumin-flared Steelpush, throwing generals and riders back in a wide circle. She downs another vial, restores her steel and pewter, and jumps off to hunt Straff's surviving officers as her koloss host crashes into the disorganised front ranks. Elend had warned him what would happen if he attacked the city.
On the western hill, Cett watches the koloss fall on Straff's army with Bahmen beside him counting forces. He intends to wait it out and pick off whoever wins, weak. Allrianne, immaculately dressed even in a war camp, rides up arguing they must help; he refuses; she kicks her horse alone down the slope toward the battle and pauses to yell back that if he wants to protect her he will have to charge. Bahmen points out that the forces are nearly matched — Cett's intervention would settle it either way. Cett finally orders his column to march in defense of the city — and someone to ride after his fool of a daughter.
Sazed rides slowly across the empty field behind Vin's battle, his metalminds nearly empty and his mind hollowed by Tindwyl's death. The ones with faith were right, he tells himself — Vin came back while he had lost hope. He turns over what he and Tindwyl had studied of the Hero of Ages prophecy: a person not royalty themselves but who came to it, who united others, whom kings rode to aid. As he thinks it, Cett's banners crest a rise to the west, and Straff's line begins to break — the terror in their movements is her cutting down their generals one by one. Tindwyl had insisted to the end that the girl was too convenient a fit. Riding on, he realises they had the wrong gender all along.
Before an hour is out, Straff's troops begin to surrender. The koloss stop fighting and part for Sazed as he rides up. He finds Vin standing bloodied with a koloss sword over one shoulder. Janarle — leg broken, held by koloss under each arm — is dropped before her. She tells him Straff is dead and the army is his. He kneels and swears it instead, at her instruction, to Elend Venture — Straff's estranged son. Penrod follows on her gesture, dismounting and kneeling in the snow, yielding the crown he had taken from Elend in the Assembly and swearing the city back to him. Cett, eyed suspiciously by his own koloss escort, smiles bitterly — she has openly threatened to kill him, she has said aloud that he is not the man Elend is. He is helped down from his saddle into the snow and bows, swearing himself to Elend Venture too — provided Elend can take the Western Dominance back from the obligator now holding it.
Vin names Sazed her second; the three kneeling kings are told to obey him as they would Elend or herself. She gives him his orders — secure the city, requisition Straff's storehouses, keep the armies from each other, fetch Elend home from the road. Then she drops the koloss sword and Pushes herself backward into the sky toward the city — to sleep at last. Sazed turns to watch her fly, and runs the Hero of Ages prophecy through one more time.