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A week after the battle, Sazed sits at the head of the conference table in Keep Venture with the three sworn kings — Cett, Janarle, and Penrod — presiding as Vin's second over a council he can barely keep on topic. Cett pounds the table for permission to invade west and retake his capital; Janarle sips tea and argues the Northern Dominance must be stabilised before any westward push; Penrod mediates from a careful position between them, eventually offering an outright deal — accept Elend's rule, even his eccentric notions of government, in return for staying in power for the next decade. Sazed keeps the coalition glued together by reminding them, again, what Vin did to the koloss — almost the only argument any of them will respect.

Inside, he is hollow. Disconcern. Apathy. Everything feels wrong because Tindwyl is dead, and he cannot quite force himself to care whether the city survives the kings squabbling. Pressed on when the empress will resume command, he understates Vin's condition: a pewter drag coma she has not woken from in a week. Her koloss host remains controlled outside the wall, apparently, but he privately worries that a pewter-drag this severe can kill, and that the city has no contingency for what comes after if she does not wake.

Outside the trees on the Luthadel plain that same afternoon, Elend and Spook crouch in the falling ash and look across at broken gates and work crews burying corpses. Straff's camp is still there, abandoned. Spook shades his over-sensitive eyes and reads the flag on the gate: it is Elend's own. They mix into a line of skaa refugees returning for food and walk back in through the gate before nightfall.

Alone in his room as the mist curls at the shutters, Sazed opens the original draft of the manuscript he and Tindwyl made — the frantic book that alternates between their two hands, sometimes a dozen times to a page. He weeps over her script. Then he turns to the section she insisted they include: the prophecies' most blatant contradictions. The Hero will be tall; the plate says small. All men are selfish; the Hero is selfless. The power must not be taken; the Hero uses it to defeat the Deepness. For the first time he reads her objections fairly. Something is wrong. He notices, with a chill, that the plate calls Kwaan himself the "Holy First Witness" — the same title the skaa have lately been calling him at the gates.

Vin is standing behind him. She is awake at last, haggard from her week of coma but resolute. The Well of Ascension is not in the Terris Mountains as the records say — he himself lied about that. It is here, in the city, pulling at her. The Lord Ruler reshaped the land when he Ascended, raising the Ashmounts and cutting the deserts; he would have flattened the original northern mountains too, hidden the Well, and built his city over the top so he could watch it himself. She drew on the mists once before, when she killed the Lord Ruler — she does not yet know how. From below, shouts go up that the king has returned. She leaps out the window.

In the street, Ham joins Elend with his arm in a sling, trying to explain that Vin retook the city after he himself was knocked out at Keep Hasting. Vin steps out of the mist in front of them looking, for a moment, like the figure Elend saw on the road; then she runs into his arms and tells him she has done something bad — she has made him emperor. He accepts, admitting his own earlier convictions about the Assembly now look simplistic. She tells him this is not pewter-drag. This is something else. And tells him to come.

Watching from his window with a tin ring tapping his sight, Sazed confirms it is Elend below, then turns to find a torn scrap on his floor — his own handwriting, the same line that has been ripped from every copy of the plate-text he has ever made. He rewrote it from his coppermind after the last incident; it has come loose again. Fitting it back into the book, finds the same line his memory carries — the prohibition that Alendi cannot be permitted to take the Well's power — and wonders, finally, why Kwaan in particular feared even an honourable man claiming it.

Vin leads Elend, Ham and Spook up through the city to Kredik Shaw. The pulsings are loud and clear in her head now; the mist pulls away from her where it used to guide her. In the upside-down-bowl audience chamber she burns iron and notices one Pull-line that is too thick — pointing through a wall. The inlays on its face have been masking the seam of a hidden door. Anchoring against floor inlays she duralumin-Pulls. A section of wall grinds open onto a stone staircase descending into the rock under the city. They go down.

Back in his room, Sazed looks up to find a figure of mist at his desk — the same form Alendi and Vin both described — bent over the book. It is too short to be her ghost. Asked what it wants, it points toward the centre of the city. Screams begin outside. He runs after it. In the street he stumbles over a skaa body twisted in the same agony as the village deaths he investigated months ago — the mist itself killing now, inside the city. The Deepness is here. The spirit hurries him on toward the palace and remains behind in the mist at its doors as he runs in.

Crossing the audience chamber by candlelight, Sazed sees the new opening in the wall — and a figure standing in it with head bowed. Marsh. He tells him he should not have come, says he does not know why he must kill him, and Pushes on the metal bracers on Sazed's arms, throwing him bodily into the wall.