POV: vin
Summary
Vin lies quietly weeping in the empty pool chamber with her arms around Elend, holding him as he gasps his last few breaths. The cavern is still, the thumping gone from her head, the Well drained, the thing it had held loose somewhere in the world. She has screamed for Ham and Spook and gotten no answer — they are too far away in the outer cavern for her voice to reach them. She feels cold and empty. After holding so much power and having it ripped out of her, she feels like nothing; once Elend dies, she will be nothing. What is the point. Life means nothing. She has betrayed him and she has betrayed the world. She has tried so very hard to choose rightly, even where it cost her, and she has — somehow — made a terrible, irreversible mistake.
The figure of mist looms above her and raises an arm, pointing. She cannot summon rage at it. She tells it to leave them be — it is over; she will not get to anyone in time, and the cut was deeper than even Sazed could mend, she saw it with the power. The figure should be pleased, she tells it; it got what it wanted. And then — slowly, sitting there with his blood on her hands — she puts the pieces together. It cut Elend to make her heal him. To force her to take the power and burn it to fix him, and so keep her from releasing it into the void. She blinks. The figure waves its arm again, demanding.
Numbly she gets to her feet and follows where it points — to a fragment of broken pottery on the cavern floor a few paces off. The ledge-disk Elend had picked up earlier and was clutching when the cut took him. It is broken now. At its centre, lying small in the shards, is the nugget of unfamiliar metal it had held. The spirit urges her over and she bends and picks the bead up between her fingers, then walks back to Elend's side.
He is still alive, just barely; he is shaking less, growing weaker, eerily steadier as he draws near death. His lips move; he whispers her name. The spirit stands motionless beside them. She rolls the bead between her fingers, hesitates, then makes as if to swallow it herself; the figure waves her off urgently, hands shaking, then points hard at Elend. What. What does it want? She holds the bead up to him. "You must swallow this," she whispers, leaning close, and places it in his mouth. His lips move; he starts to choke. She fishes in the empty pool for her earring and sash, recovers a metal vial, and pours the liquid into his mouth. He coughs weakly. The vial does its work and the bead goes down with it.
He closes his eyes. Then, oddly, colour returns to his cheeks. She kneels confused, watching him — the way he lies, the set of his face, the change of his skin. She burns bronze and feels, with shock, Allomantic pulses coming off him. He is burning pewter. Holding pewter, holding life, holding her dying husband alive on the cavern floor. He is a Mistborn.