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Two weeks after the Well, Sazed arrives alone at the Conventical of Seran. He has left Luthadel quietly, with only a note — unable to stay near Vin, who expected him to record and study what she had experienced, and unable to bear Tindwyl's absence in the rooms they had shared. The mists still kill people at random each night; some only sicken; some die outright; some come back untouched. Marsh has vanished again — by the time Sazed and Ham climbed back out from under Kredik Shaw he had slipped away, his work apparently done.

He walks the steel-plated halls past the torture chamber to the small rock room he visited months before, drops his pack, and takes from his portfolio the original rubbing he made the first time. He recognises his own fingerprints on the thin paper, the smudges left by his palm. With growing nervousness he lifts the rubbing up to the steel plate on the wall. They do not match.

The last line — the sentence the mist spirit kept tearing from his copies — is different on the actual plate. Where his rubbing always read that Alendi must not take the power for himself, the original plate-line forbids letting him reach the Well at all, on the grounds that the prisoner there must stay imprisoned. The whole moral imperative of the prophecies has been inverted. He reads the second half of the plate, which contains paragraphs his rubbing never carried, and finds Kwaan's actual warning: that the prophecies themselves are changing word by word, that the changes are subtle and clever, that the other Worldbringers cannot see the drift because the drift extends into their own metalminds too, that whatever force is doing it constructed Alendi to fit the prophecies perfectly and sent the Deepness to drive him desperately northward to the Well. The altered prophecies turn giving up the power at the end into a moral imperative. Kwaan writes that he can be sure of the drift only because he never relied on a metalmind to memorise.

The whole religion is a lie. The Hero of Ages the Keepers spent millennia searching for is a trap — bait laid by something that needed a willing hero to release it. The very first words of the plate told them everything they needed: the plate's own opening warned that any record outside metal could not be relied on — and they had paid no attention. Sazed sits down quietly on the cold floor. It is the final blow, the last strike that kills whatever was left of his faith. He knows at that moment that he will never believe again.

In the city, Vin finds Elend standing on the wall in one of Tindwyl's white uniforms, watching the bustling people below. He looks harder than he did a few weeks ago. He is alive only because the small bead she fed him at the Well made him a Mistborn and he could burn pewter through the surgery; even with pewter the surgeons were uncertain he would live, and he has spent most of the days since delirious. He is up the first day he is lucid, as a true Allomancer would be.

He asks her what happened. She shakes her head — the booming voice still rings through her: I am free. She tells him she set something free at the Well, something terrible that should never have been released and that had led her there in the first place; going looking in the first place had been the mistake. They agree, looking at his new burning pewter, that they now probably know where the very first Mistborn came from — what was in the disks on the ledge.

She tells him she may be worse than the Lord Ruler — at the end, perhaps he had seen through the manipulation in time and understood that taking the power was the only way to keep the thing inside. Elend answers her plainly: if he had been a good man, he would not have done what he did to this land. She buries her head in his chest and asks what is left to them — facing the killing mists and whatever it is she set loose out there. He looks at the people moving in the streets a long moment and gives her Kelsier's old lesson back as the answer — that they will endure.