POV: marasi
Summary
The Rioting Armal unleashes is shame, and because the emotion comes in as a directional cone *on full automatic*, it catches Marasi too. Crumpled on the patio of Entrone's mansion with blood trickling from a scalp cut, Marasi feels her whole life arrive in a wave: a childhood hidden away by an embarrassed father, the legends she dreamed of as a girl and the foolish way she threw herself at one of them when he walked into her life, the rebuffing, the long years lived as someone else's deputy because she could not find her own. *She'd always been nothing.* The pressure of it is total.
Then a second observation lands. None of this is new. She has felt every one of these fears before, less powerfully, and she has lived through and past most of them already. The shame is not data; it is weight. She takes a long breath, whispers that it will pass, and shoulders it. Entrone cannot. He whimpers, curls up on the green-painted stone, and stops moving — all the healing in the world is no use if you cannot stand, and without the aluminum-lined hat she knocked off, he is entirely subject to Armal's cone. A few Wayfarer soldiers come running; one of the other townspeople meets them with a Soothing, and Armal (now thinking like a constable) hands jars of Investiture around to her neighbours.
Marasi could rest here. Her primary job — empowering the people — has been done. Except the portal is still opening. The invasion is still coming. That worry is narrow and bright enough to cut through the shame like a knife, and Marasi crawls under it. With each grueling inch she sheds another lie. She does not care whose shadow she stands in if the job is getting done. She does not care if her father, or society, is ashamed of her, if she is not ashamed of herself. When she finally crawls past Entrone and out of the cone of Armal's Rioting, the borrowed feelings vanish like smoke and there is, briefly, just her. She warns the townspeople not to underestimate Entrone — he is Hemalurgically healed and strong — and limps back into the mansion to deal with the pool.
Most of the building is a sham. The vast majority of the floorplan is one room with a glowing white pool sunk twenty feet wide into the ground, beginning to churn. A jar of Investiture had turned TwinSoul into a twelve-foot stone juggernaut; a jar had turned Moonlight into Shay-I; a jar had let Armal Riot like the Lord Ruler himself. This pool holds thousands. Marasi steps too close and the half-open portal shows her what is on the other side: a dark sky over misty ground and thousands of golden-skinned, glowing-red-eyed soldiers like living statues, holding rifles of an advanced design — the men of gold and red. *Bearers of the final metal,* Miles had said. The destroyers have arrived.
She steps back. The pains of being thrown through the window catch up to her now that there is room for them, but the pull of the pool sets them at a distance. Once before, she had given up the Bands of Mourning rather than hold power like that, and she does not need to hold it today either. Duty, she realises, was never about what she needed. It was about what was needed from her. Centuries ago Elend Venture had faced an analogous problem of how to dispose of a great deal of power, and Marasi knows the solution he used.
She walks out of the mansion to find that the townspeople have already begun calming the remaining guards down. Armal is finishing tying Entrone — a man named Macil, she explains, is a Leecher and has drained his strength. Marasi tells Armal what she needs next: every Allomancer in the cavern, here, now. There is a well of power in the room next door that is opening a door to something terrible, and they are going to close it the old way — by burning it up between them.