Yes, Kelsier thought, stopping on the street. Those towers were distinctive even in the dreamy, misted landscape of this Realm. Longsfollow. How could he have reached this place already? It was well outside the Central Dominance. How long had he been running?
Time had become a strange thing to him since his death. He had no need for food, and didn’t feel tiredness beyond what his mind projected. With Ruin obstructing the sun, and the only light that of the misty ground, it was very difficult to judge the passing of days.
He’d been running … for a while. A long while?
He suddenly felt exhausted, his mind numbing, as if suffering the effects of a pewter drag. He groaned and sat down by the side of the canal mound, which was covered in tiny plants. Those plants seemed to grow anywhere water was present in the real world. He’d found them sprouting from misty cups.
Occasionally he’d found other, stranger plants in the landscape between towns—places where the springy ground grew more firm. Places without people: the extended, ashen emptiness between dots of civilization.
He heaved himself to his feet, fighting off the exhaustion. It was all in his head, quite literally. Reluctant to push himself back into a run for the moment, he strolled through Longsfollow. A town had grown up here around the canal stop. Well, a village. Noblemen who ran plantations farther out from the canal would come here to trade and to ship goods in toward Luthadel. It had become a hub of commerce, a bustling civic center.
Kelsier had killed seven men here.
Or had it been eight? He strolled, counting them off. The lord, both of his sons, his wife … Yes, seven, counting two guards and that cousin. That was right. He’d spared the cousin’s wife, who had been with child.
He and Mare had been renting a room above the general store, over there, pretending to be merchants from a minor noble house. He walked up the steps outside the building, stopping at the door. He rested his fingers on it and sensed it in the Physical Realm, familiar even after all this time.
We had plans! Mare had said as they furiously packed. How could you do this?
“They murdered a child, Mare,” Kelsier whispered. “Sank her in the canal with stones tied to her feet. Because she spilled their tea. Because she spilled the damn tea.”
Oh, Kell, she’d said. They kill people every day. It’s terrible, but it’s life. Are you going to bring retribution to every nobleman out there?
“Yes,” Kelsier whispered. He made a fist against the door. “I did it. I made the Lord Ruler himself pay, Mare.”
And that boiling mass of writhing serpents in the sky … that had been the result. He’d seen the truth, in his moment between time with Preservation. The Lord Ruler would have prevented this doom for another thousand years.
Kill one man. Get vengeance, but cause how many more deaths? He and Mare had fled this village. He’d later learned that Inquisitors had come, torturing many of the people they’d known here, killing not a few in their search for answers.
Kill, and they killed in turn. Get revenge, and their vengeance returned tenfold.
You are mine, Survivor.
He gripped at the door handle, but couldn’t do more than gain an impression of how it looked. He couldn’t move it. Fortunately, he was able to push against the door and force himself through. He stumbled to a stop, and was shocked to see that the room was occupied. A solitary soul—glowing, so it was a person in the real world, not this one—lay on the cot in the corner.
He and Mare had left this place in a hurry, and had been forced to stash some of their possessions in a hole behind a stone in the hearth. Those were gone now; he’d pilfered them after Mare’s death, following his escape from the Pits and his training with the strange old Allomancer named Gemmel.
He avoided the person and walked to the small hearth. When he’d returned for that hidden coin, he’d been on his way to Luthadel, his mind overflowing with grand plans and dangerous ideas. He’d retrieved the coin, but had found more than he intended. The pouch of coin, and beside it a journal of Mare’s.
“If I’d died,” Kelsier said, loudly, “if I’d let myself be pulled into that other place … I’d be with Mare now, wouldn’t I?”
No reply.
“Preservation!” Kelsier shouted. “Do you know where she is? Did you see her pass into that darkness you spoke of, in that place where people go after this? I’d be with her, wouldn’t I, if I’d let myself die?”
Again Preservation didn’t reply. His mind certainly wasn’t in all places, even if his essence was. Considering how erratic he’d been lately, his mind might not be completely in even one place. Kelsier sighed, looking around the small room.
Then he stepped back, realizing that the person on the cot had stood up and was looking about.
“What do you want?” Kelsier snapped.
The figure jumped. Had he heard that?
Kelsier walked up to the figure and touched him, gaining a vision of an old beggar, scraggly of beard and wild of eye. The man was muttering to himself, and Kelsier—while touching him—could make some of it out.
“In me head,” the man muttered. “Geddouta me head.”
“You can hear me,” Kelsier said.
The figure jumped again. “Damn whispers,” he said. “Geddouta me head!”
Kelsier lowered his hand. He’d seen this, in the pulses. Sometimes the mad whispered the things they had heard from Ruin. But it seemed they could hear Kelsier as well.
Could he use this man? Gemmel muttered like that sometimes, Kelsier realized, feeling a chill. I always thought he was mad.
Kelsier tried to speak further with the man, but the effort was fruitless. The man kept jumping and muttering, but wouldn’t actually respond.
Eventually Kelsier made his way back out of the room. He’d been glad for the madman to distract him from his memories of this place. He fished in his pocket, but then remembered he didn’t have the picture of Mare’s flower any longer. He’d left it for Vin.
He knew the answer to the questions he’d asked of Preservation just before. In refusing to accept death, Kelsier had also given up returning to Mare. Unless there was nothing beyond the warping. Unless that death was real and final.
Surely she couldn’t have expected him to just give in, to let the stretching darkness take him? Everyone else I’ve seen passed willingly, Kelsier thought. Even the Lord Ruler. Why must I insist on remaining?
Foolish questions. Useless. He couldn’t go when the world was in such danger. And he wouldn’t just let himself die, not even to be with her.
He left the town, turned his path to the west again, and continued running.
3
KELSIER knelt down beside an old cookfire, no longer burning, represented by a group of shadowy, cold logs in this Realm. He found it was important to stop every few weeks or so to catch a breather. He had been running … well, a long time now.
Today he intended to finally crack a puzzle. He seized the misted remains of the old cookfire. Immediately he gained a vision of them in the real world—but he pushed through that, feeling something beyond.
Not just images, but sensations. Almost emotions. Cold wood that somehow remembered warmth. This fire was dead in the real world, but it wished it could burn again.
It was a strange sensation, realizing that logs could have wishes. This flame had burned for years, feeding the families of many skaa. Countless generations had sat before this pit in the floor. They’d kept the fire burning almost perpetually. Laughing, savoring their brief moments of joy.
The fire had given them that. It longed to do so again. Unfortunately, the people had left. Kelsier was finding more and more villages abandoned these days. Ashfalls went on longer than usual, and Kelsier had felt occasional trembling in the ground, even in this Realm. Earthquakes.
He could give this fire something. Burn again, he told it. Be warm again.
It couldn’t happen in the Physical Realm, but all things there could manifest here. The fire wasn’t actual
ly alive, but to the people who had once lived here, it had been almost so. A familiar, warm friend.
Burn …
Light burst from his fingers, pouring out of his hands, a flame appearing there. Kelsier dropped it quickly, stepping back, grinning at the crackling blaze. It looked very much like the fire that Nazh and Khriss had carried with them; the logs themselves had appeared on this side, with dancing flames.
Fire. He’d made fire in the world of the dead. Not bad, Kell, he thought, kneeling. After taking a deep breath, he pushed his hand into the fire and grabbed the center of the logs, then closed his fist, capturing the bit of mist that made up the essence of that cookfire. It all folded upon itself, vanishing.
He cupped the small handful of mist. He could feel it, like he could feel the ground beneath him. Springy, but real enough as long as he didn’t push too hard. He tucked the soul of the cookfire away in his pocket, fairly certain it wouldn’t burst alight unless he commanded it to do so.
He left the skaa hovel, stepping out into a plantation. He’d never been here before—this was farther west than he’d traveled with Gemmel. The plantations out here were made of odd rectangular buildings that were low and squat, but each had a large courtyard. He strolled out of this one, entering a street that ran among a dozen similar hovels.
All in all, skaa were better off out here than they were in the inner dominances. It was like saying that a man drowning in beer was better off than one drowning in acid.
Ash fell through the sky. Though he’d not been able to see it during his first days in this Realm, he’d learned to pick it out. It reflected like tiny curling bits of mist, almost invisible. Kelsier broke into a jog, and the ash streamed around him. Some passed through him, leaving him with the impression that he was ash. A burned-out husk, a corpse reduced to embers that drifted on the wind.
He passed far too much ash heaped up on the ground. It shouldn’t be falling so heavily here. The ashmounts were distant; from what he’d learned in his travels, ash only fell once or twice a month out here. Or at least that was how it had been before Ruin’s awakening. Some trees still lived here, shadowy, their souls manifesting as misty forms that glowed like the souls of men.
He approached people on the road who were making westward, toward the coastal towns. Likely their noblemen had already fled that direction, terrified by the sudden increase of ash and the other signs of destruction. As Kelsier passed the people, he stretched out his hand, letting it brush against them and give him impressions of each one.
A young mother lamed by a broken foot, carrying her new baby close to her breast.
An old woman, strong, as old skaa needed to be. The weak were often left to die.
A young, freckled man in a fine shirt. He’d stolen that from the lord’s manor, most likely.
Kelsier watched for signs of madness or raving. He’d confirmed that those types could often hear him, though it didn’t always require obvious madness. Many seemed unable to make out his specific words, but instead heard him as phantom whispers. Impressions.
He picked up speed, leaving the townspeople behind. He could tell that this was a well-traveled area from the light of the mists beneath him. During his months running, he’d come to understand—and to an extent even accept—the Cognitive Realm. There was a certain freedom to being able to move unhindered through walls. To being able to peek in at the people and their lives.
But he was so lonely.
He tried not to think about it. He focused on his run and the challenge ahead. Because of the way time blended here, it didn’t feel to him as if months had passed. Indeed, this experience was far preferable to his sanity-grating year trapped at the Well.
But he missed the people. Kelsier needed people, conversation, friends. Without them he felt dried out. What he wouldn’t have given for Preservation, unhinged as he was, to appear and speak to him. Even that white-haired Drifter would have been a welcome break from the wasteland of mists.
He tried to find madmen so he could at least have some interaction with other living beings, no matter how meaningless.
At least I’ve gained something, Kelsier thought. A campfire in his pocket. When he got out of this, and he would get out of it, he’d certainly have stories to tell.
4
KELSIER, the Survivor of Death, finally crested one last hill and beheld an incredible sight spread before him. Land.
It rose from the edge of the mists, an ominous, dark expanse. It felt less alive than the shifting white-grey mists beneath him, but oh was it a welcome sight.
He let out a long, relieved sigh. These last few weeks had been increasingly difficult. The thought of more running had started to nauseate him, and the loneliness had him seeing phantoms in the shifting mists, hearing voices in the lifeless nothing all around.
He was a much different figure from the one who had left Luthadel. He planted his staff on the ground beside him—he’d recovered that from the body of a dead refugee in the real world and coaxed it to life, giving it a new home and a new master to serve. Same for the enveloping cloak he wore, frayed at the edges almost like a mistcloak.
The pack he carried was different; he’d taken that from an abandoned store. No master had ever carried it. It considered its purpose to sit on a shelf and be admired. So far it had still made for a suitable companion.
Kelsier settled down, putting aside his staff and digging into his pack. He counted off his balls of mist, which he kept wrapped up tight in the pack. None had vanished this time; that was good. When an object was recovered—or worse, destroyed—in the Physical Realm, its Identity changed and the spirit would return to the location of its body.
Abandoned objects were best. Ones that had been owned for a long while, so they had a strong Identity, but that currently had nobody in the Physical Realm to care for them. He pulled out the ball of mist that was his campfire and unfolded it, bathing in its warmth. It was starting to fray, the logs pocked with misty holes. He could only guess that he’d carried it too far from its origin, and the distance was distressing it.
He pulled out another ball of mist, which unfolded in his hand, becoming a leather waterskin. He took a long drink. It didn’t do him any real good; the water vanished soon after being poured out, and he didn’t seem to need to drink.
He drank anyway. It felt good on his lips and throat, refreshing. It let him pretend to be alive.
He huddled on that hillside, overlooking the new frontier, sipping at phantom water beside the soul of a fire. His experience in the realm of gods, that moment between time, was a distant memory now … but, honestly, it had felt distant from the second he’d fallen out of it. The brilliant Connections and eternity-spanning revelations had immediately faded like mist before the morning sun.
He’d needed to reach this place. Beyond that … he had no idea. There were people out there, but how did he find them? And what did he do when he located them?
I need what they have, he thought, taking another pull on the waterskin. But they won’t give it to me. He knew that for certain. But what was it they had? Knowledge? How could he con someone when he didn’t even know if they’d speak his language?
“Fuzz?” Kelsier said, just as a test. “Preservation, you there?”
No reply. He sighed, packing away his waterskin. He glanced over his shoulder toward the direction he’d come from.
Then he scrambled to his feet, ripping his knife from the sheath at his side and spinning about, putting the fire between him and what stood there. The figure wore robes and had bright, flame-red hair. He bore a welcoming smile, but Kelsier could see spines beneath the surface of his skin. Pricking spider legs, thousands of them, pushing against the skin and causing it to pucker outward in erratic motions.
Ruin’s puppet. The thing he’d seen the force construct and dangle toward Vin.
“Hello, Kelsier,” Ruin said through the figure’s lips. “My colleague is unavailable. But I will convey your requests, if you wish it of me.”
/> “Stay back,” Kelsier said, flourishing the knife, reaching by instinct for metals he could no longer burn. Damn, he missed that.
“Oh, Kelsier,” Ruin said. “Stay back? I’m all around you—the air you pretend to breathe, the ground beneath your feet. I’m in that knife and in your very soul. How exactly am I to ‘stay back’?”
“You can say what you wish,” Kelsier said. “But you don’t own me. I am not yours.”
“Why do you resist so?” Ruin asked, strolling around the fire. Kelsier walked the other direction, keeping distance between himself and this creature.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kelsier said. “Perhaps because you’re an evil force of destruction and pain.”
Ruin pulled up, as if offended. “That was uncalled for!” He spread his hands. “Death is not evil, Kelsier. Death is necessary. Every clock must wind down, every day must end. Without me there is no life, and never could have been. Life is change, and I represent that change.”
“And now you’ll end it.”
“It was a gift I gave,” Ruin said, stretching out his hand toward Kelsier. “Life. Wondrous, beautiful life. The joy of the new child, the pride of a parent, the satisfaction of a job well done. These are from me.
“But it is done now, Kelsier. This planet is an elderly man, having lived his life in full, now wheezing his last breaths. It is not evil to give him the rest he demands. It’s a mercy.”
Kelsier looked at that hand, which undulated with the pinprick pressing of the spiders inside.
“But who am I talking to?” Ruin said with a sigh, pulling back his hand. “The man who would not accept his own end, even though his soul longed for it, even though his wife longed for him to join her in the Beyond. No, Kelsier. I do not anticipate you will see the necessity of an ending. So continue to think me evil, if you must.”
“Would it hurt so much,” Kelsier said, “to give us a little more time?”
Ruin laughed. “Ever the thief, looking for what you can get away with. No, a reprieve has been granted time and time again. I assume you have no message for me to deliver, then?”