Mistborn #01 The Final Empire

underground in whatever city you eventually find yourself; you should earn enough to live on for years. Go quickly! I don’t know how long you have until an alarm is raised.”
    Walin stumbled back, confused. “Who . . . who are you?”
    “I am what you will soon be,” the stranger said, stepping up to the rift. The ribbons of his enveloping black cloak billowed around him, mixing with the mists as he turned toward Walin. “I am a survivor.”

    Kelsier looked down, studying the dark scar in the rock, listening as the prisoner scrambled away in the distance.
    “And so I return,” Kelsier whispered. His scars burned, and memories returned. Memories of months spent squeezing through cracks, of ripping his arms on crystalline knives, of seeking each day to find a geode . . . just one, so that he could live on.
    Could he really go back down into those cramped, quiet depths? Could he enter the darkness again? Kelsier held up his arms, looking at the scars, still white and stark on his arms.
    Yes. For her dreams, he could.
    He stepped over to the rift and forced himself to climb down inside of it. Then he burned tin. Immediately, he heard a cracking sound from below.
    Tin illuminated the rift beneath him. Though the crack widened, it also branched, sending out twisting rifts in all directions. Part cavern, part crack, part tunnel. He could already see his first crystalline atium-hole—or what was left of it. The long, silvery crystals were fractured and broken.
    Using Allomancy near atium crystals caused them to shatter. That was why the Lord Ruler had to use slaves, and not Allomancers, to collect his atium for him.
    Now the real test, Kelsier thought, squeezing down further into the crack. He burned iron, and immediately he saw several blue lines pointing downward, toward atium-holes. Though the holes themselves probably didn’t have an atium geode in them, the crystals themselves gave off faint blue lines. They contained residual amounts of atium.
    Kelsier focused on one of the blue lines and Pulled lightly. His tin enhanced ears heard something shatter in the crack beneath him.
    Kelsier smiled.
    Nearly three years before, standing over the bloody corpses of the taskmasters who had beaten Mare to death, he had first noticed that he could use iron to sense where crystal pockets were. He’d barely understood his Allomantic powers at the time, but even then, a plan had begun to form in his mind. A plan for vengeance.
    That plan had evolved, growing to encompass so much more than he’d originally intended. However, one of its key parts had remained sequestered away in a corner of his mind. He could find the crystal pockets. He could shatter them, using Allomancy.
    And they were the only means of producing atium in the entire Final Empire.
    You tried to destroy me, Pits of Hathsin, he thought, climbing down further into the rift. It’s time to return the favor.

----
We are close now. Oddly, this high in the mountains, we seem to finally be free from the oppressive touch of the Deepness. It has been quite a while since I knew what that was like.
The lake that Fedik discovered is below us now—I can see it from the ledge. It looks even more eerie from up here, with its glassy—almost metallic—sheen. I almost wish I had let him take a sample of its waters.
Perhaps his interest was what angered the mist creature that follows us. Perhaps . . . that was why it decided to attack him, stabbing him with its invisible knife.
Strangely, the attack comforted me. At least I know that since another has seen it. That means I’m not mad.

    33

    “ S O . . . THAT’S IT?” V IN ASKED. “For the plan, I mean.”
    Ham shrugged. “If the Inquisitors broke Marsh, that means they know everything. Or, at least, they know enough. They’ll know that we plan to strike the palace, and that we’re going to use the house war as a cover. We’ll never get the Lord Ruler out of the city now, and we’ll certainly never get him to send the palace guard into the city. It doesn’t look good, Vin.”
    Vin sat quietly, digesting the information. Ham sat cross-legged on the dirty floor, leaning against the bricks of the far wall. The backup lair was a dank cellar with only three rooms, and the air smelled of dirt and ash. Clubs’s apprentices took up one room to themselves, though Dockson had sent away all of the other servants before coming to the safe house.
    Breeze stood by the far wall. He occasionally shot uncomfortable looks at