Mistborn #03 The Hero of Ages

their society. Only we obeyed. The Survivor will watch over us."
    Spook shivered quietly. It felt very strange to be hearing men he didn't know speak of Kelsier in such tones. Spook had walked with Kelsier, learned from Kelsier. What right did these men have to speak as if they had known the man who had become their Survivor?
    The conversation turned to matters more mundane. They discussed new laws that would forbid certain kinds of clothing once favored by the nobility, and then made a decision to give more funding to the genealogical survey committee. They needed to root out any in the city who were hiding noble parentage. Spook took notes so he could pass them on to the others. However, he had trouble keeping his eyes from trailing back down to the young woman in the garden.
    What brings her such sorrow? he wondered. A part of him wanted to ask—to be brash, as the Survivor would have been, and hop down to demand of this solemn, solitary girl why she stared at that plant with such melancholy. In fact, he found himself moving to stand before he caught himself.
    He might be unique, he might be powerful, but—as he had to remind himself again—he was no Mistborn. His was the way of silence and stealth.
    So, he settled back. Content, for the moment, to lean down and watch her, feeling that somehow—despite their distance, despite his ignorance—he understood that feeling in her eyes.

The ash.
    I don't think the people really understood how fortunate they were. During the thousand years before the Collapse, they pushed the ash into rivers, piled it up outside of cities, and generally just let it be. They never understood that without the microbes and plants Rashek had developed to break down the ash particles, the land would quickly have been buried.
    Though, of course, that did eventually happen anyway.
    15
    THE MISTS BURNED. Bright, flaring, lit by the red sunlight, they seemed a fire that enveloped her.
    Mist during the day was unnatural. But even the nightmists didn't seem to be Vin's anymore. Once, they had shadowed and protected her. Now she found them increasingly alien. When she used Allomancy it seemed that the mists pulled away from her slightly—like a wild beast shying away from a bright light.
    She stood alone before the camp, which was silent despite the fact that the sun had risen hours ago. So far, Elend continued to keep his army protected from the mists by ordering them to remain in their tents. Ham argued that exposing them wasn't necessary, but Vin's instinct said that Elend would stick to his plan to order his soldiers into the mist. They needed to be immune.
    Why? Vin thought, looking up through the sunlit mists. Why have you changed? What is different? The mists danced around her, moving in their usual, strange pattern of shifting streams and swirls. It seemed to Vin that they began to move more rapidly. Quivering. Vibrating.
    The sun seemed to grow hotter, and the mists finally retreated, vanishing like water evaporating on a warming pan. The sunlight hit her like a wave, and Vin turned, watching the mists go, their death like an echoing scream.
    They're not natural, Vin thought as guards called the all clear. The camp immediately began to shift and move, men striding from tents, going about the morning's activity with a flair of urgency. Vin stood at the head of the camp, dirt road beneath her feet, motionless canal to her right. Both seemed more real now that the mists were gone.
    She had asked Sazed and Elend their opinions of the mists—whether they were natural or . . . something else. And both men, like the scholars they were, had quoted theories to support both sides of the argument. Sazed, at least, had eventually made a decision—he'd come down on the side of the mists being natural.
    Even the way that the mists choke some people, leaving others alive, could be explained, Lady Vin, he had explained. After all, insect stings kill some people, while barely bothering others.
    Vin wasn't that interested in theories and arguments. She had spent most of her life thinking of the mists like any other weather pattern. Reen and the other thieves had mostly scoffed at tales that made the mists out to be supernatural. Yet, as Vin had become an Allomancer, she had grown to know the mists. She felt them, a sense that seemed to have grown even more potent on the day she'd touched the power of the Well of Ascension.
    They disappeared too quickly. When they burned away in the sunlight, they