Mistborn #03 The Hero of Ages

you not reconsider your place with us, Master Keeper?" asked another. "We want not for food or for land. Yet, what we do lack is a leader."
    "The Terris people were oppressed long enough, I think," Sazed said. "You have no need for another tyrant king."
    "Not a tyrant," one said. "One of our own."
    "The Lord Ruler was one of our own," Sazed said quietly,
    The group of men looked down. That the Lord Ruler had proven to be Terris was a shame to all of their people.
    "We need someone to guide us," one of the men said. "Even during the days of the Lord Ruler, he was not our leader. We looked to the Keeper Synod."
    The Keeper Synod—the clandestine leaders of Sazed's sect. They had led the Terris people for centuries, secretly working to make certain that Feruchemy continued, despite the Lord Ruler's attempts to breed the power out of the people.
    "Master Keeper," said Master Vedlew, senior of the elders.
    "Yes, Master Vedlew?"
    "You do not wear your copperminds."
    Sazed looked down. He hadn't realized it was noticeable that, beneath his robes, he wasn't wearing the metal bracers. "They are in my pack."
    "It seems odd, to me," Vedlew said, "that you should work so hard during the Lord Ruler's time, always wearing your metalminds in secret, despite the danger. Yet, now that you are free to do as you wish, you carry them in your pack."
    Sazed shook his head. "I cannot be the man you wish me to be. Not right now."
    "You are a Keeper."
    "I was the lowest of them," Sazed said. "A rebel and a reject. They cast me from their presence. The last time I left Tathingdwen, I did so in disgrace. The common people cursed me in the quiet of their homes."
    "Now they bless you, Master Sazed," said one of the men.
    "I do not deserve those blessings."
    "Deserve them or not, you are all we have left."
    "Then we are a sorrier people than we may appear."
    The room fell silent.
    "There was another reason why I came here, Master Vedlew," Sazed said, looking up. "Tell me, have any of your people died recently in . . . odd circumstances?"
    "Of what do you speak?" the aged Terrisman asked.
    "Mist deaths," Sazed said. "Men who are killed by simply going out into the mists during the day."
    "That is a tale of the skaa," one of the other men scoffed. "The mists are not dangerous."
    "Indeed," Sazed said carefully. "Do you send your people out to work in them during the daylight hours, when the mists have not yet retreated for the day?"
    "Of course we do," said the younger Terrisman. "Why, it would be foolish to let those hours of work pass."
    Sazed found it difficult not to let his curiosity work on that fact. Terrismen weren't killed by the daymists.
    What was the connection?
    He tried to summon the mental energy to think on the issue, but he felt traitorously apathetic. He just wanted to hide somewhere where nobody would expect anything of him. Where he wouldn't have to solve the problems of the world, or even deal with his own religious crisis.
    He almost did just that. And yet, a little part of him—a spark from before—refused to simply give up. He would at least continue his research, and would do what Elend and Vin asked of him. It wasn't all he could do, and it wouldn't satisfy the Terrismen who sat here, looking at him with needful expressions.
    But, for the moment, it was all Sazed could offer. To stay at the Pits would be to surrender, he knew. He needed to keep moving, keep working.
    "I'm sorry," he said to the men, setting aside the ledger. "But this is how it must be."

During the early days of Kelsier's original plan, I remember how much he confused us all with his mysterious "Eleventh Metal." He claimed that there were legends of a mystical metal that would let one slay the Lord Ruler — and that Kelsier himself had located that metal through intense research.
    Nobody really knew what Kelsier did in the years between his escape from the Pits of Hathsin and his return to Luthadel. When pressed, he simply said that he had been in "the West." Somehow in his wanderings he discovered stories that no Keeper had ever heard. Most of the crew didn't know what to make of the legends he spoke of. This might have been the first seed that made even his oldest friends begin to question his leadership.
    23
    IN THE EASTERN LANDS, near the wastelands of grit and sand, a young boy fell to the ground inside a skaa shack. It was many years before the Collapse, and the Lord Ruler still lived. Not that the boy knew of such things. He was a dirty, ragged