Like someone in the world of the living. This pool had let Drifter transition from the world of the dead to the real world. Kelsier gaped, following Drifter with his eyes as the man strode past the pillars in the room, then stopped at the other side. Two tiny sources of metal still glowed fiercely there to Kelsier’s eyes.
Drifter selected one. It was small, as he could toss it into the air and catch it again. Kelsier could sense the triumph in that motion.
Kelsier closed his eyes and concentrated. No pain. His leg wasn’t actually hurt. Concentrate.
He managed to make some of the pain fade. He sat up in the pool, rippling light coming up to his chest. He breathed in and out, though he didn’t need the air.
Damn. The first person he’d seen in months had thrashed him, then stolen something from the chamber outside. He didn’t know what, or why, or even how the Drifter had managed to slip from one world to the next.
Kelsier crawled to the center of the pool, lowering himself down into the deep portion. He stood, his leg still aching faintly, and put his hands to the sides. He concentrated, trying to…
To what? Transition? What would that even do to him?
He didn’t care. He was frustrated and humiliated. He needed to prove to himself that he wasn’t incapable.
He failed. No amount of concentration, visualization, or straining of muscles made him do what the Drifter had managed. He climbed from the pool, exhausted and chastened, and settled on the side.
He didn’t notice Fuzz standing there until the god spoke. “What were you doing?”
Kelsier turned. Fuzz visited infrequently these days, but when he did come, he always did it unannounced. If he spoke, he often only raved like a madman.
“Someone was just here,” Kelsier said. “A man with white hair. He somehow used this Well to pass from the world of the dead to the world of the living.”
“I see,” Fuzz said softly. “He dared that, did he? Dangerous, with Ruin straining against his bonds. But if anyone were going to try something so foolhardy, it would be Cephandrius.”
“He stole something, I think,” Kelsier said. “From the other side of the room. A bit of metal.”
“Aaah…” Fuzz said softly. “I had thought that when he rejected the rest of us, he would stop interfering. I should know better than to trust an implication from him. Half the time you can’t trust his outright promises….”
“Who is he?” Kelsier asked.
“An old friend. And no, before you ask, you can’t do as he did and transition between Realms. Your ties to the Physical Realm have been severed. You’re a kite with no string connecting it to the ground. You cannot ride the perpendicularity across.”
Kelsier sighed. “Then why was he able to come to the world of the dead?”
“It’s not the world of the dead. It’s the world of the mind. Men – all things, truly – are like a ray of light. The floor is the Physical Realm, where that light pools. The sun is the Spiritual Realm, where it begins. This Realm, the Cognitive Realm, is the space between where that beam stretches.”
The metaphor barely made any sense to him. They all know so much, Kelsier thought, and I know so little.
Still, at least Fuzz was sounding better today. Kelsier smiled toward the god, then froze as Fuzz turned his head.
Fuzz was missing half his face. The entire left side was just gone. Not wounded, and there was no skeleton. The complete half smoked, trailing wisps of mist. Half his lips remained, and he smiled back at Kelsier, as if nothing were wrong.
“He stole a bit of my essence, distilled and pure,” Fuzz explained. “It can Invest a human, grant him or her Allomancy.”
“Your… face, Fuzz…”
“Ati thinks to finish me,” Fuzz said. “Indeed, his knife was placed long ago. I’m already dead.” He smiled again, a gruesome expression, then vanished.
Feeling wrung out, Kelsier slumped alongside the pool, lying on the stones – which actually felt a little like real stone, instead of the fluffy softness of everything else made of mist.
He hated this feeling of ignorance. Everyone else was in on some grand joke, and he was the butt. Kelsier stared up at the ceiling, bathed in the glow of the shimmering Well and its column of light. Eventually, he came to a quiet decision.
He would find the answers.
In the Pits of Hathsin, he had awakened to purpose and had determined to destroy the Lord Ruler. Well, he would awaken again. He stood up and stepped into the light, strengthened. The clash of these gods was important, that thing in the Well dangerous. There was more to all of this than he’d ever known, and because of that he had a reason to live.
Perhaps more importantly, he had a reason to stay sane.
2
Kelsier no longer worried about madness or boredom. Each time he grew weary of his imprisonment, he remembered that feeling – that humiliation – he’d felt at Drifter’s hands. Yes, he was trapped in a space only five or so feet across, but there was plenty to do.
First he returned to his study of the thing Beyond. He forced himself to duck beneath the light to face it and meet its inscrutable gaze – he did it until he didn’t flinch when it turned its attention on him.
Ruin. A fitting name for that vast sense of erosion, decay, and destruction.
He continued to follow the Well’s pulses. These trips gave him cryptic clues to Ruin’s motives and plots. He sensed a familiar pattern to the things it changed – for Ruin seemed to be doing what Kelsier himself had done: coopting a religion. Ruin was manipulating the hearts of the people by changing their lore and books.
That terrified Kelsier. His purpose expanded, as he watched the world through these pulses. He didn’t just need to understand, he needed to fight this thing. This horrible force that would end all things, if it could.
He struggled, therefore, with a desperation to understand what he saw. Why did Ruin transform the old Terris prophecies? What was the Drifter – whom Kelsier spotted in very rare pulses – doing up in the Terris Dominance? Who was this mysterious Mistborn to whom Ruin paid so much attention, and was he a threat to Vin?
When he rode the pulses, Kelsier watched for – craved – signs of the people he knew and loved. Ruin was keenly interested in Vin, and many of his pulses centered around watching her or the man she loved, that Elend Venture.
The mounting clues worried Kelsier. Armies around Luthadel. A city still in chaos. And – he hated to confront this one – it looked like the Venture boy was king. When Kelsier realized this, he was so angry he spent days away from the pulses.
They’d gone and put a nobleman in charge.
Yes, Kelsier had saved this man’s life. Against his better judgment, he’d rescued the man that Vin loved. Out of love for her, perhaps a twisted paternal sense of duty. The Venture boy hadn’t been too bad, compared to the rest of his kind. But to give him the throne? It seemed that even Dox was listening to Venture. Kelsier would have expected Breeze to ride whatever wind came his way, but Dockson?
Kelsier fumed, but he could not remain away for long. He hungered for these glimpses of his friends. Though each was only a brief flash – like a single image from eyes blinked open – he clung to them. They were reminders that outside his prison, life continued.
Occasionally he was given a glimpse of someone else. His brother, Marsh.
Marsh lived. That was a welcome discovery. Unfortunately, the discovery was tainted. For Marsh was an Inquisitor.