Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [377]
It was the first real book she had ever owned, though it was just a collection of pages bound loosely at one side. That suited her just fine; the simple binding had made the book that much easier to pull apart.
She sat amid stacks of paper. It was amazing how many pages there were in the book, once she had separated them. Vin sat next to one pile, looking over its contents. She shook her head, then crawled over to another pile. She leafed through the pages, eventually selecting one.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m going mad, the words read.
Perhaps it is due to the pressure of knowing that I must somehow bear the burden of an entire world. Perhaps it is caused by the death I have seen, the friends I have lost. The friends I have been forced to kill.
Either way, I sometimes see shadows following me. Dark creatures that I don’t understand, nor do I wish to understand. They are, perhaps, some figment of my overtaxed mind?
Vin sat for a moment, rereading the paragraphs. Then she moved the sheet over to another pile. OreSeur lay on the side of the room, head on paws, eyeing her. “Mistress,” he said as she set down the page, “I have been watching you work for the last two hours, and will admit that I am thoroughly confused. What is the point of all this?”
Vin crawled over to another stack of pages. “I thought you didn’t care how I spent my time.”
“I don’t,” OreSeur said. “But I do get bored.”
“And annoyed, apparently.”
“I like to understand what is going on around me.”
Vin shrugged, gesturing toward the stacks of paper. “This is the Lord Ruler’s logbook. Well, actually, it’s not the logbook of the Lord Ruler we knew, but the logbook of the man who should have been the Lord Ruler.”
“Should have been?” OreSeur asked. “You mean he should have conquered the world, but didn’t?”
“No,” Vin said. “I mean he should have been the one who took the power at the Well of Ascension. This man, the man who wrote this book—we don’t actually know his name—was some kind of prophesied hero. Or…everyone thought he was. Anyway, the man who became the Lord Ruler—Rashek—was this hero’s packman. Don’t you remember us talking about this, back when you were imitating Renoux?”
OreSeur nodded. “I recall you briefly mentioning it.”
“Well, this is the book Kelsier and I found when we infiltrated the Lord Ruler’s palace. We thought it was written by the Lord Ruler, but it turns out it was written by the man the Lord Ruler killed, the man whose place he took.”
“Yes, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “Now, why exactly are you tearing it to pieces?”
“I’m not,” Vin said. “I just took off the binding so I could move the pages around. It helps me think.”
“I…see,” OreSeur said. “And, what exactly are you looking for? The Lord Ruler is dead, Mistress. Last I checked, you killed him.”
What am I looking for? Vin thought, picking up another page. Ghosts in the mist.
She read the words on this page slowly.
It isn’t a shadow.
This dark thing that follows me, the thing that only I can see—it isn’t really a shadow. It is blackish and translucent, but it doesn’t have a shadowlike solid outline. It’s insubstantial—wispy and formless. Like it’s made out of black fog.
Or mist, perhaps.
Vin lowered the page. It watched him, too, she thought. She remembered reading the words over a year before, thinking that the Hero must have started to go mad. With all the pressures on him, who would have been surprised?
Now, however, she thought she understood the nameless logbook author better. She knew he was not the Lord Ruler, and could see him for what he might have been. Uncertain of his place in the world, but forced into important events. Determined to do the best he could. Idealistic, in a way.
And the mist spirit had chased him. What did it mean? What did seeing it imply for her?
She crawled over to another pile of pages. She’d spent the morning scanning through the logbook for clues about the mist creature.