Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [735]
She opened the book to the marked page and reread a particular paragraph. The Deepness must be destroyed, the words said. I have seen it, and I have felt it. This name we give it is too weak a word, I think. Yes, it is deep and unfathomable, but it is also terrible. Many do not realize that it is sentient, but I have sensed its mind, such as it is, the few times I have confronted it directly.
She eyed the page for a moment, sitting back on her bench. Beside her, the canal waters passed, covered with a froth of floating ash.
The book was Alendi’s logbook. It had been written a thousand years before by a man who had thought himself to be the Hero of Ages. Alendi hadn’t completed his quest; he had been killed by one of his servants—Rashek—who had then taken the power at the Well of Ascension and become the Lord Ruler.
Alendi’s story was frighteningly close to Vin’s own. She had also assumed herself to be the Hero of Ages. She had traveled to the Well, and had been betrayed. She, however, hadn’t been betrayed by one of her servants—but instead by the force imprisoned within the Well. That force was, she assumed, behind the prophecies about the Hero of Ages in the first place.
Why do I keep coming back to this paragraph? she thought, eyeing it again. Perhaps it was because of what Human had said to her—that the mists hated her. She had felt that hatred herself, and it appeared that Alendi had felt the same thing.
But, could she even trust the logbook’s words? The force she had released, the thing she called Ruin, had proven that it could change things in the world. Small things, yet important ones. Like the text of a book, which was why Elend’s officers were now instructed to send all messages via memorized words or letters etched into metal.
Regardless, if there had been any clues to be gained by reading the logbook, Ruin would have removed them long ago. Vin felt as if she’d been led by the nose for the last three years, pulled by invisible strings. She had thought she was having revelations and making great discoveries, but all she’d really been doing was following Ruin’s bidding.
Yet, Ruin is not omnipotent, Vin thought. If it were, there would have been no fight. It wouldn’t have needed to trick me into releasing it.
It cannot know my thoughts. . . .
Even that knowledge was frustrating. What good were her thoughts? Always before, she’d had Sazed, Elend, or TenSoon to talk with about problems like this. This wasn’t a task for Vin; she was no scholar. Yet, Sazed had turned his back on his studies, TenSoon had returned to his people, and Elend was far too busy lately to worry about anything but his army and its politics. That left Vin. And she still found reading and scholarship to be stuffy and boring.
Yet, she was also becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of doing what was necessary, even if she found it distasteful. She was no longer just her own person. She belonged to the New Empire. She had been its knife—now it was time to try a different role.
I have to do it, she thought, sitting in the red sunlight. There is a puzzle here—something to be solved. What was it Kelsier liked to say?
There’s always another secret.
She remembered Kelsier, standing boldly before a small group of thieves, proclaiming that they would overthrow the Lord Ruler and free the empire. We’re thieves, he’d said. And we’re extraordinarily good ones. We can rob the unrobbable and fool the unfoolable. We know how to take an incredibly large task and break it down to manageable pieces, then deal with each of those pieces.
That day, when he’d written up the team’s goals and plans on a small board, Vin had been amazed by how possible he had made an impossible task seem. That day, a little bit of her had begun to believe that Kelsier could overthrow the Final Empire.
All right, Vin thought. I’ll begin like Kelsier did, by listing the things that I know for certain.
There had