Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [875]
I attacked a koloss army on my own, he thought as he slogged through a patch of thigh-deep ash. I did it without Vin’s help, intent on defeating their Inquisitor by myself.
How had he thought to fight an Inquisitor on his own? Kelsier himself had only barely been able to defeat one of the things.
Vin has killed three now, he thought. We took them on together, but she was the one who killed each one.
He didn’t begrudge her the abilities she had, but he did feel occasional glimmers of envy. That amused him. It had never bothered him when he’d been an ordinary man, but now that he was Mistborn too, he found himself coveting her skill.
And even with her skill, she had been captured. Elend tromped along, feeling a weight he couldn’t shake. Everything just seemed wrong to him. Vin imprisoned, while he was free. Mist and ash suffocating the land. Elend, despite all his powers, was unable to do anything to protect the people—and the woman—he loved.
And that was the third reason that he walked ploddingly with his koloss, rather than returning immediately to his camp. He needed some time to think. Some time alone. Perhaps that was what had driven him to leave in the first place.
He’d known that their work was dangerous, but he’d never really thought that he might lose her. She was Vin. She always got out. She survived.
But what if, this time, she didn’t?
He’d always been the vulnerable one—the common person in a world of Mistborn and koloss. The scholar who couldn’t fight, who had to depend on Vin for protection. Even during the last year of fighting, she’d stayed close to him. If she’d been in danger, he’d been in danger, and there hadn’t really been time to think about what would happen if he survived and she didn’t.
He shook his head, pushing through the ash. He could have used koloss to force a trail for him. For the moment, however, he wanted to be apart even from them. So, he walked ahead, a lone figure in black on a field of solid ash backlit by a setting red sun.
The ashfalls were getting far worse. Before he’d left the village, he’d spent a day having his koloss clear the streets and rebuild some of the homes. Yet, with the rate at which the ash was falling, the mist and even the possibility of other wandering koloss were becoming secondary problems. The ash. It alone would kill them. Already, it buried trees and hills. It was up to his waist in places.
Perhaps if I’d stayed in Luthadel, he thought, working with my scholars, we could have discovered a way to stop this. . . .
No, that was foolish. What would they do? Plug the ashmounts? Find a way to wash all of the ash out into the sea? In the distance ahead of him through the evening mists, he could see a red glow in the sky, even though the sun set on the opposite horizon. He could only assume that the light to the east came from fire and lava rising out of the ashmounts.
What did he do about a dying sky, ash so thick he could barely move through it, and erupting volcanoes? So far, his way of dealing with these things had been to ignore them.
Or, rather, to let Vin worry about them.
That’s really what has me worried, he thought. Losing the woman I love is bad enough. But, losing the one I trusted to fix all this . . . that’s truly frightening.
It was an odd realization. The deep truth was, he really did trust Vin as more than a person. She was more like a force. Almost a god, even? It seemed silly, thinking about that directly. She was his wife. Even if he was a member of the Church of the Survivor, it felt wrong to worship her, to think her divine.
And he didn’t, not really. But he did trust her. Vin was a person of instinct, while Elend was one of logic and thought. Sometimes, it seemed she could do the impossible simply because she didn’t stop to think about how impossible it really was. If Elend came to a cliff, he stopped,