Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [884]
But Kelsier had years to plan, Vin thought. I . . . I don’t even know how long I have. Not long, I would guess. Even as she thought, another earthquake began. The walls trembled, and Vin heard guards cursing in the hallway as something fell and broke. And Ruin . . . he seemed to be in a state of bliss, his eyes closed, mouth open slightly and looking pleasured as the building and city rumbled.
Eventually, all fell still. Ruin opened his eyes, staring her down. “This work I do, it’s about passion, Vin. It’s about dynamic events; it’s about change! That is why you and your Elend are so important to me. People with passion are people who will destroy—for a man’s passion is not true until he proves how much he’s willing to sacrifice for it. Will he kill? Will he go to war? Will he break and discard that which he has, all in the name of what he needs?”
It’s not just that Ruin feels that he’s accomplished something, Vin thought, he feels that he’s overcome. Despite what he claims, he feels that he’s won—that he’s defeated something . . . but who or what? Us? We would be no adversary for a force like Ruin.
A voice from the past seemed to whisper to her from long ago. What’s the first rule of Allomancy, Vin?
Consequence. Action and reaction. If Ruin had power to destroy, then there was something that opposed him. It had to be. Ruin had an opposite, an opponent. Or, he once had.
“What did you do to him?” Vin asked.
Ruin hesitated, frowning as he turned toward her.
“Your opposite,” Vin said. “The one who once stopped you from destroying the world.”
Ruin was silent for a long moment. Then he smiled, and Vin saw something chilling in that smile. A knowledge that he was right. Vin was part of him. She understood him.
“Preservation is dead,” Ruin said.
“You killed him?”
Ruin shrugged. “Yes, but no. He gave of himself to craft a cage. Though his throes of agony have lasted several thousand years, now, finally, he is gone. And the bargain has come to its fruition.”
Preservation, Vin thought, a piece of a gigantic whole clicking into place. The opposite of Ruin. A force like that couldn’t have destroyed his enemy, because he would represent the opposite of destruction. But imprisonment, that would be within his powers.
Imprisonment that ended when I gave up the power at the Well.
“And so you see the inevitability,” Ruin said softly.
“You couldn’t create it yourself, could you?” Vin asked. “The world, life. You can’t create, you can only destroy.”
“He couldn’t create either,” Ruin said. “He could only preserve. Preservation is not creation.”
“And so you worked together,” Vin said.
“Both with a promise,” Ruin said. “My promise was to work with him to create you—life that thinks, life that loves.”
“And his promise?” Vin asked, fearing that she knew the answer.
“That I could destroy you eventually,” Ruin said softly. “And I have come to claim what was promised me. The only point in creating something is to watch it die. Like a story that must come to a climax, what I have done will not be fulfilled until the end has arrived.”
It can’t be true, Vin thought. Preservation. If he really represents a power in the universe, then he couldn’t really have been destroyed, could he?
“I know what you are thinking,” Ruin said. “You cannot enlist Preservation’s power. He is dead. He couldn’t kill me, you see. He could only imprison me.”
Yes. I figured that last part out already. You really can’t read my mind, can you?
Ruin continued. “It was a villainous act, I must say. Preservation tried to escape our bargain. Would you not call that an evil deed? It is as I said before—good and evil have little to do with ruin or preservation. An evil man will protect that which he desires as surely as a good man.”
But something is keeping Ruin from destroying the world now, she thought. For all his words about stories and endings, he is not a force that would wait for an “appropriate