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Venture frowned, black ash dusting his shoulders. “You’re not doomed. You have something they don’t—something very important.” “What’s that?” Venture met his eyes. “You have me.”
Vin was not fury. She was not terror. She had grown beyond those things.
“You were always the best of us, Sazed,” he said quietly. “Because you believed in something.”
Vin had a tendency to be paranoid and assume the worst. Of course, she also had a habit of being right.
“What kind of monsters are we?” Fatren asked in a hushed tone. “The kind we have to be,” Elend said.
During those first few weeks, Spook had flared his metals as almost a penance—he’d wanted to feel everything around him, take it all in, even though it was painful. Perhaps because it was painful.
“There has to be a balance, Vin,” he said. “Somehow we’ll find it. The balance between who we wish to be and who we need to be.” He sighed. “But for now,” he said, looking to the canal, “we have to be satisfied with who we are.”
“A man is what he has passion about,” Breeze said. “I’ve found that if you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you’ll just end up miserable.”
“Faith,” Spook said, “means that it doesn’t matter what happens. You can trust that somebody is watching. Trust that somebody will make it all right.”
That’s a lie, he thought, forming a fist. Why do I lie to myself? I still care. I never stopped caring. If I’d stopped caring, then I wouldn’t still be searching. If I didn’t care so much, then being betrayed wouldn’t feel so painful.
Belief … He remembered a voice from the past. His own voice, speaking to Vin on that terrible day after Kelsier’s death. Belief isn’t simply a thing for fair times and bright days, I think. What is belief—what is faith—if you don’t continue in it after failure?
She understood him, as he understood her. It was an understanding that required love. And she suspected that was something that Ruin would never be able to comprehend.
“It sounds to me, young one,” Haddek said, “that you’re searching for something that cannot be found.” “The truth?” Sazed said. “No,” Haddek replied. “A religion that requires no faith of its believers.”
They were of Preservation all along.
I can’t decide if you’re a fool, Vin thought toward it, or if you simply exist in a way that makes you incapable of considering some things.
She didn’t see death; she saw life. She saw faith.
We create things to watch them grow, Ruin, she said. To take pleasure in seeing that which we love become more than it was before. You said that you were invincible—that all things break apart. All things are Ruined. But there are things that fight against you—and the ironic part is, you can’t even understand those things. Love. Life. Growth. The life of a person is more than the chaos of its passing.
At the center of the flowers, he found two people. Vin lay wearing her customary mistcloak, shirt, and trousers. Elend was in a brilliant white uniform, complete with cape. They were holding hands as they lay amid the flowers. And they were both dead.
