The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,147
then multiplying, changing, transforming. She saw through it all, everything in blue. There were no people or objects, just energy coalesced. The metals shone brilliantly, as if they were holes into someplace different. Concentrated essence, providing a pathway to power.
She was using the reserves with startling quickness. She slowed her speed, and for some reason the people beside her jumped, holding their ears. She cocked her head, then PUSHED.
The Push flung the guards a good fifty feet. That left her facing Suit and Telsin, who regarded her with horrified expressions. They were glowing energy to her, but she recognized them. They had spikes inside of them.
Convenient. Those spikes resisted Pushes, but not enough to bother Marasi now. She lifted a hand and flung both of them away by the very metals they’d used to pierce themselves.
All around, guards grabbed guns and turned on her. She swept them backward, then lifted herself off the ground, Pushing on the trace minerals in the stone beneath her.
She hung there, and was surprised to see something spinning around her. Mist? Where was it coming from?
Me, she realized.
She hovered in the sky, flush with power. In that moment, she was the Ascendant Warrior. She held the fullness of what Waxillium had barely tasted his whole life. She could be him, eclipse him. She could bring justice to entire peoples. Holding it all within her, having it and measuring it, she finally admitted the truth to herself.
This isn’t what I want.
She would not let her childhood dreams hold sway over her any longer. She smiled, then threw herself through the air in a Push toward the temple.
* * *
Steris watched her sister fly away.
“Unexpected,” she said. And here she assumed she’d been prepared for anything. Marasi starting to glow, throwing people around with Allomancy as if they were dolls, then streaking away and leaving a trail of mist … well, that hadn’t been on the list. It hadn’t even made the appendix.
She looked down at poor Allik, so cold he’d stopped shivering. “I shall have to enlarge my projections of what is plausible during activities such as this, don’t you think?”
He mumbled something in his language. “Foralate men!” He waved his hand in a gesture. “Forsalvin!”
“Telling me to flee without you?” Steris said, walking over and retrieving her notebook. “Yes, running while they are all confused would be wise, but I don’t plan to leave yet.” She opened the notebook, which she’d hollowed out with Wax’s knife in the rear of the skimmer, while Marasi was talking with Allik up front and the others slept. “Did you know that when I evaluated everyone’s usefulness on this expedition, I gave myself a seven out of a hundred? Not very high, yes, but I couldn’t reasonably give myself the lowest mark possible. I do have my uses.”
She turned the large notebook, showing an extra medallion from the skimmer’s emergency store settled protectively into the gouged-out section she’d made.
She smiled at Allik, pulled it free, and pressed it into his hand. He let out a long, relieved sigh, and the blown snow that had stuck to his face melted away.
Nearby, soldiers were regaining their feet and shouting to one another.
“And now,” Steris said, “I think your earlier suggestion has merit.”
* * *
“Now what?” Wax asked Harmony. “I fade off into nothing?”
“I don’t believe it’s nothing,” God said. “There is something beyond. Though perhaps my belief is merely my own desire wishing it to be so.”
“You are not encouraging me. Aren’t You omnipotent?”
“Hardly,” Harmony said, smiling. “But I believe that parts of me could be.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It won’t until I make it do so,” Harmony said, extending His hands to either side. “In answer to your question, however, you don’t fade just yet. Though soon. Right now, you make a choice.”
Wax looked from one of the deity’s hands to the other. “Does everyone get this choice?”
“Their choices are different.” He proffered His hands to Wax, as if offering them for him to take.
“I don’t see the choice.”
“My right hand,” Harmony said, “is freedom. You can feel it, I think.”
And he could. Soaring, released from all bonds, riding upon lines of blue light. Adventure into the unknown, seeking only the fulfillment of his own curiosity. It was glorious. It was what he’d always wanted, and its lure thrummed through him.
Freedom.
Wax gasped. “What … what is the other one?”
Harmony held up His left hand, and Wax heard something. A voice?