Kelsier turned. Fuzz visited infrequently these days, but when he did come, he always did it unannounced. If he spoke, he often only raved like a madman.

“Someone was just here,” Kelsier said. “A man with white hair. He somehow used this Well to pass from the world of the dead to the world of the living.”

“I see,” Fuzz said softly. “He dared that, did he? Dangerous, with Ruin straining against his bonds. But if anyone were going to try something so foolhardy, it would be Cephandrius.”

“He stole something, I think,” Kelsier said. “From the other side of the room. A bit of metal.”

“Aaah…” Fuzz said softly. “I had thought that when he rejected the rest of us, he would stop interfering. I should know better than to trust an implication from him. Half the time you can’t trust his outright promises.…”

“Who is he?” Kelsier asked.

“An old friend. And no, before you ask, you can’t do as he did and transition between Realms. Your ties to the Physical Realm have been severed. You’re a kite with no string connecting it to the ground. You cannot ride the perpendicularity across.”

Kelsier sighed. “Then why was he able to come to the world of the dead?”

“It’s not the world of the dead. It’s the world of the mind. Men—all things, truly—are like a ray of light. The floor is the Physical Realm, where that light pools. The sun is the Spiritual Realm, where it begins. This Realm, the Cognitive Realm, is the space between where that beam stretches.”

The metaphor barely made any sense to him. They all know so much, Kelsier thought, and I know so little.

Still, at least Fuzz was sounding better today. Kelsier smiled toward the god, then froze as Fuzz turned his head.

Fuzz was missing half his face. The entire left side was just gone. Not wounded, and there was no skeleton. The complete half smoked, trailing wisps of mist. Half his lips remained, and he smiled back at Kelsier, as if nothing were wrong.

“He stole a bit of my essence, distilled and pure,” Fuzz explained. “It can Invest a human, grant him or her Allomancy.”

“Your … face, Fuzz…”

“Ati thinks to finish me,” Fuzz said. “Indeed, his knife was placed long ago. I’m already dead.” He smiled again, a gruesome expression, then vanished.

Feeling wrung out, Kelsier slumped alongside the pool, lying on the stones—which actually felt a little like real stone, instead of the fluffy softness of everything else made of mist.

He hated this feeling of ignorance. Everyone else was in on some grand joke, and he was the butt. Kelsier stared up at the ceiling, bathed in the glow of the shimmering Well and its column of light. Eventually, he came to a quiet decision.

He would find the answers.