“TenSoon?” he asked as the kandra continued forward.

“Come along, human.”

“Is that…”

“Yes. Many people hid in the basements of Kredik Shaw, the Lord Ruler’s palace. Sazed moved that here, as he did with all other caverns of refuge.”

Wax couldn’t pull himself away, gaping at history—no, mythology—come alive. The Lord Ruler’s palace. Places where the Survivor and his followers had walked.

Rusts… the Well of Ascension itself would be in there.

“Human,” the kandra said, insistent. “There is something I wish for you to see. Come.”

Another time, Wax thought, turning from the entrance to lost Kredik Shaw and following TenSoon. “MeLaan said that the kandra don’t come down here often. Why not? Isn’t this your home?”

“It is a sacred place,” the wolfhound said. “Yes, it is home, but also a prison—and so much more. Under the Lord Ruler, we needed this place for freedom, to be ourselves. Outside, we were controlled, enslaved by men.”

Bitter, Wax thought. Even after hundreds of years, this creature was pained by the life it had led. Did he blame humankind? Did Bleeder?

“We come here,” TenSoon said, “when the mood strikes us. Usually we come alone, and infrequently. There are clubs up above where we can socialize now, being ourselves. Homes. Lives. The younger generations almost never visit this place. They prefer their lives as they are now, and don’t wish to remember the past. I suppose I’m the same, though for different reasons.”

Wax nodded, walking alongside the kandra as they penetrated ever deeper into the twisting tunnels of the Homeland. They passed many empty chambers, but some that held oddities, like two with old baskets and some discarded bones on the floor.

Wax had been in his fair share of tunnels out in the Roughs, but most of those had been some kind of man-made mine. These caverns were different. Those had smelled of dust and dirt, while this place somehow felt alive. Of water and fungus. Of patience.

The tunnels were knobby, yet smooth, like wax pooled beneath a long-burning candle. Holy ground. Everything else in the world, so far as he knew, had been completely remade during the Catacendre. But these caverns stretched back to eternity, as old as human memory. Older.

Eventually they reached a small chamber that didn’t seem quite as organic as the others. Had it been shaped, somehow, by kandra hands? TenSoon settled down on his haunches in the entrance to the room. Wax’s light glittered off the smooth, bulbous rock of the floor, which fell away into a series of pits. Perhaps three feet across, they looked like holes dug by prospectors foolishly hunting metals out in the Roughs.

Wax glanced at TenSoon.

“I passed by here on my way to meet with you,” the kandra said in his growling, half-human voice. “I smelled something wrong.”

Smelled something? Wax couldn’t catch any odd scents—but this whole place smelled strange to him. He stepped into the room, then noted something. One of the small pits was full. Were those sheets of paper?