[quote]After a few shoves, the lid gave in enough for him to peer outside, everything was in ruins. it seemed as if he was in the bottom of a enormous crater, lit by last remains of light as the day gave way to the moon, trees on the top of the crater, pillars, half broken statues and the remains of machines that have not worked for very long cast ominous shadows upon the field of rubble in the bottom.[/quote]

The sinking sun cast red shadows on the twisted wreckage and mangled roots. Water trickled from a broken pipe and splashed into a pond far below. A breeze hushed through the leaves high above. Someone was singing.

Someone else called out from the rubble below.

[quote]"Who's there? You aren't one of those Gods are you? I don't want to go another round with the who's going to get my soul game."[/quote]

Not far above Vin's empty coffin -- clinging to a broken catwalk -- stood a thin, pale girl in a dirty white dress. She had been staring down at Vin, watching as he emerged from his own grave, when the call from farther below drew her attention. She stopped singing, and she stared down at Rain and the half-repaired elevator. Her voice wasn't strong enough to call back.

Instead, she crouched on her perch, and she leaned as far toward Vin as possible, holding tightly to the railing. She was still more than ten feet above him.

"How do I get down?" she asked him, her voice quiet and frightened. She spoke in a thick, lilting dialect that suggested English wasn't her first language. "The gods will come back."

Down among the gears and broken pipes, the metal-man finished reattaching a part of the elevator cord and turned his soulless eyes toward the scene across the chasm, where the singing had just stopped. He crouched atop the elevator and tilted his head.

"That's Nor. The girl. The godkeeper. A snare like me, not a god but gods are afraid. Of her, not of me. I'm just Soul." He lifted his face to the sky, where the remains of Lha-tak's storms scudded calmly across the sky as dark dissipating clouds. "It's getting dark."