Across the seemingly infinite universe known to mankind as of yet, only Twilight contains life. It is as if Twilight contains a special quality; it is as if Twilight possesses a quality called "providence."

  What is providence, though? Is it a creator's grace, a god's blessing, or is it being the one possible in the infinite possibilities that has actually happened? Forgoing a foray into philosophy in general, one can say that twilight indeed has providence. It is because providence means divine guidance or care, and it can be said that in the hearts of men, there is this voice which can guide.

  The voice is not truly a voice, and it is not truly in one's heart. It is neither gentle nor firm, neither female nor male. It can be seen as a centre. In a way, it is the source of all arts and the fountain of knowledge. The nature of its existence is debated by those seeking the truth. It may exist internally, externally, or not truly exist at all, but the voice, or as I like to call it, the divine symphony, is real, for it can be experienced.

  In my belief, it is wrong to say it is twilight that has providence, for I think it is mankind that can bring about providence. I call the guiding symphony of souls divine only in the sense that, as flawed as it can be, it is almost perfect for the one listening.

  20000 years before the arcane era, Huma became one of the first to truly listen to the divine symphony. It was only a short time since a former age of ice, and at the time, mankind lived in hunter-gatherer societies.

  Huma was not called Huma before he birthed Hume. She was the cursed one, the one who couldn't conceive a child. In such circumstances, it was natural that the song she heard was a song of birth.

  At times, living in a cave with torchlights was a fog-laden experience. Smoke, shadows dancing on the cave walls, at times the sound of flutes, and the way the cave shaped the sound inside—it all made the cave itself a world for the spirits.

  It was on one such night that Huma entered a strange state, between wake and sleep. The edges of her vision were a little blurry. She was in a state that she felt strangely, almost forcefully, relaxed but also aware. Shadows began to feel like liquids changing form. A shadow began to look like a child, triggering a pain Huma could not name. The smoke rising from the fire began to weave and turn. In one moment, the dancing smoke appeared to look like children dancing. Faintly, Huma had the illusion that she could hear the boisterous sound of children.

  The next day, there was not much she remembered except one thing. In the final moment of her being conscious, she seemed to have exhaled deeply and had caught a glimpse of the breath of herself taking the shape of a child. Huma's heart beat rapidly in her chest each time she thought of that. The thought itself made her restless, and the thought did not leave her because each time she exhaled, she would be reminded.

  Huma was much more conscious of her breathing now. It was maddening. Sometimes she breathed slowly, at times fast, and because she was conscious of it, she herself would affect the rate of her breathing. It took some time, but for Huma, who treated the night before as a desperate hope and a revelation, there was a message she found in this torment. And so Huma was perhaps the first person to exercise breathing.

  It was surprisingly hard, but as days passed, Huma found a rhythm of breathing that was rather comforting, and the madness began to subside. It took much longer for it to settle and Huma's breathing to become a constant rhythm.

  Interestingly, Huma found she could produce a greater volume of mist when she exhaled. Huma had her own theory of how exhaling worked. The mist she exhaled came from her stomach, and the mist there was produced by her heart. The hazy revelation, making her restless, pushed her to play with breathing and the mist produced on exhaling, and soon Huma made art of breathing.

  One night, the shadow of her form, relentlessly practising breathing, began to intertwine with other shadows, forming a strange shape of a winged snake, and it appeared as if the winged being was her shadow. Huma had gone from the one who was cursed to the one who breathed fire, and this, of course, meant a change in her status within the tribe.

  Huma did like her change in the gathering, but she still hadn't conceived, and she was beginning to feel her heart becoming heavier. She felt it had something to do with her mist breathing. She felt her heart was turning to stone, and she felt a sense as if something was beginning to change.

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  Huma hadn't stopped trying to conceive, and she hadn't stopped her mist breath practice. She felt a greater and greater amount of mist in her stomach. As her stomach bulged and she produced milk, she knew her greater work was finished, for she had produced milk from the void. She could now produce from the world that those who went to, they would not name.

  Hume was different from other children. This was Huma's firm belief. He was a result of her great work and was born of mist in her stomach. Huma treated him very differently. The tribe too treated Hume differently; after all, it wasn't common that an infant produce milk from his or her breast. It was why he had a name and that it was not a name that would change as he grew up.

  Hume grew up with a mother who expected a lot from him. Making art of breathing and achieving mastery in it meant that Huma was very sensitive to the way people breathed. This quality had surprisingly managed to come to the tribe's aid several times. However, for Hume, who was growing up under such a mother, it would soon resemble a nightmare. Hume grew up conscious of the way he breathed, and at any moment, he had to maintain a steady rhythmic breath. Harsh as the conditions were with Huma as a master and the breathing art as an entry, Hume managed to reach a point where he felt the mist the way that his mother felt. Not just seeing it form when exhaling, but actually feeling it forming.

  It was the way the divine symphony manifested to the mistborns. Given the fact that Hume and his mother were the only people who sensed it, they became like the tribe's shamans. It also made them the only people who believed that the world had come from a formless mist.

  In sensing the mist, Hume had reached a bottleneck in his path. Huma had listened to the divine symphony and was guided to the truth; it didn't mean she was guided to the truth that was general to everyone. The path she had found could not be walked by a man, for how could a man produce milk?

  Truthfully, given what had happened when he was an infant, Hume had tried but had failed.

  As to why Hume would seek the milk of the void, it wasn't because of having a child; that was not what tempted him. The only reason Huma's great work of producing milk of the void mattered to him was that Huma had reached the truth.

  Hume was smart, but even he couldn't overcome the bottleneck of the physiological difference with what he had at the time. He thought hard about it. In the end, he decided, given his destined shaman role in the tribe, that he would learn to build totems from Red Hand. It is just that he didn't want to become like Red Hand either. The speed at which he became proficient in it was astonishing, but Hume was restless. To him who heard the divine symphony, his own great work mattered more, and it frustrated him to no end that he had no path forward to follow his mother's way.

  One night, suddenly, a clear picture appeared in his mind. It was very sudden, and it felt like it couldn't have possibly been his own mind that produced that image.

  It was of a figurine, a Venus figurine, as they came to call it. The figurine was of a pregnant woman. It had three holes: one in the place where the heart was located, one in the vagina, and one in the stomach. Restless as Hume was, he built the figurine quickly, but what to do with it? Only days later, when he learned what the tribe did to produce a child, did he understand. "Understood" was an exaggeration; however, he moved as if possessed.

  He ejaculated in the lower hole of the totem. He then grabbed the totem and moved circularly and saw the semen swirl, and then he ate the white liquid from the upper hole of the figurine.

  When Hume had done his rite, he felt what his mother had felt, his heart becoming heavier and becoming like stone.

  So Hume finished his great work and, as such, became a great shaman. Hume thus considered not the milk of the void but the heartstone, the goal of the misty way. Hume's contribution to the way of the mist was that in ritualising the use of semen and, after that, other bodily fluids, he managed to find strange cures for some ailments. The use of the Venus figurine led him to have the assumption that the human body had holes or apertures, which was a significant contribution to Mistborns.

  Him was the third one of the Mistborns. Him was a man who felt a sort of strange kinship with Hume. Him wasn't Him before what happened. Him learned how to breathe from Hume, but it did nothing for him. It was either Him was not suited to that art or that Hume's true mastery lay elsewhere.

  However, Him was a hunter and a lover of the misty air in the early morning hunts and the mist in rivers. One day, Him, a bit distracted, entered a misty mountain. He got lost. He eventually managed to return, but the tribe, assuming he had died, did not use his name. It was days after, and at first, only Hume started conversing with him again. This experience of being lost and living like a ghost and the intense isolation were what had driven Him to finally hear the divine symphony.

  The broken and the fragmented ones tend to hear the divine symphony, a thread that, if they follow it, would lead them to wholeness and meaning, but what kind of wholeness and what kind of meaning is the question.

  Lost, returning only to be ignored, Him had felt the mist. Being friends with Hume had helped him greatly because, though he did not know Hume's rituals and didn't have his totem, he had heard Hume's ramblings about apertures and maybe that the great work of mist could be done without rituals. Desperation of isolation and even believing he was a nameless one himself had driven him to breathe and guide the mist through the apertures. It was only when he had felt his heart becoming the heartstone that Hume had approached him.

  Ever since that time, whenever he went to a misty or foggy place, he would feel a strange feeling, and he would enter a trance. It was as if he wasn't present, and when he would come out of the place, he would be very confused and vulnerable, and yet he couldn't help but seek the feeling again and again. There was this idea in his mind of a being, a greater beast than the beasts he faced on the hunts. He actually was not strictly a hunter now and closer to a shaman in the tribe, but he still went to every hunt.

  One day, when his mind was wandering about, he found himself weaving his hands above the flame and guiding the smoke and feeling a dark thrill. He didn't know why, but it didn't stop him from soon learning how to guide smoke to create shapes and how to use smoke, mist, and fog as art. Him's contribution to the Mistborns came from this art and what would be called mist sorcery.

  One time when they faced a dangerous situation in a misty mountain. He had used this sorcery. He had moved branches, created smoke, and moved as if possessed. It perhaps was the first and last time Caligo would be cast, shaped like a great dragon. It was a great act of conjuration.

  Legend has it that the beasts avoided the tribe that day, and even to this day, animals fear anyone even touched by the mist.