The Obelisk Gate

14 you’re invited!

SIX MONTHS PASS IN THE undifferentiated white light of an ancient magic-fueled survival shelter. After the first few days you start wrapping cloth around your eyes when you’re tired, to create your own day and night. It works passably.

Tonkee’s arm survives the reattachment, though she gets a bad infection at one point, which Lerna’s basic antibiotics seem powerless to stop. She lives, though by the time the fever and livid infection lines have faded, her fingers have lost some of their fine movement and she gets phantom tinglings and numbness throughout the limb. Lerna thinks this will be permanent. Tonkee mutters imprecations about it sometimes, whenever you track her down in the middle of core sampling or whatever she’s doing and force her to go meet with the Innovator caste head. Whenever she gets too free with the “arm-chopper” insults, you remind her first that unleashing a piece of the Evil Earth to crawl through her flesh was her own damned fault, and second that you’re the only reason Ykka hasn’t had her killed yet, so maybe she should consider shutting up. She does, but she’s still an ass about it. Nothing ever really changes in the Stillness.

And yet… sometimes things do.

Lerna forgives you for being a monster. That’s not exactly it. You and he still can’t talk about Tirimo easily. Still, he heard your raging fight with Ykka all through the surgery that he performed on Tonkee’s arm, and that means something to him. Ykka wanted Tonkee left to die on the table. You argued for her life, and won. Lerna knows now that there’s more to you than death. You’re not sure you agree with that assessment, but it’s a relief to have something of your old friendship back.

Hjarka starts courting Tonkee. Tonkee doesn’t react well at first. She’s mostly just confused when gifts of dead animals and books start appearing in the apartment, brought by with a too-casual, “In case that big brain of hers needs something to chew on,” and a wink. You’re the one who has to explain to Tonkee that Hjarka’s decided, through whatever convoluted set of values the big woman holds dear, that an ex-commless geomest with the social skills of a rock represents the pinnacle of desirability. Then Tonkee is mostly annoyed, complaining about “distractions” and “the vagaries of the ephemeral” and the need to “decenter the flesh.” You mostly ignore all of it.

It’s the books that settle the issue. Hjarka seems to pick them by the number of many-syllabled words on their spines, but you come home a few times to find Tonkee engrossed in them. Eventually you come home to find Tonkee’s room curtain drawn and Tonkee engrossed in Hjarka, or so the sounds from beyond would suggest. You didn’t think they could do that much with her bum arm. Huh.

Perhaps it is this new sense of connection to Castrima that causes Tonkee to begin trying to prove her worth to Ykka. (Or maybe it’s just pride; Tonkee bristles so when Ykka once says that Tonkee isn’t as useful to the comm as its hardest-working Strongback.) Whatever the reason, Tonkee brings the council a new predictive model that she’s worked out: Unless Castrima finds a stable source of animal protein, some comm members will start showing deprivation symptoms within a year. “It’ll start with the meat stupids,” she tells all of you. “Forgetfulness, tiredness, little things like that. But it’s a kind of anemia. If it goes on, the result is dementia and nerve damage. You can figure out the rest.”

There are too many lorist tales of what can happen to a comm without meat. It will make people weak and paranoid, the community becoming vulnerable to attack. The only choice that will prevent this outcome, Tonkee explains, is cannibalism. Planting more beans just isn’t enough.

The report is useful information, but nobody really wanted to hear it, and Ykka doesn’t like Tonkee any better for sharing it. You thank Tonkee after the meeting, since no one else did. Her lower jaw juts out a bit as she replies, “Well, I won’t be able to continue my studies if we all start killing and eating each other, so.”

You shunt the orogene children’s lessons to Temell, another adult orogene in the comm. The children complain that he’s not very good—none of your finesse, and while he goes easier on them, they’re not learning as much. (It’s nice to be appreciated, if after the fact.) You do start training Cutter as an alternative, after he asks you to show him how you cut off Tonkee’s arm. You doubt he’ll ever perceive magic or move obelisks, but he’s at least first-ring level, and you want to see if you can make him a two- or three-ringer. Just because. Apparently higher-level teaching doesn’t interfere with what you’re learning from Alabaster—or at least, ’Baster doesn’t complain about it. You’ll take it. You’ve missed teaching.

(You offer an exchange of techniques to Ykka, since she shows no interest in lessons. You want to know how she does the things she does. “Nope,” she says, winking at you in a way that’s not really teasing. “Gotta keep some tricks up my sleeve so you won’t ice me someday.”)

An all-volunteer trading party goes north to try to reach the comm of Tettehee. They do not return. Ykka nixes all future attempts, and you do not protest this. One of your former orogeny students was with the missing party.

Aside from the food supply issue, however, Castrima thrives in those six months. One woman gets pregnant without permission, which is a big problem. Babies contribute nothing useful to a comm for years, and no comm can tolerate many useless people during a Season. Ykka decides that the woman’s household of two married couples will not receive an increased share until someone elderly or infirm dies to clear the way for the unauthorized baby. You get into another fight with Ykka about that, because you know full well she meant Alabaster when she offhandedly added, “Shouldn’t be long,” to the woman. Ykka’s unapologetic: She did mean Alabaster and she hopes he dies soon, because at least a baby has future value.

Two good outcomes result from that fracas: Everyone trusts you more after seeing you shout at the top of your lungs in the middle of Flat Top without causing so much as a tremor, and the Breeders decide to speak up for the new baby in order to settle the dispute. Based on the favorable recent genealogy, they contribute one of their child-allocations to the family, though with the stipulation that it will have to join their use-caste if it is born perfect. That’s not so terrible a price to pay, they say, spending one’s reproductive years cranking out children for comm and caste, in exchange for the right to be born. The mother agrees.

Ykka hasn’t shared the protein situation with the comm, of course, or the Breeders wouldn’t be speaking up for anyone. (Tonkee figured it out on her own, naturally.) Ykka doesn’t want to tell anyone, either, until it’s clear there’s no hope of an alternate solution to the problem. You and the other council members agree reluctantly. There’s still a year left. But because of Ykka’s silence, a male Breeder visits you a few days after you bring Tonkee home to finish recuperating. The Breeder is an ashblow-haired, strong-shouldered, sloe-eyed thing, and he’s very interested to know that you’ve borne three healthy children, all powerful orogenes. He flatters you by talking about how tall and strong you are, how well you weathered months on the road with only travel rations to eat, and hinting that you’re “only” forty-three. This actually makes you laugh. You feel as old as the world, and this pretty fool thinks you’re ready to crank out another baby.

You turn down his tacit offer with a smile, but it’s… strange, having that conversation with him. Unpleasantly familiar. When the Breeder is gone, you think of Corundum and wake Tonkee by throwing a cup at the wall and screaming at the top of your lungs. Then you go to see Alabaster for another lesson, which is utterly useless because you spend it standing before him and trembling in utter, rage-filled silence. After five minutes of this, he wearily says, “Whatever the rust is wrong with you, you’re going to have to deal with it yourself. I can’t stop you anymore.”

You hate him for no longer being invincible. And for not hating you.

Alabaster suffers another bad infection during these six months. He survives it only by deliberately stoning what’s left of his legs. This self-induced surgery so stresses his body that his few bouts of lucid time shrink to a half hour apiece, interspersed with long stretches of stupor or fitful sleeping. He’s so weak when he’s awake that you have to strain to hear him, though thankfully this improves over the course of a few weeks. You’re making progress, connecting easily now to the newly arrived topaz and beginning to understand what he did to transform the spinel into the knifelike weapon he keeps nearby. (The obelisks are conduits. You flow through them, flow with them, as the magic flows. Resist and die, but resonate finely enough and many things become possible.)

That’s a far cry from chaining together multiple obelisks, though, and you know you’re not learning fast enough. Alabaster doesn’t have the strength to curse you for your cloddish pace, but he doesn’t have to. Watching him shrivel daily is what drives you to push at the obelisk again and again, plunging yourself into its watery light even when your head hurts and your stomach lurches and you want nothing more than to go curl up somewhere and cry. It hurts too much to look at him, so you mop yourself up and try that much harder to become him.

One good thing about all this: You’ve got a purpose now. Congratulations.

You cry on Lerna’s shoulder once. He rubs your back and suggests delicately that you don’t have to be alone in your grief. It’s a proposition, but one made in kindness rather than passion, so you don’t feel guilty about ignoring it. For now.

Thus do things reach a kind of equilibrium. It’s neither a time of rest, nor of struggle. You survive. In a Season, in this Season, that is itself a triumph.

And then Hoa returns.

It happens on a day of sorrows and lace. The sorrow is because more Hunters have died. In the middle of bringing back a rare hunting kill—a bear that was visibly too thin to safely hibernate, easy to shoot in its desperate aggression—the party was attacked in turn. Three Hunters died in a barrage of arrows and crossbow bolts. The two surviving Hunters did not see their assailants; the projectiles seemed to come from all directions. They wisely ran, though they circled back an hour later in hopes of recovering their fallen comrades’ bodies and the precious carcass. Amazingly, everything had been left unmolested by either assailants or scavengers—but left behind with the fallen was an object: a planted stick, around which someone tied a strip of ragged, dirty cloth. It was secured with a thick knot, something caught in its fraying loops.

You come into Ykka’s meeting room just as she begins to cut open the knot, even as Cutter stands over her and says in a tight voice, “This is completely unsafe, you have no idea—”

“I don’t care,” Ykka murmurs, concentrating on the knot. She’s being very careful, avoiding the thickest part of the knot, which clearly contains something; you can’t tell what, but it’s lumpy and seems light. The room is more crowded than usual because one of the Hunters is here, too, grimy with ash and blood and visibly determined to know what her companions died for. Ykka glances up in acknowledgment as you arrive, but then resumes work. She says, “Something blows up in my face, Cuts, you’re the new headman.”

That flusters and shuts Cutter up enough that she’s able to finish the knot undistracted. The loops and strands of once-white cloth are lace, and if you don’t miss your guess, it was of a quality that would once have made your grandmother lament her poverty. When the strands snap apart, what sits amid them is a small balled-up scrap of leather hide. It’s a note.

WELCOME TO RENNANIS, it reads in charcoal.

Hjarka curses. You sit down on a divan, because it’s better than the floor and you need to sit somewhere. Cutter looks disbelieving. “Rennanis is Equatorial,” he says. And therefore it should be gone; same reaction you had when Alabaster told you.

“May not be Rennanis proper,” Ykka says. She’s still examining the scrap of leather, turning it over, scraping at the charcoal with the edge of the knife as if to test its authenticity. “A band of survivors from that city, commless now and little better than bandits, naming themselves after home. Or maybe just Equatorial wannabes, taking the chance to claim something they couldn’t before the actual city got torched.”

“Doesn’t matter,” snaps Hjarka. “This is a threat, whoever it’s coming from. What are we going to do about it?”

They devolve into speculations and argument, all with a rising edge of panic. Without really planning to, you lean back against the wall of Ykka’s meeting room. Against the wall of the crystal that her apartment inhabits. Against the rind of the geode, in which the crystal shaft is rooted. It is not an obelisk. Not even the flickering portions of crystal in the control room feel of power as they should; even if they are in an obelisk-like state of unreality, that is the only point of similarity they share with real obelisks.

But you’ve also remembered something that Alabaster told you a long time ago, on a garnet-hued afternoon in a seaside comm that is now smoldering ruins. Alabaster murmuring of conspiracies, watchers, nowhere was safe. You’re saying someone could hear us through the walls? Through the stone itself? you remember asking him. Once upon a time, you thought the things he did were just miracles.

And now you’re a nine-ringer, Alabaster says. Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic. Castrima exists amid ancient sedimentary rock laced through with veins of long-dead forests turned to crumbly coal, all of it balanced precariously over a crisscross of ancient fault-scars that have all but healed. The geode has been here long enough, however awkwardly jammed amid the strata, that its outermost layers are thoroughly fused with local minerals. This makes it easy for you to push your awareness beyond Castrima in a fine, gradually attenuating extrusion. This is not the same thing as extending your torus; a torus is your power, this is you. It’s harder. You can sense what your power cannot, though, and—

“Hey, wake up,” Hjarka says, shoving you in the shoulder, and you snap back to glare at her.

Ykka groans. “Remind me, Hjar, to someday tell you what usually happens when someone interrupts high-level orogeny. I mean, you can probably guess, but remind me to describe it in gory detail, so that maybe it can have some actual deterrent value.”

“She was just sitting there.” Hjarka sits back, looking disgruntled. “And the rest of you were just looking at her.”

“I was trying to hear the north,” you snap. They all look at you like you’re crazy. Evil Earth, if only someone else here were Fulcrum-trained. Though this isn’t something anyone but a senior would understand, anyway.

Lerna ventures, “Hear… the earth? Do you mean sess?”

It’s so hard to explain with words. You rub your eyes. “No, I mean hear. Vibrations. All sound is vibrations, I mean, but…” Their expressions grow more confused. You’re going to have to contextualize. “The node network is still there,” you say. “Alabaster was right. I can sess it if I try, a zone of stillness where the rest of the Equatorials are a seething disaster. Someone is keeping them, the node maintainers around Rennanis, alive, so—”

“So this is really them,” Cutter says, sounding troubled. “An Equatorial city really has decided to induct us.”

“Equatorials don’t induct,” Ykka says. Her jaw is tight as she speaks, gazing at the scrap of leather in her hand. “They’re Old Sanze, or what’s left of it. When Sanze wanted something back in the day, Sanze took it.”

After a tense silence, they start quietly panicking again. Too many words. You sigh and rub your temples and wish you were alone so you could try again. Or…

You blink. Or. You sess the hovering potentiality of the topaz, which drifts in the sky above Castrima-over, where it has been for the past six months, half-hidden amid the ash clouds. Evil Earth. Alabaster isn’t just sessing half the continent; he’s using the spinel to do it. You haven’t even thought about using an obelisk to extend your reach, but he does it like breathing.

“No one touch me,” you say softly. “No one speak to me.” Without waiting to see if they understand, you plunge into the obelisk.

(Because, well, some part of you wants to do this. Has dreamt of upward-falling water and torrential power for months. You are only human, whatever they say about your kind. It’s good to feel powerful.)

Then you’re in the topaz and through it and stretching yourself across the world in a breath. No need to be in the ground when the topaz is in air, is the air; it exists in states of being that transcend solidity, and thus you are capable of transcending, too; you become air. You drift amid the ash clouds and see the Stillness track beneath you in humps of topography and patches of dying forest and threads of roads, all of it grayed over after the long months of the Season. The continent seems tiny and you think, I can make the equator in the blink of an eye, but this thought scares you a little. You don’t know why. You try not to think—how far of a leap is it from thrilling in such power to using it to destroy the world? (Did Alabaster feel this, when he…?) But you are committed; you have connected; the resonance is complete. You launch yourself northward anyhow.

And then you stutter to a halt. Because there is something much closer than the equator that draws your attention. It is so shocking that you fall out of alignment with the topaz at once, and you are very lucky. There is a struck-glass instant in which you feel the shivering immensity of the obelisk’s power and know that you survive only because of fortunate resonances and careful long-dead designers who obviously planned for mistakes like yours, and then you are gasping and back within yourself and babbling before you quite remember what words mean.

“Camp, fire,” you say, panting a little. Lerna comes over and crouches in front of you, taking your hands and checking your pulse; you ignore him. This is important. “Basin.”

Ykka gets it instantly, sitting up straight and tightening her jaw. Hjarka, too; she’s not stupid, or Tonkee would never put up with her. She curses. Lerna frowns, and Cutter looks at all of you in rising confusion. “Did that actually mean something?”

Asshole. “An army,” you snap as you recover. But words are hard. “Th-there’s a… a rusting army. In the forest basin. I could. Sess their campfires.”

“How many?” Ykka is already getting up, fetching a longknife from a shelf and belting it round her thigh. Hjarka gets up, too, going to the door of Ykka’s apartment and pulling open the curtain. You hear her shouting for Esni, the head of the Strongbacks. The Strongbacks sometimes do scouting and supplement the Hunters, but in a situation like this, they are charged primarily with the comm’s defense.

You couldn’t count all the little blots of heat that pinged on your awareness when you were in the obelisk, but you try to guess. “Maybe a hundred?” That was the campfires, though. How many people around each fire? You guess six or seven apiece. Not a large force, under ordinary circumstances. Any decent quartent governor could field an army ten times that size on relatively short notice. During a Season, though, and for a comm as small as Castrima—whose total population is not much larger—an army of five or six hundred is a dire threat indeed.

“Tettehee,” Cutter breathes, sitting back. He’s gone paler than usual. You follow him, though. Six months ago, the stand of impaled corpses set up as a warn-off in the forest basin. The comm of Tettehee is beyond the basin, near the mouth of the river that wends through Castrima’s territory and ultimately empties into one of the great lakes of the Somidlats. You’ve heard nothing from Tettehee in months, and the trading party you sent past the warn-off failed to return. This army must have hit Tettehee around that time, then bunkered down there for a while, sending out scouting parties to mark territory. Replenishing stores, rebuilding arms, healing their wounded, maybe sending some of their spoils back north to Rennanis. Now that they’ve digested Tettehee, they’re on the march again.

And somehow, they know Castrima’s here. They’re saying hello.

Ykka heads outside and shouts alongside Hjarka, and within a few minutes someone is ringing the shake alarm and shouting for a gathering of the household heads at the Flat Top. You’ve never heard Castrima’s shake alarm—comm full of roggas—and it’s more annoying than you expected, low and rhythmic and buzzy. You understand why: Amid a bunch of crystalline structures, ringing bells aren’t the best idea. Still. You and Lerna and the rest follow Ykka as she strides along a rope bridge and around two larger shafts, her lips pressed together and face grim. By the time she reaches the Flat Top there’s a small crowd already there; by the time she yells for someone to stop blowing the rusting alarm and the alarm actually stops, the sheared-off crystal is starting to look dangerously packed with murmuring, anxious people. There’s a railing, but still. Hjarka shouts at Esni, and Esni in turn shouts at the Strongbacks amid the gathering, and they move clumsily to turn people away so there won’t be any horrible tragedies distracting from the possible horrible tragedy that looms imminent.

When Ykka raises her hands for attention, everyone falls silent instantly. “The situation,” she begins, and lays everything out in a few terse sentences.

You respect her for holding nothing back. You respect the people of Castrima, too, for doing nothing more than gasping or murmuring in alarm, and not panicking. But then, they are all good stolid commfolk, and panic has always been frowned upon in the Stillness. The lorists’ tales are full of dire warnings about those who cannot master their fear, and few comms will grant such people comm names unless they’re wealthy or influential enough to push the issue. Those things tend to sort themselves out once a Season rolls around.

“Rennanis was a big city,” says one woman, once Ykka’s stopped talking. “Half the size of Yumenes but still millions of people. Can we fight that?”

“It’s a Season,” Hjarka says, before Ykka can reply. Ykka shoots her a dirty look, but Hjarka shrugs it off. “We have no choice.”

“We can fight because of the way Castrima’s built,” Ykka adds, throwing Hjarka one last quelling look. “They can’t exactly come at us from the rear. If push comes to shove, we can block off the tunnels; then nothing can get down here. We can wait them out.”

Not forever, though. Not when the comm needs both hunting and trading to supplement its storecaches and water gardens. You respect Ykka for not saying this. There’s a somewhat relieved stir.

“Do we have time to send a messenger south to one of our allied comms?” Lerna asks. You can feel him trying to skirt around the supply issue. “Would any of them be willing to help us?”

Ykka snorts at the last question. Lots of other people do, a few throwing pitying looks Lerna’s way. It’s a Season. But—“Trading’s a maybe. We could load up on critical supplies, medicines, and be more ready if there’s a siege. The forest basin takes days to get across with a small party; a big group will take a couple of weeks, maybe. Faster if they force-march it, but that’s stupid and dangerous on terrain they don’t know. We know their scouts are in our territory, but…” She glances at you. “How close are the rest of them?”

You’re caught off guard, but you know what she wants. “The bulk of them were near the impaling.” That’s about halfway across the forest basin.

“They could be here in days,” says someone, voice high-pitched with alarm, and many other people take up that murmur. They start getting louder. Ykka raises her hands again, but this time only some of the assembled people go quiet; the rest keep speculating, calculating, and you catch sight of a few people breaking for the bridges, clearly intent upon making their own plans, Ykka be damned. It’s not chaos, not quite panic, but there’s enough fear in the air to scent it faintly bitter. You get up, intending to move to the center of the gathering with Ykka, to try to add your voice to hers in calling for calm.

But you stop. Because someone is standing in the place you intended to move to.

It’s not like with Antimony, or Ruby Hair, or the other stone eaters you’ve glimpsed around the comm from time to time. Those, for whatever reason, don’t like to be seen moving; you’ll catch a blur now and again, but then the statue is there, watching you, as if there has always been a statue of a stranger in that position, sculpted by someone long ago.

This stone eater is turning. It keeps turning, letting everyone see and hear it turn, watching as you finally register its presence, the gray granite of its flesh, the undifferentiated slick of its hair, the slightly greater polish of its eyes. Carefully sculpted length and weight of jaw, and its torso is finely carved with male human musculature rather than the suggestion of clothing that most stone eaters adopt. This one obviously wants you to think of it as male, so fine, it’s male. He is allover gray, the first stone eater you have seen who looks like nothing more than a statue… except that he moves, and keeps moving, as everyone falls silent in surprise. He is taking all of you in, too, with a slight smile on his lips. He’s holding something.

You stare as the gray stone eater turns, and as your mind makes out the oddly shaped, bloody thing he holds, it is recent experience that makes you suddenly realize it is an arm. It is a small arm. It is a small arm still partially wrapped in cloth that is familiar, the jacket that you bought a lifetime ago on the road. The red-smeared inhumanly white skin on the hand is familiar, and the size is familiar, even though the lump of splintered bone at the bloody end is clear and glasslike and finely faceted and not bone at all.

Hoa it is Hoa that is Hoa’s arm

“I bear a message,” says the gray stone eater. The voice is pleasant, tenor. His mouth does not move, and the words echo up from his chest. This, at least, feels normal, insofar as you are currently capable of feeling normal, as you stare down at that dripping disaster of an arm.

Ykka stirs after a moment, perhaps pulling herself out of shock, too. “From whom?”

He turns to her. “Rennanis.” Turn again, eyes shifting from face to face amid the crowd, same as a human would do when trying to make a connection, get a point across. His eyes skim over you as if you aren’t there. “We wish you no harm.”

You stare at Hoa’s arm in his hand.

Ykka is skeptical. “So, the army camped on our doorstep…?”

Turn. He ignores Cutter, too. “We have plentiful food. Strong walls. All yours, if you join our comm.”

“Maybe we like being our own comm,” Ykka says.

Turn. His gaze settles on Hjarka, who blinks. “You have no meat, and your territory is depleted. You’ll be eating each other within a year.”

Well, that sets off the murmuring. Ykka shuts her eyes for a moment in pure frustration. Hjarka looks around angrily, as if wondering who has betrayed you.

Cutter says, “Would all of us be adopted into your comm? With our use-castes intact?”

Lerna makes a tight sound. “I don’t see how that’s the point, Cutter—”

Cutter throws a slashing look at Lerna. “We can’t fight an Equatorial city.”

“But it is a stupid question,” Ykka says. Her voice is deceptively mild, but in the part of your mind that is not stunned to silence by that arm, you note that she’s never backed up Lerna before. You’ve always gotten the impression she doesn’t much like him, and that it’s mutual—she’s too cold for him, he’s too soft for her. This is significant. “If I were these people, I would lie, take us all north, and shove us into a commless buffer-shanty somewhere between an acid geyser and a lava lake. Equatorial comms have done that before, especially when they needed labor. Why should we believe this one’s any different?”

The gray stone eater tilts his head. Between that and the little smile on his lips, it’s a remarkably human gesture—a look that says, Oh, aren’t you cute. “We don’t have to lie.” He lets those pleasant-toned words hang in the air for just the right amount of time. Oh, he’s good at this. You see people exchange looks, hear them shift uncomfortably; you feel the pent silence as Ykka has no retort to that. Because it’s true.

Then he drops the other boot. “But we have no use for orogenes.”

Silence. Shocked stillness. Ykka breaks it by uttering a swift, “Fire-under-Earth.” Cutter looks away. Lerna’s eyes widen as he grasps the implications of what the stone eater has just done.

“Where is Hoa?” you ask into the silence. It’s all you can think about.

The stone eater’s eyes slide to you. The rest of his face does not turn. For a stone eater, this is normal body language; for this stone eater, it is conspicuous. “Dead,” he says. “After leading us here.”

“You’re lying.” You don’t even realize you’re angry. You don’t think about what you’re about to do. You just react, like Damaya in the crucibles, like Syenite on the beach. Everything in you crystallizes and sharpens and your awareness facets down to a razor point and you weave the threads that you barely noticed were there and it happens just like with Tonkee’s arm; shiiiiing. You slice the stone eater’s hand off.

It and Hoa’s arm drop to the floor. People gasp. There is no blood. Hoa’s arm hits the crystal with a loud, meaty thud—it’s heavier than it looks—and the stone eater’s hand makes a second, even more solid clack, separating from the arm. The cross-section of its wrist is undifferentiated gray.

The stone eater does not seem to react at first. Then you sess the coalescence of something, like the silver threads of magic but so many. The hand twitches, then leaps into the air, returning to the wrist-stump as if pulled by strings. He leaves Hoa’s arm behind. Then the stone eater turns fully to face you, at last.

“Get out before I chop you into more pieces than you can put back together,” you say in a voice that shakes like the earth.

The gray stone eater smiles. It’s a full smile, eyes crinkling with crow’s feet and lips drawing back from diamond teeth—and marvel of marvels, it actually looks like a smile and not a threat display. Then he vanishes, falling through the surface of the crystal. For an instant you see a gray shadow within the crystal’s translucence, his shape blurred and not quite humanoid anymore, though that is probably the angle. Then, faster than you can track with eyes or sessapinae, he shoots down and away.

In the reverberating wake of his leaving, Ykka takes and lets out a deep breath.

“Well,” she says, looking around at her people. What she believes to be her people. “Sounds like we need to talk.” There is an uneasy stir.

You don’t want to hear it. You hurry forward and pick up Hoa’s arm. The thing is heavy as stone; you have to put your legs into it or risk your lower back. You turn and people move out of your way and you hear Lerna say, “Essun?” But you don’t want to hear him, either.

There are threads, see. Silver lines that only you can see, flailing and curling forth from the arm’s stump, but they shift as you turn. Always pointing in a particular direction. So you follow them. No one follows you, and you don’t care what that means. Not at the moment.

The tendrils lead you to your own apartment.

You step through the curtain and stop. Tonkee’s not home. Must be either at Hjarka’s or up in the green room. There are two more limbs on the floor in front of you, bloody stumps with diamond bones poking forth. No, they are not on the floor; they are in the floor, partially submerged in it, one down to the thigh, the other just a calf and foot. Caught, as if climbing out. There are twin trails of blood, thick enough to be worrisome, over the homey rug that you bartered one of Jija’s old flintknives for. They go toward your room, so you follow them in. And then you drop the arm. Fortunately it does not land on your foot.

What is left of Hoa crawls toward the floor-mattress that passes for your bed. His other arm is also gone, you don’t know where. Hanks of his hair are missing. He pauses when you come in, hearing or sessing you, and he lies still as you circle him and see that his lower jaw has been ripped away. He has no eyes, and there is a… a bite, just above his temple. That’s why his hair is missing. Something has bitten into his skull like an apple, incising a chunk of flesh and the diamond bone underneath. You can’t see what’s inside his head for the blood. That’s good.

It would frighten you, if you did not immediately understand. Beside your bed is the little cloth-wrapped bundle that he has carried since Tirimo. You hurry to it, open it up, bring it to the ruin of him, and hunker down. “Can you turn over?”

He responds by doing so. For a moment you’re stymied by the lack of a lower jaw, and then you think fuck it and shove one of the stones from the bundle directly into the ragged hole of Hoa’s throat. The feel of his flesh is warm and human as you push it down with your finger until the muscles of his swallowing reflex catch it. (Your gorge rises. You will it back down.) You start to feed him another, but after a few breaths he begins to shiver all over violently. You don’t realize you’re still sessing magic until suddenly Hoa’s body becomes alive with glimmering silver threads, all of them whipping about and curling like the stinging tentacles of ocean creatures from lorists’ tales. Hundreds of them. You draw back in alarm, but Hoa makes a raw, breathy sound, and you think maybe it means more. You push another stone into his throat, and then another. There weren’t many left to begin with. When you’re down to only three, you hesitate. “You want them all?”

Hoa hesitates, too. You can see that in his body language. You don’t understand why he needs them at all; aside from that lashing of magic—he is made of it, every inch of him is alive with it, you’ve never seen anything like this—nothing about his damaged body is improving. Can anyone survive or recover from this degree of damage? He’s not human enough for you to even guess. But finally he croaks again. It is a deeper sound than the first. Resigned, maybe, or maybe that is your imagination patterning humanity over the animal sounds of his animal flesh. So you push the last three stones into him.

Nothing happens for a moment. Then.

Silver tendrils billow and swell around him so rapidly, with such frenzy, that you scramble back. You know some of the things that magic can do, and something about this seems altogether wild and uncontrolled. It fills the room, though, and—and you blink. You can see it, not just sess it. All of Hoa glimmers now with silver-white light, growing rapidly too bright to look at directly; even a still would be able to see this. You move into the living room, peering through the bedroom door because that seems safer. The instant you cross the room’s threshold, the substance of the whole apartment—walls, floor, everywhere there is crystal—shivers for an instant, becoming translucent and obelisk-unreal. Your bedroom furniture and belongings float amid the flickering white. There is a soft thump from behind you that makes you jump and whirl, but it’s Hoa’s legs, which are out of the living room floor and sliding along the trails of blood into your room. The arm you dropped is moving, too, already nudging up against the bright morass of him, becoming bright, too. Leaping to rejoin his body, as the gray stone eater’s hand rejoined his wrist.

Something slides up from the floor—no. You see the floor slide up, as if it were putty and not crystal, and wrap itself around his body. The light dies when he does it; the material immediately begins to change into something darker. When you blink away the afterimages enough to see, there is something huge and strange and impossible where Hoa once was.

You step back into the bedroom—carefully, because the floor and walls might be solid again, but you know that’s possibly a temporary state. The once-smooth crystal is rough beneath your feet. The thing takes up most of the room now, lying next to your disordered bed that is now half submerged in the resolidified floor. It’s hot. Your foot tangles briefly in the strap of your half-empty runny-sack, which fortunately is still intact and unmerged with the room. You stoop quickly and grab it; the habits of survival. Earthfires it’s hot in here. The bed does not catch fire, but you think that’s only because it’s not directly touching the big thing. You can sess it, whatever it is. No, you know what it is: chalcedony. A huge, oblong lump of gray-green chalcedony, like the outer shell of a geode.

You already know what’s happening, don’t you? I told you of Tirimo after the Rifting. The far end of the valley, where the shockwave of the shake loosed a geode that then split open like an egg. The geode hadn’t been there all along, you realize; this is magic, not nature. Well, perhaps a bit of both. For stone eaters, there’s little difference between the two.

And in the morning, after you spend the night at the living room table, where you meant to stay awake and watch the steaming lump of rock but instead fell asleep, it happens again. The cracking open of the geode is loud, explosively violent. A flicker of pressure-driven plasma curls forth and scorches or melts all the belongings you left in the room. Except the runny-sack, since you took it. Good instincts.

You’re shaking from being startled awake. Slowly you stand and edge into the room. It’s so hot that it’s hard to breathe. Like an oven—though the waft of warmth causes the apartment’s entry curtain to billow open. Quickly the heat diminishes to only uncomfortable, and not dangerous.

You barely notice. Because what rises from the split in the geode, moving too human-smoothly at first but rapidly readjusting to a familiar sort of punctuated stillness… is the stone eater from the garnet obelisk.

Hello, again.