The Obelisk Gate

19 you get ready to rumble

IT HAS BEEN ONE MONTH since you last went aboveground. It has been two days since you killed Alabaster, in your folly and pain. All things change in a Season.

Castrima-over is occupied. The tunnel that you first passed through to enter the comm is blocked; one of the comm’s orogenes has pulled a big slab of stone up from the earth to effectively seal it off. Probably Ykka, or Cutter before Ykka killed him; they were the two others in the comm with the best fine control besides you and Alabaster. Now two of those four are dead, and the enemy is at the gates. The Strongbacks who are clustered in the tunnel mouth behind the stone seal jump up as you walk into the electric-light circle, and the ones who were already standing stand straighter. Xeber, Esni’s second-in-command among the Strongbacks, actually smiles at the sight of you. That’s how bad things are. That’s how worried everyone is. They’ve so lost their minds as to think of you as their champion.

“I don’t like this,” Ykka has said to you. She’s back in the comm, organizing the defense that will be necessary if the tunnels are breached. The real danger is if the Rennanis scouts discover the ventilation ducts of Castrima’s geode. They’re well hidden—one in the cavern of an underground river, others in equally out-of-the-way places, as if the people who built Castrima feared attack themselves—but the comm’s people will be forced out if those are sealed off. “And they’ve got stone eaters working with them. You’re dangerous and ruster enough to fuck up an army, Essie, I’ll give you that, but none of us can fight stone eaters. If they kill you, we lose our best weapon.”

She said this to you at Scenic Overlook, where the two of you went to work things out. It was awkward for about a day, between you. By forbidding a vote, you undercut Ykka’s authority and destroyed everyone’s illusion of having a say in the comm’s management. That was necessary, you still believe; everyone shouldn’t have a say in whose life is worth fighting for. She actually agreed, she admitted as you talked. But it damaged her.

You didn’t apologize for that, but you’ve tried to spackle the cracks. “You are Castrima’s best weapon,” you said firmly. You even meant it. That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.

It eased the awkwardness between you. “Well, just don’t rusting die,” she told you at last. “Not sure I can keep this mess together without you, at this point.” Ykka’s good at that, making people feel like they’ve got a reason to do something. That’s why she’s the headwoman.

And that is why, now, you walk through a Castrima-over that has been turned into a camp by the soldiers of Rennanis, and you are actually afraid. It’s always harder to fight for other people than for the self.

The ash has been falling steadily for a year now, and the comm is knee-deep in the stuff. There’s been at least one rain to tamp it down recently, so you can sess a kind of damp-mud crust underneath the powdery layer on top, but even that’s substantial. Enemy soldiers crowd the porches and doorways of the once-empty houses, watching you, and the untamped ash under the eaves is halfway up most of the houses’ walls. They’ve had to dig out the windows. The soldiers look like… just people, because they don’t wear uniforms, but there is a uniformity to them nevertheless: They are all fully Sanzed or very Sanzed-looking. Where you can see color in their ash-faded travel clothing, you spot that telltale scrap of prettier, more delicate cloth tied around their upper arms or wrists or foreheads. No longer displaced Equatorials, then; they’ve found a comm. Something older and more primal than a comm: They are a tribe. And now they’re here to take what’s yours.

But beyond that they are just people. Many are your age or older. You guess that a lot of them are surplus Strongbacks or commless trying to prove their usefulness. There are slightly more men than women, but that follows, too, since most comms are quicker to kick out those who can’t produce babies than those who can—but the number of women here means that Rennanis isn’t hurting for healthy repopulators. A strong comm.

Their eyes follow you as you walk down Castrima-over’s main street. You stand out, you know, with your ashless skin and clean hair and your clothes bright with color. Just brown leather pants and unbleached white in your shirt, but these are colors that have become rare in this world of gray streets and gray dead trees and a gray, heavily clouded sky. You’re the only Midlatter that you see, too, and you’re small compared to most of them.

Doesn’t matter. Behind you floats the spinel, remaining precisely one foot behind the back of your head and turning slowly. You aren’t making it do that. You don’t know why it’s doing that, really. Unless you hold it in your hand, that’s what the thing does: You tried to set it down, but it floated back up and moved behind you like this. Should’ve asked Alabaster how to make it behave before you killed him, oh well. Now it’s flickering a little, real to translucent to real again, and you can hear—not sess, hear—the faint hum of its energies as it turns. You see people’s faces twitch as they notice. They might not know what it is, but they know a bad thing when they hear it.

At the center of Castrima-over is a domed, open pavilion that Ykka tells you was once the comm’s gathering center, used for wedding dances and parties and the occasional comm-wide meeting. It’s been turned into some sort of operations center, you see as you walk toward it: A gaggle of men and women stand, squat, or sit around within it, but one knot of them stands around a freshly made table. When you get close enough, you see that they’ve got a crudely made diagram of Castrima and map of the local area side by side, which they’re discussing. To your dismay, you can see that they’ve marked at least one of the ventilation ducts—the one that’s behind a small waterfall at the nearby river. They probably lost a scout or two finding it: The river’s banks are by now infested with boilbug mounds. Doesn’t matter; they found it, and that’s bad.

Three of the people talking over the maps look up as you approach. One of them elbows another, who turns and shakes awake someone else as you walk into the pavilion and stop a few feet from the table. The woman who gets up, rubbing her face blearily as she comes to join the others, does not look particularly impressive. She’s cut her hair on the sides to just above her ears—a painfully blunt chop that looks to have been done with a knife. It makes her look small, even though she’s not particularly: Her torso is a smooth barrel, brief breasts blending into a belly that’s probably carried at least one child, and legs like basalt pillars. She’s not wearing anything more than the others; her sash of tribe membership is just a fading yellow silk kerchief hanging loosely around her neck. But there’s a gravity in her gaze, even half-asleep, that makes you focus on her.

“Castrima?” she asks you, by way of greeting. It’s all that really matters about who you are, anyway.

You nod. “I speak for them.”

She rests her hands on the table, nodding. “Our message got delivered, then.” Her gaze flicks to the spinel hovering behind you, and something adjusts in her expression. It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that. Indifference is worse than hate.

Well. You can’t muster indifference in response; you can’t help but see her as human. Have to make do with hate, then. And what’s more interesting is that she somehow knows what the spinel is, and what it means. Very interesting.

“We’re not joining you,” you say. “You want to fight over that, so be it.”

She tilts her head to one side. One of her lieutenants chuckles into their hand, but is swiftly glared silent by another. You like the silencing. It’s respectful—of your abilities if not of you per se, and of Castrima even if they don’t think you have a chance. Even if you actually, probably, don’t have a chance.

“We don’t even have to attack, you realize,” the woman says. “We can just sit up here, kill anybody who comes up to hunt or trade. Starve you out.”

You manage not to react. “We have a little meat. It’ll take awhile—months at least—for the vitamin deficiencies to set in. Our stores are pretty solid otherwise.” You force a shrug. “And other communities have gotten around meat shortages easily enough.”

She grins. Her teeth aren’t sharpened, but you think momentarily that her canines are longer than they strictly need to be. It’s probably projection. “True, if that’s your taste. Which is why we’re also working on finding your vents.” She taps the map. “Close them up and suffocate you till you’re weak, then break down those barriers you’ve put across the tunnels and dance right in. Stupid to live underground; once someone knows you’re there, you’re actually an easier target, not a harder one.”

This is true, but you shake your head. “We can be hard enough, if you push us. But Castrima isn’t rich, and our storecaches aren’t any better than those of another comm that’s not full of roggas.” You pause for effect. The woman doesn’t flinch, but there’s a shuffle among the other people in the pavilion as they realize. Good. That means they’re thinking. “So many easier nuts to crack out there. Why are you bothering with us?”

You know why they’re really doing this, because Gray Man’s after orogenes who can open the Obelisk Gate, but that can’t be what he’s told them. What could induce a strong, stable Equatorial comm to turn conqueror? Wait, no; it can’t be stable. Rennanis is relatively close to the Rift. Even with living node maintainers, life in such a comm would be hard. Daily blow-throughs of noxious gas. Ashfall much worse than here, requiring people to wear masks at all times. Earth help them if it rains; it could be pure acid, and that’s if rain is even possible with the Rift cranking out heat and ash nearby. Doubtful they have any livestock… so maybe they’re facing a meat shortage, too.

“Because this is what it will take to survive,” the woman says, to your surprise. She straightens and folds her arms. “Rennanis has too many people for our stores. All the survivors of every other Equatorial city have come to camp on our doorstep. We would’ve had to do this anyway, or have problems with too large of a commless population in the area. Might as well weaponize them into feeding themselves, and bringing what’s left back home to the comm. You know this Season isn’t going to end.”

“It will.”

“Eventually.” She shrugs. “Our ’mests have calculated that if we grow enough ’shrooms and such, and strictly limit our population, we might achieve enough sustainability to survive until the Season ends. The odds are better if we take the storecaches of every other comm we encounter, though—”

You roll your eyes because you can’t help it. “You think cachebread’s going to last a thousand years?” Or two. Or ten. And then a few hundred thousand years of ice.

She pauses until you’re done. “—and if we set up supply lines from every comm with renewables. We’ll need some Coastal comms with oceanic resources, some Antarctics where growing low-light plants might still be possible.” She pauses, also for effect. “But you Midlatters eat too much.”

Well. “So basically, you’re here to wipe us out.” You shake your head. “Why didn’t you just say so? Why the foolishness about getting rid of the orogenes?”

Someone from beyond the pavilion calls, “Danel!” and the woman looks up, nodding absently. This is apparently her name. “Always a chance you’d turn on each other. Then we could just walk in and scrape up the leftovers.” She shakes her head. “Now things have to be hard.”

The dull, insistent buzz that suddenly impinges itself on your sessapinae is a warning as blatant as a scream.

It’s too late the instant you sess it, because that means you’re within range of the Guardian’s ability to negate your orogeny. You turn anyway, half tripping even as you start to spin a huge torus that will flash-freeze the whole rusting town, and it is because you were expecting negation and did not deploy a tight shielding torus that the disruption knife pegs you in the right arm.

You remember Alabaster saying that these knives hurt. The thing is small, made for throwing, and it should hurt given that it’s sunk into your bicep and probably chipping bone. But what Alabaster did not specify—you are irrationally furious with him hours after his death, stupid useless ruster—was that something about this knife seems to set your entire nervous system on fire. The fire is hottest, incandescent, in your sessapinae, even though those are nowhere near your arm. It hurts so much that all your muscles spasm at once; you flop onto your side and can’t even scream. You just lie there twitching, and staring at the woman who steps through the gaggle of Rennanis soldiers to grin down at you. She’s surprisingly young, or so she seems, though appearances are meaningless because she is a Guardian. She’s naked from the waist up, her skin shockingly dark amid all these Sanzeds, her breasts small and almost entirely areola, reminding you of the last time you were pregnant. You thought your tits would never shrink back down after Uche… and you wonder if it will hurt, when you are shaken to pieces the way Innon was.

Everything goes black. You don’t understand what’s happened at first. Are you dead? Was it that quick? Everything’s still on fire, and you think you’re still trying to scream. But you become aware of new sensations then. Movement. Rushing. Something rather like wind. The touch of foreign molecules against infinitesimal receptors in your skin. It is… oddly peaceful. You almost forget your pain.

Then light, startling against the eyelids you hadn’t realized you’d closed. You can’t open them. Someone curses nearby and comes near and hands press you down, which nearly makes you panic because you can’t do orogeny with your nerves exploding like this. But then someone yanks the knife out of your arm.

It is as though a shake siren within you has been suddenly silenced. You slump in relief, into just ordinary pain, and open your eyes now that you can control your voluntary muscles again.

Lerna’s there. You’re on the floor of his apartment, the light is from his crystal walls, and he’s holding the knife and staring down at you. Beyond him, Hoa stands in a pose of entreaty, which he must have been directing toward Lerna. His eyes have shifted to you, though he hasn’t bothered to adjust the pose.

“Burning rusty fuck,” you groan-sigh. And then, because now you know what must have happened, you add, “Thanks,” to Hoa. Who pulled you down into the earth and away before the Guardian could kill you. Never thought you’d be grateful for something like that.

Lerna’s dropped the knife and already turned away to find bandages. You’re not bleeding much; the knife went in vertically, paralleling rather than cutting across the tendons, and it seems to have missed the big artery. Hard to tell when your hands are still shaking a little; shock. But Lerna’s not moving at that blurring, near-inhuman speed he tends to use when a life is on the line, so you’re encouraged by that.

Lerna says, his back to you as he assembles items, “I take it your attempt at parley didn’t go well.”

Things have been awkward between you and him lately. He’s made his interest clear, and you haven’t responded in kind. You haven’t rejected him, either, though, thus the awkwardness. At one point a few weeks back, Alabaster grumbled that you should just roll the boy already, because you were always crankier when you were horny. You called him an ass and changed the subject, but really—Alabaster’s why you’ve been thinking about it more.

You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply… a thinning of who you are.

And maybe now is not the time to consider your cataclysm of a love life.

“No,” you say. You shrug off your jacket. Underneath you’re wearing a sleeveless shirt good for Castrima’s warmth. Lerna turns back and crouches and begins swabbing away the blood with a pad of soft rags. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone up there. They had a Guardian.”

Lerna’s eyes flick up to yours, then back to your wound. “I heard they could stop orogeny.”

“This one didn’t have to. That damned knife did it for her.” You think you know why, too, as you remember Innon. That Guardian didn’t negate him, either. Maybe the skin thing only works on roggas whose orogeny is still active. That’s how she wanted to kill you. But Lerna’s jaw muscle is already tight, and you decide maybe he doesn’t need to know that.

“I didn’t know about the Guardian,” Hoa says unexpectedly. “I’m sorry.”

You eye him. “I didn’t expect stone eaters to be omniscient.”

“I said I would protect you.” His voice is more inflectionless, now that he’s not in flesh-shape anymore. Or maybe his voice is the same, and you just read it as inflectionless because he has no body language to embellish it. Despite this, he sounds… angry. With himself, maybe.

“You did.” You wince as Lerna starts winding a bandage around your arm tightly. No stitches, though, so that’s good. “Not that I wanted to be dragged into the earth, but your timing was excellent.”

“You were hurt.” Definitely angry with himself. This is the first time he’s sounded to you like the boy he appeared to be for so long. Is he young for one of his kind? Young at heart? Maybe just so open and honest that he might as well be young.

“I’ll live. That’s what matters.”

He falls silent. Lerna works in silence. Between the collective air of disapproval that the two of them exude, you can’t help feeling a little guilty.

Afterward you leave Lerna’s apartment to head to Flat Top, where Ykka has set up an operations center of her own. Someone’s brought the rest of the divans from her apartment, and she’s set them up in a rough semicircle, basically bringing her council out into the open. In token of this, Hjarka sprawls over one divan as she usually does, head propped on fist and taking up the whole thing so no one else can sit down, and Tonkee is pacing in the middle of the semicircle. There are others around, anxious or bored people who’ve brought their own chairs or are sitting on the hard crystal floor, but not as many as you would’ve expected. There’s a lot of activity around the comm, you noticed as you headed to the Flat Top: people fletching arrows in one chamber that you pass, building crossbows in another. Down on the ground level you can see what looks like a longknife-wielding class; a slender young man is teaching about thirty people how to do an over-and-under strike. Over by Scenic Overlook some of the Innovators seem to be rigging what looks like a dropped-rocks trap.

The spectators perk up as you and Lerna come onto the Flat Top, though; that’s hilarious. Everyone knows you volunteered to go topside to deliver Castrima’s answer to Rennanis. You did this in part to show publicly that you weren’t taking over; Ykka’s still in charge. Everyone seems to be reading it as a sign that you may be crazy, but at least you’re on their side. Such hope in their eyes! It dies down quickly, though. That you are back, and that there is a visibly bloody bandage around one arm, is reassuring to no one.

Tonkee’s in full rant about something. Even she’s ready for battle, having traded her skirt for billowy pantaloons, tied her hair up atop her head in a scruffy pile of curls, and strapped twin glassknives to both thighs. She actually looks kind of stunning. Then you pay attention to what she’s saying. “The third wave will need to be the most delicate touch. Pressure sets them off, see? A temperature differential should make the wind gust enough, the air pressure drop enough. But it has to happen fast. And no shaking. We’re going to lose the forest either way, but shaking will just make them dig in. We need them moving.”

“I can handle that,” Ykka says, though she looks troubled. “At least, I can handle part of it.”

“No, it has to be done all at once.” Tonkee stops and glowers at her. “That’s not rusting negotiable.” She sees you then and stops, her eyes going immediately to the bandage around your arm.

Ykka turns and her eyes widen, too. “Damn.”

You shake your head wearily. “I agreed it was worth a shot. And now we know they can’t be reasoned with.”

Then you sit down, and the people on the Flat Top fall silent as you impart what intelligence you were able to glean from your trip topside. An army of surplus people occupying the houses, a general named Danel, at least one Guardian. Adding this to what you already know—stone eaters on their side, a whole city more of them somewhere in the Equatorials—paints a bleak picture. But it is the unknowns that are most alarming.

“How did they know about the meat shortage?” No one seems to be holding the gray stone eater’s revelation against Ykka, or at least they aren’t doing it right now, even though they now know she was keeping the information from them. Headwomen are supposed to make choices like that. “How are they finding the rusting vents?”

“With enough people, it’s not hard to search,” you start to suggest, but she cuts you off.

“It is. We’ve been using this geode in one way or another for fifty years. We know the land—and it took us years to find those vents. One’s in a damned peat bog further along the river, which stinks to the heavens and occasionally catches fire.” She sits forward, propping her elbows on her knees and sighing. “How did they even know we were here? Even our trading partners have only ever seen Castrima-over.”

“Maybe they have orogenes working with them, too,” Lerna says. After so many weeks of hearing mostly rogga, his polite orogene sounds strained and artificial to your ears. “They could—”

“No,” says Ykka. She looks at you then. “Castrima’s huge. When you came into the area, did you notice a giant hole in the ground?” You blink in surprise. She nods before you can answer, since your face has said it all. “Yeah, you should have, but something about this place sort of… I don’t know. Shunts away orogeny. Once you’re in it, it’s the opposite, of course; the geode feeds on us to power itself. But next time you’re topside, and not being almost killed I mean, try sessing this place. You’ll see what I’m talking about.” She shakes her head. “Even if they’ve got pet roggas, they shouldn’t have known we were here.”

Hjarka sighs and rolls onto her back, muttering under her breath. Tonkee bares her teeth, probably a habit she’s picking up from Hjarka. “That’s not relevant,” Tonkee snaps.

“Because you don’t want to hear it, babe,” Hjarka says. “Doesn’t mean it’s wrong. You like things neat. Life’s not neat.”

“You like things messy.”

“Ykka likes things explained,” Ykka says pointedly.

Tonkee hesitates, and Hjarka sighs and says, “It’s not the first time I’ve thought there might be a spy in the comm.”

Oh, rust. There’s an immediate murmur and shuffle among the people listening. Lerna stares at her. “That makes no sense,” he says. “None of us has any reason to betray Castrima. Anyone taken into this comm had nowhere else to go.”

“That isn’t true.” Hjarka rolls to sit upright, grinning and flashing her sharp teeth. “I could have gone to my mom’s birthcomm. She was Leadership there before she left to go to my birthcomm—too much competition, and she wanted to be a headwoman. I left my comm because I didn’t want to be headwoman after her. Comm full of assholes. But I definitely wasn’t planning to live out my useless years in a hole in the ground.” She looks at Ykka.

Ykka sighs in a long-suffering way. “I can’t believe you’re still mad I didn’t ash you. I told you, I needed the help.”

“Right. But just saying: I wouldn’t have stayed if you’d asked me at the time.”

“You’d rather have some overcrowded Equatorial comm with delusions of being Old Sanze reborn?” Lerna frowns.

“I wouldn’t.” Hjarka shrugs. “I like it here now. But I’m saying that somebody else might prefer Rennanis. Enough to sell us out for a place in it.”

“We need to find this spy!” shouts someone from over near the rope bridge.

“No,” you say then, sharply. It’s your teacher voice, and everyone jumps and looks at you. “Danel said she hoped to make Castrima tear itself apart. We’re not starting any rogga-hunts, here.” This has two meanings, but you’re not trying to be clever. You know full well that your teacher voice isn’t the only reason everyone’s staring at you in palpable unease. The spinel still floats behind you, having followed you down from the surface.

Ykka rubs her eyes. “You gotta stop threatening people, Essie. I mean, I know you grew up in the Fulcrum and don’t really know any better, but… it’s not good community behavior.”

You blink, a little thrown and a lot insulted. But… she’s right. Comms survive through a careful balance of trust and fear. Your impatience is tilting the balance too far out of true.

“Fine,” you say. Everyone relaxes a little, relieved that Ykka can talk you down, and there are even a few nervous chuckles. “But I still don’t think it’s relevant to discuss whether there’s a spy right now. If there is, Rennanis knows what they know. All we can do is try to come up with a plan they won’t anticipate.”

Tonkee points at you and glares at Hjarka with a wordless See?

Hjarka sits forward, planting a hand on one knee and glaring at all of you. She doesn’t usually argue much—that was Cutter’s role—but you see stubbornness in the set of her jaw now. “It rusting matters if the spy is still here, though. Good luck keeping them from anticipating if—”

The commotion begins at Scenic Overlook. It’s hard to see from Flat Top, but someone’s shouting for Ykka. She’s on her feet at once, heading in that direction, but a small figure—one of the comm’s children working as a runner—comes darting along the pathways to meet her before she’s even crossed the main bridge from Flat Top. “Message from the topside tunnels!” the boy calls even before he halts. “Says the Rennies are sledgehammering in!”

Ykka looks at Tonkee. Tonkee nods briskly. “Morat said the charges were set.”

“Wait, what?” you ask.

Ykka ignores you. To the child, she says, “Tell them to fall back and follow the plan. Go.” The boy turns and runs off, though only to a point where he’s got a clear sight line to Scenic; he holds up a hand, clenches a fist, and then releases it in a splay of fingers. There’s a series of whistles throughout the comm as this signal gets relayed, and a lot of bustling as clusters of people gather and head off into the tunnels. You recognize some of them: Strongbacks and Innovators. You have no idea what’s going on.

Ykka seems remarkably calm as she turns back to face you. “Going to need your help,” she says softly. “If they’re using sledgehammers, then that’s good; they don’t have any roggas. But collapsing the tunnels will only hold them for a short time, if they’re really determined to come down here. And I don’t much like the idea of being trapped. Will you help me build an escape tunnel?”

You draw back a little, stunned. Collapsing the tunnels? But of course it is the only strategy that makes sense. Castrima cannot fight off an army that outnumbers them, out-weapons them, and out-allies them in stone eaters and Guardians. “What are we supposed to do, flee?”

Ykka shrugs. You understand now why she looks so tired—not just dealing with the comm almost turning on its roggas, but fear for the future. “It’s a contingency. I’ve had people carrying critical stores into side caverns for days now. We can’t carry it all, of course, or even most of it. But if we leave and go hide somewhere—we’ve got a place, before you ask, storage cavern a few miles away—then even if the Rennies break in, they’ll find a comm that’s dark and worthless and that will suffocate them if they stay too long. They’ll take what they can and go, and maybe we can come back when they’re done.”

And this is why she’s the headwoman: While you’ve been caught up in your own dramas, Ykka’s been doing all this. Still… “If they have even one rogga with them, the geode will function. It’ll be theirs. We’ll be commless.”

“Yeah. As a contingency plan, it blows, you’re right.” Ykka sighs. “Which is why I want to try Tonkee’s plan.”

Hjarka looks furious. “I rusting told you I don’t want to be a headwoman, Yeek.”

Ykka rolls her eyes. “You’d rather be commless? Suck it up.”

You turn from her to Tonkee and back, feeling completely lost.

Tonkee sighs in frustration, but forces herself to explain. “Controlled orogeny,” she says. “Sustained bursts of slow cooling at the surface, in a ring around the area but closing inward, centered on the comm. This will excite the boilbugs into a swarm state. The other Innovators have been studying their behavior for weeks.” She flicks her fingers a little, perhaps unconsciously dismissing that sort of research as lesser. “It should work. But it has to be done fast, by someone who has the necessary precision and endurance. The bugs just dig in and go into hibernation otherwise.”

Suddenly you understand. It’s monstrous. It could also save Castrima. And yet—you look at Ykka. Ykka shrugs, but you think you read tension in her shoulders.

You have never understood how Ykka does the things she does with orogeny. She’s a feral. In theory she’s capable of doing anything you can; a dedicated self-teacher could conceivably master the basics and then refine them from there. Most self-taught roggas just… don’t. But you’ve sessed Ykka when she’s working, and it’s obvious that in the Fulcrum she’d be ringed, though only two or three rings. She can shift a boulder, not a pebble.

And yet. She can somehow lure every rogga in a hundred-mile radius to Castrima. And yet, there’s whatever she did to Cutter. And yet there is a solidity to her, a stability and implication of strength even though you’ve seen nothing to explain it, which makes you doubt your Fulcrum-ish assessment of her. A two- or three-ringer doesn’t sess like that.

And yet. Orogeny is orogeny; sessapinae are sessapinae. Flesh has limits.

“That army fills both Castrima-over and the forest basin,” you say. “You’ll pass out before you can ice half of a circle that big.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely!”

Ykka rolls her eyes. “I know what I’m rusting doing because I’ve done it before. There’s a way I know. You sort of—” She falters. You decide, if you manage to live through this, that the roggas of Castrima should start trying to come up with words for the things they do. Ykka sighs in frustration herself, as if hearing your thought. “Maybe this is a Fulcrum thing? When you run with another rogga, keep everybody at the same pace, train yourself to the capabilities of the least but use the endurance of the greatest…?”

You blink… and then a chill passes through you. “Earthfires and rustbuckets. You know how to—” Alabaster did it to you twice, long ago, once to seal a hot spot and once to save himself from poisoning. “Parallel scale?”

“Is that what you call it? Anyway, when you form a whole group working in parallel, in a… a mesh, I could do it with Cutter and Temell before… Anyway, I can do that now. Use the other roggas. Even the kids can help.” She sighs. You’ve guessed already. “Thing is, the person who holds the others together…” The yoke, you think, remembering a long-ago angry conversation with Alabaster. “That’s the one that burns out first. Has to, to take on the… the friction of it. Or everybody in the mesh will just cancel each other out. Nothing happens.”

Burns out. Dies. “Ykka.” You’re a hundred times more skilled, more precise, than her. You can use the obelisks.

She shakes her head, bemused. “You ever, uh, ‘meshed’ with anyone before? I told you, it takes practice. And you’ve got another job to do.” Her gaze is intent. “I hear your friend finally kicked off, in the infirmary. He teach you what you needed to know, before?”

You look away, bitterness in your mouth, because the proof of your mastery of individual obelisks is the fact that you killed him with one. But you’re no closer to understanding how to open the Gate. You don’t know how to use many obelisks together.

First a network, then the Gate. Don’t rust it up, Essun.

Oh, Earth. Oh, you amazing ass, you think. It’s self-directed as well as a thought thrown toward Alabaster.

“Teach me how to build a… mesh, with you,” you blurt at Ykka. “A network. Let’s call it a network.”

She frowns at you. “I just told you—”

“That’s what he wanted me to do! Flaking, fucking rust.” You turn and start pacing, simultaneously excited and horrified and furious. Everyone’s staring at you. “Not networking orogeny, networking—” All those times he made you study the threads of magic in his body, in your own body, getting a feel for how they connect and flow. “And of course he couldn’t just rusting tell me, why would he ever do anything that sensible?”

“Essun.” Tonkee’s eying you sidelong, a worried look on her face. “You’re starting to sound like me.”

You laugh at her, even though you didn’t think you’d be able to laugh ever again after what you did to ’Baster. “Alabaster,” you say. “The man in the infirmary. My friend. He was a ten-ring orogene. He’s also the man who broke the continent, up north.”

Lots of murmurs at this. Tlino the baker says, “A Fulcrum rogga? He was from the Fulcrum and he did this?”

You ignore him. “He had reasons.” Vengeance, and the chance to make a world that Coru could have lived in, even if Coru was no longer alive. Do they need to know about the Moon? No, there’s no time, and it would just confuse everyone as much as the whole mess confuses you. “I didn’t understand how he did it until now. ‘First a network, then the Gate.’ I need to learn how to do what you’re about to do, Ykka. You can’t die till you teach me.”

Something shakes the ambient. It’s small, relative to the power of a shake, and localized. You and Ykka and any other roggas on Flat Top immediately turn and look up, orienting on it. An explosion. Someone’s set off small shaped charges and brought down one of the tunnels that leads out of Castrima. A few moments later there are shouts from Scenic Overlook. You squint in that direction and see a party of Strongbacks—the ones who were guarding the main tunnel into the comm when you went up to speak with Danel and the Rennanis people—trotting to a halt, breathless and anxious-looking… and dusty. They blew the tunnel as they fled.

Ykka shakes her head and says, “Then let’s work together on the escape tunnel. Hopefully we won’t kill each other in the process.”

She beckons, and you follow, and together you half walk, half trot toward the opposite side of the geode. This happens by unspoken agreement; both of you instinctively know exactly where the best additional point to breach the geode lies. Around two platforms, across two bridges, and then the far wall of the geode is there, buried in stubby crystals too short to house any apartments. Good.

Ykka raises her hands and makes a rectangular shape, which confuses you until you sess the sudden sharp force of her orogeny, which pierces the geode wall at four points. It’s fascinating. You’ve observed her before when she does orogeny, but this is the first time she’s tried to be precise about something. And—it’s completely not what you expected. She can’t shift a pebble, but she can slice out corners and lines so neatly that the end result looks machine-carved. It’s better than you could have done, and suddenly you realize: Maybe she couldn’t shift a pebble because who the rust needs to shift pebbles? That’s the Fulcrum’s way of testing precision. Ykka’s way is to simply be precise, where it is practical to do so. Maybe she failed your tests because they were the wrong tests.

Now she pauses and you sess her “hand” being extended to you. You’re standing on a platform around a crystal shaft too narrow for apartments, which instead harbors storerooms and a small tool shop. It’s recently made, so the railing is made of wood, and you don’t much like entrusting your life to it. But you grip the railing and close your eyes anyway, and orogenically reach for the connection that she offers.

She seizes you. If you hadn’t been used to this from Alabaster, you would have panicked, but it’s the same as what happened back then: Ykka’s orogeny sort of melds with and consumes yours. You relax and let her take control, because instantly you realize you are stronger than her and could, should, take control yourself—but you are the learner here, and she is the teacher. So you hold back, to learn.

It is a dance, of sorts. Her orogeny is like… a river with eddies, curling and flowing in patterns and at a pace. Yours is faster, deeper, more straightforward, more forceful, but she modulates you so efficiently that the two flows come together. You flow slower and more loosely. She flows faster, using your depth to boost her force. For an instant you open your eyes, see her leaning against the crystal column and sliding down to crouch at its base so that she doesn’t have to pay attention to her body while she concentrates… and then you are within the geode’s crystal substrate, through its shell and burrowing into the rock that surrounds it, flowing around the warps and wends of ancient cold stone. Flowing with Ykka, so easily that you are surprised. Alabaster was rougher than this, but maybe he wasn’t used to doing it when he first tried it with you. Ykka has done this with others, and she is as fine a teacher as any you have ever had.

But—

But. Oh! You see it so easily now.

Magic. There are threads of it interwoven with Ykka’s flow. Supporting and catalyzing her drive where it is weaker than yours, soothing the layer of contact between you. Where’s all this coming from? She drags it out of the rock itself, which is another wonder, because you have not realized until now that there is any magic in the rock. But there it is, flitting between the infinitesimal particles of silicon and calcite as easily as it did between the particles of Alabaster’s stone substance. Wait. No. Between the calcite and the calcite, specifically, though it touches the silicon. It is being generated by the calcite, which exists in limestone inclusions within the stone. At some point millions or billions of years ago, you suspect, this whole area was at the bottom of an ocean, or perhaps an inland sea. Generations of sea life were born and lived and died here, then settled to that ocean’s floor, forming layers and compacting. Are those glacier scrapings that you see? Hard to tell. You’re not a geomest.

But what you suddenly understand is this: Magic derives from life—that which is alive, or was alive, or even that which was alive so many ages ago that it has turned into something else. All at once this understanding causes something to shift in your perception, and

and

and

You see it suddenly: the network. A web of silver threads interlacing the land, permeating rock and even the magma just underneath, strung like jewels between forests and fossilized corals and pools of oil. Carried through the air on the webs of leaping spiderlings. Threads in the clouds, though thin, strung between microscopic living things in water droplets. Threads as high as your perception can reach, brushing against the very stars.

And where they touch the obelisks, the threads become another thing entirely. For of the obelisks that float against the map of your awareness—which has suddenly become vast, miles and miles, you are perceiving with far more than your sessapinae now—each hovers as the nexus of thousands, millions, trillions of threads. This is the power holding them up. Each blazes silvery-white in flickering pulses; Evil Earth, this is what the obelisks are when they aren’t real. They float and they flicker, solid to magic to solid again, and on another plane of existence you inhale in awe at the beauty of them.

And then you inhale again, as you notice close by—

Ykka’s control tugs at you, and belatedly you realize she has used your power even as you meandered through epiphany. Now there is a new tunnel slanting up through the layers of sedimentary and igneous rock. Within it is a staircase of broad, shallow steps, straight up except for wide regular landings. Nothing has been excavated to make room for these stairs; instead, Ykka has simply deformed the rock away, pressing it into the walls and compressing it down to form the stairs and using the increased density to stabilize the tunnel against the weight of the rock around it. But she has stopped the tunnel just shy of breaching the surface, and now she unweaves you from the network (that word again). You blink and turn to her, understanding why at once.

“You can finish it,” Ykka says. She’s getting up from the platform, dusting off her butt. Already she looks weary; it must have tired her, trying to modulate your surprised fluctuations. She cannot do this thing she has chosen to do. She’ll burn out before she’s made it halfway around the valley.

And she doesn’t have to now. “No. I’ll take care of it.”

Ykka rubs her eyes. “Essie.”

You smile. For once, the nickname doesn’t bother you. And then you use what you just learned from her, grabbing her the way Alabaster once did, grabbing all the other roggas in the comm, too. (There is a collective flinch as you do this. They’re used to it from Ykka, but they know a different yoke when they sess it. You have not earned their trust as she has.) Ykka stiffens, but you don’t do anything, just hold her, and now it’s obvious: You really can do it.

Then you drive the point home by connecting to the spinel. It is behind you, but you sess the instant that it stops flickering and instead sends forth a silent, earth-shivering pulse. Ready, you think it’s saying. As if it speaks.

Ykka’s eyes widen suddenly as she sesses just how the obelisk’s catalysis… charges? awakens? awakens—the network of roggas. That’s because you’re now doing the thing that Alabaster tried to teach you for six months: using orogeny and magic together in a way that supports and strengthens each, making a stronger whole. Then integrating this into a network of orogenes working toward a single goal, all of them together stronger than they are individually, and plugged into an obelisk that amplifies their power manifold. It is amazing.

Alabaster failed to teach it to you because he was like you—Fulcrum-trained and Fulcrum-limited, taught only to think of power in terms of energy and equations and geometric shapes. He mastered magic because of who he was, but he did not truly understand it. Neither do you, even now. Ykka, feral that she is, with nothing to unlearn, was the key all along. If you hadn’t been so arrogant…

Well. No. You cannot say Alabaster would be alive. He was dead the instant he used the Obelisk Gate to rip the continent in half. The burns were killing him already; that you finished it was mercy. Eventually you’ll believe that.

Ykka blinks and frowns. “You okay?”

She knows the magic of you, and tastes your grief. You swallow against the lump in your throat—carefully, keeping tight hold of the power held pent within you. “Yeah,” you lie.

Ykka’s gaze is too knowing. She sighs. “You know… we both get through this, I have a stash of Yumenescene seredis in one of the storecaches. Want to get drunk?”

The tightness in your throat seems to snap, and you laugh it out. Seredis is a distilled liqueur made from a fruit of the same name that was harvested in the foothills just outside Yumenes. The trees didn’t grow well anywhere else, so Ykka’s stash might be the last seredis in the whole of the Stillness. “Pricelessly drunk?”

“Disastrously drunk.” Her smile is weary, but real.

You like the sound of this. “If we get through this.” But you’re pretty sure that you will now. There’s more than enough power in the orogene network and the spinel. You’ll make Castrima safe for stills and roggas and anything else that’s on your side. No one needs to die, except your enemies.

With that, you turn and raise your hands, splaying fingers as your orogeny—and magic—stretch forth.

You perceive Castrima: over, under, and all the matter between and below and above. Now the army of Rennanis is before you, hundreds of points of heat and magic on your mental map, some clustering in houses that do not belong to them and the rest clustering around the three tunnel mouths that lead into the underground comm. In two of the tunnels, they’ve broken through the boulders that one of Castrima’s roggas positioned to seal them. In one of these, rocks have collapsed the passageway. Some of the soldiers are dead, their bodies cooling. Other soldiers are working to clear the blockage. You can tell that’s going to take a few days, at least.

But in the other—flaking rust—they’ve found and disabled the charges. You taste the acridity of unspent chemical potential, and the sourness of bloodlust-sweat; they are making their way unobstructed toward Castrima-under, and are more than halfway to Scenic Overlook. In minutes the first of them, several dozen Strongbacks bristling with longknives and crossbows and slingshots and spears, will hit the comm’s defenses. Hundreds more file into the tunnel mouth behind them.

You know what you have to do.

You withdraw from this close view. Now the forest around Castrima spreads below you. Wider view: Now you taste the edges of Castrima’s plateau, and the nearby depression that is the forest basin. Obvious now that there was once a sea here, and a glacier before that, and more. Obvious, too, are the knots of light and fire that comprise the life of the region, scattered throughout the forest. More of it than you thought, though much of it is hibernating or hidden or otherwise guarding itself against the Season’s onslaught. Very bright along the river: Boilbugs infest both its banks and most of the plateau and basin beyond.

You begin with the river, then, delicately chilling the soil and air and stone along its length. You do this in pulsing waves, there and cool and there again and a little cooler. You drop the air pressure just on the inside of the circle of cold you’re shaping, which causes wind to blow inward, toward Castrima. It is encouragement and warning: Move and you’ll live. Stay and I’ll ice you little bastards to extinction.

The boilbugs move. You perceive them as a wave of bright heat that surges out of underground nests and aboveground feeding piles that have formed around their many victims—hundreds of nests, millions of bugs, you had no idea the forest of Castrima was so riddled with them. Tonkee’s warning about the meat shortage is meaningless and too late; you could never have competed against such successful predators. You were always going to have to get used to the taste of human anyway.

That’s neither here nor there. The ring of cold around Castrima’s territory is complete, and you direct the energy inward in waves, pushing, herding. The bugs are fast—and rusting hell, they can fly. You’d forgotten the wing covers.

And… oh, burning Earth. Suddenly you’re glad you can only sess what’s happening topside, not see or hear it.

What you perceive is painted in pressure and heat and chemical and magic. Here is a bright living cluster of Rennanis soldiers, bunched up within confines of wood and brick, as a swarm of blazing-hot boilbug motes reaches it. Through the foundation of the house you sess pounding feet, the slam of a door, the fleshier slam of bodies against each other and the floor. Mini-shakes of panic. The shapes of the soldiers glow brighter upon the ambient as the bugs land and do their work, boiling and steaming.

Terteis Hunter Castrima was unlucky; only a few bugs got him, which is why he didn’t die of it. This is dozens of boilbugs per soldier, covering every accessible bit of flesh, and it is a kindness. They do not thrash for long, your enemies, and one by one the houses of Castrima-over become still and silent once more.

(The network shudders in your yoke. None of the others like this. You steer them firmly, keeping them on task. There can be no mercy now.)

Now the swarms move into the basements, falling upon the soldiers gathered there, finding the hidden tunnels that lead down into Castrima-under. You lean on the spinel’s power more here, trying to sess which of the living motes in the tunnels are Rennanis soldiers and which are Castrima’s defenders. They’re in clusters, fighting. You have to help your people—ach—rusting—shit. Ykka bucks against your control, and though you are too embedded in the network to hear what she says out loud, you get the idea.

You know what you have to do.

So you pull a chunk out of the walls and use this to seal off the tunnels. Some of Castrima’s Strongbacks and Innovators are on the boilbug side of the seal. Some of Rennanis’s soldiers are on the safe side of it. No one ever gets everything they want.

Through the stone of the tunnels, you cannot help sessing the vibration of screams.

But before you can force yourself to ignore this, there is another scream, nearer-by, a vibration that you perceive with eardrums and not sessapinae. Startled, you begin to dismantle the network—but not fast enough, not nearly, before something yanks at your yoke. Breaks it, throwing you and all the other roggas tumbling over each other and canceling one another’s toruses as you come out of alignment. What the rust? Something has ripped two of your number loose.

You open your eyes to find yourself sprawled on the wooden platform, one arm painfully twisted under you, your face pressed against a storage crate. Confused and groaning—your knees are weak, being the yoke is hard—you push yourself up. “Ykka? What was…?”

There is a sound beyond the crates. A gasp. A groan of wood from the platform beneath you, as something incomprehensibly heavy stresses the supports. A crunch of stone, so startlingly loud that you flinch even as you realize you’ve heard this sound before. Grabbing the edge of the crate and the wooden railing, you haul yourself up on one knee. That’s enough for you to see:

Hoa, in a pose that your mind immediately and half-consciously names Warrior, stands with one arm extended. From the hand dangles a head. A stone eater’s head, hair a curling coiffure in mother-of-pearl, face gone below the top lip. The rest of the stone eater, lower jaw on down, stands in front of Hoa, frozen in a posture of reaching for something. You can see Hoa’s face in partial side view. It isn’t moving or chewing, but there’s pale stone dust on his finely carved black-marble lips. There’s a divot about the size of a bite wound in what’s left of the stone eater’s nape. That was the familiar crunch.

An instant later the stone eater’s remains shatter, and you realize Hoa’s position has changed to put a fist through its torso. Then his eyes slide toward you. He doesn’t swallow that you can see, but then he doesn’t need his mouth to speak anyway. “Rennanis’s stone eaters are coming for Castrima’s orogenes.”

Oh, Evil Earth. You make yourself get up, though you feel light-headed and unsteady on your feet. “How many?”

“Enough.” Flick and Hoa’s head has turned away, toward Scenic Overlook. You look and see heavy fighting there—the people of Castrima fighting back against the Rennanese who’ve made it down the tunnel. You spy Danel among the attackers, laying on with twin longknives against two Strongbacks as nearby, Esni shouts for another crossbow; hers has jammed. She drops her useless weapon and draws a knapped agate knife that flashes white in the light, then throws herself into the Danel fight.

And then your attention focuses on the nearer distance, where Penty has gotten herself tangled in a rope bridge. You see why: On the metal platform behind her stands another strange stone eater, this one allover citrine-gold but for the white mica around her lips. It stands with one hand extended, the fingers curled in a beckoning gesture. Penty is far from you, maybe fifty feet, but you can see tears streaking the girl’s face as she struggles to extract herself from the ropes. One of her hands flops uselessly. Broken.

Her hand is broken. Your skin prickles all over. “Hoa.”

There is a thunk against the wooden platform as he drops the head of his enemy. “Essun.”

“I need to go topside fast.” You can sess it up there, magic-feel it, looming and huge. It’s been here all along, but you’ve been shying away from it. Too much for what you needed before. Exactly what you need now.

“Topside’s crawling, Essie. Nothing but boilbugs.” Ykka is standing, just, by bracing herself against the crystal’s wall. You want to warn her—the stone eaters can come through the crystal—but there isn’t time. If you’re too slow, they’ll get her regardless.

You shake your head and stagger over to Hoa. He can’t come to you; he’s so damned heavy that it’s a wonder the wooden platform hasn’t collapsed already. His pose has changed again, now that the other stone eater is just chunks scattered around him; now he has moved to place one hand on the crystal’s wall, though the rest of him is facing you. His other hand extends toward you, open with invitation. You remember a day by a riverside, after Hoa fell into the mud. You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold. He refused you to keep his secret, and you were hurt, though you tried not to be.

Now his hand is cool compared to the warmth of Castrima. Solid—although he does not sess quite of stone, you realize in fleeting fascination. There’s a strange texture to his flesh. A very slight yielding to the pressure of your fingers. He has fingerprints. That surprises you.

Then you look up at his face. He’s reshaped his expression from the coldness that you saw when he destroyed his enemy. Now there is a slight smile on his lips. “Of course I’ll help you,” he says. So much of the boy is still in him that you almost smile back.

There isn’t time to parse this further, because all at once Castrima blurs into whiteness around you and then there is darkness, earthen-black. Hoa’s hand is on yours, however, so you do not panic.

Then you stand before the pavilion of Castrima-over, amid the dead and dying. Around you on the walkways and pavilion flagstones lie the soldiers of Rennanis, their bodies twisted, some of them impossible to see beneath carpets of insects, a very few of them still crawling and screaming. The table that Danel used to plan the attack is overturned nearby; beetles crawl over its surface. There’s that smell again, of meat in brine. The air swirls with boilbugs and the low-pressure breeze you created.

One of the bugs darts toward you and you cringe. An instant later Hoa’s hand is where the bug was, dripping hot water as the teakettle whistle of the crushed creature fizzles away. “You should probably raise a torus,” he advises. Flaking rust yes. You begin to pull away from him so you can do this safely, but his hand tightens on your own, just a little. “Orogeny can’t hurt me.”

You have more power at your disposal than just orogeny, but he knows that, so all right, then. You raise a high, tight torus around yourself, swirling with snow from the humidity, and immediately the boilbugs begin avoiding you. Perhaps they track prey by body heat. It’s all irrelevant.

You look up then, at the blackness that blots out the sky.

The onyx is like no obelisk you’ve ever seen. Most are shards—double-pointed hexagonal or octagonal columns—though you’ve seen a few that were irregular or rough-ended. This one is an ovoid cabochon, at your summons descending slowly through the cloud layer that has hidden it since its arrival a few weeks before. You can’t guess at its dimensions, but when you turn your head to take in the bowl of Castrima-over’s sky, the onyx nearly fills it, south to north, gray-clouded horizon to underlit red. It reflects nothing, and does not shine. When you look up into it—this is surprisingly hard to do without cringing—only scuds of cloud around its edges tell you that it is actually hovering high above Castrima. Looking at it, it feels closer. Right above you. You have but to lift your hand… but some part of you is terrified of doing this.

There is a strata-shaking thud as the spinel drops to the ground behind you, as if in supplication to this greater thing. Or perhaps it is only that, with the onyx here and pulling at you, drawing you in, drawing you up—

—oh, Earth, it draws you so fast—

—there is nothing left of you that can command any other obelisk. You’ve got nothing to spare. You are falling up, flying into a void that does not so much rush you along as suck at you. You have learned from other obelisks to submit to their current, but at once you know better than to do that here. The onyx will swallow you whole. But you cannot fight it, either; it will rip you apart.

The best you can manage is a kind of precarious equilibrium, in which you pull against it yet still drift through its interstices. And too much of it is in you already, so much. You need to use this power or, or, but no, something is wrong, something is slipping out of equilibrium, suddenly there is light lashing around you and you realize you are tangled in a trillion, quintillion threads of magic and they are tightening.

On another plane of existence you scream. This was a mistake. It’s eating you, and it is awful. Alabaster was wrong. Better to let the stone eaters kill every rogga in Castrima and destroy the comm than die like this. Better to let Hoa chew you to pieces with his beautiful teeth; at least you like him

love him

lo lo lo lo l o v e

Whiplash tightening of magic, in a thousand directions. Light-lattice blazing alive, suddenly, against the black. You see. This is so far past your normal range that it is nearly incomprehensible. You see the Stillness, the whole of it. You perceive the half shell of this side of the planet, taste whiffs of the other side. It’s too much—and fire-under-Earth, you’re a fool. Alabaster told you: first a network, then the Gate. You cannot do this alone; you need a smaller network to buffer the greater. You fumble toward the orogenes of Castrima again, but you cannot grasp them. There are fewer of them now, their numbers flaring and snuffing out even as you reach, and they are too panicked for even you to claim.

But there, right beside you, is a small mountain of strength: Hoa. You don’t even try to reach for him, because that strength is alien and frightening, but he reaches for you. Stabilizes you. Holds you firm.

Which allows you to finally remember: The onyx is the key.

The key unlocks a gate.

The gate activates a network—

And suddenly the onyx pulses, magma-deep and earthen-heavy, around you.

Oh Earth not a network of orogenes he meant a network of

The spinel is first, right there, as it is. The topaz is next, its bright airy power yielding to you so easily.

The smoky quartz. The amethyst, your old friend, plodding after you from Tirimo. The kunzite. The jade.

oh

The agate. The jasper, the opal, the citrine…

You open your mouth to scream and do not hear yourself.

the ruby the spodumene THE AQUAMARINE THE PERIDOT THE

“It’s too much!” You don’t know if you’re screaming the words in your mind or out loud. “Too much!”

The mountain beside you says, “They need you, Essun.”

And everything snaps into focus. Yes. The Obelisk Gate opens only for a purpose.

Down. Geode walls. Flickering columns of proto-magic; what Castrima is made of. You sess-feel-know the contaminants within its structure. Those that crawl over its surfaces you permit.

(Ykka, Penty, all the other roggas, and the stills who depend on them to keep the comm going. They all need you.)

Yet there are also those interfering with its crystal lattices, riding along its strands of matter and magic, lurking within the rock around the geode shell like parasites trying to burrow in. They are mountains, too—But they are not your mountain.

Pissed off the wrong rogga, Hoa said of his own incarceration. Yes, these enemy stone eaters rusting did.

You shout again but this time it is effort, it is aggression. SNAP and you break lattices and magic strands and reseal them to your own design. CRACK and you lift whole crystal shafts to throw them like spears and grind your enemies beneath. You look for Gray Man, the stone eater who hurt Hoa, but he is not among the mountains that threaten your home. These are just his minions. Fine. You’ll send him a message, then, written in their fear.

By the time you’re done, you’ve sealed at least five of the enemy stone eaters into crystals. Easy to do, really, when they are so foolish as to try to transit through them while you’re watching. They phase into the crystal; you simply de-phase them, freezing them like bugs in amber. The rest are fleeing.

Some flee north. Unacceptable, and distance is nothing for you now. You pull up and wheel and pierce down again, and there is Rennanis, nestled within its lattice of nodes like a spider among its bundled, sucked-dry prey. The Gate is meant to do things on a planetary scale. It is nothing to you to drive power down and inflict upon every citizen of Rennanis the same thing you did to the woman who would’ve beaten Penty to death. Bullies are bullies. So simple to twist the flickering silver between their cells until those cells grow still, solid. Stone. It is done, and Castrima’s war won, in the span of a breath.

Now it’s dangerous. Now you understand: To wield the power of this network of obelisks without a focus is to become its focus, and die. The wise thing to do, now that Castrima is safe, would be to dismantle the Gate and withdraw from the connection before it destroys you.

But. There are other things you want besides Castrima’s safety.

The Gate is like orogeny, you see. Without conscious control, it responds to all desires as if they are the desire to destroy the world. And you will not control this. You cannot. This desire is as quintessential to you as your past or your defensive personality or your many-times-broken heart.

Nassun.

Your awareness spins. South. Tracking.

Nassun.

Interference. It hurts. The pearl the diamond the

Sapphire. It resists being pulled into the network of the Gate. You barely noticed before, overwhelmed as you were by dozens, hundreds of obelisks, but you notice now because

NASSUN

IT’S HER

It is your daughter, it’s Nassun, you know the stolid complexity of her as you know your own heart and soul, it’s her, written all over this obelisk and you have found her, she is alive.

Its (your) goal accomplished, the Gate automatically begins to disengage. The other obelisks disconnect; the onyx releases you last, albeit with a whiff of cold reluctance. Next time.

And as your body sags and lists to one side because something suddenly throws off your balance, hands take hold of you and pull you upright. You can barely lift your head. Your body feels distant, heavy, like the sensation of being in stone. You have not eaten in hours, but you feel no hunger. You know you’ve been taxed far beyond your own endurance, but you feel no exhaustion.

There are mountains around you. “Rest, Essun,” says the one you love. “I’ll take care of you.”

You nod with a head heavy as a boulder. Then new presences pull at your attention, and you force yourself to look up one last time.

Antimony stands before you, impassive as ever, but there is something comforting about her presence nevertheless. You know instinctively that she is no enemy.

Beside her stands another stone eater: tall, slender, somehow awkward in its draped “clothing.” Allover white, though the shape of its facial features is Eastern Coaster: full mouth and long nose, high cheekbones and a sculpture of neatly sculpted, kinky hair. Only its eyes are black, and though they watch you with only faint recognition, with a puzzled flicker of something that might be (but should not be) memory… something about those eyes is familiar.

How ironic. This is the first time you’ve ever seen a stone eater made of alabaster.

And then you are gone.