The Obelisk Gate

20 Nassun, faceted

BUT ALSO…

I listen through the earth. I hear the reverberations. When a new key is cut, her bittings finally ground and sharpened enough that she can connect to the obelisks and make them sing, we all know of it. Those of us who… hope… seek out that singer. We are forever barred from turning the key ourselves, but we can influence its direction. Whenever an obelisk resonates, you may be sure that one of us lurks nearby. We talk. This is how I know.

In the dead of the night Nassun wakes. It’s dark in the barracks, still, so she’s careful not to step on the creakier floorboards as she pulls on her shoes and jacket and makes her way across the room. None of the others stirs, if they even wake and notice. They probably just think she has to go to the outhouse.

Outside, it’s quiet. The sky is beginning to lighten with dawn in the east, though it’s harder to tell now that the ash clouds have thickened. She goes to the top of the downhill path and notices a few lights on in Jekity. Some of the farmers and fishers are up. In Found Moon, though, all is still.

What is it that tugs at her mind? The feel of it is irritating, gummy, as if something is caught in her hair and needs to be yanked free. The sensation is centered in her sessapinae—no. Deeper. This tugs at the light of her spine, the silver between her cells, the threads that bind her to the ground and to Found Moon and to Schaffa and to the sapphire that hovers just above the clouds of Jekity, visible now and again when the clouds break a little. The irritation is… it is… north.

Something is happening up north.

Nassun turns to follow the sensation, climbing the hill up to the crucible mosaic and stopping at its center as the wind makes her hair puffs shiver. Up here she can see the forest that surrounds Jekity spread before her like a map: rounded treetops and occasional outcroppings of ribbon-basalt. Part of her can perceive shifting forces, reverberating lines, connections, amplification. But of what? Why? Something immense.

“What you perceive is the opening of the Obelisk Gate,” says Steel. She is unsurprised to find him suddenly standing beside her.

“More than one obelisk?” Nassun asks, because that’s what she’s sessing. Lots more.

“Every one stationed above this half of the continent. A hundred parts of the great mechanism beginning to work again as they were meant to.” Steel’s voice, baritone and surprisingly pleasant, sounds wistful in this moment. Nassun finds herself wondering about his life, his past, whether he has ever been a child like her. That seems impossible. “So much power. The very heart of the planet is channeled through the Gate… and she uses it for so frivolous a purpose.” A faint sigh. “Then again, so did its original creators, I suppose.”

Somehow, Nassun knows that Steel is talking about her mother with that she. Mama is alive, and angry, and full of so much power.

“What purpose?” Nassun makes herself ask.

Steel’s eyes slide toward her. She has not specified whose purpose she means: her mother’s, or those ancient people who first created and deployed the obelisks. “The destruction of one’s enemies, of course. A small and selfish purpose that feels great, in the moment—though not without consequence.”

Nassun considers what she has learned, and sessed, and seen in the dead smiles of the other two Guardians. “Father Earth fought back,” she says.

“As one does, against those who seek to enslave. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”

Nassun closes her eyes. Yes. It’s all so understandable, really, when she thinks about it. The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too. Then it’s all broken hands and silver threads woven like ropes, and mothers who move the earth to destroy their enemies but cannot save one little boy.

(Girl.)

There has never been anyone to save Nassun. Her mother warned her there never would be. If Nassun ever wants to be free of fear, she has no choice but to forge that freedom for herself.

So she turns, slowly, to face her father, who stands quietly behind her.

“Sweetening,” he says. It’s the voice he usually uses for her, but she knows it isn’t real. His eyes are cold as the ice she left all over his house a few days ago. His jaw is tight, his body shaking just a little. She glances down at his tight fist. There’s a knife in it—a beautiful one made from red opal, her favorite of his more recent work. It has a slight iridescence and a smooth sheen that completely disguises the razor-sharpness of its knapped edges.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says. She glances toward Steel, who is surely aware of what Jija intends. But the gray stone eater has not bothered to turn away from the predawn forestscape, or the northern sky where so many earth-changing things are happening.

Very well. She faces her father again. “Mama’s alive, Daddy.”

If the words mean anything to him, it doesn’t show. He just keeps standing there looking at her. Looking at her eyes in particular. She’s always had her mother’s eyes.

Suddenly it doesn’t matter. Nassun sighs and rubs her face with her hands, as weary as Father Earth must be after so many eternities of hate. Hate is tiring. Nihilism is easier, though she does not know the word and will not for a few years. It’s what she’s feeling, regardless: an overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of it all.

“I think I understand why you hate us,” she says to her father as she drops her hands to her sides. “I’ve done bad things, Daddy, like you probably thought I would. I don’t know how to not do them. It’s like everybody wants me to be bad, so there’s nothing else I can be.” She hesitates, then says what’s been in her mind for months now, unspoken. She doesn’t think she’ll have another chance to say it. “I wish you could love me anyway, even though I’m bad.”

She thinks of Schaffa as she says this, though. Schaffa, who loves her no matter what, as a father should.

Jija just keeps staring at her. Elsewhere in the silence, on that plane of awareness that is occupied by sesuna and whatever the sense of the silver threads is called, Nassun feels her mother collapse. To be specific, she feels her mother’s exertion upon the shifting, glimmering network of obelisks suddenly cease. Not that it ever touched her sapphire.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Nassun says at last. “I tried to keep loving you, but it was too hard.”

He’s much bigger than her. Armed, where she is not. When he moves, it is with a mountainous lumber, all shoulders first and bulk and slow buildup to unstoppable speed. She weighs barely a hundred pounds. She has no real chance.

But in the instant that she feels the twitch of her father’s muscles, small reverberating shocks against the ground and air, she orients her awareness toward the sky in a single, ringing command.

The transformation of the sapphire is instantaneous. It causes a concussion of air that rushes inward to fill the vacuum. The sound this makes is the loudest crack of thunder Nassun has ever heard. Jija, in mid-lunge, starts and stumbles, looking up. A moment later the sapphire slams into the ground before Nassun, cracking the central stone of the crucible mosaic and a six-foot radius of ground around her.

It isn’t the sapphire as she’s seen it up till now, although the sameness of it transcends things like shape. When she extends her hand to wrap around the hilt of the long, flickering knife of blue stone, she falls into it a little. Up, flowing through watery facets of light and shadow. In, down into the earth. Out, away, brushing against the other parts of the whole that is the Gate. The thing in her hand is the same monstrous, mountainous dynamo of silvery power that it has always been. The same tool, just more versatile now.

Jija stares at it, then at her. There is an instant in which he wavers, and Nassun waits. If he turns, runs… he was her father once. Does he remember that time? She wants him to. Nothing between them will ever be the same again, but she wants that time to matter.

No. Jija comes at her again, shouting as he raises the knife.

So Nassun lifts the sapphire blade from the earth. It’s nearly the length of her body, but it weighs nothing; the sapphire floats, after all. It’s just floating here in front of her instead of above. She doesn’t lift it, either, strictly speaking. She wills it to move to a new position and it does. In front of her. Between her and Jija, so that when Jija angles his body to stab her, he cannot help bumping right into it. This makes it easy, inevitable, for her power to lay into him.

She doesn’t kill him with ice. Nassun defaults to using the silver instead of orogeny most days. The shift of Jija’s flesh is more controlled than what she did to Eitz, largely because she is aware of what she’s doing, and also because she’s doing it on purpose. Jija begins to turn to stone, starting at the point of contact between him and the obelisk.

What Nassun doesn’t consider is momentum, which carries Jija forward even as he glances off the sapphire and twists and sees what is happening to his flesh and starts to inhale for a scream. He doesn’t finish the inhalation before his lungs are solidified. He does, however, finish his lunge, though it is off-balance and out of control, more of a fall than an attack by now. Still, it is a fall with a knife as its focal point, and so the knife catches Nassun in the shoulder. He was aiming for her heart.

The pain of the strike is sudden and terrible and it breaks Nassun’s concentration at once. This is bad because the sapphire flares as her pain does, flickering into its half-real state and back as she gasps and staggers. This finishes Jija in an instant, solidifying him completely into a statue with a frizz of smoky-quartz hair and a round red-ocher face and clothes of deep blue serendibite, because he wore dark clothing in order to stalk his daughter. This statue stands poised for only an instant, though—and then the flicker of the sapphire sends a ripple through him like a struck bell. Not unlike the concussion of turned-inward orogenic force that a Guardian once inflicted on a man named Innon.

Jija shatters in the same way, just not as wetly. He’s brittle stuff, weak, poorly made. The pieces of him tumble into stillness around Nassun’s feet.

Nassun gazes at the remains of her father for a long, aching moment. Beyond her, in Found Moon and down below in Jekity, lights are coming on in the cabins. Everyone’s been woken up by the thunderclap of the sapphire. There is confusion, voices calling back and forth, frantic sessing and probes of the earth.

Steel now gazes down at Jija with her. “It never ends,” he says. “It never gets better.”

Nassun says nothing. Steel’s words fall into her like a stone into water, and she does not ripple in their wake.

“You’ll kill everything you love, eventually. Your mother. Schaffa. All your friends here in Found Moon. No way around it.”

She closes her eyes.

“No way… except one.” A careful, considered pause. “Shall I tell you that way?”

Schaffa is coming. She can sess him, the buzz of him, the constant torment of the thing in his brain that he will not let her remove. Schaffa, who loves her.

You’ll kill everything you love, eventually.

“Yes,” she makes herself say. “Tell me how not to…” She trails off. She can’t say hurt them, because she has already hurt so many. She’s a monster. But there must be a way for her monstrousness to be contained. For the threat of an orogene’s existence to be ended.

“The Moon’s coming back, Nassun. It was lost so long ago, flung away like a ball on a paddle-string—but the string has drawn it back. Left to itself, it will pass by and fly off again; it’s done that before, several times now.”

She can see one of her father’s eyes, set into a chunk of his face, gazing up at her from amid the pile. His eyes were green, and now they have become a beautiful shade of clouded peridot.

“But with the Gate, you can… nudge it. Just a little. Adjust its tra—” A soft, amused sound. “The path that the Moon naturally follows. Instead of letting it pass again, lost and wandering, bring it home. Father Earth’s been missing it. Bring it straight here and let them have a reunion.”

Oh. Oh. She understands, suddenly, why Father Earth wants her dead.

“It will be a terrible thing,” Steel says softly, nearly in her ear because he’s moved closer to her. “It will end the Seasons. It will end every season. And yet… what you’re feeling right now, you need never feel again. No one will ever suffer again.”

Nassun turns to stare at Steel. He’s bent toward her, a look of almost comical slyness chiseled on his face.

Then Schaffa trots to a stop before them. He’s staring at the ruin of Jija, and she sees the moment when the realization of what he’s seeing flickers across his face, a mobile shockwave. His icewhite gaze lifts to her, and she searches his expression with her belly clenched against imminent pain.

There is only anguish in his face. Fear for her, sorrow on her behalf, alarm at her bloodied shoulder. Wariness and protective anger, as he focuses on Steel. He is still her Schaffa. The ache of Jija fades within the ease of his regard. Schaffa will love her no matter what she becomes.

So Nassun turns then, to Steel, and says, “Tell me how to bring the Moon home.”