The Obelisk Gate

INTERLUDE

A dilemma: You are made of so many people you do not wish to be. Including me.

But you know so little of me. I will attempt to explain the context of me, if not the detail. It begins—I began—with a war.

War is a poor word. Is it war when people find an infestation of vermin in some unwanted place and try to burn or poison it clean? Though that, too, is a poor metaphor, because no one hates individual mice or bedbugs. No one singles out for vengeance that one, that one right there, three-legged splotch-backed little bastard, and all its progeny down the hundreds of verminous generations that encompass a human life. And the three-legged splotch-backed little bastards don’t have much chance of becoming more than an annoyance to people—whereas you and all your kind have cracked the surface of the planet and lost the Moon. If the mice in your garden, back in Tirimo, had helped Jija kill Uche, you would have shaken the place to pebbles and set fire to the ruins before you left. You destroyed Tirimo anyway, but if it had been personal, you’d have done worse.

Yet for all your hatred, you still might not have managed to kill the vermin. The survivors would be greatly changed—made harder, stronger, more splotch-backed. Perhaps the hardships you inflicted would have fissioned their descendants into many factions, each with different interests. Some of those interests would have nothing to do with you. Some would revere and despise you for your power. Some would be as dedicated to your destruction as you were to theirs, even though by the time they had the strength to actually act on their enmity, you would have forgotten their existence. To them, your enmity would be the stuff of legend.

And some might hope to appease you, or talk you around to at least a degree of peaceful tolerance. I am one of these.

I was not always. For a very long time, I was one of the vengeful ones… but what it keeps coming back to is this: Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times.

That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted to win.

So this is a confession, my Essun. I’ve betrayed you already and I will do it again. You haven’t even chosen a side yet, and already I fend off those who would recruit you to their cause. Already I plot your death. It’s necessary. But I can at least try my damnedest to give your life a meaning that will last till the world ends.