N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

“Nassun does not have a father,” Schaffa says softly. (Jija will remember later that Schaffa smiles the whole time that he says this.) “She needs no father, nor mother. She does not know this yet, though someday she will learn. Shall I teach her early how to do without you?” And he positions two fingertips just under Jija’s jaw, pressing the tender skin there with enough force that Jija instantly understands his life depends on his answer.

Jija goes still for a long, pent breath. There’s nothing in his head worth relating, even speculatively. He says nothing, though he makes a sound. When the children speak later of this tableau, they leave out this detail: the small, strangled whine uttered by a man who is trying not to loose his bladder and bowels, and who can think of nothing beyond imminent death. It is mostly nasal, back-of-the-throat sound. It makes him want to cough.

Schaffa seems to take Jija’s whine for an answer in itself. His smile widens for a moment—a real, heartening smile, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes his gums show. He is delighted that he does not have to kill Nassun’s father with his bare hands. And then he very deliberately lifts the hand that had been positioned under Jija’s jaw, waggling the fingers before Jija’s eyes until Jija blinks.

“There,” Schaffa says. “Now we may behave again like civilized people.” He straightens, head turning toward the dormitory; it is clear he has forgotten Jija already, but for an afterthought. “Don’t forget to bring her things, please.” Then he rises, steps over Jija, and heads into the dormitory.

No one really cares what Jija does after that. A boy has been turned to stone, and a girl has manifested power that is strange and horrifying even for a rogga. These are the things everyone will remember about this day.

Everyone, I suspect, except Jija, who quietly limps home in the aftermath.

In the dormitory, Nassun has finally managed to withdraw her awareness from the watery column of blue light that nearly consumed it. This is an amazing feat, though she does not realize it. All she knows, as she finally comes out of the fit and finds Schaffa leaning over her, is that a scary thing happened, and Schaffa is there to take care of her in the aftermath.

(She is your daughter, at her core. It is not for me to judge her, but… ah, she is so very much yours.)

“Tell me,” Schaffa says. He has sat on the edge of her cot, very close, deliberately blocking her view of Eitz. Umber is ushering the other children out. Peek is weeping and hysterical; the others are silent in shock. Nassun does not notice, having her own trauma to deal with in the moment.

“There was,” she begins. She’s hyperventilating. Schaffa cups a big hand over her nose and mouth, and after a few moments her breathing slows. Once she is closer to normal, he removes his hand and nods for her to continue. “There was. A blue thing. Light and… I fell up. Schaffa, I fell up .” She frowns, confused by her own panic. “I had to get out of it. It hurt. It was too fast. It burned . I was so scared.”

He nods as if this makes sense. “You survived, though. That’s very good.” She glows with this praise, even though she has no idea what he means. He considers for a moment. “Did you sess anything else, while you were connected?”

(She will not wonder at this word, connected , until much later.)

“There was a place, up north. Lines, in the ground. All over.” She means all over the Stillness. Schaffa cocks his head with interest, which encourages her to keep babbling. “I could hear people talking. Where they touched the lines. There were people in the knots. Where the lines crossed. I couldn’t figure out what anybody was saying, though.”

Schaffa goes very still. “People in the knots. Orogenes?”

“Yes?” It’s actually hard to answer that question. The grip of those distant strangers’ orogeny was strong—some stronger than Nassun herself. Yet there was a strange, almost uniform smoothness to each of these strongest ones. Like running fingers over polished stone: There is no texture to catch on. Those were also the ones spread across the greatest distance, some of them even farther to the north than Tirimo—all the way up near where the world has gone red and hot.

“The node network,” Schaffa says thoughtfully. “Hmm. Someone is keeping some of the node maintainers alive, up north? How interesting.”

There’s more, so Nassun has to keep babbling it out. “Closer by, there were a lot of them. Us.” These felt like her fellows of Found Moon, their orogeny bright and darting like fish, many words schooling and reverberating along the silver lines connecting them. Conversations, whispers, laughter. A comm, her mind suggests. A community of some sort. A community of orogenes.

(She does not sess Castrima. I know you’re wondering.)

“How many?” Schaffa’s voice is very quiet.

She cannot gauge such things. “I just hear a lot of people talking. Like, houses full.”

Schaffa turns away. In profile, she sees that his lips have drawn back from his teeth. It isn’t a smile, for once. “The Antarctic Fulcrum.”

Nida, who has quietly come into the room in the meantime, says from over near the door: “They weren’t purged?”

“Apparently not.” There is no inflection to Schaffa’s voice. “Only a matter of time until they discover us.”

“Yes.” Then Nida laughs softly. Nassun sesses the flex of silver threads within Schaffa. Smiling eases the pain, he has said. The more a Guardian is smiling, laughing, the more something is hurting them. “Unless…” Nida laughs again. This time Schaffa smiles, too.

But he turns again to Nassun and strokes her hair back from her face. “I need you to be calm,” he says. Then he stands and moves aside so that she can see Eitz’s corpse.

And after she has finished screaming and weeping and shaking in Schaffa’s arms, Nida and Umber come over and lift Eitz’s statue, carrying it away. It is obviously much heavier than Eitz ever was, but Guardians are very strong. Nassun doesn’t know where they take him, the beautiful sea-born boy with the sad smile and the kind eyes, and she never knows anything of his ultimate fate other than that she has killed him, which makes her a monster.

“Perhaps,” Schaffa tells her as she sobs these words. He holds her in his lap again, stroking her thick curls. “But you are my monster.” She is so low and horrified that this actually makes her feel better.

****

Stone lasts, unchanging. Never alter what is written in stone.

IT BEGINS TO FEEL AS though you’ve lived in Castrima all your life. It shouldn’t. Just another comm, just another name, just another new start, or at least a partial one. It will probably end the way all the others have. But… it makes a difference that here, everyone knows what you are. That is the one good thing about the Fulcrum, about Meov, about being Syenite: You could be who you were. That’s a luxury you’re learning to savor anew.

You’re topside again, in Castrima-over as they’ve been calling it, standing on what used to be the town’s token greenland. The ground around Castrima is alkaline and sandy; you heard Ykka actually hoping for a little acid rain to make the soil better. You think the ground probably needs more organic matter for that to work… and there isn’t likely to be much of that, since you saw three boilbug mounds on the way here.

The good news is that the mounds are easy to detect, even when they’re only a little higher than the ash layer that covers the ground. The insects within them tickle your awareness as a ready source of heat and pressure for your orogeny. On the walk here, you showed the children how to sess for that pent difference from the cooler, more relaxed ambient around it. The younger ones made a game of it, gasping and pointing whenever they sensed a mound and trying to outdo one another in the count.