N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

She doesn’t, and that bothers her a lot. Umber does not act out of cruelty. If he sees her as a threat, there must be some reason for it. But it doesn’t matter.

“Schaffa wants me alive,” she says. “So I live. Even if I have to kill you.”

Umber appears to consider this. She glimpses the quick flicker of the silver within him and knows, suddenly and instinctively, that she’s no longer talking to Umber, exactly.

His master .

Umber says, “And if Schaffa decides you should die?”

“Then I die.” That’s what the Fulcrum got wrong, she feels certain. They treated the Guardians as enemies, and maybe they once were, like Schaffa said. But allies must trust in one another, be vulnerable to one another. Schaffa is the only person in the world who loves Nassun, and Nassun will die, or kill, or remake the world, for his sake.

Slowly, Umber inclines his head. “Then I will trust in your love for him,” he says. For an instant there is an echo in his voice, in his body, through the ground, reverberating away, so deep. “For now.” With that, he moves past her and sits down near Schaffa, assuming a guard stance himself.

Nassun does not understand Guardian reasoning, but she’s learned one thing about them over the months: They do not bother to lie. If Umber says he will trust Schaffa—no. Trust Nassun’s love for Schaffa , because there is a difference. But if Umber says this has meaning to him, then she can rely on that.

So she lies down on her own bedroll and relaxes in spite of everything. She doesn’t sleep for some while, though. Nerves, maybe.

Night falls. The evening is clear, apart from the faint haze of ash blowing from the north, and a few broken, pearled clouds that periodically drift southward along the breeze. The stars come out, winking through the haze, and Nassun stares at them for a long while. She’s begun to drift, her mind finally relaxing toward sleep, when belatedly she notices that one of the tiny white lights up there is moving in a different direction from the rest—downward, sort of, while the other stars march west to east across the sky. Slow. Hard to unsee it now that she’s made it out. It’s a little bigger and brighter than the rest, too. Strange.

Nassun rolls over to turn her back to Umber, and sleeps.

These things have been down here for an age of the world. Foolish to call them bones. They go to powder when we touch them.

But stranger than the bones are the murals. Plants I’ve never seen, something that might be a language but it just looks like shapes and wiggling. And one: a great round white thing amid the stars, hanging over a landscape. Eerie. I didn’t like it. I had the blackjacket crumble the mural away.

I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.

You stare at the stone eater that has burst forth from the chalcedony chrysalis. It stands hunched and perfectly still, watching you sidelong through the slight heat-waver of the air around the split geode. Its hair is as you remember from that half-real, half-dream moment within the garnet obelisk: a frozen splash, what happens to ashblow hair when a hard gust of wind lifts it up and back. Translucent white-ish opal now instead of simply white. But unlike the fleshly form that you grew to know, this stone eater’s “skin” is as black as the night sky once was before the Season. What you thought were cracks back then, you now realize are actually white and silver marbling veins. Even the elegant drape of pseudo-clothing wrapped around the body, a simple chiton that hangs off one shoulder, is marbled black. Only the eyes lack the marbling, the whites now matte smooth darkness. The irises are still icewhite. They stand out from the black face, stark and so atavistically disturbing that it actually takes you a moment to realize the face around it is still Hoa’s.

Hoa. He is older, you see at once; the face is that of a young man and not a boy. Still too wide, with too narrow a mouth, racially nonsensical. You can read anxiety in those frozen features, though, because you learned to read it on a face that was once softer and designed to elicit your compassion.

“Which was the lie?” you ask. It is the only thing you can think to ask.

“The lie?” The voice is a man’s now. The same voice, but in the tenor range. Coming from his chest somewhere.

You step into the room. It’s still unpleasantly hot, though cooling off quickly. You’re sweating anyway. “Your human shape, or this?”

“Both have been true at different times.”

“Ah, yes. Alabaster said all of you were human. Once, anyway.”

There is a moment of silence. “Are you human?”

At this, you cannot help but laugh once. “Officially? No.”

“Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?”

“Human.”

“Then so am I.”

He stands steaming between the halves of a giant rock from which he just hatched. “Uh, not anymore.”

“Should I take your word for that? Or listen to what I feel myself to be?”

You shake your head, walking as far as you can around the geode. Inside it there is nothing; it’s a thin stone shell bare of crystals or the usual precipitant lining. Probably doesn’t qualify as a geode, then. “How’d you end up in an obelisk?”

“Pissed off the wrong rogga.”

This surprises you into a laugh, which makes you stop and stare at him. It’s an uncomfortable laugh. He’s watching you the way he always used to, all eyes and hope. Should it really matter that the eyes are so strange now?

“I didn’t know that could be done,” you say. “Trapping a stone eater, I mean.”

“You could do it. It’s one of the only ways to stop one of us.”

“Not kill you, obviously.”

“No. There’s only one way to do that.”

“Which is?”

He flicks to face you. This seems instantaneous; suddenly the statue’s pose is completely different, serene and upright, with one hand raised in… invitation? Appeal? “Are you planning to kill me, Essun?”

You sigh and shake your head and extend a hand to touch one of the stone halves, out of curiosity.

“Don’t. It’s still too hot for your flesh.” He pauses. “This is how I get clean, without soap.”

A day along the side of the road, south of Tirimo. A boy who stared at a bar of soap in confusion, then delight. It’s still him. You can’t shake it off. So you sigh and also let go of the part of yourself that wants to treat him as something else, something frightening, something other. He’s Hoa. He wants to eat you, and he tried to help you find your daughter even though he failed. There’s an intimacy in these facts, however strange they are, that means something to you.

You fold your arms and pace slowly around the geode, and him. His eyes follow. “So who kicked your ass?” He has regenerated the eyes that were missing, and the lower jaw. The limbs that had been torn off are part of him again. There’s still blood in the living room, but whatever there had been in your bedroom is now gone, along with a layer of the floor and walls. Stone eaters are said to have control over the very smallest particles of matter. Simple enough to reappropriate one’s own detached substance, repurpose unused surplus material. You guess.

“A dozen or so of my kind. Then one in particular.”