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.
* * *
What if it isn’t dead?
—Letter from Rido Innovator Dibars to Seventh University, sent via courier from Allia Quartent and Comm after the raising of the garnet obelisk, received three months after word of Allia’s destruction spread via telegraph. Unknown reference.
You fall into my arms, and I take you to a safe place.
Safety is relative. You have driven off my unsavory brethren, those of my kind who would have killed you since they cannot control you. As I descend into Castrima, however, and emerge in a quiet space of familiarity, I smell iron on the air, amid the shit and stale breath and other scents of flesh, and smoke. The iron is a flesh scent, too: that variant of iron which is contained in blood. Outside, there are bodies along the walkways and steps. One even dangles from a ropeslide. The fighting is mostly over, however, because of two things. First, the invaders have realized they are trapped between the insect-infested surface and their enemies, who are greater in number now that most of the invading army is dead. Those who wish to live have surrendered; those who fear a worse death have flung themselves on the swords or crystals of Castrima.
The second thing that has stopped the fighting is the inescapable fact that the geode is badly damaged. All over the comm, the once-glowing crystals now flicker in irregular pulses. One of the longer ones has detached from the wall and broken, its dust and rubble scattered along the geode floor. On the ground level, warm water has stopped flowing into the communal pool, though occasionally there is a haphazard spurt of it. Several of the comm’s crystals are completely dark, dead, cracked—but within each, a darker shape can be seen, frozen and trapped. Humanoid.
Fools. That’s what you get for pissing off my rogga.
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