N. Jemisin: The Obelisk Gate

When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper sliced finer still by the distance of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” whisper distance, and denial.) To the people who live it, both those who took their dominance for granted until it comes for them in the dark with a knife, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment more of “inferiority”—

That was not a metaphor, Essun. Not hyperbole. I have watched the world burn. Say nothing to me of lost innocents, unearned suffering. When a comm builds atop a faultline, do you blame its walls for crushing the people inside when they inevitably crumble? Some worlds are built upon a faultline of pain, held stable—temporarily—by nightmare walls. Don’t lament when they fall apart. Lament that they were ever built in the first place.

Well. That’s enough of a segue.

Now let’s talk about then: the end of the last world, which was the beginning of this one. I want you to imagine what the world was like before the Seasons.

This will be unimaginable for you, I know. You have no point of reference. The Stillness is a scar, not a land. Season after Fifth Season has scoured it; its face is seamed with old burns, badly healed lacerations, ulcerated sores. The Nomidlats are much larger now than they were, did you know? Palela, the sleepy town where little Damaya Strongback discovered what she was and lost her family, sits on land that did not exist in my youth. It spilled out of the boundary between the Minimal and Maximal; once it finally cooled, I watched it change from barren shatterland to new forest over less than a century. It’s farmland now, but I remember when it was a floodplain of lava that stretched as far as the eye could see.

And before that, it was a city. I was born there, if…

Hmm. I seem to have forgotten its name. Perhaps you think that odd. The time that I spent in the garnet obelisk was good, in some respects; I remember some , where most of the others, the old ones like me, recall none . A few have even forgotten that we used to be, well, you. That’s the core of so many problems; our minds remained human, even as the rest changed. We outlive our selves. But names… I was never good with names, even when the memories were fresh.

Well. Names are irrelevant. I’ll make them up, if I feel you need them.

So imagine again, and then imagine farther. Massive cities sprawling along every coastline, brimful of the wealthy and the powerful—yes, in those days, only unfortunates lived inland. Forests and plains more green and tender than anything you’ve ever seen. Trees that would never survive a single ashfall, absurd in their design compared to the tough, compact, thick-skinned flora of today… but beautiful. A sky so deeply blue and clear that if you stared long enough, you could see where it bled into space.

(Space. Worlds beyond the world. Imagine looking up, and caring about what you see. And imagine, too, a great white eye gazing back at you from the midst of that nighttime blackness. But why does this thought frighten you? Instead of the void, another presence! Would it not be good, to feel less lonely?)

I remember all of this, though the memory is thin and curls about the edges. I remember it with the clarity of one who stared at it endlessly, hungrily, through glass.

I remember the day that started it. The person. The event. I will tell you the way that world ended. I will tell you how I rusting killed it, or at least enough of it that it had to start over and rebuild itself from scratch. I will tell you how I opened the Gate, and flung away the Moon, and laughed as I did it. And how, as the quiet of death descended, I whispered:

Right now.

Right now .

If you enjoyed

THE OBELISK GATE

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WAKE OF VULTURES

The Shadow: Book 1

by Lila Bowen

Nettie Lonesome lives in a land of hard people and hard ground dusted with sand. She’s a half-breed who dresses like a boy, raised by folks who don’t call her a slave but use her like one. She knows of nothing else. That is, until the day a stranger attacks her. When nothing, not even a sickle to the eye, can stop him, Nettie stabs him through the heart with a chunk of wood, and he turns into black sand.

And just like that, Nettie can see.

But her newfound ability is a blessing and a curse. Even if she doesn’t understand what’s under her own skin, she can sense what everyone else is hiding—at least physically. The world is full of evil, and now she knows the source of all the sand in the desert. Haunted by the spirits, Nettie has no choice but to set out on a quest that might lead to her true kin… if the monsters along the way don’t kill her first.

Nettie Lonesome had two things in the world that were worth a sweet goddamn: her old boots and her one-eyed mule, Blue. Neither item actually belonged to her. But then again, nothing did. Not even the whisper-thin blanket she lay under, pretending to be asleep and wishing the black mare would get out of the water trough before things went south.

The last fourteen years of Nettie’s life had passed in a shriveled corner of Durango territory under the leaking roof of this wind-chapped lean-to with Pap and Mam, not quite a slave and nowhere close to something like a daughter. Their faces, white and wobbling as new butter under a smear of prairie dirt, held no kindness. The boots and the mule had belonged to Pap, right up until the day he’d exhausted their use, a sentiment he threatened to apply to her every time she was just a little too slow with the porridge.

“Nettie! Girl, you take care of that wild filly, or I’ll put one in her goddamn skull!”

Pap got in a lather when he’d been drinking, which was pretty much always. At least this time his anger was aimed at a critter instead of Nettie. When the witch-hearted black filly had first shown up on the farm, Pap had laid claim and pronounced her a fine chunk of flesh and a sign of the Creator’s good graces. If Nettie broke her and sold her for a decent price, she’d be closer to paying back Pap for taking her in as a baby when nobody else had wanted her but the hungry, circling vultures. The value Pap placed on feeding and housing a half-Injun, half-black orphan girl always seemed to go up instead of down, no matter that Nettie did most of the work around the homestead these days. Maybe that was why she’d not been taught her sums: Then she’d know her own damn worth, to the penny.

But the dainty black mare outside wouldn’t be roped, much less saddled and gentled, and Nettie had failed to sell her to the cowpokes at the Double TK Ranch next door. Her idol, Monty, was a top hand and always had a kind word. But even he had put a boot on Pap’s poorly kept fence, laughed through his mustache, and hollered that a horse that couldn’t be caught couldn’t be sold. No matter how many times Pap drove the filly away with poorly thrown bottles, stones, and bullets, the critter crept back under cover of night to ruin the water by dancing a jig in the trough, which meant another blistering trip to the creek with a leaky bucket for Nettie.

Splash, splash. Whinny.

Could a horse laugh? Nettie figured this one could.

Pap, however, was a humorless bastard who didn’t get a joke that didn’t involve bruises.

“Unless you wanna go live in the flats, eatin’ bugs, you’d best get on, girl.”

Nettie rolled off her worn-out straw tick, hoping there weren’t any scorpions or centipedes on the dusty dirt floor. By the moon’s scant light she shook out Pap’s old boots and shoved her bare feet into the cracked leather.