N. Jemisin: The Fifth Season

I told her that I was called Hoa. It is as good a name as any.

This is how it began. Listen. Learn. This is how the world changed.

THERE’S A STRUCTURE IN CASTRIMA that glitters. It’s on the lowermost level of the great geode, and you think it must have been built rather than grown: Its walls aren’t carved solid crystal, but slabs of quarried white mica, flecked delicately with infinitesimal crystal flakes that are no less beautiful than their larger cousins, if not as dramatic. Why someone would carry these slabs here and make a house out of them amid all these ready-made, uninhabited apartments, you have no idea. You don’t ask. You don’t care.

Lerna comes with you, because this is the comm’s official infirmary and the man you’re coming to see is his patient. But you stop him at the door, and there’s something in your face that must warn him of the danger. He does not protest when you go in without him.

You walk through its open doorway slowly, and stop when you spy the stone eater across the infirmary’s large main room. Antimony, yes; you’d almost forgotten the name Alabaster gave her. She looks back at you impassively, hardly distinguishable from the white wall save for the rust of her fingertips and the stark black of her “hair” and eyes. She hasn’t changed since the last time you saw her: twelve years ago, at the end of Meov. But then, for her kind, twelve years is nothing.

You nod to her, anyway. It’s the polite thing to do, and there’s still a little left of you that’s the woman the Fulcrum raised. You can be polite to anybody, no matter how much you hate them.

She says, “No closer.”

She’s not talking to you. You turn, unsurprised, to see that Hoa is behind you. Where’d he come from? He’s just as still as Antimony — unnaturally still, which makes you finally notice that he doesn’t breathe. He never has, in all the time you’ve known him. How the rust did you miss that? Hoa watches her with the same steady glower of threat that he offered to Ykka’s stone eater. Perhaps none of them like each other. Must make reunions awkward.

“I’m not interested in him,” Hoa says.

Antimony’s eyes shift over to you for a moment. Then her gaze returns to Hoa. “I am interested in her only on his behalf.”

Hoa says nothing. Perhaps he’s considering this; perhaps it’s an offer of truce, or a staking of claims. You shake your head and walk past them both.

At the back of the main room, on a pile of cushions and blankets, lies a thin black figure, wheezing. It stirs a little, lifting its head slowly as you approach. As you crouch just out of his arms’ reach, you’re relieved to recognize him. Everything else has changed, but his eyes, at least, are the same.

“Syen,” he says. His voice is thick gravel.

“Essun, now,” you say, automatically.

He nods. This seems to cause him pain; for a moment his eyes squinch shut. Then he draws in another breath, makes a visible effort to relax, and revives somewhat. “I knew you weren’t dead.”

“Why didn’t you come, then?” you say.

“Had my own problems to deal with.” He smiles a little. You actually hear the skin on the left side of his face — there’s a big burned patch there — crinkle. His eyes shift over to Antimony, as slowly as a stone eater’s movements. Then he returns his attention to you.

(To her, Syenite.)

To you, Essun. Rust it, you’ll be glad when you finally figure out who you really are.

“And I’ve been busy.” Now Alabaster lifts his right arm. It ends abruptly, in the middle of the forearm; he’s not wearing anything on his upper body, so you can clearly see what’s happened. There’s not much left of him. He’s missing a lot of pieces, and he stinks of blood and pus and urine and cooked meat. The arm injury, though, is not one he earned from Yumenes’s fires, or at least not directly. The stump of his arm is capped with something hard and brown that is definitely not skin: too hard, too uniformly chalklike in its visible composition.

Stone. His arm has become stone . Most of it’s gone, though, and the stump—

— tooth marks. Those are tooth marks. You glance up at Antimony again, and think of a diamond smile.

“Hear you’ve been busy, too,” ’Baster says.

You nod, finally dragging your gaze away from the stone eater. (Now you know what kind of stone they eat.) “After Meov. I was…” You’re not sure how to say it. There are griefs too deep to be borne, and yet you have borne them again and again. “I needed to be different.”

It makes no sense. Alabaster makes a soft affirmative sound, though, as if he understands. “You stayed free, at least.”

If hiding everything you are is free. “Yes.”

“Settled down?”

“Got married. Had two children.” Alabaster is silent. With all the patches of char and chalky brown stone on his face, you can’t tell if he’s smiling or scowling. You assume the latter, though, so you add: “Both of them were… like me. I’m… my husband…”

Words make things real in a way that even memories can’t, so you stop there.

“I understand why you killed Corundum,” Alabaster says, very softly. And then, while you sway in your crouch, literally reeling from the blow of that sentence, he finishes you. “But I’ll never forgive you for doing it.”

Damn. Damn him. Damn yourself.

It takes you a moment to respond.

“I understand if you want to kill me,” you manage, at last. Then you lick your lips. Swallow. Spit the words out. “But I have to kill my husband, first.”

Alabaster lets out a wheezing sigh. “Your other two kids.”

You nod. Doesn’t matter that Nassun’s alive, in this instance. Jija took her from you; that is insult enough.

“I’m not going to kill you, Sy — Essun.” He sounds tired. Maybe he doesn’t hear the little sound you make, which is neither relief nor disappointment. “I wouldn’t even if I could.”

“If you—”

“Can you do it, yet?” He rides over your confusion the way he always did. Nothing about him has changed except his ruined body. “You drew on the garnet at Allia, but that one was half dead. You must have used the amethyst at Meov, but that was… an extremity. Can you do it at will, now?”

“I…” You don’t want to understand. But now your eyes are drawn away from the horror that remains of your mentor, your lover, your friend. To the side and behind Alabaster, where a strange object rests against the wall of the infirmary. It looks like a glassknife, but the blade is much too long and wide for practical use. It has an enormous handle, perhaps because the blade is so stupidly long, and a crosspiece that will get in the way the first time someone tries to use the thing to cut meat or slice through a knot. And it’s not made of glass, or at least not any glass you’ve ever seen. It’s pink, verging on red, and—

and. You stare at it. Into it. You feel it trying to draw your mind in, down. Falling. Falling up, through an endless shaft of flickering, faceted pink light—

You gasp and twitch back into yourself defensively, then stare at Alabaster. He smiles again, painfully.

“The spinel,” he says, confirming your shock. “That one’s mine. Have you made any of them yours, yet? Do the obelisks come when you call?”

You don’t want to understand, but you do. You don’t want to believe, but really, you have all along.

“ You tore that rift up north,” you breathe. Your hands are clenching into fists. “ You split the continent. You started this Season. With the obelisks! You did… all of that.”