N. Jemisin - The Awakened Kingdom

In the mortal realm there is a world that is very special! This was the planet Papa Tempa had shown me. It is special for bad reasons, mostly, like killing a lot of us. But it is also the world most of us go to when we visit the mortal realm, so I packed myself up and wrapped myself in skin and some bones and stuff. I picked stuff that was different from Sieh’s, just like Itempas had said, which meant that when I became a big-headed human I made myself smaller and browner and girlier, and I gave myself pretty gold eyes like Papa’s instead of green ones like Mama’s. Then I took a deep breath with my brand-new lungs, and I went! There!

Now I will skip over some stuff that is not very important.

I did not mean to break that planet it was just in the way when I came into being and I fixed it and I said I was sorry and the planet said OK so since I’m supposed to learn from stuff like that I will tell you don’t break planets , especially the ones with living things on them, or at least fix them if you do break them. Also, don’t go in black holes , no matter how much they look like cute little Nahas. They are not cute! They are actually very bitey and kind of mean. Also just OK I do not want to talk about any of this anymore.

Hello! That’s better. Now I will tell you where you came from, so you can know what it was like for me.

I went to the scary Planet Where Gods Die. (It did not have a better name, it told me, sadly. I promised I would make up a good name for it before I left.) It has two big continents; since Sieh spent most of his time on the bigger one, I picked the smaller one. There was a big city there, and a place in the city where there were many mortals shuffling about doing mortally things. I made myself be in the middle of them all, and then I put my hands on my hips and said, “Hello!”

Also, do not do this to mortals.

OK well it is a good thing to say hello. But you should maybe say it at the same volume little human-mortals speak, not the volume that big sun-mortals use. And you should maybe use a human language, because the universe doesn’t care about those and doesn’t try to say hi back.

So, um. The city. Broke, a little. And a lot of people. They broke, too.

That was really, really, really, soooooo many reallys, bad. People are not as strong as planets, and they cannot be put back together as easily. Once the Yeine of them is gone, oops I mean the life, it can’t come back. Which meant that I had made a lot of mortals die . Become grief. I felt the holes torn by their goneness! I knew they would not come back, and I knew I had been so terribly awfully bad that I might not ever be good again.

So I stood there in what remained of the market, staring at flat bodies and flat buildings and cracked streets and burning air, and I started to cry, because I didn’t know what else to do and everything was already wrong .

“Stop,” said someone, and I blinked and lifted my face out of my hands because I hadn’t thought there was anybody left to talk to me. When I looked up, though, there was a mortal still standing! He had pretty long black hair and wore pretty bright-colored blankety things and he had his hands out in front of him with his eyes shut tight like he was trying to do something hard. There was something in one of his hands, a rolled-up piece of paper on two sticks, but that wasn’t what he was trying hard at. What he was doing was keeping the air still and cool and the ground steady beneath himself. But that isn’t hard! Silly mortal. It was why he was still standing, though.

“Stop,” he said again, this time baring his teeth, “sniveling.”

I was very, very careful to make my voice more like his as wiped my face with the back of one fist. “What?”

His eyes opened a crack; they were very very black and reminded me a little of Naha’s. “Shut up ,” he snapped again. He was really mad! At me! “Stop crying and fix this.”

Oh.

I tried. I put the air and ground and buildings back to the way they were supposed to be, maybe they were a little crooked but at least they weren’t in pieces anymore, and then I tried to figure out how to fix the mortals. A lot of them could not be fixed. But the ones who were still breathing—I was scared to try and fix them. What if I made them a little crooked, too? Mortals weren’t very malleable. But if I did nothing, they would stop. I mean, die.

There was a kind of shiver and a folding and one of my siblings appeared! He shaped himself out of ether into something that looked like a tall, pale human man with flatyellowshort hair and eyes like methane ice planets, and there were weird things on his face, little circles of glass held in place with wire. But none of that mattered because he was wrong, too, and I didn’t really understand why at first.

“What, precisely, are you doing, Sibling?” he asked.

I had to try really hard not to start crying again. “I broke them and I don’t know how to fix them! I didn’t mean to!”

His eyes narrowed. “Ah,” he said at last. “You’re the new one. That explains a great deal.” He sighed and pushed the wire-glass things up his face with one finger. “One moment.”

Then everything sort of un -everythinged. Some of what happened was too fast for me to see, and that is saying a lot because, you know, I am a god. Something vast and incomprehensible as the Maelstrom passed near, and for a minute I got really scared! But then there was a shoop and a slurbt and reality shook some, and all of a sudden everything was back to normal! The mortals were all fixed, shuffling about again as mortals did, but they weren’t upset or anything, which was strange. The buildings were uncrooked, because—oh! oh, I got it!—they had never fallen in the first place! And the streets were uncracked! And the city was unbroked!

I turned to my sibling, who had folded his arms and was now looking around the marketplace through his glass things. I was so happy I wanted to cry again, in a different way. “That was amazing!”

“Yes.” This came from the mortal, who exhaled and let his bubble of cool stillness go away. Except it was still there, just a little, in a way that I did not understand. I felt it when he looked at me, still angry and lip-curled, and it made me stop smiling and remember that I had been really bad. The mortal smoothed the cloth that was wrapped around him. “Thank you, Lord Ia. May I also rely upon you to deal with your… companion? I’d rather not take up the matter with my grandmother.”

Something happened that I didn’t understand. Ia looked at the mortal. The mortal looked away, but I could tell that he had seen Ia looking at him. It was almost like they were trying to talk without words, but I had heard mortals couldn’t do that.

“Very well,” said Ia, after a moment. He folded his arms across his chest. He was wearing cloth, too, all in straight lines and white. It looked stark compared to the mortal’s flowing, draped colors, and uncomfortable! “Please give my regards to Fahno-enulai, then, should you ever deem it appropriate to speak to her of this incident.”

The mortal nodded, looked at me in an angry way one more time, then turned and walked away. “But I said I was sorry,” I said, in his wake. I did not like that the mortal had gone away still angry.

“Your regret doesn’t negate what he saw,” said Ia, “which was a godling abusing her power—destroying mortal lives out of sheer carelessness—and then doing nothing whatsoever to remedy the situation until prompted.”

He sounded a lot like Papa Tempa. Except, he sounded like Papa Tempa mad . I squirmed. “I tried to fix things.”

“Things. Not people.”