Well. You look down at yourself. You’re not wholesome anymore, but what’s left of you can be strengthened; you’ll be able to go after Nassun soon. First things first, though. “We going to do this?”
Hoa does not speak for a moment. “Are you certain?”
“The arm’s not doing me any good, as it is.”
There is the faintest of sounds. Stone grinding on stone, slow and inexorable. A very heavy hand comes to rest on your half-transformed shoulder. You have the sense that, despite the weight, it is a delicate touch by stone eater standards. Hoa’s being careful with you.
“Not here,” he says, and pulls you down into the earth.
It’s only for an instant. He always keeps these trips through the earth quick, probably because longer would make it hard to breathe … and stay sane. This time is little more than a blurring sensation of movement, a flicker of darkness, a whiff of loam richer than the acrid ash. Then you’re lying on another rocky outcropping—probably the same one that the rest of Castrima is settling on, just away from the encampment. There are no campfires here; the only light is the ruddy reflection of the Rifting off the thick clouds overhead. Your eyes adjust quickly, though there’s little to see but rocks and the shadows of nearby trees. And a human silhouette, which now crouches beside you.
Hoa holds your stone arm in his hands gently, almost reverently. In spite of yourself, you sense the solemnity of the moment. And why shouldn’t it be solemn? This is the sacrifice demanded by the obelisks. This is the pound of flesh you must pay for the blood-debt of your daughter.
“This isn’t what you think of it,” Hoa says, and for an instant you worry that he can read your mind. More likely it’s just the fact that he’s as old as the literal hills, and he can read your face. “You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too. This is not the ugly thing it seems.”
It seems like he’s going to eat your arm. You’re okay with it, but you want to understand. “What is it, then? Why …” You shake your head, unsure of even what question to ask. Maybe why doesn’t matter. Maybe you can’t understand. Maybe this isn’t meant for you.
“This is not sustenance. We need only life, to live.”
The latter half of that was nonsensical, so you latch onto the former half. “If it isn’t sustenance, then …?”
Hoa moves slowly again. They don’t do this often, stone eaters. Movement is the thing that emphasizes their uncanny nature, so like humanity and yet so wildly different. It would be easier if they were more alien. When they move like this, you can see what they once were, and the knowledge is a threat and warning to all that is human within you.
And yet. You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too.
He lifts your hand with both his own, one positioned under your elbow, his fingers lightly braced under your closed, cracked fist. Slowly, slowly. It doesn’t hurt your shoulder this way. Halfway to his face he moves the hand that had been under your elbow, shifting it to cup the underside of your upper arm. His stone slides against yours with a faint grinding sound. It is surprisingly sensual, even though you can’t feel a thing.
Then your fist rests against his lips. The lips don’t move as he says, from within his chest, “Are you afraid?”
You consider this for a long moment. Shouldn’t you be? But … “No.”
“Good,” he replies. “I do this for you, Essun. Everything is for you. Do you believe that?”
You don’t know, at first. On impulse you lift your good hand, smooth fingers over his hard, cool, polished cheek. It’s hard to see him, black against the dark, but your thumb finds his brows and traces out his nose, which is longer in its adult shape. He told you once that he thinks of himself as human in spite of his strange body. You belatedly realize that you’ve chosen to see him as human, too. That makes this something other than an act of predation. You’re not sure what it is instead, but … it feels like a gift.
“Yes,” you say. “I believe you.”
His mouth opens. Wide, wider, wider than any human mouth can open. Once you worried his mouth was too small; now it’s wide enough to fit a fist. And such teeth he has, small and even and diamond-clear, glinting prettily in the red evening light. There is only darkness beyond those teeth.
You shut your eyes.
She was in a foul mood. Old age, one of her children told me. She said it was just the stress of trying to warn people who didn’t want to hear that bad times were coming. It wasn’t a foul mood, it was the privilege that age had bought her, to dispense with the lie of politeness.
“There isn’t a villain in this story,” she said. We sat in the garden dome, which was only a dome because she’d insisted. The Syl Skeptics still claim there’s no proof things will happen the way she said, but she’s never been wrong in one of her predictions, and she’s more Syl than they are, so. She was drinking sef, as if to mark a truth in chemicals.
“There isn’t a single evil to point to, a single moment when everything changed,” she went on. “Things were bad and then terrible and then better and then bad again, and then they happened again, and again, because no one stopped it. Things can be … adjusted. Lengthen the better, predict and shorten the terrible. Sometimes prevent the terrible by settling for the merely bad. I’ve given up on trying to stop you people. Just taught my children to remember and learn and survive … until someone finally breaks the cycle for good.”
I was confused. “Are you talking about Burndown?” That was what I’d come to talk about, after all. One hundred years, she predicted, fifty years ago. What else mattered?
She only smiled.
—Transcribed interview, translated from Obelisk-Builder C, found in Tapita Plateau Ruin #723 by Shinash Innovator Dibars. Date unknown, transcriber unknown. Speculation: the first lorist? Personal: ’Baster, you should see this place. Treasures of history everywhere, most of them too degraded to decipher, but still … Wish you were here.
2
Nassun feels like busting loose
NASSUN STANDS OVER THE BODY of her father, if one can call a tumbled mass of broken jewels a body. She’s swaying a little, light-headed because the wound in her shoulder—where her father has stabbed her—is bleeding profusely. The stabbing is the outcome of an impossible choice he demanded of her: to be either his daughter or an orogene. She refused to commit existential suicide. He refused to suffer an orogene to live. There was no malice in either of them in that final moment, only the grim violence of inevitability.
To one side of this tableau stands Schaffa, Nassun’s Guardian, who stares down at what is left of Jija Resistant Jekity in a combination of wonder and cold satisfaction. At Nassun’s other side is Steel, her stone eater. It is appropriate to call him that now, hers, because he has come in her hour of need—not to help, never that, but to provide her with something nevertheless. What he offers, and what she has finally realized she needs, is purpose. Not even Schaffa has given her this, but that’s because Schaffa loves her unconditionally. She needs that love, too, oh how she needs it, but in this moment when her heart has been most thoroughly broken, when her thoughts are at their least focused, she craves something more … solid.