The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  “I have to help Schaffa,” she says again. Her shoulders are going up in a way that you recognize from a hundred afternoons in your makeshift crucible, and from when she was two and learned the word no. There’s no reasoning with her when she gets like this. Words become irrelevant. Actions mean more. But what actions could possibly convey the morass of your feelings right now? You look back at the others helplessly. Hjarka is holding Tonkee back; Tonkee’s gaze is fixed on the sky and the assemblage there of more obelisks than you’ve seen in your whole life. Danel is a little apart from the rest, her hands behind her back, her black lips moving in what you recognize as a lorist mnemonic exercise to help her absorb everything she sees and hears, verbatim. Lerna—

  You forgot. Lerna is not here. But if he were here, you suspect, he would be warning you. He was a doctor. Wounds of the family weren’t really within his purview … but anyone can see that something here has festered.

  You trot after her again. “Nassun. Nassun, rust it, look at me when I’m talking to you!” She ignores you, and it’s a slap in the face—the kind that clears your head, though, and not the kind that makes you want to fight. Okay. She won’t hear you until she’s helped … Schaffa. You push past this thought, though it is like plodding through muck full of bones. Okay. “L-let me help you!”

  This actually gets Nassun to slow down, and then stop. Her expression is wary, so wary, when she turns back. “Help me?”

  You look beyond her and see then that she was heading for another of the pylon buildings—this one with a broad, railed staircase going up its sloping side. The view of the sky would be excellent at the top … Irrationally you conclude that you have to keep her from going up there. “Yes.” You hold out your hand again. Please. “Tell me what you need. I’ll … Nassun.” You’re out of words. You’re willing her to feel what you feel. “Nassun.”

  It’s not working. She says, in a voice as hard as stone, “I need to use the Obelisk Gate.”

  You flinch. I told you this already, weeks ago, but apparently you did not believe. “What? You can’t.”

  You’re thinking: It will kill you.

  Her jaw tightens. “I will.”

  She’s thinking: I don’t need your permission.

  You shake your head, incredulous. “To do what?” But it’s too late. She’s done. You said you would help but then hesitated. She is Schaffa’s daughter, too, in her heart of hearts; Earthfires, two fathers and you of all people to shape her, is it any wonder that she’s turned out the way she has? To her, hesitation is the same thing as no. She doesn’t like it when people say no to her.

  So Nassun turns her back on you again and says, “Don’t follow me anymore, Mama.”

  You immediately start after her again, of course. “Nassun—”

  She whips back around. She’s in the ground, you sess it, and she’s in the air, you see the lines of magic, and suddenly the two weave together in a way that you can’t even comprehend. The stuff of Corepoint’s ground, which is metals and pressed fibers and substances for which you have no name, layered over volcanic rock, heaves beneath your feet. Out of old habit, years spent containing your children’s orogenic tantrums, you react even as you stagger, setting a torus into the ground that you can use to cancel her orogeny. It doesn’t work, because she isn’t just using orogeny.

  She sesses it, though, and her eyes narrow. Your gray eyes, like ash. And an instant later, a wall of obsidian slams up from the ground in front of you, tearing through the fiber and metal of the city’s infrastructure, forming a barrier between you and her that spans the road.

  The force of this upheaval flings you to the ground. When the stars clear from your vision and the dust dissipates enough, you stare up at the wall in shock. Your daughter did this. To you.

  Someone grabs you and you flinch. It’s Tonkee.

  “I don’t know if it’s occurred to you,” she says, hauling you to your feet, “but your child seems like she’s got your temper. So, you know, maybe you shouldn’t get too pushy.”

  “I don’t even know what she did,” you murmur, dazed, though you nod thanks to Tonkee for helping you up. “That wasn’t … I don’t …” There was no Fulcrum-esque precision in what Nassun did, even though you taught her Fulcrum fundamentals. You lay your hand against the wall in confusion, and feel the lingering flickers of magic within its substance, dancing from particle to particle as they fade. “She’s blending magic and orogeny. I’ve never seen that before.”

  I have. We called it tuning.

  Meanwhile. No longer hampered by you, Nassun has climbed the pylon steps. She stands atop it now, surrounded by turning, bright red warning symbols that dance in the air. A heavy, faintly sulfurous breeze wafts up from Corepoint’s great hole, lifting the stray hairs from her twin plaits. She wonders if Father Earth is relieved to have manipulated her into sparing its life.

  Schaffa will live if she turns every person in the world into stone eaters. That is all that matters.

  “First, the network,” she says, lifting her eyes to the sky. The twenty-seven obelisks flicker from solid to magic in unison as she reignites them. She spreads her hands before her.

  On the ground below her, you flinch as you sess—feel—are attuned to—the lightning-fast activation of twenty-seven obelisks. They act as one in this instant, thrumming so powerfully together that your teeth itch. You wonder why Tonkee isn’t grimacing the way you are, but Tonkee is only a still.

  Tonkee’s not stupid, though, and this is her life’s work. While you stare at your daughter in awe, she narrows her eyes at the obelisks. “Three cubed,” she murmurs. You shake your head, mute. She glares at you, irritated by your slowness. “Well, if I was going to emulate a big crystal, I would start by putting smaller crystals into a cubiform lattice configuration.”

  Then you understand. The big crystal that Nassun means to emulate is the onyx. You need a key to initialize the Gate; that’s what Alabaster told you. What Alabaster didn’t tell you, the useless ass, was that there are many possible kinds of keys. When he tore the Rifting across the Stillness, he used a network composed of all the node maintainers in his vicinity, probably because the onyx itself would have turned him to stone at once. The node maintainers were a lesser substitute for the onyx—a spare key. You didn’t know what you were doing that first time, when you yoked the orogenes in Castrima-under into a network, but he knew the onyx was too much for you to just grab directly, back then. You didn’t have Alabaster’s flexibility or creativity. He taught you a safer way.

  Nassun, though, is the student Alabaster always wanted. She cannot have ever accessed the Obelisk Gate before—it’s been yours, till now—but as you observe in shock, in horror, she reaches beyond her spare-key network, finding other obelisks one by one and binding them. It’s slower than it would be with the onyx, but you can tell that it’s just as effective. It’s working. The apatite, connected and locked. The sardonyx, sending a little pulse from where it hovers out of sight, somewhere over the southern sea. The jade—

  Nassun will open the Gate.

  You shove Tonkee away. “Get as far from me as you can. All of you.”

  Tonkee doesn’t waste time arguing. Her eyes widen; she turns and runs. You hear her shouting to the others. You hear Danel arguing. And then you can no longer pay heed to them.

  Nassun will open the Gate, turn to stone, and die.

  Only one thing can stop Nassun’s network of obelisks: the onyx. You need to reach it first, though, and right now it’s all the way on the other side of the planet, halfway between Castrima and Rennanis where you left it. Once, long ago at Castrima-over, it called you to itself. But do you dare wait for it to do that, now, with Nassun grabbing control of every part of the Gate? You need to get to the onyx first. For that, you need magic—much more of it than you can muster just by yourself, here without a single obelisk to your name.

  The beryl, the hematite, the iolite—

  She’s going to die right in front of you if you don’t
do something.

  Frantically you throw your awareness into the earth. Corepoint sits on a volcano, maybe you can—

  Wait. Something pulls your attention back up to the volcano’s mouth. Underground, but closer by. Somewhere underneath this city, you sense a network. Lines of magic woven together, supporting one another, rooted deep to draw up more … It’s faint. It’s slow. And there is a familiar, ugly buzz at the back of your mind when you touch this network. Buzz upon buzz upon buzz.

  Ah, yes. The network you’ve found is Guardians, nearly a thousand of them. Of rusting course. You have never consciously sought the magic of them before, but for the first time you understand what that buzz is—some part of you, even before Alabaster’s training, felt the foreignness of the magic within them. The knowledge sends a sharp, nearly paralyzing lance of fear through you. The network of them is close by, easy to grab, but if you do this, what’s to stop all these Guardians from boiling up out of Warrant like angry wasps from a disturbed nest? Don’t you have enough problems?

  Nassun groans, up on her pylon. To your shock, you can … Evil Earth, you can see the magic around her, in her, beginning to flare up like a fire hitting oiled kindling. She burns against your perception, the weight of her growing heavier upon the world by the instant. The kyanite the orthoclase the scapolite—

  And suddenly your fear is gone, because your baby needs you.

  So you set your feet. You reach for that network you found, Guardians or no Guardians. You growl through your teeth and grab everything. The Guardians. The threads that trail from their sessapinae away into the depths, and as much of the magic coming through these as you can pull. The iron shards themselves, tiny depositories of the Evil Earth’s will.

  You make it all yours, yoke it tight, and then you take it.

  And somewhere down in Warrant there are Guardians screaming, coming awake and writhing in their cells and grabbing at their heads as you do to every single one of them what Alabaster once did to his Guardian. It is what Nassun yearned to do for Schaffa … only there is no kindness in the way you’re doing it. You don’t hate them; you just don’t care. You snatch the iron from their brains and every bit of silvery light from between their cells—and as you feel them crystallize and die, you finally have enough magic, from your makeshift network, to reach the onyx.

  It listens at your touch, far away above the ashscape of the Stillness. You fall into it, diving desperately into the dark, to make your case. Please, you beg.

  It considers the request. This is not in words or sensation. You simply know its consideration. It examines you in turn—your fear, your anger, your determination to put things right.

  Ah—this last has resonance. You know yourself examined again, more closely and with skepticism, since your last request was for something so frivolous. (Merely wiping out a city? You of all people did not need the Gate for that.) What the onyx finds within you, however, is something different this time: Fear for kin. Fear of failure. The fear that accompanies all necessary change. And underneath it all, a driving need to make the world better.

  Somewhere far away, a billion dying things shiver as the onyx utters a low, earthshaking blast of sound, and comes online.

  Atop her pylon, beneath the pulse of the obelisks, Nassun feels that distant upcycling darkness as a warning. But she is too deep in her summoning; too many obelisks now fill her. She cannot spare any attention from her work.

  And as each of the two hundred and sixteen remaining obelisks in turn submits to her, and as she opens her eyes to stare at the Moon that she’s going to let fly past untouched, and as she instead prepares to turn all the might of the great Plutonic Engine back upon the world and its people, to transform them as I was once transformed—

  —she thinks of Schaffa.

  Impossible to delude oneself in a moment like this. Impossible to see only what one wants to see, when the power to change the world ricochets through mind and soul and the spaces between cells; oh, I learned this long before both of you. Impossible not to understand that Nassun has known Schaffa for barely more than a year, and does not truly know him, given how much of himself he has lost. Impossible not to realize that she clings to him because she has nothing else—

  But through her determination, there is a glimmer of doubt in her mind. It is nothing more than that. Barely even a thought. But it whispers, Do you really have nothing else?

  Is there not one person in this world besides Schaffa who cares about you?

  And I watch Nassun hesitate, fingers curling and small face tightening in a frown even as the Obelisk Gate weaves itself into completion. I watch the shiver of energies beyond comprehension as they begin to align within her. I lost the power to manipulate these energies tens of thousands of years ago, but I can still see them. The arcanochemical lattice—what you think of as mere brown stone, and the energetic state that produces it—is forming nicely.

  I watch as you see this, too, and understand instantly what it means. I watch you snarl and smash apart the wall between you and your daughter, not even noticing that your fingers have turned to stone as you do it. I watch you run to the foot of the pylon steps and shout at her. “Nassun!”

  And in response to your sudden, raw, incontrovertible demand, the onyx blasts out of nowhere to appear overhead.

  The sound of it—a low, bone-shaking blat—is titanic. The blast of air that it displaces is thunderous enough to knock both you and Nassun down. She cries out and slides down a few steps, coming dangerously close to losing her grip on the Gate as the impact jolts her concentration. You cry out as the impact makes you notice your left forearm, which is stone, and collarbone, which is stone, and left foot and ankle.

  But you set your teeth. There is no pain in you anymore, save anguish for your daughter. No need within you but one. She has the Gate, but you have the onyx—and as you look up at it, at the Moon glaring through its murky translucence, icewhite iris in a scleral sea of black, you know what you have to do.

  With the onyx’s help, you reach half a planet away and stab the fulcrum of your intention into the wound of the world. The Rifting shudders as you demand every iota of its heat and kinetic churn, and you shudder beneath the flux of so much power that for a moment you think it’s just going to vomit out of you as a column of lava, consuming all.

  But the onyx is part of you, too, right now. Indifferent to your convulsions—because you’re doing that, flopping along the ground and frothing at the mouth—it takes and taps and balances the power of the Rifting with an ease that humbles you. Automatically it links into the obelisks so conveniently nearby, the network that Nassun assembled in order to try to replicate the onyx’s power. But a replica has only power, no will, unlike the onyx. A network has no agenda. The onyx takes the twenty-seven obelisks and immediately begins eating into the rest of Nassun’s obelisk network.

  Here, though, its will is no longer paramount. Nassun feels it. Fights it. She is just as determined as you. Just as driven by love—you for her, and she for Schaffa.

  I love you both. How can I not, after all this? I am still human, after all, and this is a battle for the fate of the world. Such a terrible and magnificent thing to witness.

  It is a battle, though, line by line, tendril by tendril of magic. The titanic energies of the Gate, of the Rifting, whip and shiver around you both in a cylindrical aurora borealis of energies and colors, visible light ranging to wavelengths beyond the spectrum. (Those energies resonate in you, where the alignment is already complete, and still oscillate in Nassun—though her waveform has begun to collapse.) It is the onyx and the Rifting versus the Gate, you against her, and all Corepoint trembles with the sheer force of it all. In the dark halls of Warrant, among the jeweled corpses of the Guardians, walls groan and ceilings crack, spilling dirt and pebbles. Nassun is straining to pull the magic down from what’s left of the Gate, to target everyone around you and everyone beyond them—and finally, finally, you understand that she’s trying to turn everyone into rusting
stone eaters. You, meanwhile, have reached up. To catch the Moon, and perhaps earn humanity a second chance. But for either of you to achieve your respective goals, you will need to claim both Gate and onyx, and the additional fuel that the Rifting provides.

  It is a stalemate that cannot continue. The Gate cannot maintain its connections forever, and the onyx cannot contain the chaos of the Rifting forever—and two human beings, however powerful and strong-willed, cannot survive so much magic for long.

  And then it happens. You cry out as you feel a change, a snapping-into-line: Nassun. The magics of her substance are fully aligned; her crystallization has begun. In desperation and pure instinct you grab some of the energy that seeks to transform her and fling it away, though this only delays the inevitable. In the ocean too near Corepoint, there is a deep judder that even the mountain’s stabilizers cannot contain. To the west a mountain shaped like a knife jolts up from the ocean floor; to the east another rises, hissing steam from the newness of its birth. Nassun, snarling in frustration, latches onto these as new sources of power, dragging the heat and violence from them; both crack and crumble away. The stabilizers push the ocean flat, preventing tsunami, but they can do only so much. They were not built for this. Much more and even Corepoint will crumble.

  “Nassun!” you shout again, anguished. She cannot hear you. But you see, even from where you are, that the fingers of her left hand have turned as brown and stony as your own. She’s aware of it, you know somehow. She made this choice. She is prepared for the inevitability of her own death.

  You aren’t. Oh, Earth, you just can’t watch another of your children die.

  So … you give up.

  I ache with the look on your face, because I know what it costs you to give up Alabaster’s dream—and your own. You so wanted to make a better world for Nassun. But more than anything else, you want this last child of yours to live … and so you make a choice. To keep fighting will kill you both. The only way to win, then, is not to fight anymore.