The Inheritance Trilogy

by N.K. Jemisin

In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.

“There’s truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.” “Only if one knows the knowledge is tainted in the first place.”

“I’m tired of being what everyone else has made me,” I said. “I want to be myself.” “Don’t be a child.” I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. “What?” “You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”

I took his hand and held it while he bowed his head and trembled and fought to keep control of himself. He led and protected the servants here; tears would have made him feel weak. Men have always been fragile that way.

“Love can level the ground between mortals and gods, Yeine. It’s something we’ve learned to respect.”

There are some things one can understand only by experience, and there are some experiences no one wants to share.

Of course I was enough, because he loved me. That was the whole point.

“I… regret… what I did. It was wrong. Very wrong. But regret is meaningless.” He fell silent. I knew I should have let it go then, with the echoes of his pain still reverberating in the air around me. He was ancient, unfathomable; there was so much about him I would never understand. But I reached out with my good hand and found his knee. “Regret is never meaningless,” I said. “It’s not enough, not on its own; you have to change, too. But it’s a start.” Shiny let out a long sigh of almost unbearable weariness. “Change is not my nature, Oree. Regret is all I have.” More silence then, for a long while.

“Life on a leash or death? That’s your choice?”

This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.

trouble. “I trust the gods to be what they are, and I trust mortals to be mortals. Mortals, Lady Serymn, stoned my father to death. Mortals trussed me up like livestock and milked me of blood until I nearly died. Mortals killed my love.” I was very proud of myself; my throat did not close and my voice did not waver. The anger buoyed me that far. “Hells, if the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we’ve earned a little annihilation.”

“I just don’t see the point of spending all that time full of hate. That’s all.”

Beginnings. They are not always what they seem. Nature is cycles, patterns, repetition—but of what we believe, of the beginning I understand, there was once only Maelstrom, the unknowable. Over a span of uncountable aeons, as none of us were here yet to count, It churned forth endless substances and concepts and creatures. Some of those must have been glorious, because even today the Maelstrom spins forth new life with regular randomness, and many of those creations are indeed beautiful and wondrous. But most of them last only an eyeblink or two before the Maelstrom rips them apart again, or they die of instant old age, or they collapse in on themselves and become tiny Maelstroms in turn. These are absorbed back into the greater cacophony.

“Well, isn’t that what fathers do?” He had no idea what fathers did. “Love you, even if you don’t love them? Miss you when you go away?”

The mnasat have shown us by the harsh example of their deaths that it is living true, not mere strength, which dictates matters among us. Those who submitted to their natures gained power to match even the strongest of us niwwah—and those who forgot themselves, no matter how much innate power they possessed, fell. There is another lesson in this: life cannot exist without death. Even among gods there are winners and losers, eaters and eaten. I have never hesitated to kill my fellow immortals, but I sometimes mourn the necessity.

“You have a choice.” I lifted my gaze to the shifting firmament above. The gradient—night to day, day to night—did not change at a constant rate. Only mortals thought of the sky as a reliable, predictable thing. We gods had to live with Nahadoth and Itempas; we knew better. “You can accept yourself, take control of your nature, make it what you want it to be. Just because you’re the god of vengeance doesn’t mean you have to be some brooding cliché, forever cackling to yourself and totting up what you owe to whom. Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete.”

“Being with mortals isn’t anathema, but it’s not good, either. It never ends well. Any god with sense avoids it.”

“No mortals should have as much power as the Arameri had when they owned you,” she said. “No mortals should have as much power as they have now: the laws, the scriveners, their army, all their pet nobles, the wealth they’ve claimed from peoples destroyed or exploited. Even the history taught to our children in the White Hall schools glorifies them and denigrates everyone else. All civilization, every bit of it, is made to keep the Arameri strong. That is how they’ve survived after losing you. That is why the only solution is to destroy everything they’ve built. Good and bad, all of it is tainted. Only by starting fresh can we truly be free again.”

do? A god should not care about such things. A god… … should not need a mortal to be happy.

“Murder is never a thing to be celebrated.”

I had been a god reduced to a possession, and the humiliation of those days had not left me despite a hundred years of freedom.

It had not been all suffering and horror. Life is never only one thing.

Power is not a thing that can be given.

Everyone treated Eino like less than he was, but that did not make him so. Even when he tried to fit himself in with their thinking, when he let them use him, he was still not their thing. He was still himself: a great mortal temporarily folding himself small, choosing to bend and smile behind his sleeve and refrain from dancing in others’ presence. He might allow others to forget his worth, might have to remind them, might have to fight and bleed to make them recognize it—but as long as he remembered who and what he was, none of them could diminish him. He was, would forever be, glorious. Oh! And all he would ever have to do, to claim his true glorious self— OH! OH! OH! —was take his power back.

A new… trickster. The Trickster. And elsewhere, everywhere around the mortal realm, all over this planet—there were others. One… two… six… a dozen… more. Newborn gods: mortals suddenly and shockingly turned immortal, all of them still forging the selves they would become, solidifying in power… but all of them made by me. “Oh,” I said, blinking. “Whoops.”

Power cannot be given, Shill; isn’t that what you finally understood? People can only take it—and then only what is already theirs by right. Only what they can claim, and hold, with their own hands. Anything more is dangerous to them and others. Anything less, however…” She squeezed my hand, and I looked up to see her smile. “Well, that’s where you come in, my big girl. Nahadoth and Itempas will be so proud.”

“Every man in Darr has the right to be free,” Eino said. He was on his feet now. A persistent little moon orbited his head; he couldn’t seem to get rid of it. This in no way diminished the grave determination in his face. “Not at the expense of Darr’s women,” said Mikna. He rounded on her, and she lifted her chin, even though he was a god now and she was just a mortal. I felt that this was very brave of her. “… No,” he agreed after a moment, to her obvious surprise. “But our strength should not diminish yours. It makes us all powerful, together.” He inclined his head to her.

“Established a precedent,” Yeine said. “Made a path. Opened a door. It is the nature of this universe that once a thing becomes possible, it will happen somewhere, for however brief a time. Life spawns from lifelessness, gods from godlings; why should there not be a bridge in between, from the mortal to the immortal?” She abruptly looked pleased. “A new cycle of life. Fascinating.”

“One day, yes.” Yeine looked thoughtful. “Mortal life has always been, well, mortal. This universe that Nahadoth and Itempas and I have built is not eternal. There may be others, but when this one ends, mortalkind ends with it. But perhaps it need not end with death.” We all fell silent at that, in wonder, in fear. I couldn’t imagine such a time ever coming to pass. But I understood this instinctively: because I existed, the end of mortal life—the rebirth of mortal life, into immortality—was possible. And if it was possible… “I’ll work to make that happen,” I said, and even just this thought made me feel happy and right and full of light again.

I didn’t need to push. Let him make his own farewells to mortality; he had forever, after all. And after all, someday mortalkind would be better. I wouldn’t push them, either—but when they were ready, I would be there, waiting. I would help them all I could. I won’t push any of you, see? I didn’t give you anything, and you don’t owe me anything. Your power is yours; it has always been there. I’m just going to help you reach it. What you do with it, from there on, is up to you.