The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

Did she not know that Schaffa would love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair.)

Nassun makes ten, and they want to know everything about her: where she came from, what kinds of foods she likes to eat, what life was like in Tirimo, has she ever held a baby kirkhusa because they are so soft.

“The Fulcrum’s methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away from magic. The torus isn’t even necessary—you can gather ambient energy in any number of ways. But that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny, never up. Nothing above you matters. Only your immediate surroundings, never farther.” He shakes his head to the degree that he can. “It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”