The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you. Damaya was herself and the family that rejected her and the people of the Fulcrum who chiseled her to a fine point. Syenite was Alabaster and Innon and the people of poor lost Allia and Meov. Now you are Tirimo and the ash-strewn road’s walkers and your dead children… and also the living one who remains. Whom you will get back.

She is part of something vast and globally powerful now, and Schaffa, once the most important person in her world, is beneath her notice.

(You glance at Antimony. She’s gone back to watching Alabaster, her hand still supporting his back. You could almost think of her as doing it out of devotion or kindness, if you didn’t know his hands and feet and forearm were in whatever passes for her stomach.)

You shake your head, pulling back so you can focus on him. “What is that?” This time he answers. “The stuff of orogeny.”

“The civilization that made the obelisks had a word for this,” he says, nodding at your epiphany. “I think there’s a reason we don’t. It’s because no one for countless generations has wanted orogenes to understand what we do. They’ve just wanted us to do it.”

“The Moon is something this world used to have, Essun. An object in the sky, much closer than the stars.” He keeps switching between calling you one name and another. It’s distracting. “Its loss was part of what caused the Seasons.” Father Earth did not always hate life, the lorists say. He hates because he cannot forgive the loss of his only child.

You can’t understand why he sees this, this horrible slow death, as a price worth paying for anything—let alone for what he got out of it, which was the destruction of the world. And you still don’t understand what any of it has to do with stone eaters or moons or obelisks or anything else. “Wouldn’t it have been better,” you cannot help saying, “to just… live?” To have come back, you cannot say. To have made what little life he could with Syenite again, after Meov was gone but before she found Tirimo and Jija and tried to create a lesser version of the family she’d lost. Before she became you.

He starts to shake his head, winces as this causes him pain somewhere, sighs instead. “They called it magic.”

“Tell me,” she hears Jija whisper to a woman who was out scouting for a local comm, after they have shared an evening meal of meat she caught around a fire Jija built, “have you ever heard of the Moon?”

Now why would he know about the moon?

But before she can open her mouth to say this, Schaffa presses two fingers to the back of her neck. She flinches and rounds on him, instantly defensive, and he raises both hands, wagging the fingers to show that he’s still unarmed. She can feel a bit of damp on her neck, probably a smear of blood.

Much later, though, she will remember an instant after that touch, when the tips of the man’s fingers glimmered like the cut ends of the harpoon. A gossamer-thin thread of light-under-the-heat had seemed to flicker from her to him. She will remember, too, that for a moment that thread of light illuminated others: a whole tracework of jagged lines spreading all over him like the spiderwebbing that follows a sharp impact in brittle glass. The impact site, the center of the spiderweb, was somewhere near the back of his head. Nassun will remember thinking in that instant: He’s not alone in there.

Can you live with orogenes? The ones who say yes get to come in. The ones who can say yes tend to be younger.

You wonder, for the third or fourth time, why they cluster around Castrima. Are they trying to help, as Hoa helps you? Are they expecting more of you to turn to delicious, chewable stone? Are they just bored?

When Schaffa found this sleepy terrace-farming comm ten years before, and convinced the then-headwoman Maite to allow him to set up a special Guardian facility within the comm’s walls, she hoped that it was the beginning of a turnaround for her home. Guardians are a healthy addition to any community, aren’t they? And indeed, there are now three Guardians in Jekity including Schaffa, along with nine children of varying ages. There

How did Jija know about this place?

I let a child live once, who saw, but I should not have. And we both suffered for my compassion. I remember that.”

“The city exists to contain the hole. Everything about the city is built for that purpose. Even its name, which the stone eaters told me, acknowledges this: Corepoint.

Something just went wrong. The obelisks… misfired. The Moon was flung away from the planet.

People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.”

“The two hundred and sixteen individual obelisks, networked together via the control cabochon.” While you stand there wondering what the rust a control cabochon is, and marveling that there are more than two hundred of the damned things, she adds, “Using that to channel the power of the Rift should be enough.”