The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

Alas: in the Stillness, destroying mountains is as easy as an orogene toddler’s temper tantrum. Destroying a people takes only a bit more effort.

Alabaster, beloved monster, sane madman, the most powerful orogene in all the Stillness, and in-progress stone eater snack, stares at you.

(Schaffa saw her hand on the child’s face, covering mouth and nose, pressing. Incomprehensible. 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.)

Don’t be fooled. The Guardians are much, much older than Old Sanze, and they do not work for us. —Last recorded words of Emperor Mutshatee, prior to his execution

whereas you and all your kind have cracked the surface of the planet and lost the Moon.

Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

And so it goes: Bandits and scammers and a near-fatal gas waft and a tree that fires wooden spikes when warm bodies are in proximity; they survive it all.

“Crazy” is what everyone thinks all roggas are, after all—addled by the time they spend in stone, by their ostensible alliance with the Evil Earth, by not being human enough.

“When I… they brought me food.” Alabaster skips past whatever he would’ve said so seamlessly that at first the sentence doesn’t make sense. “I ate it, then tried to kill them.” His voice turns wry.

Guardians don’t dream easily. The object embedded deep within the left lobe of Schaffa’s sessapinae interferes with the sleep-wake cycle. He does not often need sleep, and when he does, his body does not often enter the deeper sleep that enables dreaming. (Ordinary people go mad if they are deprived of dreaming-sleep. Guardians are immune to that sort of madness… or perhaps they’re just mad all the time.)

He feels the cold of it as the sliver of iron is inserted, feels the coldness of the other presence within him at once. Someone stitches him up. The pain is horrific and it never really ends, though he learns to mitigate it enough to function; all those who survive the implantation do. The smiling, you see. Endorphins ease pain.

familiar artificial lights that march toward and around a yawning pit from whose walls grow endless slivers of iron. He and the other Guardians gaze down at a small, shredded body crumpled at the bottom of the pit. Every now and again the children find the place; poor foolish creatures. Don’t they understand? The Earth is indeed evil, and it is cruel, and Schaffa would protect them all from it, if he could.

There is a quicksilver lightning strike of pain along his spine, too fast for him to smile it away. Something disagrees with his resolve. Automatically his hand twitches toward the back of Nassun’s neck… and then he stops himself. No. She is more to him than just relief from pain.

It spreads over his skin, the brown hardening and developing an undersheen like tigereye, then into his flesh, though no one will see the ruby inside unless they break him. Eitz dies almost instantly, his heart solidifying first into a striated jewel of yellow quartz and deep garnet and white agate, with faint lacing veins of sapphire. He is a beautiful failure.

Perhaps a hundred miles away, a sapphire obelisk shimmers into solid reality for an instant, then flickers back to translucence—before ponderously beginning to drift toward Jekity.

You see it suddenly: the network. A web of silver threads interlacing the land, permeating rock and even the magma just underneath, strung like jewels between forests and fossilized corals and pools of oil. Carried through the air on the webs of leaping spiderlings. Threads in the clouds, though thin, strung between microscopic living things in water droplets. Threads as high as your perception can reach, brushing against the very stars. And where they touch the obelisks, the threads become another thing entirely. For of the obelisks that float against the map of your awareness—which has suddenly become vast, miles and miles, you are perceiving with far more than your sessapinae now—each hovers as the nexus of thousands, millions, trillions of threads. This is the power holding them up. Each blazes silvery-white in flickering pulses; Evil Earth, this is what the obelisks are when they aren’t real. They float and they flicker, solid to magic to solid again, and on another plane of existence you inhale in awe at the beauty of them.

There are mountains around you. “Rest, Essun,” says the one you love. “I’ll take care of you.”

How ironic. This is the first time you’ve ever seen a stone eater made of alabaster.

What if it isn’t dead? —Letter from Rido Innovator Dibars to Seventh University, sent via courier from Allia Quartent and Comm after the raising of the garnet obelisk, received three months after word of Allia’s destruction spread via telegraph. Unknown reference.