Your skin prickles.
He takes a deep breath. When he speaks again, it’s a monotone. “This is a three-sided war. More sides than that, but only three that you need to concern yourself with. All three sides want the war to end; it’s just a question of how. We’re the problem, you see—people. Two of the sides are trying to decide what should be done with us.”
That phrasing explains a lot. “The Earth and… the stone eaters?” Always lurking, planning, wanting something unknown.
“No. They’re people, too, Essun. Haven’t you figured that out? They need things, want things, feel things, same way we do. And they’ve been fighting this war much, much longer than you or I. Some of them from the very beginning.”
“The beginning?” What, the Shattering?
“Yes, some of them are that old. Antimony is one. That little one who follows you, too, I think. There are others. They can’t die, so… yeah. Some of them saw it all happen.”
You’re too floored to really react. Hoa? Seven-ish years old, going on thirty thousand. Hoa?
“One side wants us—people—dead,” Alabaster says. “That’s one way to end things, I suppose. One side wants people… neutralized. Alive, but rendered harmless. Like the stone eaters themselves: Earth tried to make them more like itself, dependent on itself, thinking that would make them harmless.” He sighs. “I guess it’s reassuring to know the planet can cock up, too.”
Your flinch is a delayed reaction, because you’ve still got Hoa in mind. “He used to be human,” you murmur. Yes. It’s just a disguise now, a long-discarded set of clothes donned again for old times’ sake, but once upon a time, he was a real flesh-and-blood boy who looked like that. There’s nothing Sanzed in him because the Sanzed did not exist as a people in his day.
“They all did. It’s what’s wrong with them.” He’s very tired now, which may be why he speaks more softly. “I can barely remember things that happened to me fifty years ago; imagine trying to remember five thousand years ago. Ten thousand. Twenty. Imagine forgetting your own name. That’s why they never answer, when we ask them who they are.” You inhale in realization. “I don’t think it’s what they’re made of that makes stone eaters so different. I think it’s that no one can live that long and not become something entirely alien.”
He keeps saying imagine, and you can’t. Of course you can’t. But you can think of Hoa in that moment. Being fascinated by soap. Curling against you to sleep. His sorrow, when you stopped treating him like a human being. He’d been trying so hard. Doing his best. Failing in the end.
“You said three sides,” you say. Focusing on what you can, instead of mourning what you can’t. Alabaster is beginning to slouch, leaning harder against your hand. He needs to rest.
Alabaster is silent for so long that you think he might have fallen asleep. Then he says, “I slipped out one night, when Antimony wasn’t there. I’d been there… years? Time got loose after a while. No one but them to talk to, and sometimes they forget that people need to talk. Nothing in the earth to listen to except the grumbling of the volcano. The stars are all wrong on that side of the world…” He trails off for a moment. Loose time, catching up with him. “I’d been looking at diagrams of the obelisks, trying to understand what their builders intended. My head hurt. I knew you were alive, and I missed you so much I was sick with it. I had this sudden, wild, half-rusted thought: Maybe, through the hole, I could get back to you.”
If only he had a hand left that you could take. Your fingers twitch against his back instead. It’s not the same.
“So I ran to the hole and jumped in. It’s not suicide if you don’t mean to die; that’s what I told myself.” Another felt smile. “But it wasn’t… The things around the hole are mechanisms, but not just for warning. I must have triggered something, or maybe that was how they were meant to work. I went down, but it wasn’t like falling. It was controlled, somehow. Fast, but steady. I should have died. Air pressure, heat, the same things Antimony took me through without the rock involved, but Antimony wasn’t there and I should have died. There are lights along the shaft at intervals. Windows, I think. People actually used to live down there! But mostly, it’s just the dark.
“Eventually… hours or days later… I slowed down. I had reached—”
He stops. You feel the prickle of goose bumps rise on his skin.
“The Earth is alive.” His voice grows harsh, hoarse, faintly hysterical. “Some of the old stories are just stories, you’re right, but not that one. I understood then what the stone eaters had been trying to tell me. Why I had to use the obelisks to create the Rift. We’ve been at war with the world for so long that we’ve forgotten, Essun, but the world hasn’t. And we have to end it soon, or…”
Alabaster pauses, suddenly, for a long and pent moment. You want to ask what will happen if a war so ancient doesn’t end soon. You want to ask what happened to him down there at the core of the Earth, what he saw or experienced that has so plainly shaken him. You don’t ask. You’re a brave woman, but you know what you can take, and what you can’t.
He whispers: “When I die, don’t bury me.”
“Wh—”
“Give me to Antimony.”
As if she has heard her name, suddenly, Antimony reappears, standing before you both. You glare at her, realizing that this means Alabaster has reached the end of his strength and that the conversation must end. It makes you resent his weakness, and hate that he is dying. It makes you seek a scapegoat for that hatred.
“No,” you say, looking at her. “She took you from me. She doesn’t get to keep you.”
He chuckles. It’s so weary that your anger breaks. “It’s either her or the Evil Earth, Essun. Please.”
He begins to list to one side, and maybe you’re not as much of a monster as you think, because you give up and get up. Antimony blurs in that stone-eaterish way, slow except when they aren’t, and then she is crouched beside him, using both hands now to hold and support him as he slips into sleep.
You gaze at Antimony. You’ve thought of her as an enemy all this time, but if what Alabaster says is true…
“No,” you snap. You’re not really saying it to her, but it works either way. “I’m not ready to think of you as an ally yet.” Maybe not ever.
“Even if you were,” says the voice from within the stone eater’s chest, “I’m his ally. Not yours.”
People like us, with wants and needs. You want to reject this, too, but oddly it comforts you to know that she doesn’t like you, either. “Alabaster said he understood why you did what you did. But I don’t understand why he did what he did, or what he wants now. He said this was a three-sided war; what’s the third side? Which side is he on? How does the Rift… help?”
No matter how you try, you cannot imagine Antimony as having once been human. Too many things work against it: the stillness of her face, the dislocation of her voice. The fact that you hate her. “The Obelisk Gate amplifies energies both physical and arcane. No single point of surface venting produces these energies in sufficient quantity. The Rift is a reliable, high-volume source.”
Meaning… You tense. “You’re saying that if I use the Rift as my ambient source, channel it through my torus—”
“No. That would simply kill you.”