The stone eater does not seem to react at first. Then you sess the coalescence of something, like the silver threads of magic but so many. The hand twitches, then leaps into the air, returning to the wrist-stump as if pulled by strings. He leaves Hoa’s arm behind. Then the stone eater turns fully to face you, at last.
“Get out before I chop you into more pieces than you can put back together,” you say in a voice that shakes like the earth.
The gray stone eater smiles. It’s a full smile, eyes crinkling with crow’s feet and lips drawing back from diamond teeth—and marvel of marvels, it actually looks like a smile and not a threat display. Then he vanishes, falling through the surface of the crystal. For an instant you see a gray shadow within the crystal’s translucence, his shape blurred and not quite humanoid anymore, though that is probably the angle. Then, faster than you can track with eyes or sessapinae, he shoots down and away.
In the reverberating wake of his leaving, Ykka takes and lets out a deep breath.
“Well,” she says, looking around at her people. What she believes to be her people. “Sounds like we need to talk.” There is an uneasy stir.
You don’t want to hear it. You hurry forward and pick up Hoa’s arm. The thing is heavy as stone; you have to put your legs into it or risk your lower back. You turn and people move out of your way and you hear Lerna say, “Essun?” But you don’t want to hear him, either.
There are threads, see. Silver lines that only you can see, flailing and curling forth from the arm’s stump, but they shift as you turn. Always pointing in a particular direction. So you follow them. No one follows you, and you don’t care what that means. Not at the moment.
The tendrils lead you to your own apartment.
You step through the curtain and stop. Tonkee’s not home. Must be either at Hjarka’s or up in the green room. There are two more limbs on the floor in front of you, bloody stumps with diamond bones poking forth. No, they are not on the floor; they are in the floor, partially submerged in it, one down to the thigh, the other just a calf and foot. Caught, as if climbing out. There are twin trails of blood, thick enough to be worrisome, over the homey rug that you bartered one of Jija’s old flintknives for. They go toward your room, so you follow them in. And then you drop the arm. Fortunately it does not land on your foot.
What is left of Hoa crawls toward the floor-mattress that passes for your bed. His other arm is also gone, you don’t know where. Hanks of his hair are missing. He pauses when you come in, hearing or sessing you, and he lies still as you circle him and see that his lower jaw has been ripped away. He has no eyes, and there is a… a bite, just above his temple. That’s why his hair is missing. Something has bitten into his skull like an apple, incising a chunk of flesh and the diamond bone underneath. You can’t see what’s inside his head for the blood. That’s good.
It would frighten you, if you did not immediately understand. Beside your bed is the little cloth-wrapped bundle that he has carried since Tirimo. You hurry to it, open it up, bring it to the ruin of him, and hunker down. “Can you turn over?”
He responds by doing so. For a moment you’re stymied by the lack of a lower jaw, and then you think fuck it and shove one of the stones from the bundle directly into the ragged hole of Hoa’s throat. The feel of his flesh is warm and human as you push it down with your finger until the muscles of his swallowing reflex catch it. (Your gorge rises. You will it back down.) You start to feed him another, but after a few breaths he begins to shiver all over violently. You don’t realize you’re still sessing magic until suddenly Hoa’s body becomes alive with glimmering silver threads, all of them whipping about and curling like the stinging tentacles of ocean creatures from lorists’ tales. Hundreds of them. You draw back in alarm, but Hoa makes a raw, breathy sound, and you think maybe it means more. You push another stone into his throat, and then another. There weren’t many left to begin with. When you’re down to only three, you hesitate. “You want them all?”
Hoa hesitates, too. You can see that in his body language. You don’t understand why he needs them at all; aside from that lashing of magic—he is made of it, every inch of him is alive with it, you’ve never seen anything like this—nothing about his damaged body is improving. Can anyone survive or recover from this degree of damage? He’s not human enough for you to even guess. But finally he croaks again. It is a deeper sound than the first. Resigned, maybe, or maybe that is your imagination patterning humanity over the animal sounds of his animal flesh. So you push the last three stones into him.
Nothing happens for a moment. Then.
Silver tendrils billow and swell around him so rapidly, with such frenzy, that you scramble back. You know some of the things that magic can do, and something about this seems altogether wild and uncontrolled. It fills the room, though, and—and you blink. You can see it, not just sess it. All of Hoa glimmers now with silver-white light, growing rapidly too bright to look at directly; even a still would be able to see this. You move into the living room, peering through the bedroom door because that seems safer. The instant you cross the room’s threshold, the substance of the whole apartment—walls, floor, everywhere there is crystal—shivers for an instant, becoming translucent and obelisk-unreal. Your bedroom furniture and belongings float amid the flickering white. There is a soft thump from behind you that makes you jump and whirl, but it’s Hoa’s legs, which are out of the living room floor and sliding along the trails of blood into your room. The arm you dropped is moving, too, already nudging up against the bright morass of him, becoming bright, too. Leaping to rejoin his body, as the gray stone eater’s hand rejoined his wrist.
Something slides up from the floor—no. You see the floor slide up, as if it were putty and not crystal, and wrap itself around his body. The light dies when he does it; the material immediately begins to change into something darker. When you blink away the afterimages enough to see, there is something huge and strange and impossible where Hoa once was.
You step back into the bedroom—carefully, because the floor and walls might be solid again, but you know that’s possibly a temporary state. The once-smooth crystal is rough beneath your feet. The thing takes up most of the room now, lying next to your disordered bed that is now half submerged in the resolidified floor. It’s hot. Your foot tangles briefly in the strap of your half-empty runny-sack, which fortunately is still intact and unmerged with the room. You stoop quickly and grab it; the habits of survival. Earthfires it’s hot in here. The bed does not catch fire, but you think that’s only because it’s not directly touching the big thing. You can sess it, whatever it is. No, you know what it is: chalcedony. A huge, oblong lump of gray-green chalcedony, like the outer shell of a geode.
You already know what’s happening, don’t you? I told you of Tirimo after the Rifting. The far end of the valley, where the shockwave of the shake loosed a geode that then split open like an egg. The geode hadn’t been there all along, you realize; this is magic, not nature. Well, perhaps a bit of both. For stone eaters, there’s little difference between the two.
And in the morning, after you spend the night at the living room table, where you meant to stay awake and watch the steaming lump of rock but instead fell asleep, it happens again. The cracking open of the geode is loud, explosively violent. A flicker of pressure-driven plasma curls forth and scorches or melts all the belongings you left in the room. Except the runny-sack, since you took it. Good instincts.
You’re shaking from being startled awake. Slowly you stand and edge into the room. It’s so hot that it’s hard to breathe. Like an oven—though the waft of warmth causes the apartment’s entry curtain to billow open. Quickly the heat diminishes to only uncomfortable, and not dangerous.