Sometimes you dream of undoing it all. Not flailing for the garnet obelisk in Allia, and instead watching happy black children play in the surf of a black-sand beach while you bled out around a Guardian’s black knife. Not being taken to Meov by Antimony; instead, you would’ve returned to the Fulcrum to give birth to Corundum. You’d have lost him after that birth, and you would never have had Innon, but both of them would probably still be alive. (Well. For values of “alive,” if they’d put Coru in a node.) But then you would never have lived in Tirimo, never have borne Uche to die beneath his father’s fists, never have raised Nassun to be stolen by her father, never have crushed your once-neighbors when they tried to kill you. So many lives saved, if only you had stayed in your cage. Or died on demand.
And here, now, long free from the ordered, staid strictures of the Fulcrum, you have become mighty. You saved the community of Castrima at the cost of Castrima itself; this was a small price to pay, compared to the cost in blood that the enemy army would have extracted if they’d won. You achieved victory by unleashing the concatenated power of an arcane mechanism older than (your) written history—and because you are who you are, while learning to master this power, you murdered Alabaster Tenring. You didn’t mean to. You actually suspect he wanted you to do it. Either way, he’s dead, and this sequence of events has left you the most powerful orogene on the planet.
It also means that your tenure as most powerful has just acquired an expiration date, because the same thing is happening to you that happened to Alabaster: You’re turning to stone. Just your right arm, for now. Could be worse. Will be worse, the next time you open the Gate, or even the next time you wield enough of that strange silvery not-orogeny, which Alabaster called magic. You don’t have a choice, though. You’ve got a job to do, courtesy of Alabaster and the nebulous faction of stone eaters who’ve been quietly trying to end the ancient war between life and Father Earth. The job you have to do is the easier of the two, you think. Just catch the Moon. Seal the Yumenes Rifting. Reduce the current Season’s predicted impact from thousands or millions of years back down to something manageable—something the human race has a chance of surviving. End the Fifth Seasons for all time.
The job you want to do, though? Find Nassun, your daughter. Take her back from the man who murdered your son and dragged her halfway across the world in the middle of the apocalypse.
About that: I have good news, and bad news. But we’ll get to Jija presently.
You’re not really in a coma. You are a key component of a complex system, the whole of which has just experienced a massive, poorly controlled start-up flux and emergency shutoff with insufficient cooldown time, expressing itself as arcanochemical phase-state resistance and mutagenic feedback. You need time to … reboot.
This means you’re not unconscious. It’s more like periods of half-waking and half-sleeping, if that makes sense. You’re aware of things, somewhat. The bobbing of movement, occasional jostling. Someone puts food and water into your mouth. Fortunately you have the presence of mind to chew and swallow, because the end of the world on the ash-strewn road is a bad time and place to need a feeding tube. Hands pull on your clothing and something girds your hips—a diaper. Bad time and place for that, too, but someone’s willing to tend you this way, and you don’t mind. You barely notice. You feel no hunger or thirst before they give you sustenance; your evacuations bring no particular relief. Life endures. It doesn’t need to do so enthusiastically.
Eventually the periods of waking and sleep become more pronounced things. Then one day you open your eyes to see the clouded sky overhead. Swaying back and forth. Skeletal branches occasionally occlude it. Faint shadow of an obelisk through the clouds: That’s the spinel, you suspect. Reverted to its usual shape and immensity, ah, and following you like a lonely puppy, now that Alabaster is dead.
Staring at the sky gets boring after a while, so you turn your head and try to understand what’s going on. Figures move around you, dreamlike and swathed in gray-white … no. No, they’re wearing ordinary clothing; it’s just covered with pale ash. And they’re wearing a lot of clothes because it’s cold—not enough to freeze water, but close. It’s nearly two years into the Season; two years without the sun. The Rifting’s putting out a lot of heat up around the equator, but that’s not nearly enough to make up for the lack of a giant fireball in the sky. Still, without the Rifting, the cold would be worse—well below freezing, instead of nearly freezing. Small favors.
In any case, one of the ash-swathed figures seems to notice that you’re awake, or to feel the shift of your weight. A head wrapped in face mask and goggles swivels back to consider you, then faces ahead again. There are murmured words between the two people in front of you, which you don’t understand. They’re not in another language. You’re just half out of it and the words are partially absorbed by the ash falling around you.
Someone speaks behind you. You start and look back to see another goggled, masked face. Who are these people? (It does not occur to you to be afraid. Like hunger, such visceral things are more detached from you now.) Then something clicks and you understand. You’re on a stretcher, just two poles with some stitched hide between them, being carried by four people. One of them calls out, and other calls respond from farther away. Lots of calls. Lots of people.
Another call from somewhere far away, and the people carrying you come to a halt. They glance at each other and set you down with the ease and uniformity of people who’ve practiced doing the same maneuver in unison many times. You feel the stretcher settle onto a soft, powdery layer of ash, over a thicker layer of ash, over what might be a road. Then your stretcher-bearers move away, opening packs and settling down in a ritual that is familiar from your own months on the road. Breaktime.
You know this ritual. You should get up. Eat something. Check your boots for holes or stones, your feet for unnoticed sores, make sure your mask—wait, are you wearing one? If everyone else is … You kept that in your runny-sack, didn’t you? Where is your runny-sack?
Someone walks out of the gloom and ashfall. Tall, plateau-broad, identity stripped by the clothes and mask but restored by the familiar frizzy texture of the ashblow mane. She crouches near your head. “Hnh. Not dead, after all. Guess I lose that bet with Tonkee.”
“Hjarka,” you say. Your voice rasps worse than hers does.
You guess by the flexing of her mask that she grins. It feels odd to perceive her smile without the usual undercurrent of menace from her sharp-filed teeth. “And your brains are probably still intact. I win the bet with Ykka, at least.” She glances around and bellows, “Lerna!”
You try to lift a hand to grab her pants leg. It feels like trying to move a mountain. You ought to be able to move mountains, so you concentrate and get it halfway up—and then forget why you wanted Hjarka’s attention. She glances around then, fortunately, and eyes your upraised hand. It’s shaking with the effort. After a moment’s consideration, she sighs and takes your hand, then looks away as if embarrassed.
“Happening,” you manage.
“Rust if I know. We didn’t need another break this soon.”