Nassun stares back at him, understanding shifting within her like an out-of-nowhere niner. It is the way of the world, but it isn’t. The things that happen to orogenes don’t just happen. They’ve been made to happen, by the Guardians, after years and years of work on their part. Maybe they whispered ideas into the ears of every warlord or Leader, in the time before Sanze. Maybe they were even there during the Shattering—inserting themselves into ragged, frightened pockets of survivors to tell them who to blame for their misery, and how to find them, and what to do with the culprits found.
Everybody thinks orogenes are so scary and powerful, and they are. Nassun is pretty sure she could wipe out the Antarctics if she really wanted, though she would probably need the sapphire to do it without dying. But despite all her power, she’s still just a little girl. She has to eat and sleep like every other little girl, among people if she hopes to keep eating and sleeping. People need other people to live. And if she has to fight to live, against every person in every comm? Against every song and every story and history and the Guardians and the militia and Imperial law and stonelore itself? Against a father who could not reconcile daughter with rogga? Against her own despair when she contemplates the gargantuan task of simply trying to be happy?
What can orogeny do against something like that? Keep her breathing, maybe. But breathing doesn’t always mean living, and maybe … maybe genocide doesn’t always leave bodies.
And now she is more certain than ever that Steel was right.
She looks up at Schaffa. “Till the world burns.” It’s what he said to her, when she told him what she meant to do with the Obelisk Gate.
Schaffa blinks, then smiles the tender, awful smile of a man who has always known that love and cruelty are two faces of the same coin. He pulls her close and kisses her forehead, and she hugs him tight, so very glad to have one parent, at last, who loves her as he should.
“Till the world burns, little one,” he murmurs against her hair. “Of course.”
In the morning, they resume walking down the winding stair.
The first sign of change is the appearance of another railing on the other side of the stairwell. The railing itself is made of strange stuff, bright gleaming metal not marred at all by verdigris or tarnish. Now, though, there are twin railings, and the stairwell widens enough that two people can walk abreast. Then the winding stairwell begins to unwind—still descending at the same angle, but less and less curved, until finally it extends straight ahead, into darkness.
After an hour or so of walking, the tunnel suddenly opens out, walls and roof vanishing. Now they descend along a trail of lighted, linked stairs that are completely unsupported, somehow, in open air. The stairs should not be possible, held up as they are by nothing but the railing and, apparently, each other—but there is no judder or creak as Nassun and Schaffa walk down. Whatever the stuff that comprises the steps is, it’s much stronger than ordinary stone.
And now they’re descending into a massive cavern. It’s impossible to see how large it is in the darkness, although shafts of illumination slant down from occasional circles of cool white light that dot the cavern’s ceiling at irregular intervals. The light illuminates … nothing. The cavern’s floor is a vast expanse of empty space filled with irregular, lumpen piles of sand. But now that they are within what Nassun once thought was an empty magma chamber, she can sess things more clearly, and all at once she realizes just how wrong she was.
“This isn’t a magma chamber,” she tells Schaffa in an awed tone. “It wasn’t a cavern at all when this city was built.”
“What?”
She shakes her head. “It wasn’t enclosed. It must have been … I don’t know? Whatever’s left when a volcano blows up completely.”
“A crater?”
She nods quickly, excited with the realization. “It was open to the sky then. People built the city in the crater. But then there was another eruption, right in the middle of the city.” She points ahead of them, into the dark; the stairwell is going right toward what she sesses is the epicenter of this ancient destruction.
But that can’t be right. Another eruption, depending on the type of lava, should simply have destroyed the city and filled the old crater. Instead, somehow, all the lava went up and over the city, spreading out like a canopy and solidifying over it to form this cavern. Leaving the city within the crater more or less intact.
“Impossible,” Schaffa says, frowning. “Not even the most viscous lava would behave that way. But …” His expression clouds. Again he is trying to sift through memories truncated and trimmed, or perhaps simply dimmed by age. On impulse Nassun grabs his hand, to encourage him. He glances at her, smiles absently, and resumes frowning. “But I think … an orogene could do such a thing. It would take one of rare power, however, and probably the aid of an obelisk. A ten-ringer. At least.”
Nassun frowns in confusion at this. The gist of what he’s said fits, though: Someone did this. Nassun looks up at the ceiling of the cavern and realizes belatedly that what she thought were odd stalactites are actually—she gasps—the leftover impressions of buildings that are no longer there! Yes, there is a narrowing point that must have been a spire; here a curving arch; there a geometric strangeness of spokes and curves that looks oddly organic, like the under-ribs of a mushroom cap. But while these imprints fossil all over the ceiling of the cavern, the solidified lava itself stops a few hundred feet above the ground. Belatedly, Nassun realizes that the “tunnel” from which they emerged is also the remains of a building. Looking back, she sees that the outside of the tunnel looks like one of the cuttlebones that her father once used for fine knapping work—more solid, and made from the same strange white material as the slab up on the surface. That must have been the top of the building. But a few feet below where the canopy ends, the building does, too, to be replaced by this strange white stair. That must have been done sometime after the disaster—but how? And by whom? And why?
Trying to understand what she’s seeing, Nassun looks more closely at the cavern’s floor. The sand is mostly pale, though there are mottling patches of darker gray and brown laced throughout. In a few places, twisted lengths of metal or immense broken fragments of something larger—other buildings, maybe—poke through the sand like bones from a half-unearthed grave.
But this is wrong, too, Nassun realizes. There isn’t enough material here to be the remnants of a city. She hasn’t seen many deadciv ruins, or cities for that matter, but she’s read about them and heard stories. She’s pretty sure that cities are supposed to be full of stone buildings and wooden storecaches and maybe metal gates and cobbled streets. This city is nothing, relatively speaking. Just metal and sand.