And yet, when she stands in the roof garden and stares at it for long enough, she begins to find the Moon beautiful. It is an icewhite eye, and she has no reason to think badly of those. Like the silver when it swirls and whorls within something like a snail’s shell. It makes her think of Schaffa—that he is watching over her in his way—and this makes her feel less alone.
Over time, Nassun discovers that she can use the obelisks to get a feel for the Moon. The sapphire is on the other side of the world, but there are others here above the ocean, drawn near in response to her summons, and she has been tapping and taming each in turn. The obelisks help her feel (not sess) that the Moon will soon be at its closest point. If she lets it go, it will pass, and begin to rapidly diminish until it vanishes from the sky. Or she can open the Gate, and tug on it, and change everything. The cruelty of the status quo, or the comfort of oblivion. The choice feels clear to her … but for one thing.
One night, as Nassun sits gazing up at the great white sphere, she says aloud, “It was on purpose, wasn’t it? You not telling me what would happen to Schaffa. So you could get rid of him.”
The mountain that has been lingering nearby shifts slightly, to a position behind her. “I did try to warn you.”
She turns to look at him. At the look on her face, he utters a soft laugh that sounds self-deprecating. This stops, though, when she says, “If he dies, I’ll hate you more than I hate the world.”
It is a war of attrition, she’s begun to realize, and she’s going to lose. In the weeks (?) or months (?) since they came to Corepoint, Schaffa has noticeably deteriorated, his skin developing an ugly pallor, his hair brittle and dull. People aren’t meant to lie unmoving, blinking but not thinking, for weeks on end. She had to cut his hair earlier that day. The bed cleans the dirt out of it, but it’s gotten oily and lately it keeps getting tangled—and the day before, some of it must have wrapped around his arm when she wrestled him onto his belly, cutting off his circulation in a way she didn’t notice. (She keeps a sheet over him, even though the bed is warm and does not need it. It bothers her that he is naked and undignified.) This morning when she finally noticed the problem, the arm was pale and a little gray. She’s loosed it, chafed it hoping to bring the color back, but it doesn’t look good. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if something’s really wrong with his arm. She might lose all of him like this, slowly but surely, little bits of him dying because she was only almost-nine when this Season began and she’s only almost-eleven now and taking care of invalids wasn’t something anyone taught her in creche.
“If he lives,” Steel replies in his colorless voice, “he will never again experience a moment without agony.” He pauses, gray eyes fixed on her face, as Nassun reverberates with his words, with her own denial, with her own growing sick fear that Steel is right.
Nassun gets to her feet. “I n-need to know how to fix him.”
“You can’t.”
She tightens her hands into fists. For the first time in what feels like centuries, part of her reaches for the strata around her. This means the shield volcano beneath Corepoint … but when she “grasps” it orogenically, she finds with some surprise that it is anchored, somehow. This distracts her for a moment as she has to alter her perception to shift to the silver—and there she finds solid, scintillating pillars of magic driven into the volcano’s foundations, pinning it in place. It’s still active, but it will never erupt because of those pillars. It is as stable as bedrock despite the hole at its core burrowing down to the Earth’s heart.
She shakes this off as irrelevant, and finally voices the thought that has been gathering in her mind over all the days she has dwelled in this city of stone people. “If … if I turn him into a stone eater, he’ll live. And he won’t have any pain. Right?” Steel does not reply. In the lengthening silence, Nassun bites her lip. “So you have to tell me how to—to make him like you. I bet I can do it if I use the Gate. I can do anything with that. Except …”
Except. The Obelisk Gate doesn’t do small things. Just as Nassun feels, sesses, knows that the Gate makes her temporarily omnipotent, she knows, too, that she cannot use it to transform just one man. If she makes Schaffa into a stone eater … every human being on the planet will change in the same manner. Every comm, every commless band, every starving wanderer: Ten thousand still-life cities, instead of just one. All the world will become like Corepoint.
But is that really so terrible a thing? If everyone is a stone eater, there will be no more orogenes and stills. No more children to die, no more fathers to murder them. The Seasons could come and go, and they wouldn’t matter. No one would starve to death ever again. To make the whole world as peaceful as Corepoint … would that not be a kindness?
Steel’s face, which has been tilted up toward the Moon even as his eyes watch her, now slowly pivots to face her. It’s always unnerving to see him move slowly. “Do you know what it feels like to live forever?”
Nassun blinks, thrown. She’s been expecting a fight. “What?”
The moonlight has transformed Steel into a thing of starkest shadows, white and ink against the dimness of the garden. “I asked,” he says, and his voice is almost pleasant, “if you know what it feels like to live forever. Like me. Like your Schaffa. Do you have any inkling as to how old he is? Do you care?”
“I—” About to say that she does, Nassun falters. No. This is not a thing she has ever considered. “I—I don’t—”
“I would estimate,” Steel continues, “that Guardians typically last three or four thousand years. Can you imagine that length of time? Think of the past two years. Your life since the beginning of the Season. Imagine another year. You can do that, can’t you? Every day feels like a year here in Corepoint, or so your kind tell me. Now put all three years together, and imagine them times one thousand.” The emphasis he puts on this is sharp, precisely enunciated. In spite of herself, Nassun jumps.
But also in spite of herself … she thinks. She feels old, Nassun, at the world-weary age of not-quite-eleven. So much has happened since the day she came home to find her little brother dead on the floor. She is a different person now, hardly Nassun at all; sometimes she is surprised to realize Nassun is still her name. How much more different will she be in three years? Ten? Twenty?