We perceive the disruption first as a ghost in the machine.
A presence alongside us, inside us, intense and intrusive and immense. It slaps the onyx from my grasp before I know what’s happening, and silences our startled signals of What? and Something is wrong and How did that happen? with a shockwave of earthtalk as stunning to us as the Rifting will one day be to you.
Hello, little enemies.
In the conductors’ observation chamber, alarms finally blare. We are frozen in our wire chairs, shouting without words and being answered by something beyond our comprehension, so Biomagestry only notices a problem when suddenly nine percent of the Plutonic Engine—twenty-seven fragments—goes offline. I do not see Conductor Gallat gasp and exchange a horrified look with the other conductors and their esteemed guests; this is speculation, knowing what I know of him. I imagine that at some point he turns to a console to abort the launch. I also do not see, behind them, the iron sphere pulse and swell and shatter, destroying its stasis field and peppering everyone in the chamber with hot, needle-sharp iron shards. I do hear the screaming that follows while the iron shards burn their way up veins and arteries, and the ominous silence afterward, but I have my own problems to deal with in this particular moment.
Remwha, he of the quickest wit, slaps us from our shock with the realization that something else is controlling the Engine. No time to wonder who or why. Gaewha perceives how and signals frantically: The twenty-seven “offline” fragments are still active. In fact, they have formed a kind of subnetwork—a spare key. This is how the other presence has managed to dislodge the onyx’s control. Now all of the fragments, which generate and contain the bulk of the Plutonic Engine’s power, are under hostile foreign control.
I am a proud creature at my core; this is intolerable. The onyx was given to me to hold—and so I seize it again and shove it back into the connections that comprise the Engine, dislodging the false control at once. Salewha slams down the shockwaves of magic that this violent disruption causes, lest they ricochet throughout the Engine and touch off a resonance that will—well, we don’t actually know what such resonance would do, but it would be bad. I hold on throughout the reverberations of this, my teeth bared back in the real world, listening while my siblings cry out or snarl with me or gasp amid the aftershakes of the initial upheaval. Everything is confusion. In the realm of flesh and blood, the lights of our chambers have gone out, leaving only emergency panels to glow around the edges of the room. The warning klaxons are incessant, and elsewhere in Zero Site I can hear equipment snapping and rattling with the overload that we have put into the system. The conductors, screaming in the observation chamber, cannot help us—not that they ever could. I don’t know what’s happening, not really. I know only that this is a battle, full of moment-to-moment confusion as all battles are, and from here forth nothing is quite clear—
That strange presence that has attacked us pulls hard against the Plutonic Engine, trying to dislodge our control once more. I shout at it in wordless geyserboil magmacrack fury. Get out of here! I rage. Leave us alone!
You started this, it hisses into the strata, trying again. When this fails, however, it snarls in frustration—and then locks, instead, into those twenty-seven fragments that have gone so mysteriously offline. Dushwha senses the hostile entity’s intent and tries to grasp some of the twenty-seven, but the fragments slip through their grasp as if coated with oil. This is true enough, figuratively speaking; something has contaminated these fragments, leaving them fouled and nearly impossible to grasp. We might manage it with concerted effort, one by one—but there is no time. And until then, the enemy holds the twenty-seven.
Stalemate. We still hold the onyx. We hold the other two hundred and twenty-nine fragments, which are ready to fire the feedback pulse that will destroy Syl Anagist—and ourselves. We’ve postponed that, however, because we cannot leave matters like this. Where did this entity, so angry and phenomenally powerful, come from? What will it do with the obelisks that it holds? Long moments pass in pent silence. I cannot speak for the others, but I, at least, begin to think there will be no further attacks. I have always been such a fool.
Into the silence comes the amused, malicious challenge of our enemy, ground forth in magic and iron and stone.
Burn for me, says Father Earth.
I must speculate on some of what follows, even after all these ages spent seeking answers.
I can narrate no more because in the moment everything was nigh-instantaneous, and confusing, and devastating. The Earth changes only gradually, until it doesn’t. And when it fights back, it does so decisively.
Here is the context. That first test bore that initiated the Geoarcanity project also alerted the Earth to humanity’s efforts to take control of it. Over the decades that followed, it studied its enemy and began to understand what we meant to do. Metal was its instrument and ally; never trust metal for this reason. It sent splinters of itself to the surface to examine the fragments in their sockets—for here, at least, was life stored in crystal, comprehensible to an entity of inorganic matter in a way that mere flesh was not. Only gradually did it learn how to take control of individual human lives, though it required the medium of the corestones to do so. We are such small, hard-to-grasp creatures, otherwise. Such insignificant vermin, apart from our unfortunate tendency to sometimes make ourselves dangerously significant. The obelisks, though, were a more useful tool. Easy to turn back on us, like any carelessly held weapon.
Burndown.
Remember Allia? Imagine that disaster times two hundred and fifty-six. Imagine the Stillness perforated at every nodal point and seismically active site, and the ocean, too—hundreds of hot spots and gas pockets and oil reservoirs breached, and the entire plate-tectonic system destabilized. There is no word for such a catastrophe. It would liquefy the surface of the planet, vaporizing the oceans and sterilizing everything from the mantle up. The world, for us and any possible creature that might ever evolve in the future to hurt the Earth, would end. The Earth itself would be fine, however.
We could stop it. If we wanted to.
I will not say we weren’t tempted, when faced with the choice between permitting the destruction of a civilization, or of all life on the planet. Syl Anagist’s fate was sealed. Make no mistake: We had meant to seal it. The difference between what the Earth wanted and what we wanted was merely a matter of scale. But which is the way the world ends? We tuners would be dead; the distinction mattered little to me in that moment. It’s never wise to ask such a question of people who have nothing to lose.