Tonkee’s not stupid, though, and this is her life’s work. While you stare at your daughter in awe, she narrows her eyes at the obelisks. “Three cubed,” she murmurs. You shake your head, mute. She glares at you, irritated by your slowness. “Well, if I was going to emulate a big crystal, I would start by putting smaller crystals into a cubiform lattice configuration.”
Then you understand. The big crystal that Nassun means to emulate is the onyx. You need a key to initialize the Gate; that’s what Alabaster told you. What Alabaster didn’t tell you, the useless ass, was that there are many possible kinds of keys. When he tore the Rifting across the Stillness, he used a network composed of all the node maintainers in his vicinity, probably because the onyx itself would have turned him to stone at once. The node maintainers were a lesser substitute for the onyx—a spare key. You didn’t know what you were doing that first time, when you yoked the orogenes in Castrima-under into a network, but he knew the onyx was too much for you to just grab directly, back then. You didn’t have Alabaster’s flexibility or creativity. He taught you a safer way.
Nassun, though, is the student Alabaster always wanted. She cannot have ever accessed the Obelisk Gate before—it’s been yours, till now—but as you observe in shock, in horror, she reaches beyond her spare-key network, finding other obelisks one by one and binding them. It’s slower than it would be with the onyx, but you can tell that it’s just as effective. It’s working. The apatite, connected and locked. The sardonyx, sending a little pulse from where it hovers out of sight, somewhere over the southern sea. The jade—
Nassun will open the Gate.
You shove Tonkee away. “Get as far from me as you can. All of you.”
Tonkee doesn’t waste time arguing. Her eyes widen; she turns and runs. You hear her shouting to the others. You hear Danel arguing. And then you can no longer pay heed to them.
Nassun will open the Gate, turn to stone, and die.
Only one thing can stop Nassun’s network of obelisks: the onyx. You need to reach it first, though, and right now it’s all the way on the other side of the planet, halfway between Castrima and Rennanis where you left it. Once, long ago at Castrima-over, it called you to itself. But do you dare wait for it to do that, now, with Nassun grabbing control of every part of the Gate? You need to get to the onyx first. For that, you need magic—much more of it than you can muster just by yourself, here without a single obelisk to your name.
The beryl, the hematite, the iolite—
She’s going to die right in front of you if you don’t do something.
Frantically you throw your awareness into the earth. Corepoint sits on a volcano, maybe you can—
Wait. Something pulls your attention back up to the volcano’s mouth. Underground, but closer by. Somewhere underneath this city, you sense a network. Lines of magic woven together, supporting one another, rooted deep to draw up more … It’s faint. It’s slow. And there is a familiar, ugly buzz at the back of your mind when you touch this network. Buzz upon buzz upon buzz.
Ah, yes. The network you’ve found is Guardians, nearly a thousand of them. Of rusting course. You have never consciously sought the magic of them before, but for the first time you understand what that buzz is—some part of you, even before Alabaster’s training, felt the foreignness of the magic within them. The knowledge sends a sharp, nearly paralyzing lance of fear through you. The network of them is close by, easy to grab, but if you do this, what’s to stop all these Guardians from boiling up out of Warrant like angry wasps from a disturbed nest? Don’t you have enough problems?
Nassun groans, up on her pylon. To your shock, you can … Evil Earth, you can see the magic around her, in her, beginning to flare up like a fire hitting oiled kindling. She burns against your perception, the weight of her growing heavier upon the world by the instant. The kyanite the orthoclase the scapolite—
And suddenly your fear is gone, because your baby needs you.
So you set your feet. You reach for that network you found, Guardians or no Guardians. You growl through your teeth and grab everything. The Guardians. The threads that trail from their sessapinae away into the depths, and as much of the magic coming through these as you can pull. The iron shards themselves, tiny depositories of the Evil Earth’s will.
You make it all yours, yoke it tight, and then you take it.
And somewhere down in Warrant there are Guardians screaming, coming awake and writhing in their cells and grabbing at their heads as you do to every single one of them what Alabaster once did to his Guardian. It is what Nassun yearned to do for Schaffa … only there is no kindness in the way you’re doing it. You don’t hate them; you just don’t care. You snatch the iron from their brains and every bit of silvery light from between their cells—and as you feel them crystallize and die, you finally have enough magic, from your makeshift network, to reach the onyx.
It listens at your touch, far away above the ashscape of the Stillness. You fall into it, diving desperately into the dark, to make your case. Please, you beg.
It considers the request. This is not in words or sensation. You simply know its consideration. It examines you in turn—your fear, your anger, your determination to put things right.
Ah—this last has resonance. You know yourself examined again, more closely and with skepticism, since your last request was for something so frivolous. (Merely wiping out a city? You of all people did not need the Gate for that.) What the onyx finds within you, however, is something different this time: Fear for kin. Fear of failure. The fear that accompanies all necessary change. And underneath it all, a driving need to make the world better.
Somewhere far away, a billion dying things shiver as the onyx utters a low, earthshaking blast of sound, and comes online.
Atop her pylon, beneath the pulse of the obelisks, Nassun feels that distant upcycling darkness as a warning. But she is too deep in her summoning; too many obelisks now fill her. She cannot spare any attention from her work.
And as each of the two hundred and sixteen remaining obelisks in turn submits to her, and as she opens her eyes to stare at the Moon that she’s going to let fly past untouched, and as she instead prepares to turn all the might of the great Plutonic Engine back upon the world and its people, to transform them as I was once transformed—
—she thinks of Schaffa.
Impossible to delude oneself in a moment like this. Impossible to see only what one wants to see, when the power to change the world ricochets through mind and soul and the spaces between cells; oh, I learned this long before both of you. Impossible not to understand that Nassun has known Schaffa for barely more than a year, and does not truly know him, given how much of himself he has lost. Impossible not to realize that she clings to him because she has nothing else—
But through her determination, there is a glimmer of doubt in her mind. It is nothing more than that. Barely even a thought. But it whispers, Do you really have nothing else?