The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  “As one does, against those who seek to enslave. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”

  Nassun closes her eyes. Yes. It’s all so understandable, really, when she thinks about it. The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too. Then it’s all broken hands and silver threads woven like ropes, and mothers who move the earth to destroy their enemies but cannot save one little boy.

  (Girl.)

  There has never been anyone to save Nassun. Her mother warned her there never would be. If Nassun ever wants to be free of fear, she has no choice but to forge that freedom for herself.

  So she turns, slowly, to face her father, who stands quietly behind her.

  “Sweetening,” he says. It’s the voice he usually uses for her, but she knows it isn’t real. His eyes are cold as the ice she left all over his house a few days ago. His jaw is tight, his body shaking just a little. She glances down at his tight fist. There’s a knife in it—a beautiful one made from red opal, her favorite of his more recent work. It has a slight iridescence and a smooth sheen that completely disguises the razor-sharpness of its knapped edges.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she says. She glances toward Steel, who is surely aware of what Jija intends. But the gray stone eater has not bothered to turn away from the predawn forestscape, or the northern sky where so many earth-changing things are happening.

  Very well. She faces her father again. “Mama’s alive, Daddy.”

  If the words mean anything to him, it doesn’t show. He just keeps standing there looking at her. Looking at her eyes in particular. She’s always had her mother’s eyes.

  Suddenly it doesn’t matter. Nassun sighs and rubs her face with her hands, as weary as Father Earth must be after so many eternities of hate. Hate is tiring. Nihilism is easier, though she does not know the word and will not for a few years. It’s what she’s feeling, regardless: an overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of it all.

  “I think I understand why you hate us,” she says to her father as she drops her hands to her sides. “I’ve done bad things, Daddy, like you probably thought I would. I don’t know how to not do them. It’s like everybody wants me to be bad, so there’s nothing else I can be.” She hesitates, then says what’s been in her mind for months now, unspoken. She doesn’t think she’ll have another chance to say it. “I wish you could love me anyway, even though I’m bad.”

  She thinks of Schaffa as she says this, though. Schaffa, who loves her no matter what, as a father should.

  Jija just keeps staring at her. Elsewhere in the silence, on that plane of awareness that is occupied by sesuna and whatever the sense of the silver threads is called, Nassun feels her mother collapse. To be specific, she feels her mother’s exertion upon the shifting, glimmering network of obelisks suddenly cease. Not that it ever touched her sapphire.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Nassun says at last. “I tried to keep loving you, but it was too hard.”

  He’s much bigger than her. Armed, where she is not. When he moves, it is with a mountainous lumber, all shoulders first and bulk and slow buildup to unstoppable speed. She weighs barely a hundred pounds. She has no real chance.

  But in the instant that she feels the twitch of her father’s muscles, small reverberating shocks against the ground and air, she orients her awareness toward the sky in a single, ringing command.

  The transformation of the sapphire is instantaneous. It causes a concussion of air that rushes inward to fill the vacuum. The sound this makes is the loudest crack of thunder Nassun has ever heard. Jija, in mid-lunge, starts and stumbles, looking up. A moment later the sapphire slams into the ground before Nassun, cracking the central stone of the crucible mosaic and a six-foot radius of ground around her.

  It isn’t the sapphire as she’s seen it up till now, although the sameness of it transcends things like shape. When she extends her hand to wrap around the hilt of the long, flickering knife of blue stone, she falls into it a little. Up, flowing through watery facets of light and shadow. In, down into the earth. Out, away, brushing against the other parts of the whole that is the Gate. The thing in her hand is the same monstrous, mountainous dynamo of silvery power that it has always been. The same tool, just more versatile now.

  Jija stares at it, then at her. There is an instant in which he wavers, and Nassun waits. If he turns, runs… he was her father once. Does he remember that time? She wants him to. Nothing between them will ever be the same again, but she wants that time to matter.

  No. Jija comes at her again, shouting as he raises the knife.

  So Nassun lifts the sapphire blade from the earth. It’s nearly the length of her body, but it weighs nothing; the sapphire floats, after all. It’s just floating here in front of her instead of above. She doesn’t lift it, either, strictly speaking. She wills it to move to a new position and it does. In front of her. Between her and Jija, so that when Jija angles his body to stab her, he cannot help bumping right into it. This makes it easy, inevitable, for her power to lay into him.

  She doesn’t kill him with ice. Nassun defaults to using the silver instead of orogeny most days. The shift of Jija’s flesh is more controlled than what she did to Eitz, largely because she is aware of what she’s doing, and also because she’s doing it on purpose. Jija begins to turn to stone, starting at the point of contact between him and the obelisk.

  What Nassun doesn’t consider is momentum, which carries Jija forward even as he glances off the sapphire and twists and sees what is happening to his flesh and starts to inhale for a scream. He doesn’t finish the inhalation before his lungs are solidified. He does, however, finish his lunge, though it is off-balance and out of control, more of a fall than an attack by now. Still, it is a fall with a knife as its focal point, and so the knife catches Nassun in the shoulder. He was aiming for her heart.

  The pain of the strike is sudden and terrible and it breaks Nassun’s concentration at once. This is bad because the sapphire flares as her pain does, flickering into its half-real state and back as she gasps and staggers. This finishes Jija in an instant, solidifying him completely into a statue with a frizz of smoky-quartz hair and a round red-ocher face and clothes of deep blue serendibite, because he wore dark clothing in order to stalk his daughter. This statue stands poised for only an instant, though—and then the flicker of the sapphire sends a ripple through him like a struck bell. Not unlike the concussion of turned-inward orogenic force that a Guardian once inflicted on a man named Innon.

  Jija shatters in the same way, just not as wetly. He’s brittle stuff, weak, poorly made. The pieces of him tumble into stillness around Nassun’s feet.

  Nassun gazes at the remains of her father for a long, aching moment. Beyond her, in Found Moon and down below in Jekity, lights are coming on in the cabins. Everyone’s been woken up by the thunderclap of the sapphire. There is confusion, voices calling back and forth, frantic sessing and probes of the earth.

  Steel now gazes down at Jija with her. “It never ends,” he says. “It never gets better.”

  Nassun says nothing. Steel’s words fall into her like a stone into water, and she does not ripple in their wake.

  “You’ll kill everything you love, eventually. Your mother. Schaffa. All your friends here in Found Moon. No way around it.”

  She closes her eyes.

  “No way… except one.” A careful, considered pause. “Shall I tell you that way?”

  Schaffa is coming. She can sess him, the buzz of him, the constant torment of the thing in his brain that he will not let her remove. Schaffa, who loves her.

  You’ll kill everything you love, eventually.

  “Yes,” she makes herself say. “Tell me how not to…” She trails off. She can’t say hurt them, because she has already hurt so many. She’s a monster. But there must be a way for her monstrousness to be contained. For the threat of an orogene’s existence to be ended.

  “The Moon�
��s coming back, Nassun. It was lost so long ago, flung away like a ball on a paddle-string—but the string has drawn it back. Left to itself, it will pass by and fly off again; it’s done that before, several times now.”

  She can see one of her father’s eyes, set into a chunk of his face, gazing up at her from amid the pile. His eyes were green, and now they have become a beautiful shade of clouded peridot.

  “But with the Gate, you can… nudge it. Just a little. Adjust its tra—” A soft, amused sound. “The path that the Moon naturally follows. Instead of letting it pass again, lost and wandering, bring it home. Father Earth’s been missing it. Bring it straight here and let them have a reunion.”

  Oh. Oh. She understands, suddenly, why Father Earth wants her dead.

  “It will be a terrible thing,” Steel says softly, nearly in her ear because he’s moved closer to her. “It will end the Seasons. It will end every season. And yet… what you’re feeling right now, you need never feel again. No one will ever suffer again.”

  Nassun turns to stare at Steel. He’s bent toward her, a look of almost comical slyness chiseled on his face.

  Then Schaffa trots to a stop before them. He’s staring at the ruin of Jija, and she sees the moment when the realization of what he’s seeing flickers across his face, a mobile shockwave. His icewhite gaze lifts to her, and she searches his expression with her belly clenched against imminent pain.

  There is only anguish in his face. Fear for her, sorrow on her behalf, alarm at her bloodied shoulder. Wariness and protective anger, as he focuses on Steel. He is still her Schaffa. The ache of Jija fades within the ease of his regard. Schaffa will love her no matter what she becomes.

  So Nassun turns then, to Steel, and says, “Tell me how to bring the Moon home.”

  APPENDIX 1

  A catalog of Fifth Seasons that have been recorded prior to and since the founding of the Sanzed Equatorial Affiliation, from most recent to oldest

  Choking Season: 2714–2719 Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: the Antarctics near Deveteris. The eruption of Mount Akok blanketed a five-hundred-mile radius with fine ash clouds that solidified in lungs and mucous membranes. Five years without sunlight, although the northern hemisphere was not affected as much (only two years).

  Acid Season: 2322–2329 Imperial. Proximate cause: plus-ten-level shake. Location: unknown; far ocean. A sudden plate shift birthed a chain of volcanoes in the path of a major jet stream. This jet stream became acidified, flowing toward the western coast and eventually around most of the Stillness. Most coastal comms perished in the initial tsunami; the rest failed or were forced to relocate when their fleets and port facilities corroded and the fishing dried up. Atmospheric occlusion by clouds lasted seven years; coastal pH levels remained untenable for many years more.

  Boiling Season: 1842–1845 Imperial. Proximate cause: hot spot eruption beneath a great lake. Location: Somidlats, Lake Tekkaris quartent. The eruption launched millions of gallons of steam and particulates into the air, which triggered acidic rain and atmospheric occlusion over the southern half of the continent for three years. The northern half suffered no negative impacts, however, so archeomests dispute whether this qualifies as a “true” Season.

  Breathless Season: 1689–1798 Imperial. Proximate cause: mining accident. Location: Nomidlats, Sathd quartent. An entirely human-caused Season triggered when miners at the edge of the northeastern Nomidlats coalfields set off underground fires. A relatively mild Season featuring occasional sunlight and no ashfall or acidification except in the region; few comms declared Seasonal Law. Approximately fourteen million people in the city of Heldine died in the initial natural-gas eruption and rapidly spreading fire sinkhole before Imperial Orogenes successfully quelled and sealed the edges of the fires to prevent further spread. The remaining mass could only be isolated, where it continued to burn for one hundred and twenty years. The smoke of this, spread via prevailing winds, caused respiratory problems and occasional mass suffocations in the region for several decades. A secondary effect of the loss of the Nomidlats coalfields was a catastrophic rise in heating fuel costs and the wider adaption of geothermal and hydroelectric heating, leading to the establishment of the Geneer Licensure.

  The Season of Teeth: 1553–1566 Imperial. Proximate cause: oceanic shake triggering a supervolcanic explosion. Location: Arctic Cracks. An aftershock of the oceanic shake breached a previously unknown hot spot near the north pole. This triggered a supervolcanic explosion; witnesses report hearing the sound of the explosion as far as the Antarctics. Ash went upper-atmospheric and spread around the globe rapidly, although the Arctics were most heavily affected. The harm of this Season was exacerbated by poor preparation on the part of many comms, because some nine hundred years had passed since the last Season; popular belief at the time was that the Seasons were merely legend. Reports of cannibalism spread from the north all the way to the Equatorials. At the end of this Season, the Fulcrum was founded in Yumenes, with satellite facilities in the Arctics and Antarctics.

  Fungus Season: 602 Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: western Equatorials. A series of eruptions during monsoon season increased humidity and obscured sunlight over approximately 20 percent of the continent for six months. While this was a mild Season as such things go, its timing created perfect conditions for a fungal bloom that spread across the Equatorials into the northern and southern Midlats, wiping out then-staple-crop miroq (now extinct). The resulting famine lasted four years (two for the fungus blight to run its course, two more for agriculture and food distribution systems to recover). Nearly all affected comms were able to subsist on their own stores, thus proving the efficacy of Imperial reforms and Season planning, and the Empire was generous in sharing stored seed with those regions that had been miroq-dependent. In its aftermath, many comms of the middle latitudes and coastal regions voluntarily joined the Empire, doubling its range and beginning its Golden Age.

  Madness Season: 3 Before Imperial–7 Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: Kiash Traps. The eruption of multiple vents of an ancient supervolcano (the same one responsible for the Twin Season of approximately 10,000 years previous) launched large deposits of the dark-colored mineral augite into the air. The resulting ten years of darkness was not only devastating in the usual Seasonal way, but resulted in a higher than usual incidence of mental illness. The Sanzed Equatorial Affiliation (commonly called the Sanze Empire) was born in this Season as Warlord Verishe of Yumenes conquered multiple ailing comms using psychological warfare techniques. (See The Art of Madness, various authors, Sixth University Press.) Verishe named herself Emperor on the day the first sunlight returned.

  [Editor’s note: Much of the information about Seasons prior to the founding of Sanze is contradictory or unconfirmed. The following are Seasons agreed upon by the Seventh University Archaeomestric Conference of 2532.]

  Wandering Season: Approximately 800 Before Imperial. Proximate cause: magnetic pole shift. Location: unverifiable. This Season resulted in the extinction of several important trade crops of the time, and twenty years of famine resulting from pollinators confused by the movement of true north.

  Season of Changed Wind: Approximately 1900 Before Imperial. Proximate cause: unknown. Location: unverifiable. For reasons unknown, the direction of the prevailing winds shifted for many years before returning to normal. Consensus agrees that this was a Season, despite the lack of atmospheric occlusion, because only a substantial (and likely far-oceanic) seismic event could have triggered it.

  Heavy Metal Season: Approximately 4200 Before Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: Somidlats near Eastern Coastals. A volcanic eruption (believed to be Mount Yrga) caused atmospheric occlusion for ten years, exacerbated by widespread mercury contamination throughout the eastern half of the Stillness.

  Season of Yellow Seas: Approximately 9200 Before Imperial. Proximate cause: unknown. Location: Eastern and Western Coastals, and coastal regions as far
south as the Antarctics. This Season is only known through written accounts found in Equatorial ruins. For unknown reasons, a widespread bacterial bloom toxified nearly all sea life and caused coastal famines for several decades.

  Twin Season: Approximately 9800 Before Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: Somidlats. Per songs and oral histories dating from the time, the eruption of one volcanic vent caused a three-year occlusion. As this began to clear, it was followed by a second eruption of a different vent, which extended the occlusion by thirty more years.

  APPENDIX 2

  A Glossary of Terms Commonly Used in All Quartents of the Stillness

  Antarctics: The southernmost latitudes of the continent. Also refers to people from antarctic-region comms.

  Arctics: The northernmost latitudes of the continent. Also refers to people from arctic-region comms.

  Ashblow Hair: A distinctive Sanzed racial trait, deemed in the current guidelines of the Breeder use-caste to be advantageous and therefore given preference in selection. Ashblow hair is notably coarse and thick, generally growing in an upward flare; at length, it falls around the face and shoulders. It is acid-resistant and retains little water after immersion, and has been proven effective as an ash filter in extreme circumstances. In most comms, Breeder guidelines acknowledge texture alone; however, Equatorial Breeders generally also require natural “ash” coloration (slate gray to white, present from birth) for the coveted designation.

  Bastard: A person born without a use-caste, which is only possible for boys whose fathers are unknown. Those who distinguish themselves may be permitted to bear their mother’s use-caste at comm-naming.

  Blow: A volcano. Also called firemountains in some Coastal languages.

  Boil: A geyser, hot spring, or steam vent.

  Breeder: One of the seven common use-castes. Breeders are individuals selected for their health and desirable conformation. During a Season, they are responsible for the maintenance of healthy bloodlines and the improvement of comm or race by selective measures. Breeders born into the caste who do not meet acceptable community standards may be permitted to bear the use-caste of a close relative at comm-naming.