Nassun sesses impending change an instant before the tunnel suddenly brightens. They can see a new, ruddy light that intersperses the rock walls of the tunnel. Ah, yes; they’ve gone far enough down that some of the rock has melted and glows bright red. This new light paints the vehimal’s interior bloody and makes the gold filigree along its walls seem to catch fire. The forward view is indistinct at first, just red amid gray and brown and black, but Nassun understands instinctively what she’s seeing. They have entered the mantle, and her fear finally begins to ebb amid fascination.
“The asthenosphere,” she murmurs. Schaffa frowns at her, but naming what she sees has eased her fear. Names have power. She bites her lip, then finally lets go of Schaffa’s hand to rise and approach the forward view. Up close it’s easier to tell that what she’s seeing is just an illusion of sorts – tiny diamonds of color rising on the vehimal’s inner skin, like a blush, to form a mosaic of moving images. How does it work? She can’t begin to fathom it.
Fascinated, she reaches up. The vehimal’s inner skin gives off no heat, though she knows they are already at a level underground where human flesh should burn up in an instant. When she touches the image on the forward view, it ripples ever so slightly around her finger, like waves in water. Putting her whole hand on a roil of brown-red color, she cannot help smiling. Just a few feet away, on the other side of the vehimal’s skin, is the burning earth. She’s touching the burning earth, thinly removed. She puts her other hand up, presses her cheek against the smooth plates. Here in this strange deadciv contraption, she is part of the earth, perhaps more so than any orogene before her has ever been. It is her, it is in her, she is in it.
When Nassun glances back over her shoulder at Schaffa, he’s smiling, despite the lines of pain around his eyes. It’s different from his usual smile. “What?” she asks.
“The Leadership families of Yumenes believed that orogenes once ruled the world,” he says. “That their duty was to keep your kind from ever regaining that much power. That you would be monstrous rulers of the world, doing back to ordinary folk what had been done to you, if you ever got the chance. I don’t think they were right about any of it – and yet.” He gestures, as she stands there illuminated by the fire of the earth. “Look at you, little one. If you are the monster they imagined you to be… you are also glorious.”
Nassun loves him so much.
It’s why she gives up the illusion of power and goes back to sit beside him. But when she gets close, she sees just how much strain he’s under. “Your head hurts a lot.”
His smile fades. “It’s bearable.”
Troubled, she puts her hands on his shoulders. Dozens of nights of easing his pain have made it easy – but this time when she sends silver into him, the white-hot burn of lines between his cells does not fade. In fact, they blaze brighter, so sharply that Schaffa tenses and pulls away from her, rising to begin pacing again. He has plastered a smile on his face, more of a rictus as he prowls restlessly back and forth, but Nassun can tell that the smile-endorphins are doing nothing.
Why did the lines get brighter? Nassun tries to understand this by examining herself. Nothing of her silver is different; it flows in its usual clearly delineated lines. She turns her silver gaze on Schaffa – and then, belatedly, notices something stunning.
The vehimal is made of silver, and not just fine lines of it. It is surrounded by silver, permeated with it. What she perceives is a wave of the stuff, rippling in ribbons around herself and Schaffa, starting at the nose of the vehicle and enclosing them behind. This sheath of magic, she understands suddenly, is what’s pushing away the heat and pushing back on the pressure and tilting the lines of force within the vehimal so that gravity pulls toward its floor and not toward the center of the earth. The walls are only a framework; something about their structure makes it easier for the silver to flow and connect and form lattices. The gold filigree helps to stabilize the churn of energies at the front of the vehicle – or so Nassun guesses, since she cannot understand all the ways in which these magic mechanisms work together. It’s just too complex. It is like riding inside an obelisk. It’s like being carried by the wind. She had no idea the silver could be so amazing.
But there is something beyond the miracle of the vehimal’s walls. Something outside the vehimal.
At first Nassun isn’t sure what she’s perceiving. More lights? No. She’s looking at it all wrong.
It’s the silver, same as what flows between her own cells. It’s a single thread of silver – and yet it is titanic, curling away between a whorl of soft, hot rock and a high-pressure bubble of searing water. A single thread of silver… and it is longer than the tunnel they have traversed so far. She can’t find either of its ends. It’s wider than the vehimal’s circumference and then some. Yet otherwise it’s just as clear and focused as any one of the lines within Nassun herself. The same, just… immense.
And Nassun understands then, she understands, so suddenly and devastatingly that her eyes snap open and she stumbles backward with the force of the realization, bumping into another chair and nearly falling before she grabs it to hold herself upright. Schaffa makes a low, frustrated sound and turns in an attempt to respond to her alarm – but the silver within his body is so bright that when it flares, he doubles over, clutching at his head and groaning. He is in too much pain to fulfill his duty as a Guardian, or to act on his concern for her, because the silver in his body has grown to be as bright as that immense thread out in the magma.
Magic, Steel called the silver. The stuff underneath orogeny, which is made by things that live or once lived. This silver deep within Father Earth wends between the mountainous fragments of his substance in exactly the same way that they twine among the cells of a living, breathing thing. And that is because a planet is a living, breathing thing; she knows this now with the certainty of instinct. All the stories about Father Earth being alive are real.
But if the mantle is Father Earth’s body, why is his silver getting brighter?
No. Oh no.
“Schaffa,” Nassun whispers. He grunts; he has sagged to one knee, gasping shallowly as he clutches at his head. She wants to go to him, comfort him, help him, but she stands where she is, her breath coming too fast from rising panic at what she suddenly knows is coming. She wants to deny it, though. “Schaffa, p-please, that thing in your head, the piece of iron, you called it a corestone, Schaffa —” Her voice is fluttery. She can’t catch her breath. Fear has nearly closed her throat. No. No. She did not understand, but now she does and she has no idea how to stop it. “Schaffa, where does it come from, that corestone thing in your head?”
The vehimal’s voice speaks again with that greeting language, and then it continues, obscene in its detached pleasantry. “— a marvel, only available —” Something. “— route. This vehimal —” Something. “— heart, illuminated —” Something. “— for your pleasure.”
Schaffa does not reply. But Nassun can sess the answer to her question now. She can feel it as the paltry thin silver that runs through her own body resonates – but that is a faint resonance, from her silver, generated by her own flesh. The silver in Schaffa, in all Guardians, is generated by the corestone that sits lodged in their sessapinae. She’s studied this stone sometimes, to the degree that she is able while Schaffa sleeps and she feeds him magic. It’s iron, but like no other iron she’s ever sessed. Oddly dense. Oddly energetic, though some of that is the magic that it channels into him from… somewhere. Oddly alive.
And when the whole right side of the vehimal dissolves to let its passengers glimpse the rarely seen wonder that is the world’s unfettered heart, it already blazes before her: a silver sun underground, so bright that she must squint, so heavy that perceiving it hurts her sessapinae, so powerful with magic that it makes the lingering connection of the sapphire feel tremulous and weak. It is the Earth’s core, the source of the corestones, and before her it is a world in itself, swallowing the viewscreen and growing further still as they hurtle closer.
It does not look like rock, Nassun thinks faintly, beneath the panic. Maybe that’s just the waver of molten metal and magic all round the vehimal, but the immensity before her seems to shimmer when she tries to focus on it. There’s some solidity to it; as they draw closer, Nassun can detect anomalies dotting the surface of the bright sphere, made tiny by contrast – even as she realizes they are obelisks. Several dozen of them, jammed into the heart of the world like needles in a pincushion. But these are nothing. Nothing.