The people around you are setting up campfire circles, cooking spits, latrines. In a few spots throughout the camp, little piles of broken, lumpy Castrima crystals provide additional illumination; good to know there must be enough orogenes left to keep them working. Some of the activity is inefficient where people are unused to it, but for the most part it’s well-ordered. Castrima having more than its share of members who know how to live on the road is turning out to be a boon. Your stretcher-bearers have left you where they dumped you, though, and if anyone’s going to build you a fire or bring you food, they haven’t started yet. You spot Lerna crouching amid a small group of people who are also prone, but he’s busy. Ah, yes; there must have been a lot of wounded after Rennanis’s soldiers got into the geode.
Well, you don’t need a fire, and you’re not hungry, so the others’ indifference doesn’t trouble you for the moment, except emotionally. What does bother you is that your runny-sack is gone. You carried that thing halfway across the Stillness, stashed your old rank-rings in it, even saved it from getting scorched to powder when a stone eater transformed himself in your quarters. There wasn’t much in it that still mattered to you, but the bag itself holds a certain sentimental value, at this point.
Well. Everyone’s lost something.
A mountain suddenly weighs down your nearby perception. In spite of everything, you find yourself smiling. “I wondered when you would show up.”
Hoa stands over you. It’s still a shock to see him like this: a mid-sized adult rather than a small child, veined black marble instead of white flesh. Somehow, though, it’s easy to perceive him as the same person – same face shape, same haunting icewhite eyes, same ineffable strangeness, same whiff of lurking whimsy – as the Hoa you’ve known for the past year. What’s changed, that a stone eater no longer seems alien to you? Only superficial things about him. Everything about you.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Better.” The arm pulls when you shift to look up at him, a constant reminder of the unwritten contract between you. “Were you the one who told them about Rennanis?”
“Yes. And I’m guiding them there.”
“You?”
“To the degree that Ykka listens. I think she prefers her stone eaters as silent menaces rather than active allies.”
This pulls a weary laugh out of you. But. “Are you an ally, Hoa?”
“Not to them. Ykka understands that, too, though.”
Yes. This is probably why you’re still alive. As long as Ykka keeps you safe and fed, Hoa will help. You’re back on the road and everything’s a rusting transaction again. The comm that was Castrima lives, but it isn’t really a community anymore, just a group of like-minded travelers collaborating to survive. Maybe it can become a true comm again later, once it’s got another home to defend, but for now, you get why Ykka’s angry. Something beautiful and wholesome has been lost.
Well. You look down at yourself. You’re not wholesome anymore, but what’s left of you can be strengthened; you’ll be able to go after Nassun soon. First things first, though. “We going to do this?”
Hoa does not speak for a moment. “Are you certain?”
“The arm’s not doing me any good, as it is.”
There is the faintest of sounds. Stone grinding on stone, slow and inexorable. A very heavy hand comes to rest on your half-transformed shoulder. You have the sense that, despite the weight, it is a delicate touch by stone eater standards. Hoa’s being careful with you.
“Not here,” he says, and pulls you down into the earth.
It’s only for an instant. He always keeps these trips through the earth quick, probably because longer would make it hard to breathe… and stay sane. This time is little more than a blurring sensation of movement, a flicker of darkness, a whiff of loam richer than the acrid ash. Then you’re lying on another rocky outcropping – probably the same one that the rest of Castrima is settling on, just away from the encampment. There are no campfires here; the only light is the ruddy reflection of the Rifting off the thick clouds overhead. Your eyes adjust quickly, though there’s little to see but rocks and the shadows of nearby trees. And a human silhouette, which now crouches beside you.
Hoa holds your stone arm in his hands gently, almost reverently. In spite of yourself, you sense the solemnity of the moment. And why shouldn’t it be solemn? This is the sacrifice demanded by the obelisks. This is the pound of flesh you must pay for the blood-debt of your daughter.
“This isn’t what you think of it,” Hoa says, and for an instant you worry that he can read your mind. More likely it’s just the fact that he’s as old as the literal hills, and he can read your face. “You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too. This is not the ugly thing it seems.”
It seems like he’s going to eat your arm. You’re okay with it, but you want to understand. “What is it, then? Why…” You shake your head, unsure of even what question to ask. Maybe why doesn’t matter. Maybe you can’t understand. Maybe this isn’t meant for you.
“This is not sustenance. We need only life, to live.”
The latter half of that was nonsensical, so you latch onto the former half. “If it isn’t sustenance, then…?”
Hoa moves slowly again. They don’t do this often, stone eaters. Movement is the thing that emphasizes their uncanny nature, so like humanity and yet so wildly different. It would be easier if they were more alien. When they move like this, you can see what they once were, and the knowledge is a threat and warning to all that is human within you.
And yet. You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too.
He lifts your hand with both his own, one positioned under your elbow, his fingers lightly braced under your closed, cracked fist. Slowly, slowly. It doesn’t hurt your shoulder this way. Halfway to his face he moves the hand that had been under your elbow, shifting it to cup the underside of your upper arm. His stone slides against yours with a faint grinding sound. It is surprisingly sensual, even though you can’t feel a thing.
Then your fist rests against his lips. The lips don’t move as he says, from within his chest, “Are you afraid?”
You consider this for a long moment. Shouldn’t you be? But… “No.”
“Good,” he replies. “I do this for you, Essun. Everything is for you. Do you believe that?”
You don’t know, at first. On impulse you lift your good hand, smooth fingers over his hard, cool, polished cheek. It’s hard to see him, black against the dark, but your thumb finds his brows and traces out his nose, which is longer in its adult shape. He told you once that he thinks of himself as human in spite of his strange body. You belatedly realize that you’ve chosen to see him as human, too. That makes this something other than an act of predation. You’re not sure what it is instead, but… it feels like a gift.
“Yes,” you say. “I believe you.”
His mouth opens. Wide, wider, wider than any human mouth can open. Once you worried his mouth was too small; now it’s wide enough to fit a fist. And such teeth he has, small and even and diamond-clear, glinting prettily in the red evening light. There is only darkness beyond those teeth.
You shut your eyes.
***
She was in a foul mood. Old age, one of her children told me. She said it was just the stress of trying to warn people who didn’t want to hear that bad times were coming. It wasn’t a foul mood, it was the privilege that age had bought her, to dispense with the lie of politeness.
“There isn’t a villain in this story,” she said. We sat in the garden dome, which was only a dome because she’d insisted. The Syl Skeptics still claim there’s no proof things will happen the way she said, but she’s never been wrong in one of her predictions, and she’s more Syl than they are, so. She was drinking sef, as if to mark a truth in chemicals.
“There isn’t a single evil to point to, a single moment when everything changed,” she went on. “Things were bad and then terrible and then better and then bad again, and then they happened again, and again, because no one stopped it. Things can be… adjusted. Lengthen the better, predict and shorten the terrible. Sometimes prevent the terrible by settling for the merely bad. I’ve given up on trying to stop you people. Just taught my children to remember and learn and survive… until someone finally breaks the cycle for good.”