“I —” About to say that she does, Nassun falters. No. This is not a thing she has ever considered. “I – I don’t —”
“I would estimate,” Steel continues, “that Guardians typically last three or four thousand years. Can you imagine that length of time? Think of the past two years. Your life since the beginning of the Season. Imagine another year. You can do that, can’t you? Every day feels like a year here in Corepoint, or so your kind tell me. Now put all three years together, and imagine them times one thousand.” The emphasis he puts on this is sharp, precisely enunciated. In spite of herself, Nassun jumps.
But also in spite of herself… she thinks. She feels old, Nassun, at the world-weary age of not-quite-eleven. So much has happened since the day she came home to find her little brother dead on the floor. She is a different person now, hardly Nassun at all; sometimes she is surprised to realize Nassun is still her name. How much more different will she be in three years? Ten? Twenty?
Steel pauses until he sees some change in her expression – some evidence, perhaps, that she is listening to him. Then he says, “I have reason to believe, however, that your Schaffa is much, much older than most Guardians. He isn’t quite first-generation; those have all long since died. Couldn’t take it. He’s one of the very early ones, though, still. The languages, you see; that’s how you can always tell. They never quite lose those, even after they’ve forgotten the names they were born with.”
Nassun remembers how Schaffa knew the language of the earth-traversing vehicle. It is strange to think of Schaffa having been born back when that tongue was still spoken. It would make him… she can’t even imagine. Old Sanze is supposed to be seven Seasons old, eight if one counts the present Season. Almost three thousand years. The Moon’s cycle of return and retreat is much older than that, and Schaffa remembers it, so… yes. He’s very, very old. She frowns.
“It’s rare to find one of them who can really go the distance,” Steel continues. His tone is casual, conversational; he could be talking about Nassun’s old neighbors back in Jekity. “The corestone hurts them so much, you see. They get tired, and then they get sloppy, and then the Earth begins to contaminate them, eating away at their will. They don’t usually last long once that starts. The Earth uses them, or their fellow Guardians use them, until they outlive their usefulness and one side or the other kills them. It’s a testament to your Schaffa’s strength that he lasted so much longer. Or a testament to something else, maybe. What kills the rest, you see, is losing the things that ordinary people need to be happy. Imagine what that’s like, Nassun. Watching everyone you know and care about die. Watching your home die, and having to find a new one – again, and again, and again. Imagine never daring to get close to another person. Never having friends, because you’ll outlive them. Are you lonely, little Nassun?”
She has forgotten her anger. “Yes,” she admits, before she can think not to.
“Imagine being lonely forever.” There’s a very slight smile on his lips, she sees. It’s been there the whole while. “Imagine living here in Corepoint forever, with no one to talk to but me – when I bother to respond. What do you think that will feel like, Nassun?”
“Terrible,” she says. Quietly now.
“Yes. So here is my theory: I believe your Schaffa survived by loving his charges. You, and others like you, soothed his loneliness. He truly does love you; never doubt that about him.” Nassun swallows back a dull ache. “But he also needs you. You keep him happy. You keep him human, where otherwise time would have long since transformed him into something else.”
Then Steel moves again. It’s inhuman because of its steadiness, Nassun finally realizes. People are quick to do big movements and then slower with fine adjustment. Steel does everything at the same pace. Watching him move is like watching a statue melt. But then he stands with arms outstretched as if to say, Take a look at me.
“I am forty thousand years old,” Steel says. “Give or take a few millennia.”
Nassun stares at him. The words are like the gibberish that the vehimal spoke – almost comprehensible, but not really. Not real.
What does that feel like, though?
“You’re going to die when you open the Gate,” Steel says, after giving Nassun a moment to absorb what he’s said. “Or if not then, sometime after. A few decades, a few minutes, it’s all the same. And whatever you do, Schaffa will lose you. He’ll lose the one thing that has kept him human throughout the Earth’s efforts to devour his will. He’ll find no one new to love, either – not here. And he won’t be able to return to the Stillness unless he’s willing to risk the Deep Earth route again. So whether he heals somehow, or you change him into one of my kind, he will have no choice but to go on, alone, endlessly yearning for what he will never again have.” Slowly, Steel’s arms lower to his sides. “You have no idea what that’s like.”
And then, suddenly, shockingly, he is right in front of Nassun. No blurring, no warning, just flick and he is there, bent at the waist to put his face right in front of hers, so close that she feels the wind of the air he’s displaced and smells the whiff of loam and she can even see that the irises of his eyes are striated in layers of gray.
“BUT I DO,” he shouts.
Nassun stumbles back and cries out. Between one blink and the next, however, Steel returns to his former position, upright, arms at his sides, a smile on his lips.
“So think carefully,” Steel says. His voice is conversational again, as if nothing has happened. “Think with something more than the selfishness of a child, little Nassun. And ask yourself: Even if I could help you save that controlling, sadistic sack of shit that currently passes for your adoptive father figure, why would I? Not even my enemy deserves that fate. No one does.”
Nassun’s still shaking. She blurts, bravely, “Sch-Schaffa might want to live.”
“He might. But should he? Should anyone, forever? That is the question.”
She feels the absent weight of countless years, and is obliquely ashamed of being a child. But at her core, she is a kind child, and it’s impossible for her to have heard Steel’s story without feeling something other than her usual anger at him. She looks away twitchily. “I’m… sorry.”
“So am I.” There’s a moment’s silence. In it, Nassun pulls herself together slowly. By the time she focuses on him again, Steel’s smile has vanished.
“I cannot stop you, once you’ve opened the Gate,” he says. “I’ve manipulated you, yes, but the choice is still ultimately yours. Consider, however. Until the Earth dies, I live, Nassun. That was its punishment for us: We became a part of it, chained fate to fate. The Earth forgets neither those who stabbed it in the back… nor those who put the knife in our hand.”
Nassun blinks at our. But she loses this thought amid misery at the realization that there can be no fixing Schaffa. Until now, some part of her has nursed the irrational hope that Steel, as an adult, had all the answers, including some sort of cure. Now she knows that her hope has been foolish. Childish. She is a child. And now the only adult she has ever been able to rely on will die naked and hurt and helpless, without ever being able to say goodbye.
It’s too much to bear. She sinks into a crouch, wrapping one arm round her knees and folding the other over her head, so that Steel will not see her cry even if he knows that’s exactly what’s happening.
He lets out a soft laugh at this. Surprisingly, it does not sound cruel.
“You achieve nothing by keeping any of us alive,” he says, “except cruelty. Put us broken monsters out of our misery, Nassun. The Earth, Schaffa, me, you… all of us.”
Then he vanishes, leaving Nassun alone beneath the white, burgeoning Moon.
Syl Anagist: Zero
A moment in the present, before I speak again of the past.
Amid the heated, fuming shadows and unbearable pressure of a place that has no name, I open my eyes. I’m no longer alone.
Out of the stone, another of my kind pushes forth. Her face is angular, cool, as patrician and elegant as any statue’s should be. She’s shed the rest, but kept the pallor of her original coloring; I notice this at last, after tens of thousands of years. All this reminiscing has made me nostalgic.