Nothing matters, right now, except the night sky. And in that sky, the Moon is beginning to rise.
It sits low on the horizon, seemingly bigger than it was the night before and made oblong by the distortions of the air. White and strange and round, it hardly seems worth all the pain and struggle that its absence has symbolized for the world. And yet – it pulls on everything within Nassun that is orogene. It pulls on the whole world.
Time for the world, then, to pull back.
Nassun shuts her eyes. They are all around Corepoint now – the spare key, three by three by three, twenty-seven obelisks that she has spent the past few weeks touching and taming and coaxing into orbit nearby. She can still feel the sapphire, but it is far away and not in sight; she can’t use it, and it would take months to arrive if she summoned it. These others will do, though. It’s strange to see so many of the things in the sky all together, after a lifetime with only one – or no – obelisks in sight at any given time. Stranger to feel them all connected to her, thrumming at slightly different speeds, their wells of power each at slightly different depths. The darker ones are deeper. No telling why, but it is a noticeable difference.
Nassun lifts her hands, splaying her fingers in unconscious imitation of her mother. Very carefully, she begins connecting each of the twenty-seven obelisks – one to one, then those to two apiece, then others. She is compelled by lines of sight, lines of force, strange instincts that demand mathematical relationships she does not understand. Each obelisk supports the forming lattice, rather than disrupting or canceling it out. It’s like putting horses in harness, sort of, when you’ve got one with a naturally quick gait and another that plods along. This is yoking twenty-seven high-strung racehorses… but the principle is the same.
And it is beautiful, the moment when all of the flows stop fighting Nassun and shift into lockstep. She inhales, smiling in spite of herself, feeling pleasure again for the first time since Father Earth destroyed Schaffa. It should be scary, shouldn’t it? So much power. It isn’t, though. She falls up through torrents of gray or green or mauve or clear white; parts of her that she has never known the words for move and adjust in a dance of twenty-seven parts. Oh, it is so lovely! If only Schaffa could —
Wait.
Something makes the hairs on the back of Nassun’s neck prickle. Dangerous to lose concentration now, so she forces herself to methodically touch each obelisk in turn and soothe it back into something like an idle state. They mostly tolerate this, though the opal bucks a little and she has to force it into quiescence. When all are finally stable, though, she cautiously opens her eyes and looks around.
At first the black-and-white moonlit streets are as before: silent and still, despite the crowd of stone eaters that has assembled to watch her work. (In Corepoint, it is easy to feel alone in a crowd.) Then she spies… movement. Something – someone – lurching from one shadow to another.
Startled, Nassun takes a step toward that moving figure. “H-hello?”
The figure staggers toward some kind of small pillar whose purpose Nassun has never understood, though there seems to be one on every other corner of the city. Nearly falling as it grabs the pillar for support, the figure twitches and looks up at the sound of her voice. Icewhite eyes spear at Nassun from the shadows.
Schaffa.
Awake. Moving.
Without thinking, Nassun begins to trot, then run after him. Her heart is in her mouth. She’s heard people say things like that and thought nothing of it before – just poetry, just silliness – but now she knows what it means as her mouth goes so dry that she can feel her own pulse through her tongue. Her eyes blur. “Schaffa!”
He’s thirty, forty feet away, near one of the pylon buildings that surround Corepoint’s hole. Close enough to recognize her – and yet there is nothing in his gaze that seems to know who she is. Quite the contrary; he blinks, and then smiles in a slow, cold way that makes her stumble to a halt in deep, skin-twitching unease.
“Sch-Schaffa?” she says again. Her voice is very thin in the silence.
“Hello, little enemy,” Schaffa says, in a voice that reverberates through Corepoint and the mountain below it and the ocean for a thousand miles around.
Then he turns to the pylon building behind him. A high, narrow opening appears at his touch; he stagger-stumbles through. It vanishes behind him in an instant.
Nassun screams and flings herself after him.
***
You are deep in the lower mantle, halfway through the world, when you sense the activation of part of the Obelisk Gate.
Or so your mind interprets it, at first, until you master your alarm and reach forth to confirm what you’re feeling. It’s hard. Here in the deep earth, there is so much magic; trying to sift through it for whatever is happening on the surface is like trying to hear a distant creek over a hundred thundering waterfalls nearby. It’s worse the deeper Hoa takes you, until finally you have to “close your eyes” and stop perceiving magic entirely – because there’s something immense nearby that is “blinding” you with its brightness. It is as if there’s a sun underground, silver-white and swirling with an unbelievably intense concentration of magic… but you can also feel Hoa skirting wide around this sun, even though that means the overall journey has taken longer than absolutely necessary. You’ll have to ask him why later.
You can’t see much besides churning red here in the depths. How fast are you going? Without referents, it’s impossible to tell. Hoa is an intermittent shadow in the redness beside you, shimmering on the rare occasions when you catch a glimpse of him – but then, you’re probably shimmering, too. He isn’t pushing through the earth, but becoming part of it and transiting the particles of himself around its particles, becoming a waveform that you can sess like sound or light or heat. Disturbing enough if you don’t think about the fact that he’s doing it to you, too. You can’t feel anything like this, except a hint of pressure from his hand, and the suggestion of tension from Lerna’s arm. There’s no sound other than an omnipresent rumble, no smell of sulfur or anything else. You don’t know if you’re breathing, and you don’t feel the need for air.
But the distant awakening of multiple obelisks panics you, nearly makes you try to pull away from Hoa so you can concentrate, even though – stupid – that would not just kill you but annihilate you, turning you to ash and then vaporizing the ashes and then setting the vapor on fire. “Nassun!” you cry, or try to cry, but words are lost in the deep roar. There is no one to hear your cry.
Except. There is.
Something shifts around you – or, you realize belatedly, you are shifting relative to it. It isn’t something you think about until it happens again, and you think you feel Lerna jerk against your side. Then it finally occurs to you to look at the silver wisps of your companions’ bodies, which at least you can make out against the dense red material of the earth around you.
There is a human-shaped blaze linked to your hand, heavy as a mountain upon your perception as it forges swiftly upward: Hoa. He is moving oddly, however, periodically shifting to one side or another; that’s what you perceived before. Beside Hoa are faint shimmers, delicately etched. One has a palpable interruption in the silverflow of one arm; that has to be Tonkee. You cannot distinguish Hjarka from Danel because you can’t see hair or relative size or anything so detailed as teeth. Only knowing that Lerna is closer to you makes him distinct. And beyond Lerna —
Something flashes past, mountain-heavy and magic-bright, human shaped but not human. And not Hoa.
Another flash. Something streaks on a perpendicular trajectory, intercepting and driving it away, but there are more. Hoa lunges aside again, and a new flash misses. But it’s close. Lerna seems to twitch beside you. Can he see it, too?
You really hope not, because now you understand what’s happening. Hoa is dodging. And you can do nothing, nothing, but trust Hoa to keep you safe from the stone eaters who are trying to rip you away from him.
No. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re this afraid – when you’ve been merged into the high-pressure semisolid rock of the planet’s mantle, and when everyone you love will die in slow horror should you fail in your quest, and when you’re surrounded by currents of magic that are so much more powerful than anything you’ve ever seen, and when you’re under attack by murderous stone eaters. But. You did not spend your childhood learning to perform under the threat of death for nothing.