The beryl, the hematite, the iolite —
She’s going to die right in front of you if you don’t do something.
Frantically you throw your awareness into the earth. Corepoint sits on a volcano, maybe you can —
Wait. Something pulls your attention back up to the volcano’s mouth. Underground, but closer by. Somewhere underneath this city, you sense a network. Lines of magic woven together, supporting one another, rooted deep to draw up more… It’s faint. It’s slow. And there is a familiar, ugly buzz at the back of your mind when you touch this network. Buzz upon buzz upon buzz.
Ah, yes. The network you’ve found is Guardians, nearly a thousand of them. Of rusting course. You have never consciously sought the magic of them before, but for the first time you understand what that buzz is – some part of you, even before Alabaster’s training, felt the foreignness of the magic within them. The knowledge sends a sharp, nearly paralyzing lance of fear through you. The network of them is close by, easy to grab, but if you do this, what’s to stop all these Guardians from boiling up out of Warrant like angry wasps from a disturbed nest? Don’t you have enough problems?
Nassun groans, up on her pylon. To your shock, you can… Evil Earth, you can see the magic around her, in her, beginning to flare up like a fire hitting oiled kindling. She burns against your perception, the weight of her growing heavier upon the world by the instant. The kyanite the orthoclase the scapolite —
And suddenly your fear is gone, because your baby needs you.
So you set your feet. You reach for that network you found, Guardians or no Guardians. You growl through your teeth and grab everything. The Guardians. The threads that trail from their sessapinae away into the depths, and as much of the magic coming through these as you can pull. The iron shards themselves, tiny depositories of the Evil Earth’s will.
You make it all yours, yoke it tight, and then you take it.
And somewhere down in Warrant there are Guardians screaming, coming awake and writhing in their cells and grabbing at their heads as you do to every single one of them what Alabaster once did to his Guardian. It is what Nassun yearned to do for Schaffa… only there is no kindness in the way you’re doing it. You don’t hate them; you just don’t care. You snatch the iron from their brains and every bit of silvery light from between their cells – and as you feel them crystallize and die, you finally have enough magic, from your makeshift network, to reach the onyx.
It listens at your touch, far away above the ashscape of the Stillness. You fall into it, diving desperately into the dark, to make your case. Please, you beg.
It considers the request. This is not in words or sensation. You simply know its consideration. It examines you in turn – your fear, your anger, your determination to put things right.
Ah – this last has resonance. You know yourself examined again, more closely and with skepticism, since your last request was for something so frivolous. (Merely wiping out a city? You of all people did not need the Gate for that.) What the onyx finds within you, however, is something different this time: Fear for kin. Fear of failure. The fear that accompanies all necessary change. And underneath it all, a driving need to make the world better.
Somewhere far away, a billion dying things shiver as the onyx utters a low, earthshaking blast of sound, and comes online.
Atop her pylon, beneath the pulse of the obelisks, Nassun feels that distant upcycling darkness as a warning. But she is too deep in her summoning; too many obelisks now fill her. She cannot spare any attention from her work.
And as each of the two hundred and sixteen remaining obelisks in turn submits to her, and as she opens her eyes to stare at the Moon that she’s going to let fly past untouched, and as she instead prepares to turn all the might of the great Plutonic Engine back upon the world and its people, to transform them as I was once transformed —
— she thinks of Schaffa.
Impossible to delude oneself in a moment like this. Impossible to see only what one wants to see, when the power to change the world ricochets through mind and soul and the spaces between cells; oh, I learned this long before both of you. Impossible not to understand that Nassun has known Schaffa for barely more than a year, and does not truly know him, given how much of himself he has lost. Impossible not to realize that she clings to him because she has nothing else —
But through her determination, there is a glimmer of doubt in her mind. It is nothing more than that. Barely even a thought. But it whispers, Do you really have nothing else?
Is there not one person in this world besides Schaffa who cares about you?
And I watch Nassun hesitate, fingers curling and small face tightening in a frown even as the Obelisk Gate weaves itself into completion. I watch the shiver of energies beyond comprehension as they begin to align within her. I lost the power to manipulate these energies tens of thousands of years ago, but I can still see them. The arcanochemical lattice – what you think of as mere brown stone, and the energetic state that produces it – is forming nicely.
I watch as you see this, too, and understand instantly what it means. I watch you snarl and smash apart the wall between you and your daughter, not even noticing that your fingers have turned to stone as you do it. I watch you run to the foot of the pylon steps and shout at her. “Nassun!”
And in response to your sudden, raw, incontrovertible demand, the onyx blasts out of nowhere to appear overhead.
The sound of it – a low, bone-shaking blat – is titanic. The blast of air that it displaces is thunderous enough to knock both you and Nassun down. She cries out and slides down a few steps, coming dangerously close to losing her grip on the Gate as the impact jolts her concentration. You cry out as the impact makes you notice your left forearm, which is stone, and collarbone, which is stone, and left foot and ankle.
But you set your teeth. There is no pain in you anymore, save anguish for your daughter. No need within you but one. She has the Gate, but you have the onyx – and as you look up at it, at the Moon glaring through its murky translucence, icewhite iris in a scleral sea of black, you know what you have to do.
With the onyx’s help, you reach half a planet away and stab the fulcrum of your intention into the wound of the world. The Rifting shudders as you demand every iota of its heat and kinetic churn, and you shudder beneath the flux of so much power that for a moment you think it’s just going to vomit out of you as a column of lava, consuming all.
But the onyx is part of you, too, right now. Indifferent to your convulsions – because you’re doing that, flopping along the ground and frothing at the mouth – it takes and taps and balances the power of the Rifting with an ease that humbles you. Automatically it links into the obelisks so conveniently nearby, the network that Nassun assembled in order to try to replicate the onyx’s power. But a replica has only power, no will, unlike the onyx. A network has no agenda. The onyx takes the twenty-seven obelisks and immediately begins eating into the rest of Nassun’s obelisk network.
Here, though, its will is no longer paramount. Nassun feels it. Fights it. She is just as determined as you. Just as driven by love – you for her, and she for Schaffa.
I love you both. How can I not, after all this? I am still human, after all, and this is a battle for the fate of the world. Such a terrible and magnificent thing to witness.
It is a battle, though, line by line, tendril by tendril of magic. The titanic energies of the Gate, of the Rifting, whip and shiver around you both in a cylindrical aurora borealis of energies and colors, visible light ranging to wavelengths beyond the spectrum. (Those energies resonate in you, where the alignment is already complete, and still oscillate in Nassun – though her waveform has begun to collapse.) It is the onyx and the Rifting versus the Gate, you against her, and all Corepoint trembles with the sheer force of it all. In the dark halls of Warrant, among the jeweled corpses of the Guardians, walls groan and ceilings crack, spilling dirt and pebbles. Nassun is straining to pull the magic down from what’s left of the Gate, to target everyone around you and everyone beyond them – and finally, finally, you understand that she’s trying to turn everyone into rusting stone eaters. You, meanwhile, have reached up. To catch the Moon, and perhaps earn humanity a second chance. But for either of you to achieve your respective goals, you will need to claim both Gate and onyx, and the additional fuel that the Rifting provides.