It is a stalemate that cannot continue. The Gate cannot maintain its connections forever, and the onyx cannot contain the chaos of the Rifting forever – and two human beings, however powerful and strong-willed, cannot survive so much magic for long.
And then it happens. You cry out as you feel a change, a snapping-into-line: Nassun. The magics of her substance are fully aligned; her crystallization has begun. In desperation and pure instinct you grab some of the energy that seeks to transform her and fling it away, though this only delays the inevitable. In the ocean too near Corepoint, there is a deep judder that even the mountain’s stabilizers cannot contain. To the west a mountain shaped like a knife jolts up from the ocean floor; to the east another rises, hissing steam from the newness of its birth. Nassun, snarling in frustration, latches onto these as new sources of power, dragging the heat and violence from them; both crack and crumble away. The stabilizers push the ocean flat, preventing tsunami, but they can do only so much. They were not built for this. Much more and even Corepoint will crumble.
“Nassun!” you shout again, anguished. She cannot hear you. But you see, even from where you are, that the fingers of her left hand have turned as brown and stony as your own. She’s aware of it, you know somehow. She made this choice. She is prepared for the inevitability of her own death.
You aren’t. Oh, Earth, you just can’t watch another of your children die.
So… you give up.
I ache with the look on your face, because I know what it costs you to give up Alabaster’s dream – and your own. You so wanted to make a better world for Nassun. But more than anything else, you want this last child of yours to live… and so you make a choice. To keep fighting will kill you both. The only way to win, then, is not to fight anymore.
I’m sorry, Essun. I’m so sorry. Goodbye.
Nassun gasps, her eyes snapping open as she feels your pressure upon the Gate – upon her, while you dragged all of the terrible transforming curls of magic toward yourself – suddenly relax. The onyx pauses in its onslaught, shimmering in tandem with the dozens of obelisks it has claimed; it is full of power that must, must be expended. For the moment, however, it holds. The stabilizing magics finally settle the churning ocean around Corepoint. For this one, pent moment, the world waits, still and taut.
She turns.
“Nassun,” you say. It’s a whisper. You’re on the bottom steps of the pylon, trying to reach her, but that won’t be happening. Your arm has completely solidified, and your torso is going. Your stone foot slides uselessly on the slick material, then locks as the rest of your leg freezes up. With your good foot, you can still push, but the stone of you is heavy; as crawling goes, you’re not doing a very good job of it.
Her brow furrows. You look up at her, and it strikes you. Your little girl. So big, here beneath the onyx and the Moon. So powerful. So beautiful. And you cannot help it: You burst into tears at the sight of her. You laugh, though one of your lungs has gone to stone and it’s only a soft wheeze instead. So rusting amazing, your little girl. You are proud to lose to her strength.
She inhales, her eyes widening as if she cannot believe what she is seeing: her mother, so fearsome, on the ground. Trying to crawl on stone limbs. Face wet with tears. Smiling. You have never, ever smiled at her before.
And then the line of transformation moves over your face, and you are gone.
Still there physically, a brown sandstone lump frozen on the lower steps, with only the barest suggestion of a smile on half-formed lips. Your tears are still there, glistening upon stone. She stares at these.
She stares at these and sucks in a long hollow breath because suddenly there is nothing, nothing inside her, she has killed her father and she has killed her mother and Schaffa is dying and there is nothing left, nothing, the world just takes and takes and takes from her and leaves nothing —
But she cannot stop staring at your drying tears.
Because the world took and took and took from you, too, after all. She knows this. And yet, for some reason that she does not think she’ll ever understand… even as you died, you were reaching for the Moon.
And for her.
She screams. Clutches her head in her hands, one of them now halfway stone. Drops to her knees, crushed beneath the weight of grief as if it is an entire planet.
The onyx, patient but not, aware but indifferent, touches her. She is the only remaining component of the Gate that has a functioning, complementary will. Through this touch she perceives your plan as commands locked and aimed but unfired. Open the Gate, pour the Rifting’s power through it, catch the Moon. End the Seasons. Fix the world. This, Nassun sesses-feels-knows, was your last wish.
The onyx says, in its ponderous, wordless way: Execute Y/N?
And in the cold stone silence, alone, Nassun chooses.
YES
coda
me, and you
You are dead. But not you.
The recapture of the Moon is undramatic, from the perspective of the people standing beneath it. At the top of the apartment building where Tonkee and the others have taken shelter, she’s used an ancient writing instrument – long gone dry, but resurrected with a bit of spit and blood at the tip – to try to track the Moon’s movement between one hour and the next. It doesn’t help because she hasn’t observed enough variables to do the math correctly, and because she’s not some rusting hack astronomest, for Earth’s sake. She also isn’t sure if she got the first measurement right because of the fiver or sixer shake that occurred right around that moment, just before Hjarka dragged her away from the window. “Obelisk-builder windows don’t shatter,” she complains afterward.
“My rusting temper does,” Hjarka retorts, and that ends the argument before it can begin. Tonkee is learning to compromise for the sake of a healthy relationship.
But the Moon has indeed changed, they see as days and then weeks pass. It does not vanish. It fluxes through shapes and colors in a pattern that does not initially make sense, but it grows no smaller in the sky on successive nights.
The dismantling of the Obelisk Gate is somewhat more dramatic. Having expended its full capability in the achievement of something just as powerful as Geoarcanity, the Gate proceeds as designed through its shutdown protocol. One by one, the dozens of obelisks floating around the world drift toward Corepoint. One by one, the obelisks – wholly dematerialized now, all quantum states sublimated into potential energy, you need not understand it beyond that – drop into the black chasm. This takes several days.
The onyx, however, last and greatest of the obelisks, instead drifts out to sea, its hum deepening as its altitude decreases. It enters the sea gently, on a preplanned course to minimize damage – since unlike its fellow obelisks, it alone has retained material existence. This, as the conductors long ago intended, preserves the onyx against future need. It also puts the last remnants of the Niess to rest, finally, deep in a watery grave.
I suppose we must hope that no intrepid young future orogene ever finds and raises it.
Tonkee is the one to go and find Nassun. It’s later in the morning, some hours after your death, under a sun that has risen bright and warm in the ashless blue sky. After pausing for a moment to stare at this sky in wonder and longing and fascination, Tonkee goes back to the edge of the hole, and to the pylon stair. Nassun’s still there, sitting on one of the lower steps next to the brown lump of you. Her knees are drawn up, her head bowed, her completely solidified hand – frozen in the splayed gesture that she used while activating the Gate – resting awkwardly on the step beside her.
Tonkee sits down on your other side, gazing at you for a long moment. Nassun starts and looks up as she becomes aware of another presence, but Tonkee only smiles at her, and awkwardly rests a hand on what was once your hair. Nassun swallows hard, scrubs at the dried tear-tracks on her face, and then nods to Tonkee. They sit together, with you, grieving for a time.
Danel is the one who goes with Nassun, later, to fetch Schaffa from the dead darkness of Warren. The other Guardians, who still had corestones, have turned to jewel. Most seem to have simply died where they lay, though some fell out of their cells in their thrashing, and their glittering bodies sprawl awkwardly against the wall or along the floor.
Schaffa alone still lives. He’s disoriented, weak. As Danel and Nassun help him back up into the surface light, it becomes clear that his hacked-off hair is already streaked with gray. Danel’s worried about the stitched wound on the back of his neck, though it has stopped bleeding and seems to cause Schaffa no pain. That isn’t what’s going to kill him.