The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(97)
We didn’t get the worst of it; that was reserved for those who had offended the Earth the most. It used the corestone fragments to take direct control of these most dangerous vermin – but this did not work as it intended. Human will is harder to anticipate than human flesh. They were never meant to continue.
I will not describe the shock and confusion I felt, in those first hours after my change. I will not ever be able to answer the question of how I returned to Earth from the Moon; I remember only a nightmare of endless falling and burning, which may have been delirium. I will not ask you to imagine how it felt to suddenly find oneself alone, and tuneless, after a lifetime spent singing to others like myself. This was justice. I accept it; I admit my crimes. I have sought to make up for them. But…
Well. What’s done is done.
In those last moments before we transformed, we did successfully manage to cancel the Burndown command to the two hundred and twenty-nine. Some fragments were shattered by the stress. Others would die over the subsequent millennia, their matrices disrupted by incomprehensible arcane forces. Most went into standby mode, to continue drifting for millennia over a world that no longer needed their power – until, on occasion, one of the fragile creatures below might send a confused, directionless request for access.
We could not stop the Earth’s twenty-seven. We did, however, manage to insert a delay into their command lattices: one hundred years. What the tales get wrong is only the timing, you see? One hundred years after Father Earth’s child was stolen from him, twenty-seven obelisks did burn down to the planet’s core, leaving fiery wounds all over its skin. It was not the cleansing fire that the Earth sought, but it was still the first and worst Fifth Season – what you call the Shattering. Humankind survives because one hundred years is nothing to the Earth, or even to the expanse of human history, but to those who survived the fall of Syl Anagist, it was just time enough to prepare.
The Moon, bleeding debris from a wound through its heart, vanished over a period of days.
And…
I never saw Kelenli, or her child, again. Too ashamed of the monster I’d become, I never sought them out. She lived, though. Now and again I heard the grind and grumble of her stone voice, and those of her several children as they were born. They were not wholly alone; with the last of their magestric technology, the survivors of Syl Anagist decanted a few more tuners and used them to build shelters, contingencies, systems of warning and protection. Those tuners died in time, however, as their usefulness ended, or as others blamed them for the Earth’s wrath. Only Kelenli’s children, who did not stand out, whose strength hid in plain sight, continued. Only Kelenli’s legacy, in the form of the lorists who went from settlement to settlement warning of the coming holocaust and teaching others how to cooperate, adapt, and remember, remains of the Niess.
It all worked, though. You survive. That was my doing, too, isn’t it? I did my best. Helped where I could. And now, my love, we have a second chance.
Time for you to end the world again.
***
2501: Fault line shift along the Minimal-Maximal: massive. Shockwave swept through half the Nomidlats and Arctics, but stopped at outer edge of Equatorial node network. Food prices rose sharply following year, but famine prevented.
— Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
13
Nassun and Essun, on the dark side of the world
It’s sunset when Nassun decides to change the world.
She has spent the day curled beside Schaffa, using his still-ash-flecked old clothes as a pillow, breathing his scent and wishing for things that cannot be. Finally she gets up and very carefully feeds him the last of the vegetable broth she has made. She gives him a lot of water, too. Even after she has dragged the Moon into a collision course, it will take a few days for the Earth to be smashed apart. She doesn’t want Schaffa to suffer too much in that time, since she will no longer be around to help him.
(She is such a good child, at her core. Don’t be angry with her. She can only make choices within the limited set of her experiences, and it isn’t her fault that so many of those experiences have been terrible. Marvel, instead, at how easily she loves, how thoroughly. Love enough to change the world! She learned how to love like this from somewhere.)
As she uses a cloth to dab spilled broth from his lips, she reaches up and begins activation of her network. Here at Corepoint, she can do it without even the onyx, but start-up will take time.
“‘A commandment is set in stone,’” she tells Schaffa solemnly. His eyes are open again. He blinks, perhaps in reaction to the sound, though she knows this is meaningless.
The words are a thing she read in the strange handwritten book – the one that told her how to use a smaller network of obelisks as a “spare key” to subvert the onyx’s power over the Gate. The man who wrote the book was probably crazy, as evidenced by the fact that he apparently loved Nassun’s mother long ago. That is strange and wrong and yet somehow unsurprising. As big as the world is, Nassun is beginning to realize it’s also really small. The same stories, cycling around and around. The same endings, again and again. The same mistakes eternally repeated.
“Some things are too broken to be fixed, Schaffa.” Inexplicably, she thinks of Jija. The ache of this silences her for a moment. “I… I can’t make anything better. But I can at least make sure the bad things stop.” With that, she gets up to leave.