You pause. Narrow your focus still further. Between the gelidity, moving, too, but in a slower and less organic way, you suddenly sess the same thing you found in the stone of him. Something else, neither flesh nor stone. Something immaterial, and yet it is there for you to perceive. It glimmers in threads strung between the bits of him, crossing itself in lattices, shifting constantly. A… tension? An energy, shiny and streaming. Potential. Intention.
You shake your head, pulling back so you can focus on him. “What is that?”
This time he answers. “The stuff of orogeny.” He makes his voice dramatic, since his facial expressions can’t change much. “I’ve told you before that what we do isn’t logical. To make the earth move we put something of ourselves into the system and make completely unrelated things come out. There’s always been something else involved, connecting the two. This.” You frown. He sits forward, growing more animated with his excitement, just the way he used to in the old days—but then something creaks on him, and he flinches with pain. Carefully he sits back against Antimony’s hand again.
But you’re hearing him. And he’s right. It hasn’t ever really made sense, has it, the way orogeny works? It shouldn’t work at all, that willpower and concentration and perception should shift mountains. Nothing else in the world works this way. People cannot stop avalanches by dancing well, or make storms happen by refining their hearing. And on some level, you’ve always known that this was there, making your will manifest. This… whatever it is.
Alabaster has always been able to read you like a book. “The civilization that made the obelisks had a word for this,” he says, nodding at your epiphany. “I think there’s a reason we don’t. It’s because no one for countless generations has wanted orogenes to understand what we do. They’ve just wanted us to do it.”
You nod slowly. “After Allia, I can see why no one would’ve wanted us to learn how to manipulate obelisks.”
“Rust the obelisks. They didn’t want us to create something better. Or worse.” He takes a deep breath carefully. “We’re going to stop manipulating stone now, Essun. That stuff you see in me? That’s what you have to learn to control. To perceive, wherever it exists. It’s what the obelisks are made of, and it’s how they do what they do. We have to get you to do those things, too. We have to make you a ten-ringer, at least.”
At least. Just like that. “Why? Alabaster, you mentioned something. A… moon. Tonkee doesn’t have a clue what that is. And all the things you’ve said, about causing that rift and wanting me to do something worse—” Something moves at the periphery of your vision. You glance up and realize the man who’s been working with Lerna is coming with a bowl in his hands. Dinner, for Alabaster. You drop your voice. “I’m not, by the way. Helping you make things worse. Haven’t you done enough already?”
Alabaster glances at the oncoming nurse, too. Watching him, Alabaster says in a low voice, “The Moon is something this world used to have, Essun. An object in the sky, much closer than the stars.” He keeps switching between calling you one name and another. It’s distracting. “Its loss was part of what caused the Seasons.”
Father Earth did not always hate life, the lorists say. He hates because he cannot forgive the loss of his only child.
But then, the lorists’ tales also say the obelisks are harmless.
“How do you know—” But then you stop, because the man has reached you, so you sit back against a nearby cot, digesting what you’ve heard while he spoon-feeds Alabaster. The stuff is watery mash of some kind, and not much of it. Alabaster sits there and opens his mouth for the feeding like a babe. His eyes stay on you throughout. It’s unnerving, and finally you have to look away. Some of the things that have changed between you, you cannot bear.
Finally the man is done, and with a flat look in your direction that nevertheless conveys his opinion that you should have been the one to administer the food, he leaves. But when you straighten and open your mouth to ask more questions, Alabaster says, “I’m probably going to need to use that bedpan soon. I can’t control my bowels very well anymore, but at least they’re still regular.” At the look on your face, he smiles with only a hint of bitterness. “I don’t want you to see that any more than you want to see it. So why don’t we just say you should come back later? Noon seems to work better for not interfering with any of my gross natural functions.”
That isn’t fair. Well. It is, and you deserve his censure, but it’s censure that should be shared. “Why did you do this to yourself?” You gesture at his arm, his ruined body. “I just…” Maybe you could take it better if you understood.
“The consequence of what I did at Yumenes.” He shook his head. “Something to remember, Syen, for when you make your own choices in the future: Some of them come with a terrible price. Although sometimes that price is worth paying.”
You can’t understand why he sees this, this horrible slow death, as a price worth paying for anything—let alone for what he got out of it, which was the destruction of the world. And you still don’t understand what any of it has to do with stone eaters or moons or obelisks or anything else.
“Wouldn’t it have been better,” you cannot help saying, “to just… live?” To have come back, you cannot say. To have made what little life he could with Syenite again, after Meov was gone but before she found Tirimo and Jija and tried to create a lesser version of the family she’d lost. Before she became you.
The answer is in the way his eyes deaden. This was the look that was on his face as you stood in a node station once, over the abused corpse of one of his sons. Maybe it’s the look that was on his face when he learned of Innon’s death. It’s certainly what you saw in your own face after Uche’s. That’s when you no longer need an answer to the question. There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.
You think of the feeling that was in your heart as you pressed a hand over Corundum’s nose and mouth. Not the thought. The thought was simple and predictable: Better to die than live a slave. But what you felt in that moment was a kind of cold, monstrous love. A determination to make sure your son’s life remained the beautiful, wholesome thing that it had been up to that day, even if it meant you had to end his life early.
Alabaster doesn’t answer your question. You don’t need him to anymore. You get up to leave so that he can at least keep his dignity in front of you, because that’s really all you have left to give him. Your love and respect aren’t worth much to anyone.
Maybe you’re still thinking of dignity when you ask one more question, so that the conversation doesn’t end on a note of hopelessness. It’s your way of offering an olive branch, too, and letting him know that you’ve decided to learn what he has to teach you. You’re not interested in making the Season worse or whatever he’s on about… but it’s clear that he needs this on some level. The son he made with you is dead, the family you built together has been rendered forever incomplete, but if nothing else he’s still your mentor.
(You need this, too, a cynical part of you notes. It’s a poor trade, really—Nassun for him, a mother’s purpose for an ex-lover’s, these ridiculous mysteries for the starker and more important why of Jija murdering his own son. But without Nassun to motivate you, you need something. Anything, to keep going.)