Somehow, Nassun knows that Steel is talking about her mother with that she. Mama is alive, and angry, and full of so much power.
“What purpose?” Nassun makes herself ask.
Steel’s eyes slide toward her. She has not specified whose purpose she means: her mother’s, or those ancient people who first created and deployed the obelisks. “The destruction of one’s enemies, of course. A small and selfish purpose that feels great, in the moment—though not without consequence.”
Nassun considers what she has learned, and sessed, and seen in the dead smiles of the other two Guardians. “Father Earth fought back,” she says.
“As one does, against those who seek to enslave. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”
Nassun closes her eyes. Yes. It’s all so understandable, really, when she thinks about it. The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too. Then it’s all broken hands and silver threads woven like ropes, and mothers who move the earth to destroy their enemies but cannot save one little boy.
(Girl.)
There has never been anyone to save Nassun. Her mother warned her there never would be. If Nassun ever wants to be free of fear, she has no choice but to forge that freedom for herself.
So she turns, slowly, to face her father, who stands quietly behind her.
“Sweetening,” he says. It’s the voice he usually uses for her, but she knows it isn’t real. His eyes are cold as the ice she left all over his house a few days ago. His jaw is tight, his body shaking just a little. She glances down at his tight fist. There’s a knife in it—a beautiful one made from red opal, her favorite of his more recent work. It has a slight iridescence and a smooth sheen that completely disguises the razor-sharpness of its knapped edges.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says. She glances toward Steel, who is surely aware of what Jija intends. But the gray stone eater has not bothered to turn away from the predawn forestscape, or the northern sky where so many earth-changing things are happening.
Very well. She faces her father again. “Mama’s alive, Daddy.”
If the words mean anything to him, it doesn’t show. He just keeps standing there looking at her. Looking at her eyes in particular. She’s always had her mother’s eyes.
Suddenly it doesn’t matter. Nassun sighs and rubs her face with her hands, as weary as Father Earth must be after so many eternities of hate. Hate is tiring. Nihilism is easier, though she does not know the word and will not for a few years. It’s what she’s feeling, regardless: an overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of it all.
“I think I understand why you hate us,” she says to her father as she drops her hands to her sides. “I’ve done bad things, Daddy, like you probably thought I would. I don’t know how to not do them. It’s like everybody wants me to be bad, so there’s nothing else I can be.” She hesitates, then says what’s been in her mind for months now, unspoken. She doesn’t think she’ll have another chance to say it. “I wish you could love me anyway, even though I’m bad.”
She thinks of Schaffa as she says this, though. Schaffa, who loves her no matter what, as a father should.
Jija just keeps staring at her. Elsewhere in the silence, on that plane of awareness that is occupied by sesuna and whatever the sense of the silver threads is called, Nassun feels her mother collapse. To be specific, she feels her mother’s exertion upon the shifting, glimmering network of obelisks suddenly cease. Not that it ever touched her sapphire.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Nassun says at last. “I tried to keep loving you, but it was too hard.”
He’s much bigger than her. Armed, where she is not. When he moves, it is with a mountainous lumber, all shoulders first and bulk and slow buildup to unstoppable speed. She weighs barely a hundred pounds. She has no real chance.
But in the instant that she feels the twitch of her father’s muscles, small reverberating shocks against the ground and air, she orients her awareness toward the sky in a single, ringing command.
The transformation of the sapphire is instantaneous. It causes a concussion of air that rushes inward to fill the vacuum. The sound this makes is the loudest crack of thunder Nassun has ever heard. Jija, in mid-lunge, starts and stumbles, looking up. A moment later the sapphire slams into the ground before Nassun, cracking the central stone of the crucible mosaic and a six-foot radius of ground around her.
It isn’t the sapphire as she’s seen it up till now, although the sameness of it transcends things like shape. When she extends her hand to wrap around the hilt of the long, flickering knife of blue stone, she falls into it a little. Up, flowing through watery facets of light and shadow. In, down into the earth. Out, away, brushing against the other parts of the whole that is the Gate. The thing in her hand is the same monstrous, mountainous dynamo of silvery power that it has always been. The same tool, just more versatile now.
Jija stares at it, then at her. There is an instant in which he wavers, and Nassun waits. If he turns, runs… he was her father once. Does he remember that time? She wants him to. Nothing between them will ever be the same again, but she wants that time to matter.
No. Jija comes at her again, shouting as he raises the knife.
So Nassun lifts the sapphire blade from the earth. It’s nearly the length of her body, but it weighs nothing; the sapphire floats, after all. It’s just floating here in front of her instead of above. She doesn’t lift it, either, strictly speaking. She wills it to move to a new position and it does. In front of her. Between her and Jija, so that when Jija angles his body to stab her, he cannot help bumping right into it. This makes it easy, inevitable, for her power to lay into him.
She doesn’t kill him with ice. Nassun defaults to using the silver instead of orogeny most days. The shift of Jija’s flesh is more controlled than what she did to Eitz, largely because she is aware of what she’s doing, and also because she’s doing it on purpose. Jija begins to turn to stone, starting at the point of contact between him and the obelisk.
What Nassun doesn’t consider is momentum, which carries Jija forward even as he glances off the sapphire and twists and sees what is happening to his flesh and starts to inhale for a scream. He doesn’t finish the inhalation before his lungs are solidified. He does, however, finish his lunge, though it is off-balance and out of control, more of a fall than an attack by now. Still, it is a fall with a knife as its focal point, and so the knife catches Nassun in the shoulder. He was aiming for her heart.
The pain of the strike is sudden and terrible and it breaks Nassun’s concentration at once. This is bad because the sapphire flares as her pain does, flickering into its half-real state and back as she gasps and staggers. This finishes Jija in an instant, solidifying him completely into a statue with a frizz of smoky-quartz hair and a round red-ocher face and clothes of deep blue serendibite, because he wore dark clothing in order to stalk his daughter. This statue stands poised for only an instant, though—and then the flicker of the sapphire sends a ripple through him like a struck bell. Not unlike the concussion of turned-inward orogenic force that a Guardian once inflicted on a man named Innon.
Jija shatters in the same way, just not as wetly. He’s brittle stuff, weak, poorly made. The pieces of him tumble into stillness around Nassun’s feet.
Nassun gazes at the remains of her father for a long, aching moment. Beyond her, in Found Moon and down below in Jekity, lights are coming on in the cabins. Everyone’s been woken up by the thunderclap of the sapphire. There is confusion, voices calling back and forth, frantic sessing and probes of the earth.