She seizes you. If you hadn’t been used to this from Alabaster, you would have panicked, but it’s the same as what happened back then: Ykka’s orogeny sort of melds with and consumes yours. You relax and let her take control, because instantly you realize you are stronger than her and could, should, take control yourself—but you are the learner here, and she is the teacher. So you hold back, to learn.
It is a dance, of sorts. Her orogeny is like… a river with eddies, curling and flowing in patterns and at a pace. Yours is faster, deeper, more straightforward, more forceful, but she modulates you so efficiently that the two flows come together. You flow slower and more loosely. She flows faster, using your depth to boost her force. For an instant you open your eyes, see her leaning against the crystal column and sliding down to crouch at its base so that she doesn’t have to pay attention to her body while she concentrates… and then you are within the geode’s crystal substrate, through its shell and burrowing into the rock that surrounds it, flowing around the warps and wends of ancient cold stone. Flowing with Ykka, so easily that you are surprised. Alabaster was rougher than this, but maybe he wasn’t used to doing it when he first tried it with you. Ykka has done this with others, and she is as fine a teacher as any you have ever had.
But—
But. Oh! You see it so easily now.
Magic. There are threads of it interwoven with Ykka’s flow. Supporting and catalyzing her drive where it is weaker than yours, soothing the layer of contact between you. Where’s all this coming from? She drags it out of the rock itself, which is another wonder, because you have not realized until now that there is any magic in the rock. But there it is, flitting between the infinitesimal particles of silicon and calcite as easily as it did between the particles of Alabaster’s stone substance. Wait. No. Between the calcite and the calcite, specifically, though it touches the silicon. It is being generated by the calcite, which exists in limestone inclusions within the stone. At some point millions or billions of years ago, you suspect, this whole area was at the bottom of an ocean, or perhaps an inland sea. Generations of sea life were born and lived and died here, then settled to that ocean’s floor, forming layers and compacting. Are those glacier scrapings that you see? Hard to tell. You’re not a geomest.
But what you suddenly understand is this: Magic derives from life—that which is alive, or was alive, or even that which was alive so many ages ago that it has turned into something else. All at once this understanding causes something to shift in your perception, and
and
and
You see it suddenly: the network. A web of silver threads interlacing the land, permeating rock and even the magma just underneath, strung like jewels between forests and fossilized corals and pools of oil. Carried through the air on the webs of leaping spiderlings. Threads in the clouds, though thin, strung between microscopic living things in water droplets. Threads as high as your perception can reach, brushing against the very stars.
And where they touch the obelisks, the threads become another thing entirely. For of the obelisks that float against the map of your awareness—which has suddenly become vast, miles and miles, you are perceiving with far more than your sessapinae now—each hovers as the nexus of thousands, millions, trillions of threads. This is the power holding them up. Each blazes silvery-white in flickering pulses; Evil Earth, this is what the obelisks are when they aren’t real. They float and they flicker, solid to magic to solid again, and on another plane of existence you inhale in awe at the beauty of them.
And then you inhale again, as you notice close by—
Ykka’s control tugs at you, and belatedly you realize she has used your power even as you meandered through epiphany. Now there is a new tunnel slanting up through the layers of sedimentary and igneous rock. Within it is a staircase of broad, shallow steps, straight up except for wide regular landings. Nothing has been excavated to make room for these stairs; instead, Ykka has simply deformed the rock away, pressing it into the walls and compressing it down to form the stairs and using the increased density to stabilize the tunnel against the weight of the rock around it. But she has stopped the tunnel just shy of breaching the surface, and now she unweaves you from the network (that word again). You blink and turn to her, understanding why at once.
“You can finish it,” Ykka says. She’s getting up from the platform, dusting off her butt. Already she looks weary; it must have tired her, trying to modulate your surprised fluctuations. She cannot do this thing she has chosen to do. She’ll burn out before she’s made it halfway around the valley.
And she doesn’t have to now. “No. I’ll take care of it.”
Ykka rubs her eyes. “Essie.”
You smile. For once, the nickname doesn’t bother you. And then you use what you just learned from her, grabbing her the way Alabaster once did, grabbing all the other roggas in the comm, too. (There is a collective flinch as you do this. They’re used to it from Ykka, but they know a different yoke when they sess it. You have not earned their trust as she has.) Ykka stiffens, but you don’t do anything, just hold her, and now it’s obvious: You really can do it.
Then you drive the point home by connecting to the spinel. It is behind you, but you sess the instant that it stops flickering and instead sends forth a silent, earth-shivering pulse. Ready, you think it’s saying. As if it speaks.
Ykka’s eyes widen suddenly as she sesses just how the obelisk’s catalysis… charges? awakens? awakens—the network of roggas. That’s because you’re now doing the thing that Alabaster tried to teach you for six months: using orogeny and magic together in a way that supports and strengthens each, making a stronger whole. Then integrating this into a network of orogenes working toward a single goal, all of them together stronger than they are individually, and plugged into an obelisk that amplifies their power manifold. It is amazing.
Alabaster failed to teach it to you because he was like you—Fulcrum-trained and Fulcrum-limited, taught only to think of power in terms of energy and equations and geometric shapes. He mastered magic because of who he was, but he did not truly understand it. Neither do you, even now. Ykka, feral that she is, with nothing to unlearn, was the key all along. If you hadn’t been so arrogant…
Well. No. You cannot say Alabaster would be alive. He was dead the instant he used the Obelisk Gate to rip the continent in half. The burns were killing him already; that you finished it was mercy. Eventually you’ll believe that.
Ykka blinks and frowns. “You okay?”
She knows the magic of you, and tastes your grief. You swallow against the lump in your throat—carefully, keeping tight hold of the power held pent within you. “Yeah,” you lie.
Ykka’s gaze is too knowing. She sighs. “You know… we both get through this, I have a stash of Yumenescene seredis in one of the storecaches. Want to get drunk?”
The tightness in your throat seems to snap, and you laugh it out. Seredis is a distilled liqueur made from a fruit of the same name that was harvested in the foothills just outside Yumenes. The trees didn’t grow well anywhere else, so Ykka’s stash might be the last seredis in the whole of the Stillness. “Pricelessly drunk?”
“Disastrously drunk.” Her smile is weary, but real.
You like the sound of this. “If we get through this.” But you’re pretty sure that you will now. There’s more than enough power in the orogene network and the spinel. You’ll make Castrima safe for stills and roggas and anything else that’s on your side. No one needs to die, except your enemies.