Photo Credit: Laura Hanifin
N. K. JEMISIN is a Brooklyn author whose short fiction and novels have been nominated multiple times for the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Nebula, shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree, and have won the Locus Award. She is a science fiction and fantasy reviewer for the New York Times, and her novel The Fifth Season was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. Her website is nkjemisin.com.
introducing
If you enjoyed
THE OBELISK GATE
look out for
THE BROKEN EARTH: BOOK THREE
by N. K. Jemisin
PROLOGUE
me and you, then and now
Let’s end with the beginning of the world, why don’t we? One beginning among many—well, no. Two: the first here and now, the second there and then.
The now is now. The here: a cavern beneath a vast, ancient shield volcano. Its heart, if you prefer and have a sense of metaphor; if not, this is a deep, dark, barely stable vesicle amid rock that has not cooled much in the thirty thousand years gone since Father Earth first burped it up. Millennia worth of additional rock, spilled forth as lava and cooling and then in turn buried by the next lava flow, insulates against heat loss. Within this cavern I stand, partially fused with a hump of rock so that I may better watch for the minute perturbations or major deformations that presage a collapse. I don’t need to do this. There are few processes more unstoppable than the one I have set in motion here. Still, I understand what it is to be alone, left alone, when you are confused and afraid and unsure of what will happen next. I understand that sometimes, keeping watch is not merely about protection.
It’s about standing witness. Standing together. Offering guidance where it is needed, care where it is not. Making sure you have everything you need to be you.
Hello, you.
Now. Let’s review.
You were once of the Fulcrum, one of the feared Imperial Orogenes sent forth to work the earth for Mother Sanze. One of the good ones, or so the stills thought of you; one of the controlled ones unlikely to wipe out a town by accident. Joke’s on them, right? How many towns have you wiped out now? So many. Sometimes you dream of undoing it all, somehow. Not reaching for the garnet obelisk in Allia, and instead bleeding out while watching laughing black children play in the surf nearby. Not going to Meov, instead returning to the Fulcrum to give birth to Corundum; you would have lost him after that birth, when the Guardians took him away to some unknown fate, and you would never have had Innon, but both of them would probably be alive. And then you would never have lived in Tirimo, never borne Uche to die beneath his father’s fists, never have half smashed the town when they tried to kill you. So many lives saved if you had only stayed in your cage.
Well. Too late, now. You are who you are.
And here, now, you are Essun, who has saved the comm of Castrima at the cost of Castrima itself. You are the second person to open the Obelisk Gate in an age, and in so doing unleash the concatenated power of a machine older than written history. Since in the process of learning to master this power you accidentally murdered Alabaster Tenring, this makes you the most powerful orogene on the planet. It also means that your tenure as the most powerful orogene has just acquired an expiration date, because the same thing is happening to you that happened to Alabaster, near the end: You’re turning to stone.
Just the arm, for now. Could be worse. Will be worse, the next time you open the Gate, or even the next time you wield enough of the strange silvery not-orogeny called magic. Good thing no one of Castrima realizes this, by the way. They think you can help them, which is the only reason they’re bringing you along, because you’re also the reason they’re homeless. They glare and mutter as you lie in the coma that swallowed you after you sealed half a dozen murderous stone eaters into proto-obelisks, and in so doing disrupted delicate technology thousands of years beyond anyone’s ability to repair. They would have words for you, if you were awake to hear them. Instead, you lie dreaming of family. I envy your comfort even as I pity you. It will not last.
You’ve got a job to do, after all. The one you have to do is the easier of the two: just catch the Moon. Seal and shut down the Yumenes Rifting. Reduce the current Season’s impact from thousands of years back down to something manageable. Something the human race has a chance of surviving.
The job you want to do is getting Nassun, your daughter, back from her murderous father. About that: I have good news, and bad news.
Ah, Essun. An apocalypse is a relative thing, isn’t it? When the earth shatters, it is a disaster to creatures that depend on plants and meat and clean water and cool fresh air to survive, but nothing much to the earth itself. When a man dies it should be devastating to the girl who once called him father, but it becomes nothing to a girl who has been called monster so many times that she finally embraces the label.
When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper sliced finer still by the distance of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” whisper distance, and denial.) To the people who live it, both those who took their dominance for granted until it comes for them in the dark with a knife, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment more of “inferiority”—
That was not a metaphor, Essun. Not hyperbole. I have watched the world burn. Say nothing to me of lost innocents, unearned suffering. When a comm builds atop a faultline, do you blame its walls for crushing the people inside when they inevitably crumble? Some worlds are built upon a faultline of pain, held stable—temporarily—by nightmare walls. Don’t lament when they fall apart. Lament that they were ever built in the first place.
Well. That’s enough of a segue.
Now let’s talk about then: the end of the last world, which was the beginning of this one. I want you to imagine what the world was like before the Seasons.
This will be unimaginable for you, I know. You have no point of reference. The Stillness is a scar, not a land. Season after Fifth Season has scoured it; its face is seamed with old burns, badly healed lacerations, ulcerated sores. The Nomidlats are much larger now than they were, did you know? Palela, the sleepy town where little Damaya Strongback discovered what she was and lost her family, sits on land that did not exist in my youth. It spilled out of the boundary between the Minimal and Maximal; once it finally cooled, I watched it change from barren shatterland to new forest over less than a century. It’s farmland now, but I remember when it was a floodplain of lava that stretched as far as the eye could see.
And before that, it was a city. I was born there, if…
Hmm. I seem to have forgotten its name. Perhaps you think that odd. The time that I spent in the garnet obelisk was good, in some respects; I remember some, where most of the others, the old ones like me, recall none. A few have even forgotten that we used to be, well, you. That’s the core of so many problems; our minds remained human, even as the rest changed. We outlive our selves. But names… I was never good with names, even when the memories were fresh.
Well. Names are irrelevant. I’ll make them up, if I feel you need them.