Corepoint is silent.

Nassun notices this when the vehimal in which she’s traversed the planet emerges in its corresponding station, on the other side of the world. This is located in one of the strange, slanting buildings that encircle the massive hole at Corepoint’s center. She cries for help, cries for someone, cries, as the vehimal’s door opens and she drags Schaffa’s limp, unresponsive body through the silent corridors and then the silent streets. He’s big and heavy, so although she tries in various ways to use magic to assist with dragging his weight – badly; magic is not meant to be used for something so gross and localized, and her concentration is poor in the moment – she makes it only a block or so away from the compound before she, too, collapses, in exhaustion.

***

Somerusting day, somerusting year.

Found these books, blank. The stuff they’re made of isn’t paper. Thicker. Doesn’t bend easily. Good thing, maybe, or would be dust by now. Preserve my words for eternity! Ha! Longer than my rusting sanity.

Don’t know what to write. Innon would laugh and tell me to write about sex. Right, so: I jerked off today, for the first time since A dragged me to this place. Thought about him in the middle of it and couldn’t come. Maybe I’m too old? That’s what Syen would say. She’s just mad I could still knock her up.

Forgetting how Innon used to smell. Everything smells like the sea here, but it’s not like the sea near Meov. Different water? Innon used to smell like the water there. Every time the wind blows I lose a little more of him.

Corepoint. How I hate this place.

***

Corepoint isn’t a ruin, quite. That is, it isn’t ruined, and it isn’t uninhabited.

On the surface of the open, endless ocean, the city is an anomaly of buildings – not very tall compared to either the recently lost Yumenes or the longer-lost Syl Anagist. Corepoint is unique, however, among both past and present cultures. The structures of Corepoint are sturdily built, of rustless metal and strange polymers and other materials that can withstand the often hurricane-force salt winds that dominate this side of the world. The few plants that grow here, in the parks that were constructed so long ago, are no longer the lovely, designer, hothouse things favored by Corepoint’s builders. Corepoint trees – hybridized and feral descendants of the original landscaping – are huge, woody things, twisted into artful shapes by the wind. They have long since broken free of their orderly beds and containers and now gnarl over the pressed-fiber sidewalks. Unlike the architecture of Syl Anagist, here there are many more sharp angles, meant to minimize the buildings’ resistance to the wind.

But there is more to the city than what can be seen.

Corepoint sits at the peak of an enormous underwater shield volcano, and the first few miles of the hole drilled at its center are actually lined with a hollowed-out complex of living quarters, laboratories, and manufactories. These underground facilities, originally meant to house Corepoint’s geomagests and genegineers, have long since been turned to a wholly different purpose – because this flip side of Corepoint is Warrant, where Guardians are made and dwell between Seasons.

We will speak more of this later.

Above the surface in Corepoint, though, it’s late afternoon, beneath a sky whose clouds are sparse amid a shockingly bright blue sky. (Seasons that start in the Stillness rarely have a severe impact on the weather in this hemisphere, or at least not for several months or years after.) As befits the bright day, there are people in the streets around Nassun as she struggles and weeps, but they do not move to help. They do not move at all, mostly – for they are stone eaters, with rose-marble lips and shining mica eyes and braids woven in pyrite gold or clear quartz. They stand on the steps of buildings that have not known human feet for tens of thousands of years. They sit along window ledges of stone or metal that have begun to deform under the pressure of incredible weight applied over decades. One sits with knees upraised and arms propped across them, leaning against a tree whose roots have grown around her; mosses line the upper surfaces of her arms and hair. She watches Nassun, only her eyes moving, in what might be interest.

They all watch, doing nothing, as this quick-moving, noisy human child sobs into the salt-laden wind until she is exhausted, and then just sits there in a huddle with her fingers still tangled in the cloth of Schaffa’s shirt.

***

Another day, same (?) year

No writing about Innon or Coru. Off-limits from now on.

Syen. I can still feel her – not sess, feel. There’s an obelisk here, I think it’s a spinel. When I canneckconnect to it, it’s like I can feel anything they’re connected to. The amethyst is following Syen. Wonder if she knows.

Antimony says Syen made it to the mainland and iswannrwandering. That’s why I feel like I’m wandering, I guess? She’s all that’s left but she ki – fuck.

This place is ridiculous. Anniemony was right that it’s a way to trigger the Obelisk Gate without control cab? (Onyx. Too powerful, can’t risk it, would trigger alignment too quickly and then who’s to make the second traj change?) But the rusters that buildt it put everything into tht stupid hole. A told me some of it. Great project, my ass. It’s worse to see, though. This whole rusting city is a crime scene. Tooted around and found great big pipes running along the bottom of the ocean.huHUGE, ready to pump something from the hole all the way to the continent. Magic, Animony says, did they really need so much????? More than the Gate!

Asked Tinimony to take me into the hole today and she said no. What’s in the hole, huh? What’s in the hole.

***

Near sunset, another stone eater appears. Here amid the elegantly gowned, colorful variety of his people, he stands out even more with his gray coloring and bare chest: Steel. He stands over Nassun for several minutes, perhaps expecting her to lift her gaze and notice him, but she does not. Presently, he says, “The ocean winds can be cold at night.”

Silence. Her hands clench and unclench on Schaffa’s clothes, not quite spasmodically. She’s just tired. She’s been holding him since the center of the Earth.

After a while longer, as the sun inches toward the horizon, Steel says, “There’s a livable apartment in a building two blocks from here. The food stored in it should still be edible.”

Nassun says, “Where?” Her voice is hoarse. She needs water. There’s some in her canteen, and in Schaffa’s canteen, but she hasn’t opened either.

Steel shifts posture, pointing. Nassun lifts her head to follow this and sees a street, unnaturally straight, seemingly paved straight toward the horizon. Wearily she gets up, takes a better grip on Schaffa’s clothes, and begins dragging him again.

***

Who’s in the hole, what’s in the whole, where goes the hole, how holed am I!

SEs brought better food today because I don’t eat enough. So special, delivery fressssh from the other sigh of the world. Going to dry the seeds, plant them. Remember to scrrrape up tomato I threw at A.

Book language looks almost like Sanze-mat. Characters similar? Precursor? Some words I almost recognize. Some old Eturpic, some Hladdac, a little early-dynasty Regwo. Wish Shinash was here. He would scream to see me putting my feet up on books older than forever. Always so easy to tease. Miss him.

Miss everyone, even people at the rusting Fulcrum (!) Miss voices that come out of rusting mouths. SYENITE could make me eat, you talking rock. SYENITE gave a shit about me and not just whether I could fix this world I don’t give a shit about. SYENITE should be here with me,I would give anything to have her here with me

No. She should forget me andInMeov. Find some boring fool she actually wants to sleep with. Have a boring life. She deserves that.

***

Night falls in the time it takes Nassun to reach the building. Steel repositions, appearing in front of a strange asymmetrical building, wedge-shaped, whose high end faces the wind. The sloping roof of the building, in the lee of the wind, is scraggly with overgrown, twisted vegetation. There’s plenty of soil on the roof, more than is likely to have accumulated from the wind over centuries. It looks planned, though overgrown. Yet amid the mess, Nassun can see that someone has hacked out a garden. Recently; the plants are overgrown, too, new growth springing up from dropped fruit and split, untended vines, but given the relative dearth of weeds and the still-neat rows, this garden can’t be more than a year or two neglected. The Season is now almost two years old.

Later. The building’s door moves on its own, sliding aside as Nassun approaches. It closes on its own, too, once she’s gotten Schaffa far enough within. Steel moves inside, pointing upstairs. She drags Schaffa to the foot of the stairs and then drops beside him, shaking, too tired to think or go any farther.

Schaffa’s heart is still strong, she thinks, as she uses his chest for a pillow. With her eyes shut, she can almost imagine that he’s holding her, rather than the other way around. It is paltry comfort, but enough to let her sleep without dreams.

***

***

In the morning, Nassun gets Schaffa up the steps. The apartment is thankfully on only the second floor; the stairwell door opens right into it. Everything inside is strange, to her eye, yet familiar in purpose. There’s a couch, though its back is at one end of the long seat, rather than behind it. There are chairs, one fused to some kind of big slanted table. For drawing, maybe. The bed, in the attached room, is the strangest thing: a big wide hemisphere of brightly colored cushion without sheets or pillows. When Nassun tentatively lies down on it, though, she finds that it flattens and conforms to her body in ways that are stunningly comfortable. It’s warm, too – actively heating up beneath her until the aches of sleeping in a cold stairwell go away. Fascinated despite herself, Nassun examines the bed and is shocked to realize that it is full of magic, and has covered her in same. Threads of silver roam over her body, determining her discomfort by touching her nerves and then repairing her bruises and scrapes; other threads whip the particles of the bed until friction warms them; yet more threads search her skin for infinitesimal dry flakes and flecks of dust, and scrub them away. It’s like what she does when she uses the silver to heal or cut things, but automatic, somehow. She can’t imagine who would make a bed that could do magic. She can’t imagine why. She can’t fathom how anyone could have convinced all this silver to do such nice things, but that’s what’s happening. No wonder the people who built the obelisks needed so much silver, if they used it in lieu of wearing blankets, or taking baths, or letting themselves heal over time.

Schaffa has soiled himself, Nassun finds. It makes her feel ashamed to have to pull his clothes off and clean him, using stretchy cloths she finds in the bathroom, but it would be worse to leave him in his own filth. His eyes are open again, though he does not move while she works. They’ve opened during the day, and they close at night, but though Nassun talks to Schaffa (pleads for him to wake up, asks him to help her, tells him that she needs him), he does not respond.

She gets him into the bed, leaving a pad of cloths under his bare bottom. She trickles water from their canteens into his mouth, and when that runs out, she cautiously tries to get more from the strange water pump in the kitchen. There are no levers or handles on it, but when she puts her canteen beneath the spigot, water comes out. She’s a diligent girl. First she uses the powder in her runny-sack to make a cup of safe from the water, checking for contaminants. The safe dissolves but stays cloudy and white, so she drinks that herself and then brings more water to Schaffa. He drinks readily, which probably means he was really thirsty. She gives him raisins that she first soaks in water, and he chews and swallows, although slowly and without much vigor. She hasn’t done a good job of taking care of him.

She will do better, she decides, and heads outside to the garden to pick food for them both.

***

Syenite told me the date. Six years. It’s been six years? No wonder she’s so angry. Told me to go jump in a hole, since it’s been so long. She doesn’t want to see me again. Such a steelheart. Told her I was sorry. My fault, all of it.

My fault. My Moon. Turned the spare key today. (Lines of sight, lines of force, three by three by three? Cubical arrangement, like a good little crystal lattice.) The key unlocks the Gate. Dangerous to bring so many obelisks to Yumenes, though; Guardians everywhere. Wouldn’t have time before they got me. Better to make a spare key out of orogenes, and who can I use? Who is strong enough. Syen isn’t, almost but not quite. Innon isn’t. Coru is but I can’t find him. He’s just a baby anyway, not right. Babies. Lots of babies. Node maintainers? Node maintainers!

No. They’ve suffered enough. Use the Fulcrum seniors instead.

Or the node maintainers.

Why should I do it here? Plugs the hole. Do it there, tho… Get Yumenes. Get the Fulcrum. Get a lot of the Guardians.

Stop nagging me, woman. Go tell Innon to fuck you, or something. You’re always so cranky when you haven’t gotten laid. I’ll jump in the hole tomorrow.

***

It becomes a routine.

She takes care of Schaffa in the mornings, then goes out in the afternoon to explore the city and find things they need. There’s no need to bathe Schaffa, or to clean up his waste again; astonishingly, the bed takes care of that, too. So Nassun can spend her time with him talking, and asking him to wake up, and telling him that she doesn’t know what to do.

Steel vanishes again. She doesn’t care.

Other stone eaters periodically show up, however, or at least she feels the impact of their presence. She sleeps on the couch, and one morning wakes to find a blanket covering her. It’s just a simple gray thing, but it’s warm, and she’s grateful. When she starts picking apart one of her sausages to get the fat out of it, intending to make tallow – the candles from her runny-sack are getting low – she finds a stone eater in the stairwell, its finger curled in a beckoning gesture. When she follows it, it stops beside a panel covered in curious symbols. The stone eater is pointing toward one in particular. Nassun touches it and it alights with silver, glowing golden and sending threads questing over her skin. The stone eater says something in a language Nassun does not understand before it vanishes, but when she returns to the apartment, it’s warmer, and soft white lights have come on overhead. Touching squares on the wall makes the lights go off.

One afternoon she walks into the apartment to find a stone eater crouched beside a pile of things that look to have come from some comm’s storecache: burlap sacks full of root vegetables and mushrooms and dried fruit, a big round of sharp white cheese, hide bags of packed pemmican, satchels of dried rice and beans, and – precious – a small cask of salt. The stone eater vanishes when Nassun approaches the pile, so she cannot even thank it. She has to blow ash off of everything before she puts it away.

Nassun has figured out that the apartment, like the garden, must have been used until recently. The detritus of another person’s life is everywhere: pants much too big for her in the drawers, a man’s underwear beside them. (One day these are replaced with clothing that fits Nassun. Another stone eater? Or maybe the magic in the apartment is even more sophisticated than she thought.) Books are piled in one of the rooms, many of them native to Corepoint – she’s beginning to recognize the peculiar, clean, not-quite-natural look of Corepoint things. A few, however, are normal-looking, with covers of cracking leather and pages still stinky with chemicals and handwritten ink. Some of the books are in a language she can’t read. Something Coaster.

One, however, is made of the Corepoint material, but its blank pages have been handwritten over, in Sanze-mat. Nassun opens this one, sits down, and begins to read.

***

WENT

IN THE HOLE

DON’T

don’t bury me

please DON’T, Syen, I love you, I’m sorry, keep me safe, watch my back and I’ll watch yours, there’s no one else who’s as strong as you, I wish so much that you were here, please DON’T

***

Corepoint is a city in still life.

Nassun begins losing track of time. The stone eaters occasionally speak to her, but most of them don’t know her language, and she doesn’t hear enough of theirs to pick it up. She watches them sometimes, and is fascinated to realize that some of them are performing tasks. She watches one malachite-green woman who stands amid the windblown trees, and belatedly realizes the woman is holding a branch up and to one side, to make it grow in a particular way. All of the trees, which look windblown and yet are a little too dramatic, a little too artful in their splaying and bending, have been shaped thus. It must take years.

And near the edge of the city, down by one of the strange spokelike things that jut out into the water from its edge – not piers, really, just straight pieces of metal that make no sense – another stone eater stands every day with one hand upraised. Nassun just happens to be around when the stone eater blurs and there is a splash and suddenly his upraised hand holds by the tail a huge, wriggling fish that is as long as his body. His marble skin is sheened with wet. Nassun has nowhere in particular to be, so she sits down to watch. After a time, an ocean mammal – Nassun has read of these, creatures that look like fish but breathe air – sidles up to the city’s edge. It is gray-skinned, tube-shaped; there are sharp teeth along its jaw, but these are small. When it pushes up out of the water, Nassun sees that it is very old, and something about the questing movements of its head makes her realize it has gone blind. There’s old scarring on its forehead as well; something has injured the creature’s head badly. The creature nudges the stone eater, who of course does not move, and then nips at the fish in its hand, tearing off chunks and swallowing them until the stone eater releases the tail. When it is done, the creature utters a complex, high-pitched sound, like a… chitter? Or a laugh. Then it slides further into the water and swims away.

The stone eater flickers and faces Nassun. Curious, Nassun gets to her feet to go over and speak to him. By the time she’s standing, though, he has vanished.

This is what she comes to understand: There is life here, among these people. It isn’t life as she knows it, or a life she would choose, but life nevertheless. That gives her comfort, when she no longer has Schaffa to tell her that she is good and safe. That, and the silence, give her time to mourn. She did not understand before now that she needed this.

***

I’ve decided.

It’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. Some things are so broken that they can’t be fixed. You just have to finish them off, sweep away the rubble, and start over. Antimony agrees. Some of the other SEs do, too. Some don’t.

Rust those. They killed my life to make me their weapon, so that’s what I’m going to be.My choice. My commandment. We’ll do it in Yumenes. A commandment is set in stone.

I asked after Syen today. Don’t know why I care anymore. Antimony’s been keeping tabs, though. (For me?) Syenite is living in some little shithole comm in the Somidlats, I forget the name, playing creche teacher. Playing the happy little still. Married with two new children. How about that. Not sure about the daughter but the boy is pulling on the aquamarine.

Amazing. No wonder the Fulcrum bred you to me. And we did make a beautiful child in spite of everything, didn’t we? My boy.

I won’t let them find your boy, Syen. I won’t let them take him, and burn his brain, and put him in the wire chair. I won’t let them find your girl, either, if she’s one of us, or even if she’s Guardian-potential. There won’t be a Fulcrum left by the time I’m done. What follows won’t be good, but it’ll be bad for everyone – rich and poor, Equatorials and commless, Sanzeds and Arctics, now they’ll all know. Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could’ve chosen a different kind of equality. We could’ve all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn’t want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that’s what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change.

Then I’ll shut it down and put the Moon back. (It shouldn’t stone me, the first trajectory adjustment.Unless I underestimateShouldn’t.) All I’m rusting good for anyway.

After that… it’ll be up to you, Syen. Make it better. I know I told you it wasn’t possible, that there was no way to make the world better, but I was wrong. I’m breaking it because I was wrong. Start it over, you were right, change it. Make it better for the children you have left. Make a world Corundum could have been happy in. Make a world where people like us, you and me and Innon and our sweet boy, our beautiful boy, could have stayed whole.

Antimony says I might get to see that world. Guess we’ll see. Rust it. I’m procrastinating. She’s waiting. Back to Yumenes today.

For you, Innon.For you, Coru.For you, Syen.

***

At night, Nassun can see the Moon.

This was terrifying, on the first night that she looked outside and noticed a strange pale whiteness outlining the streets and trees of the city, and then looked up to see a great white sphere in the sky. It is enormous, to her – bigger than the sun, far larger than the stars, trailed by a faint streak of luminescence that she does not know is the off-gassing of ice that has adhered to the lunar surface over the course of its travels. The white of it is the true surprise. She knows very little of the Moon – only what Schaffa told her. It is a satellite, he said, Father Earth’s lost child, a thing whose light reflects the sun. She expected it to be yellow, given that. It disturbs her to have been so wrong.

It disturbs her more that there is a hole in the thing, at nearly its dead center: a great, yawning darkness like the pinpoint pupil of an eye. It’s too small to tell for now, but Nassun thinks that maybe if she stares at it long enough, she will see stars on the other side of the Moon, through this hole.

Somehow it’s fitting. Whatever happened ages ago to cause the Moon’s loss was surely cataclysmic on multiple levels. If the Earth suffered the Shattering, then the fact that the Moon also bears scars feels normal and right. With a thumb, Nassun rubs the palm of her hand where her mother broke the bones, a lifetime ago.

And yet, when she stands in the roof garden and stares at it for long enough, she begins to find the Moon beautiful. It is an icewhite eye, and she has no reason to think badly of those. Like the silver when it swirls and whorls within something like a snail’s shell. It makes her think of Schaffa – that he is watching over her in his way – and this makes her feel less alone.

Over time, Nassun discovers that she can use the obelisks to get a feel for the Moon. The sapphire is on the other side of the world, but there are others here above the ocean, drawn near in response to her summons, and she has been tapping and taming each in turn. The obelisks help her feel (not sess) that the Moon will soon be at its closest point. If she lets it go, it will pass, and begin to rapidly diminish until it vanishes from the sky. Or she can open the Gate, and tug on it, and change everything. The cruelty of the status quo, or the comfort of oblivion. The choice feels clear to her… but for one thing.

One night, as Nassun sits gazing up at the great white sphere, she says aloud, “It was on purpose, wasn’t it? You not telling me what would happen to Schaffa. So you could get rid of him.”

The mountain that has been lingering nearby shifts slightly, to a position behind her. “I did try to warn you.”

She turns to look at him. At the look on her face, he utters a soft laugh that sounds self-deprecating. This stops, though, when she says, “If he dies, I’ll hate you more than I hate the world.”

It is a war of attrition, she’s begun to realize, and she’s going to lose. In the weeks (?) or months (?) since they came to Corepoint, Schaffa has noticeably deteriorated, his skin developing an ugly pallor, his hair brittle and dull. People aren’t meant to lie unmoving, blinking but not thinking, for weeks on end. She had to cut his hair earlier that day. The bed cleans the dirt out of it, but it’s gotten oily and lately it keeps getting tangled – and the day before, some of it must have wrapped around his arm when she wrestled him onto his belly, cutting off his circulation in a way she didn’t notice. (She keeps a sheet over him, even though the bed is warm and does not need it. It bothers her that he is naked and undignified.) This morning when she finally noticed the problem, the arm was pale and a little gray. She’s loosed it, chafed it hoping to bring the color back, but it doesn’t look good. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if something’s really wrong with his arm. She might lose all of him like this, slowly but surely, little bits of him dying because she was only almost-nine when this Season began and she’s only almost-eleven now and taking care of invalids wasn’t something anyone taught her in creche.

“If he lives,” Steel replies in his colorless voice, “he will never again experience a moment without agony.” He pauses, gray eyes fixed on her face, as Nassun reverberates with his words, with her own denial, with her own growing sick fear that Steel is right.

Nassun gets to her feet. “I n-need to know how to fix him.”

“You can’t.”

She tightens her hands into fists. For the first time in what feels like centuries, part of her reaches for the strata around her. This means the shield volcano beneath Corepoint… but when she “grasps” it orogenically, she finds with some surprise that it is anchored, somehow. This distracts her for a moment as she has to alter her perception to shift to the silver – and there she finds solid, scintillating pillars of magic driven into the volcano’s foundations, pinning it in place. It’s still active, but it will never erupt because of those pillars. It is as stable as bedrock despite the hole at its core burrowing down to the Earth’s heart.

She shakes this off as irrelevant, and finally voices the thought that has been gathering in her mind over all the days she has dwelled in this city of stone people. “If… if I turn him into a stone eater, he’ll live. And he won’t have any pain. Right?” Steel does not reply. In the lengthening silence, Nassun bites her lip. “So you have to tell me how to – to make him like you. I bet I can do it if I use the Gate. I can do anything with that. Except…”

Except. The Obelisk Gate doesn’t do small things. Just as Nassun feels, sesses, knows that the Gate makes her temporarily omnipotent, she knows, too, that she cannot use it to transform just one man. If she makes Schaffa into a stone eater… every human being on the planet will change in the same manner. Every comm, every commless band, every starving wanderer: Ten thousand still-life cities, instead of just one. All the world will become like Corepoint.

But is that really so terrible a thing? If everyone is a stone eater, there will be no more orogenes and stills. No more children to die, no more fathers to murder them. The Seasons could come and go, and they wouldn’t matter. No one would starve to death ever again. To make the whole world as peaceful as Corepoint… would that not be a kindness?

Steel’s face, which has been tilted up toward the Moon even as his eyes watch her, now slowly pivots to face her. It’s always unnerving to see him move slowly. “Do you know what it feels like to live forever?”

Nassun blinks, thrown. She’s been expecting a fight. “What?”

The moonlight has transformed Steel into a thing of starkest shadows, white and ink against the dimness of the garden. “I asked,” he says, and his voice is almost pleasant, “if you know what it feels like to live forever. Like me. Like your Schaffa. Do you have any inkling as to how old he is? Do you care?”

“I —” About to say that she does, Nassun falters. No. This is not a thing she has ever considered. “I – I don’t —”

“I would estimate,” Steel continues, “that Guardians typically last three or four thousand years. Can you imagine that length of time? Think of the past two years. Your life since the beginning of the Season. Imagine another year. You can do that, can’t you? Every day feels like a year here in Corepoint, or so your kind tell me. Now put all three years together, and imagine them times one thousand.” The emphasis he puts on this is sharp, precisely enunciated. In spite of herself, Nassun jumps.

But also in spite of herself… she thinks. She feels old, Nassun, at the world-weary age of not-quite-eleven. So much has happened since the day she came home to find her little brother dead on the floor. She is a different person now, hardly Nassun at all; sometimes she is surprised to realize Nassun is still her name. How much more different will she be in three years? Ten? Twenty?

Steel pauses until he sees some change in her expression – some evidence, perhaps, that she is listening to him. Then he says, “I have reason to believe, however, that your Schaffa is much, much older than most Guardians. He isn’t quite first-generation; those have all long since died. Couldn’t take it. He’s one of the very early ones, though, still. The languages, you see; that’s how you can always tell. They never quite lose those, even after they’ve forgotten the names they were born with.”

Nassun remembers how Schaffa knew the language of the earth-traversing vehicle. It is strange to think of Schaffa having been born back when that tongue was still spoken. It would make him… she can’t even imagine. Old Sanze is supposed to be seven Seasons old, eight if one counts the present Season. Almost three thousand years. The Moon’s cycle of return and retreat is much older than that, and Schaffa remembers it, so… yes. He’s very, very old. She frowns.

“It’s rare to find one of them who can really go the distance,” Steel continues. His tone is casual, conversational; he could be talking about Nassun’s old neighbors back in Jekity. “The corestone hurts them so much, you see. They get tired, and then they get sloppy, and then the Earth begins to contaminate them, eating away at their will. They don’t usually last long once that starts. The Earth uses them, or their fellow Guardians use them, until they outlive their usefulness and one side or the other kills them. It’s a testament to your Schaffa’s strength that he lasted so much longer. Or a testament to something else, maybe. What kills the rest, you see, is losing the things that ordinary people need to be happy. Imagine what that’s like, Nassun. Watching everyone you know and care about die. Watching your home die, and having to find a new one – again, and again, and again. Imagine never daring to get close to another person. Never having friends, because you’ll outlive them. Are you lonely, little Nassun?”

She has forgotten her anger. “Yes,” she admits, before she can think not to.

“Imagine being lonely forever.” There’s a very slight smile on his lips, she sees. It’s been there the whole while. “Imagine living here in Corepoint forever, with no one to talk to but me – when I bother to respond. What do you think that will feel like, Nassun?”

“Terrible,” she says. Quietly now.

“Yes. So here is my theory: I believe your Schaffa survived by loving his charges. You, and others like you, soothed his loneliness. He truly does love you; never doubt that about him.” Nassun swallows back a dull ache. “But he also needs you. You keep him happy. You keep him human, where otherwise time would have long since transformed him into something else.”

Then Steel moves again. It’s inhuman because of its steadiness, Nassun finally realizes. People are quick to do big movements and then slower with fine adjustment. Steel does everything at the same pace. Watching him move is like watching a statue melt. But then he stands with arms outstretched as if to say, Take a look at me.

“I am forty thousand years old,” Steel says. “Give or take a few millennia.”

Nassun stares at him. The words are like the gibberish that the vehimal spoke – almost comprehensible, but not really. Not real.

What does that feel like, though?

“You’re going to die when you open the Gate,” Steel says, after giving Nassun a moment to absorb what he’s said. “Or if not then, sometime after. A few decades, a few minutes, it’s all the same. And whatever you do, Schaffa will lose you. He’ll lose the one thing that has kept him human throughout the Earth’s efforts to devour his will. He’ll find no one new to love, either – not here. And he won’t be able to return to the Stillness unless he’s willing to risk the Deep Earth route again. So whether he heals somehow, or you change him into one of my kind, he will have no choice but to go on, alone, endlessly yearning for what he will never again have.” Slowly, Steel’s arms lower to his sides. “You have no idea what that’s like.”

And then, suddenly, shockingly, he is right in front of Nassun. No blurring, no warning, just flick and he is there, bent at the waist to put his face right in front of hers, so close that she feels the wind of the air he’s displaced and smells the whiff of loam and she can even see that the irises of his eyes are striated in layers of gray.

“BUT I DO,” he shouts.

Nassun stumbles back and cries out. Between one blink and the next, however, Steel returns to his former position, upright, arms at his sides, a smile on his lips.

“So think carefully,” Steel says. His voice is conversational again, as if nothing has happened. “Think with something more than the selfishness of a child, little Nassun. And ask yourself: Even if I could help you save that controlling, sadistic sack of shit that currently passes for your adoptive father figure, why would I? Not even my enemy deserves that fate. No one does.”

Nassun’s still shaking. She blurts, bravely, “Sch-Schaffa might want to live.”

“He might. But should he? Should anyone, forever? That is the question.”

She feels the absent weight of countless years, and is obliquely ashamed of being a child. But at her core, she is a kind child, and it’s impossible for her to have heard Steel’s story without feeling something other than her usual anger at him. She looks away twitchily. “I’m… sorry.”

“So am I.” There’s a moment’s silence. In it, Nassun pulls herself together slowly. By the time she focuses on him again, Steel’s smile has vanished.

“I cannot stop you, once you’ve opened the Gate,” he says. “I’ve manipulated you, yes, but the choice is still ultimately yours. Consider, however. Until the Earth dies, I live, Nassun. That was its punishment for us: We became a part of it, chained fate to fate. The Earth forgets neither those who stabbed it in the back… nor those who put the knife in our hand.”

Nassun blinks at our. But she loses this thought amid misery at the realization that there can be no fixing Schaffa. Until now, some part of her has nursed the irrational hope that Steel, as an adult, had all the answers, including some sort of cure. Now she knows that her hope has been foolish. Childish. She is a child. And now the only adult she has ever been able to rely on will die naked and hurt and helpless, without ever being able to say goodbye.

It’s too much to bear. She sinks into a crouch, wrapping one arm round her knees and folding the other over her head, so that Steel will not see her cry even if he knows that’s exactly what’s happening.

He lets out a soft laugh at this. Surprisingly, it does not sound cruel.

“You achieve nothing by keeping any of us alive,” he says, “except cruelty. Put us broken monsters out of our misery, Nassun. The Earth, Schaffa, me, you… all of us.”

Then he vanishes, leaving Nassun alone beneath the white, burgeoning Moon.