fantasy

“Nassun, through the fire,” Chapter 11 of The Stone Sky, is one of the best, most visceral chapters I’ve read in fantasy. It gripped my imagination the first time I read the Broken Earth trilogy, and it was no less powerfully arresting this second time.

⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD ⚠️

Imagine:

You’re on an unfamiliar track, a sort of trolley ride, inside an strange vehicle you don’t control. Ahead and below, you see that the track ends at a hole. This hole is dark and deep, and you have no way of stopping the ride. The vehicle reaches the hole. It tilts forward, and—

You fall.

Into darkness, down the deepest hole ever drilled.

It’s terrifying, but also you understand from the track and the vehicle’s voice—because this vehicle talks to you—that this is part of the ride. It was designed this way. And, sure enough, the force of acceleration acting on you doesn’t match the speed at which you’re falling, magically. The ride continues.

As you fall though kilometers of darkness, you see rings of light flash past. More darkness. Then … A red glow as you fall through the mantle of the earth, and a line of silvery magic that speaks to you of some titanic being.

Suddenly you realize where you’re going.

And suddenly, you realize it may be a death sentence for your adopted father, seated next to you, whom you love dearly.

It’s your fault (as much as any one person can be faulted for this calamity) that he’s here, with you, on an unstoppable ride to the one place he really should not go. You despair, knowing there’s no stopping what will happen next.

The tunnel opens up into the center of the planet, and Father Earth’s iron heart blazes like a star in molten-red and magic-silver before you, almost blinding in its brilliance. Your adopted father falls to the floor of your vehicle in agony, and Father Earth—your world—speaks to you in a voice so deep and powerful that it rattles your bones painfully and starts a tsunami on the other side of the planet.

Hello, little enemy.

Okay, let’s pause here because—shit, that is just so.

Fucking.

Cool.

I would love to see this scene in a cinema. Experience the dark ride alongside Nassun, feel in my stomach the rumbling bass from theater speakers when Father Earth speaks.

It’s already my favorite scene in all of cinema.

Father Earth speaks to you further, and you come to understand:

1. It is pissed.
2. In its anger, Father Earth has imprisoned/eaten the souls of every human being to live and die on the planet for longer than your civilization has recorded history. They exist in agony—like your father writhing on the floor beside you—forever. Suffering faces flash across the rippling surface of Father Earth’s core, too many for you to count, as it shows you its collection. It’s not just gloating. It’s a reminder. A promise: You, too, will be added to the collection some day.
3. Father Earth’s terrible anger is like yours: Justified.

And Nassun cannot help but understand this too, here within the Earth’s embrace, with its meaning thrumming through her bones. The silver—magic—comes from life. Those who made the obelisks sought to harness magic, and they succeeded; oh, how they succeeded. They used it to build wonders beyond imagining. But then they wanted more magic than just what their own lives, or the accumulated aeons of life and death on the Earth’s surface, could provide. And when they saw how much magic brimmed just beneath that surface, ripe for the taking …

It may never have occurred to them that so much magic, so much life , might be an indicator of … awareness. The Earth does not speak in words, after all—and perhaps, Nassun realizes, having seen entirely too much of the world to still have much of a child’s innocence, perhaps these builders of the great obelisk network were not used to respecting lives different from their own. Not so very different, really, from the people who run the Fulcrums, or raiders, or her father. So where they should have seen a living being, they saw only another thing to exploit. Where they should have asked, or left alone, they raped.

For some crimes, there is no fitting justice—only reparation. So for every iota of life siphoned from beneath the Earth’s skin, the Earth has dragged a million human remnants into its heart. Bodies rot in soil, after all—and soil sits upon tectonic plates, plates eventually subduct into the fire under the Earth’s crust, which convect endlessly through the mantle … and there within itself, the Earth eats everything they were. This is only fair, it reasons—coldly, with an anger that still shudders up from the depths to crack the world’s skin and touch off Season after Season. It is only right. The Earth did not start this cycle of hostilities, it did not steal the Moon, it did not burrow into anyone else’s skin and snatch bits of its still-living flesh to keep as trophies and tools, it did not plot to enslave humans in an unending nightmare. It did not start this war, but it will rusting well have. Its. Due .

— N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

You understand. You understand because you have been wronged like Father Earth has been wronged.

You recommit to your plan to put Father Earth—and yourself, and every living thing—out of its misery.

You’re only ten.

The IMMENSITY of this scene is breathtaking.

Father Earth is real.

It has been at war with humans and their champions, the orogenes, since a time before recorded history, avenging an injury humans have long since forgotten. Its wrath is undying and inescapable, and that means the planet’s lifetime of suffering for the souls of every human to live since the Shattering.

Nassun, a child, grasps all of this.

Deer gods 😳

This book is so fucking good.

There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion—unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made.

Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they’re worth—because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don’t, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort. Fleetingly.

The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

— N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

Because this is what the Sylanagistines truly made us for: to affirm a philosophy. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist—as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory. The Niess were not the first people chewed up in its maw, just the latest and cruelest extermination of many. But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There’s not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury.

Better the earth, Syl Anagist reasons. Better to enslave a great inanimate object that cannot feel pain and will not object. Better Geoarcanity. But this reasoning is still flawed, because Syl Anagist is ultimately unsustainable. It is parasitic; its hunger for magic grows with every drop it devours. The Earth’s core is not limitless. Eventually, if it takes fifty thousand years, that resource will be exhausted, too. Then everything dies.

— N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky