“What?”
He makes you sess one of his stumps again, and—oh. Ohhhh. Suddenly it’s harder to grasp the stuff between his cells. It takes longer for your perception to adjust, and when it does, you keep having to reflexively jerk yourself out of a tendency to notice only the heat and jittering movement of the small particles. One afternoon of teaching has set your learning back by a week or more.
“There’s a reason the Fulcrum taught you the way it did,” he explains finally, when you sit back and rub your eyes and fight down frustration. He’s opened his eyes now; they are hooded as they watch you. “The Fulcrum’s methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away from magic. The torus isn’t even necessary—you can gather ambient energy in any number of ways. But that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny, never up. Nothing above you matters. Only your immediate surroundings, never farther.” He shakes his head to the degree that he can. “It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”
You’d almost forgotten this part of him: the dreamer, the rebel, always reconsidering the way things have always been because maybe they should never have been that way in the first place. He’s right, too. Life in the Stillness discourages reconsideration, reorientation. Wisdom is set in stone, after all; that’s why no one trusts the mutability of metal. There’s a reason Alabaster was the magnetic core of your little family, back when you were together.
Damn, you’re nostalgic today. It prompts you to say, “I think you’re not just a ten-ringer.” He blinks in surprise. “You’re always thinking. You’re a genius, too—it’s just that your genius is in a subject area that no one respects.”
Alabaster stares at you for a moment. His eyes narrow. “Are you drunk?”
“No I’m not—” Evil Earth, so much for your fond memories. “Go on with the rusting lesson.”
He seems more relieved by the change of subject than you. “So that’s what Fulcrum training does to you. You learn to think of orogeny as a matter of effort, when it’s really… perspective. And perception.”
An Allia-shaped trauma tells you why the Fulcrum wouldn’t have wanted every two-shard feral reaching for any obelisks nearby. But you spend a moment trying to understand the distinction he’s explaining. It’s true that using energy is something entirely different from using magic. The Fulcrum’s method makes orogeny feel like what it is: straining to shove around heavy objects, just with will instead of hands or levers. Magic, though, feels effortless—at least while one is using it. The exhaustion comes later. In the moment, though, it is simply about knowing it’s there. Training yourself to see it.
“I don’t understand why they did this,” you say, tapping your fingers on the mattress in thought. The Fulcrum was built by orogenes. At least some of them, at some point in the past, must have sessed magic. But… you shiver as you understand. Ah, yes. The most powerful orogenes, the ones who detect magic most easily and perhaps have trouble mastering energy redistribution as a result, are the ones who end up in the nodes.
Alabaster thinks in bigger pictures than just the Fulcrum. “I think,” he says, “they understood the danger. Not just that roggas who lacked the necessary fine control would connect to obelisks and die, but that some might do it successfully—for the wrong reasons.”
You try to think of a right reason to activate a network of ancient death machines. Alabaster reads your face. “I doubt I’m the first rogga who’s wanted to tip the Fulcrum into a lava pit.”
“Good point.”
“And the war. Don’t ever forget that. The Guardians who work with the Fulcrum are one of the factions I told you about, so to speak. They’re the ones who want the status quo: roggas made safe and useful, stills doing all the work and thinking they run the place, Guardians actually in charge of everything. Controlling the people who can control natural disasters.”
You’re surprised by this. No, you’re surprised you didn’t think of it yourself. But then you haven’t spent much time thinking about Guardians, when you weren’t in the immediate vicinity of one. Maybe this is another kind of thought aversion you’ve been conditioned to: Don’t look up, and don’t think about those damned smiles.
You decide to make yourself think about them now. “But Guardians die during a Season…” Shit. “They say they die…” Shit. “Of course they don’t.”
Alabaster lets out a rusty sound that might be a laugh. “I’m a bad influence.”
He always has been. You can’t help smiling, though the feeling doesn’t last, because of the conversation. “They don’t join comms, though. They must go somewhere else to ride it out.”
“Maybe. Maybe this ‘Warrant’ place. No one seems to know where it is.” He pauses, grows thoughtful. “I suppose I should have asked mine about that before I left her.”
No one just leaves their Guardian. “You said you didn’t kill her.”
He blinks, out of memory. “No. I cured her. Sort of. You know about the thing in their heads.” Yes. Blood, and the sting of your palm. Schaffa handing something tiny and bloody to another Guardian, with great care. You nod. “It gives them their abilities, but it also taints them, twists them. The seniors at the Fulcrum used to speak of it in whispers. There are degrees of contamination…” He sets his jaw, visibly steering himself away from that topic. You can guess why. Somewhere along the way, it lands on the shirtless Guardians who kill with a touch. “Anyway, I took that thing out of mine.”
You swallow. “I saw a Guardian kill another once, taking it out.”
“Yes. When the contamination becomes too great. Then they’re dangerous even to other Guardians, and must be purged. I’d heard they weren’t gentle about it. Brutes even to their own.”
It’s angry, Guardian Timay had said, right before Schaffa killed her. Readying for the time of return. You inhale. The memory is vivid in your mind because that was the day that you and Tonkee—Binof—found the socket. The day of your first ring test, early and with your life in the balance. You’ll never forget anything of that day. And now—“It’s the Earth.”
“What?”
“The thing that’s in Guardians. The… contaminant.” It changed those who would control it. Chained them fate to fate. “She started speaking for the Earth!”
You can tell you’ve actually surprised him, for once. “Then…” He considers for a moment. “I see. That’s when they switch teams. Stop working for the status quo and Guardian interests, and start working for the Earth’s interests instead. No wonder the others kill them.”
This is what you need to understand. “What does the Earth want?”
Alabaster’s gaze is heavy, heavy. “What does any living thing want, facing an enemy so cruel that it stole away a child?”
Your jaw tightens. Vengeance.