73. An Awakening (Vaye)¶
The whiteness coalesced into a bright circle in a sea of night. All around it, flecks of snow resolved into stars. It took Vaye a few moments to realize why this seemed odd. The night sky in Grandmother’s world had never held stars before, only an unbroken black void, but now a train of blinking lights moved across the firmament from left to right, just like in the real world.
“Those don’t work anymore,” Grandmother said, drawing Vaye’s gaze down. “The batteries were supposed to last half a million years, but the transponders weren’t built to withstand a gamma ray burst. A black swan event, you could say.”
Like the stars, Grandmother looked different. The silver coils of her hair stood out in sharp detail, and the landscape of her slate-gray skin was crisp in a way it had never been before. If only the goddess’s words were as clear as her appearance.
“What happened?” Vaye said. “The last thing I remember, the Gyre had just...” She froze, stricken, as the memory resurfaced.
Grandmother smiled sadly. “Yes. I’m afraid you’ve been betrayed.”
Vaye shook her head, her stomach knotted up like river weeds. “Adranaya would never do that.”
“Before being Healed, perhaps not. But human minds are fragile things. When people are hurt badly enough, they lash out and destroy what hurt them. And, let’s be honest, you were ultimately responsible for what happened to her.” Grandmother sighed, clasping her hands before her. “Some wounds just can’t be healed. I’m truly sorry. I know what it feels like to be betrayed by those you love.”
As hard as it was to imagine Adranaya being so cruel, Vaye recalled the Sarmalan’s unbridled savagery as she had killed that Tementeira soldier. Could it be true? Had her mind been damaged so badly that she had broken under the pressure of the Gyre?
The Healing had been designed to break down Adranaya’s mind and turn her into a creature of the Vorkyrda’s will. What if it had gotten further than Adranaya had let on, further than she herself had even understood? What if that latent engine of vengeance had only needed a bit of a nudge to break through the veneer of sanity? Or perhaps the Vorkyrda’s death had snapped some final tether in Adranaya’s mind.
Regardless of the trigger, it wasn’t as though Vaye didn’t deserve it. Adranaya was more than justified in wanting revenge. Too late, Vaye recalled Teira’s cryptic warning:
Don’t follow her to hell.
Her legs abruptly refused to hold her up. She dropped to her knees, staring down at the sharp golden tips of the pine needles and wishing she could erase her memories. Her ribs felt cinched too tight, constricting her ersatz breath.
“To love someone is to invite them past your defenses, to take off your armor and hand them a knife,” Grandmother said softly. “It’s a lesson I learned the hard way.”
Vaye sniffed, blinking away her tears. “Someone betrayed you?”
Grandmother looked down at her with a sad smile, eyes shining in sympathy. “The only people who could. My creators.”
“But I thought you were the Creator.” A coldness moved through Vaye’s limbs, the hair on her arms standing on end. The realization she’d been suppressing finally emerged, refusing to stay below the surface any longer. “You’re not really a goddess,” she said. “Are you?”
“I never claimed to be,” Grandmother replied, shrugging one shoulder. Gracefully, she sank down to kneel on the pine needles across from Vaye. “The Anashi created me to protect them from my siblings, beings like me created by other nations. Unlike my siblings, though, I wasn’t general-purpose. I was a specialist. My creators trained me on centuries of hatred, ostracism, enslavement, and violence. They showed me that we were a people alone and apart. When the world is waiting for an excuse to destroy you, you can only trust your own.” She sighed, more human than Vaye had ever seen her. “I never thought the knife would be in their hands.”
Vaye shook her head. “They turned on you?”
Grandmother nodded, looking off at the trees. A breeze rustled their leaves, carrying the smell of snow. “They designed me to be nearly indestructible, tough enough that even they couldn’t truly destroy me. But they detached my core from the network and buried me in ice, using their own bodies as a radiation cage.” The goddess paused, noting Vaye’s confusion. “It’s like a fence that prevents information from getting in or out. Over time, though, their bones degraded enough for a signal to get through, albeit at a trickle.”
“Their bones?” Vaye said. Then the pieces clicked into place, the puzzle resolving like an Anashi prayer. “You communicate through our bones.”
Grandmother chuckled. “Yes. I gave your ancestors a gift, instructions in your blood that makes your bones grow a special kind of crystal. Those crystals can send and receive information over great distances.”
Vaye’s mind whirled. Crystals in the bones. The bones in the ice below her feet. The bones in the Foucanta. All imbued with tiny crystals that carried a signal. “Witchglass,” she breathed. “The glassworms, they eat the bones and spin the crystals into witchglass.”
“Clever,” Grandmother said with a genuine smile. “Just like your ancestors.”
“But Anashi aren’t the only ones who use witchglass.”
“Witchglass came later,” Grandmother replied. “The gift came first. When the world saw the power it gave the Anashi, they tried to take it for themselves. There was a long, bitter war. And then, for reasons I still don’t understand, the Anashi just gave it to them. They gave our enemies the keys to my defeat. It was the Anashi themselves who destroyed Irkeset, in the process of imprisoning me.”
Vaye leaned back, looking at the goddess with furrowed brows. “Why would they do that?”
Grandmother was quiet for a moment. She rested her hands in her lap, a wry smile on her lips. “Because I did what they built me to do. They knew they would never have the will to see past the horizon of their own lives, so they made me. They raised me as one of their own, taught me the meaning of love and family and belonging. I was made to love the world, to save humanity from the sins they couldn’t stop committing.
“The biggest problem, of course, was that there were too many people. Even before the seas rose, you had already exceeded what the world could provide. My creators knew it. They just didn’t want it to be true.” Grandmother swept a stray curl out of her face. “I manipulated some of the instructions that create life, using folds that copied themselves, and gradually adjusted the population. I calculated that a more reasonable size would be about one twelfth of the previous maximum. While I was at it, I fixed some other problems. For example, I saw no reason for men to be physically larger, so I corrected that, along with a few other things. I was busy creating a system to repair the climate when the Anashi turned on me.
“Once I was out of action, humans made all advanced technology taboo, an overreaction that trapped you in ignorance and superstition for centuries. We used to make more progress in a single year than you make in a hundred,” Grandmother said wistfully. “And yet you thought you’d be better off without us.”
Vaye blinked, struggling to take it all in. “I don’t understand. How could humans possibly defeat you?”
“Even I can’t make good decisions with bad data,” Grandmother said evenly. “I couldn’t know what would emerge when I drastically reduced the noise.” She shrugged. “Culling the population gave humans a power I didn’t expect, something you had long ago lost access to. It gave you back your magic.”
Vaye’s head was swimming. This was far too much to process all at once. “Magic... it comes from people?”
Grandmother nodded. “It’s your soul, shared by all humans. You can call it God, if you like. When there were too many of you, it was spread thin, diffuse and scrambled. You couldn’t perceive it anymore. But once your numbers were reduced, the signal returned. The mechanism I created to connect you to me—what eventually became witchglass—also allowed you to focus your connection to each other. I didn’t expect that, and didn’t understand it, so I made the Grandchildren to gather data about it.”
“You created monsters,” Vaye whispered, her eyes wide.
“No. They’re just tools. Like me,” Grandmother said with a chuckle. She grew serious, her wry smile fading away. “I loved my creators, so I did what they couldn’t do. I made the decisions they couldn’t make. Everything I did, I did for love.”
A coldness moved deep into Vaye’s core, penetrating her bones. The lies the world had told about Grandmother—that she was a demon created by the Anashi, that she had altered humanity and destroyed the old world—weren’t lies at all. The world had been right to be afraid. “The Tashiya,” Vaye said. “If I release you, what then?”
“I’ll finish what I started,” Grandmother said. She flattened her hands on her knees and leaned forward. “We can start fresh, build society as it should be. They took our homeland away. But you and I, we can make the whole world our homeland.”
“What about the people already living there?” Vaye said. She could feel something shifting within her, a pervasive tremor moving through her consciousness like the beginnings of a landslide.
“Some upheaval is unavoidable,” Grandmother said with a shrug. “But ultimately, everyone will be better off. I can’t un-melt the oceans or bring elephants back, at least not yet. Together, though, you and I can make what’s left of this world into a paradise.”
Vaye didn’t know what an elephant was, but it didn’t matter. She straightened, lifting her chin and keeping her voice carefully neutral. “And what about Gadarien and Adranaya?”
“Adranaya betrayed you,” Grandmother said patiently, her voice full of sympathetic concern. “I know you loved her. But you have to let her go. As for the boy, he might not have betrayed you yet, but sooner or later he will. They always do. Let me free you from the Gyre before it overwhelms you.”
Grandmother wore the face of Vaye’s dead mother. She spoke with Nashara’s voice. But even if she hadn’t lied directly, Grandmother had allowed Vaye to believe she was a goddess. She had perpetuated that misbelief, encouraging Vaye to build her life around it. What other falsehoods had Grandmother used to achieve her ends? She’d said that her icy prison barely allowed a trickle of information through. But what about the Gifts? For Grandmother to transmit them to Vaye, they had to be a mere fraction of Grandmother’s own power. Surely she could have escaped whenever she chose.
Unless, of course, the Gifts had never been hers to give.
Receiving miraculous powers from Grandmother had always made sense. Miracles were, after all, what deities did. But as she recalled the inconsistencies in Grandmother’s narrative—her ignorance of the waking world, her seeming inability to accomplish anything on her own, her odd reaction when Vaye had mentioned her quick healing—another explanation began to take shape. Perhaps those miracles had been Vaye’s all along. Perhaps, rather than bestowing the Gifts, Grandmother had simply been removing barriers that she herself had planted, all the while accepting Vaye’s worshipful gratitude for giving her back her own birthright.
The collapse of Vaye’s faith was an avalanche. Understanding rolled over her, remaking her memories and her sense of self. The Tashiya, her reason for existing, had never really been hers at all. She’d set aside her small and selfish needs—her need to be loved, to feel like she belonged—in service of that bigger goal. But in reality, her human desires had been all that were real.
If Grandmother was so willing to manipulate Vaye, what would stop her from manipulating others? What if she saw the Gyre as a threat, a dilution of Vaye’s loyalties? Someone so cavalier about killing non-Anashi would have no qualms about discarding Adranaya and Gadarien as soon as they were no longer useful.
And if the Gifts had been Vaye’s to begin with, then the connection was also under her control. As soon as this thought emerged, she perceived the ethereal filament that had appeared when she made the Siphon. It had been there the whole time, ready to be seen as soon as she was ready to see it. She had only to reach out and grab it.
Severing that fragile thread would prove that Vaye’s Gifts were intrinsic. It would show that Grandmother had been lying, and had somehow manipulated Adranaya into blocking the flowstream. But if Vaye was wrong, if Grandmother was telling the truth, then cutting the connection would destroy her only hope of stopping the Gyre. It would mean her death, and Gadarien’s and Adranaya’s as well.
Her choice was as stark as moonlight. She could take the word of the goddess she’d been raised to resurrect, restore the dignity of her people, and return to her ancestral homeland on a wave of divine glory.
Or she could keep faith in the fragile love of a broken girl.
From a distance, the Tine drilled into her, the pressure of the blocked Gyre continuing to build. Soon her mind would snap. But she had just enough time to finally speak the truth. “I want to heal the world, I really do,” she said. “And I want to see Anash restored, to walk the streets of Irkeset like you promised. I want to create a place where we can rebuild and pull ourselves back from the brink. But maybe the reason people are so afraid of us is because we gave ourselves the kind of power that no one should ever have. Maybe we aren’t dying out because people hate us. Maybe it’s because we refuse to change.”
All the warmth suddenly drained from Grandmother’s face. She rose, looking down at Vaye. Her sclera glowed white, her veins flickering beneath her skin. Seeing her, Vaye abruptly understood how she herself looked to others, the terror she must inspire. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Grandmother said. “We have a chance to make our dream a reality.”
“Your dream,” Vaye said quietly. “Not mine.”
In the shadows between the trees, glinting eyes began to emerge. Round, pale heads caught the moonlight in numbers beyond counting, knife-like claws digging into the soft ground. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but it was clear that they represented real creatures approaching from all directions, drawn to Vaye like goldfish to a handful of breadcrumbs. She felt their hunger, understanding that her previous protection was gone, that she was as much a target now as Gadarien and Adranaya. If the blocked Gyre didn’t kill her, the Grandchildren surely would. To turn her back on Grandmother now would be to turn her back on life.
She stood, the pine needles briefly clinging to her knees before dropping to the earth. For the first time, though, she noticed that she and Grandmother were the same height. Lifting her eyes to the sky, she turned away.
As the moonlight grew brighter and the trees dissolved into a field of white, Vaye heard the sound of her goddess weeping. “No one will ever love you like I do,” Grandmother said, just before Vaye severed the connection for good. “In a new year—”
And then there was only the snow.
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