The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin
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Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2017
First Edition: August 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jemisin, N. K., author.
Title: The stone sky / N.K. Jemisin.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Orbit, 2017. | Series: The broken earth ; book 3
13: NASSUN AND ESSUN, ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE WORLD
14: I, AT THE END OF DAYS
CODA: ME, AND YOU
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX 1: A CATALOG OF FIFTH SEASONS THAT HAVE BEEN RECORDED PRIOR TO AND SINCE THE FOUNDING OF THE SANZED EQUATORIAL AFFILIATION, FROM MOST RECENT TO OLDEST
APPENDIX 2: A GLOSSARY OF TERMS COMMONLY USED IN ALL QUARTENTS OF THE STILLNESS
EXTRAS MEET THE AUTHOR
A PREVIEW OF THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS
A PREVIEW OF WAKE OF VULTURES
BY N. K. JEMISIN
PRAISE FOR THE OBELISK GATE
ORBIT NEWSLETTER
To those who’ve survived: Breathe. That’s it. Once more. Good. You’re good. Even if you’re not, you’re alive. That is a victory.
prologue
me, when I was I
TIME GROWS SHORT, MY LOVE. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.
It’s strange, though. My memories are like insects fossilized in amber. They are rarely intact, these frozen, long-lost lives. Usually there’s just a leg, some wing-scales, a bit of lower thorax—a whole that can only be inferred from fragments, and everything blurred together through jagged, dirty cracks. When I narrow my gaze and squint into memory, I see faces and events that should hold meaning for me, and they do, but … they don’t. The person who witnessed these things firsthand is me, and yet not.
In those memories I was someone else, just as the Stillness was someworld else. Then, and now. You, and you.
Then. This land, then, was three lands—though these are in virtually the same position as what will someday be called the Stillness. Repeated Seasons will eventually create more ice at the poles, sinking the sea and making your “Arctics” and “Antarctics” larger and colder. Then, though—
—now, it feels of now as I recall myself of then, this is what I mean when I say that it is strange—
Now, in this time before the Stillness, the far north and south are decent farmland. What you think of as the Western Coastals is mostly wetland and rainforest; those will die out in the next millennium. Some of the Nomidlats doesn’t yet exist, and will be created by volcanic effusion over several thousand years of eruptive pulses. The land that becomes Palela, your hometown? Doesn’t exist. Not so much change, all things considered, but then now is nothing ago, tectonically speaking. When we say that “the world has ended,” remember—it is usually