Page 2 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)

AHILYA

In the silence of the jungle, the mutters of the architects echoed loud and restless. Ahilya moved to distance herself from them, her tread quiet yet careful.

The care was ingrained in her after a lifetime of exploring the unpredictable jungle, though there was hardly any need for such caution anymore.

It had been three months since the last earthrage devastated all the ashrams.

Now those storms were over.

Despite the thriving foliage, the jungle lay still, unnatural and quiescent, as though dead.

No, Ahilya thought.

Not dead.

Merely resting.

Merely watchful.

There were no animals in the jungle, but the Virohi seemed to watch her from between leaves that stirred in the breeze, tracking her footsteps.

The architects with her couldn’t sense the creatures, she knew, but she could feel the Virohi in the whispers of the trees, in the endless dark depths that even her bright sungineering torch could not pierce.

The cosmic creatures studied her with longing and rage.

A deep familiarity emanated from them, filling her with dread.

, they whispered.

Her hands slowly shook in terror.

This isn’t real, she thought.

The Virohi are in Irshar. They are not in the jungle. They cannot be.

Leaves stirred.

People murmured behind her.

Evening sunshine fell in dappled shafts, intersecting with the light of her torch, illuminating a patch of grass here, a thick bush there.

She swept aside a branch, cut a small notch in a passing tree, and hacked away the clustered vines in front of her.

She tried not to give in to the fear that always arose when the cosmic creatures called her.

The Virohi had been silent when she left the habitat three days ago, but leaving was still a risk.

The habitat—Irshar, as everyone had taken to calling it—had grown unruly, beyond her control.

A couple of months before, the Virohi-imbued pathways, roads and walls had listened to her persuasion by settling into fixed forms when she’d asked them to.

Lately, they had begun changing with more frequency.

That the Virohi were reaching to her so easily, beyond the confines of Irshar… It was a sign of her weakening hold over them.

It was a sign of their control of her.

They were growing agitated. She was needed in Irshar to stabilize the architecture.

Yet she was needed in the jungle too.

It was why she was in charge of this mission.

Councilor or not, her true vocation was to be an archeologist, and her task was to find a new home away from the ever-changing habitat.

That was why she had been sent here, leading ten people into the dark, guided by nothing but her intuition.

Ahilya ducked under a heavy branch, her cheek brushing stray vines.

Moisture hung in the air, heavy and oppressive.

Dark green moss silenced her footsteps.

She trod over fallen branches and roots, the undergrowth as still as the rest of the forest.

Twice, she had to circle back—something she had never done in a moving jungle.

It unnerved her, this stillness.

Irshar’s council had expected life to return to the jungle, as the small creatures of the landed ashrams expanded into this new ecosystem.

Yet though leaves susurrated in hushed tones, the bursting green was grim and devoid of chirrups or birdsong.

It made the hairs rise on Ahilya’s neck.

This was still an alien jungle, one that all of them had abandoned for thousands of years.

No living creature was used to it, not even the squirrels and mice that had undoubtedly climbed up the trees and burrowed into the earth. They were waiting, and wary. Just like humanity’s survivors. Just like her expeditionary team.

A glance behind confirmed this.

Irshar’s architects marched in formation, yet their voices were growing louder, laced with bitterness at their inability to traject the jungle.

Sharp words filtered to Ahilya, whispers of her name, skepticism regarding her authority to lead them.

This expedition was unlike any of the others she had undertaken before.

In the past, she had circumvented obstacles, split the vines that had reached for her, danced through the landscape like she was one of the plants herself. What little she had not managed had been managed for her by an accompanying architect. Yet none of the ones with her now trajected the jungle at all. Instead, each of them wore a bracelet made of seeds, remnants of the once-airborne ashrams. Tendrils curled from the seeds, wrapping around the architects’ arms, all the way up to their shoulders.

Pari, an architect who had once belonged to Reikshar, twisted; the vines she was trajecting strangled her, and a scream formed behind terrified eyes—

Then the light shifted, and Ahilya blinked.

Pari shrugged, muttering under her breath, her imagined strangulation still echoing in Ahilya’s mind.

Ahilya tried not to stare.

Not real, she thought again, in a slow building panic.

Not real.

See with your eyes.

Hear with your ears. Notice what is real.

The tattoos on the architects’ faces were dim, a mockery of the power the architects had once had.

Trajection in the jungle had always been difficult, but now it was impossible.

The earthrages had always been tied to trajection and in ending one, Ahilya had unwittingly damaged the other.

There was only one place the power truly worked anymore—Iravan’s Garden.

She had slowed without meaning to.

Eskayra, who had been marching with the rest of the team, caught up to her.

“You seem uncertain,”

she said, her voice husky.

“Are we lost?”

The other woman was shorter than Ahilya by a head, her build muscular, her delicate features exceedingly beautiful.

Clipped dark hair framed a dewdrop face, and her perfect white teeth glinted in the beams of the torchlight.

A few months ago, Ahilya had found Eskayra with the citizens that had stood against the cosmic creatures.

They had reforged their friendship, but in Eskayra’s light brown eyes now, Ahilya could see the same desire from years before, when they had been more than friends.

She shook her head now, as much in answer to Eskayra’s unspoken proposition as to her question.

“No,”

she replied.

“We’re not far. This is the route Irshar told me to take.”

“You mean the Virohi told you.”

Ahilya didn’t reply. They both knew the answer to that question. The habitat was Irshar; it was the embedded Virohi.

Eskayra touched her arm and spoke in a low tone.

“My dear, are the Virohi leading you right?”

The others clustered around to listen. Ahilya might be leading the way, but Eskayra was the one the expeditionary team answered to. She had mobilized them all to the cause, insisting that finding alternatives to Irshar was a priority. It was Eskayra who had become the voice for every non-trajector in Irshar. Eskayra who even the architects of Irshar obeyed, because she was neither an architect, nor associated with one. She was, in all ways that mattered, a complete being.

Once Ahilya had thought she was a complete being too, but she had changed against her will. She had battled with the Virohi, but she had invited them into herself inadvertently. Iravan had warned her the Virohi would corrupt her, and for the last several months she had become lost in her mind. The image of Pari being strangled, the delusion that the Virohi were in the jungle somehow, the constant voices in her head, all these were mild examples of the distortions she endured. Horror and grief snuck up on her when she least expected it. Eskayra was right to doubt her.

, the Virohi said in the Etherium.

Ahilya felt the sungineering torch in her hand tremble violently, flashes of light dancing in the rich darkness. Terror overtook her as a mirrored chamber glinted between her brows without her consent. She blinked rapidly until she was looking at the assembled archeologists in the dying sunlight within the jungle once more.

The unseen map in her head vanished.

“We’re here,”

she said, breathless, raising a limp hand.

Relieved sighs and nods rippled through the expeditionary team, though a couple of people looked skeptical.

Pari frowned.

“Are you sure?”

“This place looks like everywhere else,”

a non-architect called Ranjeev added.

“How do you know—”

“She knows,”

Eskayra cut in.

“This is Ahilya-ve of Nakshar you’re talking to. She controls Irshar. More working, less questioning, if you please. We’re here.”

The members of the expedition exchanged glances, but no one objected. At Eskayra’s gesture, they began fanning out and hacking at the vegetation with their machetes and axes.

Ahilya watched them, saying nothing.

Ranjeev had asked a fair question, but there was little more to the answer than they already knew.

For months, the team had tried to find a site for a new city in the jungle.

Irshar was solely dependent on Ahilya’s will; it was why finding a new home was imperative, but every mission had ended in disaster.

All the sites where Eskayra’s team had begun building had failed—one destroyed by a strange forest fire, another crumbling to ash, and the third collapsing on top of the team, who barely escaped with their lives.

No one had been able to explain the strange phenomena, though Airav suggested it was the remembered instability of the jungle, passed down seed to seed, a legacy of constant earthrages.

Eskayra, and the council, despaired over ever escaping Irshar.

Eventually, out of desperation, Ahilya had asked the cosmic creatures for potential habitats, and a map had formed in her head like a nebulous idea, revealing bit by bit.

Charged by the rest of the council to follow this lead, Ahilya had woven her way in the jungle for the last three days, turning at that tree, going past this waterfall, following not a sungineering tracker but a vague sense of rightness in her head.

She had told the team as much when they camped at night, but she was met with blank stares.

To non-architects it sounded like madness.

She thought the architects on her team would understand at least, but they saw the entire path to their trajection before they built it.

What Ahilya was doing was strange even by their esoteric standards.

She ought to be grateful people were continuing to work with her despite her communion with the cosmic creatures.

The non-architects had nowhere else to go, but the architects of Irshar could have easily defected to Iravan’s Garden, driven by their abhorrence of the Virohi.

Her husband, after all, wanted to claim all architects.

It was mere fortune, twisted as it was, that these remaining ones feared Ecstasy more than they feared the Virohi.

She sat down silently on the closest rock, her fingers worrying at the torch.

Hushed words came to her as the rest of the team discussed the cosmic creatures among themselves.

Sunlight beamed through the trees, and citizens plunged spades into the moist earth, removing weeds and brambles, lighting fires to burn the brush away.

Her mistakes had brought their entire civilization to ruin, survival become forfeit.

Thousands of people had died in the crash of the Conclave.

She had read the reports of Irshar’s council, and she had attended the mass vigil.

Like every other citizen, Ahilya had held a burning ember cupped within a clay pot, an ancient tradition common to all the sister ashrams when there was no body to return to the earth.

Irshar had blazed like fire that night, each ember signifying a death, yet Ahilya knew the tradition could not encompass humanity’s loss.

Cities she did not even know the names of had crashed in the skyrage.

Men, women, children, families… Mothers and little ones, the disabled and the elderly, innocent lives who had done nothing wrong except exist in the same time as she and her husband.

Ahilya shuddered, the weight of this knowledge crushing her.

She had no defense.

She did not deserve Eskayra’s kindness.

She deserved nothing.

Eskayra crouched next to her.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have questioned you in front of the others. Not about the Virohi.”

Still wretched, Ahilya waved away the apology.

“Do you see them now?”

Eskayra said.

Ahilya shrugged.

She was always aware of them in her mind, though true communication took place in the Etherium—but were the two things really very different? A shift of her vision—that was all it took to see the Virohi in the mirrored chambers.

they crooned, and she wrenched away.

The mirrored chamber was where she attempted to persuade the Virohi to stay bonded to Irshar.

Without that persuasion, pathways in Irshar became underwater caverns.

Homes split into two, falling into chasms.

When once a playground had changed into green rock, Ahilya had wrested control of the architecture back from the Virohi to save several children from being buried alive.

It was a close thing—the children had escaped with their lives, though several were severely wounded.

Irshar continued to suffer casualties, embedded as it was with the Virohi.

She tapped at her citizen-ring, a crude approximation resembling a rudra bead, a product of the sungineering they still had in the ashram.

The bead chimed and Chaiyya’s face formed over Ahilya’s hand, the hologram flickering in and out.

Once the Senior Architect of Nakshar, now one of the many councilors of Irshar, she looked tired as all of them did these days.

Her round face was wan, her braid almost entirely gray.

In another time it would have been incongruous to see her dressed not in her regal architect uniform but in expeditionary clothes, a head lamp on her forehead and devices strapped to her wrists.

Yet Chaiyya had been waiting ever since Ahilya had left Irshar.

Along with Kamala and Meena, members of Ahilya’s personal medical team who hovered behind her even now, she was prepared to follow the expedition into the jungle as soon as given the signal.

“Ahilya,”

Chaiyya said.

“Did you find the site?”

“Just now. The builders have begun working.”

“Good, that’s good. Send us the coordinates immediately, please. We are worried about you.”

“Transferring now,”

Eskayra replied. She tapped at her sungineering beads, and Chaiyya nodded in satisfaction.

It was bizarre that Ahilya needed her own medical team, to watch for her health every single day. When had she deteriorated so much?

Or was it that she had always been in this space, but for once was getting the help she needed all her life? A part of her wanted to deny this assistance—she did not deserve such care, not after what she had done—but she could not even summon the will to fight this mandate from the council.

Everything had changed.

The ground beneath her feet was unsteady even while the world grew still.

She could barely believe she was surrounded by so many people out on an expedition, where once she had fought to conduct one alone.

Eskayra was sending latitudes and longitudes to Chaiyya—a method so archaic it was only remembered by sungineers.

They had all returned to lost ways of living. Ahilya had no way to measure anything anymore, least of all the chaos of her mind.

Over the hologram, Chaiyya frowned.

“You are not far at all. We could be there by sunset. Yet it took you three days from Irshar?”

The question was not meant as an accusation, but Ahilya still felt compelled to explain and smooth any impending trouble.

“We did not travel in the most efficient manner,”

she said softly.

She did not give voice to her mistrust of the Virohi—there was already too much suspicion within the group, indeed all of Irshar, regarding her and the cosmic creatures—and what would speaking of that achieve? One way or the other, to trust the Virohi and arrive here had been their only option.

Chaiyya knew not to push further.

The architect merely hmmed, raising her eyebrows.

“How is the ashram?”

Ahilya asked into the silence.

“Undulating all day,”

Chaiyya answered.

The image over Ahilya’s ring wobbled into a map of the city. Several parts of the design glowed crimson, indicating architecture ready to break.

“We’re monitoring it,”

Chaiyya said tiredly.

“It looks worse than the last few days, but it ought to keep until you return.”

“I can get to it now. I just need a few minutes to rest.”

“No,”

the other woman said at once.

“Don’t start until I get there, Ahilya. That’s the entire point of us coming into the jungle. You’re tired already and you can’t make mistakes. Let me guide you through it. Just practice the initial exercises until then.”

“I don’t—”

“Promise me, Ahilya,”

Chaiyya said, her voice hard.

“You won’t attempt it until I arrive.”

Ahilya looked from the hologram over to Eskayra who watched silently. She sighed.

“All right,”

she said.

“I’ll wait.”

Chaiyya relaxed, her relief palpable.

“We’ll be there soon.”

She cut the connection.

For the last three nights, Ahilya had resisted the call of the cosmic creatures, trying not to be pulled into the mirrored chambers, but she did not know how long she could avoid it, how long she should.

Earthrages were not a threat, but what did it matter if the last survivors of humanity could be buried under their homes at any moment? Ahilya had invited the precursors of earthrages into their homes—a worse thing than being plagued by the rages themselves.

Now there was no more time to waste.

No more time to rest.

She tried to school her features and contain her shivering, but a shadow fell on her and Ahilya knew any subterfuge was useless.

“Do you need to return to Irshar?”

Eskayra asked, touching her hand.

“I can send you to Chaiyya instead of her coming here.”

Yes, Ahilya thought. It would be easier. The persuasion—and any exercise to calm her mind—was easier closer to Irshar’s core tree, the vriksh. But she shook her head.

“We’ve only just gotten here. It’ll take you days to assess if this site works for a city. I can’t ask your architects to waste their energy on me.”

“None of us want you burdened anymore than you are. If Chaiyya knew how hard this has been for you, she would suggest one of my architects take you back too. I could have them make you a nest. Return you to Irshar within hours.”

Eskayra was being kind. Ahilya took in the locked shoulders of the architects and the stiffness of their jaws. It was not from exhaustion, she knew; it was from the idea of answering to her, of changing their plan for her, she who had brought humanity to its knees.

“Can you afford to waste the few seeds we have left to traject me back and forth?”

she asked.

“Making a new city is our only real hope for any future. This mission is more important than me.”

“Is it?”

Esk said skeptically.

“What will happen if you cannot convince the Virohi, my dear?”

If she lost control of the Virohi, they would try to escape their form within Irshar.

People would get hurt, more than they did now, and who knew if Ahilya would ever be able to lock the cosmic creatures back into the architecture.

It had taken all of the everdust—an element they no longer had—the first time.

If she lost control, then every day could be filled with tragedies.

Worse, the Virohi could affect their world again, both in the jungle and in the skies.

If humanity was lucky, it would endure a slow decay filled with failing architecture, but if not, a massive final storm could erase the fragile life the survivors had attempted to build.

The last of humanity would become extinct.

It was what they’d faced only a few months ago, when Ahilya had made the fateful decision to wrap the Virohi into Irshar.

“It would be awful,”

she relented.

“But the council chose this option for a reason. We all have our duties. These architects are meant to build with you, and Chaiyya is supposed to guide me.”

“She should have joined the expeditionary team, then,”

Eskayra said, frowning.

They’d had this conversation before; Irshar could not afford for two councilors to go on this expedition, and Chaiyya’s infant daughters needed her.

It was decided that Ahilya needed to go, while Chaiyya did not.

Did Esk really expect Irshar to bow down further to Ahilya’s needs? It was stunning how she refused to see how much Ahilya was disliked.

How badly she had made mistakes.

That was the real reason Ahilya had been asked not to overextend—to not make any more decisions without anyone else at the helm.

She should have been tried as a criminal, but here they were, dependent on her, and the council was now doing all it could to control her.

“Why do you insist this?”

Ahilya asked softly.

“I agreed to listen to the council. To act in a manner they see fit.”

“Did you agree because you think they are right? Or because you think you deserve punishment? Chaiyya is supposed to take care of you, but how are you to do your job if she recuses herself whenever it is convenient for her? The council makes its calculation, but being away from Irshar has been hard for you. Every day you suffer more.”

“You expect me to fail,”

she said, uncomfortable.

“You’re insisting because you don’t expect me to be able to convince the Virohi without Chaiyya.”

Eskayra drew back at that, hurt on her face.

“Never. I am concerned about the toll this is taking on you. That doesn’t make me him.”

Ahilya said nothing.

Cataclysms aside there were other costs that only she cared about.

If the cosmic creatures escaped, Iravan would unleash war in his attempt to finally destroy the Virohi.

It was what he was counting on—the failure of her will.

Left to themselves, the councilors of Irshar would have her relinquish the Virohi to him too.

The only reason they had not commanded Ahilya to do so was because removing the cosmic creatures would hurt Irshar.

It was a terrible stalemate.

Irshar was as much a hostage to Ahilya’s actions with the Virohi as it was to Iravan’s desires.

Though he had resources in his Garden, Iravan had refused to share them.

It was another reason Ahilya was here, looking for city-sites.

Eskayra glanced at her, shaking her head.

“He is not a good man.”

He is trying to be, Ahilya thought, but she couldn’t defend this erosion of trust, and how she and Iravan found themselves over and over again at opposite ends of a fight, counting on and waiting for each other to fail.

When had that begun?

She wanted to explain how she saw Iravan to Eskayra.

This was the same man who had once wanted to change things within Nakshar.

Once, both of them had planned for how to raise non-architects to the council.

Though Ahilya had accused him of corruption, she had since understood the difficult task he’d faced.

In his own way, Iravan had challenged sacred laws.

In a society that revered the tradition of marriage he had first risen to his status without children, then wished to raise Naila to councilor, a woman who was not even married.

He had circumvented laws with the force of his charisma and his position, but despite that he had always been driven by his morals.

Now his morals told him to make amends, and he was going to do it.

No more politicking, no more asking, simply one foot in tyranny and the other in hatred, whether or not it hurt them all in the process.

Ahilya had decided to be subservient to the council, but Iravan did not have such compunctions.

He did not care to be accountable—not in the same way she did—but they were not so different.

Ahilya wanted to release her burden, and Iravan did too.

She looked to her council to guide her, to tame her, and Iravan looked to his past and his capital desire.

In a way, neither of them trusted themselves anymore, relinquishing control to someone else, now when they had destroyed everything so badly.

So what if their defeats manifested in different ways?

She understood him, just as she understood his suspicion of the cosmic creatures.

Who better than her to see what the creatures were capable of, when it was she alone who could communicate with them? She knew they’d destroyed life, not just on her planet, but on several others.

Yet buried within her terror of them lay a sickened intimacy.

Despite what she knew, she could not help but see her own desperation to be acknowledged, to be free, within the Virohi.

She had fought against erasure, and so had the cosmic creatures, and they had warped her into giving them insidious compassion.

In Iravan’s eyes it was simply more evidence of her corruption.

Perhaps the council of Irshar thought similarly too, though none had said so to Ahilya.

The truth was that while the councilors of Irshar feared him, they were wary of her too, a woman who controlled humanity’s survival, who was fast becoming part of the creatures they all wished to destroy.

If he was not a good man, could she even think of herself as a good woman? They were both the same.

Terrible versions of what they could have been, perverted reflections of each other.

“You can see him, can’t you?”

Eskayra said.

“In your Etherium?”

Eskayra spoke the word with unfamiliarity.

Ahilya had explained what she knew of the realm, the third vision of an architect, a vision that non-architects had as well, but Eskayra had never fully understood it.

Truthfully, Ahilya barely did too.

The Etherium was where she communicated with the cosmic creatures, and a burst of combined desire had made it possible for her third vision to become intertwined with Iravan’s when they’d stopped the earthrage together, so long ago.

Yet despite knowing this, the Etherium itself remained a strange place to Ahilya.

All she knew was that she could command her third vision—and his—in a way that he could not.

“What do you see when you seek him?”

Eskayra asked.

“Must I spy on my husband as a matter of course now?”

Ahilya replied quietly.

“Is he your husband, still?”

He was. In name alone, for he kept to no rules of any ashram. Where did her loyalties lie when he had chosen to abdicate his own?

Ahilya opened her connection to Iravan.

He appeared behind her eyes: a tall dark man with thick silver hair, cut in a close-cropped way that suited him, and his face clean-shaven.

He sat on a tree trunk, a glistening blade hanging around his neck held by a thin vine.

His skin was lit with silvery-white tattoos, eyes glinting with rings around the pupils as he stared ahead in contemplation.

Iravan no longer looked like the man she had married.

Yet the husband, the lover, the friend, and companion still remained, lurking in the angles of his face, the slight tilt to his mouth, the dark skin she wanted desperately to touch.

“He’s building,” she said.

“Building what? A weapon?”

“I don’t know.

I think he is looking for an alternative to Irshar and the Garden too.”

Iravan stirred, and then he was looking directly at her.

Just for an instant, his silvery eyes hollowed with guilt and regret.

Iravan stared at her, and unbidden images flashed in her mind, of when he had kissed her while she held him after Bharavi’s Ecstatic attack;

when he lay spread-eagled while she took care of him in the habitat; when he shielded her after she lost their child.

She saw both of those men together, the Iravan of her past and the one in her present, who could see the very same things she was seeing.

He flinched as her memories and longing washed over him.

His jaw trembled then hardened.

He tilted his head as though in acceptance of a punishment, and sudden rage grew in Ahilya at his gesture, at this convoluted path he was taking to make amends.

If he wanted, the two of them could atone for all they’d done by working together, find ways for life to flourish, even back away and let someone else take charge for once.

They could have a future.

They could have peace between themselves.

They could have love.

Yet he chose this senseless war.

He chose to fight her, alienate humanity, and destroy the man he had once been, all because he wished to save them from something they had already accepted.

How could he be this blind to his own devolution?

Look at what you have done to us, she thought savagely.

Look at us, Iravan.

Do you remember what we’d wanted once? Children? A home? What about amends to me? How dare you let yourself go down this path? How dare you?

Iravan blinked as though he could hear her.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

Her thoughts skittered around her mind, images of her and Iravan preparing to speak at the Conclave; throwing their wedding garlands around each other, promising to travel the same path or none at all; the both of them believing the best of each other and of humanity, once.

She couldn’t take it, the loss that engulfed her on beholding him like this.

Ahilya collapsed their connection, her breath catching in a soundless sob.

The sounds of the muttering architects returned to her. Eskayra still watched her, chewing her lip. , the Virohi called.

“Enough,”

she said, half to herself.

“I need to calm my mind before Chaiyya gets here. We all have our duties.”

“Remember yourself,”

Eskayra said, squeezing her hand.

“Remember you are not alone. We are here. I am here.”

Ahilya nodded. Her mind still full of Iravan, she braced to find a version of herself to hold onto.