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

IRAVAN

The shock of the connection with Ahilya rippled through Iravan.

Bharavi, Nakshar, the children he would never have, flickered in his mind.

He shivered, trying to stabilize.

These encounters with his wife were always sudden and out of his control.

He had become better at concealing his reactions, but the pain Ahilya had shown him today, the rage, pulsed under his skin, flooding his veins, itching.

He willed himself to silence, letting the stillness of the jungle seep into him.

Under a large banyan tree, darkness ate away at his silvery light.

Trees stood like sentinels in the shadows, vines hanging off them, motionless.

Shafts of dying sunlight illuminated a trunk with gray moss, and a heavy carpet of undergrowth.

Iravan had cleared a very precise quadrangle in front of his rock where lush grass grew.

Slowly, still reeling from Ahilya, he began trajecting again.

Soft earth flew upward in a gushing waterfall that solidified into the likeness of a carved door.

Wood shards scraped into the shape of a thousand jasmines.

Iravan flexed his fingers, and the carvings on the door bloomed into true flowers that released an intoxicating scent.

The everpower flooded him.

He called the use of it trajection, but it was not that, not truly.

He had no language for it yet.

When he alone wielded it, what did it matter what it was called? He understood this power beyond articulation.

He wielded it as naturally as breathing.

In the act of subsuming the falcon-yaksha, in becoming the yaksha, Iravan had forsaken trajection and embraced this new everpower, one so intimate that it was him.

He did not intend for anyone else to ever get such dangerous, intoxicating control that could shift the planet should he desire it.

He did not desire it.

Not now. Not yet.

Iravan desired to build.

So he cosseted the remains of the architect he had once been—and more dust flew in a small contained tornado, leaves and earth gently swirling and combining with substances sucked from deep within the planet.

The structure in front of him took shape, a shrine, a temple, a grave for what he had lost.

Had Ahilya seen this? The thought shamed him, as though he had shown her a weakness.

In that itself was a quiet grief.

Since when had being weak in front of Ahilya become a bad thing?

Grief was too painful.

He clung to the other emotion, for shame, at least, was familiar.

It had been three months since he had last seen his wife outside the Etherium.

He had gathered—stolen—hundreds of architects and nearly all the sungineers from the landed ashram of humanity.

Neither he nor Ahilya had said a word to each other as the exodus occurred.

Instead, he had bowed to her in solemn gratitude for allowing her citizens to leave.

Even if he had given her little choice, he owed her that much respect as he contradicted her wish.

She was no longer just a councilor.

She was the councilor, the only one who could control the architecture of Irshar.

The only one who stood in his way.

Tiredness overwhelmed him.

He missed her so much that it ached.

I am getting old, he thought, rubbing his eyes.

I need it to end.

The structure in front of him continued to form.

Wood chips stacked atop each other, the walls deckled.

Water turned into glinting icicles to hang like crystalline lamps along the door.

Phosphorescence shone everywhere, and furniture formed within the home, a desk, a closet, a bed, visible through the shimmering ice-windows.

Chairs grew out of the soil, not high-backed and carved like his seat in the Garden, but comfortable, low, meant for household tasks and ease.

A bitter smile formed on Iravan’s face at the suggestion of this domesticity.

If survival had not been the cost, Iravan would have found his battle of wills with Ahilya a diverting challenge.

Instead, fury rose in him.

They had come so close to reconciliation and understanding.

They had come so close to finally ending the Virohi together.

And she had chosen them.

She alone knew the pain of separation.

She had seen his fight with the falcon-yaksha, and experienced the way complete beings had been treated.

She had campaigned for change once.

If she wanted to, she could simply will the Virohi out of the architecture—give them to him so he could destroy them once and for all.

How could she put him in a position where he had no choice but to alienate Irshar, despite his desire to make amends? They could have given the survivors new life if not for her stubbornness.

But she had left him alone… with himself.

His resentment found expression in the construction.

The chairs began to decay.

The carved wooden door began to warp, and the jasmines on it grew dark, withered, fell away.

The tiny icicle lamps and delicate ice windows burst into silent shards, whipping toward Iravan’s cheeks like sharp tears.

The home he was building shook as though an earthrage was imminent.

Iravan took a deep breath, and mastered himself with an effort.

The decay paused, then shook once, before the construction bloomed anew.

He could not afford to rage, not with the everpower.

This ability, that was neither Ecstasy nor trajection but superior to both, was connected deeply to his emotion and his capital desire.

The Moment, the Deepness, the Etherium, even the silence where the falcon-yaksha once lived, had all combined into a singular evervision.

It had been this way ever since he fully embraced his Ecstasy to build the original Irshar in the skies.

Then, he did not understand it.

He stumbled through it blindly, merging all the ashrams together.

Since he subsumed the falcon though, he’d realized that in reality there were never three separate visions.

He could manipulate them all at once, like he could move his hands and feet though they were separate parts of his body.

Now he understood: there was very little that lay between himself and sheer possibility.

The only mystery that remained was his lack of control in the Etherium he shared with Ahilya.

In a futile test Iravan called for the connection to her, but nothing happened.

It irked him to distraction that she alone had that control.

Was this some sort of balance? Everpower for him and the Etherium for her? He thought the Etherium a place of guidance, a place that could not be controlled, and there had been a deep relief in that, even joy.

But if she could do it, could he? Was this only available to complete beings like her, or perhaps only to her?

She was so much more than just a complete being.

She was… she was Ahilya.

She had let him into her mind many times during the last three months, sometimes when surrounded by others in Irshar, other times to see what he was doing, at all times aloof and cool.

Her aloofness terrified him.

He was so scared that the cosmic creatures were corrupting her beyond hope that the glint of her rage today was a relief, a gift.

Oh my love, he thought in sudden despair.

We have come to an ending we were headed for all along.

The house had become a multi-storied thing of beauty, its roof slated to allow rainwater to slough off, its ice windows glazed and glittering.

Jasmine bloomed on all the walls, a rich tapestry of tiny white flowers.

Stone statues of falcons in mid-flight ornamented the front door.

Iravan hadn’t consciously built any of this, yet the house formed due to a buried intention, a stream trickling in the front, a verandah, trees that grew in the shape of a playhouse, a yard and swings and a slide.

His hand drifted to the blade of pure possibility he wore, and just for an instant he thought of whether he could do with it what he intended.

Whether he could… return.

“Iravan-ve,”

a voice said.

He turned to see a young boy stand by the trees, staring in wonder at the construction.

With his tousled hair and wide eyes, Darsh looked younger than fifteen, but that impression swiftly left Iravan as the boy neared him.

An air of seriousness hung around the child, one Iravan had noticed that first time he had met him back in Nakshar’s deathcage.

In the past few months, Darsh had grown taller by several inches and now reached nearly to Iravan’s shoulder.

A rush of pride and affection filled Iravan on seeing him.

This young man was one of the best, most skilled Ecstatics of the Garden. Iravan’s lieutenant.

“What are you building?”

Darsh asked, coming to join Iravan on the rock.

“Is this for the Ecstatics? For after we’ve united with our yakshas?”

What was he doing? Building a home for Ahilya—for his children—despite knowing everything he did? It was pathetic.

He had returned to this project often, no matter where he and Darsh stopped in the jungle, building and rebuilding idly, almost as a form of meditation.

But for the first time, the pointlessness of it hit him.

He had seen Ahilya’s anger. In destroying the Virohi, he would destroy any future with her.

His hand dropped from the blade around his neck.

Enough, he thought.

The house exploded into tiny shards.

Mulch, wood, bark and leaves spun silently around them in a gust of wind.

The falcon statues splintered then dissolved into gray dust.

Jasmine putrefied, its rotting stench smothering the air as the flowers disappeared.

The clearing lay bare as though there was never a home, never this indulgence, and Iravan thought in grim acceptance, What purpose this building? What need for such a construction? His marriage to Ahilya was meaningless now.

This house was a dream, a foolishness.

It was truly over between them.

He answered Darsh’s question with his own.

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,”

the boy said, a sullen twist to his mouth.

“The presence in the Deepness has not returned. Maybe I am not releasing Nakshar’s Constant when I traject.”

“That’s not possible. All trajection, Ecstatic or otherwise, releases the raga. Each time you traject you call out to your yaksha.”

It was one of the earliest things he and Ahilya had discovered together, all those months ago in Nakshar, when they could never have contemplated where life would bring them.

They’d hypothesized, along with Dhruv and Naila, that within trajection lay the seed of its demise, but none of them could have known how true that statement would be.

Ahilya had ended the earthrages and tied all the cosmic creatures to this dimension, effectively ending any split of a Virohi.

She had ended the rise of new architects in the future, and because of her in time trajection would die—something Iravan ought to thank her for.

But that would only occur if Iravan completed his part of the task.

Unless all architects alive united with their yakshas, they would be reborn with the power to traject, Virohi or no Virohi.

What would occur to civilization then? Everything Iravan had achieved could be erased away.

Ecstasy could be outlawed once more, years from now.

Or perhaps architects would rise again, returning to what they once had been.

Perhaps they would be imprisoned, the very power of trajection disdained, and all architects become slaves.

It did not take too much imagination to consider the many paths civilization could take if a few people continued to have incredible power.

Whether oppressors or the oppressed, nothing would really change for the architects, their destinies controlled by the power they were born with.

Iravan could not allow that.

The only way to ensure equity was to take the power away once and for all, and give architects the hope of one day becoming complete beings.

The architects of the Garden were counting on this.

They had joined him to learn to unite with their yakshas.

The fact that the Garden was the only place they could traject anymore was important not because of trajection, but because without the power they could not release the raga that would signal their presence to their yakshas.

But the yakshas were missing.

Iravan had not seen any for months.

The last time he had seen any was when several aerial yakshas joined the falcon—the falcon that he had subsumed.

Is that why the other yakshas eluded him? Because he had absorbed their leader? He needed to find them, and he had been lucky that Darsh of all people felt an inkling of a presence in the Deepness.

Since the boy had told him of it, Iravan had visited the jungle with him as often as he could to track the creatures down, hoping to be led by the boy’s signal.

“Tell me again what you experienced in the Deepness,” he said.

Darsh made a face. Iravan had asked him this already several times, and the boy’s tone grew annoyed, though he did not refuse to answer.

“When Reyla and I were trajecting, I sensed a presence in the Deepness.

A fluid one, and only briefly, and the both of us saw it.

It was unfamiliar to her, but I felt like I’d seen it before.

We followed it to the Moment and I could see it there too, though Reyla couldn’t.

That’s when we told you about it.”

It was very similar to Iravan’s experience.

Only he had been able to see the falcon in the Moment; that was how he knew Darsh was witnessing his own yaksha.

Since then, Darsh had received impressions of different parts of the jungle in his Etherium, in the same way that Iravan had once because of the falcon.

Of course, he hadn’t known back then what was happening, but these Ecstatics would receive the benefit of his experience.

Iravan understood the boy’s yaksha was likely leading him into the jungle to unite.

In reality, his problems were not finding the yakshas or assisting other architects in completing themselves.

Those were minor aspects of his capital desire.

His task was to end the Virohi—the source of all ill.

Ahilya had embraced the cosmic creatures, and it was already affecting her.

In time, they would affect all the other citizens of Irshar, in ways none of them could comprehend.

He needed to axe the root of the tree, wrench it from its depths and remove all presence of it.

Only Ahilya stood in his way.

In desperation, he sought the Etherium within his eversion for a clue again.

The darkness between his brows flared.

His many forms cycled in front of him, weaving in and out of his vision.

Iravan flitted between them: he swept his spouse, Mara, into a dance; he became Agni who beat the drums in their ashram in celebration;

he was Mohini, and he—she—was asleep between her spouses, Taruin and Radha; he kissed Vishwam, tasting his husband, the slight dryness of his lips, no, not his husband, Nidhirv’s, the man who he had once been in another lifetime.

And even as that thought occurred, Iravan became aware that he was sitting differently, his shoulder sunken like Nidhirv’s, the muscles moving in unfamiliar memorable ways.

Iravan held this awareness, as if to fix the image of Nidhirv even though he knew he had no control in the Etherium.

Ever since he’d subsumed the falcon-yaksha, the memories of his past lives had become more easily accessible to him, to a point where he could reach out and submerge in one of their lives for long hours, understanding who they were.

It was a dangerous balance—to not lose himself within them.

Iravan had finally found a method to separate his past lives enough to study them.

Everpower swirled within him and dust rose, leaves churning in the shape of a man, a memory.

The shape coalesced on the forest floor like a ghost.

Nidhirv appeared made of wind and tree bark and dust.

Unlike in the Etherium, the projection’s eyes glowed silver.

He looked more real than the wisp in Iravan’s mind, but more feral too.

Nidhirv stalked forward, a strange smile on his face, his silvery eyes flashing, and Iravan thought, What are you trying to tell me?

Had he been alone, Iravan would have strengthened the projection, trying to understand the edges of his capital desire.

But Darsh’s mouth fell open.

The boy staggered back from Nidhirv, tripping over himself.

Iravan knew he was scaring the child.

He dropped his sight in the third vision, and Nidhirv disappeared in a huff of leaves, inches from Darsh.

The shape drifted away, carried by the breeze.

Iravan clenched his fist then released it.

Frustration was futile.

He would not learn secrets from them today, and did it matter at all? He had learned to work with what he had.

Iravan turned to Darsh.

“When you call your yaksha now, are you trajecting the same pattern as when you saw it before?”

Darsh shook his head, confused.

“No. You said all trajection releases Nakshar’s Constant, so I didn’t think it mattered what or how I trajected.”

“It shouldn’t,”

Iravan confirmed.

“But if the yaksha is being so elusive, then it won’t hurt to try what you did before again.”

He gestured to Darsh to enter the Deepness.

“Traject that pattern,”

he said.

“Let’s see if we can lure your yaksha out.”