Page 37 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)

IRAVAN

A paroxysm of coughing overtook him. Slow down, he tried to say, but the dust was too thick. His chest hurt with the effort of breathing. Darsh stood in front of him, staring down at him. Had he seen? Had he understood what Iravan was attempting to do? Dark cords banded themselves around Darsh’s chest, connecting to the Ecstatics in the assembly hall. Darsh clenched his fist, and Ecstatics collapsed. Their limbs broke. Their skins sloughed off. They did not heal.

Waves of blackness enveloped Darsh like mist. The boy was barely visible to Iravan, though still only a few feet away from him, feeding off the power of the others. A few minutes ago, he had stopped shooting his ray of light in the Deepness. He simply stood there, surrounded by vapor, a glint of coldness in his eyes.

Shock hurtled through Iravan to note that Darsh had stopped trajecting. He had never seen Ecstasy like this. True, he had destroyed Viana accidentally, but he had actually trajected into the Moment. He had not simply desired her death. Trajection worked in extradimensional realms, and one had to manipulate the Moment from the Deepness to affect change in reality. Darsh had somehow bypassed this basic tenet. Almost as if…

As if he were using the everpower, Iravan realized, his heart hammering in terror.

Screams rent the air, and Iravan panicked. The ground he and Darsh were standing on was rising. More bodies were spasming, other Ecstatics somehow being blocked from entering the Deepness. How was Darsh doing this? What would it achieve? Iravan stared, not understanding, as Galan, Divena, and Vivek shot up in the air, their bodies impaled by thick curling smoke-like vines, before crashing back into the earth. Were they alive?

A soft breathy voice spoke behind him. Reyla stood there, trembling, her hand touching Iravan’s kurta lightly. She had left the protective circle of the other Ecstatics. For some reason, the cords had not affected her, and now the both of them rose on the platform along with Darsh. Iravan reached out a steadying hand to the girl as the ground shook again and she stumbled.

“Iravan-ve,”

she breathed.

“I tried to tell you. He did this before. I don’t know how, but we were both trying to attempt our evervision, and then he warped the Deepness. Let me show you how.”

Her skin lit up with the light of trajection, and suddenly she was there in the Deepness right next to Iravan’s falcon, her tiny burst of lights glimmering.

Reyla trajected before he could speak, a pattern of astonishing complexity, half-network half-vine, and in the evervision Iravan noticed it was not just the shattered Moment she was trajecting, but she was twisting the velvety Deepness itself, folding the space around Darsh. How was this possible? The realms were separate, and though he asked for his architects to view them the same way, what Reyla was doing was removing the barrier of separation altogether. Iravan had asked for a shift of perspective. This was rendering that shift in reality.

Reyla’s trajection took form. Some of the cords connecting to Darsh stripped away from him in both the visions, reacting to Reyla’s folding of space.

Darsh turned his blue-green gaze toward her. He raised his arm, and brought it down in a slashing motion. Iravan had no time to react.

Reyla’s soft sigh turned into a cry. The little girl fell, her light winking out.

Iravan roared then in grief, and inside him the falcon responded. His ray of light in the Deepness grew sharp like a blade, and he swung toward Darsh’s dust mote without thinking, like he once had in a fight with the falcon-yaksha.

Darsh parried just as easily as the falcon. He trajected his own beam, and split Iravan’s light into two. Iravan hammered with another ray, then another, a barrage of them shooting from him like missiles, but Darsh dodged them easily, him and his yaksha dancing between Iravan’s beam, returning a volley with their own shards of light.

The Deepness transformed, contracting around Iravan like he was in a deathmaze. Wonder and awe bloomed in Iravan as he realized that whatever was happening was mimicking that sungineering technology. Reyla had said that Darsh was doing this, but how? Iravan had no time to dwell on it.

The boy and the incorporeal yaksha spun next to each other, dizzyingly, their shapes becoming impossible to distinguish. A powerful ray of light emerged from them, its edges sharp and thorny, resembling a serrated brittlevine.

The vine enveloped Iravan, crushing him.

In the Deepness, the falcon’s wings grew trapped as Darsh unleashed a massive web of power, each thread sharpened like a blade.

He was attempting to cut Iravan off from the Deepness, but in Iravan’s heightened sense of the evervision, it would not only cut him off from the one realm, it would do so in all the realms. This was not mere trajection. This was a kind of excision.

The boy’s ray of light hurtled toward Iravan, too fast to stop.