Page 43 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)

AHILYA

She did not know how to reply, or whether an answer was expected. Iravan’s Etherium opened to her for the briefest of instants, and his memory took her over in a forest of falling leaves.

The falcon lifting a wing, slashing Darsh down.

Iravan trying to yoke Darsh’s capital desire.

Viana shattering into a million bones.

His grief at their lost pregnancy.

Ahilya flinched, shirking back. The ground in front of them churned, and the slabs of rock cracked in loud rumbles of earth. All the murals shattered, the casual violence of it chilling her. The ground absorbed the debris instantaneously, and everything glimmered for one instant before the entire chamber was lost to shadow with the loss of the phosphorescence. The only light came from Iravan now, and ashes flew in front of Ahilya, tasting like her husband.

Here in this new place, away from everyone else, Iravan flooded her mind. Different though this cavern was, it reminded Ahilya all too much of the habitat when the both of them had discovered everything that had led them down this path. His body was unmoving next to hers, and she stared at him, meeting his silvery gaze. Her Etherium opened wider, and she called out to her husband in a whisper. He appeared, parting the leaves to kneel next to her on the forest floor, though this man’s eyes were a familiar dark.

Her visions wobbled, and the Iravan in the forest and the one in the cave merged, so that it was suddenly impossible to tell one from the other. The cracks in the cave floor resembled the roots of the vriksh. The light leaching from Iravan in front of her intertwined with the shadowy dusk of the Etherium. She blinked, trying to separate the two Iravans, but it was as if she had drunk the most potent rasa. In this great influx of information, Ahilya felt everything from her husband, his confusion, his rage, his grief and terror—and his alien stillness too, as though something terrible that he could not control lurked within his body. What had happened to him? Who had he become?

Ahilya slipped her hand inside his, feeling his cold skin, trying to anchor in his physicality. How long had he been sitting there? Did his feather cloak not warm him anymore?

“Iravan,”

she said, and her voice was small.

“Come home.”

In the Etherium, she heard his soft sob.

“Darsh’s parents,”

he asked.

“Do they know?”

“Yes.”

Ahilya had seen them briefly in Irshar’s infirmary, being tended to by the nurses. She’d seen their stricken faces, heard the awful shrieking of Darsh’s mother. The sound echoed in the forest, manifesting in Ahilya’s memories, and Iravan closed his eyes, his face crumpling.

“No parent should have to endure that,”

he whispered.

His grief pounded at her, leaves falling around her within the Etherium as the two sat in stillness in the cave. In each leaf she saw him from a lifetime ago. The two of them on their wedding day exchanging garlands of promise. Lying on a rooftop within Nakshar, their legs entwined as they theorized survival. Preparing his research before he became a Senior Architect. On and on the onslaught came, surrounding Ahilya with his emotion. He caressed her face in one. He walked away from her in another. They stood against each other, bodies shaking after a fight. He held her in his arms, as she bled from their lost pregnancy.

Iravan’s hand shook convulsively in hers as he watched the same images, and his loss felt as real as if it had occurred yesterday. He had always wanted children—but the Virohi had erased his possibility of fatherhood. She could feel the cosmic creatures inside her, watching this, grieving with her—and Iravan sensed them too.

You should not have come, he whispered in the forest. Leave, Ahilya. Please, I’m begging you.

She stared at him, confused, unsure if he had spoken or if she’d imagined this. What he was showing her, what he was saying—why were these things important now? She tried to coalesce her vision into one, attempting to bring herself back to the cave, the only reality she was certain of, but it was like trying to keep her balance on a narrow beam that shook the more she tried to grip it.

“Those carvings you made,”

she said, her voice hoarse.

“What—what were they?”

“Did you like them?”

he whispered.

“I made them for you. Lives lived and forgotten, and at their heart always the material bonds. I did not make one showing our life together, I didn’t think you would like to see it after everything we’ve endured, but you already know—you were the best of them all. I have been so fortunate.”

Ahilya recoiled, taken aback. His words were soft, and in another time, they would have sounded loving, but she discerned a strange turmoil in him. There was a reason he had made the murals for her. Not as a gift, but as… a test? A reminder? Was he trying to tell her that she had won? That her material bond to him was honored, honoring all the others too? He said she was the best of them, but he did not trust her anymore. A dozen questions flooded her mouth, but she spoke the most important one.

“Why are you here, Iravan?”

she asked.

“I found them,”

he answered.

He stood up slowly, pulling her with him. Where Darsh’s body had disappeared, the earth began to move, opening into a crevasse. Pinpricks of silver light covered his skin, and the staircase they had been sitting on rippled forward into the chasm. Iravan tucked her arm inside his and they began descending. Ahilya kept her eyes on the steps, blinking in the deeper darkness. At the bottom, the air smelled surprisingly fresh, but there was something else here, a strange presence.

“Iravan?”

Ahilya asked.

Light poured out of him, shooting across the chasm. Shapes materialized out of the darkness. Huge shapes. Massive eyes. Tusks that curved. Paws the size of her head.

“Yakshas,”

she breathed, and heard Dhruv’s soft gasp in her ears. She had almost forgotten the sungineer was privy to this conversation.

“They’ve been here all along,”

Ahilya whispered.

Just for an instant, the Etherium receded and her vision cleared. She disengaged from Iravan, approaching the closest yaksha, a gargantuan bear-like creature that slumbered on its front paws, its breath heavy. Faint light was trickling away from it in sparkles, curving around Iravan who still stood on the last step. Further ahead was the tiger-yaksha, so large that it towered over her though it was asleep, its head resting on its forelegs. As with the bear-yaksha, light seeped away from it in sharp glimmers.

There were more too, one gigantic creature after another, each the size of a small mountain. Ahilya saw a massive raven, its wings wrapped around itself as it perched on a rock, then a gargantuan lizard, its tail so long and thick, she had to climb over it like it were a fallen tree trunk. Countless more lurked behind, in shapes too abstract to make sense, creatures she had no names for yet, with humps and tusks and feathers. All had once been simply jungle creatures. How many of these corporeal yakshas existed? How many architects had survived the crash from the skies, those who would come to claim them? Or could it be that these yakshas simply were waiting for their architects to be reborn? If so, time was running out, and there was no guarantee of their unity.

Ahilya made a whole circuit, studying as many creatures as she could, without wandering too far from Iravan’s light. In her archeological mind, she was already making records. She had seen many of these animals before. The bear-yaksha was one of the beings she had tracked, a lifetime ago. How big had it grown? Who did it belong to? Had it been Ecstatically trajecting when she’d tracked it? She couldn’t remember. Giddiness overtook her, and a small laugh escaped her. How differently she viewed these creatures now, from all the misfired hypotheses of before. Shaken, her palms sweaty, Ahilya returned to Iravan’s side. The two of them watched as silver dust motes rose from the slumbering beasts, all of them coalescing around him. The Etherium rushed her, and she inhaled sharply, trying to hold onto the brief clarity she had experienced.

“You were always right,”

Iravan said quietly.

“The yakshas were hidden in some part of the planet, building in the way that only they could for thousands of years. After I united with the falcon, all of the others left the habitat to come here. I think this area was once another habitat. Maybe the yakshas were the reason this was the most viable place for your new city, the earth here stabilized by them through the ages.”

Now that her eyes had adjusted, Ahilya could tell that the cavern extended for miles beyond the first creatures she’d circuited. She could distinguish deep inroads and tunnels, catacombs that one could lose themselves in for the rest of their lives. Light floated in lazy spirals back toward Iravan, circling him.

“You believe they built this?”

she asked.

“They are Ecstatics, after all. They can supertraject. They must have done so when the Moment and the Deepness were functioning normally. Perhaps after you and I appropriated our habitat, and took it from them.”

Ahilya’s mind buzzed with possibilities, a dozen questions, one after another. Why had the yakshas built this? Had they known about the planetrage before it occurred? Or was it simply their desire to merge with their architects that had helped them create this? An attempt to help civilization find a new city? She asked none of these questions. These were academic concerns. It was not why she was here.

The light around Iravan grew brighter. It almost seemed as though the bear-yaksha was becoming darker the brighter Iravan became. Silvery particles of light still flowed toward her husband, rising from the shapes of the sleeping yakshas all around her. Was he doing something to them? She had no way to know. She did not understand the everpower. Within the vriksh, Iravan grew stronger, his eyes glowing silver like the man in the cave. It meant something, this merging of the two Iravans, but Ahilya could not focus.

“Incorporeal yakshas too?”

she said at last.

“Are those here?”

In answer, Iravan simply grew brighter.

Light was pouring into him not just from the yaksha animals but from all over the expansive catacombs. From corners that twinkled, and amorphous-cloud-shaped vapors that blinked before dissipating. A horrified sense of calamity grew in Ahilya.

“What are you doing?”

she said, her hand over her mouth.

“Iravan. These yakshas…”

He did not reply, but his form in the Etherium shivered. She could see it happening like an architect, both in front of her and in her mind—the image of Iravan surrounded by light, his feather cloak fluttering lightly around his shins as if the movement of light created a wind.

And Ahilya understood.

This was no ordinary radiance that moved around him. This was the power of the yakshas themselves, both corporeal and noncorporeal. It swirled toward him, and with each swirl the yakshas became smaller. It was like watching time reverse, the bear-yaksha shrinking every second, the tiger-yaksha diminishing. All around them, the giant creatures shrank, unable to fight what Iravan was doing to them.

Ahilya turned to him. Her voice came out in a horrified whisper. “Why?”

she asked.

The light was so bright on him now that she could barely discern his features.

“I suspected this,”

he said softly.

“But it never truly registered, though there were so many hints. When Bharavi came to my rescue during the spiralweed attack in Nakshar’s library, the kind of kinship I felt with her yaksha… I felt something similar in a past life with another architect’s tiger-yaksha. I’d hoped such familiarity with the falcon would teach the others to enter the Deepness, but I did not ever have the time to test such a thing.”

Iravan shook his head, spilling shafts of silver light.

“The yakshas have always had a way of communicating with each other. I had been denying the falcon inside me, but now…”

His voice grew softer, barely a whisper.

“It speaks to me now. Telling me to take all of these over too, the way I took it. One last time in finality. Taking their desire to strengthen it.”

“Subsummation,”

she whispered.

The bear-yaksha uttered a growl. Light burst out of it, enveloping it, and Ahilya cried out, shielding her eyes. She saw the light race toward Iravan, who spread out his arms in welcome. The radiance seeped into him through his very pores. His eyes were almost entirely silver, not just the pupil and irises but the sclera too.

When next Ahilya looked, the bear-yaksha was gone. Nothing left of it, no evidence of its existence, not even the weight of its body on the slightly muddy floor. Who had this creature belonged to? Had its architect felt it disappear? What had Iravan done? This was an immortal creature, one of the most ancient ones of their world, that had lived for thousands of years, and Iravan had destroyed it with a thought.

Ahilya remembered the Ecstatics in Irshar’s infirmary. She had thought that they’d been damaged because of her control of them, but they had stopped trajecting because of Iravan. Because he was taking their power into himself by subsuming their counterparts. Ahilya’s shaking hands went to the sungineering device in her ear. She tapped at it, comforted to still hear Dhruv’s slight breathing, listening to this conversation. Perhaps wondering what she was seeing.

“Dhruv,”

she whispered.

“The Ecstatics—”

“Yes—”

His soft, panicked voice reverberated in her earpiece.

“Something happening—screaming—Pranav fainted—”

The words cut out, back into static.

Iravan stared at her, his eyes utterly silver. Perhaps she imagined it, but for a second it appeared that silver wings of light sprouted out of his shoulders. The effect was magnificent, and terrifying. Ahilya couldn’t hold his gaze.

“You’re killing them,”

she whispered.

“I am freeing them,”

Iravan replied, as tiny teardrops formed in the corners of his eyes like the smallest jewels.

“If I hadn’t stopped Darsh, he would have killed the others in the Garden. I am taking away the danger of such a thing.”

“You don’t know that, Iravan! I saw what happened to the Ecstatics—this is like excision to them—”

“It is completion,”

he snapped.

“The yakshas allowed the architects to traject—it is this connection with their creatures that gave them their power. Alone, without the presence of their other half in the world, neither architects nor yakshas will be able to traject. By subsuming them, I am giving the architects hope of becoming complete beings. And if it harms them…”

His voice grew icy.

“They are architects, protectors of humanity. They will thank me for my service in keeping humanity safe from themselves.”

Ahilya thought of all the architects she knew—not just the Ecstatics, but others like Naila, Chaiyya, her nephew Arth who had shown capabilities. She had to stop him, but she didn’t know how.

Her eyes darted around, watching one yaksha after another shatter in sparks of silver. A part of her wondered why the yakshas were allowing this, but she already knew the answer. For centuries, the yakshas had been passive creatures, leaving humanity alone, though with each trajection they had called to their architect. Yet sentience occurred through spontaneous will. Even the falcon-yaksha had forgotten itself, and had only found who it was the closer it had come to uniting with Iravan. These other yakshas would not have that autonomy. The falcon had evolved itself, seeking—and now it sought to take over the others.

“You’re not doing this for them,”

she said, turning back to Iravan.

“You’re doing this for yourself. You want this power—the falcon wants their power. Why?”

Iravan smiled.

“You want my help with the planetrage, do you not?”

When she nodded, his smile grew cold.

“Have you come to give the Virohi to me then?”

His tone sent a chill through Ahilya’s spine. She took a step back.

“Fighting the planetrage will kill me,”

Iravan said, walking toward her, as she continued to back away.

“But I have already embraced death. What do I have to fear from it? I have sieved and sifted through my memories to find what will occur to me after my death, and the truth is that I will return to becoming a Virohi after this final life. If I never fulfil my capital desire, then I am lost forever, but even if I complete it, I am condemned to become them. So you see, I am not afraid to die, Ahilya. Only to turn into these creatures.”

“You did not try to understand them,”

Ahilya replied.

“You feared them too much. You still do.”

“And you don’t?”

he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“That is telling.”

“They—they’ve evolved, Iravan. After being a part of Irshar. Especially after being a part of me, and now in the core tree—”

“Ah, the core tree.”

He stopped, and earth rippled in the cave, mud shaping into tangles of roots. Ahilya, still backing away, tripped, but Iravan did not seem to notice. He was staring at the earth-made roots as if seeing the vriksh in Irshar. Within her Etherium, where she had invited him, he looked around them at the fall of memories that cascaded over his face. His features were growing cold, dispassionate.

“Your Etherium is a forest now,”

he said wonderingly.

“For me, the third vision was always so confused, but you found stability and solidity there. You owned your third vision in a way I never could.”

It had taken Ahilya a long time to understand her Etherium, since she and Iravan had stopped that first earthrage together in the habitat. She had only been able to view Iravan within it, both their third visions connected in a unique way, but after the vriksh had absorbed the cosmic creatures, after she herself had opened the door to the vriksh in her mind, possibilities had tied her to the rest of humanity.

“The core tree gives me the stability to hold the image of my third vision,”

she said.

“I’ve always controlled the vriksh’s permissions—”

“And so you found control of your Etherium too, in amazing ways.”

Iravan nodded.

“But your control of the third vision did not start with the vriksh. Only cemented with it. Regardless,”

he said, shrugging.

“I did not thank you for protecting the Ecstatics from Darsh, for protecting them from the collapse of the three visions.”

Ahilya jerked.

“You know about the collapse?”

Iravan waved a hand, and she saw it waving both in the Etherium and within the cave, a dual vision that made her eyes hurt. She blinked, trying to hold onto the reality in the cave.

“It was imminent,”

he said.

“After what happened to the Moment, such a collapse was inevitable. I did not understand it when I was battling Darsh, but I’ve had time to think about it all now. The visions are all melting into each other, and one would think it would give me greater power—I, who am a creature of all the three visions. I, who have mastered them more than anyone else. Yet all my everpower, all my knowledge, all my wisdom, and control of this space still eludes me. For so long I wondered why is it that you could control it in a way that even I could not? Why has the Etherium been always beyond me?”

“You said it was a place of guidance,”

Ahilya said.

“A window to the world outside of you, but a mirror into oneself too. In some ways the same as the Moment and the Deepness, but the Moment has always been an architect’s reality, and the Deepness an Ecstatic’s. Yet everyone has access to their personal Etherium, architect or non-architect. It is a mirror to consciousness, doing what it does best. Reflecting.”

That’s why she had seen the Virohi as herself, giving both her and the cosmic creatures an identity they had needed for their communion. Her Etherium manifested as mirrors too, except she had converted that into a forest, so her mind could freely walk within the consciousness of the tree. She had controlled it, to find peace, to find herself.

“I—I see,” she said.

“Do you?”

Iravan replied, shaking his head.

“Do you really see how special you are? Because that’s the thing about mirrors. Only a sufficiently strong being can look into one to see and accept who they are. I was never that strong. My fury and desire for control got in the way, and all I ever received was guidance. But you? You have always been stronger, and so you were given control, not just to see who you were but to evolve yourself, to choose to become what you could. You—you have always been amazing.”

Iravan laughed, and the sound echoed in the cavern and the forest.

“How far you have come, my love, from an unknown archeologist.”

There was admiration in his voice, but it was laced with poison.

“What are you getting at?”

Ahilya asked.

Iravan tilted his head.

“You have been keeping secrets, haven’t you?”

Ahilya’s eyes grew wide. How could he know? She hadn’t dared to think about it, keeping it a secret from herself. Her fingers came up to clutch her heartpoison bracelet. He tracked the movement, his mouth thinning.

“Iravan,”

she said.

“Please. Listen—”

He uttered a tsking sound, so unlike him that she couldn’t understand it. This was her husband, but his mannerisms were changing from second to second. The lift of his lips, the tilt of his chin, the way he crinkled his eyes and smiled. They were movements of his body, fluid and familiar, but they were not-him too. She had seen something like this before—back when the Virohi had looked like her in the mirrored chambers. Who was he? Where was he?

Iravan chuckled, and the sound shook her, echoing in the cavern, filtering into the Etherium so the man in there laughed too.

“You could not keep secrets from me even if you wanted to,”

he said softly.

“I am a part of the vriksh too, my memories a part of it just like any other citizen’s. I sense your purpose inside it. If the others had some familiarity with the Etherium, they would be able to see it too. I might not be as strong as you in that place, but I understand it more than most.”

Ahilya continued to retreat, hands open in front of her, her mind racing. She thought that she should run, but how far would she get with everpower at his disposal? He could simply churn the rock to trap her. He could encase her in a wall if he wished. He had not allowed her to come to him out of sentiment. Suddenly she knew why she was the only one who had been let in here. Why Iravan had summoned her far from everyone.

“For so long I have wondered why you would stand in my way,”

he said.

“Why you would not let me kill the cosmic creatures.”

“Because it’s wrong,”

Ahilya said.

“Because it is genocide.”

“That’s why you started, yes. But that is not the only reason anymore, is it?”

He was almost upon her, though his pace was unhurried. She could see him despite the radiance coming off him, the unearthly eyes, the tattoos bursting on his skin. The silver silhouetted by black, and within it this creature wearing Iravan’s body, speaking to her in her husband’s voice. Iravan moved in a blur of speed, inches away from her, and his voice grew softer, a blade within a sheath. In the vriksh, he straightened, coming closer as she stumbled away.

“You have been thinking of an alternative to genocide from the very beginning. And now you’ve found something. You, who looked into your Etherium, and saw others in the mirror. You who have given of yourself so completely to those who are so alien from you.”

Iravan studied her.

“Tell me, Ahilya. Did you tell your council how you want the Virohi to overwrite everyone? How you want to save the cosmic creatures at the cost of humanity?”

A sharp inhale of breath echoed in her ears.

“Ahilya—what the fuck—”

Dhruv said, stunned.

“—is—true?”

She didn’t need to reply. Iravan reached a hand and plucked the sound piece from her ear as if he had heard the whisper. It was the two of them alone again, and Ahilya had never been more terrified.

Her head spun. The idea had been in her mind ever since the beginning when she’d lamented that she had to be the one to deal with the Virohi. Then, she had been exhausted with her responsibility, resentful of the freedom of others. But ever since the first overwriting, the idea had grown into an opportunity. It had started building after what she’d done to the Ecstatics during the fight with Darsh. She had asked Dhruv about his experience of overwriting for a reason. She’d worried about it, felt sick about it. But no matter how she tried, this was the only solution she could see. None of the others suspected it, not even Eskayra—but Iravan. He’d always known her heart.

“Would it be so bad?”

she replied.

“Iravan, architects have always believed that consciousnesses are connected. Can you not imagine that in reality?”

He just laughed, a cruel sound.

“You always did want to save everyone. I didn’t think you would go to such lengths.”

She took another step back, but her body hit a wall. She was out of moves. There was no place to run.

“Overwriting has already begun,”

she returned.

“I didn’t intend it when I sent the Virohi to the vriksh, but there is no reversing it. Whether we like it or not, the Virohi are here, and—”

“They have corrupted you. That was the problem all along. But now they are attempting to corrupt me, and this I cannot allow.”

Iravan’s hand brushed a strand of her hair away from her face, and his voice grew deathly quiet.

“They have been scraping away at my desire to destroy them. My past lives grow confused, one instant rejoicing in their material bonds, the other instant reminding me of my purpose. The falcon is the only thing remaining steadfast. It projects what I must see, but there are so many of the Virohi and there has been only one of me.”

Iravan’s silvery gaze filled her eyes.

“So you tell me, Ahilya,”

he murmured.

“Why do I need this power from the other yakshas?”

His fingers settled on her cheeks like soft petals. She saw his purpose clearly. The falcon had always been the greatest, most aware of all the yakshas, maturing and evolving through centuries, seeking its lost half. It had hated the Virohi, the creatures who had put it through insentience and a total loss of itself. In subsuming the falcon, Iravan hadn’t simply cut it away, he had absorbed it fully, all its rage and purpose.

And now Iravan was more that creature than anything else.

And she—

She was the Virohi embodied, the one thing that stood in his way.

Tears filled Ahilya’s eyes and her hands came up to clutch Iravan’s wrists.

“Iravan,”

she said.

“I chose this.”

“We’ve always saved each other, haven’t we?”

he whispered.

Across his mind, through the window of the Etherium, she saw images cascading. Iravan staying behind during the earthrage that had killed Oam, sacrificing his own safety for hers as they ascended to Nakshar. Ahilya flying away from the ashram to an unknown habitat and to certain death on the slimmest chance to find him. Iravan rising to fight the skyrage, then falling in the sky. Ahilya rushing through the Conclave, bleeding, attempting to save him from excision.

All of it culminating into now, where he wished to make amends to complete beings because he wished to make amends to her. His silvery eyes sparkled with terrible intention and tears. Ahilya felt the grip of his fingers tightening.

“Please,”

she said.

“I love you.”

“I have failed you,”

he whispered back.

“So deeply.”

Iravan wrapped his hands around her neck, and squeezed.