Page 49 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)

IRAVAN

Blankness.

* * *

Emptiness that lasted for a long, interminable instant.

* * *

He did not know where he was, or if he was.

There was a cut deep within his consciousness, and Iravan pressed down upon his heart as if to cauterize the wound. He saw sap pour out of it, but it was black and star-studded. Slowly, he understood. He was not really bleeding. The core tree was leaving him.

Ahilya’s Etherium receded in flashes. Blink. The forest shivered. Blink. She turned to mist. Blink. Her hand dropped the axe.

It must have only been seconds, but to his eyes everything was slow. He had enough time to notice the shock on her face. Enough time to watch the glinting axe be absorbed by the ground. Enough time to see her mouth open in a cry.

Memories lurched, and he saw above him a blue sky. He was flying, flying, flying—

And then he was falling for an eternity.

A mote drifting out into the sky, alone in the black void.

His visions skewed horribly—and he saw himself tumble in shades of blue, yellow, and red—as if different versions of him were falling over and over again, back into his body. A vast disconnectedness echoed in his ears like the discordant hum of sungineering gone wrong. The edges of his sight blackened, a tunnel vision. Behind, he saw his past lives chase him, on the wings of the falcon-yaksha. Ahead, and at the end of the tunnel—death in an endless void.

Iravan lurched blindly onward, and leapt into the void, away from his past lives.

He heard the falcon’s roar as it reached him. The shadows still lurked within him, and he saw Nidhirv’s silvery gaze, along with Mohini’s and Askavetra’s. Each of his past lives surrounded him as he fell through this tunnel, circling him as if he were prey and they were a flock of hungry birds. Their hands extended, making to grasp him; they reached into the tunnel to clutch at his miniscule, disappearing body.

Then he slipped past their reach.

Floating in a neverspace, he stared back into the tunnel. A moat of nothing surrounded him and the past-lives, and they were unable to breach the thin wounded wall around him, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out a method. Tattoos still covered his skin, and though he was trajecting the everpower, the tattoos were no longer silvery-gray. They were blue-green, as if he were trajecting the Moment or the Deepness. Between him and his lives an ocean opened, and the ocean was his ability to traject, leaking from him like blood.

He spun away from the past lives, moving in panicky circles. He no longer fell within the forest of Ahilya’s Etherium. He could not sense the Virohi, or the rest of the citizens.

He could not sense her.

He felt the divorce like a slicing of his limbs, and tears gushed down his face, uncontrolled. To be forsaken now, when he had finally learned to see. It was poetic.

“I—I’m alone,”

he stuttered.

His physical reality slammed into him, and Iravan choked, a fist covering his mouth as if to keep from retching.

Ahilya fell to her knees next to him.

“I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—”

His visions were melding one into another, and with her in front of him within this cave, his fall came to a standstill. He knew he was tethered in the cave because of her. Iravan took a deep shaky breath.

“You excised me,”

he said wonderingly.

“I—I had to,”

she said.

“Iravan, they were killing you, they were killing you.”

He raised a hand, and the movement felt alien, mechanical. Who was he now? To be excised not just from the core tree but from everything, all of humanity? What did that make him? His hand touched her hair, and he felt himself shudder.

“It was the right thing,”

he said, and his voice sounded strange. In some part of his mind, he wondered where she had learned such a thing as excision. She had behaved like an architect. How did she know it would work? He didn’t know what to make of it, or of her now.

Ahilya closed her eyes and swallowe.

“I—I just meant to stop their influence on you, to stop them from destroying you. How do you feel?”

I’m excised, he thought, and the very words were terrifying. Hadn’t he feared this right from the beginning, from the Exam of Ecstasy that he’d undergone in Nakshar? Hadn’t Bharavi once threatened him with it when he’d first detected the Resonance in Nakshar’s temple?

He could still feel his trajection power, a hairsbreadth away, like a limb that he could still use but which was atrophying fast. The fear of excision had hung over him for years as an architect in Nakshar, the obedience to the ashram’s rules, the secrets he’d kept from Ahilya. It all flashed in his head, his wretchedness of being trapped in a deathcage during the Conclave, waiting for this inevitable moment.

In the end, it was Ahilya who’d done it.

It was only fitting.

He felt the falcon’s frustration and its rage as it clawed for the remains of the everpower through the tunnel he’d escaped from, but Iravan dismissed it. The falcon could not hurt him, not for a while yet. Ahilya had done the unthinkable. All he could feel was relief.

“Thank you,”

he whispered. He wanted to weep—but it was as if all his emotion was being held at a distance. I’m in shock, he thought. Everything seemed so slow. There was so much time. Why had he ever hurried? He wanted to sit down and never stand up. He wanted to sleep and never stop.

“Do you—do you still have use of the everpower?”

she asked.

Iravan nodded slowly.

“For a time,”

he whispered.

“Only for a bit.”

He flexed his fingers, and earth rose in the cave as he trajected, but his power bled away from him as if his body had been split in half. He tried staunching the flow, tried to retain his power, but it was continued to dribble away, gushing. He knew it would be futile. Hadn’t he seen others excised in the same way? Hadn’t he excised Manav?

In the airborne ashrams, Senior Architects would maneuver the Ecstatic Architect into a deathcage. They would change the orientation of the ashram so that the core tree would begin thinking of that member of the ashram as a dangerous creature, becoming intent on destroying the Ecstatic. The trajection triggered the tree to attack the Ecstatic, and cut away their consciousness from itself, but every excised architect still retained trajection for a few minutes, until it withered away within the deathcage. That was why the shields over the deathcage were maintained. That was why the protocol of excision was so carefully guarded.

It would all occur to him now.

Everpower was within his reach, but only briefly. Only for minutes. In the next hour, it would all be over. Knowing what he did now—how the use of such power destroyed the planet, unleashing a version of planetrage—Iravan could only feel freedom and a profound loss, for everything that the others would endure. He? Well, he had already suffered the worst.

Gently, Ahilya sat him up. He leaned on her, his whole body grown cold, unable to move. The bleeding of the power felt like a physical wound, pain rebounding with every slight movement. His heart spasmed, and he thought he might be having a cardiac arrest. The pain in his shoulder was so acute, each inhale felt like burn wound.

Iravan swallowed hard, willing himself to hold on. Would his body heal now like it once had with Ecstasy, now that he’d been excised? He doubted it—trajection manifested the ability to heal, but excision likely took it away. The pain he felt, in his chest and his shoulders and limbs, was an indication. His body was failing. He was aging, finally caught up to everything he’d put himself through for the past few years. He had behaved like a man much younger. He had cheated death many times. To finally let go would not be so bad. At least he had his mind. He had become so used to his loss of self that he rejoiced for this kindness.

Ahilya studied him, her eyes full of guilt and concern. Iravan gave her a tight, grim smile, the best he could manage.

“The falcon-yaksha,”

she asked softly.

“The other lives that were killing you. What has become of them?”

“Gone,”

he said, wheezing. He could see them in the back of his mind, and the falcon would always be a part of him now after he’d subsumed it. Yet Ahilya’s action had pushed the creature far enough away that he could finally see it as a separate entity again. He would never be rid of it. He could feel it still, its rage at being small and useless again, trying to resurrect his past lives to use once more as minions.

“They can’t hurt me anymore,”

he said.

“I am not bound by them, or their capital desire.”

The thought was heady. Freedom from them finally? What would he do with it? Who would he become? He no longer had any need to destroy the Virohi, nor to change the world. He wanted to live—for as long as he could, for the fleeting time before the planet razed away.

Iravan tried to push himself up. The yaksha’s desire still echoed in him, to destroy the Virohi, but now it was simply the memory of a temptation he knew not to succumb to. How much had he already done in thrall to the falcon? He would never be able to make amends, but it had never been about that. It was about doing better. He could not atone for the past, but in whatever way he could, he could help repair the future. If only he had thought like this before.

Ahilya had been watching the passage of emotions on his face—perhaps she had felt echoes of it, connected as she was to his Etherium. Her eyes gleamed with tears.

“Dissolution still comes,”

she whispered.

“We need you.”

Finally to make amends, he thought. But his hands trembled.

“I don’t know if I can do it,”

he said.

“I have never known how to rebuild the Moment. I don’t think it is possible. The Moment is an extradimensional reality, and it was already weakening. You are asking me to rebuild a universe of consciousness, and now when I have only minutes left of the everpower—”

Iravan shook his head.

The task was mammoth. It was why he hadn’t done it, not even at the peak of his power. He had not wanted to deplete himself, so he’d gone about fixing the problems the shattering had caused. He’d given Irshar resources, food, technology. But if repairing the Moment was the only way to combat dissolution, he’d have to look through this sludgy, messy, soup of allvision. He’d have to pull out shards of the Moment, fragments of stars which retained consciousness. And then, somehow, he’d have to weave it together to rebuild this massive architecture. How was such a thing possible? He did not have the expertise. He did not have the time. Everpower was trickling away from him in a torrent of his wounded consciousness.

“If you don’t find a way,”

Ahilya whispered.

“humanity is lost.”

Her fingers were entwined with his. He felt her skin, the coolness and familiarity of her touch. Slowly, he lifted her hands to his lips. His kiss was paper rough, a mere whisper, but he felt her tremble. Her eyes full of grief and curiosity, the contours of her cheeks, and her hair falling around her face—all of it filled him with love. Ahilya looked older, but she had never been as beautiful, as real, as alive, as she was now. Humanity is lost, she’d said, but what was humanity if not her? She who held their fate in her hands.

He had wanted to save her. All along, that was what he’d wanted to do.

He freed one hand, and touched the stone blade hanging around his neck. A half-dreamed and unacknowledged possibility flickered to him, one that he’d nurtured in that shadow space between dreaming and waking. The home he’d built for her in the jungle flashed in front of his eyes, the relaxed seating, a single large bed, a playground. Iravan had been saving the last of the everdust—the last of possibility—for his marriage, despite everything that had happened with her. He’d never thought himself a romantic. He was learning so much now, at the end of all things.

A soft sound escaped him, half horror, half laughter.

“I may have a way,”

he said slowly. He fingered the stone blade.

“Pure possibility might help me repair the Moment. I’m not sure how, and the everdust contained within this is limited.”

He raised his eyes to her.

“All I can do is try.”

She nodded. Perhaps she had seen what he’d intended the everdust for through her Etherium, but he was grateful that she did not question him.

“The subsummation of the yakshas is a problem,”

Iravan continued softly.

“It has made the falcon stronger, and the falcon will try to seize the last of the everpower from me. When I am repairing the Moment, I will be vulnerable. I will have to find a way to release those yakshas from the falcon—if such a thing is possible. It is so much more powerful than it has been before.”

Again, Ahilya nodded. He saw from her memories the state of the Ecstatics he’d sworn to protect. Glassy-eyed, uncomprehending faces, images from the infirmary of Irshar, right before she left to find him. He’d begun subsuming the yakshas before she’d arrived, and she’d told him that his subsummation of the yakshas was akin to excision. Could he reverse it, take the power away from the falcon, and unleash it back to the architects somehow? The yakshas were gone in the shape they had existed in once, but would the architects survive if he returned this power to them somehow? What could he do in a few minutes? He could barely stand. All I can do is try, he thought, misery washing over him.

“What about you?”

he asked.

“The overwriting… What will become of you?”

Ahilya shook her head, not answering, but explanations tumbled in his mind from hers, too fast to catch. He gathered the gist of it, brief images of a hive mind, of the vriksh spreading, and a thousand voices speaking from her mouth. He pulled her to him then. Her arms came to wrap around his body. They held each other for a long instant, and Iravan thought of the last time they had been this way, before he’d gone to fight the falcon-yaksha only to subsume it. How long ago was that? Three months? Four? When time was about to melt into the sludge of allvision, when his own time was so limited, what did it matter? This moment was all that mattered.

They didn’t say goodbye.

They didn’t speak or try to reassure each other.

It took a long time, for Iravan’s legs were shaking too hard to stand, but finally he rose, gathering his will to him. The rock they stood on arose in a soft column, carrying the two of them upward, responding to his everpower as if nothing had happened. Ahilya supported his weight in the silence. Her eyes were on him, watching his chest rise and fall as if afraid he would forget how to breathe, now that he was so alienated. Iravan pressed her hand with his, and his touch was limp.

The column erupted from the ground. They stood on a small hill, and beyond them rippled the city he had made for her. It extended for miles around, but through the prism of his bleeding power, they could make out details.

Pillars that were engraved with carvings of airborne ashrams. Gleaming marble walls etched with yakshas, painted in careful colors. Stained windows made of ice, but that were warm to the touch somehow, radiating with sunlight. Tapestries of moving foliage where glorious, fragrant flowers changed shape constantly to show pictures of the crashed Conclave, then the Garden, then a solar lab from some forgotten ashram. Above this magnificence—this temple of humanity and all that it had once been—the sky glimmered with incandescent light. In the distance, shapes appeared, citizens of Irshar arrived here as part of their migration. Ahilya stared at the city, speechless.

Humility unlike anything before filled Iravan.

“Ahilya,”

he whispered, and she turned to him.

“Ahilya-ve,”

he amended.

She who had control of the core tree now. She who embodied both the alien and the familiar, the other and the intimate. She who was humanity in all its shapes.

Iravan took a step back and knelt at her feet, his head bowed. Tears filled his eyes.

He felt her surprise, and her hand hovered over him, and he cocked his head to see the shock on her face. The blade of pure possibility pulsed against his skin, and he thought in wretched clarity, Too late. I have seen you too late.

Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

Iravan stood up abruptly, and stepped back. Wind whirled around him, and he launched into the sky to finally do better.