Page 5 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)

IRAVAN

Within the Deepness, Iravan and Darsh floated next to each other.

Embedded though he was in the velvety blackness, Iravan could still sense the other realms.

The jungle was visible to him in his first vision, the reality of his physical surroundings clear as it always was while trajecting.

He saw Darsh too, standing next to him, his hands clenched into fists.

But though Iravan was not in the Moment, he could sense it as well.

It hovered in his mind, a part of the evervision and its unchanged reality.

The Moment, the Deepness, his first vision—these were not separate realms, but he could focus on any one of them at a time, like experiencing sensation in one part of his body while still inhabiting the rest.

For now, he let the other realms subside from his attention, and nodded to Darsh.

The boy’s dust mote flickered in the Deepness, more jagged than before.

Vaguely, Iravan wondered if Darsh’s form was an evolution of his growing familiarity in the Ecstatic realm.

Iravan’s own manifestation had developed since his very first time.

Where once he had been little more than a speck, now he took the shape of an enormous silver-winged falcon, in a crisscrossing of glittering light.

He flapped his wings and felt the rush of wind on his face within the jungle.

“Begin,”

he said quietly.

In the Deepness, Darsh summoned the Moment.

Iravan felt sucked in by Darsh’s intention as the boy began to traject a thin filament of light into the quivering, fragile-looking Moment.

Once where it had appeared as a shining globule of stars, the Moment was now shrunken.

No matter whether Iravan saw it from the evervision or from the Deepness, or inhabited the Moment proper, the universe remained distorted, like a withered grape that had lost its juice.

Lights still glowed within it, but hesitantly.

This was another infection of the Virohi—the Moment was not the same since those creatures had infiltrated it to mutilate the architects.

This realm had been his home once, his peace.

The cosmic creatures had taken that away from him.

Iravan buried his hatred of the Virohi, and watched as Darsh’s filament of light split in the Deepness, then became four, eight, and then too many to count.

It was a form of supertrajection the boy had come up with—what he had been doing when his yaksha had first appeared.

This particular one created tiny thorny plants in the Garden.

They used it to make blades that were near indestructible.

But as Iravan watched, the Ecstatic trajection changed.

It started to shake, the way it had for the past fifteen minutes while Darsh had undertaken this exercise.

Lines disconnected from the trajection, whipping into darkness, disappearing.

One ricochetted into the Moment, aimed at a stray star.

Another struck close to Iravan’s wing, and he felt the wind of its passage.

Iravan thought, This is why they outlawed Ecstasy.

Architects always did lose themselves in this realm.

He slashed at Darsh’s power and instantly the beams of light dissipated.

His movement was harsh, akin to pushing the boy down to stop him from hurtling into danger, but Ecstasy was not a subtle power.

There was no other way to stop Darsh while he held so much trajection energy.

It was clear Darsh could not summon his yaksha right now, and there was no point in the boy remaining in the Deepness unnecessarily.

Iravan had to get to the root of the problem, instead of making Darsh repeat the same exercise fruitlessly.

He raised his hands in a gesture of pacification, but Darsh stared at him, breathing hard.

Anger gleamed in the boy’s eyes.

For a second, Iravan thought Darsh was going to attack him; light seemed to glow in his dust mote, and he knew that if the boy struck at him in the Moment, it would hurt.

But Darsh took a step back and suddenly Iravan was alone in the Deepness.

They stared at each other in their first visions.

“If you ever want to find your yaksha, you need to control yourself,”

Iravan said, dropping his hands.

“I know.”

“If you keep losing focus, you will never be able to unite with it.”

“I know.”

“It all begins there, Darsh—”

“For fuck’s sake,”

the boy said, throwing up his hands.

“I said I know!”

Iravan paused. Darsh continued to breathe heavily for a moment, then finally met Iravan’s deadpan gaze.

“I apologize, sir,”

the boy said at last, his voice tight and formal. Iravan waited until Darsh had mastered his breathing again.

“You are driven by anger when you traject, or seek your yaksha,”

he said at last.

“But you cannot find your counterpart in such a state.”

“Can’t I?”

Darsh challenged.

“You did. How is my anger different from yours when you seek to destroy the cosmic creatures?”

This time Iravan raised an eyebrow.

He did not allow anyone else to speak to him this way, and Darsh was pushing the line, but he had already given the boy too many liberties.

He reminded him too much of himself.

In a way they only had each other, the last true relationship Iravan maintained with anyone.

How ironic that this material bond had arisen without his control when he had been ending all others.

Darsh had carved a place in his heart, a place he’d saved once for his children.

Perhaps for that alone he owed the boy an explanation.

“I am not led by anger,”

Iravan said.

“Not only by anger,”

he amended at Darsh’s skeptical look.

“There is reason here too. Tell me, what do you think will happen to the Garden—to all the architects within it—once they unite with their yakshas?”

Darsh blinked, confused.

“We will gain powers. Like you.”

“Yes,”

Iravan said gently.

“You will know yourselves. But you will have no more lives or reincarnations, not in the sense that you have been taught. When architects die after unity, it is a final death—yet our entire culture is built on rebirth. I don’t think it is even possible to have a final death; one presupposes the other. Then what will occur to us?”

Darsh frowned. Iravan had taught the boy to think of these events in the last few months of patronage, but this question had haunted Iravan for so long that it was hardly fair to expect Darsh to answer it.

“We’d return to becoming the Virohi in some capacity,”

Iravan said, answering himself.

“That is what the final death would achieve. Can you imagine that, Darsh? Everything we have done, all that we hope to achieve in the Garden, all of it for nothing? Can you imagine us condemned to ultimately return to becoming the worst of us over and over again in a cycle of imprisonment? Would you want that? Would any of the others?”

Horror grew on Darsh’s face. Iravan suppressed a sigh, half-satisfied half-regretful, to make Darsh feel this way.

In truth, he did not know if this was the path his consciousness would take.

All his searching within his past lives was to learn for certain whether he would die and turn into a Virohi, or if another kind of rebirth would present itself.

There had, after all, been a time when Ecstatics had fulfilled their capital desires and disappeared, during Nidhirv’s life.

What had happened to them? Surely they did not return to a Virohi-like state? And what of those who never completed their capital desire? That question was even more important.

But it was not something Iravan needed Darsh to know. He needed Darsh’s compliance, and he had made the right calculation.

Anyone else would have preferred life—even life as a Virohi—over complete death.

Ahilya certainly had argued for it.

Yet Darsh and all the others in the Garden were architects.

They were trained from infancy in the culture of the ashrams, in believing themselves superior, in serving their community with their power.

The reason so many had come to join Iravan was because they abhorred the Virohi, and Iravan was offering retribution and redemption.

They came to him because the cosmic creatures had mutilated their powers during the Conclave’s crash.

They saw their own helplessness.

The architects hated the Virohi. As far as Iravan knew, the citizens of Irshar did too.

Only Ahilya was attempting to find common cause with the cosmic creatures, trying to forgive the Virohi, turning him into the enemy.

That alone showed how corrupted she had become.

His heart tore at the thought of how much he had failed her in allowing this.

“Why do you think you’re unable to make this pattern of trajection now?”

he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,”

Darsh said moodily.

“I can try again.”

“No. I want to figure this out first. You’ve made this pattern a dozen times before in the Garden, but for some reason you can’t do it now. Why?”

Darsh merely shook his head.

“It is because of Irshar, isn’t it?”

Darsh frowned, but did not reply. He hardly needed to. Iravan knew he’d guessed right.

When they’d left the Garden to come to the jungle today, they’d passed Irshar.

Ordinarily, Iravan would not have picked that way, but it was the fastest path to get to this part of the jungle.

He’d noticed Darsh’s lingering gaze on the ashram, noticed the tightening of the boy’s mouth.

It was hard for Darsh, this alienation of the Garden from Irshar, this renunciation of material bonds.

Irshar was meant to have been a sanctuary for Ecstatics, but ever since the Conclave Darsh’s world had turned upside down.

Iravan had caught him looking wistfully toward Irshar more than once, as though hoping to return there.

After all, Irshar was where Iravan had promised Darsh a new life, safe within an ashram-like society, the only society the boy had ever known.

In the ever-cycling vision of the Etherium, Iravan saw Mohini pick up her child, and nuzzle the baby to her.

“Everything we’re doing,”

Iravan said softly.

“From finding our yakshas, to training in the Deepness, to the war with the Virohi… it is all for those we love. For those whom we disagree with, and those who are left behind while we forge a new world in the Garden. Because even if they don’t see, we do. We know what is right. I know it is not easy.”

Darsh’s mouth trembled, and his gaze fell.

“My parents,”

he said haltingly.

“They will never be convinced.”

Iravan wanted to pull the boy into a hug.

Darsh’s parents were architects of Nakshar.

They’d written him off when he was found an Ecstatic.

They’d supported the council’s imprisonment of him in a deathcage with the intention of excising him.

Even the events since the Conclave’s crash hadn’t changed their minds.

They had refused Iravan’s personal invitation to join him in the Garden, and though they had been civil enough their politeness had been forced, intimidated by his power.

Even if they hated the Virohi, they likely blamed Iravan and his Ecstatics for it all.

They weren’t the only people.

“I’m sorry,”

Iravan said.

“Is that why you cannot retain control? I can speak to them again, convince them to come—”

“Don’t,”

Darsh snapped.

“They’re as good as dead to me.”

That kind of thing was so much easier to say than to live.

If they had died, Darsh would have blamed himself, and Iravan too—though there was no telling the boy’s reaction.

He changed from grief to anger to moodiness like quicksilver, emotions hurtling through him in the throes of adolescence.

Iravan had been around too many angsty teenagers in Nakshar’s Academy, teaching them about their role in survival, to expect any different.

Combined with everything Darsh had endured, it was no surprise the boy retained fleeting control.

Or perhaps it was the boy’s yaksha.

Darsh was more unpredictable since feeling his counterpart.

The falcon had made Iravan more prone to emotional outbursts, a full-grown adult and a Senior Architect.

It had slipped past his self-awareness to embed him with its emotion.

He didn’t understand it fully on his first unity with the falcon, but through the subsequent months it became more and more apparent that the lines separating him from the creature were blurred.

He was always an angry man, but the falcon had ripped apart any veneer of calm, infecting him with its thousand-year-old simmering rage.

Even now, he could feel its form in the Deepness replacing his.

Here, Iravan was the falcon, his wings glittering in magnificent fury.

Here, he acquiesced to the yaksha’s superiority, for this realm had always belonged to the creature.

Here, the falcon’s rage was indistinguishable from his own, for the falcon showed him just how much there was to rage about.

In a way, it was like Ahilya.

They both awoke something in him he had been unaware of.

In his head, he could hear the falcon’s laughter.

He had subsumed the creature, but Ahilya had warned him that all he had done was absorb the creature’s hate.

What she didn’t understand was that they had always been inseparable.

As though in summons, his Etherium flickered.

Ahilya flashed between his brows.

She had opened their connection again and he saw through her eyes, architects staring, and a short-haired woman shaking her head, while Ahilya argued, horrified.

The connection ceased.

Sudden silence loomed over Iravan. Ahilya hadn’t opened the connection to him deliberately, but her sheer horror and panic… What had caused it?

His heart raced as his eyes traveled to the beads looping around Darsh’s wrists.

Darsh understood.

They had both rendered their beads inactive in order for the communion with the yaksha to remain uninterrupted, but now they tapped at their sets together.

A burst of static greeted them, before a hologram formed over Iravan’s wrists: Dhruv’s face barking out commands, sungineers working around him.

Over Darsh’s wrist, another image flickered: Irshar wobbling, making ready for another change, viewed through the drones Dhruv had floating over the ashram.

“Dhruv,”

Iravan said.

“What is going on?”

“Finally!”

The sungineer turned to face him, his face now clearer.

“For fuck’s sake, Iravan, you can’t just up and leave whenever you want to. We’ve been trying to reach you. You have responsibilities, and you’ve given me no leave to act on your behalf. Especially in a moment like this—”

“What,”

Iravan asked again, injecting calm into his voice.

“is going on?”

Dhruv’s voice thrummed with suppressed anger.

“It appears Irshar is collapsing. We can’t tell from the Garden, but we’ve been hearing screams from all directions. And the architecture—we can see shapes and movements. Pranav thinks the Virohi are coming alive.”

Images from the drones replaced the sungineer’s face.

Iravan watched as the sprawling ashram within the jungle shook like a water droplet.

Roads and alleys, buildings and playgrounds, shivered as if they were little more than toy structures before an approaching hurricane.

The last city of humanity, this oasis of massive proportions spreading out for miles and miles, caved, hollowing out from the inside.

Buildings crumpled like paper, arches collapsed, and a substance leached out of the city like dark smoke.

It took the shape of half-formed limbs, of hands outstretched, and faces with features eerily like Ahilya’s.

The sungineer’s words reverberated in the jungle.

Iravan bent his head, his breath coming out in shallow heaves.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Darsh freeze.

Ahilya had finally failed, after months of resisting. This was it then. The end of it all.

A dozen thoughts chased him.

He had anticipated this.

Irshar’s construction was flawed.

Ahilya, despite her strength, would never have been able to hold it together.

That she had done it for three months was beyond astonishing; the Virohi had destroyed whole planets in the pursuit of immortality.

Had she suffered through those months? Had she lost bits of herself like he had?

He would relieve her now, but the thought of fulfilling his capital desire after so many lifetimes brought tears to his eyes.

Would she see he did it to make amends? That he did it for her as much as himself? Would she understand? Would she forgive? It had always been about saving her.

From the very beginning, even during the earthrage that had swallowed Oam, Iravan had done everything he could to protect Ahilya.

This was no different.

His fingers tightened over the blade around his neck, and its smooth texture was like touching Ahilya’s skin.

“What do we do?”

Darsh whispered.

Iravan raised his head, his grief giving him purpose.

“Ready the architects and the sungineers,”

he told Dhruv.

“I’m on my way.”