Page 7 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)

IRAVAN

He flew toward Irshar, the jungle flashing underneath him.

Wind rushed through his silver hair, slicking it back. The feather-cloak he wore streamed behind, making him appear half-a-bird. Iravan glanced below to see trees and smoke, wood and dust. Green landscape chased his flight. The jungle was motionless, ignorant of the Virohi’s escape from Irshar, but it was only a matter of time before it was destroyed. The cosmic creatures’ escape would have consequences for their world. He knew Ahilya was somewhere down there. Iravan put on a burst of speed.

Darsh flew next to him, sustained by Iravan’s everpower. The boy flew inelegantly—this was only the second time Iravan had allowed him to rise with him—yet there was a raw delight on his face that warmed Iravan despite his grimness. When they had arrived in the jungle from the Garden, Iravan had used Ecstasy to create a nest to wheel them to their destination. The events in Irshar now warranted more speed—but seeing the wide-eyed smile on Darsh, and how infectious it was—perhaps he should have allowed this innocent joy more frequently. Darsh had so few chances at joy these days.

“This?”

Darsh screamed incredulously.

“This is what I can do if I gain the everpower?”

Iravan merely smiled, tight-lipped.

The first few times he had flown, he had struggled to understand the falcon inside him. Flight had been precarious, subject to his moods, careful and precise one day, a disastrous misadventure the next where he’d crash to the jungle. Over the last few months, he had learned how to manipulate the air with everpower, how to turn his body to the changing wind currents, how to direct the particles around him so he could breathe and hear and see while flying.

The knowledge of flight came from the falcon-yaksha and Iravan embraced his shape in the Deepness: massive wings, glinting eyes, an awareness of profound and complete loneliness. The yaksha’s rage at the cosmic creatures pounded at him, erase, destroy, never split, never again, the emotion spurring him faster.

Dhruv’s face hovered over the black beads around Iravan’s wrist.

“The Ecstatics are ready.”

Iravan could see his army in the Deepness, a hundred different architects arrayed in battle formation. The deep, velvety darkness of the Deepness flickered, and beyond that a million worlds blinked in and out, worlds the Virohi had tried to contaminate too.

The Ecstatics couldn’t see those worlds, but they didn’t need to. They continued to bind themselves to each other in the manner he had trained them. Brilliant lights of a hundred different hues zoomed past each other, their rays crisscrossing in complex patterns around Iravan’s falcon. Some of the shapes in the Deepness reverberated as they lent each other their power, fastening to each other with tight, unbreakable knots. Somewhere in the Garden, the Ecstatics were waiting, their skins glowing blue-green. Iravan’s skin shone with silver tattoos. No matter which realm he used the everpower in, such was the effect of the evervision.

“The sungineers are ready as well,”

Dhruv reported.

Briefly, Iravan’s bead flickered. Arrayed around the bone-white battery that had once brought Ahilya to him in the habitat stood a dozen sungineers. Massive golden holograms enveloped them from all sides. Iravan had found the battery months before and kept it with him as a memento of both Ahilya and Nakshar. Darsh’s face darkened when he saw it; he had once been tortured by a similar one. The Garden had never used it for that purpose, but this evolved version would help Iravan destroy the beings that had trapped him in this existence.

As though reading his mind, Dhruv spoke over the bead.

“I know you are committed to this, Iravan. But I want to reiterate that I still haven’t built safeguards around the device.”

“We must act,”

Iravan replied.

“Ahilya might be trying to coax the Virohi back into the architecture even now.”

“I disagree with her on many things, and for better or for worse you have my allegiance. But think of what happened the last time we used the battery.”

Memory flashed. Ashrams wobbling. Lightning storms. A face with jagged teeth and fiery eyes. Skyrage. The battery had weakened the Moment before, allowing the cosmic creatures to break through into the world.

“This time it could be worse,”

Dhruv warned.

“You could damage the Moment irreparably.”

Did it matter if the Moment was damaged? The Moment was useful only to a rare few, and trajection was nearly dead. The architects of the Garden used Ecstasy to traject into the Moment; very rarely did they use constellation lines to build anymore. Even the architects left in Irshar who could use the realm couldn’t truly traject their precious ashram to manipulate its architecture. They could only use it on seeds left over from the crash.

Iravan did not voice this. It was callous, even for him.

“We will not be in the Moment this time,”

he said instead.

“We will be in the Deepness, and the Deepness is immune to damage.”

The original battery had broken Airav’s mind, and the Ecstatic battery had tortured Ecstatics. All batteries were dangerous to consciousness, which was why a battery was the only way to ensure the true death of a vast consciousness such as the cosmic creatures. Dhruv had taken the technology from those early prototypes and created a bomb, a remarkably ingenious invention that would suck the consciousness of the Virohi into itself in the same way that a battery had once sucked Airav’s. Then instead of using such an energy, the bomb would explode the Virohi out into the Deepness in a species-destroying cataclysm.

Iravan had no doubt that it would work exactly as intended. He and Dhruv had tested it already on the Virohi Iravan and Ahilya had trapped in the Moment when they’d stopped that first earthrage in the habitat. Iravan had gone hunting for the creature, and seen the effects of the bomb. This time, the bomb was more powerful, aimed to obliterate not just one cosmic creature but all of them.

Darsh’s face was thoughtful and full of questions, but he didn’t speak. Iravan was hardly modelling the restraint he’d advised, but he did not anticipate anything occurring to the Moment or the Deepness. The entire point of removing the Virohi into the Deepness was to ensure no damage could occur to the Moment.

He’d tested the bomb in the Moment, but had known it would not be a viable option to destroy the species. The cosmic creature he had tested the bomb on was weak, imprisoned as it had been by the maze Ahilya and Iravan had constructed. But the others who were embedded in Irshar would be able to affect the Moment; they would try to infiltrate the architects again, making them burn crimson like they had during the skyrages. Iravan could not afford to leave his Ecstatics vulnerable. He had to take the cosmic creatures to a realm they had no power in, and that realm was the Deepness. Besides, the Deepness was a realm which superseded architect-control. A realm where other planets existed, where Iravan could see those planets, this was a place of a thousand worlds, far vaster than a single universe, too immense for a minor explosion to have an effect. Iravan had calculated the risks carefully.

“You’re certain you want to do this?”

Dhruv said quietly.

“It’s either them or humanity,”

Iravan said grimly.

“What choice would you have me make?”

Dhruv did not reply, but the answer was likely clear to the sungineer, in the furious cascades of dust rippling over the ashram, the terrifying gusts of wind howling like enraged beasts. The sounds were miniscule, coming from Iravan’s beads, but in the Garden Dhruv would be able to feel the rumbles of an impending storm, the very same one Ahilya had delayed by interring the Virohi into Irshar. This time Iravan was prepared.

He was going to commit genocide, but what else could one do when faced with such parasites, such a plague? The Garden had superseded the need for ethics. This was about survival.

An image hovered over Iravan’s bead from the drones Dhruv kept positioned over Irshar. Molten stone-like entities dragged themselves out of the architecture. Chunks of green rock lifted into the air and crashed, smoke and fog overtaking the city in thick tentacles. Screams echoed through the device, breaking into static. Nausea built in Iravan, merging with the falcon-yaksha’s vengeance. He willed his body to fly faster.

In the Deepness, the Ecstatics stood ready. Ten-year-old Reyla hovered, her binding to a dozen Ecstatics making her light brighter than everyone else’s. Beside her the other Senior Ecstatics, Pranav who had once belonged to Nakshar, Theria who had sworn allegiance from Kinshar, and Jyaishna who had once been of Reikshar, all waited for Iravan’s signal.

Each of them was an Ecstatic he had trained. Once, there had only been four, but since then nearly three thousand architects had come to his Garden to learn of their destinies. Each of them would undoubtedly have their own capital desires once they reunited with their yakshas, but for now he was conditioning them so deeply with his own that their only purpose would be to make amends.

That reality was minutes away.

Giddy laughter built within Iravan, and he spun mid-air, flying faster. Within the Etherium, Nidhirv, Mohini and Agni stared at him across time and space, their eyes glinting silver. The falcon reared back in the Deepness. The lives inside of him waited, their eagerness and confusion a sharp reminder of how long he had delayed the fulfillment of his capital desire, how this one fateful action was the last thing needed before true freedom was his. Bhaskar shifted his weight. Mohini rang out in desperate laughter. It was dizzying, to hold so many lives. The desire was like the sweetest rasa, forcing him to react. And he yearned—oh, how he yearned.

“Watch closely,”

he said to Darsh.

“You can’t make a mistake. Everything hinges on today, and all your training has led to this.”

Thin filaments of silvery light shot out of Iravan’s falcon in the Deepness. His skin radiated silver, coiling patterns blinking in an amazing tapestry. In the Deepness he knotted himself to the five Senior Ecstatics, and through them to a hundred other architects.

A surge of power filled Iravan.

A hundred voices burst into his mind. He could sense the architects in the Deepness, their terror, their excitement, their adrenaline. A part of him wondered what they would feel when he unleashed his wrath. He could sense their strain, how they attempted not to fight his leash, and how they attempted to acquiesce. Their motes flickered and steadied, long lines of power weaving through a complex trajection of knots to feed him their Ecstasy.

“I already know how to do this linking,”

Darsh said.

“Teach me about the everpower. You’re going to use it now, aren’t you? To destroy the Virohi? Let me help you.”

“No,”

Iravan said.

“You have your task.”

Darsh made a face, but did not argue. They continued to fly in silence until they could see the Garden in the distance, its cave mouth and open clearing visible through the foliage.

Carefully, Iravan manipulated the wind stream around Darsh. He slowed long enough to jettison the boy down to the clearing, watched to make sure he was safe, then accelerated again. Darsh would take his command from the Garden, directing other Ecstatics in the Deepness the way Iravan had just now. He was going to act as a general in the war, helping the other Ecstatics with their trajection, while Iravan took the battle to the enemy. Dhruv had disapproved, both for using Darsh in this way and for the fact that he did not have that control though he was Iravan’s true second, but this was a matter of trajection. The sungineer would not be able to help. Iravan could feel his simmering annoyance over his communication bead.

But then Iravan forgot about Dhruv’s irritation, for he had arrived.

Irshar spread out below him, a lone city in the jungle with spires and columns sprawling far into hills. Even as Iravan watched, a massive tower cracked in two, falling in slow motion, bodies hurtling through it as the Virohi escaped in streams of smoke. Several buildings surrounded a huge central plaza, each of them caving in, sucked from within. Roads and paths snaked in and out of each other, massive stone slabs rising in the air then crashing in balloons of dust. Arches and orchards crumbled. Dust rose everywhere, as if many tiny earthrages were beginning. Within the city, shadowy tentacles swam, appearing almost human-like in their imitation of arms, and legs, and bodies. The single massive core tree shivered in the center of the plaza, rearing back in agony.

Next to this, the Garden remained untouched. Existing a few miles away, far enough from Irshar to stand as its own dwelling, the Garden was separated by a large swathe of hills. A massive tower made of bark and moss rose within a central courtyard, leaves curling and uncurling with the power of trajection. Glinting glass windows trembled in their panes, their chinking sound coming to Iravan through his beads. This last final storm would surely destroy the Garden too, but for now it stood strong, uncontaminated as it was by the Virohi.

Grim laughter bubbled in Iravan as he looked back to Irshar. He had created the Garden in purity. He would purify Irshar too. He hovered, surveying the landscape for a long second.

Wind buffeted his feather cloak. A thousand lives within him radiated their terrible fury, their desperation, their will. Voices thrummed in his head, echoing from the architects in the Deepness. Even from so high up, he could hear the screams of the citizens within the ashram.

I am going to save you, Iravan thought, but he did not know who the words were for—himself, the citizens, Ahilya, or humanity.

His wings flapped in the Deepness as a signal he was about to enter the Conduit.

Iravan pulled the Ecstatics with him into the Moment, and a billion stars surrounded him. In the Moment, the possibilities of the cosmic creatures glittered at him. Some shaped like irregular stars, some like rocks tapering off into waves, others like smoke-filled chambers that thrummed and vibrated—all were possibilities of the Virohi, blinking in and out. All living creatures were reflected as possibilities within the Moment, including the Virohi now that they had become so fully part of this dimension, but consciousness existed on a scale of sentience and awareness, and one could only sense an awareness less than their own in the Moment. The Ecstatics—advanced though they were, and capable of sensing a yaksha—were still not sensitive enough to feel the consciousness of a massive entity like the Virohi. None of them had the capability—not even now when so many of them were tied to him. Iravan almost wished he could show them what the Virohi looked like. Unlike regular stars and frozen possibilities, the cosmic creatures existed as movable pieces—so advanced and alien that even the Moment could not contain their infinite possibilities. They were alive here, in the same way architects were.

Iravan had found these strange stars of the Virohi long ago. He had prepared for this instant. He had simply not trajected the creatures so far, ignorant of how he would harm Ahilya or Irshar in the process, but with Ahilya’s failure, there was no need for such deep care.

They were here. They were accessible. They were finished.

Iravan dove from the skies, launching his attack.