The Surviving Sky, page 44
She had thought she had burned in the vortex, but her skin was still the exact shade it had been. Her eyes were the same brown, thick lashes framing them. Her eyebrows arched slightly, sardonic, in this examination of herself. Ahilya’s long black hair rippled to her waist, windswept, undone. The satchel was still strapped around her shoulder, and the normalcy of the bag took her aback, as though the events in the vortex had been a dream, occurring in a different reality. Ahilya blinked, and cupped her hands to taste the water; it was sweet like nectar. She drank thirstily; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk water.
When she’d had her fill, she glanced around her. She was in a garden, wild yet deliberate. It birthed in front of her eyes, but not in the riotous manner of the jungle after an earthrage. Every branch that grew on a tree was careful. Every tendril that tied itself to another seemed designed. Wildflowers bloomed in a profusion of colors, yet the colors were coordinated, pinks merging with lilacs, blues contrasting with golds.
Through the whispering of the foliage vibrated a melody—no, a raga. It grew in her heart, like life springing. A stirring rippled in her belly, flowed through her limbs, tingled in her fingers and toes. For a very long time, Ahilya remained still, letting the sounds wash over her.
Finally, she arose and turned her gaze away from the garden to look behind her.
And she saw him.
Iravan.
He sat less than twenty feet away on the highest steps of a grassy staircase. His thick hair was ruffled, his kurta rumpled and tattered. He had rolled up his sleeves again—what was left of them—and he stared at his bare arms, at the blue-green patterns that grew on his skin like restless vines. The falcon-yaksha lay curled behind him on the stair’s landing, its head tucked under one of its massive silvery wings. Behind them, moss-covered rock opened into a jagged window. Thick tree trunks stood past the window, leaves waving gently in the breeze.
Ahilya took a step forward.
Iravan looked up.
His eyes shone with blue-green light, obscuring the white sclera, overtaking his once-black irises. He stared at her with that unearthly gaze, the angles of his face as though hewn out of the very rock he sat on.
Iravan had never looked as wild nor as majestic. He stared at her a long moment, and she paused, stared back, uncertain of her welcome.
His face broke into a smile.
“Ahilya,” he said, and it was his voice, no matter how different he looked.
He made to stand up, but Ahilya ran up the stairs. She stopped as she neared him, and he shifted to make space. Ahilya sat down beside him.
For a while, they just looked at each other. Closer, she could see the patterns of his skin weren’t mere vines. Spirals twined over him, reached up to his neck, glimmered lightly on his face.
“I’m building,” Iravan said simply.
He waved a hand around them. Arches and pillars grew out of the bark, solidifying. Curtains of vines crept down from the ceiling, braiding to create veils and shady nooks. On the grassy floor, pathways ran between the wildflowers, as though the place were anticipating a large party of people and was intent on giving them a warm welcome.
Ahilya turned back to Iravan. He hadn’t looked away to the garden. His unearthly eyes rested on hers, yet despite that formidable gaze, he seemed nervous.
“Your eyes,” she said.
“I think—” he said, raising a hand to his face. “I think it’ll fade. But it’s too soon… since the union.”
“The union,” she repeated. “Between you and the falcon?”
“Between me,” he replied, “and me.”
Ahilya nodded slowly. She had seen something in the vortex. Snatches of the vision returned to her, of formless air fragmenting into two; of a star-studded universe like Iravan dying; of another universe where she and Iravan had forged a wondrous labyrinth.
“I saw all that,” Ahilya said. “How?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, his voice heavy. “I don’t understand it all. But I think when you entered the vortex, you somehow linked with my Etherium.”
“Your… Etherium.”
“A third vision. Beyond the two split visions of trajection or the two expanded visions of Ecstasy. I think you have it too.”
Ahilya frowned, trying to picture what he meant. “The mind’s eye, you mean?”
“No, a different dimension that lies far beyond the mind’s eye. A place of guidance.” Iravan shook his head. “It’s difficult to explain. I don’t understand it myself.”
Ahilya closed her eyes. Images beckoned her, of Iravan’s glowing eyes, of the vortex, of the cave where they’d seen those carvings. Yet beyond that she discerned something, a presence that was watching her even as she watched it, focused and burning behind her brows. She had never once paid attention to it, but now that Iravan had pointed it out, she knew the presence had always been around her, within her.
“The other yakshas,” she said, opening her eyes, alarmed at sensing the Etherium. “Where are they?”
“Somewhere around the habitat. Or perhaps back into the jungle now that…”
“Now that we’ve ended the earthrage.”
“Yes.”
Ahilya shook her head. “I’ve spent my life studying them—and to know that they’ve been here all along… so many of them.” Her breath came out in a shudder. “I suppose they are immortal.”
Iravan nodded solemnly. “In a way, yes. I have died and been born so many times, but the falcon has retained its shape and its memory. No matter the passage of time, it will always remember me.”
Ahilya swallowed. She had considered it—the agelessness of the yakshas, the minute she had seen them snap from jungle creatures on the carvings. Yet the fact of it—the falcon resting behind her now, the elephant-yaksha she had tagged, all those creatures she had examined and studied so closely… That they had all been around since the very first earthrages… Awed tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t comprehend the enormity of this revelation. The yakshas were the most ancient creatures in the world. What she would not give to see the passage of life through their sight.
She turned to Iravan and squeezed his hand, but tiny glasslike tears shone in his blue-green eyes. “What is it?” she asked.
“The yakshas,” he said quietly. “They are immortal and they remember, but I think—I suspect—we have done great damage to many already.”
“How so?”
“Through excision,” Iravan said. “I can’t be sure, but I think that’s what excision does. It cuts an architect away from their yaksha, from the source of their connection to trajection and Ecstasy, and from their Nakshar’s Constant. I imagine it drives the creature insane—perhaps even makes it mortal somehow. Perhaps the yaksha forgets its architect, the same way an architect no longer can perceive the Constant.” He took a deep, ragged breath, as though struggling with a great burden, then stilled again.
Ahilya did not speak. What could she say? Iravan had felt guilty about excising Manav before, but now, when he knew the whole truth of his action, an action he and the others had been forced to do through generations of lies? Her own history had been erased, but for Iravan to learn of his history now—the shame and consequence of it—nothing she said could alleviate his guilt.
He seemed to be following the same line of thought. When he spoke, his voice was calm, though she could still detect an undercurrent of fury. “Architects are taught about earthrages,” he said. “They learn that earthrages are caused by a disruption of consciousness. But the true extent of that theory… it is not fully known. If it were, it would devastate us.”
“You mean that thing… that being,” Ahilya said softly. The Etherium had shown it to her as a formless wisp of air. She had felt its desperation in its attack. She had known desperation like that once. “It is not the yakshas that cause the earthrages like we’d thought.”
“No. It is a cosmic creature. I don’t have a term for it yet. For the kind of thing I… we… used to be.”
His hand gripped hers. The other hand clenched into a fist on his knee. Behind them, the falcon ruffled its feathers and uttered a growl in its throat. Vibrations rippled through Ahilya like the aftershocks of an earthrage.
After a long moment, Iravan released his hold on her fingers. He smoothed his hand, caressing hers in apology.
“When a cosmic being like that splits,” he said, “the disruption to consciousness occurs at a planetary level. Those beings were connected to the planet in some intrinsic way. That is why we have trajection. Each time one of those creatures splits, an earthrage begins. And it only ends when they’re successful, when they embed their broken consciousness in… in an available vessel. In humans who are subsequently born with the ability to traject,” he said pointing at himself. “And animals that snap to become yakshas.” He gestured at the falcon, which seemed to have gone back to sleep.
“You are implying that every earthrage we’ve ever had, a new architect was born in some ashram or another.”
“An architect born, and a yaksha formed. But given how wild creatures don’t exist in the jungle anymore… perhaps that’s something you can answer?”
Ahilya considered this. “Perhaps the yakshas formed in the most recent earthrages are not yakshas at all but something else altogether. I’d have to study the split to know how many forms the two halves of a being can take.”
Iravan pressed her hand. “I suspect the yakshas—all the ones you’ve studied, and all the ones we saw before the vortex—those must be the counterpart creatures of the original architects. The first architects. Yet more and more of those cosmic beings have been splitting, into architects and some unknown form. A new earthrage begins on the heels of the last, without a break. Perhaps multiple beings split at the same time. It might be why the rages have been getting longer and the lulls shorter. We were lucky that we had to stop only one of the creatures—although it is only a matter of time before the being we trapped breaks through our barrier or another one attempts the split.”
Ahilya nodded. She had already worked it out. It corroborated the census data she had once studied. More and more people had been born with the ability to traject. If earthrages created architects, it only made sense. And if multiple beings split at the same time… Could that explain the many epicenters of a single storm?
“That being I saw,” she said, confirming, “that wasn’t you.”
“No. But it was of the same species like me. Like us.” He nodded back toward the falcon. “A yaksha and an architect are fragments of the cosmic being, but a being is greater than its parts. We lost something in the process of splitting that no amount of union can repair. Despite our union, we are incomplete.”
Ahilya stared at him. The cosmic creature had appeared nothing more than a wisp of air to her, but its split had seemed like the world breaking. Rocks had shattered in her mind, and a chilling scream had echoed over the planet. It was what had happened to Iravan, to what he and his yaksha had once been. How had they survived the pain of that for so many lifetimes? The guilt?
“You are still you,” she whispered, almost afraid of what he’d say. “Aren’t you?”
Iravan smiled. “Yes. I am still me. More so than I’ve ever been.”
“And the union?” Ahilya asked, studying his face, those unearthly eyes. “How do you feel?”
Iravan’s shoulders moved uncomfortably. “It feels like I’ve… grown… a limb where once there had only been a phantom. I can see the Resonance in the Deepness. And I feel a silence in the back of my mind. I know both of those are the falcon, but we’ll have to learn to communicate with each other. Fragments as we both are, the bird has as much its own consciousness as I have mine.”
They sat silently, their fingers weaving in and out of each other’s. Around them, the garden grew in rasps and creaks. There could be life here, Ahilya thought. Birds and animals and people, just like there were in the ashrams above. This could be the haven that she’d always sought in her research, a place for humankind to live again. A weight of sadness filled her chest. She swallowed, trying to loosen it.
“When we were in the caves,” she said after some time, “you said Ecstasy brought clarity. Is this what you meant, about the yakshas and these cosmic beings?”
“More than that,” Iravan said. “I meant clarity about my history. Ahilya, the ancient architects always knew yakshas were their own selves—their other halves—they knew this from the very beginning. There was a time when the yakshas were revered, when architects released the cosmic beings into birth deliberately to sustain trajection, and sought the yakshas after, perhaps to unite with them. That was a time when Ecstasy was desirable. Yet Ecstasy was a reminder that we split, that we created the earthrages. If a society of architects chose Ecstasy, there’d be no going back—and so, eventually, architects began to fear the jungle. They erased the yakshas and buried this knowledge, perhaps in a part of the histories that they kept secret even from their own kind. I don’t know what brought the change about, but I can understand it. Architects would have had to live with the knowledge of their guilt and shame—and more, they would have to recompense for what they had done after they became Ecstatics.”
Ahilya glanced at him. “What do you mean? Recompense how? Why?”
Iravan took a deep breath. “Ecstasy—it changes you. Bharavi tried to tell me, but it is only now that I understand—now that I feel this burning desire in me so clearly. Inherent to Ecstasy is the union with the yaksha, and inherent to the union is the desire to make up for lifetimes of mistakes.”
Iravan raised a slow hand to his chest.
“I can feel it,” he whispered, staring. “The desire to make amends weighs on me, heavy on my heart. If architects throughout had allowed Ecstasy, they would have had to make up for everything they had once done; they would almost have had no choice. It was better to outlaw Ecstasy altogether—to build material bonds and limits and arbitrary rules, and forbid the jungle and forget the yakshas. It was better to be worshipped by those who couldn’t traject instead of admitting to them how we had destroyed their world. That secret—that is my shameful history.”
“But you built the labyrinth. You stopped the earthrage.”
Iravan shook his head, dropping his hand. “No, Ahilya. You stopped the earthrage. You were the template to fix me. You were the shield that could touch the creature. You brought the will and the desire and the form. I merely had the means, but you—and those like you without the ability to traject—you hold the power to stop earthrages and take away trajection altogether, for all future to come. It’s why the architects feared your kind. It’s why they erased you. What we did today—somewhere out there is a fetus that will gain consciousness, but it won’t have the ability to traject. It will be… whole unto itself. Like you. That is not the kind of thing the architects would have liked. Only a very small section of architects sought to find the truth.”
“Those rebel groups we saw in the caves,” Ahilya whispered, understanding.
“Yes. A group of architects and citizens. I think they chose to build the habitat and tried to stop the earthrages. They knew that the rages couldn’t be stopped by architects alone—or by complete beings who cannot traject. They needed to work together, one to build, the other to push the labyrinth into reality. But they were a splinter group. Most architects chose to fly. Rather than face their truths, they escaped into the skies. In the end, the increasing earthrages killed the rebels, too.” Iravan’s hands trembled once, then stilled. “I was one of them. One of those who chose power and flight instead of truth and completion. Again and again and again.”
Tears thickened her throat. Ahilya couldn’t think of a single appropriate thing to say. If Iravan was right, then everything their civilization had built itself on, all the decisions the ashrams took—they were all based on a lie. She had been right, but she couldn’t feel vindication. A heavy sadness grew in the place where anger had once lived. Her lingering resentments against the architects faded like fog in sunlight.
She broke the gaze and looked back at the garden Iravan had built. It had bloomed in the last few minutes. More streams of water had appeared, and Iravan had constructed several waterfalls gently trickling down the rocks. Ahilya smelt the moisture and life in the air.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. She could feel him smile though she couldn’t bear to look at him, not with the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks. “You’ve built this place for others, too.”
“Yes. I…” Iravan choked on his own repressed tears. “I don’t belong to an ashram anymore. Not like this. Not with who I’ve finally become. But my purpose has never been clearer. To find a way to tell the other ashrams about the truth I’ve learned, to release the architects from the fear of Ecstasy, and to—”
“End every earthrage,” Ahilya whispered.
“Yes. With your help.”
Ahilya shook her head. “Those beings were trying to escape erasure. You would stop them from doing so? Is that right, Iravan? When once you funneled them into birth yourself?”
“What else is our choice? To let them split? To let them break our planet?”
“So, it is us against them?”
“I’ve been so lost, Ahilya. I would not wish it upon those beings. It is… harrowing.”
“I’ve been erased, my love. It is harrowing too.”
Iravan said nothing, but his brow furrowed. Carefully, Ahilya disentangled her fingers from his. Iravan froze, but she raised her hand to his cheek and stroked it. “You said leaving that dusty little copse would change us. You were right.”
He closed his own hand over hers, gazing at her with those blue-green eyes. “It doesn’t have to change us. It doesn’t have to change you and me.”
Ahilya said nothing, but a choked sob escaped her.
“In the vortex,” Iravan continued, “there was a moment where—I was broken, the falcon and I, we were broken. We knew we must unite and complete ourselves, but we didn’t know how.” Iravan took another deep ragged breath. “You showed me how. You saved us.”
