Page 129 of The Surviving Sky
The tiger watched her for so long that Askavetra grew cold. Then the yaksha padded forward. It was almost of a height with her, and she was the tallest woman in their ashram. The creature bent down and nuzzled her neck. She laughed despite herself and embraced it. The tiger purred in its throat, a sound that sent warmth through her belly.
They played in the jungle a long time, tumbling and running, hiding and discovering. The yaksha made the plants move just like architects did, of course. But when Askavetra touched the Moment, the yaksha growled threateningly.
She stopped at once, chastised. They had told her in the ashram to practice her skills as an architect, but touching the Moment agitated the yakshas. She had known it. She should not have tested it now.
The tiger padded to her, its yellow eyes dark, circling patterns within them. It crouched as though to pounce. Askavetra gasped, stumbling back, and the yaksha leapt to the branch above her and disappeared. She ran back to the ashram then.
Too afraid to approach a yaksha again, Askavetra told no one about her adventure, not through the years when the architects worried about the frequency of the rages, not through the times when all the ashrams convened to discuss survival in the jungle.
Yet when death embraced her, Askavetra’s last vision was that of a yaksha flying in an unfamiliar sky, lonesome and in pain; she sought it but it was too late. Another earthrage came, and shebecame—
***
Him.
He washeagain, although those limits were fleeting; they had always been themselves.
In that space between the two steps, he saw all of the sister ashrams on the brink of plummeting into the earthrage. He saw her, the strangely familiar woman, lying behind a giant bark oblong in the sky. He watched her thrash wildly and thought,Wake up, and remind me
of who I am.
She jerkedup—
***
On the mountain path, Iravan planted both feet on the ground. He had left his origin far behind, but ahead the peak awaited; another kind of origin, he knew.
Another step,
another life/ves
innumerable
In the space between, he saw the woman, but she was inside an orb now, and the orb plunged toward destruction. He moved reflexively, and the falcon dropped from the sky.
In its clutches, he saw himself, a body limp in his own talons, head back and eyes closed, asleep. He had been flying in circles, almost as though waiting, knowing, and now he swooped down, and he feltits—his—rageat these choices. His free talon snatched her orb from the falling sky and released it into a shimmer of green dust.
On the mountain, Iravan reached a crossroads.
Two paths unfolded, leading in opposite directions.
One path was littered with more lives, yet unlived, unification but a forgotten concern for whomever he became next. The other path led to his choices.Him. Iravan.
There was joy and fury on the first path, desire and fear, love and life, Ahilya.
On the other, there wasclarity.
Iravan froze in agony, poised at the crossroads.
43
AHILYA
There were rules to the strangeness of the habitat, Ahilya learned.
Rules she neither knew nor understood but which were consistent nevertheless.
At first, she sat watching over Iravan, her muscles tense in anticipation. If the falcon-yaksha had brought him there, then perhaps it would come back. The machete trembled in her hand, a slim defense against what was really a gigantic magical creature.
