Page 133 of The Surviving Sky
Iravan thought back towhat—inthe chaos of that terriblenight—hadnot occurred to him. He had swung the branch at Bharavi with enough force to smash her head in, yet not only had she survived, she had been fully in her senses on waking. Andbefore…she must have broken through her own healbranch bracelet and the vows she’d made as a Maze Architect, in order to land Nakshar in the jungle during the earthrage. He himself had recovered from his broken healbranch vow; even with Chaiyya’s intervention, it should have affected him deeply, making him sick after he’d broken it, yet he had felt no consequence from it before he’d arrived at the habitat, as though Ecstasy had given him self-healing as a passive ability.
Ahilya looked thoughtful. “If Bharavi broke these limits, can you?”
Iravan frowned.“I—Idon’t know. Why? What do you mean?”
“Thisplace—”Ahilya waved a hand and displaced some of the green dust that had crept along the copse. “It’s falling apart, the dust diminishing, but surely, it responds to the trajection of the yakshas. If Ecstatic trajection is the same as theirs, and I think it is, then maybe you can traject heresomehow—”
“I wouldn’tknowhow.”
“It can’t be very different from trajection itself. Maybe the principles are the same?”
“Or maybe they’re completely different. After all, trajection is not the same as Energy X. Dhruv said they have different energy signatures.”
“We’ll never know until you try, right?”
“I—Ahilya—”Iravan grabbed her hands and bent over them as though in prayer. “I’m scared,” he admitted softly.
She lifted his chin so he met her eyes. “Why? There’s no architecture here to destroy with Ecstasy. It’s the perfect place to try.”
He hesitated. Poised at the crossroads of the mountain path, he knew any decision now would propel him in one direction or another. He could see clearly, what his journey would look like on either path. Ahilya on the first path, a life no matter how short, rich with experiences and emotion; and after death, many more lives.
But on the other path,answers.
Once he took a step, it would be irreversible.
This time, the fork would not reappear.
“It’s not about the destruction,” he said, swallowing. “I think this path of Ecstasywill—Ahilya,I think it’ll changeus—youandme—insome way. There won’t be any going back.”
She drew back at that. “Then we stay here in this copse. We wait until it vanishes. We stay together until we’re reborn.”
He stared at her. “You would do that? For me?”
“Not for you. For me.” She smiled slightly, a sardonic smile, like in a private joke. “But is that what you want?”
Iravan imagined it, a life lived in the thicket, waiting for death. Could he do that? Could he embrace fate so easily while the ashrams fell and their own destruction was inevitable? His eyes returned to hers, beautiful, amazing, challenging Ahilya. “No,” he admitted at last. “It’s not what I want.”
She smiled; she had known this, of course.
Iravan sighed. “All right. Let me try.”
Ahilya moved away, gathering everything that had been scattered around the copse, the sungineering equipment, the solarnote, an identical tracker locket to the one around his neck. She stuffed all of it into her satchel, then approached him, holding two ends of the rope. She began to tie one end around his waist. “Just to be safe,” she muttered.
Iravan watched her, saying nothing. He examined his overlapping visions. Like with trajection, in the first he saw Ahilya as he would normally, winding the rope around her waist, tightening the knots with deft fingers. In his second vision he saw the now-familiar dark of an Ecstatic’s Deepness.
Andyet—
Herealized—
He was on the crossroads on the mountain path inneitherof those visions.
There werethreevisions.
There was a third place like a constant backdrop to the other two.
In this third place, he had seen the maze of his own consciousness. Here, he had watched from behind the falcon-yaksha’s eyes; he had seen his own consciousness; he had lived and died a thousand times; more.This…vastness,this…thisEtherium—it existed beyond the Moment and the Deepness, glimmering and burning behind his brows. Suddenly, Iravan could separate all the times he had been taken over by it. All those weeks before, when he had fought the magnaroot in the jungle during the earthrage, he had seen the Moment not as a motionless reality but a raging storm. In the library, when he’d nearlydied—he’dfloated in a never-space and watched Nakshar, watched the earthrage, and seen beyond it to a terrifying vision of a shattering being. Right before the attack on the ashram, when he had seen the falcon-yaksha, when he hadbecomeit—
All that had occurred within the third vision of the Etherium.
