Page 64 of The Legend of Meneka
Indra makes a slicing motion.
The vajra cuts through the air.
I duck, uttering a choked cry, but the vajra is nowhere close to me. I blink and it is back in Indra’s hand. His eyes gleam.
At first, I don’t understand. Something has happened, something terrible. A deep horror seizes me, tasting of bitterness and bile. Everything looks much the same. The lord standing opposite me, his vajra glinting, rainstorm pouring around us. The illusion of the hermitage still glimmering. The isolation of my own good sense.
Then a hollowness grows behind my navel. It creeps its way deep into my heart, deeper into my soul. A whimper trickles from my mouth. The illusion I made turns gray.
My fingers are still curled into dance mudras, but an aching sense of loneliness yawns within me, my tether from Amaravati fraying, whiplashing. The illusion flickers, all color draining from it. It becomes weaker.
Within me, a flame dies.
I fall to my knees in the same instant the illusion vanishes.
“No,” I whisper, knowing, feeling, not understanding. “No, please, no.”
Indra’s cold voice washes over me as though from a distance. “You have such a fondness for the mortals that you would betray your own king. You no longer need Amaravati and her power. You can live and die as one of them.”
“NO!” I scream, grief making me raw. “My lord, please, I beg you,I beg you.”
“Stop blubbering, child. It is already done.”
But I can’t think. I can’t stop.
It is not possible. He has taken away my magic. Nothing could have prepared me for this—it has not happened to any apsara in memory. What will become of me? There is no return to Amaravati anymore. No home. No illusions or dance. This is not merely exile. This is a death sentence.
In desperation, I curl my trembling fingers into a mudra as though to deny it all, but no magic emerges from me. In the place within me where my tether to Amaravati once lay is a burned cord, a severed thread. I am on my knees, keening, rocking back and forth.
“Please,” I whisper, cold. “Please don’t do this. I—I am an apsara of your court, my lord. I—I don’t know who else to be. I don’t—”
Light shifts, and Indra crouches to his knees in front of me. His hands settle on my shoulders, and I hear the command in my head to look at him.
His eyes are sorrowful. Kind. There is anger there, certainly, simmering underneath the impatience and coolness—but he is sad too. My eyes brim with tears. What have I done?
“Oh, daughter,” Indra says softly. “You have failed me at every turn. You will never dance again. Should you survive the next few hours without your magic, you must find a way to atone for your sins. But you are finished here in this mission, never again to return to Amaravati.”
It is the kindness in his voice that undoes me. I reach for the slimmest hope, searching inside me for the prana magic I learned at the hermitage. Kaushika’s crescent comb burns at my scalp, and I try to focus on it. I imagine the dewdrops of my prana within my own breath. I think of the instructions of the yogis from the hermitage. A part of me always hoped it was not Indra who gave me the power—that it was mine and mine alone, learned through my own tapasya.
Yet there is emptiness within me when I hunt for my wild prana. A sickening feeling grows.
My eyes lift to Indra, who stands, his resolve clear on his face to destroy Kaushika. I see my own destiny sealed, and a tidal wave of grief smashes into me. Here is the truth, then, one I have been too afraid to accept.
Rambha had been right all along.
All my magic, celestial or mortal, came from Indra.
I truly am nothing without the lord.
CHAPTER 24
Battle looms in the skies.
I watch it happen, in the storm clouds that race, the rain that thunders, the winds that churn. I stumble through the forest, trying to find my way back to the hermitage. To warn Kaushika that Indra is coming for him. To beg for his forgiveness for everything I did.
Yet with Amaravati cut away from me, my vision sways. I fall and stumble, a repelling in my stomach like a swallowed poison. I do not know if this is what occurs when an apsara is cut away from her magic and the city. I did not even know it was possible. Exiled apsaras are not spoken of in swarga. Their punishment is to remain forgotten until they can prove their devotion to Indra and become worthy of acknowledgment again. Am I dying? Only desperate hate and powerful magic can destroy an immortal, but Indra implied I might not survive the next few hours. It is too difficult to piece together these thoughts.
Pain seizes me with every movement as I stagger from tree to tree. Leaves, stem, bark. They touch me, caress me, stab me. Sometimes my vision clears, and I turn this way or that, thinking I see something familiar. Other times, everything is a haze, and I move only through sheer will and by rote. Do hours pass? Do days? I sleep, but I do not remember waking. I look at my hands, trembling, and I see Kaushika’s fingers interlocking with mine, weaving in and out curiously, restlessly. I cannot remember his face from when he loved me. I can only remember his revulsion.
