Page 55 of The Enduring Universe
She glimpsed other items in the satchel, more books, a few faded pictures of Basav with a woman and children, some documents that looked official. She did not know what they meant, but suddenly she received a glimpse from behind his eyes, as he was presented with honors for the work he did in his ashram. Basav’s younger face shone with pride before withering away into memory. Ahilya shivered as if she had done something wrong by glimpsing this.
In the infirmary, the Senior Architect opened the tome. Upside-down though it was, Ahilya could tell that it was an ancient architect record. The paper was yellow with age, and Basav lifted each page carefully like it was the most delicate child. It was shocking that he had recovered this from the Conclave’s crash. How much other literature had they lost? Ahilya still did not have access to all of the remaining records, though with her corruption, this rejection finally made a perverse kind of sense.
Basav did not offer the book to her. From the way his fingers clutched the pages, Ahilya knew that it pained him to share whatever knowledge it contained with her, with a non-architect.
But Ahilya was no stranger to such architect records. She had seen others of this kind before—books with no words but only beautifully drawn pictures, in colors made out of plant dye and paper of the thinnest bark. Iravan had once brought her something similar as a gift. He had seduced her with the promise of more. She leaned forward and studied the image, though Basav held the book away from her. A tree covered the open page, broad-trunked and healthy. Yet cracks bled on the tree, leaking not sap but blood. Though the tree stood erect, there was pain in the posture, reverberating from its branches in the tightening of the leaves and the clenching of the branches.
“I have been arming myself with knowledge of the trees ever since the creation of the vriksh,” Basav said slowly, still staring at the book.
Basav led the charge for communing with survivors of the fallen ashrams, attempting to record architect history, trying to hold onto the version of the past he was familiar with. Ahilya had known the tragedy of such an endeavor, but his pain disconcerted her now. The lines on his face, the way his fingers shook. He was barely holding on to sanity, and she wanted to reach out a hand, comfort himdespite his abhorrence of her, but Basav looked up to meet Ahilya’s eyes, and she flinched.
She wanted to tell him she wasn’t infiltrating him, not willingly at least, but the words stuck in her throat. She looked back to her covers.
“What I tell you now has been a great secret, even in architect circles,” Basav said, his voice gravelly, holding onto his fury. “Understand that I would not share this if there was any other way.”
She nodded once, but Basav did not acknowledge it. Instead, he traced a finger over the image. “You already know that we excised architects who showed Ecstasy. In your ashram, the councilors used an Examination of Ecstasy, but within the Seven Northern Sisters, suspicion was enough. We did not seek proof that would only be ambiguous, at best.”
Ahilya stared at him. In her mind’s eye, she saw Iravan in a deathcage, his sleeves rolled back, as he faced the Conclave of all the sister-ashrams in a sham trial that was meant to unhinge him. Basav had never wanted Iravan to live. He’d stepped into the deathmaze, opening himself to being trajected into madness, all to prove a point. She had called him a bastard for it, she had railed against him. Even now, she could not help her distaste. Ahilya stirred, wanting to put some distance between them.
Basav’s flat gaze swept across her as if he could hear her judgment. “We were not so frivolous, gambling with survival,” he said coldly, his eyes taking in the other two councilors too.
Ahilya watched her own shame and confusion spark across Chaiyya and Airav’s faces. All three of them had once been councilors of Nakshar. She had fought for Ecstasy to become legal, but before her time the other two had been part of the laws to uphold the Examination of Ecstasy. Basav’s unspoken disgust and recrimination was clear—had Nakshar followed instant-excision, humanity would not be in the jungle, facing extinction.
Was that the path she had not taken, then? Would that have prevented all this? His ashram had destroyed lives. His ashram had excised children.We are all wrong in some measure, she thought.What can we do, except work with what we have been given?It should have been a comforting thought, but all Ahilya felt was misery. Was this to be the destiny for their species then? To make mistakes over and over again, to destroy themselves because of hate and arrogance and superfluous power grabs?The Virohi truly are foolish, she thought in morbid irony.To wish to become likeus—they have to be mad.
“The codes for excising an Ecstatic Architect were wrought within the core trees of the Seven Northern Sisters,” Basav continued. “Your ashram might have drifted from tradition in terrible directions, but even Nakshar kept to this as did every sister ashram. Only Senior Architects of a city knew how to trigger these excision codes. In some ways, it is a similar trajection they orchestrated with the Architects’ Disc when subsuming an offending ashram—excising its core tree into tiny parts, then absorbing the remainder of the ashram into itself. Every ashram had this knowledge.”
Ahilya had a horrifying image of an airborne city sending a thousand tentacle-like roots into another airborne structure, splitting it into fragments and sucking its pieces into itself, while the core tree burst into powder. Even imagined, the violence of it shook her.
It was the danger Nakshar had faced in opposing the Conclave and supporting the claim for Ecstatics to be free. The Conclave’s crash into the jungle had ended the need for such political maneuvering, but once Nakshar’s total erasure had held the city’s councilors at chokepoint. It was the reason Chaiyya had sacrificed Iravan and the other Ecstatics, opening them to excision and paving the path to illegal experimentation on them for powering an Ecstatic battery. How different things would have been had they all simply treated one another as human beings, worthy of respect and care.But wehave shown time and again that we are not capable of compassion, Ahilya thought.We do not care for the other. Wecreatethe other.
She had been such an outsider once. Now it was the Virohi.
Silent laughter built in her head. “How is this to help me?” she asked.
Basav looked at her, frowning at her tone. “If you had found a way to extract the Virohi, we would be having a different conversation,” he said. “Iravan-ve knows the codes of excision, and I would simply have had you contain the infection within a single part of the vriksh, and hand it over to him to excise. But he cannot control the Etherium like you can, so you are our only option. You will have to perform the excision.”
He turned to another page. Then, reluctance in every inch of his movements, Basav handed Ahilya the book.
The second sketch was beautiful and horrifying. Two architects of indeterminate gender faced each other under the boughs of a massive, leafy core tree. Circles of radiance emanated from each of their bodies, but one was on their knees—clearly an Ecstatic—whereas the other stood glowing blue-green, clearly a Senior Architect. Stars wheeled overhead connected through constellation lines—a representation of the Moment, Ahilya knew. Jagged shards of lightning flung down from the stars, powered by the looming Senior Architect’s trajection.
Ahilya flipped a page, her heart racing. The Ecstatic Architect’s face was thrown back in a scream. The circles of radiance around their body diminished, as she continued to flip the pages, becoming smaller and smaller, until the architect was no longer within the boughs of the tree. The last image showed the Ecstatic Architect prone on the floor. Discarded. Alone. Excised.
She raised her eyes to the other councilors. Each one of them had once committed such an act.
“Excision,” she breathed. “When you excised an architect, you did not simply cut them from their yakshas. No—you didn’t know of the yakshas. You cut them away from their ashram’s core tree. From the codes of trajection. Am I right?”
Basav’s silence was answer enough.
Ahilya felt nauseated.
Iravan had always been tight-lipped about excision. He’d told her excision cut an architect away from their power, but how could architects do so without trajecting each other? Architects were forbidden from trajecting people or their core trees—each of those actions was a sign of sure Ecstasy. So they trajected the ashram instead, withdrawing permissions until the Ecstatic was unrecognizable by the city as a citizen. The tree was coded to protect architects over non-architects, but if they took away the tree’s ability to recognize the Ecstatic as a citizen, as a person or a human being, the core tree would become compliant. And instead of a Senior Architect conducting excision, the core tree would attack the Ecstatic.
Ahilya imagined it—a core tree, with all its power, sloughing away at an Ecstatic’s consciousness, seeing their life as a contaminant to the ashram, much like a forbidden jungle plant. Once, Nakshar had chosen not to recognize ordinary citizens as part of the ashram during the Conclave. Ahilya had taken Chaiyya’s borrowed rudra bead and changed the permissions, protecting her sister and the rest of the non-architects, unwilling to sacrifice them for the council’s politics.
But the council had always done such calculations, even unto their own. Each time they’d sent an architect to be excised, they had stripped away that architect’s humanity.
Perhaps the Ecstatic had withered away, their power leaking with their consciousness, until nothing else remained. Perhaps their loss of self came not from their inability to traject, but because theyhad been cut off from their society. That is what had happened to Manav. To Maiya, who Iravan had shown her in Nakshar’s sanctum, and to all those who had been found guilty of the power for thousands of years. They lost their ability to trajectbecauseof the loss of their mind. Hadn’t Iravan told her often that in order to traject, one had to hold onto their own consciousness, their own will. Tied in a thousand ways to a core tree, with memory and consciousness fed to it through every act, the separation from a tree would be devastating to an Ecstatic Architect. Ahilya stared at the picture in the book and imagined the total obliteration of a person, performed in concerted cruelty, all because they were different.
