Page 62 of The Enduring Universe
“I don’t think this will be as smooth as it was for Iravan,” she said quietly. “Maybe we should clear the chamber of these Ecstatics so they don’t interfere or wreak any damage?”
“Clear the chamber,” Naila repeated. “You and me. Clear this chamber of Ecstatics.”
Ahilya heard her own incredulity in the other woman’s voice. What authority did the two of them have? Naila was disdained for not having joined the Garden to become an Ecstatic. And Ahilya… well, she did not think the Ecstatics would hold her in high regard, not after her demands of Iravan, and certainly not when she viewed the Garden with so much contempt. The two of them were interlopers, their authority only as much as Iravan gave them. And he had given them none.
Still, Naila rolled up her sleeves. “It’s always something easy, isn’t it?” she muttered.
Shaking her head, she strode forward, and Ahilya followed.
34
IRAVAN
Iravan shouldered through the thrum until he was right where he’d left Darsh and Reyla. He already knew it was the boy attempting to unite with his yaksha. He could see the boy’s two presences in the Deepness next to the shattering supernova of the Moment, both Darsh’s dust mote and his incorporeal yaksha, circling each other warily.
Reyla stood trembling in the Garden, watching Darsh apprehensively. Iravan could see her shape in the Deepness too, a small bright frisson of light among all the others of the curious Ecstatics who had begun glowing blue-green, jostling their way in both the visions to get a clearer view. He made to approach Darsh, but Reyla caught his arm.
“Wait, he’s—” Reyla’s voice was a whisper. Small tears of fright pooled in her eyes. “Iravan-ve, right before… He did something to the Deepness. When we were trying to teach the others to find the evervision, the Deepness changed.”
Iravan nodded, then gently disengaged. “Leave the Deepness,” he called out. “All of you.”
One by one, light trickled out of the assembled Ecstatics. The chamber dimmed, the only radiance coming from Iravan’s silver, and Darsh and Reyla’s skins from inhabiting the Deepness.
“You too, Reyla,” Iravan said to the girl.
She looked for a second like she was going to argue, but then she winked out of the velvety blackness too. Reyla joined the others in the crowd, leaving Iravan and Darsh alone in the center.
He approached Darsh slowly, careful to not startle him. The boy was glowing as expected, being in the Deepness, but there were no tattoos on his skin for now, which was a welcome sign. He had not begun trajecting toward his unity, and from the Deepness Iravan could tell that the yaksha had not begun either. Darsh and his yaksha were simply circling each other endlessly in recognition.
Perhaps that is why the vortex of light in front of Darsh was but a slim pillar, more a simple thin rod than the kind of spiral Iravan had unleashed with his own falcon-yaksha. Iravan and the falcon had created their vortex through their Ecstatic trajection of each other, but if Darsh and his yaksha were not trajecting one another yet, it made sense why the vortex was still misshapen. Though the pillar shot straight into the sky, the light from it was bent with black, leaching darkness in vapors. Iravan could not recall anything like that from his unification, but of course there was no reason Darsh’s would be the same. Too much had changed since then within the realms, and Darsh’s power was not identical to Iravan’s own.
He stepped closer to Darsh, then dropped to his knees. This close, Iravan could see blue-green flickering deep in the boy’s eyes like a flame, in and out, in and out. Darsh was frozen, his body so still it might have been a statue. Roots circled under his feet, curling around his ankles.
In the second vision, Iravan watched Darsh and the incorporeal yaksha from a distance. The yaksha sparkled, an amorphous wateryform hovering in the darkness. A tug formed on Iravan’s heart, something akin to familiarity, but he did not have time to discern it now. Neither the yaksha nor Darsh were supertrajecting, but what if they began suddenly? Would they be able to find each other’s stars in the Moment, when splintered pieces from other possibilities were floating everywhere, instead of being frozen like they once were? What if they hurt something or someone else in the process? What if they broke the Moment further?
He had thought about this after the Moment’s destruction. He had been prepared for it, and he’d told everyone in the Garden how they were to proceed if their yakshas beckoned to them. That it had happened to Darsh instead of another Ecstatic was good; Darsh’s loyalty to him at least was unquestioned. There would not be resistance. Still, Iravan was careful. This here, now—it was an event of purity, witnessed by no one else before. It was the closest thing to sacrosanct, to truth, an architect could experience in their condemned lives. He would not lead Darsh through it with confusion.
“Darsh,” he asked in a low voice. “Can you hear me?’
The roots around the boy’s ankles tightened. His chest rose and fell in a steady beat, and his eyes were pools of blue-green light.
Then, slowly, as though being forced, his face turned toward Iravan. He nodded, and flames of blue flickered and died again in his eyes.
“Let me guide you,” Iravan said.
The yaksha shot out a slim ray of light from the Deepness into the broken Moment. In front of him, Darsh began to tremble. The boy’s dust mote in the Deepness burgeoned with light, and he aimed it toward the Moment, presumably toward the stars of his yaksha. To traject each other was a basic step of unity. That is how it had occurred with Iravan and the falcon too, but an unexpected wave of blackness rippled through the assembled Ecstatics like a searing cord, connecting a few of them.
Cries of shock echoed as Kriya, Somdev, and Lana tipped their heads back, spasming where they stood. They dropped back into earth, crumpling.
Panic seized Iravan.
He saw instantly what was occurring. Darsh was not trajecting his yaksha as he was supposed to. He was taking power from these other Ecstatics to power himself, trajecting them in a dangerous, terrible shortcut. Trajecting a higher being was always dangerous, even for someone like Iravan. Viana flashed behind his eyes. When he had trajected that architect in Nakshar, he had killed her. In his ignorance, Darsh would do the same thing.
The architects in the Garden writhed, groaning on the floor. Iravan flapped his wings in the Deepness, hesitating, even as Darsh made to traject the architects again. Had the boy been using the linked trajection that Iravan had used in the battle with the Virohi, Iravan could have severed the lines of power. But in the midst of unity, anything Iravan attempted could harm Darsh.
“Listen to me,” he said urgently. “I’m going to help you, do you understand? Whatever you are doing, let me lead you through this. You have to trust me.”
As he said the words, Iravan trajected a beam of light in the Deepness to encircle Darsh’s form within a lasso. Instead of feeling Darsh’s power inside himself, Iravan simply became aware of it. He closed in on Darsh in the second vision, as the boy and his yaksha trajected haphazardly into the Moment.
