Page 82 of The Enduring Universe
He did not know where he was, or if he was.
There was a cut deep within his consciousness, and Iravan pressed down upon his heart as if to cauterize the wound. He saw sap pour out of it, but it was black and star-studded. Slowly, he understood. He was not really bleeding. The core tree was leaving him.
Ahilya’s Etherium receded in flashes.Blink.The forest shivered.Blink.She turned to mist.Blink.Her hand dropped the axe.
It must have only been seconds, but to his eyes everything was slow. He had enough time to notice the shock on her face. Enough time to watch the glinting axe be absorbed by the ground. Enough time to see her mouth open in a cry.
Memories lurched, and he saw above him a blue sky. He was flying, flying, flying—
And then he was falling for an eternity.
A mote drifting out into the sky, alone in the black void.
His visions skewed horribly—and he saw himself tumble in shades of blue, yellow, and red—as if different versions of him were falling over and over again, back into his body. A vast disconnectedness echoed in his ears like the discordant hum of sungineering gone wrong. The edges of his sight blackened, a tunnel vision. Behind, he saw his past lives chase him, on the wings of the falcon-yaksha. Ahead, and at the end of the tunnel—death in an endless void.
Iravan lurched blindly onward, and leapt into the void, away from his past lives.
He heard the falcon’s roar as it reached him. The shadows still lurked within him, and he saw Nidhirv’s silvery gaze, along with Mohini’s and Askavetra’s. Each of his past lives surrounded him as he fell through this tunnel, circling him as if he were prey and they were a flock of hungry birds. Their hands extended, making to grasp him; they reached into the tunnel to clutch at his miniscule, disappearing body.
Then he slipped past their reach.
Floating in a neverspace, he stared back into the tunnel. A moat of nothing surrounded him and the past-lives, and they were unable to breach the thin wounded wall around him, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out a method. Tattoos still covered his skin, and though he was trajecting the everpower, the tattoos were no longer silvery-gray. They were blue-green, as if he were trajecting the Moment or the Deepness. Between him and his lives an ocean opened, and the ocean was his ability to traject, leaking from him like blood.
He spun away from the past lives, moving in panicky circles.He no longer fell within the forest of Ahilya’s Etherium. He could not sense the Virohi, or the rest of the citizens.
He could not sense her.
He felt the divorce like a slicing of his limbs, and tears gushed down his face, uncontrolled. To be forsaken now, when he had finally learned to see. It was poetic.
“I—I’m alone,” he stuttered.
His physical reality slammed into him, and Iravan choked, a fist covering his mouth as if to keep from retching.
Ahilya fell to her knees next to him. “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—”
His visions were melding one into another, and with her in front of him within this cave, his fall came to a standstill. He knew he was tethered in the cave because of her. Iravan took a deep shaky breath. “You excised me,” he said wonderingly.
“I—I had to,” she said. “Iravan, they were killing you, they were killing you.”
He raised a hand, and the movement felt alien, mechanical. Who was he now? To be excised not just from the core tree but from everything, all of humanity? What did that make him? His hand touched her hair, and he felt himself shudder.
“It was the right thing,” he said, and his voice sounded strange. In some part of his mind, he wondered where she had learned such a thing as excision. She had behaved like an architect. How did she know it would work? He didn’t know what to make of it, or of her now.
Ahilya closed her eyes and swallowed “I—I just meant to stop their influence on you, to stop them from destroying you. How do you feel?”
I’m excised, he thought, and the very words were terrifying. Hadn’t he feared this right from the beginning, from the Exam of Ecstasy that he’d undergone in Nakshar? Hadn’t Bharavi once threatenedhim with it when he’d first detected the Resonance in Nakshar’s temple?
He could still feel his trajection power, a hairsbreadth away, like a limb that he could still use but which was atrophying fast. The fear of excision had hung over him for years as an architect in Nakshar, the obedience to the ashram’s rules, the secrets he’d kept from Ahilya. It all flashed in his head, his wretchedness of being trapped in a deathcage during the Conclave, waiting for this inevitable moment.
In the end, it was Ahilya who’d done it.
It was only fitting.
He felt the falcon’s frustration and its rage as it clawed for the remains of the everpower through the tunnel he’d escaped from, but Iravan dismissed it. The falcon could not hurt him, not for a while yet. Ahilya had done the unthinkable. All he could feel was relief.
“Thank you,” he whispered. He wanted to weep—but it was as if all his emotion was being held at a distance.I’m in shock, he thought. Everything seemed so slow. There was so much time. Why had he ever hurried? He wanted to sit down and never stand up. He wanted to sleep and never stop.
“Do you—do you still have use of the everpower?” she asked.
