Page 2 of The Enduring Universe
Irshar’s council had expected life to return to the jungle, as thesmall creatures of the landed ashrams expanded into this new ecosystem. Yet though leaves susurrated in hushed tones, the bursting green was grim and devoid of chirrups or birdsong. It made the hairs rise on Ahilya’s neck. This was still an alien jungle, one that all of them had abandoned for thousands of years. No living creature was used to it, not even the squirrels and mice that had undoubtedly climbed up the trees and burrowed into the earth. They were waiting, and wary. Just like humanity’s survivors. Just like her expeditionary team.
A glance behind confirmed this. Irshar’s architects marched in formation, yet their voices were growing louder, laced with bitterness at their inability to traject the jungle. Sharp words filtered to Ahilya, whispers of her name, skepticism regarding her authority to lead them. This expedition was unlike any of the others she had undertaken before. In the past, she had circumvented obstacles, split the vines that had reached for her, danced through the landscape like she was one of the plants herself. What little she had not managed had been managed for her by an accompanying architect. Yet none of the ones with her now trajected the jungle at all. Instead, each of them wore a bracelet made of seeds, remnants of the once-airborne ashrams. Tendrils curled from the seeds, wrapping around the architects’ arms, all the way up to their shoulders.
Pari, an architect who had once belonged to Reikshar, twisted; the vines she was trajecting strangled her, and a scream formed behind terrified eyes—
Then the light shifted, and Ahilya blinked. Pari shrugged, muttering under her breath, her imagined strangulation still echoing in Ahilya’s mind.
Ahilya tried not to stare.Not real, she thought again, in a slow building panic.Not real. See with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Notice what is real.
The tattoos on the architects’ faces were dim, a mockery of the power the architects had once had. Trajection in the jungle had always been difficult, but now it was impossible. The earthrages had always been tied to trajection and in ending one, Ahilya had unwittingly damaged the other. There was only one place the power truly worked anymore—Iravan’s Garden.
She had slowed without meaning to. Eskayra, who had been marching with the rest of the team, caught up to her. “You seem uncertain,” she said, her voice husky. “Are we lost?”
The other woman was shorter than Ahilya by a head, her build muscular, her delicate features exceedingly beautiful. Clipped dark hair framed a dewdrop face, and her perfect white teeth glinted in the beams of the torchlight. A few months ago, Ahilya had found Eskayra with the citizens that had stood against the cosmic creatures. They had reforged their friendship, but in Eskayra’s light brown eyes now, Ahilya could see the same desire from years before, when they had been more than friends. She shook her head now, as much in answer to Eskayra’s unspoken proposition as to her question.
“No,” she replied. “We’re not far. This is the route Irshar told me to take.”
“You mean the Virohi told you.”
Ahilya didn’t reply. They both knew the answer to that question. The habitat was Irshar; itwasthe embedded Virohi.
Eskayra touched her arm and spoke in a low tone. “My dear, are the Virohi leading you right?”
The others clustered around to listen. Ahilya might be leading the way, but Eskayra was the one the expeditionary team answered to.Shehad mobilized them all to the cause, insisting that finding alternatives to Irshar was a priority. It was Eskayra who had become the voice for every non-trajector in Irshar. Eskayra who even the architects of Irshar obeyed, because she was neither an architect,nor associated with one. She was, in all ways that mattered, a complete being.
Once Ahilya had thought she was a complete being too, but she had changed against her will. She had battled with the Virohi, but she had invited them into herself inadvertently. Iravan had warned her the Virohi would corrupt her, and for the last several months she had become lost in her mind. The image of Pari being strangled, the delusion that the Virohi were in the jungle somehow, the constant voices in her head, all these were mild examples of the distortions she endured. Horror and grief snuck up on her when she least expected it. Eskayra was right to doubt her.
, the Virohi said in the Etherium.
Ahilya felt the sungineering torch in her hand tremble violently, flashes of light dancing in the rich darkness. Terror overtook her as a mirrored chamber glinted between her brows without her consent. She blinked rapidly until she was looking at the assembled archeologists in the dying sunlight within the jungle once more.
The unseen map in her head vanished. “We’re here,” she said, breathless, raising a limp hand.
Relieved sighs and nods rippled through the expeditionary team, though a couple of people looked skeptical.
Pari frowned. “Are you sure?”
“This place looks like everywhere else,” a non-architect called Ranjeev added. “How do you know—”
“She knows,” Eskayra cut in. “This is Ahilya-ve of Nakshar you’re talking to. She controls Irshar. More working, less questioning, if you please.We’re here.”
The members of the expedition exchanged glances, but no one objected. At Eskayra’s gesture, they began fanning out and hacking at the vegetation with their machetes and axes.
Ahilya watched them, saying nothing.
Ranjeev had asked a fair question, but there was little more to the answer than they already knew. For months, the team had tried to find a site for a new city in the jungle. Irshar was solely dependent on Ahilya’s will; it was why finding a new home was imperative, but every mission had ended in disaster. All the sites where Eskayra’s team had begun building had failed—one destroyed by a strange forest fire, another crumbling to ash, and the third collapsing on top of the team, who barely escaped with their lives. No one had been able to explain the strange phenomena, though Airav suggested it was the remembered instability of the jungle, passed down seed to seed, a legacy of constant earthrages. Eskayra, and the council, despaired over ever escaping Irshar.
Eventually, out of desperation, Ahilya had asked the cosmic creatures for potential habitats, and a map had formed in her head like a nebulous idea, revealing bit by bit. Charged by the rest of the council to follow this lead, Ahilya had woven her way in the jungle for the last three days, turning at that tree, going past this waterfall, following not a sungineering tracker but a vague sense of rightness in her head.
She had told the team as much when they camped at night, but she was met with blank stares. To non-architects it sounded like madness. She thought the architects on her team would understand at least, buttheysaw the entire path to their trajection before they built it. What Ahilya was doing was strange even by their esoteric standards. She ought to be grateful people were continuing to work with her despite her communion with the cosmic creatures. The non-architects had nowhere else to go, but the architects of Irshar could have easily defected to Iravan’s Garden, driven by their abhorrence of the Virohi. Her husband, after all, wanted to claim all architects. It was mere fortune, twisted as it was,that these remaining ones feared Ecstasy more than they feared the Virohi.
She sat down silently on the closest rock, her fingers worrying at the torch. Hushed words came to her as the rest of the team discussed the cosmic creatures among themselves. Sunlight beamed through the trees, and citizens plunged spades into the moist earth, removing weeds and brambles, lighting fires to burn the brush away.
Her mistakes had brought their entire civilization to ruin, survival become forfeit. Thousands of people had died in the crash of the Conclave. She had read the reports of Irshar’s council, and she had attended the mass vigil. Like every other citizen, Ahilya had held a burning ember cupped within a clay pot, an ancient tradition common to all the sister ashrams when there was no body to return to the earth. Irshar had blazed like fire that night, each ember signifying a death, yet Ahilya knew the tradition could not encompass humanity’s loss. Cities she did not even know the names of had crashed in the skyrage. Men, women, children, families… Mothers and little ones, the disabled and the elderly, innocent lives who had done nothing wrong except exist in the same time as she and her husband. Ahilya shuddered, the weight of this knowledge crushing her.
She had no defense. She did not deserve Eskayra’s kindness. She deserved nothing.
Eskayra crouched next to her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have questioned you in front of the others. Not about the Virohi.”
