Page 9 of The Enduring Universe
Ahilya tried to clear her mind as she had been taught. The mirrored chambers beckoned to her, and she conjured the strongest picture of herself—a necessary exercise before talking to the Virohi. She saw an archeologist laughing with Dhruv as they planned tobecome councilors. But the image darkened, and Dhruv said to her,You two deserve each other.She saw a wife, throwing the wedding garland over her husband’s neck. But Iravan smiled at her, a dark cutting smile.You will find me a difficult enemy.Tariya flashed in her mind, memories of growing up together—but they had not spoken in months, and the very thought of her sister was a knife to the heart. Ahilya gasped, wrapping her arms around her, staring at the jungle floor, breathing hard.
Chaiyya dropped to her knees. Her concerned face swam in Ahilya’s vision. “What happened?”
“T-too much,” Ahilya stuttered. Her entire body was cold. She couldn’t stop shivering. Where was her cloak? Chaiyya was still looking at her, waiting for an explanation and Ahilya tried to contain the stutter in her voice. “Everything we’ve lost,” she said. “Everything—all the people—Ihave lost…”
“But those you’ve gained too,” the architect said softly. “Focus onus, Ahilya. On me and Airav and Eskayra and Naila and all those who stand behind you.”
“Because you have no choice,” Ahilya said. “Because I have forced you to.”
A range of emotions passed over Chaiyya’s face, from resentment to anger to sadness, but she did not deny it. Ahilya waited for Chaiyya’s censure, almost wished for it—would it not be better to confront her failure, rather than tiptoe around it simply because she was unwell? Simply because she held their survival in her hands? But all she had were these vague hints of her friends’ true feelings, these imagined vapors of hate and terror. At least Iravan’s anger was honest. The others thought so little of her, expecting her to be fragile, her mind ready to break at the slightest instance. They had stripped her of her dignity with this treatment, and in the end she was alone.
“Your blood pressure,” Meena squeaked. “Ahilya-ve, it is out of control.”
Chaiyya’s eyes grew wide in alarm. “Stop,” she said. “Stop, Ahilya, whatever you’re thinking, stop.”
In her mind, the Virohi laughed, and she heard Iravan say,They will corrupt you.
“Say the words,” Chaiyya commanded. “Ahilya, say the words out loud.”
“I feel foolish.”
“Do it anyway.”
Ahilya raised her eyes to Chaiyya. “Architects really did this in their training?”
“Young ones and even Maze Architects.” Chaiyya’s face grew earnest. “I myself have done this when my Two Visions have merged accidentally. Ahilya, I do this everyday since Iravan jerked me into the Deepness against my will.”
The words should have been comforting, but implicit in them was an undercurrent that Ahilya still cared to compare herself to the architects. She had been envious of them once, and now that she was like one, her body was weakening and her mind shattering. They had always been the source of her inferiority, but worse, she finally understood them—and by extension, everything Iravan had endured—now when she was so removed from him. She was trying to hold ontoanyfamiliarity in this alien terrain, and architects and trajection and their history were her history too, no matter how much she’d fought it. For so long those things had given her identity as they had Iravan, and it was such a twisted realization, so full of contradiction—
“Ahilya?” Chaiyya asked, her voice heavy with worry.
Ahilya watched the rising terror and alarm on Chaiyya’s face. “I am an archeologist of Irshar,” she said mechanically. “I am anon-architect, a complete being. I am a councilor. There are other councilors too. We work together to ensure survival. I am not alone.” She breathed deeply. “My name is Ahilya, and I am not alone.”
Chaiyya nodded in approval, and opened her mouth to speak, but a series of soft sounds emerged from her beads—a signal from other councilors in Irshar that the deterioration of the ashram was beginning. Ahilya saw her own anxiety in Chaiyya.
“We can wait a few more minutes, if you need time,” Chaiyya offered.
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Ahilya said. Besides, she could sense the agitation of the Virohi.
Chaiyya did not protest. She simply stepped back, joining the nurses in order to monitor Ahilya’s vitals.
The Etherium beckoned. A great sense of inevitability filled Ahilya. She closed her eyes and entered the mirrored chambers.
4
IRAVAN
Within the Deepness, Iravan and Darsh floated next to each other.
Embedded though he was in the velvety blackness, Iravan could still sense the other realms. The jungle was visible to him in his first vision, the reality of his physical surroundings clear as it always was while trajecting. He saw Darsh too, standing next to him, his hands clenched into fists. But though Iravan was not in the Moment, he could sense it as well. It hovered in his mind, a part of the evervision and its unchanged reality. The Moment, the Deepness, his first vision—these were not separate realms, but he could focus on any one of them at a time, like experiencing sensation in one part of his body while still inhabiting the rest. For now, he let the other realms subside from his attention, and nodded to Darsh. The boy’s dust mote flickered in the Deepness, more jagged than before.
Vaguely, Iravan wondered if Darsh’s form was an evolution of his growing familiarity in the Ecstatic realm. Iravan’s own manifestation had developed since his very first time. Where once he had been little more than a speck, now he took the shape ofan enormous silver-winged falcon, in a crisscrossing of glittering light. He flapped his wings and felt the rush of wind on his face within the jungle.
“Begin,” he said quietly.
In the Deepness, Darsh summoned the Moment. Iravan felt sucked in by Darsh’s intention as the boy began to traject a thin filament of light into the quivering, fragile-looking Moment. Once where it had appeared as a shining globule of stars, the Moment was now shrunken. No matter whether Iravan saw it from the evervision or from the Deepness, or inhabited the Moment proper, the universe remained distorted, like a withered grape that had lost its juice. Lights still glowed within it, but hesitantly. This was another infection of the Virohi—the Moment was not the same since those creatures had infiltrated it to mutilate the architects. This realm had been his home once, his peace. The cosmic creatures had taken that away from him.
Iravan buried his hatred of the Virohi, and watched as Darsh’s filament of light split in the Deepness, then became four, eight, and then too many to count. It was a form of supertrajection the boy had come up with—what he had been doing when his yaksha had first appeared. This particular one created tiny thorny plants in the Garden. They used it to make blades that were near indestructible.
