Page 10 of The Enduring Universe
But as Iravan watched, the Ecstatic trajection changed. It started to shake, the way it had for the past fifteen minutes while Darsh had undertaken this exercise. Lines disconnected from the trajection, whipping into darkness, disappearing. One ricochetted into the Moment, aimed at a stray star. Another struck close to Iravan’s wing, and he felt the wind of its passage. Iravan thought,This is why they outlawed Ecstasy. Architects always did lose themselves in this realm.
He slashed at Darsh’s power and instantly the beams of lightdissipated. His movement was harsh, akin to pushing the boy down to stop him from hurtling into danger, but Ecstasy was not a subtle power. There was no other way to stop Darsh while he held so much trajection energy. It was clear Darsh could not summon his yaksha right now, and there was no point in the boy remaining in the Deepness unnecessarily. Iravan had to get to the root of the problem, instead of making Darsh repeat the same exercise fruitlessly.
He raised his hands in a gesture of pacification, but Darsh stared at him, breathing hard. Anger gleamed in the boy’s eyes. For a second, Iravan thought Darsh was going to attack him; light seemed to glow in his dust mote, and he knew that if the boy struck at him in the Moment, it would hurt.
But Darsh took a step back and suddenly Iravan was alone in the Deepness.
They stared at each other in their first visions.
“If you ever want to find your yaksha, you need to control yourself,” Iravan said, dropping his hands.
“I know.”
“If you keep losing focus, you will never be able to unite with it.”
“I know.”
“It all begins there, Darsh—”
“For fuck’s sake,” the boy said, throwing up his hands. “I said I know!”
Iravan paused. Darsh continued to breathe heavily for a moment, then finally met Iravan’s deadpan gaze.
“I apologize, sir,” the boy said at last, his voice tight and formal. Iravan waited until Darsh had mastered his breathing again. “You are driven by anger when you traject, or seek your yaksha,” he said at last. “But you cannot find your counterpart in such a state.”
“Can’t I?” Darsh challenged. “Youdid. How is my anger different from yours when you seek to destroy the cosmic creatures?”
This time Iravan raised an eyebrow. He did not allow anyone else to speak to him this way, and Darsh was pushing the line, but he had already given the boy too many liberties. He reminded him too much of himself. In a way they only had each other, the last true relationship Iravan maintained with anyone. How ironic that this material bond had arisen without his control when he had been ending all others. Darsh had carved a place in his heart, a place he’d saved once for his children. Perhaps for that alone he owed the boy an explanation.
“I am not led by anger,” Iravan said. “Notonlyby anger,” he amended at Darsh’s skeptical look. “There is reason here too. Tell me, what do you think will happen to the Garden—to all the architects within it—once they unite with their yakshas?”
Darsh blinked, confused. “We will gain powers. Like you.”
“Yes,” Iravan said gently. “You will know yourselves. But you will have no more lives or reincarnations, not in the sense that you have been taught. When architects die after unity, it is a final death—yet our entire culture is built on rebirth. I don’t think it is evenpossibleto have a final death; one presupposes the other. Then what will occur to us?”
Darsh frowned. Iravan had taught the boy to think of these events in the last few months of patronage, but this question had haunted Iravan for so long that it was hardly fair to expect Darsh to answer it.
“We’d return to becoming the Virohi in some capacity,” Iravan said, answering himself. “Thatis what the final death would achieve. Can you imagine that, Darsh? Everything we have done, all that we hope to achieve in the Garden, all of it for nothing? Can you imagine us condemned to ultimately return to becoming the worst of us over and over again in a cycle of imprisonment? Would you want that? Would any of the others?”
Horror grew on Darsh’s face. Iravan suppressed a sigh, half-satisfied half-regretful, to make Darsh feel this way.
In truth, he did not know if this was the path his consciousness would take. All his searching within his past lives was to learn for certain whether he would die and turn into a Virohi, or if another kind of rebirth would present itself. There had, after all, been a time when Ecstatics had fulfilled their capital desires and disappeared, during Nidhirv’s life. What had happened to them? Surely they did not return to a Virohi-like state? And what of those who never completed their capital desire? That question was even more important.
But it was not something Iravan needed Darsh to know. He needed Darsh’s compliance, and he had made the right calculation.
Anyone else would have preferred life—even life as a Virohi—over complete death. Ahilya certainly had argued for it. Yet Darsh and all the others in the Garden werearchitects. They were trained from infancy in the culture of the ashrams, in believing themselves superior, in serving their community with their power. The reason so many had come to join Iravan was because they abhorred the Virohi, and Iravan was offering retribution and redemption. They came to him because the cosmic creatures had mutilated their powers during the Conclave’s crash. They saw their own helplessness.
The architects hated the Virohi. As far as Iravan knew, the citizens of Irshar did too.
Only Ahilya was attempting to find common cause with the cosmic creatures, trying to forgive the Virohi, turninghiminto the enemy. That alone showed how corrupted she had become. His heart tore at the thought of how much he had failed her in allowing this.
“Why do you think you’re unable to make this pattern of trajection now?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Darsh said moodily. “I can try again.”
“No. I want to figure this out first. You’ve made this pattern a dozen times before in the Garden, but for some reason you can’t do it now. Why?”
Darsh merely shook his head.
