Page 98 of The Enduring Universe
Cohesion was frozen, aware of itself in a terrifying moment of stillness.
Everything else was frozen too, each boulder of the planetrage that suddenly seemed motionless mid-shot. The sky caught in a ripple like a picture of a rumpled blanket. Water droplets that remained unmoving in a rain that did not fall.
The silence was deafening.
Cracks appeared from the heart of everything frozen, like a cave-in, sucking matter and rain and earth and soil and the whole planet into a yawning blackness.
So fast, so long, yet instantaneous. Cohesion had no time to respond.
Everythingripped—edifices crumbling, the vriksh snapping through the middle, the great blackness eating all physicality up. Dissolution chewed through the planetrage, coming for Cohesion from all directions.
Cohesion balked, an animal in a trap. Stunned, frozen, helpless.
Prey.
62
IRAVAN
His past lives choked him, their projected hands throttling his throat. Iravan gasped, his eyes bulging—he felt their touch inside his body, creeping inside his muscles, curling through him. He felt them pounding in his heart, and lurking beneath his skin.
The projections disappeared one by one from the maze, but Iravan knew they had only retreated inside him. He could see the gaping crumble of reality and meaning rush toward him—and the projections had crept within him now as if he would provide a final sanctuary. The thought of having them take him over again like they had when he’d tried to kill Ahilya choked him. He scrabbled at his skin, scratching it, leaving bloody marks. He tried to claw them out of him, but it was already too late. His hands froze, midway to his throat, and his mind clouded. Mohini chuckled with his mouth, before the laugh swept into the deep-throated cackle of Bhaskar. Feral, hysterical, insane, the past lives pushed and probed his body, and spun around, a thousand visions of reality bending.
Through their attack of him, Iravan realized one thing.
Dissolution had come.
He had not even begun to repair the Moment, and it was already too late.
The blade of pure possibility swung around his neck, and he clutched it desperately, willing reality to stabilize. Out of options to traject or fight, he simply hurled his will at the blade, hoping for the remaining everdust to respond.
Before his intention could complete, one of his lives used his hand to snatch the blade away. He willed his mind to use it, tried to believe those were his fingers clutching it, that his mind that was superior to theirs, but everything he did was futile. There were too many of them. Light cascaded around him in rainbow hues, and he trembled, trying to reach the blade.
No, he thought aghast, as Nidhirv inhabited his body. He read the man’s thought. How easy it would be to bring back Vishwam with the everdust.
No, Iravan thought again, but some other life knocked away Nidhirv’s to grab at the everdust and fulfill its own want.
The falcon screamed, trying to get at the blade as well, its mad intention to kill the cosmic creatures, destroy Cohesion, still ringing through matter and time.
Iravan could do nothing to stop them. He was a marionette, obeying their bidding.
Overpowered, he diminished.
They infiltrated him.
63
COHESION
It ruptured.
Lost its mind.
Careened into madness.
Its sentience crashed, caving in as dissolution smashed into it, chewing away parts of it, taking away meaning and sense. Each loss was painful, each piece of information lost like an amputation. Its mind broke, trying to connect disparate pieces of itself, attempting to hold its own form with narrative.
Fire tore at its roots, ice freezing its people who rested within its boughs. Light shifted, and the tree yawned and caved, stretching far beyond reckoning, crushing parts of itself into balls, killing its citizens.
