The Rages Trilogy - The Enduring Universe E-Book

Kritika H. Rao

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 665

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The explosive and reality-shattering Rages trilogy, started by The Surviving Sky, concludes as Ahilya and Iravan fight one last time to save everything they've ever loved—the survivors of humanity, their families, their home and each other. A powerful, immersive and sweeping epic fantasy like no other. "Rao is a phenomenal new voice and deserves a place alongside authors like Arkady Martine, N.K. Jemisin, and Adrian Tchaikovsky. I can't wait to see how she wraps up this epic series!" —S.B. Divya on The Unrelenting Earth The worst has happened. The Conclave has crashed into the jungle, and humanity builds one last city, clinging to survival in the ruins. Forced into a deadly alliance with the Virohi, Ahilya alone can communicate with the cosmic creatures – but she is growing weaker with every encounter. Equally revered and feared by her council, Ahilya desperately tries to balance the needs of her people with the untameable desires of the trapped Virohi. Iravan does not believe reconciliation is possible. All he sees is a crumbling bastion being eaten from the inside out. Answering to no law, he would destroy the Virohi before they can destroy humanity. As Ahilya and Iravan wage war, the planet itself rebels, unleashing new rages of untold power. Caught between a wounded planet and the cosmic creatures, all screaming to exist, the last survivors of the human race confront the approaching maelstrom. At the last, Ahilya and Iravan must face up to their mistakes to forge peace between themselves – to save each other and humanity.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1.Ahilya

2.Iravan

3.Ahilya

4.Iravan

5.Ahilya

6.Iravan

7.Ahilya

8.Ahilya

9.Iravan

10.Together

11.Iravan

12.Ahilya

13.Iravan

14.Ahilya

15.Iravan

16.Ahilya

17.Iravan

18.Ahilya

19.Iravan

20.Ahilya

21.Iravan

22.Iravan

23.Ahilya

24.Iravan

25.Ahilya

26.Iravan

27.Ahilya

28.Iravan

29.Ahilya

30.Iravan

31.Ahilya

32.Iravan

33.Ahilya

34.Iravan

35.Ahilya

36.Iravan

37.Ahilya

38.Iravan

39.Ahilya

40.Iravan

41.Ahilya

42.Iravan

43.Ahilya

44.Ahilya

45.Ahilya

46.Iravan

47.Ahilya

48.Ahilya

49.Ahilya

50.Iravan

51.Ahilya

52.Iravan

53.Ahilya

54.Iravan

55.Cohesion

56.Iravan

57.Cohesion

58.Iravan

59.Cohesion

60.Iravan

61.Cohesion

62.Iravan

63.Cohesion

64.Past Lives

65.Ahilya

66.Iravan

67.Together

68.Together

69.Ahilya

Epilogue: Dhruv

Glossary

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE ENDURING UNIVERSE

“Rao gifts us a soaring and heart-wrenching epic fantasy about grief, rage, and the enduring power of love.”

SUNYI DEAN

“Powerful, intricate, and raw – a richly satisfying and riveting conclusion to the Rages trilogy.”

H. M. LONG

“A mind-blowing close … As always, Rao’s prose is lush and poetic.”

S.B. DIVYA

“An explosive conclusion to the Rages trilogy … Fans will be anchored in their seats through the last page … If you haven’t picked this series up yet, what are you waiting for?!”

M. J. KUHN

PRAISE FOR THE RAGES TRILOGY

“Riveting … an instantly immersive epic that expands the boundaries of what fantasy can be.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL

“A powerful, sweeping story; epic science fantasy at its best.”

SUNYI DEAN

“A powerful epic of heartbreak and hard-bought triumph, of anguish and enduring hope.”

MELISSA CARUSO

“Breathtakingly inventive … This is a book to get lost in.”

TASHA SURI

“Intensely imaginative and heartbreakingly human.”

ANDREA STEWART

“Extremely original and thought-provoking … I utterly loved it and couldn’t put it down.”

SHANNON CHAKRABORTY

“Wildly imaginative … Don’t miss it!”

LUCY HOLLAND

“[An] utterly creative, heady and mysterious tapestry of love, duty, and discovery.”

H.M. LONG

“A prodigious gift best slowly unwrapped … Rao has offered us a world like no other.”

SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA

“An immersive and original epic fantasy.”

GAUTAM BHATIA

“Brimming with fascinating lore and dangerous magic.”

CHELSEA ABDULLAH

“[A] brilliant, gorgeous debut.”

FRAN WILDE

“Everything I hope for in a novel.”

JOSHUA PHILLIP JOHNSON

Also by Kritika H. Raoand available from Titan Books

The Surviving Sky

The Unrelenting Earth

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The Enduring Universe

Print edition ISBN: 9781803365299

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803365305

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: September 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Kritika H. Rao 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Kritika H. Rao asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

To those seeking.

PROLOGUE

In the airborne nest, the falcon found him.

Its massive silver wings cut through the air. Its black eyes glinted in satisfaction, for there was fear and recognition in the man’s eyes. The falcon slammed into the floating nest, ripping it apart. Earth and trees fell away, disappearing into the jungle below, as the nest tilted, plummeting a hundred feet before righting itself. Where was the man-thing? It would not be denied again. It saw him emerge onto grass, holding a female body. It saw his indecision as he looked to the female, as if he would choose her.

The falcon screeched in outrage, unleashing its power. Vines grew around the woman, strangling her. It would take her out of the reckoning. It would destroy her.

It swooped down, clutching the man’s body between its talons, leaving behind cries of fear and shock. The jungle screamed below, and the falcon turned its power into the globule of stars, exerting its will. Shards of earth pierced its wings but as the falcon pushed its power, the storm relented. To navigate carefully through the storm was necessary. The human would not survive the jungle. The falcon despised the man-thing, but it needed him safe, and so he remained alive for now. The falcon flung him away in disgust once they arrived at the safe-nest. It returned to the darkening caves where others of its kind slumbered. Awake, it called to the other survivors, but it had tried before. These creatures—its kin—were lesser still, unheard by their halves. For thousands of years, the falcon had tried to awaken them, to corral them into action. They were too dull. Too lost. Exhausted, it tucked its head under a wing to tend to its wounds.

The next time it awoke, the man had arrived, accompanied once again by the female. The falcon fluttered its wings warily. In the velvety darkness, it saw the man’s jagged shape, and felt a rush of relief as it realized the human wished to finally unite their powers. Thousands of years, it had waited for this moment.

It mimicked the man’s light, creating a spiral vortex of great power, and wrapping the man and his female within its wings. Power coursed through it, and it wove among the stars, guided by the man, just as the man wove through the Deepness guided by it. They felt completion. Its voice burrowed within the man, and the falcon thought, Peace. There is peace. Words and language flowed into its mind, slowly at first, then with growing rapidity. The remembrance of such sentience was so beautiful, it ached.

But despite months of unity, the man did not give in.

He did not learn. He refused to see purpose. His heart was too full of anguish. The falcon studied the shape of him, the angst and infinity, the shame and guilt, and its rage mirrored back. Its purpose bled in the man.

Amends, he heard the man say.

Destroy, the falcon returned.

And the man agreed those meant the same thing.

The falcon laughed, a feral sound even to its own ears. In the velvety darkness, it attacked the man over and over again, trying to take him over—this small, foolish creature that should have acquiesced in seconds but had resisted for years. It felt the man’s terrible purpose and it screamed in panic and terror as this small creature performed a subsummation—no, no, no—

It dissolved in a final relief, its presence a shadow inside the man’s heart.

And within that shadow, an understanding.

A waking.

A learning.

1

AHILYA

In the silence of the jungle, the mutters of the architects echoed loud and restless. Ahilya moved to distance herself from them, her tread quiet yet careful.

The care was ingrained in her after a lifetime of exploring the unpredictable jungle, though there was hardly any need for such caution anymore. It had been three months since the last earthrage devastated all the ashrams. Now those storms were over. Despite the thriving foliage, the jungle lay still, unnatural and quiescent, as though dead.

No, Ahilya thought. Not dead. Merely resting. Merely watchful.

There were no animals in the jungle, but the Virohi seemed to watch her from between leaves that stirred in the breeze, tracking her footsteps. The architects with her couldn’t sense the creatures, she knew, but she could feel the Virohi in the whispers of the trees, in the endless dark depths that even her bright sungineering torch could not pierce. The cosmic creatures studied her with longing and rage. A deep familiarity emanated from them, filling her with dread.

<Ahilya>, they whispered. <Come back to us. You belong to us.> Her hands slowly shook in terror. This isn’t real, she thought. The Virohi are in Irshar. They are not in the jungle. They cannot be.

Leaves stirred. People murmured behind her. Evening sunshine fell in dappled shafts, intersecting with the light of her torch, illuminating a patch of grass here, a thick bush there. She swept aside a branch, cut a small notch in a passing tree, and hacked away the clustered vines in front of her. She tried not to give in to the fear that always arose when the cosmic creatures called her.

The Virohi had been silent when she left the habitat three days ago, but leaving was still a risk. The habitat—Irshar, as everyone had taken to calling it—had grown unruly, beyond her control.

A couple of months before, the Virohi-imbued pathways, roads and walls had listened to her persuasion by settling into fixed forms when she’d asked them to. Lately, they had begun changing with more frequency. That the Virohi were reaching to her so easily, beyond the confines of Irshar… It was a sign of her weakening hold over them. It was a sign of their control of her. They were growing agitated. She was needed in Irshar to stabilize the architecture.

Yet she was needed in the jungle too. It was why she was in charge of this mission. Councilor or not, her true vocation was to be an archeologist, and her task was to find a new home away from the ever-changing habitat. That was why she had been sent here, leading ten people into the dark, guided by nothing but her intuition.

Ahilya ducked under a heavy branch, her cheek brushing stray vines. Moisture hung in the air, heavy and oppressive. Dark green moss silenced her footsteps. She trod over fallen branches and roots, the undergrowth as still as the rest of the forest. Twice, she had to circle back—something she had never done in a moving jungle.

It unnerved her, this stillness.

Irshar’s council had expected life to return to the jungle, as the small 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; it was the 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. She had 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.

<Ahilya>, the Virohi said in the Etherium. <You belong with us. You’re one of us.>

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, but they saw 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.”

Still wretched, Ahilya waved away the apology.

“Do you see them now?” Eskayra said.

Ahilya shrugged. She was always aware of them in her mind, though true communication took place in the Etherium—but were the two things really very different? A shift of her vision—that was all it took to see the Virohi in the mirrored chambers.

<Ahilya> they crooned, and she wrenched away. The mirrored chamber was where she attempted to persuade the Virohi to stay bonded to Irshar. Without that persuasion, pathways in Irshar became underwater caverns. Homes split into two, falling into chasms. When once a playground had changed into green rock, Ahilya had wrested control of the architecture back from the Virohi to save several children from being buried alive. It was a close thing—the children had escaped with their lives, though several were severely wounded. Irshar continued to suffer casualties, embedded as it was with the Virohi.

She tapped at her citizen-ring, a crude approximation resembling a rudra bead, a product of the sungineering they still had in the ashram. The bead chimed and Chaiyya’s face formed over Ahilya’s hand, the hologram flickering in and out. Once the Senior Architect of Nakshar, now one of the many councilors of Irshar, she looked tired as all of them did these days. Her round face was wan, her braid almost entirely gray.

In another time it would have been incongruous to see her dressed not in her regal architect uniform but in expeditionary clothes, a head lamp on her forehead and devices strapped to her wrists. Yet Chaiyya had been waiting ever since Ahilya had left Irshar. Along with Kamala and Meena, members of Ahilya’s personal medical team who hovered behind her even now, she was prepared to follow the expedition into the jungle as soon as given the signal.

“Ahilya,” Chaiyya said. “Did you find the site?”

“Just now. The builders have begun working.”

“Good, that’s good. Send us the coordinates immediately, please. We are worried about you.”

“Transferring now,” Eskayra replied. She tapped at her sungineering beads, and Chaiyya nodded in satisfaction.

It was bizarre that Ahilya needed her own medical team, to watch for her health every single day. When had she deteriorated so much? Or was it that she had always been in this space, but for once was getting the help she needed all her life? A part of her wanted to deny this assistance—she did not deserve such care, not after what she had done—but she could not even summon the will to fight this mandate from the council. Everything had changed. The ground beneath her feet was unsteady even while the world grew still. She could barely believe she was surrounded by so many people out on an expedition, where once she had fought to conduct one alone. Eskayra was sending latitudes and longitudes to Chaiyya—a method so archaic it was only remembered by sungineers. They had all returned to lost ways of living. Ahilya had no way to measure anything anymore, least of all the chaos of her mind.

Over the hologram, Chaiyya frowned. “You are not far at all. We could be there by sunset. Yet it took you three days from Irshar?”

The question was not meant as an accusation, but Ahilya still felt compelled to explain and smooth any impending trouble.

“We did not travel in the most efficient manner,” she said softly. She did not give voice to her mistrust of the Virohi—there was already too much suspicion within the group, indeed all of Irshar, regarding her and the cosmic creatures—and what would speaking of that achieve? One way or the other, to trust the Virohi and arrive here had been their only option. Chaiyya knew not to push further. The architect merely hmmed, raising her eyebrows.

“How is the ashram?” Ahilya asked into the silence.

“Undulating all day,” Chaiyya answered.

The image over Ahilya’s ring wobbled into a map of the city. Several parts of the design glowed crimson, indicating architecture ready to break.

“We’re monitoring it,” Chaiyya said tiredly. “It looks worse than the last few days, but it ought to keep until you return.”

“I can get to it now. I just need a few minutes to rest.”

“No,” the other woman said at once. “Don’t start until I get there, Ahilya. That’s the entire point of us coming into the jungle. You’re tired already and you can’t make mistakes. Let me guide you through it. Just practice the initial exercises until then.”

“I don’t—”

“Promise me, Ahilya,” Chaiyya said, her voice hard. “You won’t attempt it until I arrive.”

Ahilya looked from the hologram over to Eskayra who watched silently. She sighed. “All right,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

Chaiyya relaxed, her relief palpable. “We’ll be there soon.” She cut the connection.

For the last three nights, Ahilya had resisted the call of the cosmic creatures, trying not to be pulled into the mirrored chambers, but she did not know how long she could avoid it, how long she should. Earthrages were not a threat, but what did it matter if the last survivors of humanity could be buried under their homes at any moment? Ahilya had invited the precursors of earthrages into their homes—a worse thing than being plagued by the rages themselves. Now there was no more time to waste. No more time to rest.

She tried to school her features and contain her shivering, but a shadow fell on her and Ahilya knew any subterfuge was useless.

“Do you need to return to Irshar?” Eskayra asked, touching her hand. “I can send you to Chaiyya instead of her coming here.”

Yes, Ahilya thought. It would be easier. The persuasion—and any exercise to calm her mind—was easier closer to Irshar’s core tree, the vriksh. But she shook her head. “We’ve only just gotten here. It’ll take you days to assess if this site works for a city. I can’t ask your architects to waste their energy on me.”

“None of us want you burdened anymore than you are. If Chaiyya knew how hard this has been for you, she would suggest one of my architects take you back too. I could have them make you a nest. Return you to Irshar within hours.”

Eskayra was being kind. Ahilya took in the locked shoulders of the architects and the stiffness of their jaws. It was not from exhaustion, she knew; it was from the idea of answering to her, of changing their plan for her, she who had brought humanity to its knees.

“Can you afford to waste the few seeds we have left to traject me back and forth?” she asked. “Making a new city is our only real hope for any future. This mission is more important than me.”

“Is it?” Esk said skeptically. “What will happen if you cannot convince the Virohi, my dear?”

If she lost control of the Virohi, they would try to escape their form within Irshar. People would get hurt, more than they did now, and who knew if Ahilya would ever be able to lock the cosmic creatures back into the architecture. It had taken all of the everdust—an element they no longer had—the first time. If she lost control, then every day could be filled with tragedies.

Worse, the Virohi could affect their world again, both in the jungle and in the skies. If humanity was lucky, it would endure a slow decay filled with failing architecture, but if not, a massive final storm could erase the fragile life the survivors had attempted to build. The last of humanity would become extinct. It was what they’d faced only a few months ago, when Ahilya had made the fateful decision to wrap the Virohi into Irshar.

“It would be awful,” she relented. “But the council chose this option for a reason. We all have our duties. These architects are meant to build with you, and Chaiyya is supposed to guide me.”

“She should have joined the expeditionary team, then,” Eskayra said, frowning.

They’d had this conversation before; Irshar could not afford for two councilors to go on this expedition, and Chaiyya’s infant daughters needed her. It was decided that Ahilya needed to go, while Chaiyya did not. Did Esk really expect Irshar to bow down further to Ahilya’s needs? It was stunning how she refused to see how much Ahilya was disliked. How badly she had made mistakes. That was the real reason Ahilya had been asked not to overextend—to not make any more decisions without anyone else at the helm. She should have been tried as a criminal, but here they were, dependent on her, and the council was now doing all it could to control her.

“Why do you insist this?” Ahilya asked softly. “I agreed to listen to the council. To act in a manner they see fit.”

“Did you agree because you think they are right? Or because you think you deserve punishment? Chaiyya is supposed to take care of you, but how are you to do your job if she recuses herself whenever it is convenient for her? The council makes its calculation, but being away from Irshar has been hard for you. Every day you suffer more.”

“You expect me to fail,” she said, uncomfortable. “You’re insisting because you don’t expect me to be able to convince the Virohi without Chaiyya.”

Eskayra drew back at that, hurt on her face. “Never. I am concerned about the toll this is taking on you. That doesn’t make me him.”

Ahilya said nothing. Cataclysms aside there were other costs that only she cared about. If the cosmic creatures escaped, Iravan would unleash war in his attempt to finally destroy the Virohi. It was what he was counting on—the failure of her will. Left to themselves, the councilors of Irshar would have her relinquish the Virohi to him too. The only reason they had not commanded Ahilya to do so was because removing the cosmic creatures would hurt Irshar.

It was a terrible stalemate. Irshar was as much a hostage to Ahilya’s actions with the Virohi as it was to Iravan’s desires. Though he had resources in his Garden, Iravan had refused to share them. It was another reason Ahilya was here, looking for city-sites.

Eskayra glanced at her, shaking her head. “He is not a good man.”

He is trying to be, Ahilya thought, but she couldn’t defend this erosion of trust, and how she and Iravan found themselves over and over again at opposite ends of a fight, counting on and waiting for each other to fail. When had that begun?

She wanted to explain how she saw Iravan to Eskayra. This was the same man who had once wanted to change things within Nakshar. Once, both of them had planned for how to raise non-architects to the council. Though Ahilya had accused him of corruption, she had since understood the difficult task he’d faced.

In his own way, Iravan had challenged sacred laws. In a society that revered the tradition of marriage he had first risen to his status without children, then wished to raise Naila to councilor, a woman who was not even married. He had circumvented laws with the force of his charisma and his position, but despite that he had always been driven by his morals. Now his morals told him to make amends, and he was going to do it. No more politicking, no more asking, simply one foot in tyranny and the other in hatred, whether or not it hurt them all in the process.

Ahilya had decided to be subservient to the council, but Iravan did not have such compunctions. He did not care to be accountable—not in the same way she did—but they were not so different. Ahilya wanted to release her burden, and Iravan did too. She looked to her council to guide her, to tame her, and Iravan looked to his past and his capital desire. In a way, neither of them trusted themselves anymore, relinquishing control to someone else, now when they had destroyed everything so badly. So what if their defeats manifested in different ways?

She understood him, just as she understood his suspicion of the cosmic creatures. Who better than her to see what the creatures were capable of, when it was she alone who could communicate with them? She knew they’d destroyed life, not just on her planet, but on several others. Yet buried within her terror of them lay a sickened intimacy. Despite what she knew, she could not help but see her own desperation to be acknowledged, to be free, within the Virohi. She had fought against erasure, and so had the cosmic creatures, and they had warped her into giving them insidious compassion. In Iravan’s eyes it was simply more evidence of her corruption. Perhaps the council of Irshar thought similarly too, though none had said so to Ahilya.

The truth was that while the councilors of Irshar feared him, they were wary of her too, a woman who controlled humanity’s survival, who was fast becoming part of the creatures they all wished to destroy. If he was not a good man, could she even think of herself as a good woman? They were both the same. Terrible versions of what they could have been, perverted reflections of each other.

“You can see him, can’t you?” Eskayra said. “In your Etherium?”

Eskayra spoke the word with unfamiliarity. Ahilya had explained what she knew of the realm, the third vision of an architect, a vision that non-architects had as well, but Eskayra had never fully understood it.

Truthfully, Ahilya barely did too. The Etherium was where she communicated with the cosmic creatures, and a burst of combined desire had made it possible for her third vision to become intertwined with Iravan’s when they’d stopped the earthrage together, so long ago. Yet despite knowing this, the Etherium itself remained a strange place to Ahilya. All she knew was that she could command her third vision—and his—in a way that he could not.

“What do you see when you seek him?” Eskayra asked.

“Must I spy on my husband as a matter of course now?” Ahilya replied quietly.

“Is he your husband, still?”

He was. In name alone, for he kept to no rules of any ashram. Where did her loyalties lie when he had chosen to abdicate his own?

Ahilya opened her connection to Iravan.

He appeared behind her eyes: a tall dark man with thick silver hair, cut in a close-cropped way that suited him, and his face clean-shaven. He sat on a tree trunk, a glistening blade hanging around his neck held by a thin vine. His skin was lit with silvery-white tattoos, eyes glinting with rings around the pupils as he stared ahead in contemplation. Iravan no longer looked like the man she had married. Yet the husband, the lover, the friend, and companion still remained, lurking in the angles of his face, the slight tilt to his mouth, the dark skin she wanted desperately to touch.

“He’s building,” she said.

“Building what? A weapon?”

“I don’t know. I think he is looking for an alternative to Irshar and the Garden too.”

Iravan stirred, and then he was looking directly at her. Just for an instant, his silvery eyes hollowed with guilt and regret. Iravan stared at her, and unbidden images flashed in her mind, of when he had kissed her while she held him after Bharavi’s Ecstatic attack; when he lay spread-eagled while she took care of him in the habitat; when he shielded her after she lost their child. She saw both of those men together, the Iravan of her past and the one in her present, who could see the very same things she was seeing.

He flinched as her memories and longing washed over him.

His jaw trembled then hardened. He tilted his head as though in acceptance of a punishment, and sudden rage grew in Ahilya at his gesture, at this convoluted path he was taking to make amends. If he wanted, the two of them could atone for all they’d done by working together, find ways for life to flourish, even back away and let someone else take charge for once. They could have a future. They could have peace between themselves. They could have love.

Yet he chose this senseless war. He chose to fight her, alienate humanity, and destroy the man he had once been, all because he wished to save them from something they had already accepted. How could he be this blind to his own devolution?

Look at what you have done to us, she thought savagely. Look at us, Iravan. Do you remember what we’d wanted once? Children? A home? What about amends to me? How dare you let yourself go down this path? How dare you?

Iravan blinked as though he could hear her.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

Her thoughts skittered around her mind, images of her and Iravan preparing to speak at the Conclave; throwing their wedding garlands around each other, promising to travel the same path or none at all; the both of them believing the best of each other and of humanity, once. She couldn’t take it, the loss that engulfed her on beholding him like this.

Ahilya collapsed their connection, her breath catching in a soundless sob.

The sounds of the muttering architects returned to her. Eskayra still watched her, chewing her lip. <Ahilya>, the Virohi called. <Return to us.>

“Enough,” she said, half to herself. “I need to calm my mind before Chaiyya gets here. We all have our duties.”

“Remember yourself,” Eskayra said, squeezing her hand. “Remember you are not alone. We are here. I am here.”

Ahilya nodded. Her mind still full of Iravan, she braced to find a version of herself to hold onto.

2

IRAVAN

The shock of the connection with Ahilya rippled through Iravan. Bharavi, Nakshar, the children he would never have, flickered in his mind. He shivered, trying to stabilize.

These encounters with his wife were always sudden and out of his control. He had become better at concealing his reactions, but the pain Ahilya had shown him today, the rage, pulsed under his skin, flooding his veins, itching. He willed himself to silence, letting the stillness of the jungle seep into him.

Under a large banyan tree, darkness ate away at his silvery light. Trees stood like sentinels in the shadows, vines hanging off them, motionless. Shafts of dying sunlight illuminated a trunk with gray moss, and a heavy carpet of undergrowth. Iravan had cleared a very precise quadrangle in front of his rock where lush grass grew. Slowly, still reeling from Ahilya, he began trajecting again.

Soft earth flew upward in a gushing waterfall that solidified into the likeness of a carved door. Wood shards scraped into the shape of a thousand jasmines. Iravan flexed his fingers, and the carvings on the door bloomed into true flowers that released an intoxicating scent.

The everpower flooded him. He called the use of it trajection, but it was not that, not truly. He had no language for it yet. When he alone wielded it, what did it matter what it was called? He understood this power beyond articulation. He wielded it as naturally as breathing. In the act of subsuming the falcon-yaksha, in becoming the yaksha, Iravan had forsaken trajection and embraced this new everpower, one so intimate that it was him. He did not intend for anyone else to ever get such dangerous, intoxicating control that could shift the planet should he desire it.

He did not desire it. Not now. Not yet.

Iravan desired to build. So he cosseted the remains of the architect he had once been—and more dust flew in a small contained tornado, leaves and earth gently swirling and combining with substances sucked from deep within the planet. The structure in front of him took shape, a shrine, a temple, a grave for what he had lost.

Had Ahilya seen this? The thought shamed him, as though he had shown her a weakness. In that itself was a quiet grief. Since when had being weak in front of Ahilya become a bad thing?

Grief was too painful.

He clung to the other emotion, for shame, at least, was familiar.

It had been three months since he had last seen his wife outside the Etherium. He had gathered—stolen—hundreds of architects and nearly all the sungineers from the landed ashram of humanity. Neither he nor Ahilya had said a word to each other as the exodus occurred. Instead, he had bowed to her in solemn gratitude for allowing her citizens to leave. Even if he had given her little choice, he owed her that much respect as he contradicted her wish.

She was no longer just a councilor. She was the councilor, the only one who could control the architecture of Irshar. The only one who stood in his way.

Tiredness overwhelmed him. He missed her so much that it ached. I am getting old, he thought, rubbing his eyes. I need it to end.

The structure in front of him continued to form. Wood chips stacked atop each other, the walls deckled. Water turned into glinting icicles to hang like crystalline lamps along the door. Phosphorescence shone everywhere, and furniture formed within the home, a desk, a closet, a bed, visible through the shimmering ice-windows. Chairs grew out of the soil, not high-backed and carved like his seat in the Garden, but comfortable, low, meant for household tasks and ease.

A bitter smile formed on Iravan’s face at the suggestion of this domesticity. If survival had not been the cost, Iravan would have found his battle of wills with Ahilya a diverting challenge. Instead, fury rose in him. They had come so close to reconciliation and understanding. They had come so close to finally ending the Virohi together.

And she had chosen them.

She alone knew the pain of separation. She had seen his fight with the falcon-yaksha, and experienced the way complete beings had been treated. She had campaigned for change once. If she wanted to, she could simply will the Virohi out of the architecture—give them to him so he could destroy them once and for all. How could she put him in a position where he had no choice but to alienate Irshar, despite his desire to make amends? They could have given the survivors new life if not for her stubbornness. But she had left him alone… with himself.

His resentment found expression in the construction. The chairs began to decay. The carved wooden door began to warp, and the jasmines on it grew dark, withered, fell away. The tiny icicle lamps and delicate ice windows burst into silent shards, whipping toward Iravan’s cheeks like sharp tears. The home he was building shook as though an earthrage was imminent. Iravan took a deep breath, and mastered himself with an effort. The decay paused, then shook once, before the construction bloomed anew.

He could not afford to rage, not with the everpower.

This ability, that was neither Ecstasy nor trajection but superior to both, was connected deeply to his emotion and his capital desire. The Moment, the Deepness, the Etherium, even the silence where the falcon-yaksha once lived, had all combined into a singular evervision. It had been this way ever since he fully embraced his Ecstasy to build the original Irshar in the skies. Then, he did not understand it. He stumbled through it blindly, merging all the ashrams together.

Since he subsumed the falcon though, he’d realized that in reality there were never three separate visions. He could manipulate them all at once, like he could move his hands and feet though they were separate parts of his body. Now he understood: there was very little that lay between himself and sheer possibility.

The only mystery that remained was his lack of control in the Etherium he shared with Ahilya.

In a futile test Iravan called for the connection to her, but nothing happened.

It irked him to distraction that she alone had that control. Was this some sort of balance? Everpower for him and the Etherium for her? He thought the Etherium a place of guidance, a place that could not be controlled, and there had been a deep relief in that, even joy. But if she could do it, could he? Was this only available to complete beings like her, or perhaps only to her?

She was so much more than just a complete being. She was… she was Ahilya. She had let him into her mind many times during the last three months, sometimes when surrounded by others in Irshar, other times to see what he was doing, at all times aloof and cool.

Her aloofness terrified him. He was so scared that the cosmic creatures were corrupting her beyond hope that the glint of her rage today was a relief, a gift. Oh my love, he thought in sudden despair. We have come to an ending we were headed for all along.

The house had become a multi-storied thing of beauty, its roof slated to allow rainwater to slough off, its ice windows glazed and glittering. Jasmine bloomed on all the walls, a rich tapestry of tiny white flowers. Stone statues of falcons in mid-flight ornamented the front door. Iravan hadn’t consciously built any of this, yet the house formed due to a buried intention, a stream trickling in the front, a verandah, trees that grew in the shape of a playhouse, a yard and swings and a slide. His hand drifted to the blade of pure possibility he wore, and just for an instant he thought of whether he could do with it what he intended. Whether he could… return.

“Iravan-ve,” a voice said.

He turned to see a young boy stand by the trees, staring in wonder at the construction.

With his tousled hair and wide eyes, Darsh looked younger than fifteen, but that impression swiftly left Iravan as the boy neared him. An air of seriousness hung around the child, one Iravan had noticed that first time he had met him back in Nakshar’s deathcage. In the past few months, Darsh had grown taller by several inches and now reached nearly to Iravan’s shoulder. A rush of pride and affection filled Iravan on seeing him. This young man was one of the best, most skilled Ecstatics of the Garden. Iravan’s lieutenant.

“What are you building?” Darsh asked, coming to join Iravan on the rock. “Is this for the Ecstatics? For after we’ve united with our yakshas?”

What was he doing? Building a home for Ahilya—for his children—despite knowing everything he did? It was pathetic. He had returned to this project often, no matter where he and Darsh stopped in the jungle, building and rebuilding idly, almost as a form of meditation. But for the first time, the pointlessness of it hit him. He had seen Ahilya’s anger. In destroying the Virohi, he would destroy any future with her.

His hand dropped from the blade around his neck.

Enough, he thought.

The house exploded into tiny shards.

Mulch, wood, bark and leaves spun silently around them in a gust of wind. The falcon statues splintered then dissolved into gray dust. Jasmine putrefied, its rotting stench smothering the air as the flowers disappeared.

The clearing lay bare as though there was never a home, never this indulgence, and Iravan thought in grim acceptance, What purpose this building? What need for such a construction? His marriage to Ahilya was meaningless now. This house was a dream, a foolishness. It was truly over between them.

He answered Darsh’s question with his own. “What did you find?”

“Nothing,” the boy said, a sullen twist to his mouth. “The presence in the Deepness has not returned. Maybe I am not releasing Nakshar’s Constant when I traject.”

“That’s not possible. All trajection, Ecstatic or otherwise, releases the raga. Each time you traject you call out to your yaksha.”

It was one of the earliest things he and Ahilya had discovered together, all those months ago in Nakshar, when they could never have contemplated where life would bring them. They’d hypothesized, along with Dhruv and Naila, that within trajection lay the seed of its demise, but none of them could have known how true that statement would be. Ahilya had ended the earthrages and tied all the cosmic creatures to this dimension, effectively ending any split of a Virohi. She had ended the rise of new architects in the future, and because of her in time trajection would die—something Iravan ought to thank her for.

But that would only occur if Iravan completed his part of the task.

Unless all architects alive united with their yakshas, they would be reborn with the power to traject, Virohi or no Virohi.

What would occur to civilization then? Everything Iravan had achieved could be erased away. Ecstasy could be outlawed once more, years from now. Or perhaps architects would rise again, returning to what they once had been. Perhaps they would be imprisoned, the very power of trajection disdained, and all architects become slaves.

It did not take too much imagination to consider the many paths civilization could take if a few people continued to have incredible power. Whether oppressors or the oppressed, nothing would really change for the architects, their destinies controlled by the power they were born with.

Iravan could not allow that. The only way to ensure equity was to take the power away once and for all, and give architects the hope of one day becoming complete beings.

The architects of the Garden were counting on this. They had joined him to learn to unite with their yakshas. The fact that the Garden was the only place they could traject anymore was important not because of trajection, but because without the power they could not release the raga that would signal their presence to their yakshas.

But the yakshas were missing. Iravan had not seen any for months. The last time he had seen any was when several aerial yakshas joined the falcon—the falcon that he had subsumed. Is that why the other yakshas eluded him? Because he had absorbed their leader? He needed to find them, and he had been lucky that Darsh of all people felt an inkling of a presence in the Deepness. Since the boy had told him of it, Iravan had visited the jungle with him as often as he could to track the creatures down, hoping to be led by the boy’s signal.

“Tell me again what you experienced in the Deepness,” he said.

Darsh made a face. Iravan had asked him this already several times, and the boy’s tone grew annoyed, though he did not refuse to answer.

“When Reyla and I were trajecting, I sensed a presence in the Deepness. A fluid one, and only briefly, and the both of us saw it. It was unfamiliar to her, but I felt like I’d seen it before. We followed it to the Moment and I could see it there too, though Reyla couldn’t. That’s when we told you about it.”

It was very similar to Iravan’s experience. Only he had been able to see the falcon in the Moment; that was how he knew Darsh was witnessing his own yaksha. Since then, Darsh had received impressions of different parts of the jungle in his Etherium, in the same way that Iravan had once because of the falcon. Of course, he hadn’t known back then what was happening, but these Ecstatics would receive the benefit of his experience. Iravan understood the boy’s yaksha was likely leading him into the jungle to unite.

In reality, his problems were not finding the yakshas or assisting other architects in completing themselves. Those were minor aspects of his capital desire. His task was to end the Virohi—the source of all ill. Ahilya had embraced the cosmic creatures, and it was already affecting her. In time, they would affect all the other citizens of Irshar, in ways none of them could comprehend. He needed to axe the root of the tree, wrench it from its depths and remove all presence of it. Only Ahilya stood in his way.

In desperation, he sought the Etherium within his eversion for a clue again. The darkness between his brows flared. His many forms cycled in front of him, weaving in and out of his vision. Iravan flitted between them: he swept his spouse, Mara, into a dance; he became Agni who beat the drums in their ashram in celebration; he was Mohini, and he—she—was asleep between her spouses, Taruin and Radha; he kissed Vishwam, tasting his husband, the slight dryness of his lips, no, not his husband, Nidhirv’s, the man who he had once been in another lifetime. And even as that thought occurred, Iravan became aware that he was sitting differently, his shoulder sunken like Nidhirv’s, the muscles moving in unfamiliar memorable ways.

Iravan held this awareness, as if to fix the image of Nidhirv even though he knew he had no control in the Etherium. Ever since he’d subsumed the falcon-yaksha, the memories of his past lives had become more easily accessible to him, to a point where he could reach out and submerge in one of their lives for long hours, understanding who they were. It was a dangerous balance—to not lose himself within them. Iravan had finally found a method to separate his past lives enough to study them. Everpower swirled within him and dust rose, leaves churning in the shape of a man, a memory.

The shape coalesced on the forest floor like a ghost. Nidhirv appeared made of wind and tree bark and dust. Unlike in the Etherium, the projection’s eyes glowed silver. He looked more real than the wisp in Iravan’s mind, but more feral too.

Nidhirv stalked forward, a strange smile on his face, his silvery eyes flashing, and Iravan thought, What are you trying to tell me?

Had he been alone, Iravan would have strengthened the projection, trying to understand the edges of his capital desire. But Darsh’s mouth fell open. The boy staggered back from Nidhirv, tripping over himself. Iravan knew he was scaring the child. He dropped his sight in the third vision, and Nidhirv disappeared in a huff of leaves, inches from Darsh.

The shape drifted away, carried by the breeze. Iravan clenched his fist then released it. Frustration was futile. He would not learn secrets from them today, and did it matter at all? He had learned to work with what he had.

Iravan turned to Darsh. “When you call your yaksha now, are you trajecting the same pattern as when you saw it before?”

Darsh shook his head, confused. “No. You said all trajection releases Nakshar’s Constant, so I didn’t think it mattered what or how I trajected.”

“It shouldn’t,” Iravan confirmed. “But if the yaksha is being so elusive, then it won’t hurt to try what you did before again.” He gestured to Darsh to enter the Deepness. “Traject that pattern,” he said. “Let’s see if we can lure your yaksha out.”

3

AHILYA

The sun had set by the time Chaiyya arrived.

The Senior Architect appeared in a rustle of leaves, brushing twigs off her hair and clothes as she entered the clearing the builders had made. Her dark skin shone with the light of trajection, but though Chaiyya was now an Ecstatic, she still worked only in the Moment. Ahilya knew Chaiyya had never been curious about Ecstasy, and her encounter with Deepness had been unnatural.

Chaiyya smiled tightly at Ahilya as she picked her way through Eskayra’s team toward her. Two other healers accompanied her, Kamala and Meena, both of them non-architect nurses. They had both been studying the mind, a nascent field in the airborne ashrams, at least with non-architects as the mind had always been the purview of consciousness-experts like Iravan.

Now, when people couldn’t trust architects, when Irshar barely had any left, these nurses had become more important than ever, helping people with their grief and loss. Kamala and Meena were specifically assigned to Ahilya, assisting Chaiyya in guiding her through the interaction with the Virohi.

While Meena went to work on arranging a delicate medical instrument, Kamala greeted Ahilya with a nod. A young woman, perhaps Naila’s age, her long angular face cut by apple-cheeks, and a certain cold wariness in her eyes, Kamala had once belonged to Nakshar. She had perhaps known Oam who had been a nurse studying the mind. If he were alive, Ahilya’s case would have been handled by him, but perhaps if he was here, Ahilya wouldn’t have found herself in this situation. It was such a circular thought that Ahilya choked, unable to follow it.

Under Chaiyya’s supervision, the two nurses began to sort the medical instruments, uncoiling thin glass tubes, and tinkling sungineering equipment. Chaiyya trajected the seeds around her wrists and neck to power the equipment but, if the slow blinks on the devices were any indication, she was having trouble in the jungle, just like the team of Eskayra’s architects.

Perhaps it would have been wiser to return to Irshar, but all they had were bad choices. Ahilya suppressed a wince as Kamala inserted an intravenous line, strapping a few bands around Ahilya’s wrists and chest to read her vitals. Another line infused saline and herbal medicine directly into Ahilya’s bloodstream. A surge of clarity rushed through her, and the jungle became brighter, more present. Chaiyya and the others sharpened, as her own Etherium receded. Ahilya breathed a sigh of relief.

Encounters with the Virohi always fatigued her. This was why for the past three days, she had been instructed by Irshar’s council not to attempt the persuasion, no matter the call from the Virohi. To do so without her team of healers was practically suicidal—not just for her but for all of Irshar.

It had not always been this way, of course. In the early days after the Conclave had crashed, Ahilya had entered the Etherium to conduct the persuasion easily, following her instincts. The Virohi had appeared as smoky forms then. Ahilya spent hours in the mirrored chambers, showing them a life in the ashram, conjuring images of her sister Tariya and her nephews, Arth and Kush, feeding Virohi parts of her memory. Laughter and love, pain and joy, grief and regret—she gave the Virohi everything. They listened at first. She thought that would be the extent of her interaction with them.

But then the shivering had started, followed by incessant vomiting. Once Ahilya had fainted in the middle of the persuasion, and Irshar had wobbled, buildings crashing, people trapped and injured and dead, all while she lay unconscious. It was sheer luck that the Virohi did not escape then. Nearly twenty people had been buried in the wreckage.

The council agreed Ahilya’s loss of control was unacceptable, and all of them imagined it was the stress finally manifesting in her. But the diagnoses didn’t indicate anything out of the ordinary—nothing that other non-architects were not experiencing. Then Chaiyya began using methods usually reserved for architects. They’d realized then how Ahilya had become more like an architect with her awareness of her Etherium. In treating with the cosmic creatures so intimately, in offering them her consciousness as meat and fodder, Ahilya had gone too deep. She had given unknowingly, and they had taken, and taken, and taken.