“Yes, yaksa,” she said. “Of course.”
She entered a prayer room alone. She kneeled and covered her face with one hand. She was still stained in blood and dirt, so tired she could have cried, but her life wasn’t her own. She had her orders.
She opened the way down to the deathless waters.
The light was, at least, oddly soothing. Blue reflected on thewalls, a deep luster emanating from the waters themselves. She breathed in the scent of the waters: sweet flowers, petrichor. Salt.
With a breath, she entered the sangam. Within it she saw the same light, but stronger, colder—the stuff made of distant stars, stitched into the water and the rippling mirror of a sky above her.
“Sapling.”
She did not see Mani Ara in the water until Mani Ara had risen from it and pressed her cold, wood-whorled hands against Priya’s jaw.
Priya saw, for a dizzying moment, through Mani Ara’s eyes—her own shadow flesh, starlight-flecked; her own mortality. For a moment she was not simply Priya. She was more, vast. She was Mani Ara.
“Wh-what,” Priya gasped, not able to quite form a question.
“We are becoming one, sapling,” said the yaksa, joy rich in her voice. “My magic to your hollowness. Your heart to my ancient cruelty. Your natural belonging to the world and flesh, to my cosmic nature, my roots and green.” She was still holding Priya. “You have fought and grown,” she said. “Soon you will be strong enough to hold me.”
“You told me you wouldn’t erase me,” Priya said, shaky. Struggling to comprehend it. “That you wouldn’t turn me into a shell.”
“There are many things that are green and living, that belong to your world, that can only exist because their life is twined with another life,” Mani Ara said. “Think of the banyans of your forest, sapling. How one being grows upon another, and together they make a great life.”
Sapling. She was a plant, a seed, a tree that could act as Mani Ara’s host—the living, breathing bones that would allow her to slip into the world and grow from Priya’s skin.
Was that what the not-rot upon Priya was? Her sap-heavy blood, and the flowers at her collarbones—the flecks of green at her eyes. Were they all Mani Ara slowly eking out her space, her presence in Priya’s flesh?
“You have not been destroyed,” said Mani Ara, tenderly clasping Priya’s face, hair, skull—as if she could reshape her gently. Asif she already had. “You will never be destroyed. You are a precious thing. You are my beloved, carved and hollowed for me. So slow you’ve grown, but now you’re close. So close.”
“Was I so difficult to create?” Priya asked. “Am I such a rare thing?”
“So many of you burned,” Mani Ara murmured. “Poor children. Nothing but husks.” Mani Ara’s hands released her. “The last one who was anything akin to what you are to me burned in mothers’ fire too,” Mani Ara said.
“I am surprised you don’t lock me away, if I’m so precious,” said Priya.
“How will you grow strong if I do so? It was only fighting and suffering in Srugna that allowed you to become so much more mine—so utterly complete.”
Panic was clawing up in her.
“How long until I am ready?” Priya asked, voice shaking.
“A few spans of days,” said Mani Ara sweetly. “Sunrises and sunsets, and you will be fit for me. And we will be one and yet not. Two halves.”
“One half eclipsing the other,” whispered Priya. “We won’t be equals, will we?”
“I am your god, sapling. Is that answer enough?”
It was in a way. It was.
“Look,” Mani Ara urged. “Look at the water.”
Priya lowered her head and looked.
The water beneath them, for a breath, stilled. And Priya saw one reflection in the water—one being, bigger than either of them. Her face, wrought strange, with a skin of bark whorled with stars; one mortal eye and another of flowers. Mortal skin at the throat and the shoulders, then a riot of flowers again at the heart. As she watched, it rippled and changed—flesh, to flowers, to utter cosmic starlight.
It was awful, and it was beautiful.
“What do I want you to do, sapling? Where must you go?” Mani Ara urged.
