“What do you want from me, yaksa?”
“Reach for her here,” the yaksa said. “Mani Ara has created a miracle through you. New paths. The world altered a step further. Let her in again. Yield.”
The yaksa’s hands pressed onto Priya’s shoulders. There was no option to refuse their pressure or the yaksa’s commands. Priya closed her eyes and let herself be submerged.
The sangam greeted her like an old friend. Joy rippled through her. It wasn’t her own joy, she knew that. It was vaster, like the sweep of wind over grass, the sun on bare earth. Was this how immortals felt happiness?
“Sapling.” Mani Ara’s rich, laughing voice. “Can you feel it, as I do? The paths, the sangam, the cosmos?”
She could not see Mani Ara, but she could hear her—and feel as she felt too. Once she’d felt her siblings in the sangam. Now she could feel the mask-keepers, and the wound where Bhumika should have been, and worlds bursting and withering… and something great and terrible stalking her kin through a thousand eons.
“Yes,” Priya whispered. “I can.”
“Good. Feel what lies at the end of my paths, sapling. Feel what I want you to seek.”
The yaksa, in the sangam, like clusters of bright stars. And beyond them, further, sleeping in the earth…
Images flashed through her mind. A ring of vast stone-like trees. A lake of blue lotus flowers. Two yaksa.
“Other yaksa,” Priya breathed out. “Sleeping. In the soil. Awakening in the places where they died.”
“Yes.” Exultant.
“One in—Alor,” Priya said. The words poured from her. “One in Srugna. She’s waking. I feel her.”
“She will be awake very soon,” Mani Ara agreed, and her voice was in Priya’s ear, her lips soft, her hands at Priya’s throat. “Go to her. Be there to usher her into the world, so she arrives without fear, with her kin watching over her. Be where I cannot be. My heart, my hands.”
“Your kin,” Priya said, dazed. “They’re returning.”
“Our kin,” Mani Ara said. Her laugh was rippling, delighted. The very stars shuddered with it. She turned Priya by the shoulders, the throat, and pressed her mouth to Priya’s own.
“You are exactly what you are meant to be,” Mani Ara whispered to Priya’s lips, like breathing a secret between them. “A herald, a storm, my hands, my feet, my sword.”
Abruptly, Priya was back in her skin, standing in murky water, swaying. Clutching a beating flower-heart, sluggishly pulsing in her hand.
Tentative fingers touched her cheek. There was a question in the yaksa’s eyes.
Bhisa Ara, Priya thought.
She wanted to sayI know you now.
Wanted to sayMani Ara loves you all so much. She loves you in a fathomless way my brain can’t comprehend. She loves you like… rivers and mountains and oceans love one another. It’s impossible and ancient, and I don’t know how such cruel beings can love so much.
“Yaksa,” she said instead, and saw the question wither in the yaksa’s lifelike face. “I saw her. I know what to do.”
She sought out Ganam. He was waiting for her at the mahal. Maybe he’d felt her coming. Her magic was a thrum now, pulsing through Ahiranya. Impossible to ignore.
Hair still dripping, a bloody lotus clutched in her fist, she wentto him at the mahal’s entrance. He barked orders, sending the mask-keepers around him away. The words slid from her ears like water. He met her eyes.
“The yaksa,” she said thinly. “They have orders.”
“Priya,” he said. “Tell me what the yaksa need.”
“You need to tell the mask-keepers the time’s come,” she said. “You’ll be passing through the deathless waters again. All of you. And…” The lotus was still pulsing in her hand. Still gasping for life. “And when this is done—those who survive are coming with me to Srugna. You’re coming with me to Srugna.”
His gaze was steady. “Are we finally going to fight a proper war? Soldiers and swords?”
“No,” said Priya. “We’re going to watch a yaksa being reborn.”
