“You’ve already hollowed yourself for us. You’re already bound to the yaksa—by rivers, by root, by emptiness.” The flowers were growing more swiftly now, more thickly. Filling the water. They were climbing her now, winding around her body, reshaping her, bloom by bloom. “We’ve already begun.”
The last touched her mouth.
She opened her lips. And.
Knowledge poured through her.
How the yaksa had clawed their way from one world to another. Mani Ara, the first, with her thorn-sharp smile, her flowering eyes. And all the others, flowering and growing, gathering followers. The way the world changed where they walked. The way the world became their own—
(She heard a cry, distantly, in the sangam. Or felt it. Something had realized what was being done, here. Someone had turned their focus toward her and Ashok. Someone was coming.)
The knowledge poured into her. Poured and she remembered—cutting out her own heart. Hollowing herself open. This was the same and yet worse, a thousand times worse. Knowledge flowed into her, and with it an understanding of the immortal that wore her brother’s skin and memories as if it were his own.
It was not a simple kind of knowledge, this. It was as ancient as the yaksa, and as complex. It was a thing that could not be stored in tomes, had never been recited by poets. It was memory: the feel of soil underfoot. The first time this yaksa had spilled blood. The world they had come from, and the world they sought to build.
The sacrifices they had made in order to come here. The dark grief in their hearts.
I know how you can die, she tried to say.I know, I know, I know.But the knowing had eaten its way through her, filled her hollowness to the brim.
“I need to do it before they find you,” said Ashok-who-was-not-Ashok. And very suddenly, she sagged forward, back in her own flesh again. “I need to…”
He went silent as she reached up and touched his face. When she drew her hand back, she drew moss with it, thick with blood.
“It’s all falling away,” she said.
He stared at her. Eyes as yellow as the flowers that had consumed her.
“You have it,” he said. “You have everything I know.”
He touched her face in return. A mirror of her movement.
“Goodbye, Bhumika,” he said.
She felt something twist. Something deep within her go silent. Dizziness overcame her.
When she next opened her eyes, she could see trees above her. She was in someone’s arms.
“Where shall I take you, my lady?” the man asked.Jeevan, her mind whispered, and then the name turned to dust. Fled from her.
“You cannot—call me that. Anymore,” she whispered. Her eyes would not stay open. But she tried. She could hear the huff of his breath. The crunch of undergrowth beneath his feet as he carried her as swiftly as he could, as if he feared the yaksa were at his heels.
“Bhumika, then,” he said. “Where shall we go?”
A lake of knowledge in her head. A history with its roots cut. She licked her dry lips.
“The seeker’s path,” she said. “And then—Alor. Take me to Alor.”
Who is Bhumika?she thought. And then nothing. Nothing.
The last thing she saw was the night sky above her.
RAO
After the work was done, they gathered.
“I hate having to trust knowledge gained through torture,” Rao murmured.
“Are your fine morals troubling you, Prince Rao?”
