Then there was a ripple. A wet gasp.
Fingers on the bank—on wet stone. The fingers pressed down, and the stone splintered into new buds, flowers pressing through stone to meet him, as the fingers clung on and dragged. Dragged.
Arms. Shoulders. His body leveraged itself from the deathless waters. He paused to breathe, learning the new weft of his own lungs, the way air filled their emptiness and sank into him. He breathed again, and felt the workings of his nose. His mouth. The fine bones of his jaw, the strangeness of the way they moved.
The muscles of his back bunched and released. He landed flat on the ground, face to the floor. Around him the stone erupted, blooming into flowers and saplings, splinters of stone fanning like a delicate spine, bursting with the beauty of bones.
He pressed his forehead to the ground and rubbed his knuckles against his eyes. Blood, against his knuckles. Red petals against his knuckles, bruised and withering, as he brushed them away.
The bones, the muscles, the nerves of his face ached. The air hurt them. His skin knitted over them, smoothing the pain, fashioned to match the needs of this world, this fragment of the cosmos.
He rose onto his hands. Turned, crawling, back toward the water.
But no. He couldn’t go back.
He could only lean forward, and look.
Brilliant blue water-light shone in his eyes. He looked at his own reflection, in the gleaming water, in the shadow of the sangam, and saw a face like a mirror: blank of feeling, reflecting nothing back at himself but his own skin, his own eyes, his own bones.
He touched a fingertip to his lip. The reflection in the water didn’t move.
“Rest then,” he said shakily. His skin. His skin spoke. “Rest then. I’ll be here for you.”
And there, in the water, his reflection closed his eyes, and vanished in a swirl of pale silver leaves.
The stone of the Hirana opened for him. The world parted easily for him. That made sense. He knew this was his country. Shaped by his own hands. His own blood. His sacrifice.
And it knew he had somewhere to be.
He walked unsteadily through a city, strange with brightness, lanterns hanging in windows and on verandas, vendors hawking in the corners.
There were statues of the yaksa set back in alcoves. He wasted a long moment staring at one of them, with eyes like an owl, and a face that was all flowers. Lotus roots for fingers.
But he was being called. So he kept on walking.
The forest also parted for him. Dark, winding trees. Undergrowth soft beneath his feet. He walked until his feet threatened to bleed, and his legs—too new to the business of life—screamed for rest.
Still, he kept on moving. She was waiting for him.
Eventually, he came to a tree. Old, old. Faces a rictus upon its surface. It smelled of life on the verge of death—too rich, too bloody, a sickening odor.
He did not want to touch it.
He stumbled toward it. Pressed his hands into the mass of it and gripped. Wrenched.Pulled.
The rot parted, fibrous, thick with veins. And there she was beneath it, for all the world sleeping. Hair wet with sap. Her eyes closed, lashes fanned against her cheeks. The last time he had seen her she had laughed, and pressed leaves into their little sister’s skirts.
Then she had been murdered. Throat slit. Body set alight.
“Sanjana,” he said.
Her eyes snapped open. She shuddered out a breath.
She touched her own face.
“Sanjana,” he said again, helpless. “Fuck. You’re here. You’re here.”
“Drawn straight from the roots and the waters,” she said nonsensically, in a voice that suggested agreement. She leaned forward, and as the moon slanted over her cheek, he saw that her skin was wood, not flesh. Her teeth were the piths of fruit, sharpened to fine points.
