“It is my name, yaksa,” he said, bowing his head.
“You need not venerate me,” she said with a smile. “Not you.”
Not you.It reverberated through him. It meant something.
Not you.
“Yaksa,” he said. Hesitated. He did not know what he had meant to say.
“Don’t you know my name?” she asked him. She cocked her head. There was a faint rustling noise. A snapping of wood, a noise green with sap.
“No,” he said.
“You called me Sanjana, when you first drew me out of the earth,” she replied. “And you call me that still. I thought it was a kind of game for you, at first. You always liked to play at being human. There was always a… softness, to you.” The look she gave him was thoughtful. “But perhaps not.”
She was watching him curiously.
“You are not as you should be,” she said.
“Something is wrong with me,” he whispered in return.
She approached him then. Took his face in her hands. Her skin was like wood—all grain, rich with the scent of sandalwood.
“Don’t worry,” she said, dabbing her fingertips over his cheek and then his jaw with the lightest of touches—as if the feel of his skin fascinated her and repelled her in equal measure. “You won’t feel like this forever.
“Let me tell you a tale,” she said, cupping his face now, turning it just so. The perfect angle for their eyes to meet. “A tale mortal children know, I think. Once there was a being who swam in the cosmic rivers where all universes meet. She was a creature of those rivers. Later, humans would only be able to envisage her as a fish.”
“Mani Ara,” he murmured. He remembered the Birch Bark Mantras. Remembered the stories he was taught as a boy, and taught his little sister in turn.
“Yes, good,” she said, sounding pleased. “The first yaksa who found the shore of a world. And the world was green and loud and so alive. She crept onto its shore, and she tasted it. The green. The life. And it was beautiful, you understand? So she decided she would enter it and become of that world.”
“I know this,” he said. Not to boast, not to stop her, but to say—What is it that I don’t know? Why do you stare at me like I am a child, Sanjana-who-is-not-Sanjana?
“Deciding is easy,” Sanjana said. “But to do it is—was—harder. Oh, you can touch the sangam from this world. You can dream it and envision it and worm your way into it through your gods and your griefs. But to cross from one to the other with all your flesh—to breathe with it, move with it, be within it—that takes magic.” Her eyes gleamed, like coins, like the silt gold of a riverbed. “That takes sacrifice. So Mani Ara sacrificed.”
This, he didn’t know. It was not part of the tale Ashok had ever been told, temple-raised though he’d once been.
“What did she sacrifice?” he asked.
“What all the yaksa did, in the end,” Nandi piped up. His voice was like a hollow reed—like something carved out for wind and music. “Rootlessness. We bound ourselves to this world. To its soil. To its green. We tried to make a home of it. But there were people who rejected what the yaksa offered. And they made a sacrifice of their own. In fire. And the yaksa burned. They burned, and it hurt, and they wanted to run, but they could not flee from this world. They’d sacrificed that strength, and the path was gone. They could only sink into their roots. Into the rivers they’d bled for their priests. The trees that grew from their own agony-charred bones.”
The deathless waters. The trees of sacred wood. The forest that twisted time strangely, and the bones that hung from trees. All this. All this—
“We still want this world,” Sanjana said into the silence. “And we were willing to sacrifice more of ourselves to belong. We became things of green, once, giving up our rootlessness for soil. Now we have to become… things of flesh.” She tilted her own face, side to side, like a child showing off a new toy or costume. “A fair exchange,” she murmured. “The humans who worship us hollowed themselves—sacrificed their humanity—for power. And now we wear their flesh and their bones and their hearts like garb.
“You are in a costume, brother,” she said kindly. “You wear it cinched tight, because that was always your way…”
“Stop,” he choked out. Wrenched away from her hand. Where she’d touched him, his face burned. He pressed his own fingertips to it, feeling nothing but his own skin—warm, faintly marked with stubble.
He thought again, of the weary voice in his mind when he’d woken from death. Tired. Old.I never wanted this.And it was true, absolutely true. He did not want this. What Sanjana was offering him.
He clutched his own hands, one over the other. Holding somethingin.
“Play your game, then,” she said, after a moment. She sounded faintly amused. “I will be excited, I think, to see what you do. But not all the others will be. Try and remember that, if nothing else.”
She turned, beginning to walk away. He watched the shape of her shoulders. Watched as Nandi trailed after her, ferns sprouting where his feet had pressed the soil. He thought of shells—of wearing a skin, an echo. He thought of Priya. And Bhumika.
“My sisters,” he managed to say.
