That made my blood freeze. Sesha’s plan for destroying the multiplicity of the multiverse had started this long ago?
“No, Sesha, it’s your name that will be forgotten!” I said. To prove my point, and to buy myself some time, I pulled out my bow and arrow, aiming right at Sesha’s head.
“Wait, I haven’t granted you the right of challenge kill,” Pinki protested. “What makes you think you have more right to kill than me?”
“Challenge kill is an ancient right among our kind, and if this rakkhoshi has the right of injury on her side, it cannot be denied.” Surpanakha the headmistress stepped in between Pinki and me. “You say this serpent prince has harmed your loved ones, land demoness. If that is so, you must bind yourself to him and let fate decide if you have the right of vengeance upon him.”
“Bind myself to him?” I asked, feeling weak again.
“Yes.” Surpanakha waved her hand in front of Sesha’s mouth and somehow magically extracted a fountain of poison from one of his teeth. This she caught in a little vial and handed to me. “Drink, young land clanswoman, and if you have the right of challenge kill, it will not harm you.”
I heard Neel shouting a warning, but without knowing why, I knew I would be able to drink the serpent poison without being harmed. Giving Sesha an approximation of Neel’s raised-eyebrow look, I lifted the vial, gave him a little “cheers,” and then drank the venom in one gulp. For a minute, I felt queasy and dizzy, but then the feeling cleared up almost right away. Even those few sips of Sesha’s venom made me feel sharper, stronger, and more powerful. I locked eyes with my serpent father, and I felt him begin to recognize me.
“Who are you?” he hissed.
I did not answer, because I heard Surpanakha asking me the question as if from far, far away. “What do you see, land clanswoman?”
What did I see? I strung an arrow in my magic bow again and peered down its shaft, my vision condensing to one sharp point, right in the center of Sesha’s forehead. What did I see? I asked myself, my own voice thrumming through me like a song. What did I see? What did I see?
“I’ll tell you what I see!” I heard Sesha shouting at me. “I see a monster made from hate!”
I hesitated, my bow arm quavering a bit. Then a shocked murmur rose from all the students, who were pointing at me and rising from their tree-side seats. The grove was buzzing with conversation, exclamations, and shouts, and even Surpanakha was looking at me with a seriously surprised expression.
My skin prickled with heat and power. I felt like myself, but a more beautiful version, a more powerful version, a more balanced and wiser version of me. Rather than killing me, I had survived Sesha’s poison and it had made me stronger. I glowed with what felt like moonlight from the inside out. It was as if I was manifesting into my most pure and true self.
“What do you see?” Surpanakha had asked me.
What did I see when I looked at Sesha? I saw hatred. I saw cruelty. I saw pain. I saw greed and suffering, but longing too. An intense longing, like a hunger. A hunger to possess things, to rule things, to dominate things. These were Sesha’s poison. These were the dark matter that had corrupted him. But even under all that poison, there was more there too. There was a desire to be more, do more, leave a mark on the multiverse. In these qualities, I saw myself. These were the parts of myself I had inherited from him. Parts of myself I could use for good or for evil. Ultimately, they were parts of myself I had to accept to truly know who I was.
Sesha was beside himself, frothing at the mouth even as he shouted at me. “You hate me, do you? Well, I hate you too! I hate you too! And you have no idea what future your hate will bring!”
As he snapped and hissed, banging against the bars of the magic cage like a demented animal, his words rang in my mind. You have no idea what future your hate will bring. Why did he say that? And where had I heard about hate bringing about some kind of future?
My arm trembled, so long had I held out my bow. I still had no idea how to save Sesha, but his words had triggered a memory. It had been the end of my moon mother’s poem: Hate, not love, makes difference end. Hate, not love. That must be it. That must be how Sesha was making all these stories smush in the past, present, and future. That must be part of his plan to bring about the big crunch. To fan as much hate as possible in the multiverse. From petty rivalries to interspecies distrust to war, it was all a part of his plan. I thought of how Neel and I had been squabbling, and for that matter, Neel and Lal, me and Mati too. Was it all because of Sesha’s hate?
Long ago, Einstein-ji had told me a riddle: Everything is connected to everything, but how? The answer, I had learned, was love. Love, and only love, would make the multiverse keep expanding. Love, and only love, would create more stories. Love, and only love, was the answer to how everything was connected to everything. So if love made stories, hate and fear killed them.
As I thought this, a single flower from the champak tree floated off, as if on a breeze, becoming a bright blue butterfly. The tiny insect landed delicately on the end of my arrow, as if trying to tell me something. And all at once, I saw. The butterflies were stories—each delicate and fragile on its own, easily crushed, easily discarded. But together, migrating in a beautiful, beating mass, the insects were mighty. “Use the butterfly effect,” the scientists had told me. And I would.
“Butterflies, please, I need your help!” I called. “Your stories are in danger. You are in danger!”
They did not waste any time. A fluttering, rumbling, rustling sound made me look up. Layered thick along the banyan tree canopy were all the blue butterflies that had been flowers on the champak tree. The tree itself looked bare, dead. But the butterflies were layered so thick, their beating wings were like a living, breathing sky above our heads. As I looked up and saw them, so too did the rest of Ghatatkach Academy of Murder and Mayhem. The rakkhosh students snarled and whooped and tried to catch the delicate insects. The butterflies swooped down among the rakkhosh crowd, now changing a demon into a cartoon beagle, now changing a demoness into a glittering pony. The insects seemed to be playing with the rakkhosh, swooping down, landing on one, then flying away to land on another.
But the majority of the butterflies landed en masse on and inside Sesha’s cage. They covered the cage, and him, so much I could hardly see him anymore. I lowered my weapon, mesmerized by the sight.
“What is this? Get off! Get off!” Sesha sputtered. But the butterflies were relentless, flapping in his eyes, his hair, his ears, his nose, his mouth. I caught a glimpse of him changing now into an evil king with a bad haircut, now into a beating eye hungry for power. Then, in the next moment, he was a riddling master criminal with question marks all over his clothes, and then he was a corrupt president who liked to wear white roses in his lapel. Sesha—who would become the terrible and hated King of Serpents—was becoming instead a series of other villains from other stories.
“He’s losing his own uniqueness,” said Neel. “The stories are mad that he’s trying to destroy them.”
“They’ve been around us all the time, all these stories,” I wondered. “We just never recognized them.”
“Sesha needs chaos as much as we do,” Neel said. “He thinks the hate will save him, but it won’t. It’ll destroy who he is.”