The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,84
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.”
Finally, I lowered my weapon. “I’ll tell you what I see, Headmistress.” As I spoke these words to Surpanakha, I approached the magic cage. With a wave of my hands—a power I conjured from who knows where—I opened the door. It didn’t matter, because Sesha was such a prisoner of the butterflies, he could barely move now.
I said, more to myself than anyone else, “I see my father, who I can’t love or hate. Who I can’t even understand, really. But still, I can put him in my past. I can forgive him and move on. Because without his story, my story would never have begun. And for better or worse, we need all our stories. All of them, for the multiverse to go on.”