Dive Into a New Sci-Fi World With an Exclusive Excerpt from ‘MAYA: Seed Takes Root,’ Read by Hugo Weaving

What happens when a filmmaker and a game designer team up to create a speculative universe? Readers will soon find out with MAYA: Seed Takes Root, the first book in a new series from Anand Gandhi (Ship of Theseus) and Zain Memon (SHASN). The authors spent five years crafting their new world, with collaborative input from other artists as well as scientists, linguists, architects, and beyond.

As for the story, it’s described as a blend of “science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy” and “a new mythology for the 21st century—not of gods and monsters, but of us.”

Here’s a little more about the plot:

The Divya Trials have been announced. Billions will compete. One will ascend to godhood.

On the planet Neh, the living forest called Maya is the planet’s neural network. Each citizen tethers daily to Maya, entering shared dreamscapes for work, play, and learning. The immortal Divyas harvest the data. Every thought and memory; predicting futures and bending reality itself. Everyone is connected. Everyone is tracked. Everyone is controlled.

Everyone except Yachay. An ordinary 19-year-old manushya raised in isolation by his ailing grandfather, Daddu, Yachay has never tethered to Maya—making him invisible to the gods of data. Daddu urges him to enter the upcoming Divya Trials, a once-in-a-lifetime competition where billions compete for immortality and omnipotence. Yachay wants no part of it—until his grandfather’s death uncovers an ancient resistance and a lifetime of secret training.

MAYA: Seed Takes Root, the first novel in the expansive MAYA universe, fuses science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy into an epic of thrilling adventure and urgent allegory. Drawing on South Asian mythology, hard science, and sharp social commentary, it asks the questions that define our time: Who controls our stories? Who profits from our data? And in an age of perfect prediction, is freedom still possible?

io9 is thrilled to share this exclusive audiobook excerpt from MAYA: Seed Takes Root, read by iconic actor Hugo Weaving (The Lord of the Rings and Matrix movies, not to mention V for Vendetta, Captain America: The First Avenger, and more).

Below, you can also read the first chapter of MAYA: Seed Takes Root in text form. The book releases August 25 but is available for preordering now.

BARBAROUS ELSEWHERE

Chapter 1

Our peace rests on a barbarous elsewhere.

—Nathani, the palms of the great body

KSHAR FLICKED his forked tongue, searching for the little girl. There she was again.

Though again wasn’t quite right. Again implied something happening once, and then happening once more. This was the same place, the same moment, just a different could-be. And it wasn’t really happening. Surely, the Great-Divyas have a word for it.

The first few times Kshar died, the implosion had caught him mid-slither. Now he kept his distance from where the scooter would crash, far down the market’s cliffside terraces.

You never get used to dying, no matter how many times you wake up from it.

He slipped through a narrow gap between two shops with living, breathing walls. His thick serpentine tail pressed against the ground, steadying him as he rose upright upon it.

Years of vertical posture had settled a dull ache into his spine where his torso became tail. It was a price all urban naags paid to fit in. His body was built for sliding along the ground, not this strained mimicry of bipeds.

He tightened the tension-weave vest around his middle. The fabric’s hair-thin bands flexed like tiny muscles, bracing his spine. His long, scaled fingers worked the fastenings. The contraption eased the pain, but never enough.

His great-grandmother would have hissed at such compromises, and even more so at the reason he made them. When Darib was born, Kshar had watched his muscles spasm, noticed how his tail already showed signs of failing. There was an established path for such things.

The naag clans had always sent their runts on risky errands. Prison or death would filter out weakness from the bloodline. But when Darib’s pearl-soft scales first brushed his chest, Kshar had made an unthinkable choice: His son would live. Even if it meant taking on a hundred missions like this one.

Kshar slipped into the market crowd. Cooks stretched noodle dough from high balconies, letting gravity pull the strands downward as customers wagered on which would snap first into waiting bowls.

An artisan caught Kshar’s eye, waving a stylus carved from a colhaan’s leg bone. “A portrait, friend? Carved fresh!” he called, etching detailed faces into giant insect shells that released fragrant resin dust.

Kshar’s heat pits flickered with a warm signature they’d picked up before. He didn’t look up. He knew. There were eyes upon him. Above, cable-carts with wind sails glided along elevated tracks. In their shifting shadows, a vaanar enforcer crouched on a patrol beam, watching. His nimble tail and strong arms gripped an overhead support. Muscular legs folded beneath him, ready to spring into action.

Kshar had spotted him before. The vaanar’s pink fur marked him as a low-rank patroller. His tail tip shifted nervously. The diamond-studded mace strapped to it shimmered in the light. Kshar had seen what one swing could do.

The enforcer dropped to a lower beam, tracking Kshar’s movements.

Kshar knew what made this burly enforcer so uneasy. Something about the way a naag glided triggered ancient suspicions in vaanar minds. But today, those fears fell short of his true purpose. His lips curled faintly.

Later, when asked how the riot began, the vaanar would recount every stone hurled, every scream. But he would never think to say, It began when the naag gave the girl a fruit.

Kshar moved on, keeping his cobra hood flat against his back. Another inheritance that city life had tamed. These days, flaring it was merely an admission of weakness, no longer signaling the lethality it once had.

A network of poles and ropes turned the market’s airspace into a vaanar’s path. The enforcer could swing across the entire market without ever touching the ground.

But he wouldn’t dare. Even without official robes, Kshar carried himself with unmistakable authority. The patroller knew better than to underestimate a confident-looking naag, not these days, when naags were running for office.

The vaanar turned away, looking for easier targets.

Kshar couldn’t deny the plan’s brutal elegance, though it defied every instinct he’d honed in the field. “Weeding out the scion of a Great-Divya in Dhaara’s busiest market?” He had confronted Adharvan with an operative’s caution. “I might as well announce it to the vaanar police.”

Adharvan’s reply had illuminated the way. “A spark ignites a flame. A flame starts a fire, a fire becomes an inferno. A chain reaction is beautiful, but even more so is the spark’s innocence.”

A procession of a dozen ornate carriages wound its way through the market’s distant quarter. At their center, a palanquin draped in rare thraak silk shifted colors with each sway. Vaanars riding two-legged colhaans formed a living wall around it. They led their blind mounts with sonar rattlers. Their crimson-dyed fur marked them as elite militia.

The scion’s caravan had arrived, right on schedule. But first, Kshar needed his spark.

Near the procession, Kshar spotted her. The manushya girl, barely six years old. There she was. Again. She threaded her way between the colhaans, darting to the next lane.

She wore a loose hand-me-down dress that seemed to have once belonged to a child who had never known her kind of hunger. The fabric was faded but clean, quiet proof of a mother’s struggle to hold onto dignity amid scarcity. The girl’s eyes, older than her years, were locked onto a heap of gleaming sunpears, guarded by a fruit seller across the street.

The girl had almost reached the fruit stall when screams erupted, drawing all eyes skyward. A young naag tore through the market’s airspace on a stolen rikta skyscooter, its volatile core sputtering warnings. Vaanar police swung in pursuit through the aerial infrastructure. The thief’s forked tongue sampled the air, tasting freedom and capture in equal measure.

Stupid kid, Kshar thought, watching the fleeing naag. What did he think he was going to do with a rikta skyscooter? Only those twin-headed gandharvas were permitted to own them.

A portly vaanar enforcer hurled a bola with deceptive agility. It struck the scooter’s tank, exposing the light-sensitive rikta fuel. The dark liquid drank up every bit of light, reflecting nothing. The thief leaped clear as the rikta core imploded midair, creating a violent vacuum. It sucked in nearby matter—bola, scooter, even the corner of a treetop—into a dense, hurtling orb.

The crowd watched in horror as the orb slashed through the air, splintering terrace edges before plunging into the gorge below.

The thief hit the pavement and slithered low, belly scraping stone as he wove through legs and carriages. Vaanars descended behind him, swift, relentless.

This was Kshar’s cue.

He had tried to master this timing by counting breaths or keeping beats, but the moment always defied precision. There was no rhythm to memorize, only shifting markers to watch for: the thief’s pungent fear, the pressing heat of the crowd’s panic, a seller distracted by fleeting drama.

Kshar slid through the frenzy with reptilian calm. He slipped behind the housing of a large, unwinding spring, one of many that lifted passengers to the aqueduct channels above. Its position offered perfect access to the fruit stall while keeping him hidden from view.

The market returned to its baseline hum, a restless organism used to shrugging off brief disruptions. The fruit seller’s attention settled back on his wares. The girl now stood at the stall, still transfixed by the sunpears.

Though there was slim chance of commerce, a salesman’s hope died hard. “Got coin, girl?” the fruit seller asked, ignoring the stark evidence to the contrary.

She stared at him, amused by the odd sounds he made.

“Handouts are that way.” He dismissively flicked his wrist toward a group of Udayan refugees huddled around a food distribution booth. Their unbroken pride spoke of lives only recently touched by loss. Vaanar officials shouted orders at a sufficiently orderly crowd that simply spoke a language of lesser familiarity.

The girl bumped her tiny fists together in response. It was a silent, defiant gesture she did not fully understand, yet its impropriety sparked a primal thrill within her.

The fruit seller chose to ignore the indecent retort, turning instead to someone who did have coin.

Adharvan’s voice echoed in Kshar’s memory. “Do you share this merchant’s fascination with these mundane discs of metal?” he’d asked, casually weighing the bag of rushika coins, as though he might fling them into the gorge if Kshar showed insufficient interest.

“They have their uses,” Kshar had replied, drawing a single coin from the bag. “A compact ledger of the world’s distributed sacrifice, holding essence of time and toil through common agreement.” He’d flicked the coin back. “But I seek something more . . . fundamental.”

It was a price only a certain kind of employer could comprehend, let alone pay. Kshar had named it only once he was certain that Adharvan was precisely the kind who could. The flitt-locust pendant around Adharvan’s neck had confirmed it. No artificer, however skilled, could ever forge such a thing.

Concealed behind the windup spring’s bulk, Kshar slid his tail forward like smoke, well out of the fruit seller’s view. It swept two sunpears from the stall, the act so smooth the fruits seemed to vanish on their own.

His tail curled back, depositing one sunpear into the girl’s small palms. She turned to his hiding spot with a gap-toothed grin.

Before she could form a thought, Kshar nudged her, pivoting her to face the fruit seller. No words, just a subtle rearrangement in the world’s geometry.

The girl locked eyes with the fruit seller. Fear flooded her. She bolted.

A guttural yelp escaped the fruit seller. Two impulses collapsed into a single utterance.

“Fru—ief!”

The fruit seller shoved through the crowd behind the girl, his pursuit fueled by the conviction that humiliating one thief deterred the next.

Kshar remained as inconspicuous as the half-light of dusk. With a flick of his tail, he tossed the second sunpear into the dry gutter that sloped along the road.

The fruit rolled, guided by the channel’s funnel, spurred on by gravity. It threaded beneath tails and wheels until it bumped to a stop a few steps away from a leashed gruff.

The creature’s ribs showed beneath matted fur. Its nose lifted, testing the air.

The gruff lunged for the fruit, only to be yanked back by its leash. The prize sat just beyond reach, taunting it. Kshar watched with satisfaction as the beast strained against the stretched leash.

Down the road, circumstances snowballed.

The girl ran as the hunted run, without thought, without plan. The fruit seller’s strides ate up the distance between them, each step promising retribution.

From the opposite direction came the naag thief at breakneck pace, scales burning stone, vaanar police in hot pursuit. The gruff’s taut leash, stretched across the thief’s path, became an instant tripwire. The thief’s momentum folded him over the cable and sent him crashing down on top of the fleeing girl.

The first vaanar, eyes locked on the thief, hit the same leash at full speed. He slammed into the fallen naag. A chorus of grunts and curses erupted as more vaanars piled on top in a tangle of fur and limbs, oblivious to the small life trapped beneath them. Their weight was crushing the air from her lungs.

The vaanars dragged their prize away, the bound naag cursing and thrashing. The fruit seller had vanished at the first sight of red furs, his inventory a little lighter, but his sense of justice temporarily restored.

Two vaanar constables lingered. Their captain noticed, and sent the younger one back with official regrets. What happened here, he reminded his junior, was most definitely an accident.

The sunpear slipped from the girl’s limp hand, rolling until it met its twin. Two points in a constellation of cause and effect, now united, their purpose served.

As the child lay still, a contagious silence emanated in waves.

A manushya refugee pushed through the crowd and crumpled beside his daughter. He cradled her head gently, as if to hold each vertebra in place—an unconscious hope that she might still wake.

A rakshasi healer emerged from the circle of onlookers. She knelt beside the father, her pouches of curatives now futile. Her hand on his arm carried the finality of condolence.

The vaanar constable approached with measured steps, his tail lowered. He spoke of the state’s remorse, of compensation. Words that even he knew were inadequate for their task.

The father’s scream tore through the city’s skandha-stone foundations, a plea to undo this nightmare. Kshar strained to hear, but couldn’t catch the girl’s name, which the frail manushya was trying to etch into the city’s memory. The market swallowed the father’s rage into its underbelly, where it kindled and erupted.

The first stone flew from the crowd, a mother’s grief-made weapon. It struck the vaanar captain’s brow, drawing blood. He shoved the naag thief aside, more to shield than restrain. “Hold!” he ordered, to de-escalate. But his youngest officer’s bola was already in flight, spinning toward its mark. The mother collapsed beside her daughter’s still form.

The crowd surged forward with raised fists. The vaanars locked formations. Their armored tails lifted high, legislating anguish, insisting sorrow be swallowed. Their iron discipline held the tide back until an urn came flying into a vaanar’s face. A decade of brittle peace shattered with clay and skull.

A volley of stones followed. A pointed rock punctured a vaanar’s chest plate. Another caved in a helmet. Blood turned red fur rust-black. Stones whistled through market air, finding flesh with an accuracy bred by years of bowing.

For three heartbeats, the vaanar line held, like they were contemplating the weight of what would follow. Then they answered with brutal efficiency.

Lassos, meant for naags, wrapped around manushya necks instead. Bodies jerked, feet leaving ground. Combat nets fell from above, iron mesh on flesh. Protesters thrashed in their folds.

Vaanar enforcers swung on ropes, their feet and tails striking with precision: a kick to a rioter’s head, a tail-mace to a shoulder. Beautiful and efficient. Protesters fell. One, then another.

Each vaanar strike bred deeper anger. Protesters smashed the skandha-stone pillars, and the splintered shards became weapons as if that were what they were always meant to be.

The protesters’ fury sought everything that had towered over them. The shops that loomed, the wares that gleamed, the high perches of the elite garudas that mocked them. The ancient marketplace foundations, laid long before uniform or uprising, trembled.

Kshar glanced up at the tower where the city’s garuda mayor presided. It had been vacated at the first sign of unrest. He recalled his guru’s words: Our peace rests on a barbarous elsewhere. Once puzzling, now clear as Kshar watched his design unravel.

Today that elsewhere is here.

The scion’s caravan sat trapped in the riot’s heart, cut off by the surging mob. Frenzied bodies closed in, drawn by the gleam of wealth.

Kshar needed better vantage; from street level, it was all a blur of limbs and flying debris.

His tongue sampled the air: spilled food from toppled urns, the sterile smell of collagen bandages, then the earthy musk of mud clinging to stones as they arced toward the garuda statue that dominated the marketplace.

He tilted back to take in the full height of the sculpture. Fifteen stories of skandha stone, a monument to a long-dead garuda politician that dwarfed the surrounding buildings.

Even from this distance, Kshar could see how the garuda’s infamous sneer had been preserved in stone. The statue’s massive hooked beak was large enough to swallow a real garuda whole. Her keeled breastbone thrust forward, still towering over the streets she had once governed.

Enormous wings with metal feathers spread out from her sides, flapping back and forth in slow, mechanical sweeps. Each pass cast moving shadows over the market below, bright day and sudden dusk chasing each other.

The statue’s head served as an observation chamber. Its eyes were vast windows, made from the polished chitin of giant insects. A dual-headed gandharva was stationed within: One head watching the riot, the other tethered to a Maya tree that had grown within the statue’s hollow core. Together, they transmitted everything they witnessed to the tree.

Stones pelted the chitin windows, fracturing them. Kshar almost pitied the mob’s futile attempt to blind the city’s memory. They never understood that true surveillance lived in the eyes of their own loved ones.

He considered seizing the chamber. It would provide the perfect view for now, but be worthless on the day that truly mattered. He wouldn’t want his face to be the gandharva’s final memory preserved in the tree. Instead, he set his sights on the statue’s mechanical heart.

A gap in the mayhem revealed his path. His tail dipped into spilled jona oil as he wound toward the statue’s base. The sticky oil invaded the grooves of the hard vajra plating at the end of his tail, making his scales crawl. He left a slick trail behind.

The garuda statue’s stone robes fell in deep folds, offering hidden routes upward. Finally prone, Kshar scaled the shadows until he reached the chamber housing the wing mechanisms. Inside, a network of service platforms surrounded the central gear works.

From a ledge above the western wing’s axle, he surveyed the scene below. Each mechanical wing sweep cast a broad eclipse over the street, then slid away, revealing a crowd that moved like pieces in a game. Through this strobing gloom, he saw his target: the lavish palanquin at the riot’s core.

Elite vaanar guards formed a tight ring around it. Their colhaans snapped at anyone who ventured close. But stones continued to rain down, drawn by the gravity of opulence.

The palanquin’s open sky-door offered Kshar a clear view. Inside, the garuda Divya-scion Tarkash perched on a carved beam. His keeled chest leaned against the ornate frontrest. Though his wings twitched at each scream from outside, the tilt of his head indicated calculation, not fear.

Tarkash reached for the sky-door.

“Stay inside, shreeman!” a guard shouted, the honorific sharp with alarm, but Tarkash was already rising, his upper body emerging like he might address the mob. A shard of stone slipped through a gap between vaanar shields, striking his wing-claw.

His talons lost their grip, wings spreading instinctively. Another stone clipped him mid-motion, cutting his ascent short. His pinions flared for balance, but too late. Tarkash crashed back into the gilded interior.

Satisfaction curled in Kshar’s chest.

But something was changing. Young voices emerged from the other carriages, reasoning with the mob. The words Divya-scion carried on the wind. Fingers pointed at the rare hue-shifting thraak silk on the palanquin as proof. Even the most enraged rioters hesitated, their hatred of wealth warring with reverence for the progeny of a Divya.

Kshar watched his careful plan dissolving. He had to act fast.

Below his ledge, the statue’s heart lay exposed, a massive coiled spring. Its slow unwinding powered the metal wings through gears and counterweights.

If he jammed the axle, all that pent-up tension would tear the wing free.

He searched for something sturdy—a loose tool, a metal bar, anything. His eyes caught on a chunk of skandha stone, broken loose from the statue’s core, bigger than his head.

He lunged for it, both hands closing around its jagged edges, scales scraping stone. At the ledge, he studied the churning gears below, their curved teeth pulling everything inward. The distance made precision impossible, but he had to try. He heaved the rock up and over. It tumbled and glanced harmlessly off a support beam, vanishing into the depths. The machinery ground on, indifferent.

He needed something longer and stronger. Something he could guide. The mob’s conviction was cooling into doubt. There was only one way.

Kshar uncoiled his large tail, lowering it into the churning gears. He watched the wing’s sweep intently. Then, bracing himself, he twisted sharply, and wedged the thickest, most heavily plated section of his tail between two massive, interlocking gears.

Metal shrieked in protest as gears bit hard into his tail’s vajra armor. Kshar winced. The wing juddered to a stop, its shadow frozen directly above Tarkash’s palanquin.

The spring’s trapped force pulled relentlessly against the jammed wing. Pain shot up Kshar’s spine as gears ground deeper into his plating with crushing pressure.

Counterweights swung wild, yanking at locked levers, as the system began tearing itself apart. Housing bolts popped free, shooting off like shrapnel. One ricocheted off the wall with a sharp clang, missing him by a scale’s breadth.

The wing’s central joint gave way with a deafening crack. Below, the crowd was now shouting demands to see the scion. The guards wrestled them back. The chaos drowned out the groaning metal above.

Kshar bared his fangs through the excruciating pain. The wing tore loose, its immense weight looming over the palanquin. Nearly there—

The vajra armor shattered.

Gears ripped through his tail. Scales sliced, flesh shredded, bone snapped. The world shrank to a single point of agony, all-consuming, his scream lost in the screech of tearing metal.

The spring burst through the platform beneath him, blasting the skandha ledge into fragments. Kshar plummeted with the debris, the ground rushing up to meet him.

“Stha!”

Stop. The command tore from his throat as he hit the ground.

And the universe obeyed.

The massive axle froze midair above him. Debris hung in arrested time, like studs embedded in solid space.

Only he stirred in the stillness. He could taste static air, see through motionless light—Maya’s selective mercy. The agony still insisted on being true.

“End it.” Adharvan’s voice possessed the space around him. Not from anywhere. From everywhere.

“Wait.” The word burned through what remained of Kshar’s body.

“Why prolong pain?” Adharvan’s question held no mockery, only curiosity.

“Pain is noise. Only time is true.” Another day lost if he died now. He dragged himself forward on raw bone. He had to see how close he’d come.

Rolling onto his side, he surveyed the frozen chaos. All around, figures stood motionless. Vaanars mid-swing, faces locked in grim oaths, water suspended like crystal archways from broken aqueducts.

And there, in the palanquin’s sky-door, Tarkash. The young garuda’s eyes blazed with confidence, his beak open as if to address the mob. Scattered feathers hung in the air around him.

The massive wing dangled by its last hinge above. In this frozen moment, Kshar could see every detail. The fractures spreading through metal, the perfect angle of its impending fall.

“It could work.” The words escaped him like a prayer.

“It won’t,” Adharvan said.

Kshar’s forked tongue tasted the impossible stillness one last time. “Gaman.” Resume.

Reality lurched back into motion with violent force. Before he could see the wing fall, the platform collapsed, killing him instantly.

Enter MAYA
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Copyright © 2026 by Department of Lore Inc.
Publisher: Authors Equity, August 25, 2026

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