Chapter 225 I Need To Die

Eden swallowed the caravan whole.

There was no gate to speak of; at the end of the long road, past three days of frozen plains and a fourth of wind that cut through every cloak in the wagons, the land simply dropped into a white nothing.

A wall of snow stood where the horizon should have been.

The Faraja walked up to it, spoke a single word, and a section of the drift slid aside like a curtain.

Behind it, a stair led down into the dark.

Malik rode in the back of the third wagon with the gray cloak still pulled up to his ears.

He did not look at the stairs; he had spent the whole trip looking at nothing in particular, because looking at nothing was the only way to keep his eyes off the wagon ahead of him, where a girl in a blanket kept turning her head.

Huda had not stopped.

Every few miles, her pink eyes slid back down the line to the one-armed man with the mule.

She never said a word. She only looked, with that uncertain light still flickering at the back of them, and then Safira would murmur something, and she would turn away again.

He let her look.

It was the only thing he could give her.

The cohort entered Eden in a tired line.

Those who had stayed in the cave camp came with them, a few hundred refugees, soldiers wrapped in blankets, and a woman with a white and purple knot of hair alongside her daughter, clutching her sleeve.

Layla and Amal.

Malik kept to the very end of the column. He kept his shoulders hunched, counting the steps down.

Layla did not look back once.

Amal did.

She turned her head halfway down the stairs, slowly, and her golden eyes passed over the faces behind her without catching on any of them.

They passed over his.

They moved on.

Then she faced forward again, and Malik let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

’Not yet.’

The stairs opened into a hollow so large that his mind needed a moment to fit it.

A cavern rolled out in every direction, big enough to hold a continent or two, distorted space.

Lantern-moss glowed green along its walls. Tents stood in uneven rows across the floor, with smoke rising from a hundred cookfires. High above it all, a window of clear crystal lay under a thick sheet of snow, and through it hung twelve pale moons.

They were beautiful.

He found that he did not want to look at them.

On the far wall hung a banner pole with nothing on it.

A crumpled flag lay on the ground at its foot.

Nobody had picked it up.

Malik turned his face away before anyone could see the rag move.

Dunya was nowhere in sight.

He scanned the crowd twice, and he was grateful and ashamed of how grateful he was.

He slipped out of the column at the first side tunnel, and nobody noticed. A thin man with one arm was not a thing people watched.

The whole way there, he had been circulating his Rukh.

It was the only work he had been able to do on the road.

He had sat in the back of the wagon for six days with his eyes half shut, drawing the new tide of power in through his chest and pushing it out along the cracked lines of his Soul, in and out, round and round, like a man winding a long clock.

Class Five Rukh was nothing like the old kind.

It was vast and slow and heavy, and it had a way of settling into the places he pushed it.

Malik had been pushing it at the Divine Kingdom.

The system had gone dark on the hill, somewhere between the hundredth Soul Glyph and the arrow.

He could still feel it, a cracked ledger sitting in the back of his mind, but the pages had stuck together.

Every night he worked a thumbnail under one of them and wriggled it loose.

By the time the caravan reached the snow, he had gotten half of it back.

It was the useless half.

He had expected as much.

The Class panels were still dark. The shop was a blank slab. The quests and the Soul Glyph counts lay buried under a gray fog he could not cut through.

What had come back were the soft things at the edges of the ledger, the Traits, the old titles, a list of names he had earned and never wanted.

And, sitting among them like a coin at the bottom of a purse, the Wheel of Fortune.

He found an empty storage alcove off the side tunnel, a low niche stacked with sacks of barley, and he sat down on a sack and looked at it.

’Hm.’

Malik had no good reason to touch it.

He had a lot of reasons not to. The last time he spun, he had drawn a God out of a pile of sand and learned a great deal more than he wanted to know. He had also learned that the itch to spin was not entirely his own, and that something had taken advantage of it.

The whole mechanism was a little too convenient to trust.

But the Wheel was one of the only things that worked. And a man sitting in the dark with a half-healed Soul did not often get to choose which tools were left in the box.

’A test.’

That was all.

He would see whether the thing answered.

Thus, he lifted his left hand and reached for it.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick—

DING!

—

{Cyrus’s Diary (?/?)!}

—

Malik blinked.

He had not expected that.

A diary fragment was the least likely thing to fall out of a wheel that had lately been handing out Gods.

It lay in his mind like a small flat stone, worn smooth at the edges, and he felt the old, faint twinge of curiosity he had always had for the thing.

He opened it.

—

Malik.

The boy is far more than I ever expected.

Far, far more. Smart? The bastard is a genius. I truly underestimated him back at the cave. After his battle in the North, I had my doubts, but then he won the Kingdom of Light, and he won it too easily.

He is ready. After that, I have no doubt left in my mind.

He is ready for the Trial, ready to become a Mithqal.

I don’t have many years left, not anymore. So I am going to fetch him soon, bring him back, and prepare him. I must mold him one last time.

I don’t care that he doesn’t want this. Only he is up to par. I need him.

The world needs him.

—

I saw a nightmare.

Or was it a dream?

I needed to reach him; I could not.

A tide met me. An unending wave, black, swallowing the world. They blanketed the skies, and the Shams, its dusk, rose from the west. Heads rolled, gates collapsed, and cities burned.

None of us escaped.

IT conquered.

The Fall is here.

Our lives are lost.

I am too late...

—

Malik paused reading, knowing the next words.

They were words he himself had once said:

’I need to die.’