Chapter 228 Above The Abyss

The True Sultan stood.

He did it slowly, with a small grunt, like an old man rising from a low seat, and the black wool of His robe pooled around His ankles.

Malik had imagined someone vast, but that He was not. The Former Sultan’s body was just a man, a lean and slightly stooped one, with the lines of a long life carved around His eyes.

"Then you’ll take no crown... very well. I will not insist. But you did come all this way, and I don’t like to send a guest back with empty hands."

"I do not want anything from you."

"Everyone says that. Hold still."

He raised His right hand.

The dusk went quiet.

The leaves overhead stopped spinning.

Even the thin warm wind that had been moving through Malik’s hair died away, and the whole vast plain held itself in one suspended breath.

A faint dark light gathered in the True Sultan’s palm, the color of an ember seen through a closed eyelid.

"A parting gift."

He pressed two fingers against Malik’s chest.

It felt like being touched by a very old hand, which was exactly what it was.

The warmth sank through the cloth, his skin, and ribs; it settled somewhere beneath his heart, beside the slow cracked ledger of the Divine Kingdom.

His Soul.

It shifted and turned over.

One of the sealed pages came free.

—

╔════════════╗

║TITLE GRANTED!║

╚════════════╝

[Title — The End]

[Bestowed by: The True Sultan, God of Death]

[Description: A title belonging to one who has been named, by Death itself, as the enemy of the rot, killer of the undying.]

—

Malik stared at the glowing script.

Ding!

—

╔════════════╗

║TITLE UNLOCKED!║

╚════════════╝

[Title — Golden-Eyed Devil]

[Title — Weaver Of Fate]

[Title — Cursed Child]

[Title — Forsaken]

[Description: You are beyond what you once were.]

—

...he stared at the glowing scripts.

His many Titles... all have returned home.

And now a new one had joined that list of Titles, one more among a dozen.

But a Title was only what the system called a Trait. A Trait was what a God said aloud, and it fell into his Divine Kingdom with a different weight, far more substantial, filled with Rukh.

The words in front of his eyes sank slowly into his chest, and he felt them settle there.

"You will be The End."

The True Sultan’s voice had changed.

It was deeper now, and there was something behind it that made the plain tremble.

The borrowed face still smiled, but a second voice moved underneath the first.

"An interloper in our house. The realm of Gods."

Malik went very still.

He knew those words; he had heard them before.

They had been spoken in a hall full of banqueters while a snake wore his mother’s face. They had been spoken with a petty, scornful grin, by a thing that had called him Stranger as though the word were an insult.

Hearing them in this mouth made the hair rise along his arms.

"Never have you truly become a man of any realm."

The dusk darkened.

Malik remembered the Abyss.

He remembered an alley in Zawaya where a boy with a stick for a cane had lain in his own blood. He remembered the East, and the Tree of Life with its roots in a stranger’s dream. He remembered a cave, a throne, a stone with a single word carved into it, and a hand he had taken only for a moment.

He had never been from anywhere, not truly.

"You are a Stranger."

Indeed he was, despite letting go of that title upon a death hidden by Fate.

Malik had worn the name like a mask. He had made it a banner. He had learned, over a long and ugly path of fire and blood, to carry it as a weight he had chosen. It no longer stung.

It only sat in the hollow of his chest and told him the truth.

The True Sultan’s fingers lifted from his sternum.

"But just this once..."

He smiled.

It was an honest smile, the first one that had no performance in it.

It looked, for a heartbeat, like the smile of a man seeing off a son.

Blink.

"You’ll belong."

The ash was gone.

There was no ground under his boots.

There was no dusk over his head. The tree, the stone, the old man in the black wool robe, all of it was swept away in a single sound, a door closing at the other end of a very large house.

Malik opened his eyes.

Light.

It was the first thing he understood, and it was so enormous that his mind stuttered.

This light poured from every direction at once, clean and warm, with no source he could find.

It was the light of a morning that had never ended and never would, lying across his skin.

He was standing on cloud.

It was not the thin gray vapor he had flown through over the Ten Seas.

This was solid, thick and white and faintly springy, a floor of pearl-colored mist that stretched out in every direction until it dissolved into haze.

Pillars rose from it in the distance.

They were slender and impossibly tall, white marble veined with gold, and they held up nothing at all.

Arches spanned the gaps between them, delicate as lace. Terraces floated in the empty air, each one hung with vines of silver flowers. Fountains poured water upwards, water that rose until vanishing into the haze of the sky.

It was beautiful.

Yes, it was entirely lacking in mistakes.

He could not find a single crack in it, not even a single speck of dust.

It had the serene, untouched feeling of a room where nobody had ever lived.

Malik turned slowly.

Behind him, the cloud-floor fell away and far below it, enormous and utterly familiar, lay a wound in the world.

A vast black mouth in the earth, ringed by dust and rust-colored stone.

Tiny streams of lights moved along its rim like ants, seekers waiting in a queue he had once stood in himself.

It drew the eye the way a drop in the floor draws the eye of a child.

Down in the depths, so deep that the sunlight gave up on it, a faint pulse of crimson showed where something old and terrible was breathing.

Malik knew every inch of it.

He had fallen through it with Huda and Safira. He had crawled across a sea of corpses at the bottom. He had stood in Hell and pulled a sword out of a root, and he had never once looked at it from above.

His breath caught.

Malik had been wrong.

For all the years he had lived in Zawaya, a town built over that wound, he had looked up at the sky every day, and he had seen only air, the Sun, and the extremely hot weather.

He had never imagined that there was a... house up here, floating in the light, looking down.

This was a House only for Them.

One that called him an interloper.

Malik instinctively knew where he was.

After all, there was only one thing above the Abyss.

Heaven.

[End Of Volume Three: Above The Abyss]