Chapter 229 Gone Forever

The moment Malik understood where he was, something in him let go.

It started in the Soul.

He felt it lift; every weight he had carried through the Abyss, every old hand that had pressed down on his spine since Zawaya, came loose at once and drifted away.

The scars of the now-broken Soul Contract. The gnawing fatigue of the cracked Divine Kingdom. The Corruption’s cold fingerprints along the edges of his mind. So many other little things that built up. They did not break so much as fall apart.

The golden chains came next.

They had sat around his Runes for so long that he had never thought he’d ever truly rid himself of them. Self-imposed by his past self, a way to return to his truth without sacrifice... a broken method that led to a failed result.

Now they snapped, one after another, a bright run of tiny sounds.

Ember’s Touch. Goliath’s Fall. Scorpion’s Sting. Devil’s Footsteps. Zephyr’s Kiss. Shifting Ground. Eternal Life. Thirst’s Quench. Dust To Stone.

All ten of them.

Each one flared in his chest as the last link gave, and each one woke a little larger than it had been.

Then he Ascended.

There was no ceremony to it.

No chime rang, and no script unrolled across his vision, because the Divine Kingdom was still half dark and had nothing to say.

It simply happened, all at once.

The first thing to change was the... taken arm.

Warmth rushed down his right shoulder and filled the empty sleeve.

Bone grew first, then muscle wrapped around it smoothly, then skin pulled over it like a glove.

Fingers formed at the end.

Malik flexed the hand, and it closed into a fist without a tremor.

He stared at it.

’Well. There you are.’

The rest followed in a rush.

His body filled out as the hollows in his cheeks closed. His ribs vanished under a deep layer of dense muscle, and his shoulders broadened until the gray cloak split down the back and fell away in strips.

His chest swelled, his legs thickened, and he grew taller, a full head perhaps.

The cloud under his boots seemed to dip a little to bear the weight of him.

The starved body of a man who had been burned in a cellar was gone.

In its place stood the frame he had first seen in a lake, built of iron and packed muscle, a body that looked as though it had been chewed up by wars and spat back out because it tasted too much like blood.

It was younger, too.

The lines the last weeks had carved around his mouth smoothed out. But even then, a short beard remained along his jaw, and he decided he did not mind it.

His hair went last.

It crawled out of the white, an aggressive gold that started at the roots and ran to the tips. It gathered itself at the back of his head and fell over his shoulder in a long rat tail that flicked lazily against his collarbone.

His eyes burned warm.

Malik did not need a mirror to know their color.

He could feel it, a clear gold, lit from within.

The pale winter-moon gray had gone out of them.

There was nothing holding him back.

His Divine punishment was over.

He was an Angel.

Standing still on the cloud floor, feeling the word settle through his whole body, he found that he had nothing clever to say about it.

This was beyond anything he had imagined.

He had pictured the Ascension a hundred times.

It had always been a staircase, with numbered steps and a bill at the bottom.

Fear Points paid in, a Glyph spent, a class panel flipping from one name to the next. A reward earned in a ledger. A temporary boost, the kind that wore off when the Glyph ran out.

This was nothing like that.

The power sat inside him with a weight that had no ending. It did not hum or strain. It simply was, the way his own heartbeat was, and no timer ticked in the back of his mind.

He reached for Ember’s Touch and the fire came out of his palm in a sheet so gold and so quiet that the cloud around it did not even stir. He did not have to spend anything for it.

Malik did not have to ask.

Being in Heaven had not been the push that got him here.

He understood that after a moment. The light had helped. The air of this place was thick with Rukh that wanted him to rise, and it had loosened the knots. But Rukh alone did not lift a man two Classes in a single breath.

The push had come before.

It had come from the old man under the tree.

He thought of those two fingers against his chest, the faint dark light, the Title falling into his Divine Kingdom.

Indeed, a parting gift, the True Sultan had said.

Malik had assumed it was the title.

He had been wrong again.

The Title was only an... introduction.

Right behind it, in the instant after the old man’s hand lifted, a surge had poured into him that was unlike anything he had ever felt. It was slow and enormous and so very old.

He had thought it was the dusk itself, passing through him.

It was not.

It was the core.

The very core of the True Sultan had flowed into him, the thing that sat at the bottom of a God.

’Has he di...?’

Malik did not finish the thought.

There was no need; the answer sat in the quiet of his chest, in a place where a faint cool presence had lived since before he could remember.

For years it had been a sliver of power under the floorboards, a distant eye.

It had nudged him and watched him and built him.

He had hated that feeling.

It was gone now.

Forever.