Chapter 231 He Found A Smile

Malik reached out and touched the scale.

He did it without thinking, with two fingers like Death.

The marble was cold, and the empty pans did not move.

For a heartbeat nothing happened, and he had just enough time to feel faintly foolish.

Then the light bent.

It slid off the plaza like a cloth pulled from a table.

The pillars, the fountain, and the long ring of worn statues all folded away into a white seam, and he stood in the middle of something else.

A vast hall without walls, a floor of pale glass over a sky of stars.

The air smelled of rain on hot stone, and a very long way off, something was singing.

A statue stood before him, the same one.

No, she was no longer stone.

A woman of pale light had taken her place, the blindfold still knotted across her eyes.

The scale hung from her right hand; in the dishes, a faint gold dust turned slowly, and every grain of it carried a tiny face.

He saw one he knew, then he looked away before he could count the rest.

’A God.’

There was no need for a title.

This woman had once held the whole world on that crossbar, and somewhere along the road she had been turned into a decoration. A statue in a ring of statues, left to gather dust in a House with no one in it.

Her mouth moved.

"What Falls seeks what lies behind."

The voice was wrong.

It took him a moment to find the word for it.

It was warm and clear, carrying the cadence of a kind old woman reading a story to a child.

But it sat a half-step off the shape of her lips. Underneath it ran a second sound, one he had heard before and could not place.

"Below the Abyss is a world between worlds. There rests the Hidden Nexus, the source of all Rukh. "

The stars in the glass floor leaned towards her.

"Above it is this House, a Heaven. The snake cannot reach either, but you can, and you have. You can go where no Angel is allowed to go. Nothing binds you in both Divinity and mortality."

Malik’s expression remained still.

"The key is an... orb."

She lifted the scale a little.

The gold dust in the pans stirred.

"Find it, and you can end the Corruption at its root."

The song far away rose and held a sweet note.

Then the hall folded up, and Malik was standing on the plaza again with his fingers resting on a cold white pan, while a ring of blank statues stared over his shoulder.

He did not move for a while.

The words turned in his head.

What Falls seeks what lies behind.

It was a strange line, almost a proverb.

’Falls.’

Yes, he had seen it once.

It had happened in the East, in the moment after he killed the snake.

The thing had shown him a piece of his own future, a narrow window of it, flashing past before the world closed again.

A man falling out of a sky that was not his own, light burning away behind him. A hand stretched out, fingers wide, reaching for a glowing sphere that hung in the dark below him.

Wrapped around that man’s body, coil on coil, a snake.

IT had been smiling.

Malik had kept it at the back of his mind among all the other things he did not look at directly.

He had been Class Ten, then, and a falling Angel had seemed about as likely as a talking mule.

Now he was a falling Angel’s next-door neighbor.

The pieces slid together one at a time, and each one made a small satisfying click.

’An orb.’

A glowing orb, the thing he had reached for in the vision.

It was the key.

The woman in the hall had said it with no prompting, as if the two stories had been written by the same hand.

’A world between worlds.’

His mind went there at once, because it was the only door he knew.

A world between worlds could only mean a Divine Kingdom.

A pocket of reality that sat in the cracks between realms, belonging to nobody but its creator, unreachable by any road on a map.

Archive Of Fate.

This orb, whatever it was, could fix it.

But there came the obvious question:

Where would he find it?

’What Falls seeks what lies behind.’

’What lies behind...’

’Ah.’

The past.

What was once his home.

A planet so far from Devil’s Maw.

Earth.

That was the place only he could go.

No other Angel would be allowed to; their faction’s rules... Mortality.

IT couldn’t either, at least not without wearing an Earthener’s body... Divinity.

He felt something rise in his chest that was very close to hope.

It was a small, dangerous thing, and he held it up very carefully.

For the first time since the hill, he had a plan that struck at IT directly.

Not at a farmer, or a snake, or a wall of ships, but at the root.

The snake could not reach it.

But he could, apparently.

A man in the Abyss had fallen into that bright dark once already, and in a vision, he had been holding the key.

It was the cleanest answer he had been offered in all his lives.

Still before the statue, he listened to the quiet.

’It’s too clean.’

Malik thought of every gift he had ever been handed.

A ring. A Golden Throne. A necklace. A diary slipped into a Wheel. A trinket from a girl who loved him. A God in a pile of sand, with a speech so kind. Every one of them had been true. Every one of them had cost him something he had not seen on the bill.

He didn’t know what this would cost.

It was a gift too great.

Perhaps the cost would be too.

But even then, he found that he was smiling.