Chapter 235: Open Arms

Huda heard it from the corner of her room.

She was wrapped in a blanket, her pink eyes fixed on the ceiling,

Sleep hadn’t once visited her; she didn’t dare to accept its embrace, no matter how tired she got.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw a head on a silver plate, looking at her.

Her big brother’s head.

A stranger was soon there as well.

A white-haired man who had told her it was fake.

His figure, despite being so different, reminded her of him.

The one whose head he crushed to ash.

Huda could never remove those images from her head.

But all of that stopped mattering in the next moment.

She heard a familiar voice.

Familiar words.

The Sultan.

He was back.

That stranger hadn’t lied.

The head was truly fake.

But Huda didn’t process that yet.

It all happened so very fast.

She sat up.

It took her three tries.

Her legs would not hold.

She pushed herself off the ground, caught the edge of a table, and lurched towards the corridor.

Huda dragged herself into the Garden with one hand on the wall, and a wild light burning in her eyes.

"I-Idiot."

She was crying.

"Idiot. Idiot. You absolute..."

A hiccup swallowed the end, and she pushed on towards the sound of his voice.

Finally, she understood a most undeniable fact.

Her big brother was back!

Sinbad was on a beam above Eden.

He had not left Amal’s side in days.

His crimson feathers were ruffled, little Isha and his other children lying beneath his wing.

When the voice came, he only raised his head, very slowly, and his pink eyes went wide.

He had carried an arm across a thousand miles of ash. He had held it in his talons and laid it at a woman’s feet. That couldn’t be faked. It had to be Malik’s hand, and yet...

"ELDER BROTHER!"

The screech tore through Eden.

Isha and the other little ones woke with a squeak.

Every Crimson Owl answered in a chorus, following his call.

The gathering crowd flinched as a streak of crimson shot across the roof and spiraled down towards the ledge.

Sinbad hit the stone rail and clung there, shaking, his claws scraping the rock.

He looked at Malik, and his eyes were wide and wet and furious.

’Don’t you ever...’

Or so those eyes said.

Malik raised a hand and laid it very gently on top of his head.

"I have not lied, have I, little brother?"

Amal sat by the cold hearth.

That was the place her hollow self made home,

She had not eaten a full meal, and she had not answered a single question.

Her knees were still drawn up, her chin on her arms as she watched the ashes.

The people who loved her had given up trying to fill the silence.

But her father wasn’t one to give up.

His voice filled the silence.

Amal didn’t move.

Her golden eyes stayed on the hearth.

But her fingers, which had been curled in the fabric of her dress for days, uncurled one at a time.

Her breath caught; she turned her head and looked up at the ceiling, as if somebody had called her name.

Layla was beside her, holding her daughter’s hand without knowing it.

She felt the small fingers twitch, and she turned, seeing her daughter’s face.

A face that had its freezing cold break bit by bit.

"M-Mother..."

It was a very small voice, a door that had not been opened in a long time.

The first word she had spoken in three weeks.

Layla’s heart stopped.

"Yes, my love?"

"That’s Father."

"It..."

"That’s my baba."

Amal said again, and her voice grew clearer.

She stood up, her legs wobbled, and she caught herself on her mother’s arm.

"That’s Father’s voice. I told you. I told you he was coming."

"You did."

"I said it so many times."

"Did you?"

"Nobody heard me."

"I... I heard you now."

Amal looked up at her with burning gold eyes, then she turned and ran.

Layla didn’t follow after her daughter.

She remained beside the cold hearth with her hand still stretched towards the place where her daughter had been, unable to make her feet move.

Her heart was pounding deafeningly loud in her ears, but the voice still reached her, flowing down through the stone, every word of it as if spoken at her ear.

"As I promised you, mother of Devil’s Maw."

She remembered a hall.

A hand on her cheek.

You trust me, don’t you?

"I remained alive."

Layla pressed her palm against her mouth.

It was only then that she let herself shake.

It rolled through her from her shoulders to her knees, the shaking of a woman who has held something up for what felt like decades and had just been told she may finally set it down.

She did not make any sound; the tears simply ran, hot and fast and endless, and she stood in her plain gray dress with her white and purple hair coming loose.

Then she lifted her head.

Layla walked.

To him she went.

Like all of his subjects.

An unfathomable number of people.

All of Eden’s residents faced a single direction.

And all of them heard a single voice:

"The Order’s control over the Holy Palace will not stand for much longer."

Malik now had both of his hands on the rail, and his golden eyes swept over the faces of the people below him.

Tens of thousands of upturned faces filled the Garden, tear-streaked and wide-eyed, but they were so quiet that he could hear the water dripping from the crystal overhead.

"I know what they have taken... how much it means to you. I know the banners that hang on the walls, and I have seen the graves. They think they have won; they think that this war ended on a hill."

He lifted his chin.

"They are wrong."

The crowd began to stir.

"I am your Sultan. I am also now your Angel."

He let the word fall.

"And I, your Angel, promise you that the day is coming when every flag of theirs will burn. You will walk home. You will walk into the Holy Palace through its own front gates, and it will be yours again."

A rumble began somewhere at the back.

Before it could build, a teenage girl in a plain dress burst through the crowd.

She was running full tilt, her hair flying out behind her, and she did not slow down.

The young lady hit the stairs and took them two at a time. Her mother was a dozen steps behind her, one hand lifting her skirt, her face shining with tears.

Malik saw them.

Everyone present saw them.

Thus, no one spoke, and neither did he.

Instead, Malik turned from the rail and opened both arms.