Chapter 195: Wronged Stranger

Devil’s Maw citizens numbered in the billions.

Relatively speaking, only a few lived in this region.

Malik’s Evacuation Army, the best of the Faraja, the Guard, and the soldiers, were mainly situated further north, around the Sultanate, not this far south, where the desert dominated.

Kabir, Azeem, Duban, Zafar, Aladdin, and the rest of his generals were situated there.

Though likely under attack as well, it was this region that bore the brunt of the Order’s army.

That was why Malik intended to come here alone, already expecting a massacre, his failure.

But that didn’t mean he had come here defeated; no, far from it.

Rather, he came expecting to sacrifice it all.

To defeat them.

Save his people.

If not obvious by now, Malik was a man of honor.

It sat at the bottom of everything he did, the one beam that held the rest of the house up.

He did not sacrifice his own for abstract goals. He did not trade a handful of lives for the sake of a larger number on some ledger.

When he had stood in that cave at the edge of the Abyss, when he had cradled his daughter, when he had given a dying disciple a promise, it had always been the same oath.

Nobody gets left behind.

The Order lived by the opposite law.

Their whole creed was the status quo, held in place by the tidy deaths of the few for the sake of the many.

A village burned so a city might stand.

A faction fed to a war so that the war might end on their terms.

They called it vision... they called it order.

They had been doing it for ten thousand years, and they had never once lost sleep.

And today, on a road he had chosen, in a plan he had drawn himself, Malik had ultimately done what they would have done.

Yes, it wasn’t his intention.

He was to sacrifice himself, not his people.

He was to go against what he promised Jasmine and himself.

Yet the end result remained the same.

A few died so that many could live.

History would call it a victory, and people would sing about it.

This region’s people seemed impossible to save, yet it was done.

Nearly all were saved.

But Malik could only think one thing...

’I failed them.’

It arrived plainly, sat in his chest, and did not move.

Something in him broke.

It did not feel like grief.

Grief was slow, and it would come later, he knew, in some quiet hour with nobody watching.

This was something older and colder, and it rose like a tide.

It was rage.

A rage that filled him from the soles of his boots to the crown of his skull, until there was no space left in him for anything else.

His rage did not want revenge or justice. It wanted the army, every banner and every blade and every white halo, to stop existing. It wanted the sky to be empty again.

Only one thing could quiet it.

He stood.

The Order’s army was already in sight.

It rolled up the road in the same perfect ranks.

Malik walked towards them with Spine Splitter dragging in the dust.

’But behind me, I will leave a body on the burning sand.’

The first soldier to see him stopped walking.

All that followed did the same, until a horn began to sound deep in the formation.

He lifted his sword high.

No Glyph answered, and no fire rose.

The only light on the road came from the cracks in his own skin, and it was enough.

It shone out all across his body, and where it touched the air, it spilled out in thin gold ribbons that rose and scattered.

That was his Rukh leaking.

Draining out of him.

He did not care.

’Bury me in the warmth of your memory, O brother,’

Malik ran forth.

The next stretch of time was a blur he would never remember properly.

He cut through the front rank, and the rank behind it, and the rank behind that.

He used weight, speed, and the sheer, shaking certainty that he would reach the other side.

His body kept cracking.

Each blow he struck opened a new seam.

One line after another... one platoon after another.

’For none shall remain to weep for me.’

The ranks around him began to thin, and then they began to run.

He chased them, not remembering when he decided to.

There was no thoughts going through his mind.

Only rage.

As endless as his Rukh.

But...

CRACK!

It wasn’t truly endless, was it?

A bolt of white light tore the sky open.

It came from above, from a height that Malik had not thought to watch.

One more Angel.

He had stayed behind the army the whole time, hanging in the black ceiling, watching, and waiting for exactly this.

His bow was made of light, and the arrow nocked to it was longer than a spear.

Malik felt him a half-moment too late.

His rage had slowed him down.

’I will go as I had come, O brother—’

For this was the bastard that massacred his people.

There was no doubt in his mind that it was his doing.

Only an Angel could kill that many that fast.

Malik saw the arrow leave the string.

And at that exact moment, an incredible pain arrived.

It came all at once, upon the piercing of his right arm.

Every wound he had ever gotten resurfaced in a single wave.

His knees locked, his breath caught, and his vision narrowed to one bright point.

Malik stood there in the open field with his sword half raised and his mouth open, frozen in the smallest, most terrible gap between one heartbeat and the next.

The arrow punched out his arm in a spray of gold light, and the cracks along his body flared bright.

He felt his Rukh pour out of him in a rush unlike any before.

His fingers opened, and Spine Splitter fell from his hand.

Old Cane hit the dirt beside it.

He did not hear himself fall.

The sky above him was never darker.

The last Angel hung against it, a small silver figure growing smaller as the world went white at the edges.

’A wronged Stranger.’

Darkness took him.