Chapter 197: The Cycle Of Fools II

“But if we survive this, that will not be the case any longer.”

Hakim nodded slowly and took a moment.

They were talking.

More so than they ever did before.

It was a strange thing to do on a field full of the dead, inside a dome of black fire with an Angel waiting outside. But nobody had told them to stop, and neither of them knew how to say anything else.

Eventually, Hakim reached over, took Malik’s remaining hand in both of his, and held it.

Hakim’s palms were blistered and hot, and they burned a little against the chill in Malik’s fingers.

Neither of them said anything about it.

“It is strange. I spent years planning what I would say to you upon your return. I even wrote speeches… practiced them in front of the mirror, you know? I was very eloquent.”

“And now?”

“Now I find that I cannot remember a single word.”

“That sounds about right.”

“You are very blunt.”

“I get it from somewhere.”

Hakim laughed.

It was rough, and it cracked in the middle.

He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and held it there for a moment.

Meanwhile, Malik watched the flames ripple against the sky.

“Do you think you can face him?”

The question was quiet.

Hakim’s eyes lifted towards the white shape beyond the wall.

He studied it for a moment, the bow and the one who wielded it.

Then he chuckled at the odds, finding that he had no opinion about them.

“No.”

“Good. At least you are honest.”

“But who else is there? Look at yourself. You are in no position to do it. The Guard and the Faraja are gone. Everyone who could stand in front of that bastard is already in Eden or is soon to be there.”

He tilted his head.

“So it is me, or it is nobody. I find that settles the matter.”

“It does not.”

“It does for me.”

“It does not.”

“Yes it does.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“…”

Malik stopped whatever they were doing and looked at him.

He had not once let himself imagine this, a face lit by dark firelight, blistered hands holding his own, and a quiet refusal to leave.

Was this guilt built from all his past misdeeds? Or was this the true Hakim, a face Malik did not bother to search forth underneeth all of what he saw as irremediable filth.

“Go.”

“No.”

“Take what is left and run. Reach Eden.”

“I said no.”

“Hakim.”

It was the first time Malik had used the name without any edge on it.

“Eden is not going to be safe if I am alive anyway. They will follow me. Wherever I go, they will follow. It is the only thing that has ever been true about this war. If I stay here, they chase me. If I run, they chase me into Eden.”

He took a breath that rattled.

“If I am dead, or if they think I am dead, they stop. The people live.”

“You are not dead.”

“Not yet.”

“You said you would not die.”

“I said I would delay them. I am going to do that. I do not need to be alive for it.”

Hakim’s grip on his hand tightened.

For a moment, it hurt, a soft pain that pierced through the numbness of death.

He looked down at his son one last time.

His mouth opened, and Malik could see the question coming.

It was the one every father in history had asked at the end of the road, and it sat on his tongue and would not move.

He did not dare say it.

Malik smiled.

It was not the smile he used on his commanders, or the thin one he wore into a fight.

It was warm and a little crooked, not made for any audience.

Hakim had never seen it before.

He had waited his whole life for it without knowing it existed.

It was a smile that two people could only share if one of them was the other’s father.

“I forgive you.”

The words came out plain, with no weight on them at all.

Yet they had Hakim stop breathing entirely.

Everything around them seemed to go still.

The slow crackle of the dome was gone.

He stared at his son’s face, at the cracks, the blood, and the gold light.

Hakim did not seem to understand what he was looking at.

A single tear slid out of his left eye.

It ran down his cheek, caught on his singed beard, and fell.

It struck the dirt between them with a tiny sound.

The black dome vanished.

It went out all at once.

Light poured in.

The Suns seemed to have returned.

And with them came the noise of the army.

Noise led by an Angel of Light, who retreated to the sky.

Hakim was already on his feet.

He laid Malik’s hand gently on the ground.

Then he turned his back, and the fire came up around him, not the dark dome this time but a roaring column of red, hot enough to blister the air.

“Thank you.”

He blasted off the ground towards the Angel.

Malik watched him go, one small figure in burned robes climbing the sky on a pillar of fire, with an army the size of a continent waiting at the end of it.

‘Idiot.’

He thought it fondly.

It was the first time in his life that he had been able to.

Somewhere far behind them, a child’s laughter in a woman’s embrace hung in his memory.

The woman wasn’t alone, for a man stood behind her, looking at both of them fondly.

That memory wasn’t real.

In another life perhaps.

For in this one, a flaming man went to meet the sky.

While his child laid near dead on the ground.

And so the cycle went on.

A son who would not be saved, and a father who could not stop trying to save him.

The cycle of fools.