Chapter 204: The Sultanate’s Fall

Silence reached Eden before anyone could explain it.

For hours and hours the stone had trembled.

It was a steady shudder, felt in the soles of their feet.

The children had stopped noticing it by nightfall.

But those older, those who knew who was on the other side, they never stopped.

They sat with their palms flat against the cavern walls, listening to the world fight them.

Then it stopped.

As did their hearts.

Nobody screamed or cried.

An innumerable number of people from all walks of life sat in the dim glow of lantern-moss, and not one of them spoke, because everyone knew what a battle sounded like when it was over.

A bell does not ring forever.

Someone had rung the last of it.

Aladdin heard it sitting on an upturned crate near the eastern tunnels, a whetstone in one hand and a blade across his knees.

The blade was already sharp.

He had been sharpening it for two hours.

Aladdin had talked about dying for the Sultan since the first day they met.

He had shouted it from dunes and walls and the backs of horses, to anyone who would listen.

Now the stone had gone quiet, and he sat with the whetstone frozen halfway down the edge.

All of that shouting felt very small and very loud.

’I was supposed to be there.’

He drew a breath, set the blade down very carefully, and pressed his fist against his mouth.

Azeem stood in the middle of a corridor with a tray of bread in his hands, seemingly performing.

A dozen small voices had been calling for him, but they hushed as they watched his face.

His rings dimmed, one after another, the elements inside them going still.

"Right Hand... some Right Hand."

He had not looked back at the Holy Palace.

He had made a promise to himself about that, because looking would have kept him there.

His loyalty had cost him too much.

Azeem set the tray down gently and walked away before the children could see him cry.

Zafar did not cry.

He had done all of that in the Sultan’s Hall, and there was nothing left in him to spend.

He sat with his back to a pillar of ice and stared at a wall that did not interest him.

His white hair hung in front of his eyes, hiding his face.

Zafar had waited his whole second life for a moment to fight at the Sultan’s side.

It had come, it had been taken, now it had gone by without him, and the quiet where the war used to be sounded exactly like the word he had said in that hall.

’Dammit.’

He closed his eyes and did not open them again.

Duban heard it with a large mug of mead before him.

A prince-like man, no longer princely, drowning away.

’You still owe me that drink.’

He had said it so quietly that only the wind could have heard.

Kabir had come in late.

He had walked through the last circle with what remained of the Guard behind him.

There were not many; every one of them bleeding, having done the impossible.

When the light closed behind them, he stood where he was and waited.

He had not moved since.

A wounded mountain, staring at the place where the circle had been.

He had obeyed his Sultan.

It was the hardest order he had ever followed.

Now the stone was silent, and he could feel the ghost of that last conversation sitting on his tongue, the one he had not been allowed to finish.

"I should have stayed with him."

His calm voice cracked straight down the middle.

The Guard around him did not look at him; they were in the same cruel woes.

They stood with their heads bowed, a ring of dark cloaks, mourning their only Sultan.

Noor stood on a ledge above the central cavern, her arms folded, watching the citizens settle.

She had spent years chasing acknowledgment, a nod, a word of praise from the man who sat on the Golden Throne. She had worked for it in the council chambers and on the walls.

She had told herself she did not need it, which was how she had known she did.

Though nothing was confirmed yet, she knew.

She knew that she would never hear it again.

Those thoughts arrived with such cold clarity that she nearly laughed.

A grand vizier, proud and gifted and very clever, with no one left to be proud in front of.

Safira’s hands went dark.

She had been healing a boy with a burned arm, and the light in her palms suddenly went out.

It stopped, the way a candle stops when someone puts a thumb on the wick.

The boy looked up at her in confusion, and she smiled at him.

Her smile was a practiced smile, hiding her exhaustion.

She finished bandaging the arm with plain cloth.

’This is not goodbye.’

Safira had said it to his face with every ounce of faith she owned.

She held onto that sentence now with both hands.

It was the only rope she had left, and she did not let herself look at how thin it was.

Teacher had walked out of impossible places before.

Teacher had always come back.

She tied off the bandage, not noticing that her fingers were shaking until the boy took one in his small hand and held it.

Dunya had barely moved since her arrival at Eden.

She sat at the very edge of the cavern, away from the crowd, in a world of her own.

The air in front of her stayed empty.

She stared at it for a long time.

Only when the sounds stopped did she move.

Her trembling fingers began to weave Death.

She was writing.

[He is not dead.]

She looked at it, wiped it clean, and she wrote it again.

Over and over and over and over and over and over.

Each time the words grew a little more... cracked.

[He is not dead.]

She had to believe it.

Meanwhile, far to the west, in the deep dark beneath a castle of white stone, a very old tree shivered.

The Empress of Parsa had not wept in three centuries; she was not weeping now, but the leaves along her arms had begun to curl, one by one, the way they do in the first cold of autumn.

She had given him a ring.

She had put her own strength into it, all of her Runes.

It was a bargain, the contract binding them together.

That ring had gone quiet once morning came.

"Ah..."

It was the only sound she made.

Like them, they all felt it, in the end.

None of them had believed that victory was possible.

They had not said so aloud, because saying so would have been a kind of betrayal.

Their Sultan had done the impossible so many times that the word had stopped meaning anything.

He had flipped armies, reached the bottom of the Abyss, and killed Angels with his bare hands.

They had grown used to the miracle.

But this was a different kind of impossible.

One man against many tens of Angels, thousands of armies.

One man against the one who walked behind them, a God.

No amount of faith could stretch that far.

Somewhere deep down in the dark places where a person keeps the truth, every one of them had known it.

The Sultanate had fallen.

[End Of Volume Five: The Sultanate’s Fall]