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Chapter 101: Miracle
Malak of Galthena was in hell.
He had no other word for the shrieking shroud of screaming souls that surrounded him, engulfed him, abraded him, consumed him. One moment, he had been clutching the bleeding wound in his chest beneath the blue skies of his home; the next, he had been lost in the maelstrom, pieces of himself shredding away with every moment.
First, physical sense was stripped from him: touch, taste, sight, smell, and sound. All that was left to him was the vertigo of a mind ill at ease: that distant dizziness, that frothing tumult of thoughts refusing to rest, all streaking like a comet across a dark sky, with such mad speed that he could barely keep up with his own racing plummet.
Deep within that collapsing darkness, he found the maelstrom: alien thoughts streaking against his own, rubbing his raw; alien emotions stabbing into him, so he felt sorrow in a happy memory, happiness in an angry one. And soon the memories began to bleed together, too, unfamiliar visions of unfamiliar vistas, unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places, over and over and over again, each one like a bit of hard food in his gums, an irritant in his eyes. It rubbed him raw, and he could not clear it away, no matter how he tried.
Every brush took more of himself from himself, jabbed a splinter of alien intent against his original mind. He could not move without encountering another soul, could not fight without encountering another soul, could not flee without encountering another soul. Everything within the crimson nightmare was a matter of flaking away, fracturing his self beneath the weight of all those other lives.
Soon, he could not remember which was the intrusion, and which the original. Soon, he could not even remember if he was a he. Soon, the trembling mind could not remember if it had been a person at all, or if it had always been just another screaming soul within the storm.
"Malak."
Malak, yes. Malak was his name. He had lost bits and pieces of himself, but he still remembered that. He was Malak of Galthena.
"The sun is setting on Riovanes."
Riovanes? Vague imprints here, of other halls and other places, but some felt wrong. When he tried to reach for the right ones, he felt foreign walls between his true memories, like a chill wind cutting through his clothing, numbing him. He couldn't remember what Riovanes was, or where he was supposed to be.
"The Duke is gone."
The Duke? What Duke? Barinten? Goltanna? Larg? Denamda? There were other names in the maelstrom, pale whispers threaded through the cacophonous shouts and screams of the larger storm, and Malak's mind shank back from that precipice of nightmarish conjoined knowledge. Too many voices fought against his, dwarfed him, deafened him. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. It didn't matter.
"We're free."
Free. He had never been free. He didn't remember free. What was free even supposed to mean? Certainly not this tattered shell of a life, this loose constellation of disparate ideas wrapped around a name that barely felt like his. This was not free.
So what was? What did free mean? Had he been free before this maelstrom?
He tried to conjure a memory of who he had been before. It was hard going, like trying to roll his thoughts up a slick hill, constantly fumbling for detail, pushing and pushing as his weary feet slipped and slid beneath him. Flashes appeared before him (a frozen hilltop beneath a clouded night sky, weeping in a dungeon with another body wrapped in his arms), unmoored from context, from anything he could use to understand them.
And then a vivid flash, bright and beautiful and clear and him, he was Malak of Galthena and he was not alone, there was Clara poring over a book by the fire, there was Clarice alighting upon the earth like a falcon returned from the hunt, there was Berkeley with their many faces and their wicked humor, and there-
There was Rafa. His sister. His fixed point. Through every bad moment in his life (and there were terrors in the broken memories, flashes of pain and anger and grief and hunger, of a locked cellar and the sounds of screams and the sights of flame, of desperate fights in the orphanage, of casual blows from callous soldiers, of pointed sadism from older children, of battling for his life against warriors twice his age), he had never been alone. His sister had been with him. Rafa, brilliant and brittle, strong and fragile.
Rafa, who he'd failed.
"Please, brother."
How long had she been begging for his help? How many years since she'd first attacked the Duke, trying to tell him what he did to her while Malak labored on in service of a monster? How long since he'd bought into the Duke's honeyed lies, and left her to suffer so he could forget his own pain?
Clearer memories, now. Of his doubt, his disbelief, and his determination, trying to hold the crumbling fabric of his life together. And of searching frantically for his sister through the bloody halls of Riovanes Castle, racing up the staircase to the sound of gunfire, only to hear the Duke admitting to every monstrous thing Rafa had ever accused him of.
"Please."
He had stood there for a moment, in roiling shame, hating himself more than he'd hated any of the predators and bullies in any orphanage, hating himself even more than the soldiers who had burned his village while he and Rafa had cowered in a cellar. And now he knew that the man he loved most in the world—the man who he had fought for, suffered for, killed for—had been the one responsible. And had heaped salt upon the wounds he had carved into their flesh.
A flash of determination, in the thick of his self-hate. He had failed his sister so many times. He would not fail her again. So he strode out onto the rooftop, his swords floating beside him and-
Died.
He'd died. He was dead. He remembered the bright, ragged fire of the bullet ripping through him. He remembered staring up into the blue sky, and sinking deeper and deeper into his own body, beyond sight, beyond sound, beyond pain. He remembered plunging down into the dark, and into this place. Into what could only be Hell.
"Wake up."
There was no waking up. There was no going back. His life was one long joke, one long string of failures. The man he'd served so faithfully had been his parents' killer and his sister's torturer. In trying to redeem himself, he had died. There would be no redemption. There would be no atonement. There was only this maelstrom. There was only this endless grinding misery, until he forgot himself again. And by God, he wanted to forget. Remembering all this failure was worse than hell.
Sinking, sinking, sinking away into the dark, into the maelstrom, washed away like a sandcastle by the ocean waves of foreign minds. Malak of Galthena, whoever he was supposed to be, did not know the way home. His home had been ripped from him, over and over and over again.
"Saint above, who knew he was such a whiner?"
He knew that voice. Wry and grinning, no matter what face they wore. Berkeley's voice.
"Like he's the only one who's had a rough day," grunted Clarice's voice, somewhere in that darkness.
"He died, the same as us," Clara protested. "Not his fault he's got a way out."
A way out?"
And then there was light.
He would have squinted, if he had eyes anymore. The light was bright, blindingly bright, buoyingly bright: it reached out towards him with the ferocity of a sun, and its rays crept beneath his being like fingers, but those fingers were not intruders, those fingers were not trying to poke or prod or pry away, they were like the hands of a parent, steadying you when you were scared, or lifting you up to place you on their shoulders. They were reassuring. They wanted to keep you standing. They wanted to keep you you.
Lifting, lifting, lifting, pulling him out of the maelstrom, pulling him towards the light. And though he had no eyes, but Malak got the faintest glimpse of something he recognized: of the selves he'd known and loved, outlined by the flesh they'd worn in life, riding the light like birds upon the breeze.
"Come with me," he said.
"Don't think it works that way," Clarice replied.
"Then I'll stay."
"Like hell you will!" Berkeley shouted. "Always the fucking martyr!"
"You never let us down, Mal," Clara said. "Not once."
"You get a second chance," Clarice grunted. "Don't you dare fucking waste it."
They kept lifting him up, out o the crimson darkness. They kept lifting him up, to that bright blue light. They lifted him so he felt like he was a bird on the wing again, like he was flying into the sky, riding a high thermal into a cloudless infinity, like he could soar forever-
He blinked, and discovered he could see, and discovered he could hear, and discovered he could hurt. He gasped at the pain, and discovered he could breathe, and discovered he'd forgotten how, and struggled, and coughed, and retched, and almost laughed.
"Mal?" Rafa whispered, and Malak blinked again, and found himself on a rooftop at sunset, with his sister cradling him in her arms, a heavy blue Stone pressed against his chest where his bullet wound had once been.
"Hey, Raf," he croaked, and then her too-strong arms were hugging him, crushing him, warm and tight and painful, and Malak groaned and gasped and laughed, all at once.
He was free.