Chapter 154: Behold Your Truth
The Deceiver blinked, and Malik found himself elsewhere.
Much like Safira's and Huda's departure, there was only movement.
He was in a realm of absolute black, far different from the false void of the Abyss's upper layers and the darkness of the eighth layer, where demons' eyes had watched him fall.
This was real.
A black that ate everything.
Light, sound, thought, hope.
He floated in a place that was not a place.
And here, he was surrounded by nothing but black holes.
Each one spun silently, like watching Gods, he their prey.
Their event horizons curved the darkness around them, bending what little existed into impossible spirals.
Malik could feel their pull on his Soul, the very fabric of his existence.
Sound—not heard but felt—shook through him.
A howling of a trillion Arcane.
It was as though every lost scream in the Abyss had been funneled here and warped into something only the Old Ones could understand.
This was a... pressure.
The weight of every death, every failure, every moment of despair that had ever occurred in this place.
Malik floated in the center of it all, unmoved.
"Or this perhaps?"
Blink.
The Deceiver's voice came from nowhere, and Malik's eyes met another realm.
It was a land of Titans.
But not the mountain-sized beings that old stories spoke of. Malik had long since passed that stage. These Titans were beyond planets. Walking on a sea that stretched forever, their feet sinking into waters that contained galaxies.
Each step they took sent tsunamis reaching stars. Each swing of their arms broke Suns.
They fought without sound, locked in a war that had probably been raging for eons before the first human drew breath and would continue for eons after the last one died.
Those beings did not see him.
His time was paused.
He was an observer, nothing more.
Dozens of Titans, punching each other without regard for the smaller worlds caught in their wake, without care for the civilizations that must have been crushed beneath their feet.
Malik watched for a moment, then looked away.
"No? Then this."
Blink.
The Deceiver sounded almost frustrated now, though it was hard to tell with an Angel.
What came next was even more unfathomable.
Each realm was worse than the last.
More Corrupted... wrong.
One was a storm of black thunder, a lightning that struck upward. One was a maelstrom of golden shackles, chains that bound nothing to nothing, rattling in a wind that didn't exist.
One was a pulsing womb of flesh trying to drown Malik in blood before the Blink came and took him away.
Another held a Maw where Angels once wept, a land of broken Laws worse than that of the Titans.
Here, the very concept of causality had been shattered and left to rot.
True to his name, the Deceiver was trying to break Malik's mind while doing as he was asked.
The Deceiver was showing him horrors, impossibilities, things that should have driven any sane being to madness.
Unfortunately for the Deceiver, Malik felt nothing from all that he witnessed.
Thanks to the paused time, his Soul Glyph remained activated.
His Rukh was near infinite.
In other words, his mind was protected by the full might of an Angel's will, wrapped in the power of a Sultan's determination.
He had survived the resets.
He had survived the fog.
e...the Venerable.
The Abyssal King.
A few visions of cosmic horror weren't going to break him.
"It seems you've come ready."
The voice sighed.
"Pity."
Blink.
Malik returned to the void.
But this time, it was different.
'Hm.'
Beneath him, floating in this endless black, was a pure white core.
It didn't pulse like a heart, nor did it glow like a star.
Instead, it bent reality.
Its own light curved into itself, the void stretching toward it, as if desperate for its touch.
A singularity.
The Mouth of God.
The universe's tunnel to the Forgotten Nexus.
The point where Rukh was breathed into the world.
It was where Laws collapsed, failing reality, breaking it down into threads of naked being.
Mere filaments of primordial creation that unspun matter itself.
Malik stared at it, and for the first time since entering the Abyss, he felt something close to awe.
They had crossed paths once more.
"Good luck, Young Sultan. You will need it."
The moment the Deceiver's voice echoed, the time pause disappeared.
Sound rushed back: the howling of the black holes, the distant echoes of the Titans' war, the wet pulsing of the flesh womb. At the same fraction, gravity returned, and Malik felt the pull of the white core beneath him, trying to drag him down into its unmaking embrace.
He didn't have time to think about it.
Far behind the core, he saw a gate.
A black, charred gate, as big as the sky.
Its surface was covered in thick chains that had been forged in fires that no longer burned.
Glowing symbols covered every inch of it, Arcane script that shifted and changed as he watched, refusing to be read.
Skulls were embedded in the wood, thousands of them.
What remained of their faces was locked in screams, their mouths open unnaturally wide.
They had been there for so long that the bone had fused with the wood, becoming one substance.
A monument to suffering.
The gate to Hell.
Malik, before losing his Soul Glyph completely, began to move.
He stepped above the Forgotten Nexus, using all of his strength to not fall into it and be unmade.
The pull was incredible, a force that so desperately wanted to unravel him at the most fundamental level and scatter his atoms across dimensions.
But he pushed through.
His feet found purchase on nothing, and he walked across the void, his eyes fixed on the gate.
One step.
Two steps.
Three.
The white core screamed beneath him, but he didn't look down.
Directly facing the Mouth of God was utterly suicidal.
Thankfully, he reached the other side before his Soul Glyph ended.
The gates trembled in his approaching presence.
CHRRRRRRRRAAAKKK!
And what followed was a most deafening sound.
The skulls on the gate's surface seemed to turn towards him, their hollow eyes following his approach.
They knew him.
Of course they did.
The gates remembered the last time he had been here.
The fire he had brought, the sword he had left, and the blood he had spilled.
Once, they had opened for him, and now they opened again.
Black flames surged out from the crack between the doors.
Gold flames joined them, and crimson whirlwinds of molten Rukh spiraled through the air. The heat was immense, enough to vaporize steel.
But Malik didn't feel it.
He felt something else.
Memory.
The fires of Hell didn't only burn; they remembered.
Every sin he had ever committed poured through him, every betrayal he had ever enacted, every agony he had ever inflicted. The shame of his failures. The silence of his losses. The deaths he could have prevented.
A tidal wave of guilt, rage, and grief crashed against his Soul.
He faced it all unfazed.
Hell welcomed him in.
Then he paused.
'...ah.'
Malik felt dread.
A familiar all-black figure stood before him.
The Origin of Corruption...
"WELCOME."
IT.
IT had been waiting all this time.
IT had been watching all this time.
And now its prize had come walking into its cold embrace.
Smiling with eyes that were too bright, too white, too wrong.
"I WAS WAITING."
IT had come.
"THANK YOU FOR COMING TO ME."
Indeed, something had been pushing Malik along. The Venerable. The Abyssal King. The fog. The labyrinth. The Deceiver. All of it had been leading him here, to this moment, to this meeting.
Behind IT were... graves, many tens of them.
These were the graves of past Sultans.
Men who had worn his crown, sat on his throne, and carried his burden.
"JOIN YOUR OWN IN DEATH."
IT gestured at the graves.
"BEHOLD YOUR TRUTH."
Blink.
"MAYBE THIS TIME IT'LL WORK."