Chapter 162: Awakening

Malik had barely sheathed his sword when the world blinked, and in the gap between one moment and the next, everything changed.

In that same blink, he had already realized where he was.

He was standing in the East, or in what had once been the East.

The sky above him was the same pale lavender he remembered, with the same soft light filtering down through clouds that never quite behaved like clouds, and for a moment it felt as though he had stepped back into a memory he already knew by heart.

’This... it is the same as last time.’

It was a flicker of relief, and he welcomed it.

After everything in Hell, IT, after the snake-man and his endless regenerating limbs, after the frozen fire and the suicide notes of dead Sultans, landing somewhere familiar felt almost like mercy.

It did not last.

The ground shifted beneath his feet, though in no way he could have measured.

It felt as though the very idea of "here" had quietly rearranged itself while he was not looking, and what he stood upon now was no longer the same thing he had stood upon a breath ago.

’...huh.’

The lavender sky cracked, slowly and gently, the way old paint peels from a wall, and beneath the crack Malik saw another color entirely.

Red.

A deep, pulsing red, like the inside of something alive.

The crack spread, and within seconds the whole sky had shed itself, the lavender sloughing away until what lay beneath swallowed the horizon whole.

Malik stood very still.

Over the course of this journey he had learned that stillness was often the wisest first move, since rushing into things had left him burned, stabbed, crushed, and nearly unmade more times than he cared to count.

’Don’t tell me...’

His eyes narrowed.

’...the East changes each time it is perceived, even by the same eyes.’

That would explain it.

When he first came here, it had been a unique... paradise, with endless gardens, soft light and a Tree of Life stretching into eternity, its roots cradling an entire ecosystem beneath its branches, a place made to soothe Corruption.

What he looked at now had been underneath all along, the truth that the paradise had been laid over, and once he had seen it, really seen it, there was no unseeing it again.

That earlier twisted paradise had only ever been a veneer.

And in the center of that red, impossible sky, there sat a throne.

It was so large that Malik’s mind refused to take it in at first, the way a person standing too close to a mountain can see only the part directly before his face.

He had to step back, mentally if not physically, to let the scale of it settle.

The throne was carved from something that resembled bone and something that resembled gold, fused together in patterns that hurt to look at directly.

The longer he stared, the more those patterns shifted, rearranging themselves into shapes his eyes could not hold steady.

Upon it sat a giant.

Malik had seen giants before.

He had seen the Titans locked in endless war, their bodies the size of continents, their battles reshaping stars and breaking suns with every careless swing of an arm, and he had watched all of it from a frozen moment in the Deceiver’s void, an observer with no stakes in the outcome.

This giant was of another order altogether, and it was larger still.

Its face was turned away, looking out over something Malik could not yet see, its features lost to distance and to the wrongness of trying to understand a being of that size as having a face at all.

Looking at it directly made his vision swim and his stomach lurch, as it might at the edge of a very tall cliff.

’The True Sultan.’

Malik did not know how he knew that.

He simply did, in the same way he had known of his arrival in the East.

Beneath the throne, beneath the giant, beneath everything, there was a world.

It was a real and breathing world, existing in the space under a being too large to measure and too vast to properly fear.

It was an ocean.

Malik looked down and realized, with a creeping understanding, that he was standing in it.

The ocean came up to his ankles, thick and dark, more like liquid shadow than water, and it left his skin dry as it stretched in every direction until it met a horizon made entirely of masks.

They were giant masks, dozens of them and perhaps hundreds, scattered as far as his eyes could reach and jutting out of the ocean like islands, their painted faces staring blankly at nothing with expressions frozen somewhere between serenity and screaming.

Some wore gentle, closed-eyed smiles, while others had mouths stretched wide in silent and eternal horror, and Malik could not decide which unsettled him more.

Above, purple lanterns floated in slow, lazy drifts, their light falling in soft violet pools across the water.

They hung from no strings or chains and had no visible source holding them aloft, and they drifted toward some destination only they understood.

Then there were the hands.

Massive pale hands rose from beneath the surface at intervals, palms up and fingers spread, as if something ancient were holding the entire sea aloft from below. Malik counted twelve of them before he stopped counting, and he knew there were more hidden beneath the dark water, holding up a world he had not begun to understand.

This was a realm above all laws.

He could feel that much without needing confirmation, because the rules and patterns he had learned to rely on across the layers of the Abyss and the gates of Hell did not apply here.

But despite everything, despite the wrongness of it and the scale of it and the way his mind kept trying to reject what his eyes told him, it was beautiful.

It was a terrifying, aching beauty, the kind that made a person feel very small and very temporary.

Malik had seen a great deal in his life, and in his many lives, if the memories he had just relived counted for anything. He had watched cosmic horrors paraded before him by the Deceiver, had stood at the edge of the Mouth of God and felt his own existence threaten to unravel, and none of it had looked like this.

’This is beyond me.’

He had thought as much before, about the True Zaqqum and about the branch stretching endlessly above Hell’s gates, and he was beginning to think it more and more often.

Everything in the ocean was moving.

It was almost imperceptible, but it was movement all the same.

The masks drifted towards the center, inch by inch, while the hands rose and sank in a steady rhythm, pulling currents that rippled outward across the dark water.

Even the purple lanterns, for all their apparent aimlessness, were drifting in the same direction, drawn by some gravity Malik could neither see nor name.

All towards the center.

Towards Him.

This was his tomb.

The East was a grave made for the True Sultan.

That was why all that left it couldn’t remember how it looked.

No mind could fathom leaving such a place behind.

No mortal could even escape such a place.

Only those with a Corrupted... inclination.

Hence why they were called Hexbloods.

Hence why Easterns were prone to IT.

’Hm.’

Malik let his hand drift to Spine Splitter’s hilt, without drawing it yet, only feeling its familiar weight against his palm.

Whatever awaited him here, he doubted it would be friendly.

And sure enough, somewhere among the masks shifted.

This time it moved with purpose, and it did not drift with the rest.

Malik’s eyes found it at once, every instinct honed over years and countless deaths snapping into focus.

Something was waking up.