Chapter 168: The Smile Of Death

A much cleaner Malik with a trimmed beard returned to the throne room.

The hall was quiet, the afternoon light slanting through the tall windows and pooling across the marble in long, golden stripes. It looked exactly the way he remembered it.

That, somehow, made everything else feel stranger.

His wife was there.

Layla, purple and white hair framing a face that hadn’t changed in all the time he’d been gone, dark skin, eyes the same deep purple as her hair.

Beside her stood his daughter, Amal, purple-haired and golden-eyed, achingly similar to him in the ways that mattered most.

Sinbad perched on her shoulder, small and crimson, his pink eyes fixed on Malik the moment he stepped through the doorway.

Malik looked at them.

They looked back.

There was one question sitting plainly in all three sets of eyes, even the owl’s.

Where did you really go?

He’d given them the excuse before disappearing, something about needing to cultivate, needing solitude to push past his current limits. But judging by how he looked now, older, bearded, carrying himself with the particular exhaustion of someone who’d survived more than any cultivation retreat could account for, they all knew it had been a lie.

A lie none of them were brave enough to challenge out loud.

"I am fine. There is nothing for you to worry about."

The words landed about as convincingly as he expected them to. Which was to say, not at all. Especially coming from him, a man who rarely bothered softening the truth for anyone.

But none of them pushed.

Layla simply stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.

Amal rushed in a half-second later, squeezing herself into the space between them, sandwiched tight against her father’s chest. Sinbad hopped from her shoulder to Malik’s, finding whatever small purchase he could manage.

"You smell like smoke."

Amal mumbled into his robes while Malik closed his eyes.

"I know."

He held them.

Softly. Carefully. Like something he was still relearning how to hold without breaking.

Behind him, Dunya, Huda, and Safira watched the reunion with bright, unguarded smiles.

The rest of his people would have gathered too, given the chance, but they’d deliberately kept their distance, not wanting to crowd a moment that clearly belonged to family first.

Hakim was among those holding back.

He lingered near the edge of the hall, half-hidden in shadow, watching his own family embrace a man he knew he hadn’t earned the right to stand beside.

Malik noticed him, of course. He noticed everything these days.

He didn’t invite him closer.

Whatever relationship existed between them remained complicated, strained in ways that time alone wasn’t going to fix. What Malik had learned about his father couldn’t be forgiven in so little time.

Time he, surprisingly, actually had now.

Because after all of it, things had finally calmed down. Just a little.

He wasn’t being summoned every other minute anymore. He spent real hours with his family, managed the Sultanate at a pace that didn’t feel like drowning, even dared to sit still for once.

Tea went cold at his elbow.

Reports were read in full, rather than skimmed between crises.

And yet.

Instead of relaxing into the quiet, it felt tense. Like something was coiled just beneath the surface, waiting. Building on a suspicion he’d been carrying since Hell, since the Deceiver’s endless parade of horrors, since every obstacle that had tested him seemed to be circling towards something bigger.

Peace, he was beginning to realize, was just another thing that could be taken.

To settle the restlessness, Malik decided to spin the wheel.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick—

DING!

—

{A God!}

—

’...What?’

The Fortune’s Wheel had never landed on anything like that before.

But Malik had no time to think that.

A vision followed, and it wasn’t a stranger’s memory.

It was the True Sultan.

The God Malik had been bred to one day replace.

The same towering figure he’d glimpsed sitting on that impossible throne in the East, now reduced to something smaller, more intimate, sitting atop a pile of gray sand.

A memory. Him and Malik, together, in the past.

’So it’s just you.’

Malik tilted his head at the dying God.

"What’s so disappointing, little Angel?"

"Unfortunately, meeting a God isn’t going to solve my many problems."

The God of Death chuckled and began to speak:

"You carry yourself well for someone who has been told so little. Sit, if you like. I would stand to receive you, but I’m afraid that particular courtesy has been taken from me."

Malik didn’t sit.

He stayed where he was, a few paces from the pile of sand, hands loose at his sides.

It was not out of disrespect but out of habit.

A man learned not to settle comfortably in the presence of something that had once decided who lived and who didn’t, even when that something was visibly coming apart at the edges.

"I was told very little."

Malik agreed.

"I have since learned that is the way most things are done around here."

"Around here."

The God seemed to turn the phrase over, amused by it.

"You say it as though this place were a house you’d wandered into. It was meant to be yours, you know. In time."

"Was."

"Is. Was. Does the tense matter, when neither of us can say what comes next?"

Malik didn’t answer. The silence that followed wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t comfortable either.

Two men circling the same subject, each waiting for the other to be the first to name it.

It was the God who gave way.

"You’ve been feeling it, haven’t you? A gap. Something you reach for out of instinct, and find missing."

Malik’s jaw tightened, barely.

Once, he thought them to be his memories, but no.

It was more than that, more than just rediscovering his past.

"Say what you mean."

"Very well."

The God’s voice softened.

"When you became an Angel, you paid for it. You know this. The sentence on you was reduced, the weight of what you were meant to become lessened. A mercy, of a kind. But mercies are rarely free, little Angel, and they are never given by only one hand."

He lifted a finger, trembling slightly, and let it fall again.

"The same act that lowered your sentence also cut you from the Soul Contract. The one you held with the others. The Lady of Time among them."

’The Lady of Time.’

Malik kept his face still. He was good at that. But something moved behind his eyes, a flicker of recognition with nothing to attach itself to, like hearing his own name spoken in a language he’d forgotten he knew.

"I do not remember agreeing to any contract."

"No. You wouldn’t."

The God almost sounded sorry.

"That is rather the point."

"Then explain it properly. I’m tired of being handed pieces and told to guess the whole."

"Pieces are all I have left to give, but I’ll give them in order, if it pleases you."

The sand beneath Him shifted, a thin trickle running down from the peak and vanishing into the gray.

"Long before you were a Sultan, before you were a man with a name and a throne and a family waiting for him, there was a Soul. A vessel, shaped carefully, over a very long time. The Gods had a hand in that shaping. All of us. Some more willingly than others."

"Even you."

"Especially me."

There was no shame in it.

"A Sultan was to be made. Someone strong enough, stubborn enough, and human enough to carry what I could no longer carry. But a Soul of that kind is a fragile thing. It cannot be built from one material alone."

Malik felt his pulse slow, the way it did before a battle.

"The Sultan and the other."

"The other. Yes."

The God’s eyes settled on him.

"A Soul from somewhere else. From a place that was not here and a life that was not yours. Fused with the Sultan’s, so that neither would break under the weight of what was coming. Two halves, bound into a single man."

’Me.’

The thought arrived quietly, without the theatrics he might once have expected.

Yet hearing it said aloud, in this place, by this being, made him feel... colder.

"And the Contract? What was it for?"

"A promise between the Gods and the one they had made. Each of us gave something. Guidance, protection, a thread of our own power to anchor you. In return, you were meant to see the plan through."

"The plan being that I replace you."

The God didn’t deny it. He didn’t confirm it either.

He only smiled faintly.

"I would never have put it so bluntly."

"Of course you wouldn’t."

"But I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise. That was the shape of it. You were to climb. Slowly, carefully, with every step prepared for you. And when the time came, you would take what I could no longer hold."

Malik exhaled through his nose.

"And instead I became an Angel on my own terms."

"Instead, you cut the plan short."

The God agreed.

"Whether from courage or recklessness, I cannot say. Perhaps even you don’t know. But the Contract was built on the assumption that you would walk the long road. When you left it, the threads that bound you to the others snapped. And a Soul cannot lose that much of itself without paying for it."

He tilted his head, and for the first time his voice held something that might have been regret.

"Your memories paid the price."

"Hm. So why tell me this?"

"If you’re asking why I’d help you, consider it a gift to a successor. If you’re asking what use this information is, then know this. Those Gods are watching you now. I can’t say whether they’re angry at what you did, but either way, their interest in you has only grown. If you wish, you could make allies of them. You may need them when the time comes."

The idea of allying with actual Gods wasn’t as far-fetched as it might have sounded a year ago.

Malik was weakened, sure. But he was an Angel. Two classes short of becoming a God himself.

He needed to start thinking that far ahead now.

"I’m no successor, but don’t worry. Gods are the least of my problems."

The True Sultan smiled.

The smile of Death.

He knew as well.

Of IT.