***
I died… again.
It was quite something.
My ‘first death’ certainly wasn’t pretty, but this?
This one hurt… it hurt bad, at a level I hadn’t imagined possible.
A part of me knew something like this was coming.
{The death you’ve endured} was what the Lady Of Time had said.
That wasn’t a throwaway line.
Gods didn’t act like that, and whoever sat with ‘Her’ at the same table—the gang of cosmic chess players—didn’t either.
It was why they numbed me down so much.
If they hadn’t, I was sure to have already gone insane by now.
Reliving, or more accurately, embodying that long moment of death was gut-wrenching.
Thinking about it alone made me shudder—if I had a body right now, I might’ve even felt it.
Tears I would’ve shed, and maybe I’d be screaming into the void too, but alas, I’ve abandoned my mortal coil.
Dead. Nothing but a soul drifting in the void. No body, no voice, no tears.
Though not for long.
I felt it—a pull, like a hook yanking me backwards.
Before I could even process it, the world started rushing back into focus, dragging me with it.
Or maybe I was being dragged to it.
Either way, next thing I knew, I wasn’t floating anymore.
I was slammed back into my body. My dead body.
Eyes fixed on the ceiling, lungs burning with the memory of breath.
It didn’t feel right—not alive, not dead. Just… wrong.
I tried to move, but nothing, as if something else had taken hold.
Not my arms, not my legs, not even my fingers.
Then, my head tilted on its own, wobbling like a marionette.
At that moment, a sound started—wet, raspy, wrong.
I would’ve called it breathing, but it was too strenuous and strange.
Like someone choking on mud.
…It was coming from me.
I didn’t need a mirror to figure it out.
My chest barely moved, but the sound kept going, close enough to echo in my ears.
I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t control it.
And then it hit me.
‘I see.’
That was it.
That was all I could think.
Everything clicked into place in one awful, perfect moment.
I was back. Back in my body. Back where I’d died.
Back in a world that had already moved on. And I couldn’t stop smiling.
Because I knew exactly what was waiting for me.
Hell.
***
{Outside The Projection}
The projection flickered, the image stuttering for a moment as if it was struggling to hold itself together.
And then—just like that—the world blinked.
It did so hard, like a bad cut in some cheap indie movie.
Everyone just stood there, frozen, watching in shock as Malik’s memories rewound.
First, his head jerked back up, then he started breathing—like it was the most unnatural thing in the world.
After a few heart-stopping moments, he flew to one of the guy’s legs.
There was no mistaking it.
The world was turning back in time.
“What the fuck?”
Azeem muttered, scrambling to his feet.
His cocky smirk was gone now, replaced by wide eyes and furrowed brows.
“Did anyone else just feel like their brain got drop-kicked?”
The projection fast-forwarded through his suffering, stopping just when Sinbad held out his pinky finger.
A moment after, and there it was, the catch for whatever power he seemed to have.
A flicker. It was faint, so faint they almost missed it.
Just a shadow, rippling across Malik like dark ink spilling into water.
It was suffocating, like something was creeping in, threatening to swallow him whole.
The whole room sucked in a breath.
“Oh, fuck no!”
Azeem blurted out, pointing at the screen like it owed him an explanation.
“Tell me someone else saw that shit!”
“We all saw it, you idiot.”
Noor answered her usual amusement nowhere to be found.
Huda took a step forward, her breathing uneven.
“This… this can’t be true. It can’t be.”
Zafar wiped away the sweat forming on his face.
“Wait. No. No way, you guys aren’t thinking this is what actually happened, right?”
They collectively ignored his murmurs, though not on purpose, as everyone in the hall was busy racking their brains about what they had just seen.
Time reversal was impossible. That was a fact. Everyone believed it.
But what they’d just seen? That shattered everything they thought they knew.
“He didn’t.”
“He couldn’t.”
“He can’t.”
But he did.
“Is this… the future?”
“A prophetic memory?”
“A goddamn déjà vu?”
“…No, it’s not. There’s no denying it; we see his present… This actually happened.”
“It did.”
Noor agreed with whoever had explained, her voice obviously agitated.
“This’s something far worse than that.”
Layla’s fists clenched, the faint tremor in her hands betraying her nerves.
“You don’t mean… You can’t mean…”
“Oh, but I can.”
“Lady Noor’s right.”
Azeem breathed, his voice hushed like he was afraid to say it too loud.
“The Sultan can go back in time… He can return by death.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
Silence slammed into the room like a thunderclap, broken only by Roya’s whisper:
“That’s how… That’s how he won. That’s how he became the most dominant Sultan in history.”
“It’s…”
Safira hesitated, swallowing down her words, but Layla spoke for her, knowing exactly what she was going to say:
“It’s impossible. No one can… no one can do that. Not even Malik.”
Huda nodded her head in a stutter.
“Y-Yeah, not even one of the Ten Commandments can play with time… This is something else. As Noor said, it’s something… worse.”
“Worse?”
Azeem laughed, though it was bitter, really bitter, as if he was the one most wounded by this secret.
“That’s not even the half of it. The implications of this aren’t something we can predict… especially whatever that shadow was. Clearly, we didn’t know the Sultan as well as we thought.”
“…But it does explain everything.”
Noor’s voice had turned cold.
“What?”
Zafar demanded, turning to her.
“What the fuck does it explain?”
She met his gaze, her eyes piercing through the veil.
“How he always seemed to be ten steps ahead of us, no matter what we did…”
“I-Is that why he changed so much?”
Huda stared at the Malik sitting in that projection, the one looking at Sinbad like a father would a son.
She now knew that he wasn’t the man they’d watched die earlier.
He was someone else entirely… a man who knew death.
‘Am I the one at fault?’
She wanted so badly to ask that question, but she couldn’t get it out, leaving her eyes to do so for her.
But unfortunately, she wasn’t going to get an answer.
Never.
She had already condemned her brother to death.
Layla looked down, her face blank.
“It is exactly why. He didn’t just grow into it. He… he died… he built himself. Over and over again.”
Noor giggled darkly, glancing at Huda.
“And now we’re finally seeing the building blocks.”
Zafar dragged a hand down his face, feeling great envy.
‘So, not only was he the Sultan, he was the goddamn cheat code.’
If he thought logically about it even for a second, he wouldn’t have come up with such a hypocritical thought, but it was to be expected from the “hero.”
“Dying’s a minor inconvenience when you can just… undo it, isn’t it?”
Noor said with a smile, though her hands trembled as they rested on her floating throne.
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
Nobody dared to respond.
Whether to admonish her or support her.
They didn’t have to.
The implications were burning themselves into their brains fast enough.
It all made sense now.
Every impossible victory, every uncanny shift in his strategies, every time it seemed like Malik had just known exactly what was coming.
Because he had.
The Sultan, who had ruled with an iron fist, who had orchestrated rebellion and bloodshed, hadn’t just been a Magi.
He’d been something else.
Something that took the whole planet to unite just to stop him.