***
‘Ah…’
Malik’s face grew emotion.
‘I remember everything now.’
It came in a rush—like a dam breaking through the cracks of his mind.
A tidal wave of self, of moments, of truths once obscured by the veil of forgetting.
He staggered, but not because of his body—no, his body was fine.
It was his mind that reeled, struggling to make sense of the deluge.
Memories… his memories, they were as vivid as the day they were recorded.
He was the one whose mother called Malik.
He was a bastard son, a son of a bastard.
He was the ward of Mahdi.
He was a child of Al-Zayni.
He was a boy who killed his guardian.
He was a boy who grew up a beggar.
He was a boy who was embraced by a curse.
He was a… man who took care of his little ones.
He was a man who lost his little ones.
He was a man who became the hope of many.
He was a man who let hope slip from his grasp.
He was a man who clawed his way back to hope.
He was a man who accepted sacrifice.
The boy had become a man.
The man had never stopped being a boy.
In both was his past. His pain. His purpose.
The weight of it all should have crushed him, but it didn’t.
If anything, it made him stand taller.
Malik was here for a reason.
He had always been here for a reason.
And now… that reason was to move forward.
Malik took a step—or at least, he thought he did.
The act of movement was strange in this seen void.
It wasn’t like walking in the world he remembered, where steps led to distances crossed, where time was marked by the rhythm of footfalls.
Here, movement felt… arbitrary. Direction was an illusion. Distance a lie.
The space around him—if it could even be called that—wasn’t space at all.
It was a vast, infinite stretch of black, thick as oil, heavy as stone.
And yet, it wasn’t solid.
It twisted and trembled at the edges of his perception, half-dreamed, half-formed.
The air—or whatever substance filled this void—clung to him, unseen hands that kept pulling at his limbs.
The ground beneath him—if it even was ground—was the same, shifting repeatedly.
Sometimes it felt solid, like stone. Other times, it crumbled underfoot, as if he were treading on sand. And then there were moments where there was nothing at all, just the sensation of movement without any real proof that he was moving at all.
It was like this world refused to acknowledge his existence.
Like it wanted to pretend he wasn’t even there.
It made him lose his sense of time.
…How long had he been here?
Seconds? Hours? A lifetime? Multiple?
He didn’t know.
Yet, no matter the time spent, he felt it to be of worth.
He was something more now. Or at least, on the final step of becoming that.
Soon, the world would no longer be able to push him around as it liked. It’d require effort.
That didn’t mean that he didn’t realize the changes he had undergone.
No, he noticed them clear as the Shams in a realm of dark.
He could no longer hunger. He could no longer thirst.
Oxygen could be replaced. Blood could be paused.
Mortality no longer held him in its weakest prison.
That automatically meant that his “trial” wasn’t going to be a physical one.
Rather, it appeared to be his specialty… a mental battle.
Now, he was likely in the deepest pits of the True Abyss.
Beyond the Unseen Valley.
A place where many a Magi entered but never left.
But Malik was not just a Magi anymore, was he?
He was not… and so, he kept walking.
Soon after, the voices returned.
But they were not just whispers anymore—cries. Pleas. Screams.
They struck like hammers against his skull, forcing themselves into his thoughts, filling his mind with visions that didn’t belong to him.
A warrior stumbled forward, hands clutched over his bleeding chest.
‘I should have run faster…’
A mother, arms outstretched, reaching for a child she could never save.
‘Please… just one more moment.’
A Shah, choking on his own blood, eyes wide with betrayal.
‘I…I was supposed to be eternal.’
Hundreds. Thousands. Countless voices, countless lives, their final moments laid bare before him. Their regrets, their anguish, their failures—pouring into him like an ocean trying to fill a hollow vessel.
They wanted to drown him. To pull him under. To fill every crack and crevice inside him until there was nothing left of Malik, only them.
He gritted his teeth.
No.
The dark could whisper all it wanted. It could claw at him, try to drag him down, try to make him forget who he was. But he wasn’t about to break. Not here. Not now.
So, again, for the third time, he did the only thing he knew how to do.
Walk.
He just kept on walking.
Pain wasn’t his anymore.
He had left it behind, discarded it.
Regret? That was for people who still had something to lose.
The living could afford regret. He couldn’t.
So he walked and walked and walked.
Eventually, the dark twisted around him, folding into walls, endless corridors that built themselves only to collapse again.
They snaked and curled, rearranging like a maze that didn’t want to be solved.
Such a sight would’ve brought many minds beyond the brink.
But Malik knew better than to busy himself with it.
None of it was real.
It was all just tricks—illusions meant to break him, to keep him walking in circles until he forgot why he started.
And maybe… maybe it was working.
Because it was all starting to feel the same.
The same paths, the same shadows, the same silence pressing against his ears.
A loop with no exit. A road with no end.
Déjà vu crawled under his skin, whispering that he’d been here before. That he’d done this already. That he had walked these paths a thousand times before. And then a thousand more.
But still, he pressed on.
Not because he had some grand purpose or unshakable resolve. No.
That wasn’t enough. That was never enough.
The only reason he was still moving, still putting one foot in front of the other, was simple.
Pure.
Unfiltered.
Madness.
No sane man could endure this. No ordinary willpower could survive a journey like this.
Time had shattered into something unrecognizable—moments stretching into lifetimes, years folding into seconds. It was endless. It was nothing. It was both.
And Malik?
He endured it with the same expression he grew to have.
Frozen, cold, unchanging—like the North.
Like the stillness of an untouched tundra, his face hadn’t so much as twitched.
His mind, just as still, waded through the emptiness without resistance.
Another hundred or so years had passed.
Or maybe it was just a breath.
It didn’t matter.
He had lived through every second of it, felt every dragging, suffocating moment stretch past its breaking point, yet it vanished all the same.
It reminded him of the time he fell into Al-Fawra.
Albeit it was a much… snappier experience.
This?
This was slower.
So, so, so much slower.
Another three hundred years had passed.
Maybe more. Maybe less. Not like it mattered.
Time had stopped meaning anything a long, long, unmeasured time ago.
His golden eyes, once burning with purpose, had dulled into something hollow.
They had lost their shine, their fire, their warmth.
Now, they were just… there. Open, but seeing nothing.
The whispers had long since faded into static.
A buzzing hum that used to claw at his mind but now barely even registered.
At some point, his brain had just decided they weren’t worth hearing anymore.
And just like that, they vanished.
For at least a thousand years, he had walked in silence.
But silence was never truly empty. Not here.
Because when the whispers stopped, something worse ramped up its pace.
Illusions had come at him with a vengeance.
They weren’t much different in the first few blinks of time.
Death at the corner of his vision. White shadows that looked a little too familiar.
A breath of warmth in a place where warmth shouldn’t exist.
Then, they became a lot bolder.
Faces formed right before him.
Familiar faces.
Family. Friends. Foes.
Every ghost that had ever lived in his memories crawled out of the abyss, uttering things he did not want to hear.
“You killed me.”
“I wish I never met you.”
“It was all because of you.”
“You’re not strong enough.”
“Your revenge will go unfulfilled.”
“You are WEAK.”
“Fate—”
But then:
“Fall.”
The voices rose, uttering as one:
“Give in… and fall.”
“Fall… fall… fall…”
The word bled into itself, multiplying, stacking, crashing like an enormous tide.
“FALL!”
“FALL!!”
“FALL!!”
At first, they were voices.
Then, they became something else.
A chant. A demand. A law.
“Fall! Fall! Fall! Fall! Fall!”
And then it became everything:
“FALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALLFALL!”
A storm. A flood. A crushing, all-consuming demand.
Fall.
Fall.
FALL.