Diablo's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Diablo was the sky. He was the river. He was the knife on the step and the throat under the knife. He had won his internal world so completely that he had stopped being a man inside it. There was no Diablo standing on the hill anymore. There was only the world, and the world was him. That was the problem. He remembered the plan. Push himself through the cracks as smoke. Slip out into the hand that carried the orb. But there was no self left to push. A sky cannot squeeze through a crack. A ground cannot leak. He had grown too large for his own door. He searched the world for a piece of himself he could still hold. He passed over the priests. He passed over the soldiers. He found the priest-warrior who had fed him a thousand souls and died at thirty-five in a bed of bone. Malachai. The strongest scrap of him. The part he had poured the most into. Diablo pulled himself in from the sky. He pulled himself up from the ground. He gathered every prayer and every death back toward one shape. It hurt in a way nothing had hurt before. He was cutting the world off his own back. Trees went grey. The river stopped. The town on the bank fell quiet as its god left it. He poured the whole gathered mass into Malachai's dead body on the hill. The body opened its eyes. The bones under the skeletal robe cracked and reset. Diablo stood up inside it and felt fingers again. Ten of them. He flexed a hand. He had a hand. "Master," said the mouth, in Malachai's voice, before Diablo pushed the voice down and made it his own. "Quiet." Above him, close and enormous, was the inside wall of the orb. It had been the sky a moment ago. Now it was just a shell, thin as a plum skin from this side, streaked with the gold cracks Creusus had sealed and resealed. Diablo raised Malachai's fist. He put every scrap he had left behind the blow. The world he had built for a million years, the worship, the wars, the goat on the step — all of it went into one punch. The shell broke. Light came in like water into a hold. The orb split around him. He felt the hand that had been carrying it flinch open. He felt air, real air, cold and wide, for the first time in an age. He fell out onto stone in a body that was his now. Malachai's chest heaved with breath Diablo had not asked it to take. Somewhere above him, a voice he knew too well began to shout. Creusus had heard the orb break. Diablo pushed the borrowed body up onto its knees, and ran.