Malachai's Arc

Chapter 11 of 11

Malachai's body stepped off the cabin porch and did not go far. It stopped in the pine needles and stood still. Inside, in the corner where he had been shoved, Malachai pushed against the walls of himself and felt nothing move. Diablo spoke without a mouth. The words landed in Malachai's chest like coins dropped in a jar. Watch. The world Malachai had lived in his whole life came apart. The trees folded inward. The cabin behind them thinned like smoke. The sky peeled back and showed nothing under it. Every village, every road, every face he had ever taken a soul from went out the way a candle goes out. It had all been inside the orb. It had all been Diablo's. Now Diablo did not need it. The nothing rushed into Malachai's chest. A thousand small lights he had never known were there streamed past him and into the dark shape that wore him. Diablo was pulling the world back into himself. Malachai understood then what he had been feeding. Not a master. A mouth that had made him a room to live in, and was closing the room. He thought of Deborah on the pine bed. He thought of her hand on his face the last night. He thought of Diablo forcing his fingers around her throat. He struck. He threw himself against the inside of his own ribs. He kicked at the corner. He found his own hand from the inside and tried to close it into a fist. The little finger twitched. He saw it twitch. He shouted her name in a throat that would not carry sound and drove his will up through his shoulder and into that hand. The hand shook. Then it stopped. Inside him, Diablo turned his attention like a lamp turning. The pitch black shape with the burning crown filled every inch of the small room Malachai had been given. It pressed. It kept pressing. Malachai's edges gave. He tried to hold the shape of himself and could not remember what shape that was. He had spent fifteen years being the thing this mouth wanted. There was no Malachai under it. There had never been. You turned on me, Diablo said, without heat. Like Creusus did. Malachai tried to say her name one more time. Deborah. He got as far as the first sound. The pressure closed. His corner shrank to a point. The point went out. On the pine needles outside the cabin that no longer existed, Malachai's body opened its eyes. They were not Malachai's eyes anymore. The mouth that was his mouth smiled with satisfaction at a quiet job finished. It flexed the fingers of the hand that had twitched. The hand obeyed. Diablo took a breath through Malachai's nose and began to walk.