***
{Outside The Projection}
The hall was silent.
The laughter and murmurs that had filled the space earlier were gone.
All was swallowed whole by the brutal scene that had just unfolded.
Even the faintest sound—the shifting of a foot, the rustle of fabric—seemed like an insult to its weight.
And then someone—someone stupid—had finally broken the silence:
“What… what the Hell was that?”
The voice was shaky, disbelieving, and it triggered an avalanche of reactions.
“Did he just—?”
“Did he really—?”
“He actually did it…”
Low murmurs spread through the crowd, growing louder, more chaotic.
“Return by death.”
Someone whispered it like it was the most unholy thing they’d ever known, and suddenly a consequential question surfaced:
“But wait, if he did that, then how—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
The yell came out of nowhere, furious, and it shut everyone down in an instant.
Huda.
Her fist slammed down on the floor, a jarring crack that seemed to shake the entire hall.
The crowd? Silent again. Not a single damn peep after that.
And Huda didn’t even bother looking at them.
“Watch…”
Her voice was shaking, but it was solid, like steel wrapped in fire.
When she spoke, you listened.
“Just watch.”
They did.
Her whole body was trembling like a leaf in a storm just seconds ago, but now?
Now she was stone.
Eyes locked on the projection.
Not blinking. Not moving. Not breathing.
Because this?
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
…Not like this.
Not like this, Malik.
She wanted to scream, to tear her hair out, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he woke up.
‘It’s okay… big brother.’
‘You don’t have to do this anymore.’
‘You don’t have to hurt like this.’
But she couldn’t.
Because it wasn’t over.
Not for him.
***
{Inside The Projection}
Blink.
Malik gasped awake, choking as his body spasmed against the cold dirt.
“Haaah… haaah… haaah…”
He could breathe again… he could see.
“…Fuck. Shit… haaaah—shit…”
After a few stuttering breaths, he pressed his hand to his throat—nothing.
No gaping wound. Just skin.
But the memory was still there, a phantom pain.
And his neck wasn’t the only part of him that felt pain.
“No.”
His whole body was screaming.
A raw, vicious ache all over, like he’d been torn apart and pieced back together wrong.
“No… no!”
The dirt under his bloodied palms felt too real.
The familiar sting of every ache, the pounding in his skull, his lungs struggling to draw air—they all screamed one thing.
“No, no, no, no… Please, no…”
…It wasn’t the same.
That peaceful stillness he had been expecting wasn’t there.
“No, no, no, no, no, no…”
His eyes darted around the patch of trees.
Where was it?! Where were they?!
He was supposed to be back in the cave. Back with them.
On the morning of the seventh day, long before the bird swooped in.
Long before it all went to Hell.
But this? This wasn’t it.
The warmth of Huda beside him nestled close, the sound of Sinbad aimlessly walking around the cave.
“No. No, no, no, no, no—this isn’t right. This isn’t fucking right!”
The relief of a new day, the chance to start over.
A quiet moment of hope, a clean slate.
“Please!”
No, this was different.
This wasn’t that moment at all.
The “checkpoint…”
It had moved.
At that realization, Malik felt pain that he didn’t even think was possible.
“WHY?!”
The word tore out of him, ripping through the still air like a wounded animal’s cry.
And then he was moving.
Crawling. Dragging himself forward, his hands scraping against the dirt, leaving bloody streaks as he pushed through the agony.
‘AHHHHHHHHHHHH!’
His mind screamed, feeling like a thousand shards of glass were slicing through his skull.
But it wasn’t just the pain.
It was the panic.
He didn’t understand.
“…This can’t be real.”
The ground scraped against his palms, his knees, the pressure building up in his body like a dam about to burst.
“Please… please let me see them.”
The cave got close, already suffocating. Its smell nauseating.
“Let me hear Sinbad’s voice.”
The entrance loomed ahead, dark, but Malik didn’t hesitate.
“Let me see him alive… just one more time.”
He collapsed through the entrance, tumbling down, his body harshly hitting the rocks.
And there they were.
Sinbad.
Huda.
Rafiq.
The blood. The stillness. The silence.
It was all exactly the same.
Malik’s heart shattered all over again.
“No… no, no, no…”
His voice was barely audible now as he crawled toward Sinbad’s body.
His eyes stayed fixed on the boy’s face, on the lifeless, agonized expression frozen there.
“WHY DO THIS TO ME?!”
This couldn’t be happening.
It wasn’t supposed to happen.
But it was.
He couldn’t deny it anymore.
“WHHHYYYYY?!”
The hopelessness, the rage, the screaming.
All of it had returned. All of it.
“—FUCK!”
Malik didn’t even hesitate this time.
He crawled to Sinbad’s body and grabbed that damned blade, his heart a hollow thing.
Before the tears could come, he slit his throat.
Blink.
But nothing changed.
He didn’t get to feel the peace he needed, no sweet release.
The world went dark, then came back—again, in that cursed moment.
Same place, same feeling. Same desperation.
Everything… everything felt like it had been for nothing.
There was no escape.
But still, Malik couldn’t believe it.
He wouldn’t.
So he did it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
He lost count.
Each time, the pain was worse. The despair deeper.
By the fifth time, Malik no longer screamed.
He just stared at Sinbad’s body before slicing his throat open like it was routine.
By the tenth, he stopped looking.
The blood, the bodies, the pain—they blurred together into one endless nightmare.
And yet, every time he opened his eyes, he was back in that same Godforsaken place.
The twelfth time, Malik didn’t even move.
He just lay there, staring up at the twisted branches above him, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged breaths.
“…Why won’t you just let me die?”
Tears streamed down his face as he waited for a reply.
“…”
But no one answered.
The fifteenth time, a piece of him broke.
Malik crawled back to Sinbad’s body, his hands trembling as he pulled the boy close.
Sinbad’s skin was cold. So cold it burned.
Malik’s arms wrapped around him tightly, his body shaking as he pressed his forehead against Sinbad’s.
“…I’m sorry.”
Blink.
Was it the twentieth time? The fiftieth? Who cared?
Every time he ended it, it was the same thing.
He was trapped in it.
Sinbad’s cold body, Rafiq’s blood, and Huda…
She still slept like the world hadn’t just torn itself apart.
At times, he didn’t even bother crawling to them.
He just slammed his head against the ground, over and over, until his mind shut down, and death took him again.
The pain felt like it was peeling him apart, layer by layer, each death making him a little less human, a little less himself.
But then, after an uncounted number of cycles, pain, and mind-numbing despair…
Something changed.
His darkening soul gained a pink speck of brightness.
And that, for whatever reason, calmed his desperate mind.
Malik crawled to Sinbad’s body once more, but this time he didn’t just do it mechanically.
He seemed to have accepted it.
The lifeless figure of his little brother was no longer a ‘thing’ to escape.
Malik held him close, pressing his body against Sinbad’s, feeling the cold seeping into him.
His heart shattered again, but this time, he didn’t look away. He didn’t try to escape it.
He pulled Sinbad even closer, his hands shaking, and pulled Huda into the same embrace.
For a moment, Malik just sat there, holding them both, his tears falling silently onto their faces.
Two opposites in his arms, and he was stuck right in the middle, drowning in it.
One body was ice. Cold as death. Because it was death.
The other burned up. Hot like fire under his hands.
It messed him up.
Twisted his heart into knots that he couldn’t even begin to untangle.
It was all too much, too cruel.
Then, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, he spoke:
“…You.”
His voice was hoarse, broken, and jagged like it’d been scraped against stone.
He wasn’t talking to anyone in the room—not to Sinbad, not to Huda, not to himself.
It was to something else. Someone else.
“I’ve heard your name a thousand times from those preachers…”
His gaze locked on the ceiling, as if staring straight through it to some distant, unreachable place.
“The True Sultan. The God of All.”
His bloodshot eyes burned with a hatred that didn’t even make sense to him.
“They say you’re always there… watching.”
Those words tasted bitter in his mouth, like bile.
“You are almighty…”
His chest heaved, his voice rising.
“Tell me… Are you or are you not?!”
“…”
Nothing.
Just the oppressive weight of silence, pressing down like a slab of stone.
“WHY WON’T YOU FIX THIS?! WHY?!”
His desperate scream echoed back to him as if to mock him.
“If you’re there… if you’re real—you can stop this, right?! Fix it?! BRING HIM BACK!”
“…”
“…”
“…”
And still, there was no answer.
Just nothing but silence.
Malik chuckled bitterly, the sound so hollow it made him ache even more.
“…How can you be so cruel?”
He stared down at them—his responsibility.
“What did they… did we do to deserve this?”
His family.
The ones he was supposed to protect.
The ones he failed to save.
He buried his face in Sinbad’s blood-matted crimson hair, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
“Just what have they done to us?”
His voice was nothing but a quiet rasp in the silence.
Then, as if in answer, footsteps echoed—soft at first, then heavier, louder with each step.
Malik’s head snapped up, his bloodshot eyes darting to the cave’s entrance.
A shadow stretched across the ground, long and distorted, until finally, a figure entered the cave.