Despite what history says, Malrik's hubris was always in the name of love. He loved the Queen dearly, even against the weight of their respective obligations, and for a time that love was the most well-known and polarizing entanglement among the powers of God's Nest. But as the Emperor grew older, grief began to swell in him until it was the same size as his love for her. Humans were not long-lived like the Elves, or the Dwa'w, or the Orcs, or anyone else. It was not fair, and yet the gods had made it so.
When Malrik declared war upon Rotulvuxe — the Ever-Shedding One — it was this grief that armed him. He did not want conquest. He wanted ten more years. A hundred. The same span the others took for granted. What he got instead was a civil war that broke out overnight, before he could even begin his assault: those for love, those against it, those desperate for longer lives and those terrified of what longer lives might cost, all tearing each other apart within Candorman's Hold itself.
Rotulvuxe saw the Emperor's hubris as a spear pointed toward his eye, and for a moment the Ever-Shedding One shivered. It was this very reflex which cursed humanity with wretched immortality — they would lose everything that distinguished them with every passing generation, living excruciatingly long lives as their bodies decayed around them. As humans in Myrrhion began to transform, the Queen's High Sorcerers took matters into their own hands. Surviving witnesses report a blinding white light, a noise too loud to hear that could only be felt in the chest, the smell of burning hair and something like rain — and then stillness. This conjunction of events is known as the Cataclysm.
Although his palace is nothing but ash, glass, and sand, Malrik Candorman still lives. His body is in a grotesque state, and every moment is agony. He endures in the ruins of Candorman's Hold within the Scar — the living fossil the lore names him — flickering with memory, love, and torment, rotting in isolation while his legend is paraded through Gamoran cities as something clean and heroic.
Very few of the living know his true state. The Queen is among them. When he was still a man, the two shared Breath in a sacred rite that granted them the power to spirit-walk to the other's location in their dreams. His Breath is now too weak to reach her, but she still visits him almost every night — his only comfort in an existence the word bleak does not come close to describing. She whispers prayers of healing to his shuddering, malformed shape. She knows she cannot save him. She goes anyway.
Malrik's image — or at least the image of his human self — is no longer solely his own. The Fraternity of the Bellicose Dawn has taken it as a banner, recasting him as the heroic founder of the Order of the Scarf and Sword: a saint-like figure for mortals to emulate, a martyr whose sacrifice sanctifies their authority. He had no hand in the Order's formation. The myth is entirely theirs.
The dissonance between the Emperor's suffering and the public veneration of his name forms a kind of cruel theater. The Fraternity turns a man into a symbol and a tool — a justification for their work with Ki-Oth — while the flesh and soul of the original are abandoned in the Scar, unmourned by anyone who has the power to act, and known in their true state by almost no one still living.
Anahita is aware of what is being done with his name. She finds it repugnant and finds herself, for now, unable to stop it.
Malrik's personal life was never simple. His bond with Anahita-Vayutsara was the most public and the most consequential — a love that reshaped cultural attitudes toward interspecies relationships and helped make the two of them a political phenomenon in their time. But it was not the whole of his intimate history.
He once shared a clandestine, brief affair with the Gamoran King — a memory now heavy with regret and the ghost of mislaid trust. What passed between them complicated loyalties and inflamed jealousies that would quietly twist around Malrik for the rest of his life. Whether it was a single night or a turning point in their relationship, the intimacy left its mark on all three members of what became, for a time, a triadic arrangement between Malrik, Anahita, and Samiriel.
Any understanding of the King's choices at the Scar — the expeditions sent for Ki-Oth, the absence of any effort to retrieve Malrik — now carries a bitter resonance. In that moment, friendship, desire, and ambition collided in a place where cruelty and fate met, and whatever the King's reasons were, they were reasons Malrik could not have anticipated from the man he had known.