Malzareth was, before anything else, one of the thirteen who built the worlds. He embodied a portion of the divine order, and for a long age he kept it. Then, by degrees so small that even his peers were slow to mark them, he began to want — obedience that had not been earned, dominion that had never been assigned, influence beyond the role that creation had given him.
It fell to a mere Archangel to answer him. Kryor, who alone moved when no one else would, struck the wound that the order had thought impossible — and the cosmos did not punish the striking. The shame of that bent rule cut deeper than the blade. Malzareth flared into his God Form in panic, was contained by the rest of the thirteen, and threw his spear at Kryor in the last spite of a beaten god. The spear missed. It has been Kryor's receipt ever since.
He was not destroyed. The Gods do not destroy. He was diminished, watched, and set aside, and from that side-place he has done what humiliated cunning always does. He remembers every bend in the rules. He moves nothing visibly, and yet things move. Whatever shape the present quiet war is taking, his hand is somewhere underneath it.
