Planar Chaos

by Timothy Sanders

  The glass storm covered the desert before him, stretching out as far as he could see in all directions. It was as if the misty sky itself had descended to engulf the entire surface of northern Shiv. All of the blasted flatlands and countless rolling dunes were now hidden under a broad expanse of buzzing glass fragments, a billowing mass that rose almost a mile into the air.

  Venser looked more closely and gasped. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of shapes within the great mass of slivered crystal, vague outlines of bodies in all shapes and sizes: lean, tall viashino with their sharp scales on end, stunted goblins bearing cudgels and rocks in their stubby limbs, hulking orcs with their too-broad shoulders and comically puny heads, wedge-shaped slivers with lashing double tails.

  The living shapes inside the glass storm did not maintain their discrete outlines for long. As Venser watched and the feral Shivans screamed, the wind-driven glass reduced the horde first to ragged, featureless forms, then on to a fine, red mist. This crimson tinge slowly spread across the cloud until its center shone with the soft, pink glow of a sunrise. As the last of the agonized cries faded, the brittle, crackling sound of glass striking glass continued.

  Its purpose fulfilled, the storm’s frenzy only increased. Venser found himself unable to do anything but stare and fight for breath.

  “What have you done?” Corus spoke again, softer now.

  “Not this.” Jhoira still spoke through her cough. “I couldn’t have. I’m not capable.”

  “And yet.” Corus sneered. His tongue lashed angrily, and he left his accusation unfinished, allowing the nearby carnage to speak for him.

  “Surges,” Teferi muttered. Only the whites of his eyes showed, and he did not raise his chin. “All along the border.”

  Corus twisted and hissed at the wizard. “Disaster follows you, Planeswalker,” he said. “I’ve come to expect that.” He turned back to Jhoira. “But you…you swore to restore Shiv, to heal our homeland. And I trusted you.”

  “She has,” Venser said. “She brought it back just as she said she would. And in case you missed it, she just saved us all. That mob would have eaten us alive. It’s not her fault the mana is unstable.”

  “A fine welcome home,” Corus spat. He reached forward and hoisted Jhoira up with both hands clamped tight on her shoulders, lifting her to his face. “Those are viashino lands,” he said, gesturing to the cloud-covered region. “How many of my tribe have you just killed? How many of my own descendents just died because of your miscalculation?”

  Still dazed, Jhoira did not reply. Venser spoke up quickly. “Put her down, Corus.”

  Corus did not move, did not even flick an eye toward Venser. “Or what?”

  Venser paused, but when he spoke his voice was strong and firm. “Or you will have made an enemy for life.”

  The big lizard hissed. “So be it.” He turned at the waist and hurled Jhoira’s body high into the air, arcing directly toward the killing cloud.

  Venser cried out and took one step forward, but the viashino was far too quick. Venser felt powerful, scaled hands take hold of him, followed by a dizzying rush of motion. Then he too was airborne, hurtling after Jhoira. The last thing he saw before vertigo blurred his vision was Corus’s tear-streaked, grief-maddened face, the viashino’s lips pulled back to expose his needle-sharp teeth.

  Vaguely aware of tumbling as he fell, Venser heard Corus cursing Teferi. Then Venser’s head broke through the surface of the cloud and the glass storm swallowed him whole.

  Jhoira woke to the piercing screech of glass shredding glass. She had the presence of mind to keep her eyes firmly shut as full consciousness returned, but her teeth clenched involuntarily against the awful sound. Her back molars crunched down on grains of sand, which sent sharp needles of pain up through her jaw.

  She held perfectly still as she assessed herself. She had landed awkwardly on her shoulders and back, but her spine and skull were intact. Her legs were sore and twisted painfully beneath her. She started to see how deeply she could inhale, but a sharp, shooting pain through her right shoulder stopped her cold. Jhoira tried to flex the fingers on her right hand, noting with some concern that the arm itself was cold and numb. The fingers only twitched at first, but then they curled under her palm. Jhoira said a silent prayer of thanks for the layer of sandy grit that collected beneath her fingernails. Calmly, deliberately, she opened her eyes.

  A clear bubble of empty space surrounded her, stretching three feet out from her body in all directions. The air seethed and vibrated as the deadly fragments dashed themselves into ever smaller and sharper pieces. Jhoira saw river-wide currents competing for the right of way and larger, almost tidal, surges of crystalline dust rising high overhead. The glass storm still raged, but she was safe inside this artificial eye, this perfect sphere of stillness and calm.

  At least that much of her spell had functioned properly. For Corus’s concerns and in case they themselves needed to break through the barrier she was creating, Jhoira had defined the swarm of sharp-edged crystal as one that would never harm them. The very magic that animated the sand also spared Jhoira, Venser, and Corus from its fury.

  Jhoira slowly sat up, scowling at the irony. The safeguards Corus inspired her to include actually saved them from Corus. She gritted her teeth again, sending a new volley of pain through her jaw. Jhoira turned her head and spat to clear the last of the sand from her palate and she struggled to her feet. The clear space around her folded and bubbled as she moved to keep the edge of the storm safely at bay.

  The storm’s undiminished strength brought on a momentary rush of dread. Teferi had not been part of the ritual and so was not protected from it. His titanic magical capabilities had been fluctuating wildly of late—able to patch a hole in reality one moment but succumbing to a fist-sized rock the next. If Corus threw the planeswalker into the storm cloud after Venser and herself, Jhoira realized her old friend might already be dead.

  Damn Teferi anyway. She had to exclude him from the ritual—his ongoing deceptions and omissions, the unpredictable results of his magic, and his current semiconscious state made him ineligible, even dangerous, for most Ghitu rituals. Jhoira had more than enough lives on her conscience from this fiasco, and if Teferi had also been vaporized by flying grit he had no one to blame but himself.

  Jhoira paused to get her bearings. She peered into the swirling mass of facets and dust but was unable to tell north from south. Jhoira knelt down on one knee and pressed her palm into the tightly packed sand. Shiv still felt the same to her, unchanged from the moment she set foot on it, despite all that had been done and undone since then. The continent’s missing half had returned, restored from three hundred years in a timeless, formless state. A disruptive tear in time and space had been sealed. Teferi had seemingly exhausted his magical power, and now Jhoira had covered a significant portion of her homeland in a lethal, buzzing shroud. Yet Shiv still felt the same.

  Venser spoke of mana here, and Teferi mumbled about surges, yet neither she nor Corus, the native Shivans, sensed any such thing. She knew the world was different from what it had been yesterday because she had seen it change with her own eyes. Shiv had been halved and was now whole. The time rift had been draining the nation’s magical energy, and that drain had been plugged.

  Why wasn’t there any evidence of the change in the land itself? Beyond her memories, where was the proof? Why didn’t Shiv’s heartbeat grow stronger in her breast, or weaker, or change its endless, rumbling rhythm? Had her innate connection to the land had been stymied, blunted, perhaps even severed?

  “Jhoira?” Venser’s voice was faint, barely audible over the buzzing and crackling of the glass. Jhoira heard the anxiety in his tone nonetheless.

  “Here,” she called, her voice still thick from coughing. “Follow the sound of my voice.”

  She regretted all the young man had endured since they met him, but Venser had been part of the great riddle even before she undertook its solution. So far he had attracted the attention
s of two godlike planeswalkers simply by being born and raised in the shadow of a major time rift.

  Though Jhoira and Teferi had traveled halfway around the globe they had encountered only two natives of Dominaria who were innately connected to the time rift phenomenon, two beings whose magic was somehow rooted in the underlying structure of the cosmos rather than in the soil of the nations that bore them. The first was Radha, a barbarian warrior from the wilds of Keld. She wielded primal magic from the rift and used it to forge her own unique link to her homeland, becoming a living, functioning part of this world’s mana flow. The other such being was Venser, who so far had evidenced no magical ability or interest beyond building his arcane machinery.

  “Jhoira? What’s going on?” Venser said. “Why isn’t the glass cutting me?”

  “Follow the sound of my voice,” Jhoira said again.

  “I will. But you have to keep talking.”

  Jhoira began to recite the alphabet in her native Ghitu, pronouncing each syllable in the same cadence she had learned as a small girl. Her voice grew louder as her throat cleared and her lungs filled once more to capacity.

  Venser had no natural affinity for magic and no spell training, yet he could read the state of Shiv’s mana better than she. He had no magic, but he had been seized by an ancient planeswalking dragon and used to open an doorway between worlds. No magic, yet he contributed to the glass storm that went so wildly out of control.

  Venser had no magic, but his presence continued to have a clear and undeniable magical impact.

  As she continued to recite, Jhoira stood perfectly still and assessed their situation as thoroughly as she had earlier assessed her own body. Their mission was far from over. The Shivan rift was only the first and most pressing of the time fissure phenomena, and sealing it had almost destroyed them all. Thus far they had been following Teferi’s lead, but now the planeswalker was injured and exhausted. They were stranded in the middle of Shiv with no means of getting out, and so far the entire desert had proven to be hostile territory. If the heat and the fumes and the volcanic activity didn’t kill them, the local goblins, orcs, and viashino seemed more than up to the task.

  Jhoira unconsciously raised her hand to cup around her lips and winced as new pain shot through her dislocated shoulder. Hot tears welled up in her eyes, and she growled a withering curse.

  “Jhoira?” Venser said. He sounded very close. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She spat the words through clenched teeth. “You’re almost here. Keep moving.” Jhoira’s voice trailed off, but her thoughts continued to address Venser.

  Pace yourself, my friend. We’ve a very long way to go.

  * * *

  —

  Venser woke up from visions of being trapped inside a wide bolt of lightning. The energy surged and crackled all around him, though Venser himself remained fixed in place. He felt the bolt as if it were his body, head in the clouds and feet plunging deep into the ground below.

  Once his vision cleared and he saw his predicament, Venser relaxed. Compared to the larger list of painful things that he had recently experienced but didn’t understand, this barely registered. He didn’t give a second thought to the strange bubble of safety around him. It was currently keeping him alive, so Venser decided not to ponder it too deeply for fear of undoing it.

  He paused to consider how much he hated the sights and sounds of the glass storm, especially from his current position. The noise punished his eardrums like a rusty tool, and the flickering edges of innumerable glass flakes tired his eyes. He had an excellent sense of direction, but in this morass he was as lost and adrift as a rudderless ship.

  He called out for Jhoira. He took a few steps forward. The bubble seemed to move with him, so he wasn’t obliged to stay where he landed. He called again, louder.

  On the fifth call, Jhoira responded. Her voice raised both relief and new anxiety, for she was alive but sounded weary, even beaten. As bad as the past few days had been for Venser, he realized they had been even worse for Jhoira. It was her home that had been threatened, and her fellow citizens who had abandoned her and attacked her.

  Venser drifted through the glass storm toward the sound of Jhoira’s voice. He went astray numerous times until she began ticking off a series of foreign-sounding words in sequence. Venser honed in on the singsong jumble of unfamiliar syllables until it seemed they were coming from only a few feet in front of him.

  Then the leading edge of Venser’s protective bubble broke the surface of Jhoira’s. He almost shouted with joy, but his revelry was ruined by the sight of her. Her landing had been rougher than his—Jhoira’s right arm hung awkward and lifeless from her shoulder, and her youngish features were creased with tension and pain. She was half-covered in Shivan grit and half-snarling the words of her song through clenched teeth.

  She noticed Venser immediately but kept speaking. Jhoira’s face seemed haggard and lifeless as he approached and the glass storm curved around the rounded mass of their shared safety zones.

  “Jhoira—” Venser began, but she raised her left hand to silence him.

  “I need your help,” she said, and Venser quietly thrilled to her words. So far he hadn’t been able to offer her anything more than moral support. If she had a task for him to do, he meant to do it quickly and well, if only to repay her for all the times she had saved his life in the past few days.

  “Anything,” he said.

  Jhoira nodded curtly and turned her right side to face Venser. “My shoulder is dislocated,” she said, “and there’s no wall nearby. I need you to take hold of my wrist and stand firm.” She gestured with her right shoulder, which sent a ripple of pain across her face.

  Crestfallen, Venser stepped forward and gingerly took hold of Jhoira’s wrist. He had hoped to be of more use than as a wall, a second-choice wall at that, but concern for Jhoira’s obvious pain quickly blotted out his wounded pride.

  “Tighter.” Jhoira grimaced as Venser clenched his fist. Then, with a sudden surge of motion, she drove her wounded shoulder hard into Venser’s chest.

  He was glad she had told him to brace, because otherwise she would have knocked him off his feet. Her shoulder cracked loudly, and Jhoira shouted. Venser reflexively let go of her arm, and the Ghitu woman fell to her knees once more, supporting herself with her stronger left arm.

  Deliberately, Jhoira lifted her right arm and flexed each of her fingers in sequence, strumming the air like a master musician. She clenched her fist tight and all of her knuckles popped.

  Jhoira refused Venser’s offered hand and stood up. “Thank you,” she said, though her eyes were still clouded and vacant.

  “What is going on here?” Venser said. He waved his arms at the swirling glass that surrounded them. “Why aren’t we dead?”

  “I made sure the spell could not harm us,” she said. She brushed some desert dust from her clothes. “Though I didn’t imagine we’d need it this badly.”

  Venser paused. “Will Corus come after us?”

  Jhoira shook her head. “Doubtful. I think he’s long gone. He may have stopped to murder Teferi, but I think he dived into the sand and is already halfway back to his tribe by now.”

  Venser exhaled. “That’s good.” He blinked. “Can Corus murder Teferi? He’s a planeswalker.”

  “I’m not sure what Teferi is anymore.” Jhoira’s expression and tone were miserable. “But if a goblin’s rock can split Teferi’s head open, a fighting-mad viashino can do much worse.”

  “Fair enough,” Venser said. “What about us?” He glanced around at the razor flakes and fragments. “How do we get out of here?”

  “We walk,” Jhoira said.

  “Through the storm?

  “Through the storm and the desert beyond. Shiv may have changed a great deal since I was last here, but there are always huge tracts of open ground to cover.” She smiled grimly. “We Ghitu spend our whole lives walking across the desert.”

  Venser was gratified to see Jh
oira smile, but he said, “Where will we go? How will we get out of here? How will I get home?”

  “I have a theory.”

  “But what—” Jhoira raised her left hand again and Venser fell silent.

  “The storm has edges,” she said. “It’s finite. Step one is to get clear of the glass.”

  Venser nodded but did not speak.

  Jhoira’s eyes cleared somewhat and she fixed them on Venser. “What do you remember about the storm spell?”

  “Not much,” he admitted. “I felt your hand and a lot of pressure. There was a surge of energy between us. I thought you wanted me to let go, so I tried, but my fingers didn’t work.” He shrugged. “Either you pulled free on your own or my numb hand slipped.”

  Jhoira nodded, but her face was unconvinced. “And you felt Shiv’s mana even before I cast the spell.”

  Venser nodded.

  “I didn’t let go of your hand,” Jhoira said. “It seemed to me that your hand…vanished from my grip.”

  “Vanished?”

  She nodded. “Right when I needed it to. You were right, by the way. I did want you to let go.”

  “What does it all mean?” Venser hated the helpless, confused timbre in his voice, but it was all he had to give.

  Jhoira closed her eyes slightly and paused. Venser waited silently, barely breathing, until she opened her eyes again.

  “It’s just a theory,” she said, “but I believe there’s something about you that is interacting with the mana here. Maybe it’s the fact that you’re carrying two powerstones in your pack, but I think it’s something else, something internal. It’s the same thing that made Teferi come looking for you in Urborg, and it’s probably why Nicol Bolas used you and Radha to break through to this world. But we don’t have to know exactly what it is to put it to good use. We just have to be cautious, more cautious than we have been so far.”