Time Spiral

by Scott McGough

  Teferi’s eyes twinkled. “Very, very good,” he said, “but you missed one crucial detail.”

  Jhoira patiently held Teferi’s gaze. “What would that be?”

  “That this is all your fault. You brought it up, your idea to fix things. You can’t blame any of what happened next on me.” Teferi twirled his arm until his sleeve wound tight around his wrist, his long, elegant fingers extended. “Take my hand, old friend, and I will forgive you. Then we can get on with the important business before us.”

  Jhoira stared coldly at Teferi’s hand.

  “My fault?” she said.

  “Entirely.”

  “I alone am responsible. I magically took two continents off the map. All by myself.”

  “Indeed. Well, it’s fair to say I helped, but only in the same way that we collaborated on this room.” He craned his head around appreciatively. “I did the leg work and the heavy lifting, but the impetus and the main thrust of—”

  “Teferi,” Jhoira said, “if I agree to take the blame, will you stop babbling? Will you tell me what you want to do? I’m not saying I will agree to do it, but I do want to hear what it is.”

  Teferi nodded. For a moment Jhoira saw a glimpse of him as she knew him for so long: patient, informed, and concerned. This glimpse of her friend was a welcome sight to Jhoira, even with the weariness and worry on his features.

  With a flourish Teferi conjured a large ball of crystal-clear ice. The sphere was solid with a series of irregular shapes across its surface. Jhoira recognized the sphere as a globe and the globe as Dominaria, home world to herself and Teferi both. Each of Dominaria’s large continental masses was in its proper place, separated by vast stretches of accurately rendered ocean. The ice model included the surface of the globe and a thin shell of frosty air to represent the planet’s breathable atmosphere.

  “Recognize the place?”

  “Of course.” Jhoira let the planeswalker’s patronizing tone pass for now, as she was engrossed in studying Teferi’s display. There were strange, crackling shapes on the surface of Teferi’s model that she did not recognize, that did not correspond to any land or sea she knew. These objects pulsed with a sickly greenish glow, and Jhoira noted that the space directly above or below each glowing mass had a jagged network of thin cracks and fissures radiating from it.

  She gestured to the nearest glowing shape and the single lightning bolt shaped crack that pierced it. “What does this represent?”

  “It’s hard to articulate,” Teferi said slowly, “but let’s call it a disruption … a rip in the fabric of things. Time, space, energy, magic—the stresses they exert are all centering on this spot. The stress is starting to show.” He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly, but it’s definitely connected to Shiv’s return.” Jhoira’s eyes narrowed at the mention of her homeland, which they had uprooted and removed from its spot on the map.

  At the time, their purpose had been to preserve part of the world before it was completely overrun by the toxic armies of an evil god. At the time, they sought to secure those places and people that could rebuild the social, physical, and magical foundations of society. At the time, she hadn’t felt like a person who saves her most prized possession from a burning house instead of trying to fight the fire.

  “How is it connected to Shiv?” she said at last.

  Teferi paused. “It’s better if I just show you.”

  “Show me, then.”

  Teferi gestured and the globe spun smoothly around. It stopped with one of the troubling glowing shapes positioned directly in front of Jhoira.

  “When we took Shiv out,” Teferi said, “we didn’t get it all, but we took enough to leave a major hole—a very large, very irregular hole.” On the globe, a jagged gap in the ice flared then continued to pulse as Teferi talked about it.

  “Now Shiv is coming back, right to the place we took it from, to the hole it left behind. I can’t stop it. I can only minimize the impact. If it were a perfectly round hole or perfectly square, we might be able to finesse it back into place—a nudge here, a twist there—but it’s not a perfect shape. It’s not even the same shape as the hole anymore.” Teferi paused for dramatic effect.

  “So it’s not going to fit,” Jhoira said.

  Teferi’s shoulders slumped. “Yes, yes. You really know how to spoil—”

  “What will happen when it doesn’t fit?”

  Teferi shrugged sadly. He closed his eyes and gave a dismissive wave as he turned away from the globe.

  Behind him, a sharp-edged chunk of ice materialized just above the surface of the model. The chunk sank toward the glowing gap they had been inspecting, the one that represented the absent part of Shiv. Jhoira recognized the rough shapes representing the continent on which she was born, and she saw that the two would never match up again.

  Ponderously, inexorably, the chunk plowed into the surface of the globe, sending thick cracks deep into its center and showering the floor with shards of brittle ice.

  “I see, Teferi,” Jhoira said, “so how—”

  The globe continued to splinter and crack, loud enough to drown out Jhoira’s voice. Huge wedges broke out from the sphere’s interior and tumbled to the stone floor. The entire globe shuddered and split into pieces but held its component parts in a roughly spherical shape.

  “Teferi, you’ve made your point. Stop this.”

  The gaps between pieces of the globe glowed an eerie yellow and Jhoira heard a high-pitched whine. The air around the disintegrating sphere suddenly folded and cracked in on itself, bubbling like boiling oil yet brittle as glass. Jhoira took an involuntary step back as these ripples undulated up across the walls and ceiling, breaking the polished stone open and sending showers of dust and grit across the room.

  The floor fell out from below Jhoira’s feet as her workshop disintegrated. Outside the walls was a vast, yawning void of blackness and indistinct motion. The cracks in reality crawled across the surface of the void, folding and mashing the emptiness against itself. Jhoira’s vision went dark, and she opened her mouth to scream as everything around her heaved and crumbled to a noisy end.

  Teferi stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. With his face pressed alongside hers, his lips almost touching her ear, the planeswalker whispered, “It gets much worse from here on.”

  Then they were both standing once more in Jhoira’s shop. The ice globe was still intact before them, the ceiling and walls were intact, and the beetlelike toolbox was still busily at its work.

  Jhoira pushed back from Teferi as she cleared her throat and tried to control her breathing. She was determined not to let his awesome display have its intended effect. Instead of looking at him, Jhoira leaned in close to the surface of the globe.

  “Show me Zhalfir,” she said.

  “Zhalfir can wait. Shiv comes first, and if we don’t sort it out there won’t be anything for Zhalfir to return to.”

  Jhoira clenched her teeth. Without rising or turning away from the globe, she said, “Show me Zhalfir.”

  Teferi sighed and gestured. The globe spun. It stopped with the northeast coast of the supercontinent Jamuraa facing Jhoira. There was a glowing space where Teferi’s home had been and the ice above it was riven by another large, deep crack.

  Jhoira’s breath had almost settled to normal and her heartbeat had stopped racing. Slowly, she stood up straight and faced Teferi. “We’d better go see for ourselves,” she said. “We can’t really do anything for Dominaria from here.”

  Visibly relieved, Teferi let his eyes close for an extended blink. “I agree,” he said as his eyes fluttered open, “and I apologize for the bombast of the presentation, but that’s how I see it … late at night, when I’m trying to relax.”

  Jhoira’s lip curled. “We can talk later about how necessary that was. Right now I’d like us to start preparing for Shiv.”

  Teferi’s wide, false smile returned. “Well,” he said smoothly, “there’s going to be a stop or two we have to make elsewhere fir
st.”

  “Where? What for?” Jhoira crossed her arms. “Why are you being so cagey about this?”

  “Because I know you won’t like it. I don’t like it either, but there are too many good reasons not to do it. It makes too much sense, perfect sense when you think about it.”

  “Then let me think about it.” Jhoira went up on her toes to force Teferi into eye contact. “I’m tired of this, Teferi. Shiv is my home. Dominaria is my home. Tell me where you want to go first so we can get started saving them.”

  The bald man turned sheepishly. He gestured once more and the globe rotated a half-turn. Jhoira stared until a small, glowing shape in the northern hemisphere caught her attention. A rich emerald dot glowed steadily at the center of the shape’s otherwise sickly green pulse. A single thick fissure stabbed down into the center of the dot.

  Jhoira stared a few seconds more. Then she closed her eyes. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am. It has to start here.”

  Jhoira opened her eyes. “Why?”

  “Because it is one of the only places I know where someone has done what we want to do. In fact, it was even harder than what we face because there wasn’t even a hole for it to fit into. She made it fit anyway, without disturbing so much as a single snowflake, and,” he added, “it’s the only such place with the planeswalker who pulled it off still living there.”

  Jhoira shook her head “That is the best reason I can think of not to go.” She paused. “Actually, I can think of ten better reasons right now, off the top of my head. Shall I list them?”

  Teferi stepped forward. His eyes were soft and human and he looked more tired than Jhoira had seen him in decades. “Please,” he said.

  “You were right when you said that careless thing. We should do something. I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but I know it starts here.” He pointed to the globe. “I promise not to decide without you, but I need to do this. No, I want to. I want to do the right thing and to do it carefully, with no bad consequences. For that I absolutely need you.”

  Jhoira paused, her keen mind racing. She didn’t like the options. Teferi was up to something, obviously, and he was determined to keep her from learning what. Could she bear the responsibility of helping him without fully knowing his mind more easily than she could by letting him act alone?

  “All right,” she said, “I’m with you, but if we’re going into barbarian country I want some protection.”

  “You’ll be traveling with me,” Teferi said winningly. “What better protection is there?”

  “Warriors,” Jhoira said evenly. “Ghitu and viashino both.”

  Teferi shook his head. “Problem. It’s not so easy to take people out of phase, and once we do we still have to prepare them for the rigors of—”

  “Nonsense, Teferi Planeswalker. Everything’s easy for you, and if I’m taking the entire blame for this mess, I should at least get to bring a few friendly faces along as we fix it.”

  Teferi sighed. “Viashino, then?”

  Jhoira nodded. “And Ghitu. Warriors all.”

  “Agreed.”

  Jhoira exhaled. It wasn’t much, but adding more people to the equation would force Teferi to interact with other mortals besides her. Also, as they were about to place themselves among the most notoriously bloodthirsty and violent people ever known, it was always a good idea to have strong, loyal bodyguards who knew how to fight. Even when traveling with a planeswalker, it was wise to be prepared for anything.

  Teferi’s eyes suddenly twinkled anew. “So it’s agreed. Warriors all,” he said. “Now … can we please get to it? I don’t know what’s going on … not fully, anyway … and the longer it takes us to find out, the more anxious I become.”

  “You lead,” Jhoira said, “I’ll follow.” She nodded again, but her eyes were back on the ice globe. “For now.”

  “For now,” Teferi echoed, smiling radiantly, “that’s all I need.”

  An icy mist wallowed over the beach, crowning brackish green waves and charcoal-dark sand with cold, clinging gray. The occasional stinging gust raised mournful sounds from the driftwood and from the skeleton of a fisherman’s shack half-standing on the dunes above.

  A drop of cobalt blue liquid appeared in the fog halfway between the edge of the bay and the dunes. The speck grew to a line then contracted back down to a marble-sized ball. The ball flattened, spread, then inflated back into a larger sphere. It repeated this process, each time driving the dense fog back.

  The glowing blue sphere began to spin and crackle, its substance swirling back into its own center. This vortex gathered momentum but the sphere did not shrink. Instead it expanded, stretching its mouth wider and its tail farther as it shaped itself into a sparkling horizontal cyclone.

  Pure white light flashed from inside the funnel. When it faded Teferi was there, majestically floating several feet above the sand. The planeswalker quickly scanned the area. He scowled. He settled down onto the beach rather harder than he’d intended, his fine Zhalfirin sandals disappearing into the wet sand. This would not do.

  Teferi shook off the displeasure that was twisting his face and turned back to the open mouth of his funnel-nexus. He didn’t want to give Jhoira any more misgivings about this endeavor. She was sure to notice and comment on his ostentatious entrance, sure to remind him that he’d never created such a lightshow for a simple planeswalk before. She might even accuse him of trying to dazzle her and the warriors in their party, to impress them and keep them distracted.

  Teferi straightened his robes and extracted his feet from the sand. He planted the end of his ceremonial staff in the beach and reached out toward the vortex. He didn’t need to, but he did because simply concentrating and thinking the others through would not sufficiently distract him from the dullness of the scenery. Showing off for Jhoira was a pleasant diversion, and it also provided an obvious explanation for why he was making such a spectacle of their arrival. At the very least, he hoped it would keep Jhoira from delving into the real reasons this planeswalk was so much more difficult than it ought to be.

  Teferi gestured dramatically and the vortex spun faster. The sparks circling the cyclone’s outer edges crackled and glowed, growing more intense as their velocity increased. The lights became more numerous and more frenzied as Teferi clenched his fist and pale cyan smoke rose from the wind-funnel’s edges. The sparks all flared as one and the smoke hissed as the mouth of the nexus flashed blinding white once more.

  Jhoira emerged from the cyclone. She stepped down onto the sand and glanced at Teferi, who bowed and presented the beach to her with a lowered head and a wave of his arm. As he bowed, Teferi scanned their surroundings again from the corners of his half-closed eyes.

  He was very disappointed. He had expected much more when he set foot on the world of his birth for the first time in over a century. Where was the renewing rush of familiarity? The warm, welcoming sense of being home at last? He didn’t expect parades and throngs of well-wishers scattering flower petals before him, but he had hoped for at least a twinge of nostalgia or a dash of regret for the time he’d spent away from this endlessly fascinating place.

  Jhoira looked down the beach. She looked up at the murky gray sky and out to the dreary green sea. She carefully pivoted in place, her feet plowing up tiny mounds of sand as she turned, her eyes always on the sky. She was counting or calculating to herself, her lips moving slightly and silently until she faced the mountainous horizon to the north.

  Jhoira turned to Teferi, her face wrinkling in annoyance. “This isn’t Keld,” she said.

  “Of course it is,” he said. But was it? Was Jhoira right? Was the ’walk even more difficult than he realized, to the point he had missed their destination?

  Teferi blinked through a disquieting moment of doubt. That wasn’t what he’d expected her to say. He was expert at mind to mind communication and had even mastered a form of telepathy, but he had long ago stopped trying to read Jhoira’s mind. It was rude, for one thing, and fo
r another, Jhoira’s thoughts were so tightly organized that he never had access to anything she wouldn’t tell him herself.

  “It can’t be Keld.” Jhoira glanced up. “See for yourself.”

  Teferi carefully mimicked her survey of the sky, scanning overhead from the southern sea horizon to the northern mountains. Then he reversed the process and scouted from the mountains back out to the sea, his lips moving all the while.

  Then, still peering upward, Teferi said, “What am I looking for again?”

  Jhoira paused. Teferi suspected it was only because she was choking back exasperation.

  “The weather is wrong,” she said at last, her voice calm but stern. “The landscape is wrong. The air, the sea, the mountains … everything is wrong. If we could see the stars I could prove it to you, because I bet they’re wrong, too.”

  “I can see the stars.” Teferi said. He had not moved or changed his stance, but his eyes darkened to a deep indigo black and their surfaces glistened like metal. “This is definitely Keld.” Teferi turned to Jhoira. He blinked and his eyes were back to their usual friendly brown. “This is where I meant for us to be. Where we need to be.”

  Jhoira tossed her head, unconvinced. “I trust your abilities,” she said, “but Keld is one of the strongest sources of red mana in the world. The local culture is founded on fire magic, and there’s no fire here. Look, I can hardly raise a decent spark.” She concentrated, staring at her own upturned hand. Seconds passed before the faintest red fleck appeared, flickering weakly as it hovered over her palm.

  The pale red spark faded quickly. When it was gone Jhoira shook her hand vigorously and flexed her fingers. “If this is Keld, something has gone terribly wrong here.”

  “This is Keld,” Teferi said again, “and something has gone terribly wrong, but not just here.” He held her concerned eyes for a moment then motioned to the vortex. “Shall I bring in the rest of the group?”

  “Please.” She glanced up at the ruins of the half-collapsed shack. “I think we should provide them with an alternative source of mana. If they’re counting on the supply here, none of their spells will work. Then again …” Jhoira scanned the nearly empty beach. “There don’t appear to be as many bloodthirsty barbarians as I expected.” She looked back at Teferi. “Or anyone else, for that matter.”