Time Spiral

by Scott McGough

  “Stop,” he said. His eyes flashed and the entire Keldon beach disappeared under a surge of blue-white light. When the wave faded, only Teferi and the Shivans remained on the shore, the Keldon raiders having disappeared in mid-charge. Robbed of his target, Skive overextended his tail strike and fell clumsily to his knees.

  The rift still rippled and wavered overhead. Teferi stared at it, savoring the rare and powerful emotion it inspired in him. He hated it. It confounded him, pained him, and worst of all, it was delaying him. He had come to do other things, important things, but now he had to include this in his larger list of urgent problems to be addressed.

  “What’s going on?” Dassene shouted. The others echoed her confusion.

  “It is a fair question,” Jhoira said.

  Teferi looked at his friend, and beyond, over her shoulder to the regrouping Ghitu and viashino and the rift that still hung in the air.

  “A fair question deserves a swift answer,” Teferi said, his voice mellifluous and warm, “which I don’t currently have, but just wait. I’ll be back in a second.” He winked. “At least, I’ll be back long before the barbarians will.”

  Before Jhoira could object, Teferi planeswalked away from the Keldon beach.

  The tranquility in the wake of Teferi’s’ sudden departure only lasted a few moments. After that, the first ghostly images of the Keldon raiders began to reappear. They flickered into view all together, each in precisely the same posture as when they had vanished, and though they were as pale and insubstantial as phantoms, they were growing more solid all the time.

  Corus stepped up to one of the ghostly Keldons, tasting the air around it with his long tongue. The viashino grinned unpleasantly. “Think the super-wizard will make it back in time?”

  “Absolutely.” Jhoira glanced at each of her fellow Shivans in turn then added, “But let’s prepare to defend ourselves as well. Just in case.”

  The Ghitu and viashino formed a quick skirmish line between Jhoira and the returning Keldon raiders. The Shivans were calm and confident, their gems sparkling, and their muscles loose and ready for action.

  Jhoira’s gaze traveled back and forth between the rift and the spot where Teferi had left them to fend for themselves. For the world’s sake, as well as her own, she wondered what he’d do if the berserkers returned in force before he did.

  Teferi returned once more to the Blind Eternities. This was the all-encompassing void that separated planar realms, a place between places that was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The Blind Eternities had been named by ancient planeswalkers, and since they were still the only beings who could breach such a barrier unaided, the name stuck. Like other planeswalkers before him, Teferi used the Blind Eternities not only as a conduit for his travels but also as a waystation and vantage point from which to consider his grandest cosmic designs.

  Teferi paused, gathering strength after another unexpectedly strenuous journey. Before him lay the entire multiverse like a great, chaotic hive, its countless planes all stacked into a seemingly infinite array with no discernable pattern. He skimmed along the surface of this great, untidy mass like a drop of water on polished glass, looking down at the galaxies and arcane nether realms hurtling by below him.

  All around, the horizon was filled by countless glittering stars and an army of planets that marched in tight orbital formation. There was vast empty space here as well, unbroken stretches of black vacuum that connected swirling nebulae of colorful ice and dust. The physical and magical stresses here would kill almost instantly anything less than a planeswalker, but to Teferi it was a quiet place that afforded him the solitude he craved.

  Alone now, he allowed his thoughts to flow freely. The Keldons he had just seen were creatures out of time. Everything about them was off—their look and feel, their sights and sounds—and Teferi believed it all stemmed from being out of synch with the world around them. Somehow they had been plucked from an earlier era and deposited in modern Keld. Worse, the plucking had happened right in front of him and yet he, the great and patient observer, learned nothing about it. Whatever moved the warriors through time was somehow connected to the strange rift, and the rift’s mere presence was harmful to Teferi even without the killers that came through it.

  Most troubling of all, Teferi now knew that he had been unable to tell how badly out of temporal tune the barbarians were because his own frame of reference was askew. In other words, while he was sure where he was, he was not so certain about when.

  Safe from the Blind Eternities’ churning, caustic void, still clothed in the body and robes of a Zhalfirin court mage, Teferi forced himself to relax. This was ultimately a question of time, and time was his special area of expertise. He simply needed to focus his full attention on the matter at hand, and so he now allowed his mind return to his favorite subject, the one that had called him and absorbed him for most of his life.

  He had been fascinated by the concept of time for as long as he could remember. As a nine-year-old at the Tolarian Academy, he was celebrated for being more advanced than the other prodigies, and it delighted him to be given special treatment simply for being as he was. At the age of nine he became truly enamored of the concept “wise beyond his years” and strove to live up to it. His first duties as one of Tolaria’s advanced students involved the construction and maintenance of a working time machine. Later, as both wizard and planeswalker, Teferi repeatedly focused his energies on the study of time, on its nature and effects.

  It was a truly elemental force, perhaps the only unstoppable one. Time guarded its secrets jealously, and unlocking those secrets in full had always been Teferi’s idea of the ultimate reward. It was not greed or ambition that drove him, as he was not interested in personal glory, rewriting history, or channeling this primal force for his own ends. He simply wanted to understand it better. And, if he were being completely honest, he also loved the pure academic pursuit of its secrets.

  The time rift on Keld had challenged him, perhaps even bested him, but time had defeated Teferi before, and he still admired it, even loved it. He savored each new priceless bit knowledge that his studies mined from it. Time had defied all of history’s greatest thinkers alike, including Teferi, but he was also one of the rare few to whom time had confessed at least some of its secrets.

  Teferi paid a heavy price for his fascination over the centuries. The Tolarian time machine he worked on exploded almost as soon as it was switched on, exposing the entire island and its population to the violent effects of unrestrained temporal energy. Many died in the first minutes after the disaster, aged to dust or victims of the heat and toxic fumes from Tolaria’s primordial past.

  The time disaster left only a handful the students and faculty unharmed. One was the school’s headmaster, Urza, the obsessed planeswalker who had disguised himself as a mortal wizard and scholar in order to personally lead his team of hand-picked time-travel researchers. Urza drove the design and construction of the time apparatus, meticulously oversaw the construction and testing of the device, then promptly pushed both the machine and his students past their respective limits.

  Another unscathed survivor was Jhoira, whose quick wits and survival skills kept her safe from nearly all of the disaster’s negative time effects. Teferi himself was not so lucky. The Tolarian Academy’s youngest prodigy was caught in the initial mechanical explosion, which set his heavy robes on fire. Panicking, enveloped in flame, Teferi then stumbled into a pocket of slow time where each grain in the hourglass took months or even years to fall. He spent four decades burning in that bubble of altered time before Jhoira devised a way to get him out. He spent an additional three decades enduring vivid, paralyzing nightmares about burning alive.

  This ordeal had an incalculably huge effect on Teferi, of course, but not even this horrific trauma could sever him from his interest in time. As he saw it, the fault lay not with the elemental force or the study of it but with the careless methodology of headmaster Urza. Time was like fire, most dangerou
s when it was misunderstood or misused. In Urza’s hands, time could destroy, as it had the academy, but in Jhoira’s it could also heal and protect. She proved that with a device that used the stricken island’s slow time against its fast time to cancel each other out and safely extract him from the flames. She was also living proof of the miraculous age-retarding secrets of the island’s water supply in the wake of the disaster.

  Now, even as they tried to understand its potential impact on their homeland, time was toying with him and Jhoira once more. The continents he had taken and preserved were outside the normal flow of events—virtually no years had passed for Shiv and Zhalfir while they’d been gone. When he compared one hundred years of stasis to the devastation left by the Phyrexian Invasion there was a dangerous discrepancy between the taken part of Shiv and the part that remained. He had plans to adjust for this discrepancy, as he expected Shiv’s return to be the most difficult part of his endeavor, but now the Keldon time rift added a new hurdle. If a similar phenomenon existed or appeared while Shiv was rematerializing, the additional stress would be catastrophic for the entire multiverse. At the very least it would accelerate the reality-collapsing disaster he had so vividly demonstrated for Jhoira.

  Just as troubling, though less pressing, was the dismal state of Dominaria’s mana. Teferi had saved Shiv and Zhalfir from the degradations of a war that destroyed huge sections of the planet, but that war had ended over a hundred years ago. Dominaria’s magical resources should have recovered by now, or at least they should have recovered more. Barring a second devastating, planet-wide event, there was still nothing to explain what had so drained an entire world of its vital energy.

  Teferi fought to organize his thoughts. He had playfully described his planeswalker status as being “just shy of omnipotent, well short of omniscient,” but he was always half-bound by his humbler origins as a normal man. As an immortal, he understood how mortal minds simply aren’t well-suited to process the infinite. He had been a planeswalker far longer than he had been a man, but it was still very difficult for him to get anything done if he also had to contemplate the entirety of the universe while he was doing it. Pondering reality often made his eyes glaze over and sometimes his mind would drift for weeks, unfocused but seeing all. For his own sanity and for the sake of a world that needed him to act, Teferi now chose to focus on just the myriad things that affected him and his plans for the immediate future rather than every thing there was.

  So the planeswalker marshaled his thoughts. He arranged them and guided them not as a drill instructor, shouting crisp commands to a company that responded without hesitation, but as a lion tamer, urging, cajoling, even whipping the snarling, truculent things through hoops and onto pedestals until they had achieved the formation he sought.

  He reviewed his situation and his options, finally acknowledging that his original plans hadn’t actually changed very much. He still sought to confer with Freyalise to learn how she had integrated an entire landmass into the existing fabric of Dominaria. Time rifts, mana droughts, and anachronistic Keldons were important but secondary. He needed to find out more before Shiv returned, as everything still hinged on that return. If he learned Freyalise’s method, Teferi could adapt it to his own ends.

  You overlook an important element, Teferi of Tolaria. What if Freyalise chooses not to receive you?

  The woman’s voice was confident, measured, and stern. Though Teferi reached out to her now, Freyalise remained a hidden, disembodied voice. Teferi had not spoken to her before, through voice or thought, but he recognized his fellow planeswalker instantly.

  Freyalise, he sent back. Well met, Mistress of Skyshroud.

  Already we disagree. You are not welcome here. Your presence is disruptive here. I do not want you here.

  Teferi pressed on, unconcerned. I will not stay long. If you can grant me just a little of your time in order to save a world, that is all the time I will need.

  I have already saved a world, Freyalise said. Several, in fact, and several times over.

  Then you shouldn’t mind helping me do it once more.

  On the contrary. I am openly hostile to anything you might wish to accomplish and will resist you however I can. I have saved worlds before without your help—this world, in fact. You need me, Teferi. I do not need you.

  Teferi paused, weighing his next words carefully. Freyalise had always been extremely territorial and hostile to intruders. Now he was in her territory and she was far too powerful to be compelled. She needed to be convinced.

  I seek to do what you have done, he said, but elsewhere. I had hoped that you would be willing to share with me, for no other reason than it’s the quickest way to be rid of me, for I am determined, Freyalise. I have just returned to this world and I see that it is in jeopardy. Surely you, who stayed behind, are aware of the current dangers?

  My world and my interests begin and end with the Skyshroud Forest, Freyalise flared. I will protect both from any danger that arises, be it unnatural phenomena or a planeswalker’s interference.

  The danger I’ve seen threatens everything, inside Skyshroud and out.

  Skyshroud has me. Let everything else find its own protector.

  Teferi fought back a wave of anger at her selfish short-sightedness. I seek to be that protector, Freyalise. I want to do for the world what you do for this small part of it. Will you help me?

  I will not.

  Why? How can you maintain your isolation when circumstances will not allow it?

  You’re not listening to me, little man, Freyalise said. I control the circumstances that affect Skyshroud, and my isolation ends when I choose, not because you desire it. I listened to you Tolarians once before, during the Invasion. It did not suit me, nor the world.

  I’m not Urza, Teferi said earnestly. I’m not asking to you follow me into battle as he did. I only—

  Very wise. For Urza’s planeswalker strike force was as ill-conceived as it was ill-fated. The nine of us hardly lasted a day before we began betraying and murdering each other. Urza himself accounted for at least two of the deaths, sacrificing us like pawns. Of the original number, I mark only two who carried out our mission and returned alive and intact.

  Since then, Freyalise sniffed her disdain, I have been far more selective in my choice of allies.

  Teferi pounced. I’m not asking you to go to war. I’m merely asking you to talk to me, to educate me by sharing your success with Skyshroud.

  Oh, no, Freyalise’s tone became sharper, colder, and more cutting. Teferi would never ask me to fight as Urza did. Teferi does not fight, not when he can run away and hide for three centuries. Not when he can see his own nation and his own tribes to safety. Not when he can skulk away and leave the rest of the world to defend itself.

  Teferi started as if struck. He was not wounded by Freyalise’s slanted view of his actions but from one simple detail nigh-lost among her cruel invective.

  Three centuries? Teferi said.

  Freyalise paused. When she finally spoke, her glee was savage. You didn’t know? You lose track of how long you’ve been gone, and you have the gall to ask me to educate you? Leave here at once, meddler, and take your Shivan minions with you. I will protect Skyshroud from the dangers here. Your battle and your burden are where you left them in Shiv.

  Teferi turned his thoughts back to Jhoira and the others. What else don’t I know?

  Freyalise laughed coldly. That is a subject one could expound on at length.

  Have a care, Freyalise. I have had too many rude shocks today. I will not gladly endure much more of your abuse.

  No? Freyalise mirth was obvious. Let me assure you, there’s more to come. Her voice became dark and menacing. If you truly object, Teferi, if you wish to challenge me to a formal duel … do something.

  “I shall,” Teferi said, “and you will help me, Freyalise.”

  The planeswalker’s harsh, mocking laughter echoed across the Blind Eternities. Teferi made a show of ignoring it, but he busily memoriz
ed every sound and syllable.

  Without another word, Teferi concentrated. There was a moment of disorientation and a flash of stabbing pain, then he took himself back to Keld.

  Jhoira scanned the beach in the wake of the abortive battle. It had been a short, savage exchange, and now five berserkers lay motionless on the ground. There were no casualties on the Shivan side.

  Two of the prone raiders were definitely dead and the other three were preparing to follow, burned and bleeding in the sand. The rest of the barbarian raiders had retreated in the face of the Shivans’ ferocity.

  Aprem slowly brought his whirling, flaming bolas under control and holstered them. Grinning, he called out, “That was too easy. Do Keldons usually turn and run away?”

  “No,” Jhoira said emphatically. “They do not.”

  “Far too easy,” Skive agreed. The end of his tail was streaked with crimson, as three of the berserker casualties were his. “These were just cannon fodder, the lowest of the low. They don’t even have a leader—without a warlord, Keldons are just another gang of thugs who pillage and make a lot of noise. No discipline, no danger.”

  The Shivan warriors were disappointed when their foes pulled back as quickly as they’d attacked. The raiders had retreated back over the dunes, glaring and growling all the way. Though Skive and Corus followed, they only pursued the enemy long enough to make sure they were not regrouping for a second attack. The raiders had been bloodied, but they were by no means beaten. Not yet.

  Jhoira had no idea how Teferi wanted to proceed from here, but she was certain the safest and smartest thing they could all do was wait for him. At least the Shivan warriors were savvy enough not to pepper Jhoira with questions about their mission or the planeswalker who commissioned it. She stared up at the mysterious rift that still hovered over them, readying questions of her own for Teferi.