Time Spiral

by Scott McGough

  As she waited, the rest of the party quickly grew restless. Skive idly split a piece of driftwood into uniform lengths with his tail while Corus impressed Aprem and Dassene with the quality of his Ghitu-forged blades.

  Jhoira heard a grating, low-pitched groan in the air beside her. She turned just as a conical portal opened, Teferi at its wide end. He looked determined, clear-eyed, and focused, and Jhoira said a silent prayer of thanks.

  Grinning and raising his eyebrows, the planeswalker said, “Ready to begin?” He stopped then, eying the dead barbarians. “What happened here?”

  “The barbarians came back,” Jhoira said. “They phased in far sooner than you anticipated, but they didn’t stay long after that.”

  Dassene twirled her wooden baton in one hand. “We discouraged them from lingering. I hope that was part of your plan.”

  “If not,” Aprem put in, “maybe you should stick around to keep us up to date.”

  Teferi’s eyes narrowed. Jhoira had not often seen the planeswalker angry, but he was clearly approaching the end of his even temper.

  “You disappoint me, sir,” he said softly. “I am no warrior and never claimed to be. That’s why we brought you. I would never have imagined the noble Ghitu and the mighty viashino needed an academic to tell them how to fight, but if I must, shall I also spoon-feed you your meals and tell you where babies come from?”

  Corus laughed, but Teferi held Aprem in a withering stare.

  The Ghitu mage looked down. “No, sir,” he said.

  Teferi turned to the other warriors. “We have a job to do and it’s time we got started.”

  “Teferi’s right.” Jhoira stepped between the warriors and the planeswalker. Softly, to Teferi, she said, “For now, but you really must tell me exactly what is going on here and tell me soon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’ve been surprised by just about everything we’ve seen so far. When you left us you were off-balance and confused. Now you’ve come back all focused and full of purpose. What happened? Did you see Skyshroud or talk with Freyalise?”

  “Forget Freyalise. She’s more insular than ever. Cattier, too. She won’t help us.”

  Jhoira’s stomach sank. “I see.”

  “I also discovered we have … less time than I thought,” Teferi added, “Things have deteriorated more than I ever imagined, but we don’t need much time, and we certainly don’t need Freyalise. One good, hard look at Skyshroud will be enough. It took a colossal effort to do what she did, and an astounding amount of force. The act had to leave some readable signs that we can interpret and put to good use.”

  “That sounds reasonable. Not as reasonable as heading straight for Shiv, mind you, but since we’re here….”

  Teferi looked back up at the time rift and winced slightly. “We should go right away. We can march there in a few hours if we leave now and move quickly.”

  “March?”

  Teferi shrugged guiltily. “Until I know more about what we’re dealing with, I’m trying to use as little magic as possible. If we march, I’ll have time to get a feel for the mana situation straight through my own two feet. Each step will give me a slightly clearer picture of what happened to Keld.”

  Jhoira nodded. “We march,” she said, “but double-time.”

  “That suits me,” called Skive. “Frankly, you warmbloods have been slowing us down.” He grinned and his tail sliced the air behind him. Corus tossed the last segment of driftwood into the air and Skive sliced it lengthwise with his tail.

  “Excellent,” Teferi said. “Then there’s nothing left to discuss and no more reason to wait.”

  Jhoira immediately thought of several good reasons—the fact that they were not prepared for this strangely altered Keld, for example, or the growing list of things Teferi was keeping from her. She decided to keep these issues to herself for just a little while longer.

  Whatever had just shocked Teferi into alacrity also made him more determined than ever to visit the forest. Once they had done that and learned all they could, perhaps then he would feel confident enough to share the smaller details of his plans for Shiv. If not, Jhoira would simply have to figure it out for herself.

  Teferi winked at her. “So, then. To Skyshroud?”

  She nodded. “To Skyshroud, and eventually, Shiv.”

  Teferi neither agreed nor disagreed, but cocked his head. His only answer to her sober, probing expression was a playfully crooked smile.

  The Skyshroud Forest sat in a sheltered valley near the center of Keld. It had always been somewhat absurd when seen from above, a perfectly round garden of leafy green set against a solid sheet of bare rock and snow. The valley was otherwise barren, a cold north wind and shadows from the nearby mountains keeping it in a permanent hard freeze all year. The trees of Skyshroud were thick and strong, and unseen birds filled the frozen air between them with their eerie, hollow songs.

  Teferi stood at the crest of a broken ridge overlooking the forest below. Jhoira and the Shivans had already begun climbing down into the valley, carefully picking their way across the jagged cliffs. They moved cautiously but easily down the rocks, comfortable on the rocky terrain. The light and nimble Ghitu were making steady progress, but the heavier viashino moved down the mountainside so quickly it seemed they were falling. They stayed in complete control of their momentum as they descended, and Teferi could hear tiny clicks as their claws found purchase.

  Teferi fixed his gaze on the forest beyond as his party descended. His expanded senses told him a great deal about the place even at this distance. He felt the first tingling rush of new discovery, of obtaining information without yet knowing all its implications. He had to get closer, to see more.

  Unconsciously, Teferi rose a foot off the ground and floated down the mountain. He continued to stare at Skyshroud as he drifted several yards behind Jhoira and the Ghitu.

  He had no firsthand experience with Skyshroud and there was precious little information recorded about it. He knew that the grounds were originally excavated from Dominaria eons ago and cultivated elsewhere, like a rare flower nurtured inside a hothouse.

  Skyshroud was then exposed to a viciously hostile environment as part of a mad Phyrexian god’s vast and terrible experiment. After millennia of growth and forced evolution, the experiment ended and the forest was to be returned to its original home, but Freyalise intervened. The planeswalker always held herself a goddess among Dominaria’s great elf tribes, and she recognized Skyshroud’s elves as descendents of her own loyal worshippers. Freyalise took the forest and its elves under her protection and diverted it here, to this inhospitable Keldon valley. She then dedicated a portion of her limitless might to protecting and sustaining the forest against the cold and created this impossible island of growth and abundance in an otherwise unbroken field of frozen rock.

  Teferi shifted his perceptions, taking in the view of Skyshroud as patterns of energy that drifted and whorled like oil on water. The forest appeared not as a thick wall of timber and creeping vines, but as a complicated patchwork of pale green lights. Freyalise’s magic still enveloped the place, nourishing and warming Skyshroud with the verdant power of nature to make survival possible.

  Teferi drifted closer to the forest, easing away from the mountainside and out into empty air. Freyalise’s blessing had sustained and helped protect the mana supply from the drought that was crippling the rest of Keld, but the forest was far from robust. He suspected without a direct and continuous infusion of Freyalise’s power, Skyshroud would be as desiccated and fallow as Keld proper. As it was Skyshroud was slightly better off, but only because its mana was slower to waste away.

  “Teferi.” Jhoira’s voice was far away, far below. Teferi glanced down and saw that the Shivans had reached the valley floor while he himself was still hovering in place halfway down the mountain.

  I’m surveying. Teferi sent his thoughts directly to Jhoira. He was more comfortable keeping their discussions between themselves, and
it also spared them the trouble of waiting for their words to stop echoing off the valley walls.

  Jhoira’s thoughts came back after a short pause. Seen anything helpful?

  I have, and I’m seeing more all the time.

  That’s good. We’re ready to approach the forest as soon as you catch up.

  I’m on my way. Teferi looked once more to Skyshroud as he floated down, this time through the eyes of a planeswalker choosing his next course.

  The structure of the multiverse was one of the most difficult things to impart to a non-planeswalker, as so many of its facets were self-contradictory. The infinite array of planes was held together by the Blind Eternities, but it was also separated by them; planes had definite boundaries but indefinite shapes; travel between planes was frequently more difficult when one’s origin and destination were adjacent in the multiverse’s grand array. There weren’t many hard and fast rules that could be applied to every plane, but there were norms that could be codified and discussed. Teferi had used a thousand different metaphors over the years, and a million different examples, but in the end he always felt any explanation was too facile and glib. A student who submitted similar answers for an exam would have found himself in the bottom half of the curve, among the other essayists who had written well but not answered the question.

  Teferi looked carefully at Skyshroud, the alien landscape that had been integrated to the existing structure of Keld. It was not an easy fit. Skyshroud’s soil was largely clay and loam; Keld was all bedrock. Skyshroud’s climate was cool and damp where Keld was dry and lethally cold. Skyshroud’s trees had massive exposed roots and grew over and around each other like weeds; Keld’s native pines and redwoods were tall, straight, and sharp, and they grew in uniform lines of spiked evergreen. Skyshroud was suffused with nature magic, the magic of growth, abundance, and instinct; Keld seethed with the magic of fire, destruction, and wild, chaotic joy.

  No, Skyshroud into Keld had not been an easy fit by any measure, and if all Teferi’s observations so far hadn’t already proven the forest did not belong in the valley, there was another, supremely obvious proof. Rising from the center of Skyshroud’s leafy canopy (and almost certainly descending down through the forest into the Keldon bedrock below) was a massive rent in the fabric of the multiverse. It was superficially similar to the one that had unleashed barbarians on the beach, but only to the extent that a zephyr and a sirocco are both streams of air.

  The Skyshroud rift was enormous, stretching high up into the sky and disappearing there among the dense clouds. As Teferi adjusted his vision once more he saw that it did indeed stab deep into the ground below. He looked back up and imagined he could follow the great rift all the way back to Skyshroud’s second home, through the Blind Eternities to the far edge of the multiverse, then all the way back to its original location on the other side of Dominaria.

  His first presumptions were now confirmed: Freyalise didn’t just guide Skyshroud into place; she made a place for it. She had elegantly integrated the forest landscape with that of the mountains, but her elegance was backed by a brute magical power. The ground she prepared for Skyshroud was not fully ready to receive the forest, so she had been obliged to use force. This last inelegant push is almost certainly what cracked the planar structure here, but Teferi was less concerned with fixing this damage than he was with avoiding a similar result when he delivered Shiv. He was already starting to see just how Freyalise had made this happen … and how he could improve on her methods.

  Teferi picked up speed as he descended, dropping faster even than the viashino could climb. How could he tell Jhoira and tell her quickly? This huge reality fissure was the source of Keld’s mana troubles—Teferi could actually see the flow of red and green energy streaming into the rift from all sides like water draining from a cracked basin. Freyalise’s work was otherwise so careful, so seamless, but even she had to hammer this particular nail home.

  Teferi allowed himself a confident smirk. He was not Freyalise. He had considerably more experience in working with continent-sized landmasses, and he had spent several lifetimes observing, researching, and sometimes causing disruptive space-time events. Having a test case like Skyshroud was all he needed to all but insure Shiv’s safe return. All that remained was to crack the mystery of the rift’s mana depletion of its surroundings.

  Jhoira was waiting for him on the valley floor, her eyes anxious. “New information?”

  “Plenty,” Teferi said. “Still sorting through it. I was right, by the way: we won’t need to stay long. In fact, I expect we’ll be in Shiv by lunch time tomorrow.”

  Jhoira seemed satisfied by that. “What’s our next step here?”

  Teferi’s eyes sparkled. “Stand still,” he said, “and enjoy the ride.” He stretched out his staff and inscribed a circle in the air over their heads. “Come closer, please.” The viashino and Ghitu quickly huddled in so that they were inside the arc of his staff, which Teferi continued to wave.

  The group silently floated several inches into the air. There was no magical glow, no dramatic smoke, as he was too keen on this new line of inquiry to bother with theatrics. As one, the group surged forward, one foot above the frozen ground, moving faster than ever.

  The warriors seemed comfortable enough, though both Ghitu tended to keep their arms extended so as not to lose their balance. Jhoira kept her hands folded behind her as she stood alongside Teferi until he noticed she was staring at him. Again.

  “What have I done now?” Teferi said.

  Jhoira shrugged. “Just wondering what changed. Why you didn’t use this trick earlier but can use it now.”

  “I can’t share every thought I have,” Teferi said. “We’re here to reconnoiter and learn. I’m quickly learning the limits of what this place will let me do.”

  “Fair enough.” Jhoira brought her hands around and held them up in surrender. “But you brought us to help, not to stand by and wait for you to return. We’re in this together. If you do need us, put us to work. If not, take us to Shiv and we’ll get started there while you run down your leads here.”

  “I absolutely need you,” Teferi said quietly. “All of you. Weren’t you listening when I said we’d be in Shiv tomorrow?”

  “I was, and you did. I still think that’s the best course, but I didn’t want to gloat.”

  “Gloat away,” Teferi said. “When we’re done here and I have what I need, the smart bet is I’ll spend the next fifty years rubbing it in.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Jhoira muttered.

  Teferi saw the state of Skyshroud more clearly as they drew closer. The forest was remarkably healthy compared to the rest of Keld, but it was still tired and twisted. The trees were alive, but the wood was soft, weak, and wan. The thickest and tallest trunks were all broken just above thirty or forty feet, with the remaining parts pitted by disease and parasites. The characteristic exposed roots of Skyshroud trees formed a confused tangle of dead, gray tendrils.

  The roots and the lower half of each tree were covered in a thick vine that appeared to be equal parts plant and fungus. Ghastly yellow tumors hung from the vines like grotesque fruit, reminding Teferi of diseased muscle tissue and abscessed internal organs. He did not look too closely at the vines, nor did he allow himself to wonder who fertilized them or with what. Sharp, chattering sounds clicked and whistled from the shadows just beyond this heavy vine thicket, the sound of chitinous claws and mandibles snapping and scraping against each other.

  Teferi slowed and set the group down twenty yards from the edge of the trees. “From here,” he said, “we walk.”

  Proximity to the massive Skyshroud rift was uncomfortable for Teferi, but it was not as acute as the beach rift had been. Perhaps this one was older, its painful aspect diminished over time? Perhaps Freyalise’s blessing had blunted this rift’s impact, as it had Keld’s frigid weather?

  The viashino went ahead, slithering down from the platform onto the cold valley floor. They had barely gone a
few paces before a host of tall, lean figures materialized out of the fungus-bearing vines.

  “Wait,” Teferi said, but the viashino needed no such order.

  They each held their position, confident but not hostile, ready to attack or withdraw as needed. Aprem and Dassene fell in behind the two lizards, weapons drawn but unignited.

  It was Teferi’s first view of a modern Skyshroud elf and he quickly counted ten or more as they silently emerged from the woods. He had been told to expect long, sinewy warriors who favored snakeskin armor—fierce and proud, they would bear a peculiar bluish-green skin tone that made them seem damp and stern in any weather.

  What he saw were cadaverous, almost skeletal creatures with hollow eyes, sunken chests, and only the most rudimentary clothing. They were horribly emaciated, each rib and joint clearly visible under their drab gray cloaks. Jaundiced yellow eyes stared dully out from each leathery face, their ragged lips drawn back over stained, broken teeth.

  “Gyah,” Skive spat. He hissed from the side of his mouth to Corus. “Are these elves or zombies?”

  “Maybe both,” Corus said.

  Teferi wondered if the viashino were correct. They were definitely Skyshroud elves; they definitely had the right demeanor and blue-green tone. They did not seem especially aggressive, but they were all armed with simple square blades of flexible metal or bows and arrows made from bones and fangs of a carnivorous predator. Given the elves’ desperate appearance and the clearly stated hostility from Freyalise, Teferi chose not to relax his guard.

  “Greetings, you children of Skyshroud.” Teferi’s voice rolled out from his chest, booming, confident, calling all who heard it to bask in its comforting tones. “I am Teferi of Zhalfir. I have been called many things, planeswalker, wizard, wanderer, loreweaver, and solver of riddles, but the elves of this forest may call me friend or at least respectful visitor, for I mean you no harm. I only wish to view the wonders of your home.”