Time Spiral

by Scott McGough

  “Stop,” Teferi said suddenly. “Venser, turn it off!” He repeated the cry in Jhoira’s mind, in all their minds, his thoughts sounding close to full panic.

  I can’t, Venser’s voice came back. It won’t power down.

  Jhoira turned to Teferi, preparing to call for Venser’s rescue, but the words never came. Teferi was standing stock-still, staring fixedly at the vortex as his mouth mumbled silently. Whatever these rift phenomena were, this one had overwhelmed the planeswalker just as the one in Keld had.

  A massive vertical bolt of purple energy split the Stronghold vortex down the center, followed by a clap of thunder so loud it shook branches from the trees. A gigantic, winged shape flickered into view inside the vortex, illuminated by surges of amethyst light. Sharp claws curled around the edges of the whirling cloud, then a long, loglike reptilian head hauled itself out into the skies of Urborg. The face was oddly inverted, only eyes and a beaklike face at the front end, the massive, rippled skull stretching out behind.

  The dragon spread its wings and climbed high into the air. It was black, completely black, so dark that it appeared to be a solid shadow even in the bright glare from the rift below. Its eyes gleamed like purple diamonds and its small, conical teeth were pure, clean white. It was alternately real and insubstantial, shifting between solid, liquid, gas, light, and void. Jhoira could half-see the seams of its serrated scales moving against one another, but otherwise the beast’s body seemed to absorb all of the light sent its way, swallowing it whole and returning nothing but rippling, gooey darkness to the viewer.

  “Oh, yes,” Radha shouted, her voice rising. She turned to the Shivans and said, “Let’s kill that.”

  Venser’s machine continued to rev and grind. Teferi continued to stare, poleaxed by the combination of the rift and the ambulator. The shadow dragon continued to soar, circling overhead as it prepared to swoop down upon them.

  Jhoira made her decision. The others could care for themselves. She and Venser were in the most danger. As the dragon banked and folded its wings, Jhoira sprinted for the ambulator.

  Teferi had been rattled, surprised, and caught off-guard far too often lately. He would have to work on that.

  Venser’s machine agitated the Stronghold rift, which he had expected. He was also prepared for the rift energy to push the ambulator past its limits, even ready for something nasty to emerge from the vortex. He was not expecting to be part of the problem.

  For some reason, his mere presence had intensified the rift’s violent reaction. Together, the Stronghold phenomenon and the ambulator were volatile, but adding Teferi to the equation made the whole thing go critical. He had been careful to keep himself clear and to consciously not influence the ambulator’s peculiar connection to the rift, but everything went insane anyway.

  The dragon was also completely unidentifiable, which added a lot to the confusion. The brute was not from this plane—not from any natural plane Teferi had visited or researched. It simultaneously existed here in Urborg, yet it didn’t exist at all. It didn’t flicker in and out of reality but was permanently trapped between the states of real and unreal.

  Teferi tried to move, to cast a spell that would stop the dragon before it attacked, but his body was too distant and vague. He watched Jhoira sprint toward Venser’s machine, disturbed at how detached he was from the experience. There was his best friend running into several different kinds of danger, and all Teferi could do was gape.

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  Speaking aloud helped break through his stupor. He strenuously turned his head away from the vortex and faced the ambulator, where Jhoira and Venser were jerking at the harness, trying to get it off the captive artificer. The machine shuddered as the two pulled as hard as they could.

  The ambulator was still running, still trying to process the surge of energy from the rift. Venser had designed fail-safes that would cause the device to burn out and shut down before it exploded in such a circumstance, but his machine wasn’t operating according to its design. The powerstones he used were easily overloaded, especially by a massive jolt of unknown magical force. If even one of the gems ruptured, the explosive release could boil away Urborg’s swamps down to the bare rock for a mile in all directions.

  Worse, the rift was growing bigger as well as more violent. Here was all the proof Teferi needed that there was a connection between the ambulator and the Stronghold rift … for all the good it did him. He still didn’t understand the connection and he certainly didn’t understand how to break it.

  If he didn’t act quickly, something was bound to kill most of his party in the next few seconds: the dragon, the expanding rift, or the overloaded machine. All of his best spells had deserted him, and the ones he could think of wouldn’t help.

  Jhoira finally snapped the harness loose. Venser came tumbling out in a cloud of smoke, almost knocking Jhoira to the ground, but she caught him and kept him upright. Together they ran from the sparking, shivering machine, without the slightest chance of getting clear in time. They wouldn’t make it. None of them would.

  Teferi could planeswalk them all to safety easily, except for the fact it would make everything worse. At this range, in the middle of the stormy exchange between the Stronghold and Venser’s machine, there was no telling where the ’walk would end, if it ever did.

  “Forgive me,” he said, though no one was close enough to hear.

  Shiv’s return was the mission, but the time rifts were the mystery. He couldn’t finish the mission until he solved the mystery. Radha hadn’t solved it for him; Venser and his machine couldn’t. If Teferi wanted to know what the rifts really were and how they were slowly eating Dominaria alive, he would have to investigate for himself.

  He had truly intended to save Shiv, but it seemed now he would have to try his final gambit here in Urborg. Though he hated having his colleagues and friends on his conscience, there was no way to take them along. Teferi reached out with his mind, locating and tagging each member of his party and then Venser. He would protect them as best he could and hope that the danger followed when he left them here.

  He paused for one last moment to extend a traditional Zhalfirin farewell. Live on, Jhoira, he sent. Be well and happy.

  What?

  Teferi planted his staff in the wet ground, then wrapped both hands tightly around it. Jhoira’s confused question echoing in his mind, he closed his eyes and planeswalked directly into the center of the Stronghold rift.

  Teferi’s voice cut through the noise, but Jhoira could hardly spare the attention. He said something that sounded very much like good-bye.

  What? she sent back.

  Teferi didn’t answer. Jhoira stopped, allowing Venser to continue running past her, but he also stopped and looked back at her questioningly. She motioned for him to move on and turned to her oldest friend.

  Teferi was standing still, resolutely staring at the Stronghold with a tight grip on his staff. What was he preparing to do?

  To her surprise and annoyance, Venser ran past her, heading back to the ambulator.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled, hoping to get an answer from one of them.

  Only Venser replied. “The stones,” he shouted. He had reached the ambulator and forcefully tore off the powerstone housing panel. “I need to recover the stones.”

  Overhead, the dragon roared. Venser was going to get himself killed. Jhoira wondered briefly if helping him get the stones would be faster and safer than having Radha knock him on the head and carry him to safety.

  The Keldon elf was nearly salivating as the dragon descended, her dagger in one hand and a tear-shaped blade in the other. Aprem and Dassene lit up their weapons while Corus and Skive positioned themselves to fight, but none of the Shivans looked eager for this battle. It was no wonder: the Ghitu revered most dragons and hated the idea of killing one almost as much as they hated the idea of being killed by one. For their part, the viashino routinely bragged about how their tribes had driven all the dragons ou
t of their homes in Shiv. This was Urborg, however, and Corus and Skive both knew that the odds were quite different here, only two viashino against a multi-ton dragon.

  Venser retrieved the second stone and hurried back toward Jhoira. She waited until he was close then turned and ran herself, driving for the cover of the nearby trees. When she reached the edge of the copse, she threw herself behind a fallen log. She quickly and carefully peered over the log, watching Venser approach and the dragon home in.

  Teferi began to fade away in the distance. Jhoira refused to believe what she was seeing, refusing to accept that Teferi would choose to leave them behind once more, but he did.

  He was gone in an instant. Jhoira swallowed her rage as Venser arrived. She grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him down behind her log.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I was hoping you could tell me. It’s your machine.”

  Venser shook his head, horrified at the implication. “It’s never done this before.” The pale artificer blinked. “I feel strange.”

  Jhoira’s view started to dissolve into a field of blue and white light. “Oh, Teferi,” she said. This was all too familiar and the realization that she was being planeswalked stabbed through her belly like an icy knife. “You bastard.”

  “What’s happening?” Venser’s voice had lost all composure. “Where are we going?”

  If we only knew, Jhoira thought. If only we knew enough to guess. She shot a glance over at Radha and the Shivans, barely registering that they, too, seemed to be disappearing from the marsh.

  Jhoira saw no more as she felt herself go. She was drawn up and hurled headlong into the swirling vortex that glowered over the Stronghold, its eerie lightning tearing through the sea of blood red clouds.

  As a planeswalker Teferi could go where he pleased, and he loved to travel. He had been a passenger or a pilot in just about every kind of conveyance there was: boats, airships, cycles, submersibles, and tunnellers. He had ridden on horses, camels, drakes, and winged sphinxes. He had smuggled himself in the belly of a whale. As a student he had even strapped beebles onto each of his feet and bounced along, taking giant strides in his pair of living, giggling, seven-league boots.

  His first planeswalk had been a taxing and terrifying ordeal. It had felt as if he were splitting apart while falling through a bottomless pit. Adrift in the void with no sense of himself, he had been blind, deaf, and mute. When he arrived, the shock of becoming a physical being once more had given him a crippling migraine that lasted for days.

  Still, nothing he had experienced prepared him for the Stronghold rift. Though he remained conscious and self-possessed, he was helpless, out of control, bullied and bounced along like an acorn through whitewater rapids. His view changed from moment to moment, sometimes fading between multiple images and sometimes flickering from one stark scene to another.

  It was not the sights and sounds that pained him as he hurtled through the rift’s roiling void of energy and smoke, but the jagged wounds those sights and sounds concealed. There now was Skyshroud, pale and depleted, the canyonlike rift of smoke and white haze flanking it on both sides. The rift bore into him like an auger blade and sent sharp, stabbing pains throughout his body. He saw a ghostly image of Freyalise over the trees, her sharp features stern and judgmental.

  The scene before him rolled and vanished as if falling under the curl of a massive tidal wave. Teferi felt a sense of motion, of progressing forward and down. Was the massive wave that obliterated Skyshroud also drawing him to the bottom of some otherworldly abyss?

  His motion slowed, and Teferi found himself high over a different forest, one with massive, healthy trees. A beautiful blonde woman dressed all in green stood balanced on the tip of a tall pine. She was weeping. Below her, two massive armies faced each other. There were huge siege engines and giant-sized warriors on each side, along with thousands of human soldiers. Each army had left a wide swathe of shattered, broken ground in its wake, and Teferi saw they had strip-mined and clear-cut huge sections of the forest elsewhere. Fire now swept through the entire region, filling the air with smoke and blackening the live trees. The war-ravaged place was clearly dying, and if the armies were fighting over its resources, they did not see the futility or the irony of their actions.

  Two men, perhaps generals, met at the center of the battlefield. One was fair-haired, the other dark. They fought. The dark one fell. The blond raised his fists and screamed as if he regretted his victory. Then he drew a large, shallow bowl and held it over his head with both hands.

  Teferi scolded himself. He should have recognized this scene from the start.

  “That’s Urza,” Jhoira’s voice said, “at the end of the Brothers’ War.” She sounded whole and healthy.

  “Jhoira?”

  She was nowhere in sight, and Teferi was unable to perceive her presence beyond the sound of her voice. Teferi tried to call out with thoughts and words alike, but neither seemed to work. His thoughts were low and diffuse, even in his own head.

  “Teferi?” Jhoira sounded as if she were close by. “Are you here?

  “I am.”

  Another voice answered. “Good. Now I’ll get some answers. What have you done to us, clean-head?”

  “Radha,” he said. “This is insane. None of you are supposed to be here. I made a point of that.”

  “But we’re all here,” Jhoira said. “I can’t see any of you but I can hear you.”

  “Well, hear this: I want out now.”

  “Um, hello? I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You brought Venser too? Why?”

  “Probably to keep that black dragon from eating his sorry behind. Who cares? Who cares about the Brothers’ War? An ancient family dispute settled with machine soldiers. So what? Big deal.”

  “I didn’t bring anybody,” Teferi said. “I was trying to leave you all behind.”

  “Great. Thanks for that.”

  Below Teferi, Urza activated the sylex bowl. The battlefield, the forest, the entire continent vanished under a blinding flash of light. Before the glare began to fade, Teferi felt the same sensation of being pulled away.

  “What was that?” Jhoira asked. “Are we in the past?”

  “We were,” Teferi said, “or at least we were somewhere else, if not somewhen.” Now that the shock and disorientation were fading he began to come to grips with what was happening. At least they were all still together. “Try to stay calm.”

  “I really hate this.”

  “Try to stay calm and quiet, Radha.” Teferi tumbled through the void, thinking quickly. He was still mystified by the others’ presence here. He’d never taken people along on a planeswalk by accident and didn’t think it was even possible. “Everyone please declare yourself. Say your names.”

  Voices came at him from the emptiness, familiar voices stating familiar names. It was a bit like mind-reading but easier and more direct. He could hear each individual’s thoughts when they intended to share them, much like speaking to a roomful of strangers in a pitch black room. Teferi quickly isolated and identified all the members of his party.

  The dead dark space around them turned an angry scarlet as the next blurred landscape grew sharp and clear before them.

  “Fiers’ teeth,” Corus hissed.

  Teferi recognized Shiv, or rather the part of Shiv he left in place. The sight of their diminished continent struck the other Shivans silent, their thoughts painful, private, and not for discussion.

  Teferi tried to take in as much as he could. The current landmass represented less than a third of Shiv’s original size. The southern shore was a long arc of razor-sharp cliffs that rose hundreds of feet above the water. Seen from this great distance, Teferi could mentally draw the rest of the shoreline. The perfectly round shape encompassed all of southern Shiv, several outlying island chains, and millions of gallons of sea water.

  An angry red wound glowed in the sky overhead. Shiv’s rift was exactly the same size as the miss
ing portion of land. Through it, Teferi saw an endless field of smokestacks belching fire. The vast desert wastelands had become one gigantic mana refinery.

  “Soon,” Teferi said quietly, “we will welcome you home.”

  The image boiled away and left another landmass with another clean scoop missing from its shoreline. Of the party only Jhoira would recognize the northwestern coast of Jamuraa, from where the kingdom of Zhalfir once ruled the region. Now Zhalfir was gone, excised cleanly from its moorings and spirited away.

  The hole in reality here was huge and billowing like a cloud. It hung over the coast of Jamuraa, clinging like a massive, semisolid fog bank.

  “Teferi?” Jhoira’s voice was sharp with concern.

  “We shall return here once Shiv is safely installed,” Teferi said, preferring to keep his true thoughts about his homeland to himself.

  Teferi suddenly slammed into what felt like a stone wall. The sensation of tumbling forward gave way to a jolt of pain as he met something immoveable. Dazed from the phantom impact, Teferi went into a wrenching, headlong plunge. As he dropped, he tried to brace himself for the next sudden stop.

  After a tunnel of pure white silence, Teferi looked down from high above a flat-topped mesa. Apart from the rocky cylinder there was nothing else to see but flat, blasted desert. The wasteland had no color, but was a sepia sea of dust. It was an unnatural state, something caused by powerful magic, or perhaps by the lack of it.

  There, on top of the mesa, floated a terrifying figure. She was dressed in gleaming white cloth and golden armor, her huge war helmet winged like an angel’s. She stood tall, proud, and beautiful atop her mountain, and Teferi saw that while the rest of the desert was drab and washed out, the woman herself was vibrant, bright, and alive with color.

  “Karona,” he whispered. “We meet at last.” Teferi gazed closer at the tableau and realized with a shock that he had been wrong. There was something else on the desert floor.