There was a multitude. Tens of millions of people all crawled through the dust, coated with the stuff until they were almost indistinguishable from the ground. They were abject, bent, and servile. Emaciated and weak, they were barely able to move, yet they struggled on.
Worst of all, they were hopeless, bereft of anything but the desperate need to survive. Somehow Karona had become the only way for any of them to do that, and she was making them crawl for the privilege.
The spectacle in the desert faded to gauzy white. Teferi was jolted once more, less painfully this time. He began to rise, accelerating as if gravity had reversed and he was falling up.
“What is all this?” Radha asked.
“The answer,” Teferi said. “I just don’t understand it yet.”
A circular window formed in front of him then, purple sparks and dust churning inside its brittle pane. Teferi felt a fresh wave of disorientation when he viewed the Stronghold through the window, looking down upon the black, jagged peak from above. As he had seen Freyalise’s visage over Skyshroud, Teferi saw a transparent image of a huge panther’s head with its ears flattened angrily over glistening yellow eyes.
“Windgrace,” Venser said. His voice had a breathless, awed quality. “We are back in Urborg.”
“Keep going,” Radha said.
Teferi half-expected their frenzied journey to end where it began, and he welcomed the chance to meet his fellow planeswalker Windgrace. Instead, the circular window shattered into fragments and Teferi once more surged upward with a gorge-rattling lurch.
When he stopped he was looking down on a lush river valley. A stone shrine sat nestled between the forks of a river that ran along the western edge of a rugged mountain range. The scene rolled below him as if someone had spun the globe and Teferi shot west, traveling along the river’s central fork. It led all the way to the sea, where he stopped moving and hovered over the beach.
Teferi noticed two huge spires of rock less than a mile from the shore, their points curving toward each other like a pair of pincers. Before anyone could speak he said, “Don’t ask. This is totally unfamiliar to me.”
Nonetheless he knew there was something very wrong here, something terrible. Whatever it was hadn’t noticed them yet, but Teferi could sense its baleful face turning toward them even now.
From the sky, a flaming object fell. It was small but very bright and it angled down toward the river valley like a comet. It was heading toward the spot where Teferi had arrived, bearing down on the stone shrine.
“Oh, hells,” Teferi said. He was not an expert at fire magic, but he knew serious spellwork when he saw it.
“This is going to be good,” Radha said.
The burning meteor gathered speed and intensity as it fell. Teferi tried in vain to place this scene geographically or chronologically, but it was maddeningly indistinct. All he could tell was that they were somewhere on Dominaria at some point in the past. There was a rift nearby somewhere, but he couldn’t pin down its location.
The meteor landed and the valley disappeared in a fiery surge of force and heat. Out to sea, silver-white light flashed at the tips of the sharp stone pillars. Before Teferi could see the aftermath, he tumbled forward again, flipping end over end through the dizzying void.
Then he was once more high above the coast of Zhalfir. The great nation was still intact, its coastline whole and occupying its proper place on the map. His momentum brought him down closer until he was within view of a small, unobtrusive island far from any port and well clear of all shipping lanes.
Teferi recognized his former island sanctuary with a mixture of pride and regret. He had achieved great things in this facility, and he had also done great harm. In the end he had put it all to right, thankfully, so this was at least one past sin for which he had already atoned.
As if to support his opinion, Teferi’s island slowly phased out of sight below. Teferi himself floated gently down as the sea around his sanctuary vanished in a curtain of frothy blue.
“Teferi,” Jhoira said, “are you seeing any planeswalkers at any of these sites?”
“A few,” he said, “the ones we already knew about in Skyshroud and Urborg.”
“Odd,” Jhoira said, and Teferi loved her for it. Only Jhoira could look at this situation, in this company, and declare one small part of it “odd.”
“How do you mean?” he said.
“As far as we know, we’ve been seeing the past. You, Urza, and Karona, all that happened long ago. The places we’ve seen from this time … Shiv, Zhalfir, Urborg, and Keld … all have rifts. Only Urborg and Keld had planeswalkers watching over them.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“You seem a logical choice to be Zhalfir’s protector, but Shiv has no such patron.”
“I have always intended to protect Shiv as well as Zhalfir.”
“But your weren’t at either site.”
“Ahh, but that is probably because I’m right here. Once this ride stops—”
“If it stops.”
“If and when, I swear it will be my benevolent smile that oversees the installation of your home.”
Their gentle downward motion eased and Teferi broke through a grimy cloudbank to emerge over another remote island. It might have been green and lush at one point, but now it was crawling with black metal monsters. Burning oil scoured the island’s surface and pooled into great lakes that filled the sky with choking black smoke. It was hard for someone without special knowledge to see why this remote location was worth flooding with troops. Teferi and Jhoira knew better.
“What’s this?” Radha said. “Those look like the metal beasties we saw in pieces back at the swamp.”
“They are from the same horde,” Teferi said, “and the same war. They are Phyrexians. This is Tolaria at its end.”
From this distance Teferi could not clearly see individuals in detail. Nonetheless, he was able to pick out the haggard, dark-haired wizard fighting his way to the island’s center. Even if Teferi didn’t recognize the old scholar, he would have been able to find the man by following the trail of dead Phyrexians.
“That one’s a warrior,” Radha said approvingly, “but he doesn’t look like a fire mage.”
“Barrin was a master wizard,” Teferi said crisply. “He knew grand and complicated spells in all five colors.
“He’s doing well for himself, but he’s doomed if he doesn’t get out of there.”
“He knows,” Jhoira said. “He’s already lost his wife and child to … to the demons of this war. This will be his final battle. He doesn’t plan to leave.”
“Oh.” Radha spoke solemnly, almost reverently. “Then die well, Barrin.”
“He did. Teferi,” Jhoira’s voice had dropped to almost a whisper, “I don’t want to see this, but I can’t close my eyes.”
“We don’t have eyes to close,” Teferi said. “It will be all right. The end comes quickly.”
Indeed, even as he spoke Teferi saw the first licks of fire rise up from Barrin’s last spell. The wizard’s flames surged, burning higher until they collapsed back on themselves. The pyroclastic cloud rolled out from his position, melting the Phyrexians and dashing them to pieces against the ground and each other. The blast continued to expand until it covered the entire island. Then the angry red-orange cloud of dust and fire lingered, seething and rippling like a living thing.
The cataclysmic scene split, melted, and remerged before him. Teferi felt an unsettling internal wrench, but without the expected sense of motion. The images were changing as they had done since he entered the rift, but this time he was not leaving them behind.
The blur of color resolved itself to reveal the exact same island from the exact same perspective. It was clearly long before Barrin’s final battle, as there were dozens of intact buildings and lush, green vegetation. Drawing closer, Teferi recognized Urza’s time laboratory, a huge white stone building that only the most advanced students were allowed to enter.
To
his mounting horror, the time lab exploded, casting its heavy stone doors off their hinges. Bolts of silver-blue light beamed out from the door, the windows, and the corners of the walls. The roof seemed to come off the building and hover a few feet above it, suspended on a cloud of brilliance. A mighty wind rushed out, knocking students to the ground and pieces of off the other buildings.
People began streaming from the open door of the lab. Some coughed and wept, others burned and bled. A thin man at the front of the group stumbled into one of the beams of silver light that had not yet faded. As Teferi watched, the man’s front half aged from youth to senility to dust in less than a second. As his back half toppled grotesquely to the ground, the other Tolarians around him screamed.
Teferi was now viewing from less than fifty feet above the ground. He could see faces and expressions now, recognizing his friends and peers and hearing the cries of the injured.
Someone shouted a warning from inside the lab. It sounded like Jhoira, but she hadn’t been anywhere near the site of the accident. She only came around to save him later, much later, though the time dilation effects made it impossible for anyone to say precisely how much later. If Jhoira hadn’t been there, how was Jhoira’s voice shouting at him now, telling him to look away?
Teferi turned just as a small figure ran screaming into the courtyard. The boy’s face and body were totally obscured behind a shroud of fire, but as he staggered forward, he looked right up at Teferi hovering invisibly overhead. The boy stopped, rooted in place as the flames continued to dance in slow, sinuous motion.
Teferi looked up at Teferi, who looked back down at Teferi.
The planeswalker had no recollection of seeing anyone in the sky the night he burned, much less an adult version of himself … but he had very few clear recollections from that incident. He felt a confusing rush of pity, both for the small boy he was and the man he had become. For a moment his vision flickered between that of a thousand-year-old planeswalker and a nine-year-old student. The man he had become saw himself as he was; the boy he had been saw him now.
Teferi screamed as flames engulfed him once more, burning simultaneously as both boy and planeswalker. In the depths of the Stronghold rift, Teferi’s bodiless presence was ravaged by the same agony that had almost destroyed him as a child. It was far worse this time, for he had gone on to become a scholar, a wizard, an explorer, and a god, but he was still as helpless and as terrified as a nine-year-old boy on fire.
“Teferi!”
He definitely heard Jhoira’s voice. No surprise there. Since the fire, she had always been there to look out for him. Whenever he asked, she would answer. There was so much he wanted to tell her, yet so much he should have never said.
Teferi struggled to regain himself. He was not a child anymore and he did not have to endure this. Time was his toy, his playground, his to direct, channel, and command. He knew a spell that would freeze the boy and the fire alike, fully stopping them in time. The effect would surround them with a thick bubble of stopped time, making it an easy matter to extract the boy and leave the flames embedded. Teferi could rescue himself now and spare them both forty years of hell and thirty years of nightmares after that.
“Teferi! Please stop!”
He did not stop; perhaps he didn’t even hear Jhoira’s words. The flames still danced across his face and body. The smell of his own flesh cooking was strong in his nostrils. He gestured or tried to gesture as best as he could with no physical presence. Teferi focused his mind and his power on the burning boy in front of him, the boy he had been.
Teferi cast his spell, and the world around him screamed. All disappeared, winking out like a candle dropped into a full jug of water.
Then there was silence.
Radha was the first to awaken, so she was the first to see the strange figures that had half-surrounded them. Her instinct was to lash out, to clear the space around her and launch herself at the strangers blades-first, but her mind and body still ached from the crazy river ride they’d just been on. Bouncing from place to place with no idea where they were or where they were going seemed to be the only way these people covered ground, but Radha had already had her fill of it.
Instead of striking, Radha merely sat up and latched onto the closest stranger’s tunic with an iron grip. She hauled the little man forward and glared into his eyes, less than an inch from her own. He gasped but made no other sound, his face twitching nervously.
As her catch stood trembling, Radha examined his strange features. His eye teeth had been filed to razor-sharp tips and he had animal hide markings on his face. They were not natural, but inked onto his cheeks and forehead with a tattoo needle. He looked vaguely feline, and Radha wondered if he were a priest from some sort of cat cult.
She released the little man with a shove. He retreated and gestured for his fellows to come to him. Though the group gathered in front of Radha, they made no aggressive moves and gave her plenty of space.
Radha got to her feet and looked around. If they were a cat cult they were all the same rank, because they all bore similar tattoos. All twenty of the strangers had the same tigerlike stripes on their faces and each had filed their teeth into fangs. She counted the rest of the unconscious forms dotting the cliff, accounting for everyone but Teferi.
She was confused. Radha hated being confused. The last thing she remembered was watching some nameless island blow up then blow up again. Now she seemed to be on top of a seaside cliff, overlooking two giant spears of stone about a mile out in the water.
She had been here before, during the ride through history, but it looked very different now. The only tree she had seen on the cliffs then was now a small stand of four. Where the skies had been clear of everything except the flaming, hammer-shaped meteor, now they were dotted with a half-dozen or more winged monsters.
None of the huge beasts was close enough to attack, but Radha could clearly see their luxurious fur and spectacular markings. Long muscles rippled under that fur, giving the four-footed creatures a graceful lilt as they swept through the air on leathery wings.
The little man she had grabbed stepped forward. “My name is Jiro. Please,” he said, “you cannot be here.”
Radha snarled. “Here I am. I’m not going away.” She smiled at the man, baring her teeth. “How would you like to proceed?”
Jiro swallowed. “You don’t understand. You and your friends are not safe here. No one is safe on this cliff top, not even us. This is Madara, dragon country. We are in the capitol of the whole nekoru nation.” He gestured up at the magnificent flying beasts.
Skive and Corus began to stir nearby. Radha also heard Dassene and Aprem groaning as they awoke. The only ones still unconscious were Jhoira and Venser.
Radha looked up. “You call that a dragon?” The flying beasts were big enough, but there was nothing reptilian about them apart from their wings.
“Yes, ma’am, a very dangerous one, and there are worse ones yet. Please.” Jiro gestured nervously, trying to coax Radha toward the large staircase that had been carved into the cliffs beyond the fruit trees. “You mustn’t stay out in the open like this. If you’re seen—”
“I said I wasn’t going anywhere,” Radha interrupted.
“But ma’am—”
“What’s going on?” Skive slithered to his feet and stood behind Radha.
“I’m handling this,” she said, without turning. “Is everyone else alive?”
Skive stretched his neck to work a cramped muscle. “Seems that way.”
“Go and check, scaly. This little fellow here says we might be in danger. I want to know which of us is alive and worth carrying if it comes to that.”
“I’m alive,” Corus called.
“Good. I didn’t feel like hauling your bulk around anyway.” She waited for Corus, who had moved up alongside Skive, then she turned to the big viashino. “Wake everyone up and regroup around Jhoira.”
Corus flicked his tongue. “What for?”
“Becau
se Teferi doesn’t care about the rest of us, but he’ll come back for her. Keep her alive and close by and we’ll take the first planeswalker out of here.”
“She’s right,” Skive said. “We swore to protect Jhoira, and the best way to do that is to stay together.”
“Sirs,” Jiro said.
“Quiet,” Corus hissed. He angrily eyed Skive then turned to Radha. “What about the artificer?”
“Bring him, too,” Radha said. “It was his toy that sent us here. Maybe he can tell us how to get back. If not, we can chop him up and use him as bait.”
Corus turned and went back among the rest of their party. Skive stayed behind, near Radha.
She resumed glaring fiercely at the little man with the cat stripes on his face.
“Please,” Jiro said again, imploring with his hands. “This is Yurei-teki’s hunting ground. He is a nekoru prince. The land from here to the mountains is his, and you are on it. How can I make you understand?” He spoke slowly, emphasizing each word distinctly. “You are all fair game.” He turned to Skive. “Forgive me, sir, but I have never seen the likes of you before. Neither has the prince. He will surely hunt you for the novelty alone.”
Skive’s tail lashed behind him. “Oh, mercy me,” he said. “I’m to be hunted by a dragon, am I? This sort of thing never happened to me in Shiv.” He stretched, yawning broadly.
“Sir.” The little man’s tone changed from polite urgency to angry admonishment. “Yurei-teki is a terrible foe. He is also my lord and master, and he deserves your respect.
Radha stepped in between Skive and Jiro. She glared down at the little man. “Prove it,” she said. She flashed her hard, square teeth.
The tattooed man stepped back. “When I summon my master,” Jiro said, “you will wish I had left you to the demon that haunts these cliffs.”
Jiro turned and led the entire party of cat-faced people as they withdrew to center of the cliff top. When they were all assembled twenty feet from Radha and Skive, Jiro reached into his robe and pulled out a round talisman of polished jade. The rest of his tribe clasped hands and began to chant.
Time Spiral Page 20
