Alara Unbroken

by Doug Beyer

  “How?” said Ajani.

  “How doesn’t matter,” said Sarkhan. “How is details. It’s right here, plain as the volcano before us. Just go after what you want, and take it. And if there’s something in your way, you take it anyway. You blast through it, you push it out of your way, or you fly over it.”

  Then, as if to prove his point, he leaped off the ledge into the caldera.

  Ajani gawked as the man tumbled down toward the lava, a dark humanoid silhouette against the glowing red. But then he moved laterally across the lava, and eventually gained in altitude. As Ajani watched, Sarkhan sprouted leathery wings and became a huge flying creature—a dragon.

  The Sarkhan-dragon spiraled around the pillar of lava a few times with the other dragons. As he flew, the pyromantic spell ended, and the pillar dissipated and sank back into the caldera. Ajani saw only a cloud of dragons—Sarkhan had become indistinguishable from them. The dragons began to break off one by one, heading off into the orange sky of Jund. Soon Ajani was alone with the volcano.

  Ajani held his head in his hands. His mind swirled with thoughts that bled with pain and rage. Jazal is dead, he thought. And I’m in a world of fire. He was cut off from his home, and a man who might have understood how to get him back there had just turned into a monster and flown away. The heat from the volcano felt strangely soothing, a fuming salve to his pain. Ajani threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the entirety of the caldera.

  He inched his feet toward the ledge. The heat on the tips of his toes was excruciating.

  What was he about to do? Was he insane—or suicidal? The heat poured into Ajani, penetrated right through his skin, and sizzled inside his veins.

  Jazal was dead, he thought, and he was as good as dead as well. His fate had already been decided. Why not make one choice he could actually control? If death was coming for him, then why not fly into it?

  He took a step—

  What am I doing what am I doing I’m going to die

  As he fell, fumes from the caldera blasted up around him. They scorched his body and his soul, shredding him into pieces and reforming him, enveloping him in an eternity of fiery destruction.

  NAYA

  Smoke wafted from Ajani’s fur.

  The smell of it woke him. He coughed. If he was dead, then the afterlife must smell a lot like his home jungle.

  He sat up and looked around. He recognized the trees and the trails around his pride’s den. It was day. Some cinders were smoldering in his fur; he rubbed them out with his hand. The cinders and smoke kept him grounded—they forced him to remember his planeswalk to Jund, and convinced him it had actually happened.

  Ajani felt hollow.

  The jungle lianas felt like teasing fingers, reaching out to prod and pinch him as he wandered. His fur was grubby, and his mane was speckled with burrs. Instinctively he turned uphill, walking any slope that led upward, without thinking anything but a dim sense of wanting to move away from his own footprints.

  As he climbed in elevation, the roots and cloddy dirt turned to mud. The oppressive humidity turned to rain. The first heavy droplets plunked on the leaves and made them shudder around him. When they dropped onto his body, they broke apart into steam, cooling and soothing him.

  In the distance he heard the low rumbles of gargantuans’ voices over the beginnings of the rain. The colossal beasts’ voices carried for miles—which was good, because being in earshot didn’t mean being in range of their huge feet. Jazal used to say that their ancient minds held the secrets of another age. When they were boys, the two brothers would strain their ears to listen to the gargantuans’ voices, but they could never understand the words. It was a music of pain, Ajani thought, part of the deep rhythm of Naya. Sometimes as he slept in their camp, he fell asleep to the long, low, rumbling sighs of the gargantuans, and fell into dreams where the stars were singing sad songs to him.

  The rain was clattering, and Ajani was soaked in moments. He usually had a tarp to keep him out of the afternoon rain, but without one, the water just ran down his body in rivulets, chasing streaks of ash from the Jund volcano. That was exile, pridelessness, he thought. The inability to get out of the rain.

  The slope was getting steeper. Ajani didn’t know if he was trying to reach a destination, but he recognized where he was. The canopy opened up to reveal a clearing, in which sat the ruins of a nacatl city. Huge broken slabs of white granite jutted up at odd angles from the earth. A temple supported a network of climbing vines twisting over its steep, moss-covered steps. Birds alighted on shrines and headless statues. The rain gave the ruins an even more deserted feeling—no one was there to protect any of its structures. It was naked to the elements.

  It was a forbidden place. They were the ruins of Antali.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” said a delicate voice.

  Ajani whirled around. A very old nacatl woman stood before him in shaman’s dress, not looking up into his eyes. Her fur was dark gray, like the coal tips of hardwood after an evening’s fire, but now matted with rain. Her pupils were huge, almost filling her entire eyes. She didn’t seem to be using them.

  “You shouldn’t be here, but I suspect you’re meant to be. You’re here to read the Coil, I suppose?”

  “No, I—”

  “Come along, then.”

  Ajani looked around. The rain was moving on, rolling along the grassy square of Antali like a cloud. Mist soon enveloped the ruins. The old woman was so silent of foot that Ajani had to hurry to keep sight of her in the fog.

  “This is where the hero Marisi led his uprising, you know,” said the old woman. “You’ve heard the story? You should, young thing like you. They should teach you the stories. Marisi was a great man—he freed the minds of the nacatl who lived here. The city was decadent. No one remembered their inner natures here. They had gone soft, because life was too easy up here. Peace and law for generations—it made everyone fat and vile.”

  The woman was leading Ajani through the fog. Ajani wondered how her steps were so sure, given her obviously failing sight. There was a rough trail that led up a bit higher.

  “They pulled down the Coil, smashed it to rubble. But you can still read the scratchforms. You’ll see.”

  Ajani had heard mention of the Coil in the hadu, during the yearly Feast of Marisi. The memory stung him—Jazal. He wished he remembered more of what Jazal’s speeches were supposed to teach him.

  “What exactly is the Coil?” he asked.

  “The Coil was Law,” said the old woman. “One hundred twenty-one guiding principles, scratched into granite by the Cloud Nacatl. One hundred twenty-one shackles on our minds. The high-minded nacatl of Qasal, over on the next mountain, are still bound by its precepts. They still hold onto civilization. But their souls have lost the rage, the rage that makes us who we are.”

  They came upon a bowl in the earth, an amphitheater carved into a grassy slope. Steps led down to a dais where an immense disc of white granite lay broken. As they approached it, Ajani saw the spiraling geometric shapes of the scratchforms gouged into it, a recording method only the shamans in Ajani’s pride had used. Jazal had been able to read some simple scratchforms, and had tried to teach his brother, but Ajani had always been more interested in developing his skill with the axe instead. The thickness of the disc came up to Ajani’s waist, and its diameter was thrice his height. A meandering crack divided the disc into two large pieces and many smaller ones, and seedlings and patches of moss had blossomed between them. The pattern of the scratchforms across the pieces was dizzying.

  “The Coil recorded a way of life that was supposed to support freedom through law,” said the old woman. “When I was a girl, the hero Marisi smashed the Coil so that we all could recover what we had lost.”

  “I can’t read it,” said Ajani.

  The old woman put her hand on the disc. She ran her fingers over the scratchforms. “You don’t need to. You can feel what they represent, can’t you? There’s rage in your scent. I can sense you share
in Marisi’s cause.”

  “What I feel is not Marisi’s rage. I have my own.”

  “Even better. Each of us needs our own burden to shove against. Each of us needs our own load to weigh us down. What have you pushed up the mountain with you?”

  Ajani was beginning to wonder whether the old crone had anything left rattling around in her head. He looked at his hands. “I have nothing.”

  “Nonsense. Tell me what you’ve brought with you here, boy. What burden do you carry?”

  He said the first thing that came to mind, the only thing on his mind. “The death of my brother.”

  The old woman hissed a laugh. “Death? It must be fresh for your scent to be so warm.”

  “He was … murdered.”

  “Ah, yes. Now I see. You have the blaze in you now. That’s good. Who killed your kin, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The blaze demands better than that. It will eat away at you the longer you put it off. I see now why you’ve come. Say it.”

  What was she talking about?

  “Say it!”

  “Say what, old woman? I don’t know what you think I was trying to—”

  The woman sprang forward and clawed him suddenly, raking his bare chest with surprising viciousness. Ajani roared and instinctively fell into a battle stance.

  “Yes,” she said. “Tell me what the blaze wants.”

  Ajani didn’t know whether to leave or break her arms.

  She raked at him again. He was ready for it and stepped out of the way, but her other claw slashed at his arm as he dodged the first blow. Blood oozed down his arm.

  “Say it! Say it!” she cried.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say!”

  The woman pounced on him, sinking her claws deep into his chest. It felt like she were clutching his heart itself, coiling her claws around the still-beating organ and twisting it around in its cage. Ajani roared and seized the woman in his own claws, wrenched her free of him, and threw her.

  She was light. She arced up and down and slammed her head into one corner of the Coil. She fell limp on the ground.

  Ajani gasped and rushed over to her, cradling her in his arms. His blood was pumping, and his claws wouldn’t retract.

  Blood oozed from a gash above one of the woman’s pupil-filled eyes. She came to, blinking and smiling. “Now you know it,” she said. “Now you can say it.”

  Ajani’s nostrils flared with his brisk breaths.

  “I will kill whoever murdered my brother.”

  PART

  TWO

  NAYA

  The dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas exhaled a sigh of black smoke. He had grown used to the chill, dead air of Grixis, and Naya’s cloud jungle felt intolerably hot. The sodden air clung to his skin and slithered through his nostrils. And the plane positively teemed with living things. Something was crawling on every part of him—a rodent of some kind, a bird, a legion of insects. He twitched his limbs to shoo them away, but they were quickly replaced by other living things. Naya was the most exuberant world of Alara. It was suffocating.

  Before him, looking more like an insect to him than the warrior hero of his reputation, was the leonin Marisi, kneeling like a forgotten penitent.

  “I didn’t expect your visit, Master,” said Marisi, bowing his head.

  Despite the oppressive life of the plane, Bolas’s plans required such unpleasant stopovers. Once his plans were properly actualized, he would be able to summon his minions to his lair, fill their tiny brains with his orders, and fling them back across the aether. He longed for that day. Until then, he’d have to make the visits in person. Exhausting.

  “It was necessary. I need to be elsewhere soon, so I’ll keep this short. The issue is this: I need more assurance of conflict from your world. The leonin of Naya already hate one another, thanks to your intervention years ago. But I want more. I want the elves,” said Bolas.

  “You can’t have the elves,” said Marisi.

  “This is not a negotiation. This is not a request. I need the elves.”

  Marisi shook his furry little cat-head. “I’m sorry, Master, but it’s too late,” he said. “The convergence is too soon.”

  Bolas lowered his brow. “Then you’ll have to act quickly, won’t you?”

  “It’s not a matter of acting quickly or slowly. The elves have a deep history on Naya. They won’t be motivated to war so easily. They won’t believe any prophecy we could cook up in the time remaining, let alone my counsel. I am a hero to the nacatl, but to the elves, I’m just some cat-man.”

  “Need I remind you of your advanced age? If you see fit to sever our agreement, I would be happy to let you face the depredation of time.”

  “No … I—I’m sorry, Master. I appreciate your magics. But the elves—they’re more difficult than the nacatl. They trust only one thing.”

  Bolas flicked his tongue against his teeth. “And what is that?”

  “They call it Progenitus.”

  “What is ‘Progenitus’?”

  “It’s their supposed hydra god. They believe that it created the world, and that now it lives deep under Naya. Of course it’s legend, but it gives their dull lives some comfort. Elves live a long time. I think they need stories to occupy their minds.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, nobody has ever seen this Progenitus, of course. But the elves depend on its ‘ judgment.’ They believe this elf girl, Mayael, can read secret signs extant in the natural world. The signs allow the girl to perceive the mind of Progenitus directly, and her pronouncements guide all of elvish society. But I doubt her authenticity. It’s just myth and superstition.”

  Bolas sat back, finally comfortable in the heat.

  “Not anymore, it isn’t.”

  JUND

  If you’re lying about this, I’ll kill you,” said Sarkhan. “You know that.”

  Rakka grinned, her sharp black teeth meshing into one another. “If I were interested in your death, I’d have left you under a pile of rock.”

  Sarkhan and Rakka rested on the top of a volcanic cliff overlooking the green, jungle-choked channels below. The stones were like cut glass. Sarkhan’s gloves were sliced through in a dozen places, and he wasn’t looking forward to examining his boots. They had taken a circuitous route up the mountain, avoiding cascades of lava that poured over outcroppings at regular intervals and fell hundreds of feet to red-hot pools. As they climbed they passed cooled lava tubes, many of which showed signs of habitation: simple tools, broken pottery. Who would live among dripping lava, up on the high cliffs where dragons flew? On every world he had seen, it was the same thing, thought Sarkhan. What cosmic crime had goblins committed that they occupied the worst point on the food chain everywhere he went?

  As they climbed, Rakka’s feet caught the nooks in the volcanic cliff easily and regularly. She was more nimble than she looked. She was full of surprises, Sarkhan thought grimly.

  “Don’t worry,” said Rakka. “You’ll see. You’ll be impressed. He’s just your type, trust me.”

  “I didn’t come all the way to this place to be ambushed by more of your raiders,” he told know where you’ve been the last her. “Or struck down by a petty spell while I’m weak from climbing. I mean it. You lie, and you die.”

  Rakka scoffed. “You’re worse than Kresh.”

  “And you betrayed Kresh. You got most of his men devoured by that hellkite! The last thing I should be doing is following y—”

  “Shh!”

  “What is i—”

  “Shhhh!”

  Rakka had stopped. What ruse was she planning? But as he listened, he heard scrabbling sounds echoing from deep inside the lava tubes. Goblins. Sarkhan readied a spell—a little lavamancy should keep the hungry buggers off of him.

  “Don’t move,” Rakka hissed. “And don’t cast anything.”

  You’re out of your mind, Sarkhan thought. Or perhaps this was her ambush. He began the first steps of the spell. He could a
lready feel the satisfying tug of a nearby stream of lava; its course was beginning to divert. One more good, solid act of will, and it would pour into the echoing lava tube and make crispy statues of the incoming goblins.

  Rakka hissed once more—not an instruction, just a noise of urgency.

  “Fine,” he said under his breath. “I’ll wait one moment. But if one of those goblins so much as nibbles on me, I’ll roast the lot of them.”

  Sure enough, goblins surged out of the tunnels, chittering and rasping like deranged rats. They flowed over the cliffs in a furry stream, moving in every direction including against gravity, as if they didn’t notice its pull. They came close to Sarkhan, brandishing short spears and making click-wheeze sounds of irritation at him. He didn’t budge—he just stared back at them. One of them reached tentatively toward the staff at his side, and he snarled at it. It yelped and scrabbled off up the mountain.

  The goblins swarmed up past the two shamans and disappeared over the top of the cliff. Sarkhan heard their steps and clicking calls recede into the distance, and only then did he speak again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me they were plant-eaters?”

  “They aren’t,” said Rakka. “They just have bigger things to worry about than us.”

  “What, I’m not tasty enough?”

  “It’s just a little while now. Let’s go—it’s just a little farther to his favorite spot.”

  “I’m offended, really. I’ve been bitten by goblins on five worlds, and these things didn’t even stop to—”

  “Come on.”

  The goblins climbed over one another in a jumble on the mountaintop plateau, a pile of furry humanoids eager to be as close to the sky as possible. It was as high as those goblins would ever get outside of a dragon’s maw, thought Sarkhan, and yet they had brought themselves so low. It was disgusting—choosing to make themselves prey for the draconic lords of the world. He could understand their revering the mighty beasts, but not prostrating themselves before them. That was not a relationship of respect or admiration. That was an orgy of self-destruction, the pathetic chorus of victims begging homicidal charity from a superior being.