by Doug Beyer
His eyes were red and bloodshot.
“Rafiq. No. What you did was right. Don’t spend any more time bothering with it. I was a monster. I have to live with that.”
“But it was just—”
“And don’t tell me it was the enchantment. I know that. But I remember how it felt, Rafiq. I remember the crunch of my mace against their skulls. I remember the coldness in my veins. I remember the thrill of it. It may have been magic that awakened those parts of me, but they were already there.”
“No.”
“They were already there, Rafiq.”
Rafiq felt like hitting something. He exhaled, calming himself.
“The sages … The sages want to know more,” Rafiq said. “About the mind control you suffered. They want to know as much as they can, so they can avoid it in the future.”
“Rafiq, listen. I’ve been doing some reading. There are some similarities—”
“No, you listen. We’re out there fighting the horrors from Esper every day now. We need your experiences, so we can learn to fight against their magics, and defend our land. All of Bant is at stake.”
“But this is important,” said Mubin. “I think these old passages, these ancient prayers, mention things that are actually coming to pass, and give instructions for what to do when the—”
“That’s enough! Enough of these choir-boy distractions! At attention! On your feet, soldier!”
Mubin’s eyes went wide.
“Oh, holy Asha. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m—”
“Rafiq, it’s all right.”
“I’m so sorry. I … Look, I have to go. Uh, please tell the clerics all you can remember. It’ll … It’ll help the war effort. It was good to see you. I …”
He left.
Rafiq was out the door before he could see Mubin’s expression. He held the door shut with his back. He wondered whether friendship was something a sword could sever.
ESPER
Rafiq’s contingent huddled between strange, glittering dunes in a desert of fine particles of glass. They were deep in Esper, ahead of the main invasion force just as Rafiq wanted. The plane’s night sky was crisscrossed by grid-lines, as if even the stars had been categorized and dissected by the world’s mages, just like the etherium-infused bodies of the Esper denizens themselves.
“If I may speak freely, Knight-General, sir?” said an aven scout.
“You may, Scout—Kaeda, is it?” asked Rafiq.
“Yes, sir,” said the aven. His wings were folded military-tight, ruffled only slightly by the winds of Esper. “Sir, it’s not appropriate for you to accompany us on this mission. Your life is too valuable. If we’re only doing a routine city capture, then with all due respect, we don’t need your direction.”
“I understand your concern, Scout Kaeda, and I agree. You are quite capable of carrying out the letter of this mission without me.”
“I thought you would believe so, Knight-General. Which means there are parts of the mission that are secret, which I fully understand and accept. But out of concern for your safety, as the second-in-command of this party, I believe …” The aven trailed off.
“Yes?”
“I believe you should let us help in that part of the mission.”
Rafiq smirked.
“You should only do what’s appropriate, of course,” the aven continued. “But you should know that this squad is ready to die for whatever cause requires your presence here. We are some of the best eyes in Asha’s Army, and there are several Sigiled among our ranks, including me. We can help, if you let us.”
“Thank you for your offer,” said Rafiq. “I feel genuinely secure because of your devotion to Bant and to my safety.”
“Sir.”
“But I cannot divulge any reasons for my presence here. Please continue on the orders you’ve been given.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Dismissed.”
Rafiq felt a heavy weight on his heart—a literal one. Gleaming over his breast was a broad sigil, the face of the archangel Asha crossed with two swords, the sigil of patronage signifying his rank as Knight-General. His assigned mission in Esper was to strike a blow against the enemy by capturing or razing Palandius, a large city of Esper—a singularly daring and perilous maneuver. His personal quest was stranger, more occult, and far more dangerous.
BANT
Still in his bedchamber, Mubin looked up from the courier’s letter, furious.
“He left? How could he leave?”
“Knight-General Rafiq said he’d expressed his reasons in that letter, sir,” said the soldier. “Several small forces of Asha’s Army have begun actually invading parts of Esper. It’s seen as the proper strategy, not only to defend Bant, but to cleanse the entire new world of the enemy’s forces.”
Mubin wadded the letter up. “Damn fool. Damn, damn, damn, damn fool.”
“Sir?”
“ ‘ My cherished friend,’ he says. He goes on about ‘magics in Esper’ and ‘exotic metals that perfect the body.’ He’ll be a corpse in a foreign land without me—and he’s only going because of me. Me and my useless legs.”
“He had orders to go,” said the soldier.
“We had orders to go,” said Mubin. “This mission, this thought of invasion, should have been off the minute I betrayed us all. This was not supposed to be a mission for one man.”
“It won’t be,” said the soldier. “He took a contingent of elite soldiers and knights with him. He’s the Knight-General, sir. He’s leading the invasion of Esper; it’s a glorious time for us.”
“Dismissed,” Mubin said, because there was nothing in reach to hurl at the soldier.
“Yes, sir,” said the soldier. The door closed behind him.
The world spun around Mubin. In his mind’s eye, he saw the entire plane of Bant as one continent floating on a vast sea of blackness. He saw Rafiq riding ahead of a legion of valiant soldiers to the edge of the world, marching in time, taking step by excruciating step with their heads held high, their eyes not watching for the cliff’s edge, but scanning for angels in the heavens above them.
ESPER
The demon-dragon Malfegor strode across the white sandbanks of Esper, the deformed entourage of his undead army trudging and scuttling their way around him. The sky was odd in Esper, a bright hood of gray clouds for half the time, and a clear black basin littered with glittering lights for the other half. Thankfully, it was in the darker state, and Malfegor could detect faint lines of magic crisscrossing in a grid above him, as if painted directly on the sky. The wind blew in wild gusts, but the towering clouds moved only in rigid patterns, their volumes cut and shaped by hegemonic magics like razors in clay. The mages on Esper were obsessed with control and measurement, Bolas had said, never leaving anything to chance. To Malfegor, the whole plane seemed like a delicate toy obeying a lattice of arbitrary rules. Malfegor relished the opportunity to shatter as much of as it as he could as he made his way to the Bant frontier.
A ghostly gray silhouette, one of his undead informants, floated up by his ear. “The Cliffs of Ot are dead ahead,” whispered the ghost. “At this rate, we’ll reach the tower of Palandius in four days.”
“Not fast enough,” Malfegor seethed. “Tell the necromancers we’re doubling our pace. No rest for the wicked.”
JUND
Ajani would have been standing firmly on solid ground, the rocky, pyroclastic floor of Jund, had the ground not been suddenly perforated by an enormous, rubble-covered, sandstone step-pyramid from his home world of Naya. He would have reflected on that, and how physically nonsensical it was, had he not been suddenly forced into the position of rolling down the steep and painful steps of that very pyramid as it erupted out of the surface of Jund. After he had managed to claw his way to a rough stop on those steps, he would have taken some time to catch his breath after his planeswalk and to sort out exactly what had happened with the worlds intermixing, had he not been suddenly surrounded by a clan of human warriors wiel
ding obsidian-tipped longspears and crudely-constructed, two-handed greatswords.
“You’re just what we’ve been looking for,” said a muscular, broad-chested human man with braided hair.
“Sinzo, this is an excellent find,” said Kresh.
Sinzo grinned and shook her spear in the air. The other warriors hooted with glee—they knew as well as Kresh did, the white cat-man was a sign meant for them.
Ajani looked stunned, but not injured.
“Are you a ghost?” asked Kresh. “Are you the ghost of this temple of the underworld?” “No,” said the white cat. “But I do come from another world.”
The warriors murmured and nodded to each other.
“Are we to hunt you, then?” asked Kresh. “Or do we follow you, as a guide, to our fates?”
The white cat blinked. It didn’t look sure, which was strange. How could it travel all the way from the underworld, or whatever spirit-world it came from, and not be sure?
“I will lead you,” the cat-man said.
“Excellent,” Kresh said, and the warriors shouted their assent. “Where is it you will lead us, O death-guide? To the highest peak of the Boiling Slopes? Into the mouth of Varakna, deepest of the tarswamps?”
“Well, I was hoping that maybe you could help me with that,” said the cat. “I’m looking for a particular dragon.”
“Ahh,” marveled Kresh. “You are a powerful spirit indeed. You bring us on our final, our greatest Life Hunt. Truly, it is fitting. We shall meet good deaths on the hunt for the grandest species of life in the world.”
“So you know the dragon of which I speak? A dragon called Bolas?”
“Bow-loz? Boh-loss,” said Kresh. “I’ve heard this name. Some have claimed to see the dragon made of shadow blot out the sky.”
“You know where he is?”
“No. But I know a shaman who does.”
It was a lucky day, Kresh thought. He might be able to take vengeance on Rakka after all.
ESPER
The aven Kaeda returned from his sortie near the Esper city of Palandius, a small contingent of other soldiers and mages returning with him. Rafiq noted that he carried an object with him, a container. Perhaps they had actually succeeded.
“Scout Kaeda, report,” said Knight-General Rafiq.
“Sir, the mission went well. We located a group of Esperites who were transporting something—something that I believe is just what you were looking for.” The aven scout set down the heavy metal chest and smoothed down his flight feathers. The dunes of white sand provided good natural cover, but Rafiq knew that Esper’s winds blew the grit directly into his aven scouts’ wings.
“Take a look at your little present,” said Kaeda. The scout cocked his head and pointed his beak in a characteristically aven way, a gesture signifying the equivalent of a smile. He kicked the heavy chest at his feet.
Rafiq grinned with pride. “I hope you didn’t spend too much. All right, all right, open it already! The suspense is eating me up.”
The chest was mostly one solid piece of weathered, dark metal. Kaeda ran his talon over an ornate rune on the top, and a seam appeared around its middle.
“It took us a while to figure out how to open the thing. It takes a little practice.”
The aven pulled the top half off of the chest. Inside was an object wrapped in a healthy amount of cool blue silk cloth. Kaeda moved the cloth to reveal a chunk of brilliant red crystal, about the size of Rafiq’s head. The crystal looked razor-sharp, with an inferno of reflected light glinting in its heart. It looked like the blood of a god.
Rafiq’s grin gave way to open-mouthed amazement. “This is the red rock? The ingredient required for making the Esper metal?”
“Carmot. Yes, we think so. There was a small transport approaching Palandius with the chest. A mage, some soldiers, some little blue-skinned things. They are sure gonna be angry when they wake up. The experiences your friend Mubin shared with us, his insights into their mind attacks, were invaluable.”
“That’s good. All right. Take us to our little sleepers. I want to be there when they wake up.”
Kaeda cocked his head and pointed his beak. “Yes, sir.”
The mage Drimma, before she became the first Esperite ever to be captured by Bant, had studied the Noble Work her entire life. The Noble Work was a grand project, handed down by the wise sphinxes, to perfect all life on Esper by infusing it with the magical alloy known as etherium. Etherium extended one’s lifespan and refined one’s savage impulses, and made Esper a superior, more satisfyingly controlled world in general.
The convergence of Esper with the foreign planes was certainly a shock. The scholars hadn’t predicted it, and if the sphinxes knew it would happen, they hadn’t spread that fact to the human and vedalken communities. That no foreknowledge of that violent, world-shaking event had arisen was unthinkable, and it had shaken common trust in the Hegemon and all the other minds in charge. Drimma’s own mind fluttered with a mixture of unstifled emotions, as confused about the world as she had been in her childhood.
On the other hand, the influx of exotic materials from the fronts had revitalized her life’s work. Etherium stores on Esper had all but dried up across the entire plane, and most believed that the formula for creating more of the magical metal was lost to time. However, a sect of scholars claimed to have attained knowledge of the miraculous recipe, and were conducting experiments to try to reproduce the alloy. Substances not found anywhere on Esper were flooding in as soldiers captured caches of valuables along Esper’s fronts. The prospect of actually creating an ingot of new, not recycled etherium electrified her.
That was how Drimma found herself and her entourage of prosaics and homunculi transporting a chunk of Jundian ore, the material they called carmot, to the Cliffs of Ot. And that was how she found herself overcome by bandit bird-men from Bant.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” said a deep-voiced man in a strange accent.
Drimma’s eyelids cracked open. She scowled up at the faces around her. Oh, yes, she thought—those were the warriors of Bant who had ensorcelled her with clumsy sleep magics. It was embarrassing that they had managed to get the upper hand on her.
She glanced around. Her prosaics and homunculi were motionless on the sand—still out cold, or dead. The man who had spoken, apparently their leader, had a hawk-humanoid and a small force of human soldiers with him.
“What do you want,” she croaked at them, enunciating precisely so that they would understand.
“I am Rafiq of the Many, Knight-General of Bant,” said the man. His hair was cropped close to his head, and he was encased in armor of solid metal. A burnished medallion depicting a woman’s face hung over his breast. “And we want the secret of etherium.”
“That’s rather progressive of you,” Drimma said. “But I’m not surprised you want to stop wearing all your metal on the outside.”
The man chuckled. It sounded peculiar coming from an adult. “It’s not for us. We just want to know how to make it, and use it, for … our injured, back on Bant.”
“That would be impossible. This war has cost us much in resources and manpower. There is not enough etherium even for our own people.”
The man looked at her etherium enhancements, the filigree whorls and matrices in her neck and upper arms. “But you can make more. We have the red crystal you were transporting, to prove it.”
“Etherium would be wasted on you; you’re an unenlightened people,” she said. “You don’t know how to control your impulses, or your subjects, or your world. You’re imprecise, untuned, unbalanced. You don’t know what to do with what you have. But we do.”
“That’s why you fight us? To claim our resources?”
“Very specific resources. We take your lands to procure the materials that Esper requires, to continue our Noble Work.”
Rafiq looked her right in the eyes. “You’ll fail in this war,” he said after a moment. “Ours is the side of justice. Where is the—”
Drimma closed her eyes. The conversation was going nowhere. She was outnumbered and surrounded; better to be patient, and wait for an opening to outwit them. “Justice is impotent in the face of prophecy,” she said quietly. “Our scholars have always prophesied our victory. The Filigree Texts have always said so.”
“And yet, so have our ancient prayers,” said the man of Bant. “Put her to sleep again.”
As Drimma lost consciousness once more, she heard the Bant creatures’ voices trail off.
“Take her away,” Rafiq told his soldiers. “But keep her alive. We have some very specific questions for her later. Load up this crystal and take it back to Bant. Deliver our reconnaissance to Aarsil the Blessed.”
“What will the rest of us do, sir?”
“You’re coming with me to the next horizon… There we must be the eyes of Asha—and if necessary, her sword.”
THE BLIND ETERNITIES
The five worlds, floating together in the chaos of the Blind Eternities, were not just neighbors, but were siblings. They were all shards of a larger world, the plane of Alara, whose essence had been split five ways centuries before. For reasons Ajani never knew, the shards of Alara had broken like the colors through a prism, and traveled away from one another for a long time. And the shards had slowed in their respective journeys, and begun a return trip back to each other again. It may have been due to the way the mana fractured across the five; they couldn’t live without one another. It may have been due to the efforts of some deep force that pulled their centers to one another, something like the force that pushed water downstream and stones down the slopes of mountains. It could have been meant to be part of the very act that broke them apart, that the five pieces wouldn’t become explosive detritus but missiles in five special orbits, destined to smash back into one another again.
