It was conspicuously quiet. When he walked along the riverbank, the stones under his feet scraped against each other in an imitation of company, and the river murmured continuously. But these simple nature sounds were not Ravnica’s urban bustle. They were not Emmara’s voice in his head. If there was a way for him to communicate with her from one plane to another, he didn’t know it. The link was broken. He was cut off.
The gray trees gave way to a clearing, and the land fell away into a broad valley. The landscape looked like it had been torn by claws. Gorges traced across the valley, like roads of ruin. The soil had turned ashen, brittle, lifeless. Even the stone rubble looked pitted and porous, as if it had been drained.
He didn’t have to return, of course. If he were caged on Ravnica, or if some mystical gravity drew him irresistibly back, then he would be released from the decision. But nothing was forcing him. He adjusted the makeshift bandage on his neck, which was beginning to soak through with a wet red stain. From this serene world, Ravnica seemed unreal, like a collection of vivid paintings he had seen once in a mad dream. He squatted down on the pebbles of the riverbank and used a stick to turn over the bones of whatever he had eaten the last time he was here. He wondered where his own body would eventually rest, and how alien it would seem, his haphazard bones a curiosity on a world without humanoids or perhaps even without bones. It was entirely within his power to do absolutely nothing, and to speak to no one for the rest of his life, and to contribute his alien bones here, to this world, to this stony riverbank.
He thought of Emmara and was immediately tempted to forget her face. He hadn’t intended to abandon her, but perhaps that was how planeswalkers survived. Perhaps that was how they prevented bonds with any one place or with any one person. They kept themselves cleanly separate, isolated, and their nature secret. Knowledge of other worlds would be too difficult for the planebound to understand. The people of Ravnica wouldn’t want to know that their own plane was only one speck in an infinite Multiverse. In a way, Jace was doing Emmara a favor. That was the best way for him to care for her, to keep her at arm’s length. If he allowed himself to want anything more, it would compromise his very identity as a traveler of planes. It would compromise who he was.
Jace watched the opposite shore across the river and tried to listen for evidence of some form of animate life. It was quiet to his ears, but with his mental senses he felt a wisp of thought, like faraway voices almost hidden in the wind.
He told himself to close his mind off, to keep himself isolated from the minds he sensed. But something made him reach out to them, to find their source. He could see no one in the ruined valley. It looked as lifeless as burned sand. He walked along the river and listened with his mind.
As he walked, the thoughts grew stronger. He could hear shreds of intelligent thought, strands of conversation. He spread out his consciousness, and found their source—the thoughts were coming from somewhere deep underground. He focused in on one of the minds, fearing that someone might be trapped below the ruined land. But there was fatigue in the person’s mind, and the dull ache of constant worry, but no panic. She was a woman of Zendikar’s kor race, sharpening a steel sword while talking with her family. They all lived in a dark, grimy cavern under the surface of the land. Her family had been forced to live there as disaster had come to their world. The woman had a determination to her mind, a self-enforced sense of hope that lay behind her constant reassurances to her children. She worried that she could not instill the same hope in her children, that despair would take them.
Jace concentrated, and spread his consciousness out to the rest of the subterranean family. The minds of the son and the two daughters wavered at the edge of despondency, having spent too many weeks without a view of the sun.
Jace hesitated. He was trying to stay disconnected, not to bind himself up with even more people struggling though their lives. But he felt for this woman and her family, and how the children might be able to make it through their plight if they could understand their mother’s force of resolve. He thought back to when he fought Ruric Thar, how he channeled all the minds of the Gruul warriors at once, how he let the communion of their thoughts flow through him. He reached out to all of the family’s minds at one time.
With concentration, he could do it—but it didn’t accomplish anything. He could feel all of their thoughts together, but they couldn’t hear each other. The communication was one way, from them to Jace only. Perhaps if he could get himself out of the way, let their minds flow into one another’s without him in the way. Perhaps if he could become a kind of bridge, and put them in contact with each other directly—
Jace grabbed his head and cried out. It felt as if his mind was coming apart, disintegrating from the inside out, coming unraveled. Concentrating on multiple minds at once was arduous enough, but letting the family’s thoughts channel through him and into each other’s minds shredded his faculties and caused him outright pain. It was worse even than the feeling of planeswalking; it was as if that form of mind magic was shredding his very soul. He snapped back his senses, disconnecting himself from the family and the family from each other, and after a few long heartbeats, the pain subsided.
He stood there with his hands on his knees, alone at the cusp of the devastated valley, heaving breaths. His entire body throbbed, as if every part of him had tried to flee in a different direction all at once. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he felt he had touched something new in himself, and it almost killed him. He had attempted mind magic that was clearly beyond him, or perhaps it was inherently deadly, unable to be mastered. He never wanted to attempt that again.
Still, for a moment he had been that bridge. He had used his own mind as a conduit to let those people reach out to each other, and for a moment, the mother’s defiance flowed into her children in a way she had never been able to express, and their aching admiration of her flowed back. Jace had removed himself from the exchange almost entirely, but it somehow still made him feel intimately close to them.
Jace forced himself to turn his back on the valley. He stalked back upriver, thinking of the black void he had seen inside the mind of Calomir, or the creature that had his face. The Dimir shapeshifter’s mind had been unreachable, the perfect haven for secrets, the perfect foil for Jace’s magic. As Jace walked up the hill he also walked away from this world, his physical form inverting on itself and fading from Zendikar. His path of footprints in the riverbank came to an abrupt end.
THE PARUN’S PROXY
Jace materialized with his feet on worn stone, a quiet arrival. The spires and skywalks of Ravnica’s Tenth District soared above him, and pedestrians flowed around him. No one noticed his sudden appearance. The morning sun rose over a wide stone courtyard before him, an unusually open space in the middle of the district. Nine ancient obelisks surrounded the courtyard, each one marked with one of the guild signets—all but Dimir, which had once been an unacknowledged guild. At the base of each guild pillar was a kiosk where guild representatives handed out information about the guilds, and at the center of the courtyard, floating a few feet off the ground, was a massive stone dais. This place was the Forum of Azor, named after the founder of the Azorius guild, and Jace knew it was the endpoint of the maze, the finish line of the race that would soon be run.
Jace sensed the power contained here as a feeling of expectation, like waiting for a glacier to crack in the warmth of spring. The forum was the prize at the end of the labyrinth, an explosion of ancient power frozen in architecture and hidden in plain sight. The recruiters and guild hopefuls who lingered here didn’t seem to feel the power of the place. They treated it like any other public square in the Tenth, but the significance and concentrated mana of forum made the hairs on Jace’s neck stand on end. This was the center of all the lore that Jace had studied, forgotten, and relearned again, and this was the site of the ultimate prize that all the guilds sought. This was the place Jace had to understand, deeply and entirely, in order to make Emmara win.