Eldritch Moon

Collected Stories

Compiled by Kimberly J. Kreines

Contents

Copyright

1. The Archmage of Goldnight

2. Stone and Blood

3. Emrakul Rises

4. Innistrad’s Last Hope

5. Campaign of Vengeance

6. Saint Traft and the Flight of Nightmares

7. Battle of Thraben

8. The Promised End

ELDRITCH MOON: COLLECTED STORIES

© 2016 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Printed in the U.S.A.

Cover art by Adam Willson

First Printing: July 2016

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1

The Archmage of Goldnight

By Kimberly J. Kreines

The world of Innistrad has been descending into madness for some time now; from cultists to cathars, no mind is safe. Even angels have fallen prey. Avacyn herself went mad, transforming from protector to monster and wreaking unimaginable devastation upon even the most faithful in her church. Then she was destroyed. With its angelic protector gone, Innistrad was exposed to overwhelming forces of darkness and evil. Now, the few on the plane who have not yet lost their minds are left to wonder if this is the end. As the world tilts off balance, beginning its final descent, the people pray for anything or anyone powerful enough, good enough, to stand in Avacyn's place, to protect them from the maddening darkness.

Present Day

The scent of angel's blood. There was nothing like it in all the Multiverse: a biting bouquet, sweet and brackish, tinged with spice and sharp with power. The aroma met Arlinn's wide wolf nostrils as she raced up the sheer incline of a gorge toward the town of Lambholt under siege. She snarled at the smell of it, cursing. She hadn't been fast enough. She should have been the one to draw the blood, to fell the angel, to earn its wrath. She was the protector of the Ulvenwald.

Faster.

She had witnessed the mad angel's descent on Lambholt from afar; the divine being had dived down, past the rooftops and steeples. Cries of horror and flashes of light had followed. Moments later, the angel had surfaced, wings bloody and sword aflame, only to plunge in once more.

Art by Cynthia Sheppard

Though Arlinn hadn't seen all that had happened beyond the rooftops, she could imagine it well enough. There was only so much that mad angels did. They were broken, inconsolable, shrieking and crying of Avacyn's death as they careened through the sky. It seemed impossible that the angel was truly gone, but there was no denying the hole in the fabric of Innistrad. A hole that was filling rapidly with wails of innocents, roars of flames, and cackling of corrupted beings.

The desperate trumpet of a cathar's horn—a Goldnight's, she knew the tenor—spurred Arlinn on. She summoned strength from the forest, pumping the thick muscles of her legs, pushing herself up the slope. Faster. But she feared it was already too late. Blood had been shed, and not just angelic. Human blood too. The cathars. Arlinn could picture them, holy weapons raised, magical invocations on their lips. But they would not be blessed with the power they prayed for; Avacyn was not there to answer their prayers.

Years Ago

"Arlinn Kord, in being here tonight, you have answered the call of the holy protector, Avacyn. There is no greater blessing than that which you are about to receive. Please step forward."

Archmage Reeves stood on the altar of Goldnight, gesturing for Arlinn to join him and Archmage Rembert. The archmages could have no idea how much this moment meant to Arlinn. They would never understand fully—she couldn't tell them. It was so much more than the archangel's sacrament, extraordinary though that may be; to her, it was freedom. But if she were to explain that to the holy men before her, it would all be over.

Arlinn rose from her bent position of supplication and ascended the stairs to meet the two archmages. Reeves didn't look at her, but Rembert shifted his gaze, a smile on his thin lips. Arlinn returned the smile as best she could, her lips trembling. She fixed her eyes on the familiar sights around her in an attempt to quell the alternating swells of anxiety and anticipation that surged through her. The chapel at Elgaud Grounds was small but far from simple. The altar shone with golden detail bearing the symbol of Avacyn. Thick white fabrics were draped from the ceiling on all sides, creating the feeling of a protected alcove, which was filling with clouds of incense, peaceful yet powerful.

"In the name of Avacyn and with the power vested in me by her holy church, I confer upon you this blessing," Archmage Reeves began to chant. Arlinn knew the words well. She had listened to this prayer countless times over the past years as the sole cathar who had been present at every archmage's ceremony of blessing. She had watched those who had gone before her stand on this very altar and receive the highest sacrament. Each time, she had wondered if it would ever be her; each time, from her seat in the pew nearest the altar, she had doubted herself; and each time, from the same seat, she had reminded herself to believe in the power of Avacyn. Now, here she was.

Archmage Reeves held up the thick gold chain with the shining medallion, the mantle of Goldnight. "Arlinn Kord, I present you with this mantle, the symbol of Avacyn's endless love and ceaseless protection."

At the correct moment, Arlinn bowed her head, and Reeves slipped the chain around her neck. The medallion was heavier than she had imagined. She could feel the weight of it on her chest and she could sense its holy power. It was the power she needed, the power that she had come here seeking. Light. Goodness. Truth.

She knew she was supposed to stand still, unmoving for the duration of the ceremony, yet she couldn't stop herself from touching it, allowing it to rest in her palm, running her fingers around its circumference. It was beautiful and pure, and now it was hers.

Archmage Rembert's hand clasped her shoulder. "You must know how proud I am," he whispered as Reeves continued the chant.

A swell of emotions collected in Arlinn's throat, preventing her from responding, but she met Rembert's eyes, willing him to see her gratitude in her gaze. He had been her constant over the years, a mentor who had pushed her, been patient with her, and helped her to hone her strengths. He knew her better than anyone—and yet, even he did not know the truth.

Arlinn abruptly averted her gaze from his. How many times had she wanted to tell him? But she could not. If he knew the truth about her, about what she was, his hand would be forced against her. The clot of emotions in her throat loosed itself and seeped down into her chest, turning into icy-cold guilt. Arlinn shrunk from it. She had promised herself that she would not feel this guilt any longer, not after tonight, but it wasn't as easy to dismiss as she wished it were. Images of her wards, hundreds of them that she had crafted against the curse of lycanthropy, flashed across her mind. The feeling of the moonlight on her skin. The howls she heard late at night. She had kept the secret all this time, from all of them. She had to. A lycanthrope could not be an archmage of Goldnight, and Arlinn had to become an archmage of Goldnight. It was this blessing that would save her from her curse.

The blessing of Avacyn was stronger than the evil inside her. It would repress the savagery. All these years, this is what she had been working toward. After tonight, she would be able to trust herself. Finally, and absolutely.

She breathed out, a breath it seemed she had been holding for years. She looked back up at Rembert and held his gaze as Reeves completed the chant of Goldnight.

"And now, we pray, together." Reeves nodded to Arlinn, and she joined him as he began the final prayer. "Dear, Avacyn, protector of all, Holy One who grants us power, we—"

"It's an attack!" The shout sliced through the incense-laden air, and the thick white drapes billowed, exposing the altar to a gust of cold wind that came through the door. "Devils in Havengul! Hordes of them!" It was Cathar Leighton who was shouting, running up the aisle toward the altar, his sword raised. "The Flight of Goldnight sent for you." He stumbled up the steps to Reeves. "They asked for the aid of the archmages."

"Then we ride!" Reeves shrugged off the ceremonial robe he was wearing, already following Leighton back down the aisle.

Rembert followed suit. "Archmage Kord, your blade!"

Arlinn started. That was her. He was calling her. An archmage. "But the prayer. We didn't finish." She knew it was a foolish thing to say in such a moment, but her mind was reeling, her emotions raw. All this time she had been anticipating this moment, and now it was as though it had been left dangling, as a thread from a riding cloak, just as likely to be torn away as to unravel the rest of the cloak. She needed to know it was done; she needed to know she was finally and fully an archmage.

Rembert opened his mouth as though to chide her, but then his gaze softened as he met her eyes. He paused at the door. "You asked me before this night began if I believed you were ready to become an archmage of Goldnight."

Arlinn nodded. "I did."

"And what I said then remains true now. In my mind you have been an archmage since you first arrived. Never have I seen a brighter, more promising student. Now you have in name what you have always had in heart. You are one of the Goldnight, Arlinn Kord, bound by the sacrament that holds us together, bound to the angel and to each other, always. Completed ceremony or no, it is official."

Arlinn attempted a smile. "All right." It was official. She could live with that. Though she wished she felt it more strongly; she had imagined that in the moment she would feel a rush of power and freedom.

"And now the Goldnight have been called to ride." Rembert opened the door. "We must go."

"Yes, we must." Arlinn hurried down the aisle.

Rembert cleared his throat as they hastened through the door. "Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't do the duty of the church and ensure the final prayer is complete."

"Oh?" Arlinn looked to the achmage.

"Say it with me as we go. Dear, Avacyn, protector of all," Rembert began.

Together they completed the final prayer to Avacyn, calling the words out between heaving breaths of biting cold air as they raced across Elgaud Grounds toward the stables. By the time she climbed onto her horse, Arlinn was an archmage; she felt it in her soul.

They found the town of Havengul ablaze. As Leighton had warned, hordes of wicked devils hung from every bough, swung from the rafters, and danced in the streets. A group of a dozen or so of the fiends cavorted across the town's highest rooftops, launching fireballs at anything that was not already burning, and more just to add to the flames. One perched on an old man's head, slashing at his face from above with its needle-like fingers, while two others hung from the man's hands to prevent him from swatting the first away. Another of the devils toyed with a young man who was only barely conscious, scraping foul designs into his skin with its dirt-encrusted nails, letting just enough blood to keep him alive while causing just enough pain that he wished he was not. Their laughter rang out above the crackling flames, their lungs unaffected by the choking smoke that had driven so many of the townsfolk to their knees. Arlinn hated them instantly.

Art by Filip Burburan

Flight Goldnight had arrived just before the cavalry, and now the archmages and cathars joined the battle begun by the angels. Their first priority was to establish a sanctuary. An angel, Freydalia, blessed a small church, casting a spell of protection over it, and under Rembert's orders Arlinn and the others began shuttling victims to safety. They were to save the innocents first, and when that was through, deal with the wicked.

Arlinn crouched next to the burning remains of an upturned carriage, reaching underneath its hot wooden body for the unwilling hand of a small boy. Another angel, Olaylie, hovered above, holding at bay a mass of devils that threatened to leap down from a nearby rooftop.

"They won't be deterred much longer," Olaylie called down to Arlinn. The angel impaled one of the devils with her spear, but at the same time, four more jumped up to grab her weapon, engaging in a vicious tug-of-war.

Arlinn extended her fingers farther toward the boy. She had to hurry. "Give me your hand," she begged.

The child shook his head. The carriage creaked above him. "The devils, they'll get me with their fire if I go out there."

Arlinn didn't want to say that if he didn't come out he would meet a fiery death all the same; she didn't want to frighten him any more than he was. "I know you're scared," she said, "but you don't have to be. I'll protect you, and so will that angel up there." She reached again for his hand, but still the boy cowered.

"But you are just two, and there are so many devils." He peered up through a slit in the wood as a fiery board broke away from the body of the carriage and crashed to the ground at Arlinn's side.

They were running out of time, but Arlinn could not make the boy trust her, so she turned to her faith. "Do you know of Avacyn?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Then you must know that she is more than I could ever be, more than even that holy angel could ever be. Avacyn will help you if we cannot."

The boy considered Arlinn's words. She could not tell what was going on behind his wide brown eyes—all she could do was hope that she had convinced him. "Say the prayer with me," she urged. "Together we'll ask for Avacyn's aid." She chose the most familiar of the prayers she knew, hoping that he would know it too. "Dear, Avacyn, we pray to you now in our time of need. We ask that you—"

"How do you know?" The boy interrupted the prayer. "How do you know she'll help?" he pressed. "And I want a serious answer. Not just something you say to make me come out. I know how adults work, and I'm not going to go out there with the devils just because you say so."

It was Arlinn's turn to consider the child. She could hear Olaylie's wings beating furiously above them, and feel the heat of the devils' flames. But more pressure came from his stare than from the other two combined. "I will give you the most serious answer I know," she said. "I know that Avacyn will help if you pray because she has helped me. Something very bad happened to me once, and I was afraid I was alone. But then I learned I was not. Avacyn saved me."

The carriage above them tilted. "Hurry, Archmage Kord!" Olaylie called from above.

"Give me your hand. Please." Arlinn stretched as far as she could manage, the tips of her fingers coming just short of the boy's elbow.

"You're an archmage?" the boy's expression changed from one of doubt to awe.

"I am." Arlinn nodded down to the medallion that hung around her neck as she braced her back against the hot, sagging wood.

"That's something," the boy said. "All right." He moved cautiously, and ever so slowly. Arlinn held her breath as his small hand reached for hers.

The carriage groaned above them like a beast. Arlinn began her own prayer. Dear Avacyn give me the strength to save this innocent child. She felt the mantle of the Archmage flare to life against her chest. The blessing of Avacyn stirred deep within her. Aloud she prayed for the boy, "Protector of our world, please see us safely to your sanctuary." The stirring became an overwhelming flood of holy power. As the boy's hand touched hers, Arlinn yanked him out from under the carriage with a divine might that sent them both rolling across the ground just as the carriage collapsed.

The angel Olaylie dove, shielding Arlinn and the boy from the fiery shards of wood and the attacks launched by the devils. The boy wailed.

"We're all right," Arlinn buried her nose in the boy's matted hair, breathing in the scent of his life. "You're all right." She rocked him, stroking his face. "I'm going to get you to the church now." She lifted her hand from his head and her breath caught in her throat. Her fingers had come away covered with blood. Her heart postponed its next beat; it refused to sustain her life until she knew that the boy would live. She searched his head for the source of blood, searched his shoulders, his neck. Nothing. But there was more blood. And then more of it. A drop of red fell on Arlinn's own hand. She looked up.

Olaylie was lurching through the sky with a devil on her back. It clawed at her hair with its needle fingers. A second devil jumped on her leg and a third on her shoulder. All dug their wicked hands into her pure flesh. The angel screamed.

Arlinn had never seen an angel bleed. It was as though it was she who had been sliced across the face, as though it was her cry of agony that echoed through the town.

A drop of blood landed on Arlinn's cheek. She could smell it; the angel's blood smelled of the trees of the woods, the air of the heavens, and the waters of the sea. It was a heady aroma, heavy with holy power. It did not belong outside of the angel's body. She moved to help, calling to the angel in desperation, "Olaylie!" But then she remembered the boy, crouched in the crook of her arm. She looked down to him; angel's blood was smeared across his face.

"Save the child first, Archmage Kord!" Olaylie's voice boomed from overhead; it was a command, but it was followed by a softer plea. "Arlinn, please, save the child first."

It was all Arlinn could do to avert her eyes from the sight of the devils tearing into the angel's skin; if she watched a moment longer she would not be able to heed Olaylie's command. She offered her hand again to the boy. "Come with me."

This time he didn't hesitate. He let her guide him through the center of Havengul, running toward the sanctuary, his tiny voice intoning as they went. "Dear Avacyn, please help that angel. Stop the devils from making her bleed. They're hurting her."

Present Day

"In the name of Avacyn, the fallen protector, I will strike you down!" The wail of a mad angel's voice rang out as Arlinn crested the gorge. She plowed ahead only to skid to a stop, claws digging into the forest floor, as a clearing opened up before her. The mad angel was on the ground in the center of the ring of trees. Arlinn stayed low in the brush; remaining undetected would give her the advantage. She peered through the branches, breathing in great mouthfuls of air laced with angel's blood. The angel was bound with rope, an arrow protruding from her gut, wings bloodied. Cathars surrounded her on all sides, their weapons poised. In spite of all of it, the angel was the one with the upper hand. She was a being of unfathomable power, made all the more potent in her madness.

Art by Howard Lyon

"Impure!" the angel shrieked at the cathars. "All of you are impure!" Her sword flashed with fiery magic as she twisted against the ropes. She screamed, a sound of spiteful rage that made Arlinn raise her hackles.

Arlinn's instincts told her to protect the cathars. Baring her teeth, she stalked through the brush, pacing; there was only so long she would wait for an opening before striking.

"Hold her fast!" A familiar voice gave Arlinn pause. Her ears swiveled. "Don't let up on those ropes!" Arlinn's legs went stiff; it couldn't be. But there was no mistaking the archmage as he stormed around from behind the angel, barking orders to the other cathars. "Archers, take aim." Though Rembert's face was red from effort and crusted in dirt, the three long, white scars that ran across his cheek and down his jaw shone in the moonlight.

Arlinn's stomach turned at the sight, at the memory. She backed into the thicker trees, her tail down. Her hind paw landed on a branch. If she had not been so unsteadied by the sight of Rembert, her wild instincts would have taken over, guiding her body, shifting her balance, but in this moment she was more human than wild, and her human mind was reeling, distracted, too slow. The branch snapped—and so too did the angel's head, spinning round, her gaze fixing directly on the woods where Arlinn was concealed. An unsettling smile spread across her face, and the angel lifted her hand. "A monster!" She pointed at Arlinn. "There in the trees! A monster!"

A handful of the cathars turned to look, Rembert included. He picked the werewolf out of the trees before the others; he knew what he was looking for. His eyes locked with Arlinn's and he lifted his hand to his face, fingers tracing the longest of the scars. A tremor ran up Arlinn's spine.

"Oi! Werewolf!" another of the cathars cried, rousing Arlinn from the trance of the past.

The holy men and women stepped back reflexively from the werewolf, closer to the angel—no! Arlinn wanted to cry out, but it would only be a growl, it would only make it worse. It was already worse. That moment of lapsed vigilance was all the angel needed. In a display of mad strength, she spread her wings with enough force to cast off the ropes that bound her.

"Stop her! Hold the ropes!" The cathars cried out, but too late.

The angel took flight. Hovering in the air above, she tore the arrow from her gut and hurled it down at the youngest of the cathars. "Impure! I strike you down!"

Arlinn keened as the young woman fell to the ground, lifeless. Her wild nature took over and she lunged at the angel, jaws open—only to close around a thick branch. Rembert was wielding the branch as a weapon, against her. He yanked it back and wound up to swing again. Arlinn dodged, her hindquarters coming out from under her as she slipped on the mud of the clearing slick with angel's blood. She scrambled back to her feet, but yelped as Rembert's third swing caught her tail.

"Get her!" Rembert cried to the other cathars; he swung again at Arlinn as she ducked behind the cover of a broken stump. "Get the monster!"

Blades slashed and arrows flew—some at the angel and some at Arlinn.

Stop! She wanted to tell Rembert to stop. She wanted to tell him she was no longer the monster he had known. In truth, she never had been.

Years Ago

"Take him! Take the boy!" Archmage Arlinn Kord thrust the small child into Rembert's outstretched arms. She didn't wait to see them retreat into the safety of the sanctuary before turning to race back down the steps, her blade drawn.

Her vision blurred with the smoke from the devils' fires, but not so much that she couldn't make out the horror before her. There were at least a dozen devils hanging from Olaylie, pulling at her hair, plucking out her feathers, and slicing through her skin.

"No!" Arlinn cried. "Get away!"

The devils cackled and launched fiery spells down at Arlinn. She deflected the fire with her blade and pressed forward, closer. "I will make you cease your laughing!"

As though her words had been the punch line of a terrible joke, the fiends succumbed to vicious howls, their bony legs shaking with mirth. The one on Olaylie's head pointed at Arlinn and cried out, a shriek that the others seemed to take as a command. In unison, they heaved back, yanking on the angel's wings, sending Olaylie plummeting to the ground. They rioted with glee as she crashed down, tumbling across the dirt, unable to take flight again.

Arlinn charged at them, channeling all of her might, all of the divine power she could reach into her blade. She prayed as she did. "Avacyn, guide me. Give me your holy power—if there was ever a time, I need it now." She raged through the fire the devils spat at her, unafraid to burn. Her sword struck one straight through the chest. She pulled it out and lashed at another. Then a third. But before she could strike again, a dozen devils rained down from above, having jumped from the rooftops.

Arlinn barely had time to intone a silent prayer, Avacyn, there are too many, help me. She was grabbed from behind with needle-like fingers that tore through her jacket. She spun around, slicing for the devil, but it had attached itself to her back. She felt the weight of another join it, and then a third. Tails lashed around her neck, scorching hot. Nails latched into her shoulders and back, pulling her down. Laughter rang sharp in her ears as she was dragged to the ground. Avacyn, please.

There was no response.

The pain was great, but it was worse to see the angel before her, struggling against the suffocating horde. Between the blood and the devils, there was only red where the pure white of Olaylie had once been.

"No!" Arlinn fought to get up, but she too was being buried by the fiends. Tears or blood streaked down her cheeks, Arlinn did not know. This wasn't right. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. She was an archmage of Avacyn. Avacyn! Arlinn fought through the scratching and biting, reaching for the medallion around her neck. Her fingers closed around the mantle of the archmage of Goldnight. Avacyn, please, come to my aid. She waited, opening herself to the power of the protector; she needed power to save the angel. But there was nothing.

From just beyond Arlinn's reach, Olaylie cried out, a burst of sound released, finally, after she had resisted the pain for so long. The angel's cry was laced with agony so great that it ripped the night in two.

Arlinn felt the power of the pain in Olaylie's cry, and just like the night, she came apart.

The werewolf surged at the devils. Jaw snapping. Clenching around the throat of the nearest fiend. Ripping its head from its body. Launching it across the courtyard.

More.

Claws slashing through chests. Tearing off tails. Swiping bodies out of sight.

More.

Crunching through bones.

Seizing on flesh.

Piercing spines.

Carcasses flew.

More.

Feathers.

The werewolf's maw closed on feathers.

The taste of angel's blood. Intoxicating. Warm ambrosia. Perfect.

Shock shone in the angel's eyes. She pulled up, away, but not fast enough. The werewolf's claws struck the skin of the angel's leg, scraping down across the angel's calf and hooking into place. The pleasure of fouling that perfect skin was unmatched. The werewolf pulled the angel back to the ground and laid into its flesh with teeth.

"Get off!"

The werewolf turned at the sound of the voice. There was a human there, a man who raised his sword. The werewolf slit his gut straight down the center. Blood and organs spilled out.

More.

The werewolf turned back to the angel, but more humans closed in. The werewolf swiped at the blade of a swinging sword, knocking the sword out of the air, then hacked at the arm that wielded it, breaking it from the body. The human fell. The werewolf stepped on the severed limb, hard, breaking the bone just to feel it snap. The werewolf carved up the rest of the body.

Another human charged at the werewolf, sword and shield blazing with blinding light. A leap and the werewolf was behind the human. A lunge, a slashing of claws, and the human lay mauled on the floor at the werewolf's feet.

More.

One after another. They all fell at the werewolf's mercy.

Art by Winona Nelson

Then suddenly, a bolt struck the werewolf from above, drawing a wretched snarl. Another bolt—this one hit the werewolf's back. The angel had recovered enough to take flight. The werewolf snarled. The angel hovered above, glowing golden through the dirt and blood that caked her skin. She took aim with a shaft of holy light.

The werewolf vaulted upward, leaping through the air, slashing wildly at the glowing angel. The werewolf's claws struck first, and then teeth. A snap and the tip of the angel's wing came away. A mouthful of feathers, cartilaginous bone, and angel's blood.

The angel lost elevation. The werewolf leapt again, this time for the other wing. Tore it full off the angel's body. The holy being plummeted from the sky.

As the werewolf stalked toward the fallen angel, the angel struggled to her feet, scrambling back, limping, trying to run, trying to fly, failing. The werewolf pounced, tackling the angel to the ground. Teeth sank into soft flesh. The angel's cry melded harmoniously with the taste of its blood.

The werewolf would never have enough.

"Archmage Kord?" The call drew the werewolf's attention. The werewolf turned, hungry. A human dressed in armor and robes pointed a trembling sword at the werewolf. "Arlinn?"

The werewolf cocked her head to the side. The name the man had spoken felt wrong, it pierced her like a knife.

The man lifted his hand, pointing at the werewolf's chest. "Of all that is holy, it is you."

The werewolf snarled, but her gaze was forced down. She saw the pendent that hung from a chain around her neck. Something tugged on the back of her mind. Avacyn. She snapped her jaws, averting her gaze. Her eyes landed on the ground. On the bodies. All around her were bodies. Fallen cathars. Too many of them. She knew them all. Leighton. Reeves.

Her mind burned.

No.

No.

"Oh, Arlinn, what have you done?"

The werewolf turned on Rembert, her rage swelling. Why had he come to her? Why had he spoken? This was his fault. She raised her hackles and growled. He took a step back, but she was faster, lunging, slashing, her claws digging trenches into his cheek. He cried out, brandishing his sword at her, backing away.

The blood bloomed red on his face. "You monster!"

The werewolf howled in anguish, the truth tumbling through her mind swelling, growing out of control, until reality filled every last crevasse and threatened to break through her skull.

Rembert raised his sword. "May Avacyn forgive you."

The werewolf did not recoil. The blade would be a mercy. Let it strike. She could take no more.

The steel flashed, and the werewolf's mind cleaved.

Many Years Later

For a very long time after that, Arlinn had believed Rembert. She had believed she was a monster. Something so horrifying and terrible that even Avacyn couldn't save her. And then after that, for a very long time, she had been furious with the angel; Avacyn's blessing was supposed to have been stronger than the curse, but in the end it hadn't mattered that she was an archmage. Avacyn had failed her, the wards had failed her; lycanthropy had won.

She'd had a long time to think on these things; she had planeswalked that day, so long ago, when her mind had cleaved. Rembert's sword had never struck her. Instead she had been thrown off the world, away from the horrors she had committed, away from the body of Archmage Reeves at her feet, away from the broken, bloodied, lifeless angel Olaylie, away from the glint in Rembert's eyes. And she had landed in a forest on another world.

It had been impossible to measure the passage of time there; she hadn't wanted to. Time should not have passed for her; her life should have ended. In a way it had. The other world was like a purgatory. While there, she never once regained her human form. She remained a monster on the outside, but at the same time she could not escape her human mind and the memories it held of her deeds. The two parts of her warred, and her soul was caught in the crossfire.

But in the end, Arlinn had been grateful for it; it was this state of double life that had forced her to see the truth.

She had been wrong to think that becoming an archmage would change who she was, what she was. From the very first, after the howls of the Mondronen werewolf pack had cursed her, she had looked outward, to wards, to prayers, to Avacyn. She had convinced herself so surely that the angel and the holy power of the church could fix her. But what she had missed was that she was not broken. Not in the way she thought. She was what she was and she always would be. She was savage and wild, a predator, but she was also good and true, a protector. She could not make one part of her disappear, she couldn't run away from half of her essence. She had to be both. She had to trust herself to be whole. Her salvation was never something she should have asked from the angel Avacyn; it was to her.

It took many years, but finally Arlinn returned to Innistrad, trusting herself to set foot once more on the world she had left behind. That moment was the moment she truly gained control of her powers and of herself. Her transformations were easy now, under her control. Her mind was always her own, but it was augmented by the wild power of her physical form. She was no longer a husk, she was no longer pretending, hiding; she was everything she was meant to be.

Arlinn trod over the wet earth, her nose, exceptionally sensitive even in her human form, picking up on the familiar scents that linked to memories. Memories too numerous to count, all threatening to draw tears for the potency of heartache they wrested from her gut. It was the first time she had set foot on Elgaud Grounds in years. She had expected that the first step would be the hardest, but it was the next hundred—those that carried her to Archmage Rembert's door—that proved nearly impossible.

She had thought she was ready. She had faced all the others; she had visited the graves, Reeves's, Leighton's, all of them. She had prayed in Avacyn's churches across Nephalia, sending litanies of confessions and reparations; she had spoken to the angels, looked into their eyes, admitted her acts and stood in their shadows to be judged.

Art by Magali Villeneuve

Rembert was the only one who remained. She held up her fist to knock on the door of his chamber, but she didn't have to. His scent reached her nose an instant before his heavy hand fell on her shoulder. She spun round to face the aging archmage.

"How dare you?" Rembert was holding up a glowing ward; he had built protections against her. Arlinn's heart twisted in agony. This was the same man who had believed in her, in the goodness of her soul, so completely before. Now she would not be surprised to learn that he didn't think she had a soul at all. "How dare you set foot here on this holy ground?"

"Please, Archmage Rembert, I—"

"You monster! You murderous beast!" He tossed the ward at her chest and spat at her feet.

Arlinn recoiled. "Please," she tried again. "I know what you must feel, I know what I did. There is no way to make the past right. But I'm not what I was then. Now I am able to use what I have for good. I want to use that good here, with the Goldnight. I want to help. I am in control."

"Ha!" Rembert drew his holy sword. "Control is a lie you tell so you can live with yourself when you are like this." He waved his sword, indicating her human form. "But even now, even as you stand in that falsified flesh, you are a monster. You will always be a monster."

"I may be a werewolf, but I am not a monster." Arlinn held her ground, though he leaned closer with his blade, which was now aglow. "I am a Goldnight. And I always will be. You said as much yourself."

Rembert lunged for her, his palm colliding with her shoulder, launching her back against the door. He pressed the side of his blade to her neck. Arlinn refused to fight back—she would not allow him to push her toward savagery. "Whatever I said to you before I knew what you were, when you concealed the truth from me, you cannot use it against me now. You are not a Goldnight, Arlinn Kord, you never were."

Arlinn held Rembert's gaze. She could say nothing; the clot of emotions that had choked back her words so many years ago had returned now to do the same. But this time the clot had sharp edges, and they needled her like the devils' fingers, poking the inside of her throat and stabbing the backs of her eyes.

All at once Rembert broke their shared gaze. He let out a heaving sigh and stepped back. "Get out." He pointed down the hall, but averted his eyes, looking at the floor. "Leave these grounds, and never come back. If I ever see you again, I will strike you down."

Arlinn inhaled to speak, but Rembert's voice, thick with holy power, stifled her words. "Get out!"

Present Day

Arlinn had attempted retreat. She had not wanted to engage. But Rembert didn't leave that as an option. She was surrounded, backed against the edge of the gorge, cathars on all sides and Rembert before her, his thick branch raised over his head. "I warned you," he heaved the words at her, each one a heavy blow; his blunt weapon would come next. Arlinn braced herself. She could withstand more blows than he could know, and she would not allow him to drive her away when there was a mad angel so near.

As though beckoned, the mad angel swooped down from behind the cathars.

Arlinn couldn't warn them fast enough. She couldn't warn Rembert. The angel shrieked as it closed its bloody fingers around Rembert's arms and pulled him, gasping and wide-eyed, into the air.

The other cathars turned their weapons on the angel, and Arlinn rose up on her haunches, protective instincts taking control.

"No! Fall in!" Rembert cried to his cathars, still in command though he was dangling from the sky. "Don't turn your back on the monster! Kill the werewolf!"

The cathars appeared confused. Some shifted their aim back to Arlinn, others remained trained on the mad angel. The angel cackled, not unlike the devils, and her hands around Rembert's arms began to glow with a blood-tinged holy light. She would kill him there in the sky, snuff out his life with little effort.

One of the cathars loosed an arrow at the angel, but it fluttered uselessly over her shoulder. She snapped her teeth at the woman. "You'll be next, impure one!"

Enough. This had gone on long enough. Summoning strength into her thick muscles, Arlinn launched herself, leaping up over the heads of the staggering cathars. She found purchase on the heel of the angel's boot and drove her teeth into the leather, pulling downward and thrashing to one side as she did. The angel hit the ground with a resounding thud, Rembert tumbling from her grasp. Arlinn wasted no time. She pounced atop the holy being, sinking her teeth into its flesh. She was all muscle and sinew now, driven by the wild power of the curse of lycanthropy, the curse that had become for her a blessing.

The mad angel was dead in the matter of moments.

Arlinn turned, panting, to the cathars, but they were not immediately behind her; they had collected at the edge of the gorge, some on their stomachs, reaching over the side. Rembert was nowhere in sight. Arlinn's heart palpated and she raced for the gorge, her mind already filling in what must have happened.

She was not wrong. She assembled the facts of the scene even as her body acted. Rembert was wounded, lying on a twisted trunk of a dead tree; it would not hold his weight for long. He was too far down to reach from the edge, so she had already climbed out onto another broken trunk. Gripping the wet wood with her claws, she hung down, offering her paw to Rembert.

He gasped at the sight of her, cowering, fear painting his expression.

She stretched her paw further, silently begging him to take it.

"Monster," Rembert finally found his voice. "I will kill you."

A rumble rose up in Arlinn's throat, but she swallowed it down. It was pain and fear that had brought those words to his lips. There was so very much pain between them. But there was also a bond. One of Goldnight. Always. Arlinn closed her eyes and welcomed the transformation to her human form; she would not let the archmage perish here tonight on account of fear. When she opened her eyes again, it was her human hand she saw reaching out before her. "Take my hand," she said to Rembert.

Art by Winona Nelson

His eyes found hers. "You lied to me."

Arlinn swallowed. "I did."

"You killed the others."

"I did."

"I cannot—I will not—"

"I am no longer slave to the curse," Arlinn said. "I am free now to be a protector as I was meant to be. Please. You knew me once, know me again."

Rembert's eyes glistened behind tears as the trunk creaked under his weight.

Arlinn reached out anew. "Take my hand."

Rembert steeled himself and lifted his arm. "Avacyn help me," he whispered.

"Avacyn is gone," Arlinn said. "We must find strength in each other."

2

Stone and Blood

By Kelly Digges

Six thousand years before the events of the Eldritch Moon story, three Planeswalkers collaborated to trap the monstrous Eldrazi on the world of Zendikar. Nahiri, a kor of Zendikar, stood vigil over the prisoners. Ugin, called the Spirit Dragon, and the vampire Sorin Markov agreed to return if their aid was needed. But the Eldrazi nearly escaped over a thousand years ago, and neither Sorin nor Ugin came. Sorin was Nahiri's friend, and his absence worried and puzzled her. After quelling the Eldrazi's escape attempts, Nahiri set out to find her friend. We know from Sorin’s recollections that their meeting did not go well. But there are two sides to every story...

Reunion

One thousand years ago

Nahiri cast herself through the chaos of the Blind Eternities, the space between worlds. She'd slept for too long, in a cocoon of stone. Allowed certain things to drift beyond her awareness. She'd already corrected the most egregious case of neglect, reinforcing the wards that kept her prisoners secure and consigning their servants to oblivion. Her own world was safe, at least for the moment.

Now it was time to call on an old friend, and restore something less tangible.

It did not take long before Nahiri sensed his presence and aimed for it, warping the world around her until she could stand beside him. Their friendship was ancient now, a faded relic, but Sorin Markov had been her first ally, and Nahiri would know him anywhere.

She stood, then, on a high bluff overlooking a dark and choppy sea. She had never been here, but nothing about it surprised her. Innistrad and Sorin had shaped each other, and the world seemed to suit him—brooding and dangerous, almost purposefully unwelcome. And the moon—there was something odd about the moon that rose above the water, something that tugged at her senses.

Sorin had never brought her here, but he had spoken of it in wistful tones. Had hoped, she knew, to call upon her to defend it—as she had hoped to call upon him to defend Zendikar. Neither had gotten what they wanted, in the end.

Sorin was not here.

On the highest part of the bluff, where she had sensed his presence, stood instead a massive, rough-hewn chunk of silver, forty feet tall at least. It had faces, but they were irregular and uneven, as though an amateur lithomancer had pulled it out of the ground and not yet bothered to smooth it out to a finish.

Art by Jaime Jones

But it was finished—unquestionably, to her senses, obviously the end result of tremendous effort rather than a work in progress. It was not polished because the polish did not matter to whatever it was this thing was supposed to be. Or do.

And this—this thing—was what she had sensed. Not Sorin. The Thing had spoken to her, through the tenuous medium of the Blind Eternities, of him.

There was nothing on the bluff but the wind and the silver monolith, save a stunted tree with red leaves. She left the tree to its business and circled the tremendous chunk of silver.

Sides. It had eight of them, or perhaps seven, depending on how generous one felt as to the nature of an edge. But faces they were, deliberately shaped, almost like...But there were no hedrons on Innistrad, and Sorin had neither means nor cause to make them.

And like a hedron, the Thing was more than its physical substance. She tested it with her lithomancy, taking a sounding of the pure metal and trying to get a sense of its inner structure.

Nothing. Nothing at all. She could sense the grain of the bedrock half a mile below her feet, feel the slow and steady heartbeat of continental plates dancing their slow, inexorable waltz. But she couldn't see into this sliver of silver. Couldn't so much as scratch it. Her power vanished into it, like an infinite well. Almost like...but no. No again. It was not a hedron. Not here.

She bent and peered beneath the Thing, half expecting to see that it was floating above the ground. But it was rooted at the bottom, by a comparatively thin stem of silver not much wider than Nahiri herself.

She stood and continued her slow circle of the Thing, trailing her fingertips along it in lieu of the deeper investigation she could not seem to make. She didn't know how much time she spent examining the silver monolith, but the moon was higher in the sky when a familiar voice spoke from behind her.

"You'll have to forgive my rudimentary attempt at shaping stone, young one."

She spun. Sorin!

White hair, black coat, those strange orange eyes. How terrible his aspect, how dire his gaze—and yet she could not keep herself from grinning.

"My friend!" she managed to say at last. "You're alive!"

He smiled back at her, walked toward her, and put his hand on her shoulder. From him, it qualified as elation.

Art by Michael Komarck

"And why would I be otherwise?"

She reached up to cover his hand with hers. She was awake now, her body suffused with the warmth of life. His fingers were as cold and dead as ever.

"You never came," she said. "On Zendikar, when I activated the signal from the Eye of Ugin, you never responded. I feared that—"

Sorin withdrew his hand, frowning.

"The Eldrazi have broken free of their bonds?"

"They did, yes."

"Where is Ugin?" he asked.

"He didn't come either," she said, trying not to let bitterness reach her voice. "But I handled it. On my own. With all the strength I could muster, I managed to reseal the titans' prison."

It struck her, suddenly, that she was now far older than Sorin had been when they had met. In her memory he towered over her, her ancient mentor, a thousand years her senior. Now, what difference did a thousand years make? They were equals. At least.

"When the task was done, I came to find you. I had to know if you still lived. And here you are."

Here you are. Her joy at seeing him faded. She had been worried, so worried—that something had happened to him, or that he, like her, had sunk into a millennia-long malaise. She had come here to find him, to save him—but he was not, evidently, in need of saving.

"So, where were you?" she asked. "Sorin, why didn't you respond to the signal?"

"It never reached me," he said.

"How is that possible?"

"Hmm," he said. Just Hmmm, with little interest and no urgency whatsoever.

He reached past her and pressed a hand against the surface of the Thing.

"You have dedicated yourself to watch over the imprisoned Eldrazi, and it became clear to me that my plane was in dire need of its own protection, particularly in my absence. This Helvault is half of what I created to serve as such a protection."

Helvault. She shuddered. It was a vault. What could such a thing be meant to store?

"It's not inconceivable," he continued, sounding bored, "that your signal from the Eye was unable to break through the magic that protects this plane."

Sorin's own spellcraft had kept her from contacting him? She felt a sudden sense of vertigo, and picked her next words with care.

"Did you know at the time that that would happen?"

"It did not occur to me," he said. "Though I see now that it was a possibility."

Stone and sky!

Early in their association, before she understood what he was, and what she had now become, he had asked her if she wanted to learn to fight like him. She'd said yes—and then he'd tried to kill her.

Or so it had seemed to her at the time. She realized, not much later, that he'd been holding back, attacking her physically when he could have snuffed her with a thought. She held her ground, briefly, until his heavy two-handed sword had caught her upper arm in a glancing blow with a sickening crack, and pain overwhelmed her senses.

Well done, he said, standing over her. You lasted almost six breaths. Yours, of course. Now get up.

Get up? she cried. You broke my arm!

So fix it, he said. He wasn't even looking at her.

Fix it? Fix it? How in the hells—

Only then had he finally explained to her that she was no longer mortal. That her body was a convenience, a projection of her will.

You should have told me that to begin with, she said, holding back tears of anger.

Ah, he said, in that bored but benevolent voice. It did not occur to me.

He was using that voice now, talking down to her. But the girl he had mentored was long dead, buried in a tomb of stone. Only a Planeswalker remained. And a Planeswalker would not be condescended to.

"A possibility? You risked my plane, and more." She could not quite keep the hurt from her voice. "You abandoned me."

Sorin waved a pallid, dismissive hand.

"I was simply taking the appropriate precautions to protect my plane. I hardly think—"

Oh, enough. More than enough.

"We had an agreement, you and I," she said.

He could not deny that. Five thousand years previous, Nahiri had agreed, reluctantly, to trap the Eldrazi on her own world of Zendikar. And for their part, the other two Planeswalkers who had helped her had given her a way to contact them if the Eldrazi ever threatened to break free.

Art by Igor Kieryluk

For five thousand years, Nahiri stood watch over their monstrous prisoners. She had locked herself away in stone, watched decades and centuries drift past like clouds over the sun. Then the Eldrazi had tested the bonds of their prison and loosed their hideous spawn upon a world already changed by their presence, in ways she did not fully understand. Nahiri had awoken, broken free of her self-imposed isolation, and sounded the alarm.

No one had come. Not the dragon Ugin, whom she had never fully trusted, whose motives and origins were enigmas. And not Sorin—her mentor. Her friend.

She had dealt with the crisis on her own, at great cost to her world, far more than it would have cost had her allies honored their agreement. She still hadn't surveyed the full extent of the damage the Eldrazi had done to her world and its people before she had quelled their efforts. But she had done it, and when it was done she had gone to look for him, fearing for his existence.

And found that he had done worse than ignore her cry for help. He had blocked it out, to protect his own world from outside influence.

He turned his back to her.

"Don't dismiss this," she said. "I was willing to jeopardize my home by luring the Eldrazi to it. I promised to chain myself to Zendikar to watch over them as their warden. I spent millennia with those monsters. Do you know what that's like? All you had to do was come when I needed you."

The ground began to shake, the bedrock below them vibrating in sympathy with her mounting rage. Of all the stone and metal nearby, only the silver Helvault seemed beyond her reach.

"Don't presume to own my actions, young one. I am obligated to nothing. I owe you nothing! When your Planeswalker spark first ignited, it was I who discovered you. I could have ended you there, but I spared you."

He turned back to her, orange eyes full of malice, face inches from hers.

"I took you under my wing, and molded you into what you are," he said. "If you find it necessary to pester someone, go find Ugin. I have no patience for it."

No patience. No patience. Pain gave way to anger in a white-hot instant.

For five thousand years, Nahiri had kept watch over the Eldrazi—not just for her plane, but for every plane. For Innistrad. And once, once, in five thousand years, she had called on him to do nothing more than make good on a simple promise—a self-serving promise, one that he'd only made because it would keep his own world safe—and he had not. Just...not.

Her own patience was at an end, spent in endless vigil over the Eldrazi. She was done—done waiting, done pleading, and most of all done being treated like a child. If Sorin needed proof that she was no longer his student, she would have to provide it.

She called forth a column of rock from the depths beneath them—granite, old and strong. The earth heaved, and Sorin struggled to keep his feet. The stone column burst from the ground beneath her, carrying her high above him.

"I'm not going anywhere."

She pulled more rocks from the ground around her, sharpened into darts, swirling around the two Planeswalkers.

Sorin drew his sword.

"I never threatened you," he said, looking up at her. "Not once. If we are to be enemies, child, the blame falls solely at your own feet."

"I'm not a child," she said. "Whatever we were, surely you can see we're equals now."

There was a moment's hesitation—a hint of fear in those orange eyes, perhaps? A second spent weighing the possibility that she might be right, and his pride was in need of sharp correction?

"All I see is a tantrum," he said. "If you came to meet an equal, you should have come under truce, following the protocols for parley with a fellow Planeswalker."

"I came to meet a friend," said Nahiri.

"Then I see no grounds for complaint," said Sorin. "Friends deliver hard truths...do they not?"

Long ago, a foolish girl had called this wretched creature friend. As the last vestige of that youthfully sentimentality boiled away, Nahiri struck.

She hurtled down toward Sorin astride a fist of rock. She had no sword. She had no need of one. The ground itself was her weapon.

Sorin released a blast of death magic that caught her full in the chest, knocking her back. The stone column lurched backward, to stay under her feet.

Sorin vaulted off the broken ground and leapt straight toward her, teeth bared, sword glinting in the light of that strange, looming moon. She jumped from the column and landed on the ground in a crouch. Sorin hit the stone column feet first, ready to spring off of it and attack her again—but the stone column simply swallowed him.

She stood, fists clenched, squeezing Sorin in the stone.

Cracks appeared, first one, then several, shining with light from the vampire's magic. The column flew apart in a spray of light and stone as Sorin forced his way out. He dropped gracefully to the ground.

But he looked pained.

"I don't want your enmity," said Nahiri. "All I ever wanted was your help, Sorin. You made a promise. Come with me."

"Not now," said Sorin, with infuriating calm. "Later, perhaps. This is a critical time—"

"A critical time!" snapped Nahiri. "The Eldrazi almost escaped. You're thinking in terms of eons, but for all I know the Eldrazi are loose now. All that we worked for will be lost, your own plane will be in danger—don't you care about that?"

It hit her, then. The imprisonment of the Eldrazi had become her life's work, a constant effort that had kept her bound to her plane for almost her entire existence. But for him it had been an eyeblink—forty years of mild effort, five thousand years ago, in exchange for millennia of peace of mind. And now, with his new countermeasures, perhaps Innistrad wasn't in danger. Perhaps Nahiri and Zendikar and a hundred million carefully placed hedrons had served their purpose, in the mind of Sorin Markov.

She snarled and sent a storm of stone darts flying at him, each the size of her forearm and sharpened to a wicked point.

Sorin blasted a few of the shards to dust before they reached him, sent several more spinning away with a sweep of his sword, and grunted as three more pierced his body.

His eyes flared white, too bright, and a great weight settled on Nahiri's shoulders, forcing her to her knees. Everything was so bright—

She looked up.

The moon. He had called down a beam of moonlight, heavy as a boulder but with no substance whatsoever, to bind her. And finally, surrounded by its light, breathing in the scent of it, she understood what was so strange about Innistrad's moon.

Art by Ryan Yee

It was made of silver. Like the Helvault.

Sorin pulled the stone darts from his body one by one, the wounds closing bloodlessly. He stalked toward her. But his footsteps were uncertain, his sword drooping. Had he become so decrepit?

Still, his magic was strong. The light bound not only her body, but her magic. As long as it held, she was powerless to affect anything outside its radius.

"Go home, Nahiri," he said wearily. "End this farce, and I will allow you—"

She dug her hands into the soil, extending her will not out, but down, and dove into the earth itself.

She sank down into a womb of stone, and for a moment she left behind her anger and Sorin's damnable arrogance and that strange and unyielding chunk of silver whose purpose she still couldn't grasp. There was only her and the stone, cut off from everything save the slow and steady heartbeat of the world, like it had been for five thousand years.

She could planeswalk away, return to Zendikar and to isolation. She did not, in fact, need Sorin's help. Not anymore. But leaving things unresolved here would be dangerous beyond measure, inviting retaliation. She really would have made an enemy, then. And she wouldn't leave while there was still a chance of preventing that.

Sorin's restless footfalls echoed above her, stalking toward the Helvault.

She shaped the stone beneath her into another pillar, thinned the rock above her to the consistency of water, and burst forth from the ground once more. Sorin had dispelled the beam of moonlight, and now had his back to the Helvault for some measure of protection.

She rose on her granite pillar, towering above him, pulling a swarm of stones from the ground and arraying them around her.

She didn't want to kill him. She didn't really want to hurt him. What she wanted was for things to be right between them, the way they had been. But for that to happen, she would have to earn his respect. And to do that, she would have to beat him.

He was leaning on his sword, now. If they agreed to treat one another as equals, it seemed she would be doing him a favor.

It wasn't right. He was too weak, weaker than he had been when she was young. She thought of how the Helvault had radiated his essence, and wondered just how much of himself he had poured into it.

She sent her pillar of stone gliding forward toward him. As she slid past one of the floating stones around her, she reached into it. It instantly heated, became molten, as the metals inside it coalesced in answer to her will.

She pulled a fully formed stoneforged sword out of the rock and kept advancing, until Sorin stood beneath her, gazing up at the sword's white-hot point.

"Sorin, you will fulfill your promise. You will return with me to Zendikar. You will help me check our containment measures, and ensure that the Eldrazi are secure. Only then can you slink away."

Sorin spat.

Then everything went bright again, brighter than the moon, and a shape came screaming out of the heavens. She glimpsed feathered wings and a shining spear before the figure slammed into her, knocking her off her pedestal. They tumbled together and slammed into the ground, where they carved a deep furrow in the earth. Nahiri's array of stones tumbled to the ground, her concentration shattered.

At last, lying on her back. Nahiri got a look at her attacker.

Art by Jason Chan

She was an angel, larger than life, with white hair and white skin and dark, expressionless eyes. Nahiri was being attacked by an angel.

Nahiri had met angels, on Zendikar. They were aloof, and could be fearsome, but they were protectors, creatures of justice and of good. And none of them that she'd ever met were stupid enough to attack a Planeswalker.

Before Nahiri could speak, before she could even fully process what was happening, the angel raised her spear. Its points shone like twin suns, blinding her.

She sank down once more into stone, felt the spear's points dig into the earth where she'd been lying.

No time for repose, this time. She burst from the ground in a spray of shrapnel, sword still in hand, and as the angel shielded herself from the blast of rock, Nahiri attacked. She swung the sword, which still glowed with the heat of its forging.

The angel raised her spear to deflect, just in time, and Nahiri attacked again, and again, and again, forcing the angel backward. She felt a dim sense of wrongness, fighting an angel. But no—the angel had attacked her, unprovoked. And why? To protect Sorin? She could scarcely entertain the thought.

The angel vaulted into the air—but not to retreat. She sprang forward, to get above Nahiri, to attack again. Nahiri rose again on a stone pillar, to force the angel either to flee or to return to the earth.

The angel settled again, but stood her ground. Nahiri kept up her assault. The angel was powerful, no question. But she was no Planeswalker. Nahiri struck again—

—and her sword stopped dead on Sorin's, thrust between her and the angel.

"Enough!" he panted. "Enough."

She stared past him, at the angel with the jet-black eyes. There was something familiar about the angel, something unsettling, though Nahiri was quite certain she'd never seen her before.

"What is this, Sorin? How did you bring an angel under your thrall? Who is she?"

"The other half," he replied.

His hand whipped out, lightning-fast, and closed around Nahiri's sword. His skin hissed and sizzled, but he didn't seem to notice. Nahiri's fingers were numb, her mind reeling. She still didn't understand. He lifted the point of his own sword to her throat, wrenched her blade out of her hands, tossed it away.

The angel landed softly behind Sorin, but he held up one hand, and she waited. An angel waited, for him!

"For what it's worth," said Sorin, "I never wanted this, young one."

Then Sorin raised his sword, lashed out with a beam of tarnished light, and pushed.

Nahiri flew backward and slammed against the silver surface of the Helvault. It was no longer hard and cold, but yielding. Welcoming. Pulling.

Art by Kieran Yanner

Strands of eager silver closed around her body, drawing her in. Shards of rock whirled through the air, the bedrock beneath their feet shifted at her rage, but the Helvault itself did not care.

"Damn you!" she screamed. "I trusted you!"

He loomed over her, now, the angel's wings spread behind him, and he spoke one last time before molten silver flooded her ears. He sounded almost sad. Almost.

"I never asked for your trust, child. Only your obedience."

Then the Helvault claimed her, and she vanished into a darkness vast and total.

Repose

Interlude

Through darkness, she fell.

She knew no other sensation—no sound, no light. Not even a breath of wind, for within this place there was nothing, not even air. Nothing but her, and the endless sensation of a descent forever unfinished. She couldn't see her hand in front of her face—was not entirely sure that she had a body at all, in this place.

She extended her senses outward, pushed and pulled with her powers of lithomancy, trying to get some kind of grip on the silver exterior of the Helvault. But what was around her was not silver. It was nothing. She tried to planeswalk, but even the Blind Eternities, the chaotic no-place between planes, was beyond her reach.

It was not like her cocoon of stone back on Zendikar, the slab of rock where she had slumbered for five fitful millennia. In her cocoon, dreamlike, she could sense all of Zendikar, reach out to any part of it, appear wherever she wished.

This was much, much worse—only darkness, and falling, and the unmistakable scent of Sorin Markov.

Sorin would pay for his treachery. She would escape from this prison, and she would make him pay. She'd thought they were allies. Friends! Now she saw him for what he truly was: a monster, plain and simple.

A monster. But not a fool. He knew what was at stake, back on Zendikar. He could not be so confident in his defenses, in his Helvault and his enslaved angel, that he would simply allow the Eldrazi to escape. He would free her, when he'd recovered his strength and prepared to face her. Would ambush her and defeat her, and allow her to go home. He couldn't just leave her here. It was unthinkable.

But she had a lot of time to think.

At length, she came to a decision.

"That's enough," she said quietly.

There was no reply, no sound at all. Her words didn't echo, but faded away into the infinite blackness.

"That's enough!" she said, more loudly. "Whatever lesson you're trying to impart, I've learned it. End this, and I'll depart Innistrad and never return. Clearly there's nothing left for us to say to one another."

There was no answer. And she wasn't about to apologize, and she certainly wasn't going to beg. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

She thought of Zendikar often, of its jagged peaks and yawning skies. Of the cancer that ate at its heart, of vampires swarming its surface, building statues of gods more monstrous than they knew. She should never have left.

The isolation began to gnaw at the edges of her sanity. Even a Planeswalker, even one who had spent millennia in stone, was not meant for this kind of solitude. Even a Planeswalker could lose her mind—and for a Planeswalker, who was a mind, the consequences would be horrific. She had met a mad Planeswalker, once. Once was more than enough. She would not go mad.

At first it was the thought of vengeance that she held on to, of crushing Sorin for what he had done to her, for what might be happening on Zendikar even now. But there were only so many ways to imagine killing him, and even now the thought brought sorrow and weariness more than the cold satisfaction of revenge. Her hatred never wavered, but it crystallized and grew still.

Her memories of Zendikar became her lantern in the dark.

She knew her world down to its bones, and her memory of it was perfect. She thought of a place—of the trenches in Akoum that her tribe had wandered, before she had abandoned mortal life and sunk into the stone. In her mind, she built a model of those trenches, tracing out each layer of basalt, each shard of red volcanic glass that made up the regolith, every grain and fault within the bedrock.

Art by Jung Park

It was not Zendikar. It was Zendikar as she remembered it—after the Eldrazi, but before her slumber had allowed the world to drift out of control.

She worked her way outward through Akoum as time passed uncounted, remembering the grain of every sedimentary deposit, the temperature and viscosity of the magma that pulsed beneath the surface. She built downward, miles down, as deep as she'd ever dared go, until she had traced the edges of the tectonic plate that carried all of Akoum on its shoulders.

She held all of it in her mind, leaving parts of it unchanged for what seemed like years at a time, finding them again exactly as she had left them. Her mind was hers, and Zendikar was hers, and she would not let go of either of them.

It was impossible to say how long she'd been falling when her reverie was interrupted. She was no longer alone in the darkness. They were distant, at first—just a far-off keening, or the rustle of leathery wings. The soundlessness of her captivity had not been immutable, only the result of its emptiness.

Slowly, over countless years, the Helvault was populated. She understood, now, its purpose. Sorin would not tolerate threats to his precious Innistrad, and he had made this thing—this pit, this nowhere—to house them.

Threats, like demons, and horrors. And her. She spent a year or ten fuming, after that realization.

The other half, he had said. She very much doubted that he was personally imprisoning all these demons. She came to understand the angel's purpose in all this—however Sorin had duped or suborned her.

Eventually she had recreated all of Akoum in her mental geography of Zendikar, from the massive peaks of the Teeth of Akoum to the still waters of Glasspool. The water that surrounded her remembered continent was a sketch, a hasty scribble, by comparison—she didn't truly understand how water moved, and so the waves that lapped at the red cliffs of Akoum only sloshed back and forth. She didn't focus on them, lest she break the illusion.

She only had to make a little seafloor before she could start on Ondu. She was especially looking forward to the islands of the Crown, with Valakut its blazing jewel. But she refused to do things out of order. She had all the time in the world.

Art by Adam Paquette

The others began to impact Nahiri, to glance off her in the endless darkness. She never saw them—that had not changed—but she heard them, shrieking, in the last instant before they struck. A talon here, a wing there, a momentary contact with a patch of nameless, inhuman flesh. And then gone, back into the darkness.

She marked time by those distractions, by those brief and senseless run-ins with the things that inhabited the dark. She did not hate them, even when their numbers swelled and their impacts against her not-quite-body grew more frequent, and more painful. She had no love for demons—had put down more than one to keep them from plaguing her world—but she did not hate them. Not here.

She pitied them. They were prisoners, like her, of Sorin Markov and his angelic enforcer. And unlike Nahiri, they would never have a chance for revenge. They were pathetic creatures, wailing and gibbering, mad or terrified or both—lesser minds, cracking under the strain of an eternity in the dark.

Nahiri was accustomed to isolation, and her mind was her own. In this blackness, it was all she had: her sanity, her anger, her memories of Zendikar...and a great deal of time.

She finished with Ondu, taking extra time on the sacred peak of Valakut. She'd spent years meditating in the volcano's caldera. Her Zendikar was her anchor, the thing that reminded her who she was and where she came from. She needed to get it right.

Art by Kieran Yanner

Sometimes she went back to that caldera, in her mind. But she couldn't content herself with just dwelling in her Zendikar. Not until it was finished.

Murasa was quick work, a great slab of stone rising out of the sea. The continent's forests were remarkable, but they did not interest her, and she made no attempt to recreate them. Bala Ged held her attention for a very long time, tracing the shifting contours of Bojuka Bay and the twisting network of caverns beneath the Guum Wilds.

After that it was on to Guul Draz—dull, for the top layer, but just as fascinating as Bala Ged below the surface. She was halfway through crafting the subterranean lava tubes that drove the continent's churning geothermal marshes when—at last, after untold years—something changed.

Light—a brief flash, blinding in the darkness, scattering her focus and, for a panicked moment, obscuring her Zendikar entirely. And then there was something with her, a presence more substantial than these wispy, wailing demons. Sorin? she thought, for an instant—but no. Not him. Not...quite. Far below Nahiri, twin suns ignited, illuminating nothing, and she heard the faint rustle of feathers.

The angel—here? In her own prison? That was interesting.

The lights drew closer, and now Nahiri could see—see, for the first time in centuries. The angel's spear flashed, and she grunted with exertion as she swung it in wide arcs around her. Her wings were spread, uselessly, trying to push against nothing at all.

The demons swarmed the angel, shrieking and flapping. They'd left Nahiri alone all these years, glanced off her only incidentally. But they knew their jailer. They knew their only chance for vengeance.

The angel rose toward Nahiri—slowly, slowly, in this timeless void—until they were side by side. The cloud of demons had dissipated as Sorin's protector gained the upper hand. The angel looked over at Nahiri, and for a moment their eyes locked—and finally Nahiri understood. Sorin hadn't enslaved an angel. He hadn't tricked her or coerced her. This angel stank of Sorin, just like the Helvault.

He had made her. Just like the Helvault.

The angel recognized her, from their long-ago fight. Dark eyes flashed with fury—fury Sorin had instilled. He had created her in his own image, twisted her from the beginning. Made her hateful. Made her his. Nahiri shuddered.

Another being grievously wronged by Sorin Markov, one with no chance of vengeance or redress. No chance of freedom. A porcelain doll, to replace the student he had lost.

Nahiri couldn't say how long they fell like that, together, looking into one another's eyes. Speech seemed impossible, after all this time.

And then there was light, real light, as the void around them cracked and shredded and finally...

she was...

out...

Ruin

One year ago

Nahiri slammed into a surface on her hands and knees, her endless fall over at last. Her eyes rejected the notion of light, her ears assaulted by a blast of cacophonous noise. She focused her vision, and the blinding light resolved itself into shapes, the racket into voices, the rough surface beneath her into a tidy little cobblestone street. She raised her head. People were shouting and running everywhere, fires blazing, corpses—corpses?—shambling, and above it all was Sorin's damned angel rising into the air in a beam of white light.

And all around her fell shards of silver.

Art by Todd Lockwood

Her hands felt strange. Feeling...felt strange. She looked at her palms. They were bloody. Bloody. She willed the wounds closed, but nothing happened. Her body was no longer an extension of her sense of self. Once again, as it had been long ago, it was just...a body. Flesh and bone. She could feel the blood pumping through her veins, the heaving gasps forcing air into lungs that had needed none for millennia. The world spun around her.

She had to leave. Before he found her. If she could leave, if she was even still a Planeswalker.

She pushed against the walls of the world, experimentally, and tried to move in that unreal direction only Planeswalkers could sense. She felt the walls of the world around her—she was still a Planeswalker, whatever had happened to her body—but as she probed them, those walls proved far firmer than she remembered. They had been a soap bubble; now they were a barrier that would take will and time to overcome. Was she so diminished?

But no. No. She pushed, the way she always had. The problem wasn't strength. The walls really were higher, thicker. The Blind Eternities were less connected to this place than they had been when she arrived. The shape of the universe had changed, while she fell. She could feel it.

She was still a Planeswalker. Whatever that meant.

With effort, she cast herself into the Blind Eternities. They tore at her, assailed her, just as they always had. Disoriented as she was, there was only one plane she could possibly have reached—the one he would expect her to run to, if he were looking. But there was no helping that.

Her feet found the rocky earth of Zendikar, and for the first time since her imprisonment began, she stood on solid ground. Zendikar, the real Zendikar. Home. She stood not far from where she had left, so long ago. In Akoum's jagged heart, near what should have been the Eye of Ugin.

But the Eye was a ruin, collapsed in on itself. Fields of rubble spread out beneath her and around her, hedrons and shards of red volcanic rock spinning lazily through the air. Its careful geometries, the meticulously placed hedron array that had surrounded it, and the chamber itself were simply...gone.

No. No.

The three Eldrazi titans had escaped, while Zendikar's protector languished in Sorin Markov's pit. Everything she'd built here, everything she'd worked for, had come to ruin during her long imprisonment.

Nahiri clenched her bloodied fists. Where? Where were they? Maybe the Eldrazi had left Zendikar. Maybe her world was finally free of them.

She stretched out her senses through the stones around her until she felt a familiar tremor nearby, just the barest quivering—the light and agile footsteps of her fellow kor. She climbed a ridge to reach them, coaxing the stones to keep her upright so she could spare her bleeding hands. The wounds still would not close.

Art by Eric Deschamps

A cry went up from a sentry, and Nahiri yelled hoarsely, her own voice a stranger to her. It was an answer-cry, a wordless signal that meant simply, I am kor.

It was only a handful of breaths before a dozen weary-looking kor surrounded her.

"You're hurt," said one of them, a tall woman with a strange, puckered scar across her bare shoulder. The inflections were different, the rhythms strange, but they spoke the same language. The tall woman raised her hands, setting them aglow with healing magic. Nahiri nodded, and the other woman touched her palms, closing the angry scrapes opened on another world by cobblestones and moon-shards.

"I'm Tenri," said the woman, as Nahiri's wounds closed.

Nahiri did not respond, and tried to look absorbed in the healing process. She didn't know how much they remembered of her—or, more to the point, of the baleful Nahiri the Prophet, whose statue she had seen even before her time in the Helvault.

"You're alone," said the sentry, a man festooned with weapons and ropes. "With no gear."

"It's a long story," said Nahiri. "I'm...a hermit, I suppose. I've been shut away for a long time, and things have changed. What has happened to the world?"

They gaped at her.

"The Eldrazi and their works are everywhere," said the sentry. "Where have you been, that you do not know them?"

"Hush, Erem," said the tall woman. Tenri. "She has no gear because she's a stoneforger, and she's probably been in solitude honing her craft."

"Something like that," said Nahiri. She straightened the red armband that marked her as a stoneforge master, marveling that her people's traditions had survived so much upheaval and so long without guidance.

"Last year," said Tenri, "three enormous monstrosities rose out of the Teeth of Akoum. Apparently they've been slumbering below the surface for a very long time. Their spawn spread everywhere, but the three, the titans, were worse. Where they go...nothing remains."

"There are some," said Erem, "who believe that they are Kamsa, Talib, and Mangeni in the flesh."

Several of the kor spat. Nahiri knew only one of the names, Talib. She'd seen it carved beneath a statue of herself, calling her its prophet. During her long absence, and her longer reverie before it, half-remembered stories of the Eldrazi—stories that she, in many cases, had first told—had passed into legend. The monsters that lurked within Zendikar had become its gods.

Nahiri spat too.

"Nothing remains..." she echoed. "Where? Where have they been? What have we lost?"

"Bala Ged," said Erem.

Nahiri waited for him to say more, to say which parts of Bala Ged were gone. He said nothing.

Bala Ged. An entire continent...

"I need to see it for myself," said Nahiri.

Erem snorted. Bala Ged was a very long way from here. Tenri nodded.

"I can outfit you, before I go," said Nahiri. "It's the least I can do."

Erem shook his head.

"We've no shortage of gear," he said. "Not when we've lost so many."

"Gods go with you," said Tenri. "Whatever gods you can muster, these days."

Nahiri clasped the taller woman's shoulder.

"Thank you for your help," said Nahiri. "And I'm sorry I couldn't do more."

She sank into the stones beneath their feet, leaving behind her fellow kor—strangers to her, as like to her as she was to Sorin.

She felt the extent of the damage. The deep places of the world were riddled with new tunnels, crusted with some strange substance that confounded her senses. Everywhere she looked, there was devastation. Everywhere were signs of the Eldrazi, landscapes eroded in ways she couldn't even understand. And far away, across the world, in Bala Ged—

She concentrated—it took concentration, now—and shifted herself across her world, looking for the source of the wrongness. She felt woozy, sick. She should wait, and rest, and recover her strength.

She had had enough of waiting. She had to see what was happening. She appeared in Bala Ged, in what should have been lush jungle. What stretched before her was a seemingly endless expanse of chalky gray dust—more lifeless than any desert, like the surface of a moon.

Art by Jason Felix

There was nothing like this on the Zendikar she still held in her head, the mental model she had painstakingly built over the years of her imprisonment. On her Zendikar, Bala Ged was living and wild. On this Zendikar, it was dead. Nothing lived here. Even the rocks were silent.

The ground trembled beneath her feet, and she could not feel the source of the tremors. The dust shivered.

She turned. There, on the horizon, vast and horrible, was a being she had seen twice before—once on a world lost to the Eldrazi, and once when she imprisoned it and its brethren on Zendikar. The Devourer. The one Ugin called Ulamog.

Art by Michael Komarck

Nahiri fell to her knees, pressing her hands into that lifeless dust.

If this was loose on her world—

If what happened here could happen everywhere—

If she had no preparations, a thin shard of her old power, and a hedron network centuries out of true—

Then the Zendikar she knew was dead. There was no saving it. One might as well try to stop the sun in the sky. She closed her eyes and saw her Zendikar, Zendikar as it had been. The world she had let Sorin Markov destroy. Hot tears of rage ran down her face and landed in that awful dust with a hiss.

"As Zendikar has bled, so will Innistrad."

She opened her eyes and looked down at her hands, at hands that had shaped stone and trapped titans. They were covered in gray dust.

"As I have wept, so will Sorin."

She looked up at the thing on the horizon, watching it move across the landscape like a natural disaster.

"This I swear, on the ashes of my world."

Nahiri stood.

She had a great deal of work to do.

Art by Aleksi Briclot

3

Emrakul Rises

By Kimberly J. Kreines

The madness on Innistrad has come to a head. Jace and Tamiyo witnessed Sorin's confrontation with Avacyn, and then they watched as the vampire destroyed the angel. All of Innistrad shuddered when Avacyn drew her last breath. Now the plane is without a protector, exposed to threats both of the world and from beyond—exactly as Nahiri wants it. Rumblings can be felt across the land, and tremors shake the few hearts that have held out against the madness.

THE BLUFFS OF SELHOFF

Nahiri had done a great deal of work.

She had kept her vow, the one she made when standing in the dust of Bala Ged. There was still dust under her fingernails and in the deepest folds of her clothes; she had left it there as a reminder. Since leaving Zendikar, she had pushed herself, every hour of every day and long into each night, allowing her rage to fuel her. She had strained, reaching out into the Blind Eternities with fingertips that burned from the swelling aether, toiling in stone, in magics more powerful than she had ever dared to wield before, and all of it had been ten times more difficult than she remembered. But she had not once complained, not once faltered or paused to rest. And now, finally, she would be rewarded. She would see her work pay off. And so, too, would Sorin.

Innistrad's final ward had fallen. Nahiri had felt the lifting of the last shred of protection like heavy plated armor removed from a soldier after battle. The world was left naked and vulnerable. Only this time the battle was not over. It had just begun.

"As Zendikar has bled, so will Innistrad." Nahiri held her breath. The ground beneath her feet shifted. The plane began to pulse, seizing with tremors, like a chain of explosive reactions thudding deep under the surface and echoing through the night. Sorin would feel them too. This thought gave Nahiri great satisfaction. "Come!" she cried to the sky. "Come to me. Come to Innistrad!"

Art by Cliff Childs

She felt it then: a presence.

The air became hot and still, and Nahiri breathed in deeply. Yes. She knew that scent all too well. A thrill flooded her with an intensity she hadn't felt in centuries. She ran to the edge of the bluff, her legs wheeling out of control, her mind unable to keep up with the hammering of her heart, the pounding of her feet.

She looked to the water. To the temple she had constructed for the god. It was no longer empty. Tears blossomed in the corners of Nahiri 's eyes, but she swiped them away. This was not her moment to cry. "As I have wept, so will Sorin."

The shape under the water grew, waves churned, and the surface threatened to break. Finally. It was time.

THE MOORS OF GAVONY

It was time. Time to pray.

Dear Archangel Avacyn. Mother told me that if I get scared, I should pray. I'm scared now.

Art by Dan Scott

Though flanked by cathars with gleaming blades and hard steel armor, Maeli cowered. He felt alone.

He had felt alone since he had fled the village on the day that the horrible angels had come with their rain of fire. He had run into the forest like his mother had told him, and he had not gone back to the village. He had wanted to a hundred times. But she had told him no matter what he couldn't return, and her eyes had been more serious than he had ever seen them. He had thought it best to listen. Now he wished he hadn't. Now he wished he was home.

He clutched the stuffed rabbit given to him by the old woman with the gray hair. The one who had found him in the woods and taken him into her house that smelled of sweets and stale bread. She had told him to call her Ms. Sadie, and said that her house could be his house for as long as he wanted. But that had never been what he wanted.

Dear Archangel Avacyn. I want to go home. Please. Can I go home?

There was no answer. Instead, thick writhing arms reached for him, shooting through the space between the cathars' blades; they were the same writhing arms that had burst out of Ms. Sadie's chest that very night while they ate their dinner. It had happened not long after Maeli had felt his chair shudder, and even a shorter time after a gust of wind had blown through the open shutters, bringing along a smell like too-sweet nectar. His spoon had been in his mouth when Ms. Sadie's chest had cracked open; he had been halfway through swallowing a mouthful of thin stew. Most of the stew had come out of his nose, and it had burned him, inside his head, up behind his eyes. It had made him cry. Tears had streamed down his cheeks as Ms. Sadie and her too many arms chased him.

"Stay back!" The cathars shifted in the tall grass, slicing off one arm after another. One landed at Maeli's feet. As he looked down at it, his insides twisted and squirmed; this was one of her true arms, he was sure. There was a bit of the yellow blouse she had been wearing, and farther down, her big brown, hairy mole blinked up at him.

Maeli buried his head in the stuffed rabbit as a tear ran down his cheek. Please, Avacyn. The angel had come to him once before. She had helped him. When he was scared and lost. His mother had told him that Avacyn had come because she had prayed for the angel's help, prayed so hard that Avacyn could not ignore her. Maeli didn't know how one prayer could be harder than another prayer; he didn't know how to make his prayer so hard that Avacyn couldn't ignore it, but he knew he had to try. He screamed his prayer as loud as he could into the damp, matted fur of the stuffed rabbit. "PLEASE, AVACYN! HELP ME!"

"Avacyn is gone!" The voice pierced the cold pit in Maeli's stomach, and icy fear leaked out, seeping up his spine and the back of his neck. Like cold fingers, it reached up under his skull, grabbing hold of his head and turning his eyes up to the sky.

An angel.

Art by Zezhou Chen

For a fleeting moment, hope pulsed in Maeli's heart. Hope that was a lie, he knew even as he felt it; the angel hovering above was not Avacyn.

"She is here now," the angel said, looking straight into Maeli's eyes. "She is rising! Rising!" The angel tossed her head back and cried out with a shrieking laugh that filled the sky. Then abruptly she ceased laughing and held completely still as though frozen in the sky. "I—I'amrakul!" She dove down, her blade slicing through the air ahead of her. Maeli squeezed his eyes shut. Please.

THE COAST OF NEPHALIA

Please. Please choose me. Edith clenched her toes hard against the smooth, wet rock, securing her foothold. She was as close as she could get now. As close as she could be until the rising, until the becoming. Yet she wanted to be closer.

Please choose me. She had proven that she was devout. The most devout. "The most devout."

Choose me. She stole a hasty glance first out from under one side of her hood and then the other. Yes. She confirmed that the rocks nearest her were devoid of other cultists. She stood taller. Proud. No one else was there, where she was. No one else was as close. She was the closest. "The closest." She wanted to be closer.

"Choose me! Me! Me'mrakul." She raised her arms, spreading them to the sky, opening herself to the one that was coming.

The waves crashed over her. She could feel it; it was time.

Art by Joseph Meehan

"Emrakul!" The name, the power, the fullness unfurled within her as the water roiled. "Emrakul!" The wholeness embraced her, entwined with her, became her. The sea swelled upward toward the sky. "Choose me, Emrakul. Take me. Emrakul."

Other voices rose up behind her, chanting along with her, in time with the magenta glow pulsing beneath the surface of the water. "Choose me'mrakul. Take me'mrakul. I'amrakul."

The glow grew stronger, brighter, more powerful, and it became a steady unwavering light. Edith inched closer on her rock, her toes searching for purchase. She was foremost. The closest. Closer now. Even closer.

Around her, the great twisted stone pillars sparked in the night. Violet bolts of power discharged from the pointed edges, jumping from one to its neighbor and then to the next. Her power. It was all Her power. Everything was Her. Closer. Closer.

Art by Jaime Jones

The swell of the water sent waves crashing and rebounding. There was no longer a distinction between the sea and the land. Edith moved closer. Never before had she been the most. The best. Never before. But never before had it mattered. It mattered now, and she was now. The most. The closest. The best. "I'amrakul!"

An explosive burst of sea shot up into the sky, rising like a thick column of stone, tumbling over itself, crumbling and growing simultaneously, chaos in motion. And then it froze, as though time had stopped. It hung there like a rocky mountain bluff in the sky. From below, there was a rumbling.

And then Emrakul rose.

Art by Tyler Jacobson

Edith could not contain the wail that erupted from her chest. The sound of her voice swelled with the undulation of Her power, and melded with the resonance of Her embrace, complete.

Emrakul saw Edith there before her. She looked down at Edith with one enormous, glowing magenta eye.

And Edith saw Emrakul. She stared, transfixed, into the glow, falling deeper and deeper into the intensity of Her being. There was so much to see, so much to become. She had been chosen. "I'amrakul."

She leaned in closer.

THE DEPTHS OF THE ULVENWALD

She leaned in closer, pressing her back against Alena's. They were back to back and surrounded; Hal felt the urge to surrender, to crumple to the ground. But instead she focused on the heat radiating off Alena's sculpted arms, the feel of it against her own clammy flesh, and she acted as though the world was not on the verge of collapse. "Where do you want to begin?" She casually tossed the question over her shoulder.

Step for step they rotated together in place, sizing up the task before them. They were in a grove in the Ulvenwald, but the Ulvenwald was not the woods they had known. Everything had become twisted and horrifying: the trees now had arms with long slender fingers that reached out to pull at Hal's hair, the brambles had mouths that blabbered and shrieked, the mosses had legs that carried them around like scampering rats, and now even the townsfolk, who did not belong here in the woods, had given in to the coercive force and become things that were far worse than the worst monsters Hal had ever known.

"We should start with the townsfolk," Alena said.

Hal nodded.

There were three, so mutated that their human forms were barely recognizable.

"Come'mrakul. Be'mrakul." they called out.

Hal felt the pull of their words. They had given in to the call the way Hal had been tempted to. They had crumpled and now they no longer had to fight it.

"Are'mrakul. We'mrakul."

Hal's ears rang and her insides crawled. It would be so easy. She could—no! Alena's steady heartbeat said "no."

"I'll start with the jumpy one and you take the thick one." Alena's voice didn't hitch, not even once.

Hal forced herself to ignore the constriction in her throat, the tightness in her head. "Sounds like a plan." She would try. She would fight. She grasped her blade and closed her mind to the garbled chanting. The thick one. She focused on the thick one—and then she gasped.

"Alena. Alena, is that—" Hal couldn't finish.

Alena peered over. "Elder Kolman. May the angel save him."

Art by Dan Scott

Hal was gripped by vertigo, her vision dimmed. Impossible.

"Are'mrakul." The abomination of the elder lurched forward. It was all Hal could do to brandish her sword and block his thick, branching arm.

"Come'mrakul. Be'mrakul." Elder Kolman's words tumbled through Hal's spinning mind. How could this monster be the man she had once known?

He swung at her with an arm that was like the trunk of a tree. Hal staggered back, her mind reeling.

"Are'mrakul. Be'mrakul." The words wrapped round and round her, enveloping her. They told her not to think, not to worry, just to surrender. Be'mrakul. I'amrakul.

"Hal?" Alena's voice. "Hal! His arm. Watch on the right!"

Hal heard the words, but didn't make sense of them. Suddenly a flash of silver split through the Elder's thick arm. Alena's blade. Hal knew she should swing her sword too. But it was so heavy. It did not want to be swung.

Be'mrakul. One'mrakul. She felt like she was floating.

"Hal!" Alena sounded upset. But she was far away. So far away.

Be'mrakul.

"Stay with me, Hal."

Are'mrakul.

"I need you."

I'amraku—

"Please!"

It was Alena's touch, her sweating fingers gripping Hal's wrist, that yanked Hal away from the suffocating embrace. She looked up at the woman she loved.

"Hal? Oh please, Hal."

She didn't want Alena to be upset. She didn't want Alena to be so far away. And she didn't want Alena to be alone.

She had to fight. It was hard. Harder than anything she had ever done. But she had to do it. She pushed the tightness out of her mind and found within herself the strength to lift her blade. "I'm all right, Alena," she said. "I'll be all right."

"Of course you will." Hal felt the tension go out of Alena's body as Alena helped her to her feet.

"Be'mrakul." The elder's jowls sputtered.

Hal glared at him—no, that thing was not a him, it was not Elder Kolman. It was a monster. One that threated to tear Hal away from the staunch woman at her side. She would not allow it.

"We should take him together, I think." Alena nodded at the monster.

"Yes, I think that would be best."

They stood side by side, shoulders pressed close. Alena inhaled. "On my mark."

Hal didn't need Alena's mark to cue her; she felt the movement of Alena's muscles and hers responded instinctively. Together, they moved like a double-headed axe, lashing out on both sides but always connected in the middle. Alena sliced through the monster's left shoulder as Hal's blade chopped through its right. The squirming appendages landed on the ground at their feet, but the abomination didn't seem to notice. It lunged for them. "We'mrakul!"

Hal swung again, beheading the once-holy man. Still he continued to chant, "I'amrakul, are'mrakul, Emrakul!"

Hal couldn't bear to hear the words any longer. "Shut up!" She raised her blade and brought it down with such force that she cleaved the elder's head in two. A mass of latticed roots sprang out as though they had been packed inside too tightly all along.

The chanting ceased. It was done.

Hal reached out and Alena's hand was there. The immediacy with which their fingers intertwined told her that Alena would always be there. She silently made a promise to give the same in return.

"We'mrakul." It was the voice of another of the townsfolk from behind. "Be'mrakul."

Hal wanted to scream. And then she saw it. An opening, over the fallen elder's body, one that lead out of the grove of horrors. "Come!" She tugged on Alena's hand. "This way!"

Alena followed Hal out through the reaching appendages and writhing masses. Out into the trees. Out where the air did not reek of rotten flesh. Out where the brambles remained rooted and the moss didn't skitter in sickening patches across the ground.

They ran until they could no longer hear the chanting, until they could no longer feel the pressure in their heads. And then they ran farther, until their muscles gave way and their lungs screamed. They stopped at the edge of a bluff, collapsing into each other, forehead pressed to forehead, hands gripping shoulders, having breaths coalescing in the shrinking space between their lips.

"Hal."

"Alena."

They would never surrender this; they would never let go.

THE SKIES OVER INNISTRAD

They would never let go, never. They had seen the light, felt the power. The truth had embraced them. It had made them.

Bruna was gone.

Gisela was finished.

Instead, they had become. Her. One. One'mrakul.

Emrakul's angel parted four wings, reached out with two arms, and cried with a single voice that sprang from two mouths, "We are Emrakul!"

Art by Clint Cearley

They were in Her image, the image of the everlasting truth, and their voice was Hers. "We are Emrakul!"

Their call drew others. "We are'mrakul!" Voices rose up from the world below, melding into one sound, one truth. "One'mrakul, be'mrakul, we'mrakul!"

It was glorious. It was everything. It was Her.

Emrakul's angel led all below in following Her radiant form. What once was dark was now bathed in Her light, true light that was spreading farther and farther, a blossoming sunrise that would soon touch every corner of the world. "All are Emrakul! We are Emrakul!"

THE TWISTED ROAD TO THRABEN

We are Emrakul. All are Emrak— "Gah! No." Jace pushed the swirling words from his mind with a stern swipe. "And stay out."

Tamiyo had taught him how to combat Emrakul's maddening touch, but maintaining the mental bulwark was more challenging than the moonfolk made it seem. That was a problem. A big problem for his plan.

Every time he focused for too long on something other than the Eldrazi, Her tainted lattice would creep back into his head, corrupting his defenses and burrowing into the deepest recesses of his mind.

This time it had been the sight of the warped angel in the sky overhead that had distracted Jace. He had done well at keeping his eyes on Tamiyo's back, keeping his focus on their trek across the rocks; he was following her toward what she called the nexus point. But the presence of the angel had been too much to ignore. So impossibly alien was its shape that Jace's curiosity had gotten the better of him. He'd glanced up and been drawn in instantly, having to work to parse what he was witnessing. At first he'd thought it a demon, but it was far worse than that. By the time he had resolved the multiple wings, the lattice-like connective tissue between the dual heads, the melding echoing voice, he had lost himself. That was unacceptable. He needed to be able to trust his mind for what he was about to do. Was he really about to do it? Could he actually justify bringing the rest of them here, to be set upon by this madness?

The question dropped to the pit of his stomach and swelled up into a wave of nausea. He had thought it was the right thing. Hadn't he? Yes, he had come to it as the only solution. He was certain—almost certain. Close to certain. "Gah!" Jace threw up his arms.

"Shh!" Tamiyo shot a scolding glance over her shoulder.

"Sorry." Jace held up his hands defensively.

Tamiyo glowered but turned back to the path, to her magical lantern and her soft footfalls. He should tell her. Tell her to wait here and he would bring help. This was bigger than something the two of them could handle alone. In truth, it always had been, even when Jace thought it was just the mad angel, Avacyn. If it hadn't been for Sorin back at the cathedral—Sorin. Jace cursed the ancient vampire who had brought Innistrad to the brink of destruction and then just merely drifted away, leaving the mess for Jace to clean up.

But an Eldrazi titan wasn't something he could clean up alone. It was never meant to be something he had to do alone. Gideon himself had told Jace to come back to Zendikar if he heard news of the titan. Well, Jace had done better than that; he had found Her. Gideon should be quite pleased.

Ahead, Tamiyo paused at the shore and held her lantern aloft. Jace followed the tendrils of magically enhanced light, lifting his eyes to the sky. As soon as he did, he wished he hadn't.

It was the first time he had actually seen Her: the titan, Emrakul.

Art by Jason A. Engle

Jace was transfixed.

Emrakul was bigger, he could swear, than either of the others. And, in her way, far, far more powerful. She had only been on this world for a short time, and already so much of it seemed to belong to her. All of Innistrad had uprooted itself to follow her. Cultists, warped into her likeness, dragged themselves over the rocks, abandoning all that they had been in their former lives. Animals and monsters alike, on the land, in the sky, and in the sea flocked behind her as she went. The trees, mosses, and brambles, even the algae trailed itself from the water to be closer to her warping presence.

Jace, too, felt the urge to go to Her. I'amrakul.

No.

He wanted to shake himself. He had to clear his mind. He had to think. He couldn't let Her have what She wanted. He once again mimicked what Tamiyo had taught him, clenching his hands into fists with the effort. The process of ensuring that there was no residue of delirium was not unlike clearing away cobwebs from inside one's head. Thick, lattice-like cobwebs exuded by a towering Eldrazi monstrosity hell-bent on consuming the mind of every living thing on this world. Jace shuddered.

This is what he would have to be able to do for them, for Gideon and Chandra and Nissa. He'd have to protect their minds along with his own. He couldn't bring them here and then leave them to be consumed by Her. He wouldn't. So then the question was: Could he do it? He had asked himself this very thing what felt like a hundred times, and yet he didn't have the answer.

"You say they call Her Emrakul?" Tamiyo's curious voice drew Jace out of his thoughts. He glanced at her; her face was a study in serenity, as though holding her mind against the madness was no more difficult than breathing.

"Yes," Jace said. "That's one of the things they call Her."

"Fascinating that such a thing should have a name." Tamiyo lifted her telescope from her belt and placed it to her eye. "I wonder if that is what She calls Herself."

Jace had never paused to ask that question. He would have never thought it something worth asking; the moonfolk saw things much differently than he did. He stared ahead at Emrakul's massive form, trying to see Her the way Tamiyo did. He looked into Her enormous magenta eye. It was warm and welcoming. He wondered what he would find if he went inside. He held himself back, just on the precipice. What is your name? he asked What do you call yourself?

A deluge of words echoed from all corners of his mind:

The enteral infinity—this world is mine.

The absolute—I shall have all.

The beginning—I shall be all.

The being—all are'mrakul.

The end.

The end.

The end.

Jace pulled back, gasping for breath. This was not the end. This would not be the end. Not for him, and not for Innistrad. He had to stop doubting, stop procrastinating; he had to trust his mind. He glanced again at the serene Tamiyo; if she could do it, he could do it, he could do it for them. Yes. It was time to bring the Gatewatch to Innistrad. He cleared his throat. "Tamiyo, I have to go."

"What?" Tamiyo turned, her lavender eyes wide.

"There are three others. Planeswalkers. They're powerful, they're the best there are, and they can help. I have to go get them. On another world, we killed two more like that." He nodded at Emrakul without actually looking at Her.

Tamiyo appeared reluctant to believe him. "Two?"

"It took all of us, but yes."

Tamiyo cocked her head and squinted into his eyes. Jace had the urge to look away—he felt guilty under her scrutiny, though he wasn't sure why. And then suddenly she smiled. "You did. Yes, you really and truly did. My, now that's a story I'll have to hear." She sighed. "But another time. If this world's story hopes for an ending other than darkness, we must each do our part."

"Will you come with me?"

"No, Jace. That's not my path."

"Will you be here when we come back?"

"We will all be where we must be."

Jace opened his mouth to argue, but then he felt a calming touch on his mind. Tamiyo. He no longer had to fight to hold onto his sanity; he hadn't even realized that he had been straining so hard. It was like a terrible headache had finally broken. Relief. He relaxed into it.

"I will protect your mind so you can planeswalk," Tamiyo said. "Go."

In that moment, there was nothing Jace wanted more than to do as she said. He wanted to go, to leave this world, leave the titan. Return to the world they had already saved: Zendikar. Sea Gate. The merfolk the kor and the vampires together. Nissa would be there, her green eyes aglow. And Gideon with his broad shoulders and ready smile, and—

"Well, look who decided to show up. Hey, Gideon, over here!"

—Chandra.

"About time!" The tromping of boots materialized in Jace's ears, and the afterimage of Emrakul looming above gave way to the smiling face of his friend.

4

Innistrad’s Last Hope

By Doug Beyer

Thanks to Nahiri's machinations, the Eldrazi titan Emrakul has been unleashed on Innistrad. Meanwhile, Liliana has been in a tower of Vess Manor, probing the powers—and painful repercussions—of the Chain Veil artifact. Ever since she quarreled with Jace, Liliana has decided she can only rely on herself to face her demons.

Thin metal wires hung from the points of the Chain Veil. Liliana Vess could almost see her reflection in the spectral-glass vessels where the wires led, and in the latticework of the witchbane orb on the windowsill, and in the conductive tubes that led out the window and up onto the roof. The etchings in her face were just visible through the Veil. The lines in her skin matched the menacing light of the storm clouds outside. Lightning flickered appropriately.

Two demons still needed to die. But she had to make sure she wouldn't die herself when she managed to face them. The Chain Veil was a potent weapon, but potentially deadly to its wielder. If this worked, she could use the Veil safely. She wouldn't need the help of some mind mage who persisted in chasing some wild mystery across the provinces. And she could rid the Multiverse of her creditors once and for all.

"Are we ready?" Liliana asked.

Art by Volkan Baga

The others in the tower with her had not displayed a fraction of the smarts of Cloak Boy, but they would have to suffice. The geistmage, Dierk, listed items to himself in a micro-whisper as he adjusted a series of nozzles and tightened clamps on the orb. Dierk's assistant, Gared, stood at the window, his one big eye switching back and forth between the equipment and the lightning storm outside the tower. Gared held his hand on an appropriately sizable lever.

"The collectors are raised, madam," the geistmage said. "And the storm is reaching its peak. But I feel obligated to point out that we'll be coursing an enormous dose of spectral energy directly into the artifact..."

"You don't have to warn me," Liliana said.

"...powered by the force of a lightning storm."

"Yes."

"While you are wearing it."

"I know."

"On your face."

Liliana rolled her eyes. "The flow of geist energy through the orb will thus act as a kind of spectral antenna, shunting the object's counterassault away from the subject, sublimating the backlash as harmless atmospheric static, circumventing all repercussions and thereby allowing free utilization of the artifact."

Dierk glanced at Gared and tapped his mouth with gloved fingertips. "That is the theory."

"Look, Dierk," Liliana said. "My friend recommended you because she thought you knew something about spirit inhabitation. Do you or don't you?"

"Of course I do, madam," Dierk said, taken aback.

"Then—?"

"Then let us proceed." Dierk adjusted the goggles over his eyes. "I should add...this will hurt."

"Pain is temporary," said Liliana, sitting back in the chair. The wires dangled from the hanging points of the Chain Veil. "Besides, we learn nothing by testing this on Gared."

Gared grinned. His larger eye shuttered for a moment like a reptile's. Dierk nodded to him, and he slammed down the big lever.

Art by Adam Paquette

The witchbane orb hummed and dials flexed. Liliana could feel the links of the Veil touching the curves of her face.

"It's activated," Dierk said. "Now all we have to do is wait for a proximal bolt of—"

Lightning.

Liliana's teeth clenched involuntarily as the surge came. Writhing lassos of energy bloomed on the wires leading from the roof collectors, and the spirits of the dead followed immediately. Geists shrieked through the tubes, filling the orb and the reinforced glass with electro-spectral screams. A spray of sparks puffed from the equipment, but the circuit held.

A blast of howling energy looped through the Veil. Liliana could feel the weight of it lift from her cheeks slightly, its links floating against the force of gravity.

She glanced at the others. Dierk had given up trying to adjust clamps and switches and pressed his back to the wall, shielding his face with his arms. Gared reached a finger out toward a thrashing curl of energy and recoiled when he touched it. Between them she could see her markings shining in the equipment, the etched diagram of her demonic contract forming a reflection-halo around her.

This was when Liliana felt most beautiful—when she was about to wield a power that made others afraid.

She grasped the arms of the chair and called on the power of the Veil.

The backlash was immediate and total. The thousands of souls that resided in the Veil filled her with power, but the power was coupled with pain, and the pain was blinding venom. Inextricable from the magic it afforded. The geist circuit had not drawn off any of the backlash.

Beakers popped and the collectors blew out.

"I'm ending it!" Dierk said, reaching for the lever.

"No," Liliana said, her voice a dagger. Dierk retracted his hand.

The room shook. Liliana grasped the chair, trying to hold the room still, trying to hold in the scream that wanted desperately to get out, trying to see anything but the pain. Pain is temporary.

When she couldn't contain it anymore, she cried out. Fuses blew and the tower went dark. The spectral howling ebbed away, until Liliana only heard her own exhausted breaths.

Gared struck a match and lit a lantern. The lab was a disaster zone. The equipment was ruined. Raindrops plashed on the windowsill.

Liliana unclasped the Chain Veil and slid it off her head. Blood seeped from her etchings.

"I mentioned the risks, madam," Dierk said.

She glared at him, imagining the geistmage's skin withering away and his skeleton jawing the words "I'm sorry." Instead she nodded her head toward the door. "You may see yourself out. Deliver the orb back to its owner." A boom of residual thunder was her punctuation.

Dierk quickly collected the spent witchbane orb and a few other items into his bag and left. The echoes of his footsteps receded down the spiral stairs. Gared gently pushed aside a pile of broken glass with his foot, but did not leave.

Liliana stowed the Chain Veil in a skirt pocket. Innistrad's best and brightest hadn't been of any help. Tomes and grimoires of spectral remedies sat askew. Not even Olivia's premier geist expert had been able to tame the Veil.

Liliana looked out the window at the storm that boomed over the countryside of Stensia, daubing at her skin-words with a handkerchief. In the gloom, Thraben glowed like a distant candle.

She loathed relying on someone else.

But it wasn't that she needed Cloak Boy, she told herself. It was merely that she needed people to need her, so she had some warm bodies to stand between her and a couple of self-important demon lords.

If only he could owe her somehow.

From downstairs came a man's scream. A snarling scuffle and a crash followed.

Liliana tossed her crimson-dotted handkerchief aside and spiraled down the stairs.

She heard and smelled them before she saw them—their guttural snarls and their slobbering, hungry whines. The reek of damp fur over the reek of blood.

Art by Joseph Meehan

Werewolves. Liliana's entire throne room was overrun.

And they looked—not sick, exactly, but warped, as if their flesh and bones had been putty in the hands of some unnatural mutating force. Their extremities bent in odd ways, folding and crinkling like mats of kelp.

But they were still werewolves, and they still had claws. Dierk lay on the floor, his chest raked open. The contents of his bag and his ribcage were both spilled out over the floor. His face was pale, locked in a stare of surprise, and he was exhaling his last breath like a flattening balloon.

The werewolves turned to Liliana, sniffing. One of them roared, and it had eyes where its tongue should be.

A suite of spells, deadly ones, each tailored to one of the werewolves in front of her—that's what this called for. Just enough power to dispense with each one, for just enough of them to clear a path to the door of the manor.

"Gared!" Liliana shouted over her shoulder. "Get your coat."

The Chain Veil did not budge from her pocket.

Hours later, the storm had subsided, but the countryside of Stensia had become a twisted zoo. Liliana noted that every passerby had something reshaped about them. The bodies of roving vampires had the wrong silhouettes, always with too few of something, or too many. Anatomically improbable travelers raved prophecies of stone and sea at them as they staggered in diagonals.

Finally, Liliana, Gared, and—haltingly—Dierk, arrived at the monumental door.

Lurenbraum Fortress soared above them, a stark cliff with a citadel that protruded directly from the rock face. Higher up, the utilitarian architecture softened and elongated into tiers of ornate leaded windows, each one with its own floating chandelier of twinkling candles. In many of the windows, vampires peered down at them, wearing gleaming ancestral armor.

Liliana gestured for Gared to knock.

Gared gawked at the door's height. "You really know the lady of the house?" he asked.

Dierk, for his part, made a gurgling noise. The man's neck was broken, so his head rested at a weird angle and his throat looked lumpy. But at least his legs had gotten him here, and at least his arms had been capable of carrying the spent witchbane orb. Gared's long coat was strapped tight around Dierk's midsection, doing its best to hold the remainder of the dead man's insides in. Liliana raised her hand slightly, and Dierk squared his shoulders, but his head still dangled to one side. The desiccated tongue wouldn't stay completely inside his mouth, contributing to the gurgle. Liliana shrugged.

"I make it my business to know those who wield power," Liliana said. "As does she."

Gared banged on the door and stood back.

The door opened, and an imposing woman in an ornate gown—or possibly an ornate woman in an imposing gown—appeared. She held forth a priest's staff that radiated like hot embers in Liliana's face.

"She is not receiving human visitors," said the woman, flashing her fangs as she spoke. Her irises were black pits that seemed to smolder.

Art by Mark Winters

"I'm returning something that belongs to her," said Liliana.

The woman paused, visually inspecting Dierk and the spent witchbane orb he carried. "Leave it here. Then begone from this estate, before I call an invocation down upon you."

Gared made a movement to confront the vampiric priest, but Liliana stopped him with a touch. In a citadel full of vampires, one did not fight when there was still a chance to cajole. "I'd speak with Olivia directly, please. Tell her Liliana Vess would see her."

"I told you, she's not receiving mortals."

"Mortals!" Liliana laughed. "Bless your bloodless heart."

The vampire priest held her staff high, the jagged symbol at the tip warping the air with heat.

"Oh Liliana, my dear one!" Olivia Voldaren appeared in the door suddenly, dismissing the priest with a brief but vicious hiss. The priest stood to one side, bowing her head, but following Liliana with her eyes.

Olivia was glorious in black segmented armor. As usual, her feet didn't touch the floor. "Have you come to celebrate the good news?" she asked, ushering in her guests. "Come, come!"

"Just returning your orb," said Liliana. "And your geistmage. And hoping you might know the whereabouts of an acquaintance of mine." She smiled pleasantly at the priest as she passed by. "What exactly are we celebrating?"

Olivia took Liliana's arm, floating next to her and drawing her deeper into the citadel. "Why, the long wait is over! You haven't heard?"

They entered a broad gallery where elegant vampires stood or hovered at every staircase, every landing. Hundreds of eyes watched Liliana and her attendants as Olivia led them through the lower halls of the fortress. Every vampire that had ever held the name Voldaren seemed to be in the building, glowering in unison.

Art by Anna Steinbauer

Liliana made a furtive motion with one hand. The corpse of Dierk the geistmage dragged itself over to an antique gilded chair, slumped into it, and went limp with the orb in its lap. The coat around his middle squished, holding its contents as best it could.

Olivia leaned over conspiratorially, squeezing Liliana's arm. "It's the archangel! Poof!" She cackled. "A smear on the floor of Thraben Cathedral. Oh, but it's simply too good."

"Avacyn is dead?" A small thought of Jace descended on her, like a moth landing in her hair. He had been on Avacyn's trail when they last spoke.

Olivia made an expansive sweep with her arm. "We of the night can rejoice, for the world is ours again! I was quite cross when I had heard that she'd been freed from her little trap."

Liliana raised her eyebrows a millimeter.

"But Sorin has come to his senses and put down that thing of his. And now, I must say, it's all worked out rather well, hasn't it?" Olivia laughed. She led Liliana on, through gallery after gallery. Gared disappeared into the maze.

Liliana kept up with Olivia. "And now you're raising an army."

Art by Lake Hurwitz

"Well, my dear, it turns out that whoever opened the Helvault—"

Liliana kept her face correctly polite.

"—set loose more than just the archangel," Olivia continued. "And more than just...those demon friends of yours. They released that other one, as well. Drink?" She signaled to a nearby vampire. "You there, bring our guest a drink."

A vampire pushed a glass of wine into Liliana's hand—actual wine—and clanked away in his suit of ornate ancestral armor.

It was Liliana herself, of course, who had caused the Helvault to break open and spill its contents all over Innistrad. She had slain the demon Griselbrand, and the other consequences of its opening were of no importance to her. She hadn't seen any reason to let her vampire social acquaintances know any of this.

"And she seems quite miffed, now that she's free," Olivia went on. "Can't say that I blame her. As I said, I was cross before, but now I should adore to know who set them all free, just to express my utter gratitude!"

Liliana didn't know who else might have escaped the Helvault, who was so important to Olivia. But she had an intuition it was connected to the changes she had seen all around Innistrad. The warped werewolves in her manor. The countryside of twisted vampires and raving doomsayers.

This was the kind of thing that fascinated Cloak Boy. Liliana just wanted some demons to die. But maybe the two could be linked after all.

They emerged into a broad, thickly carpeted drawing room. A tall, white-haired vampire in a long jacket stood with his back to them, looking out the tall windows into the night.

Liliana felt claws dig into her arm. "We know it was you," Olivia hissed, suddenly hovering just by her ear. "We know you freed them." She added, brightly, "Isn't that right, Sorin?"

Sorin Markov turned around to face them. He wore hatred like a flamboyant suit.

Art by Karl Kopinski

"You," he said.

"Look who's paid us a visit," Olivia said, her voice all dainty politeness once again. "Sorin, I believe you know Liliana Vess?"

"You did this," said Sorin. "You released the Lithomancer and brought this upon us."

Liliana wrenched her arm away from Olivia and gathered herself. She walked up to Sorin and looked him up and down. Finally she chuckled, picking a mote of dust off of Sorin's lapel. "I had business to attend to," she said. "Not my fault if your closet was full of skeletons."

"You had no right," Sorin said, each word like a blade on a whetstone.

"Sorin, you and I have another matter to attend to," said Olivia, floating around them. "But I'd be remiss if I didn't allow you two the opportunity to catch up, wouldn't I?"

Sorin brought his face close to Liliana's. "All this is because of you. The Lithomancer is free, and now we must face her."

"You have quite the vampiric army assembled," Liliana said. She smirked at him. "Or—let me guess—is it more of a defense force? You slighted her, didn't you?"

Sorin's fangs flared. "I told you when you came here as a pup. Innistrad is mine. You meddle in my affairs, you die."

Liliana looked him in the eye, her fingers reaching down to touch the rings of the Chain Veil at her waist. The etchings began to glow on her skin, and her hair floated slightly. "Innistrad may be your domain, Sorin," she whispered. She patted him on the arm. "But death is mine."

Sorin snarled, whipping his arm away and pressing his forehead into hers. His eyes snapped just briefly to her neck.

"Now, my friends!" Olivia laughed lightly, putting herself between them. "As giddy as I'd be to see you two tear each other apart, all over my drawing room...Sorin, it looks like the time has come. Join me outside. Nahiri awaits." She gestured toward the tall windows, into the night.

Liliana was struck by what she saw through the glass. What had been the remnants of the lightning storm was now a swollen cluster of clouds churning over the coast of Nephalia. Tendrils of mist reached out in all directions. It was not just a few werewolves or vampires that were being warped. Whatever force had arrived—it threatened to tear apart all of Innistrad.

Olivia slid a sword from its sheath. "Liliana, dear one, I'm afraid you've exhausted my supply of geist experts and spectral toys. But perhaps you'd like to join us? You were the one who released Nahiri, after all. She may even want to thank you."

Liliana just watched the clouds. This was deep, ancient magic, world-altering and vindictive. "She caused this?"

"The petty act of a petty mage," Sorin murmured. "With a misguided sense of justice."

"So it was you who caused all this," Liliana said. "You wronged her!"

"And now we're off to wrong her again," Olivia said with a fanged grin.

Framed in the windows of the fortress, the atmospheric mass shifted slowly from its origin over the Nephalia coast, tipping toward Gavony province and the brightly lit High City. The sky seemed wrinkled and torn, Liliana thought, like those werewolves. It was as if the whole plane—the whole of Sorin's home world—had been tainted on purpose, warped from horizon to horizon, just because Sorin cared about it. Whoever Nahiri was, Liliana had to admit—she didn't do things halfway.

"Aren't you the least bit concerned about what her vengeance is doing to Innistrad?" Liliana asked. "Jace is"—she straightened herself—"there are thousands of people out there."

"This world is ruined," Sorin said. "She has made sure of that. And your Jace will die at Thraben with the rest of them."

"What Sorin means," Olivia said brightly, "is that stopping Nahiri will surely stop the unpleasantness she has wrought. We're on a heroic mission!"

Liliana glanced outside, then looked back at Olivia, now with a dreadful tenderness. "Oh, you sweet child."

Sorin slid his sword out of its scabbard, lazily, like an afterthought. "Let's go, Olivia." He turned and stalked out of the drawing room and out of the mansion without another word.

Olivia floated after him, and ranks of Voldaren vampires followed after, their armor echoing through the halls.

Liliana followed them out. As she saw Gared again, she said, "Gared, get your coat."

Gared looked sadly at his coat and began the task of extricating it from Dierk.

They emerged out into the night. The wind howled now, great cones of suction thrashing the sky. A ruddy, otherworldly glow floated along the distended bellies of the clouds.

Liliana pushed her hair out of her face as it whipped side to side. She looked toward the distant hills of Gavony as great shadows coalesced over it. This is what Jace is trying to stop, she thought.

Sorin barely glanced back over his shoulder as he and the vampires assembled. Sorin pointed with his sword. "Come, Olivia," he intoned over the wind. "It's time for you to fulfill your end of the bargain."

Olivia smiled gaily and swept into the air. The vampire army marched off down the hill, swords and pikes and red-hot priest symbols held high—off into the mists, off to battle Nahiri.

Not to battle the horrors that Nahiri had wrought upon this world. Not to help out-of-his-mind Jace.

This world was destined to die, then, Liliana thought. Its protectors had all forsaken it. It was time to say goodbye. "Goodbye, Vess Manor."

The sky uttered an unfathomable sound that shook Liliana's bones. In the distance, Thraben glittered like a fallen star resting on the horizon. "Goodbye, Cloak Boy."

But she found herself walking down the hill, on a different path from the vampires. She found herself on the road. She found herself passing a noosegraf, where the criminals lay in their graves, waiting out the eternal part of their sentence. She found herself reaching out. Corpses crawled up out of the earth. She kept walking. The corpses followed her.

She found herself passing another cemetery, and another. A little roadside shrine, a cursed iron-fenced diregraf, a mausoleum of honored cathar dead. Each time, she reached out. Each time, the dead obeyed her, wriggling themselves free from their rest and lurching along behind her.

Art by Joseph Meehan

As she walked in the direction of Thraben, she reached down to her waist. She could almost hear the scores of spectral essences sneering at her, chanting at her from within the Chain Veil—over the sound of the zombies dutifully lurching and foot-dragging their way down the road behind her.

Sorin and Olivia weren't going to do anything about the crisis Nahiri had caused. And the only person she could count on to understand—he and his broken, irritating, fathomless brain—was following his curiosity directly into messy, twisted, and almost certainly inevitable death.

It wasn't that she needed him. It was simply that she needed someone to need her.

"Well, Gared," she said loudly into the wind.

She raised her arms, feeling the etchings like hot blood vessels in her skin.

"Looks as though I'm..."

A dozen more zombies lurched out of the ground, compelled to follow in her wake of necromantic power.

"...this world's..."

The corpses did not seem warped—at least, no more warped than their disheveled bones had already become by their years in the ground. The restless dead seemed to shrug off the effects. Liliana smirked.

"...last hope."

Art by Anna Steinbauer

5

Campaign of Vengeance

By Ari Levitch

A grudge a thousand years in the making is coming to a head.

For Sorin, it is for the warping of his ancestral home. It is the unmaking of Avacyn. It is the coming of Emrakul.

For Nahiri, it is the betrayal of a friend. It is the millennium spent trapped in the Helvault. It is the ruin of Zendikar in her absence.

When two ancient Planeswalkers duel, entire planes feel it.

Art by Cliff Childs

They called her the Harbinger. They weren't wrong, these fanatics and cultists, and they had followed her here, growing in number as she set about her work on Innistrad. They were devoted to her, and they reminded Nahiri that the only thing worth saving in this whole damned world was her revenge.

The droning gibberish chorus of hundreds of cultists echoed through halls as she stared into the vampire's face. He was an ugly thing, with lips curled back to reveal hideous teeth, sharp and merciless. Two eyes, chips of amber swimming in inky pools, stared back at her, or rather past her. From what Nahiri could tell, this bloodsucker was dressed for luxury, and he, like the dozens of his kin around him, was embedded in the wall. All of them dead. On her account.

She hated this place, Markov Manor. Like so much of this plane, it reeked of Sorin. Even shattered, twisted, and reshaped, as she had done, it was not enough to purge the feel of him from it. But here she was. Preparations had been made, and work had to be checked.

It's an intricate business, revenge, but then, Nahiri had had a thousand years to consider it.

One. Thousand. Years.

It was enough time to consider her revenge from all its angles and levels of depth, to play it out, tune it, and play it out again until everything was in its place—until it was a plan.

And now, as Nahiri passed through the gnarled bones of Markov Manor, she allowed herself a slight smile. Everything was indeed in its place, where she'd put it—everything but Sorin. And he would be here soon.

She'd brought something special with her this time, too, a collection she'd gathered when word reached her that Sorin was bringing an army to face her. Sure, she had her cultists, but revenge was no time to be sloppy.

The first of Sorin's forces to arrive were the banners, ancient cloths that hung from black wooden poles, carried by vampire knights encased in polished plate armor. Hundreds of vampires fell in behind them, spreading out across the low hill opposite the manor.

Nahiri watched the procession from the manor's massive arched entryway. When Sorin at last emerged at the front of his gathered force, Nahiri's jaw was clenched. Sorin was saying something to the vampires nearest him, though she couldn't make out what it was.

Art by Igor Kieryluk

It didn't matter what he was saying though. All of this would end now. Sword in hand, Nahiri stepped out into the dull light of the day, out onto the broken causeway, and welcomed Sorin.

A metallic screech cut through the clangor of battle as Nahiri dragged her sword's blade from the ornate breastplate of a dead vampire. The corpse was one of several that lay around her in a loose semicircle. Lungs pumping, she flung herself over the lifeless heap to meet a knot of new attackers.

So many of them.

But she just needed the one.

An axe swung into view, crimson vapor trailing behind its black blade. Nahiri ducked out of range and thrust the point of her sword into the throat of another attacker who pressed in on her right. At a downward push of her free hand, the floor before her suddenly sank, so that when the axe arced in a second attack, it bit into the rim of the depression. Splinters of stone flew from the impact, and Nahiri caught them with her magic and drove them into the unprotected face of the axe wielder.

Others closed in around her. One of them, a woman all in white-enameled plate armor, stepped out from among them. She held her sword low, and Nahiri noticed the weapon had a pair of blades that twisted in a helix until they met to form a nasty tip. The vampire spoke, never taking her eyes off Nahiri, "You're not going to escape."

Nahiri cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. "Escape?"

"When this is over," the vampire in white continued, "I'll drink your blood from—" But the vampire fell silent when a marble corbel smashed into her mouth, pulverizing those grotesque teeth. Nahiri had plucked it from the debris that hung suspended overhead. She'd heard enough. As the vampire in white crumpled to the floor, Nahiri sent the heavy hewn stone caroming off the handful of bloodsuckers nearest her until skulls and chests collapsed from the pummeling. When the bodies were still, the bloodied chunk of masonry spun in the air so that red droplets flung out in every direction.

Nahiri wiped a smear of it from her check. If Sorin's plan was to tire her before they met, then he was a fool. A thousand years in the Helvault was rest enough for several lifetimes. If it meant ending every other bloodsucker in here to get to him, then she was already off to a good start.

He was here somewhere, she knew. Around her, the melee was unfolding in what she remembered had once been the manor's great hall. The chamber was choked now with vampires and cultists, all at the grisly work of slaughtering each other. Her eyes darted over the chaos, hoping to pick out that flowing white hair, or...

Those cruel yellow eyes. And for a heartbeat, they were staring back at her before being swallowed up in the roiling tumult.

Nahiri's throat was suddenly dry. Her heart hammered against the inside of her chest, and all the rage of the last thousand years welled up in her until all she could do was force out the name, "Sorin!"

Nahiri thrust her will into the sloping stone floor, and reaching into each of the enormous flagstones, she tugged at them sharply. Her hands jerked upward, and on either side of her, two parallel walls rose up a dozen feet from the floor. Stone ground against stone, and when they stopped, they ran the length of the hall to create a sort of passage, cut off from the main fray. She was at one end, Sorin at the other.

Between them stretched a thin slice of the battle—a score of vampires and at least twice that many cultists, all still tangled in their fighting. One of the vampires lunged for Nahiri, but her vengeance was too near now for such distractions. A twitch of her finger, and a lance of stone emerged suddenly from the floor. It caught the armored bloodsucker under the breastplate through the abdomen, rising until it punched through the polished red steel at the shoulder with a shrill whine. The vampire just slumped in place, and Nahiri stepped past him as he slowly sank down the length of the stone quill.

"Sorin," she called out again, her voice strong and cool as the stone she wielded. And then she was striding forward, her path direct and steady, as more quills sprang up before her to impale vampires and cultists alike.

It was just the two of them, then.

The last time Nahiri had seen Sorin, he had been the last thing she saw in the world before the solitude of the Helvault consumed her. Now, as she looked at him, standing a dozen or so paces away, he was much as she remembered him, though with none of the frailty from their previous meeting. He wore the same armor, but it was speckled with blood, which added a cruel sheen to the red stone that adorned his breastplate. His sword also bore evidence of his butchery. His face, so accustomed to displaying that sarcastic smirk that she knew so well, instead was creased with stern lines that she had never seen. It pleased her to see him so grim.

"You brought so many friends," Nahiri said, stepping out from between two grisly spikes. "But then, not everyone could make it." She knew the mention of Avacyn would sting, but there was no sarcastic retort. Sorin just raised a pale hand, and jets of black, smoky energy streaked out. Death was in those trails of shadow, death meant for Nahiri. It appeared that he desired none of the pretense or poetry of a proper duel. Her end would be enough, and she watched Sorin, unmoving, as the sinister fingers reached for her.

But the fingers never touched her. They suddenly broke apart, and flew in several directions, tracing contours in the air that were otherwise invisible. Sorin unleashed a second torrent of death magic just as the first errant bolts completed their tortuous paths back to their source, crashing into the vampire in a rapid sequence of high hisses. Sorin fell to one knee, biting his lip in anguish, and from between the plates of his armor, dark vapor rose from unseen wounds.

"You must think very little of me if you thought that would work," Nahiri said as the second cluster of magic struck home just as the first had. "Magic flows through leylines. Leylines pass through stone. And, well, we both know what I can do with that. So by all means, Sorin, try that garbage again." She was circling him now. "I brought Emrakul to your doorstep, and you still think I'm a child."

For a moment, neither spoke. More than six thousand years of history had led them both here. Staring into Sorin's eyes, Nahiri wondered if he was thinking the same thing. They had been friends, she once believed. And now...now she would have her vengeance. At last, Nahiri said, "A thousand years, Sorin. You locked me away for a thousand years."

"And yet, you're still here." Sorin coughed, sending a billow of black mist into the air. "You should have left."

"I did. I returned to Zendikar to see it being gutted by the Eldrazi. You let that happen." She raised her sword so that it was level with Sorin's throat. "You condemned me and my world."

"You knew the risks when you agreed to trap the titans on Zendikar. You knew that their escape was a possibility."

"I also knew that we had a deal." Nahiri felt her skin get hot. "If they did escape, you and Ugin were supposed to come. When they did, you were nowhere to be found. The way I saw it, the three of us were in it together. But it was only me. All that time, it was only ever me."

"So you've decided to condemn this plane."

"I'm done being a warden, and Zendikar will never again be a prison. Emrakul had to go somewhere. You just made the decision a simple one."

"Sorin, I'm inclined to watch this play out," came a woman's voice, melodic and biting, from above. Nahiri's head tilted to find a vampire, clad all in elegant black plate armor, floating in the air overhead at the head of a dozen or more similarly adorned vampires. She wore no helmet, and her pale face and shock of brilliant red hair stood out against the dark metal. There was an air of grace that seemed to radiate from her, and Nahiri recognized a power that was akin to Sorin's. This woman was a bloodsucker of an ancient variety.

"No doubt, Olivia," Sorin said from his kneeling position.

Olivia motioned to Nahiri with a delicate sword wrought of black steel. "This is her, I take it." Without waiting for a confirmation, she simply addressed Nahiri. "Whatever Sorin's done to incur your ire, I'm sure he's earned it. But he's also earned my help, so I can't allow you your revenge."

"Another guardian angel, Sorin? This one was bit rushed, I think," said Nahiri. She swept a hand out, and the stone slabs before her began to turn red with heat.

Olivia smiled. "I like her Sorin, I must say. But nevertheless..." At her signal, her vampires descended on Nahiri.

The stones in front of the lithomancer had become white-hot, and before the bloodsuckers could reach her, she willed the contents from the molten stones—four blades, identical to the one she wielded, each one pulsing with energy of their stone forge. She grabbed one so that she had a blade in either hand. The others fanned out above her like the plumage of a phoenix.

Art by Chris Rahn

"My revenge isn't yours to hand out. I earned this. Sorin is mine."

"Never forget," Sorin hissed, "I spared you. The Helvault was a courtesy."

"A courtesy," Nahiri repeated, her fingers twitching. She could rend him to pieces. "The horrors you locked me away with for so long—they became my world."

On that last word, Nahiri sunk the points of her swords into one of the stone tiles. She clenched her fists, and the weapons began to vibrate. The trembling resonated through the floor, growing in strength as it spread out. What began as a low buzz swelled into a rumble that shook the surrounding structure. Bright ribbons of energy bloomed from her hands in rapid pulses, winding down the blades, until they radiated out along the masonry to reach into every stone in the manor.

A handful of ley stones sprouted around her, all pointing outward so that they formed a kind of star.

Then, the manor lurched. The walls she created to isolate her and Sorin fell away, and the entire hall began to rotate independently of the rest of the architecture. As it swung around, the foundation creaked like the joints of some ancient god rising for the first time in an age. It was a deafening sound, and it teetered on the edge of endurable.

Soon another sound crept into her hearing. With every inch of the hall's rotation, the sound grew. It was a course, grating sound, not entirely unlike the chorus of the cultists, but this was not meant for, nor made by, people.

The hall's arched entryway moved with the massive chamber so that it no longer led to the broken causeway beyond the manor's gate. When the circular motion stopped, the entryway settled before a featureless stone wall. The otherworldly sound swelled. Without the grinding of stone, there was no softening it, and she felt it in the roots of her teeth. But it was time. Nahiri reached out with her magic, and layers of that wall slid away in alternating directions.

Even before she coaxed the last layer aside, it exploded in a shower of rubble, and out they came. Scores of monsters, bulbous and contorted, with only vague hints at the people and animals they had once been. They were Emrakul's now, touched by the Eldrazi titan so that their flesh stretched over their mutated forms in sinewy, tangled mesh.

Art by Darek Zabrocki

Nahiri had been gathering them here since Emrakul's arrival, locked away in her own vault, a gift meant for her old friend.

Nahiri watched them stream from their black chamber, swarming into the hall toward her. She didn't flinch, though. Nightmares were nothing new to her. They closed in, and just as the terrible horde would have crashed into her, they broke around her. These monsters were blind to her within her ring of ley stones. Cryptoliths, she'd heard them described by the cultists, though they were far from cryptic. Eldrazi followed leylines, the network of mana that all worlds have. Just as she had done on Zendikar six thousand years ago, Nahiri shaped these stones to bend Innistrad's leylines to her will. To these horrors, she occupied a blank spot in reality. She didn't exist.

Such was not the case for the vampires. The Eldrazi rushed toward them, and the red-haired vampire, along with her lackeys, wasted no time wading into the monstrosities with all the fury of their kind.

Art by Karl Kopinski

Nahiri backed away from the chaos, and chunks of masonry slid into place with each backward step to create an impromptu stairway that spiraled into the heights of the manor. Her ascent carried her above the hacking of vampire blades and the lashing of latticed limbs. Sorin had hoped to beat her with allies, but Nahiri was ready. Sorin had tried to beat her with his death magic, but Nahiri was ready for that too.

Was he ready for her, though?

She felt his eyes on her, and when she found Sorin in the turmoil below her, he was staring up at her. Blood ran down his chin, and a cultist hung limply from the vampire's fists. It wasn't the first time she'd seen him feed, but he'd never looked quite so monstrous as he did at that moment. And that's what he was, a monster.

Sorin's eyes never left her, even as he began his climb. He moved like lightning, the limp cultist in his hand lolling violently as he scrambled up the twisted walls, and over to the chunks of masonry held frozen in the air. He was a cat on the hunt, swift and sure-footed. By the time Nahiri was among the unmoored, broken remnants of the manor's vaulted ceiling, Sorin was on her heels.

Nahiri was a kor from Zendikar, after all. Leaping from precarious place to precarious place was second nature to her. She was also the lithomancer, and here, in a field of scattered buttresses, spires, and entire wings of the manor that were strewn about in countless bits, she was in her element. She was perched on the sill of a tall, narrow window set into a bit of wall that hung in the air in defiance of gravity. Her swords orbited above her head, a crown of blades that marked this as her domain. It was time to see if Sorin could keep up.

"Now we can finish what we started, uninterrupted," Nahiri called down to Sorin, who rose after landing gracefully on a landing that still towed part of a wide staircase with it. A long red runner still clung to the remaining steps before dropping out over empty space like the tongue of some dead animal.

"Are you so eager to die?" Sorin said. "When last we met, my strength was greatly diminished. You're not so fortunate this time, I'm afraid." He tossed the corpse of the cultist at Nahiri like it was a damp cloth, and she heard something crunch inside the body as it slammed into the stone beside her. "And I have every intention of killing you."

"You think you scare me?"

"If not yet, I will." His eyes were all cruelty, pure and ancient.

"I'm not leaving until this is done, Sorin."

"On that we agree, young one."

Young one. Without another word, Nahiri let her swords fly, all but the one she gripped. Sorin scrambled out of the way as each blade bit deep in the stone beneath his feet, and before he could secure his footing once again, Nahiri grabbed hold of the landing with her will and upended it.

For a moment, Nahiri thought he would hang on, but his fingers failed to find purchase, and he fell.

But the heavy red runner swung around with the motion, and Nahiri watched as Sorin's fingers closed around the fabric, and suddenly, he was swinging instead of falling.

Nahiri yanked at the landing's component flagstones, unraveling the whole structure. As it tumbled away, Sorin let go, and his momentum carried him to a wayward beam. From there he pounced to a shattered wall, and then to another beam that leaned diagonally in the air. It seemed all in the span of a heartbeat, and Nahiri could scarcely keep track of him.

Then she couldn't. He was so quick, and by the time she shifted her position in her window to follow his movements beneath her, she'd lost sight of him.

For several moments her eyes darted around furiously, scanning for any hint of movement. Then, a flash of silver, and all Nahiri could do was slide into the wall itself so that Sorin's blade bounced away with a deafening knell that rang for several moments through the stone.

Swaddled in masonry, Nahiri heard Sorin's words muffled, but venomous. "Nahiri, Nahiri, all this trouble over a turn in the Helvault. And yet you seem so at home in stone."

Then there was a loud crack, and agony shot through her side like a hot poker. The stone had been breached. She felt it, and she felt the steel in her flesh. With a scrape, the blade receded, and before it could strike again, Nahiri let herself fall from the wall's grasp, and suddenly, she was tumbling through open air. Her hand went to the burning at her side, and it was wet.

Some bit of balustrade came up to meet her. She tried to grab hold of it, but her hand, slick with blood, slipped, and she bounced past it. Her eyes fluttered, and the world spun around her until it stopped all at once when she slammed hard against the surface of a massive spire that lay horizontally across the length of the open ceiling.

When she was able to find enough strength, Nahiri gathered her feet beneath her and rose slowly. She leaned hard against some stonework that protruded from the surface of the spire. She was out of breath, and her mouth felt dry despite the taste of blood in her mouth.

At the sound of boots on the spire in front of her, she raised her eyes to find Sorin straightening himself from his landing. He stepped forward so that he stood over her, his sword raised and threatening, just as it was a thousand years ago when he condemned her to the Helvault. But there was no Helvault this time.

"You had the chance to kill me, young one. You should have taken that chance while it was there." There was no gloating in Sorin's words. It was a mentor addressing a protégé, a final lesson to impart.

"Maybe," Nahiri said, though more to herself. Her sword hung limply in her hand so that the point rested on the ground. Pain radiated from the gash in her side. Her free hand had been cradling the wound, and it trembled as she took a moment to glance at it.

So much blood.

So what was a little more. She took a deep breath, and spoke. "Regardless of what happens here, whether I make it out of here or not, I won, Sorin. Look around you." Nahiri swept her hand weakly out to indicate the manor. "Look carefully at what I've done to everything you claim as yours." She pointed to her left. Out in the distance, over the city of Thraben, Emrakul. "No pet angel of yours will come to the rescue this time."

Sorin's sword flicked out, knocking Nahiri's out into nothing. "What you took from me in Avacyn, I will take from your blood." Before a muscle could even twitch, she felt Sorin's teeth tear into her neck. All the blood in her body shifted course. Sorin was calling it to him, and it burned in her veins. He drank deeply, and Nahiri found her moment.

She leaned into the masonry at her back, and it responded to her coaxing by unfurling to either side of her. Each heart beat was torment, but she pushed through it to whisper, "I can bite back, Sorin, and I've got bigger teeth than you."

The stone crashed in around them, and rows of jagged stone tusks tore into Sorin from his legs to his ribs. His sword flew from his hand, and a yelp of agony exploded from his lips. Nahiri shoved herself free of him, passing through the solid stone so that only Sorin remained. The stone tightened in on him until it had him in its grasp. By the time Nahiri was finished with her work, Sorin hung in air, gripped in Nahiri's magic. There was no planeswalking from this. The stone teeth that held him chewed at his insides, keeping him in a perpetual anguish that would sap the focus he would need to leave this place.

Then Nahiri spun Sorin and his stone around so that they faced the rolling plains below Markov Manor. Sorin tried to speak, an unintelligible gurgle, as Nahiri climbed onto the cocoon she'd crafted. Whatever he had to say didn't matter. She wanted him to hear her words. With one hand clinging to the pinnacle of the stone, Nahiri lowered herself so that she could whisper those words into Sorin's ear. "I spared you," Nahiri said. "A courtesy returned.”

Art by Cynthia Sheppard

In the distance beneath a ceiling of brooding clouds, Emrakul.

And the next moment, Nahiri planeswalked away from Innistrad, leaving Sorin to the fate of his world.

The horizon was Emrakul. There was nothing Sorin could do but watch as the end of Innistrad drifted slowly across Gavony toward Thraben. The people down there were of little consequence now, but Innistrad was his, and Thraben was where he had created Avacyn to protect it. Seeing it now, on brink of its ruin, sent a pang through him that hurt worse than the lithomancer's stone teeth that ground their way through his insides.

Sorin felt it a moment before he heard it—metal against stone, a long, slow scrape that moved across the back of his sarcophagus from bottom to top.

"I think I like this one better," came a voice rich with mockery. And then Olivia descended into view to block out the chaos beyond. She was holding his sword.

"Olivia," Sorin said through gritted teeth, "release me."

"Even if I could, why? Avacyn is dead. Nahiri has been driven off. Our bargain is fulfilled." She chuckled cruelly. "I call this a victory. Do try to enjoy it. Markov Manor is yours, after all. As for me," she held up Sorin's sword to inspect its edge, "I rather like the sound of 'Olivia, Lord of Innistrad.'"

Any shred of patience he possessed was suddenly cast aside by a surge of desperation. This world was done. Olivia was his only way out. "Look!" he said, straining against the unyielding stone. Olivia peered over her shoulder, but said nothing. "You see," he continued, "that's what's coming! You've seen what she does, what she's capable of." He was speaking faster now, and his voice cracked. "You're going to need my help to deal with it!"

Sorin didn't like the way Olivia looked at him as he spoke. She was a spider, and he was a fly. "Listen to me!" he tried again. "What good is any of this if it will be gone tomorrow?"

"Avacyn is dead. And you," she said, pressing the point of his own sword against his cheek, "you're where you are. I think it's quite good." And all Sorin could do was watch as Olivia floated from view, so that Emrakul and the end she promised filled his vision once again.

6

Saint Traft and the Flight of Nightmares

By James Wyatt

When last we saw Thalia, Odric, and Grete, they had fled the evil lurking in the Lunarch Council, the governing body of the Church of Avacyn, and gathered in a remote chapel in Gavony's Nearheath. Thalia introduced her friends to the Order of Saint Traft, named after—and literally inspired by—an ancient saint known for battling demons. Thalia had allowed herself to become a vessel for the saint's geist, and armed with that sacred power, she had led a ragtag band of rebellious soldiers, cathars, and clergy in carrying on the church's mission despite the corruption at its heart.

But now the world is changed. How can the remnants of the Church of Avacyn carry on their mission when Avacyn is dead? And what power can sustain them as their world hangs on the brink of extinction?

"I hear so little news," Grete said, "and half of it is contradictory."

Thalia nodded, sighing. "Sometimes our scouts don't come back," she said, "and sometimes they're in no condition to make any report when they do." Something turned in her stomach at the thought of Halmig, who had rejoined the march yesterday morning...changed. She had been forced to kill him, or whatever he had become—more squirming thing than man. She could only guess what he had encountered on his scouting mission, and what had happened to the soldiers under his command.

"Is it true that Hanweir is destroyed?" Grete asked.

"The truth is far worse." Thalia ran her fingers through her mount's shining coat, pretending not to see Grete's arched eyebrow, and Grete didn't press the question.

They rode in silence for a little while, lost in their own thoughts. The last time an army had marched on Thraben, Thalia recalled, it had been a horde of ghouls and skaabs created by the Cecani siblings. Now she was part of the marching horde—if so few soldiers could be called a horde. They were as ragged and bedraggled as zombies, perhaps, worn down from the constant battles of the last few weeks. The world seemed to be swallowed up in madness. But as long as they drew breath, as long as they could cling to the merest shred of hope, they would fight.

Or most of them would. Odric had remained behind, his spirit broken after he turned against the Lunarch Council and freed Thalia from their prison. Thalia grieved for him, but she couldn't spend any of her faith trying to bolster his.

"I heard that Seeta and her inquisitors are continuing their work," Grete said after a time.

Thalia snorted. "Let her find us now," she said. After Thalia had confronted the Lunarch Council and fled Thraben with Odric and Grete, a zealous inquisitor named Seeta had led the hunt for them. Seeta's battle cry was "Purge the damned!" and she traveled at the head of a procession of rolling guillotines. The ox-drawn instruments of execution had so far slowed her down enough that she hadn't located the Order of Saint Traft, and now the order had grown large enough that Thalia figured they had little to fear from whatever was left of the inquisition.

Grete shook her head. "They call themselves the Sinpurged now," she said. "They claim the transformation is the result of the sin being purged from their bodies."

Thalia's lip curled in disgust. "They're trying to make a virtue out of...that?"

Grete nodded, staring at the rough path ahead.

"How far we have fallen," Thalia said, half to herself.

"What is it, then?" Grete asked. "I mean, given that it's not a virtue. What's causing it?"

"If there's an answer to be found, Thraben is where we'll find it."

She wondered what would they find—in the city, in the cathedral. Her heart quickened and her stomach lurched more violently as she thought of Thraben, her home for so many years. What if it had become like Hanweir, people and village fused into a single entity? What if there was nothing left to save? What if Avacyn really was...

Art by Vincent Proce

A lone figure stood beside a horse on the pathway ahead. Thalia nodded at Grete, who spurred her horse and bolted forward. She leaned toward her own mount's head, and the gryff spread its wings and gracefully drifted into the air, soaring past Grete's charging horse and settling down beside Rem Karolus without even stirring the dust on the ground.

Rem had been another devout servant of the church, the Blade of the Inquisitors, but the madness of the angels had changed him. He had always been grim, carrying out his duties with somber efficiency. But he had renounced his title early on, turning his renowned blade against the true threat to Innistrad. "Slayer of Angels" they called him now, though he did not use the title himself. And though she hadn't talked with him about it, Thalia strongly suspected that his faith had died along with the first angel he had slain.

As Grete reined in her horse beside them, Rem cut two straps on the side of his saddle, and a long metal shaft fell to the dirt with a heavy thud. Even with its tip broken in a jagged line, Avacyn's spear was unmistakable.

"So it's true," Thalia whispered.

"Did you kill her?" Grete blurted.

Rem snorted. "You give me too much credit," he said. "Don't get me wrong; I'd've done it if I could. But it looks like someone beat me to it."

Thalia's heart was lead. She slid off the gryff's back and fell to her knees beside the spear, as if dragged down by the weight in her chest. Her gryff nuzzled her face, its own face wet with—tears? Was the gryff mourning Avacyn as much as she was?

She shuffled forward and reached for the spear.

Rem half-shouted, "I wouldn't do—"

A flare of holy light erupted where her hand touched the metal haft, and Thalia jerked her hand back as pain jolted through her entire arm.

"—that," Rem finished flatly. "I went around in circles trying to get it slung on old Jedda here. Couldn't touch it."

Thalia ignored him. Can you do this? she asked the spirit she carried.

Her hand began to glow with soft white light as Saint Traft's power shivered up and down her spine. She felt lighter. With or without Avacyn, the world was not yet lost.

She reached for the spear again, and this time her hand closed firmly around the haft. She got to her feet and lifted the spear over her head, and its head shone like the sun under the overcast sky. Rem's mouth hung open, and Thalia tried not to grin at him.

"Grete, will you take the standard off my saddle, please?" Thalia said.

Grete dismounted and approached the gryff—nervous at first, but as soon as she was close enough to touch it, Thalia saw the fear melt away. Gryffs were calming.

Art by Christine Choi

Grete deftly removed the long spear that held the banner of Saint Traft over Thalia's head as she rode, and Thalia put Avacyn's spear in its place.

"We ride under this banner now," she said.

Rem was still flabbergasted. "How did you—?"

"You should ride with me more often, Rem. You'll see a great deal that surprises you."

"And things to give you hope," Grete added.

"Well, we'll see about that," Rem said. But he was looking at the spear, still shining in the dim sunlight, and something gleamed in his eyes, even if it was not hope.

Thalia climbed back into her saddle, turned the gryff toward the approaching army, and nudged it back into the air. She flew over the whole ragtag host, making sure that everyone had a chance to see Avacyn's spear. Some cheers rose up—the shouts of soldiers acknowledging their leader—but as they realized what they were seeing, and what it meant, the cheers turned to cries of despair.

She guided the gryff down in the midst of them. Calling again to the spirit she carried, she lifted the spear with both hands, hoisting it above her head. It was too heavy for her to wield, but it was a powerful symbol.

"Avacyn is gone!" she shouted. Groans of despair, shouts of disbelief rose around her. "Her church is corrupt beyond redemption. And nameless horrors crawl and squirm across our land."

She paused a moment, her heart aching. The grief she saw on the faces all around her mirrored her own. Everyone here had lost family, dear friends, and homes, and they were on the brink of losing their hope. The weight of the spear made her shoulder muscles burn.

"But we remain!" she shouted. "We who have fought these horrors, we who have stood against the evil and madness in the church, we who have clung to faith in defiance of despair—we remain! And if no archangel will light our path through this darkness, we must be our own light. If no wards will hold the terrors at bay, then our swords must do it. If we can find no faith in Avacyn, we must have faith in the ideals that Avacyn upheld, before her madness."

As she spoke, she saw cathars drop to their knees, tears streaming freely down battle-hardened faces, eyes raised to the heavens or faces pressed to the ground. Each of them, she thought, would deal with their grief in their own way, in their own time. She ached for them, on top of her own grief—a burden far heavier than the spear she strained to keep aloft.

Remembering what she had said to Odric months before, she said all that she knew that could lift their hearts from their grief. "Before all this, the soft light of the moon held back the terrors of the night. Before all this, the bonds between us drove out the fear that tried to break us apart. Before all this, we aspired to be more than merely human—we aspired to holiness, to a perfection shown to us by the angels.

"And so we will again. Dear friends, we remain! And this is what we fight for. For the memory of Avacyn, of the light and goodness that have fled from the world, we fight! For Innistrad and all its people, we march!"

They cheered through their tears; they stood from the ground and raised their faces to the clouded sky and lifted their swords and spears high. Thalia touched the gryff's head and it rose above them, circling one more time above the soldiers, Thalia's tiny army. Then she landed again at their head, next to Grete, and they marched: to Thraben, to make one desperate, glorious last stand against the nightmare that had seized the world.

The spires and battlements of Thraben towered high above the mouth of the River Kirch, just as it tumbled over the jagged cliffs and into the sea. The gently rolling heath that made up most of Gavony meant that under a clear sky, the Bright City could be seen from many miles away. But Thalia couldn't remember the last time she had seen a clear sky, so by the time the mist and rain parted and exposed the city to their view, they were within an hour's march.

But the way ahead of them was crowded with horrors, and it would be no easy march to Thraben. They were masses of latticed flesh and knobbed tentacles, distorted features and malformed bodies—things that once were farm animals, wild beasts, or the more ordinary sort of monsters. Some were unrecognizable as ever having been a natural creature at all. And many, all too many, had once been human, with varying degrees of anything that could be called a face remaining amid the monstrous features.

By comparison, the hideous skaabs that Geralf Cecani had sent to Thraben—amalgamations of human and animal parts arranged according to his twisted imagination—seemed sane and normal. At least a clear intelligence had formed them—a mind with an abhorrent aesthetic and utterly lacking in any moral compass, but a mind nonetheless. These things could only have been imagined by an utterly alien consciousness, some mad god dreaming in the restless sleep of eternities.

They were converging on Thraben, too, shambling on boneless legs or writhing tentacles or pulling themselves along the ground with what used to be hands. Some flapped clumsily through the air on membranous wings, and some simply drifted on the wind, as though gravity were just one more natural law they could blithely ignore.

At first, the horrors seemed more interested in making their own way toward Thraben than they did in stopping Thalia and her cathars. She ordered the soldiers to conserve their strength, fighting only if they were attacked. As nauseating as it was to leave the wriggling monsters alive, she felt sure her soldiers would need their full strength once they reached the city.

But then she strayed too close to a shambling thing the size of a large horse, and it wheeled on her. It had once been a horse, she guessed—no, a horse and rider, now fused together in a hideous mass of flesh. Something like six legs supported the thing, and interwoven cords of magenta flesh covered its sides, fusing what had once been rider and steed together. Jagged teeth jutted from various jaw-like structures beneath a ratty mane, and an orange glow beneath a three-cornered hat must once have been the face of the rider. A halberd was almost swallowed up in the tangle of tentacles.

Art by Daarken

Before she could even turn her mount to face the creature, as if she had entered some sort of mad tilting contest, it reared up on three hind legs and slammed a hoof into her shoulder, knocking her from the saddle. Her gryff lifted into the air with a flutter of ruffled feathers, and Thalia took advantage of the horse-creature's momentary distraction to find her feet and settle into a fighting stance.

As it drew near, her blade flashed out and cut two long gashes across what should have been the horse's neck. Brownish something dripped from the wounds—not blood; it writhed and squirmed like worms wriggling beneath an overturned rock. And the creature didn't seem to notice.

A hoof at the end of something that was not a leg lashed out at her. She batted it aside, cutting into the flesh just above the hoof, which this time brought a seepage of yellowish pus. But as she parried to one side, a tentacle—perhaps one of the rider's arms, before—slapped her from the other side. The side of her face stung...and then it didn't. Her skin went numb and cold where the fleshy mass had struck her.

She staggered backward two steps, shifting her sword to her other hand as the numbness spread down her neck to her shoulder. The thing followed her and reared up to strike her again, but then her gryff swooped down and drove its beak through the core of the creature's fleshy mass. A howling ululation rose from several mouths yawning open in its body.

She sank her blade deep into the thing—right above a foot still resting in a stirrup, she realized with a jolt of revulsion—and the volume of its cry increased. Several other cathars had come to her aid, and they swung heavier swords and axes until the horror lay twitching at their feet.

And Dennias, who a year ago had been a naive trainee at the Elgaud Grounds, knelt on the ground clutching his head as though he were trying to keep something inside from bursting out. His mouth gaped open in a silent scream and his wide eyes stared at nothing. His friend Mathan fell to one knee beside him, putting an arm around his shoulder and murmuring empty words meant to comfort. Thalia turned away.

Then Mathan screamed.

Thalia whirled around and saw Mathan scrambling back, his face white as a gryff. Dennias hadn't moved, but long tendrils, like magenta ribbons, protruded from between the fingers of one hand. Protruded from out of his ear.

His face went pale, and he looked like he was going to vomit. Shaking her head sadly, Thalia took a few steps toward him. She knew what was coming.

He doubled over as if to empty his stomach, but more of the tendrils came out of his mouth instead. Something large squirmed beneath his armor at his sides, too.

He was lost.

Her blade took his life quickly—far more quickly than the horse and rider had fallen, and certainly more quickly than this corruption would squeeze the life from him. She took on the burden of his death so no one else had to; she would let someone else claim the nobler role of comforting his friend.

Gryffs were calming. As she climbed back into her saddle, her pulse slowed and she managed a deep, shuddering breath. She couldn't look at the spear.

Thraben was drawing them all, now.

Thalia's mind was clear and her eyes focused on the spires of the High City, but she still felt the pull. The soldiers who marched beside and behind her kept their eyes on Avacyn's spear, pointing heavenward from her saddle, but they felt it too, she knew. Townsfolk carrying pickaxes and pitchforks joined their throng, as if they knew that this was their last opportunity to fight for the fate of the world.

And the shambling, shuddering, squirming things all around them knew nothing but the pull. Some were still mostly human, townsfolk and villagers clad in the robes of the coastal cults, sporting crab claws or suckered tentacles or froglike mouths. Some had clearly been human before, or animals, though no longer. Some were so far gone she couldn't begin to describe them. But Thraben was drawing them all.

No, not all. A troop of knights on armored horses rode across the heath, toward Thalia and her forces, not toward the city. A company of soldiers marched behind them.

"Grete, Rem," she said, snapping them out of their trancelike states. She pointed. Rem nodded grimly, while Grete's brow furrowed.

"More enemies?" Grete asked.

"The Sinpurged, maybe," Rem said.

"Don't call them that," Thalia snapped. "But I don't think it's Seeta's crew."

"Who, then?" Grete asked.

"I'll find out." Thalia didn't even have time to nudge her mount before it lifted off the ground, as if it knew her thoughts.

As she winged toward the approaching knights, a figure near the front of the wedge rose into the air as well—just one human figure, no flying mount carrying it aloft.

As her gryff winged nearer, Thalia could make out a mane of flame-red hair, black armor—and a long black skirt that seemed completely unsuited for battle. The figure had pale skin, almost white, and carried an absurdly large blade made lighter by hollowing it out so the gray sky was visible through it.

Not human, then. A vampire.

The vampire held both hands up to signal a parley, though she still held the blade—and no wonder, since Thalia couldn't imagine what a sheath for that thing might look like. Thalia returned the gesture, her own slim blade sheathed at her side. And they slowly hovered toward each other until they were close enough to speak.

It was ludicrous, in a way, yet deathly serious. Thalia sat astride a gryff whose wings flapped ever so slightly to keep it aloft, face to face with a vampire suspended in the air by her own magic. And they were going to talk.

"We have common cause, human," the vampire called. "I'm Olivia Voldaren, lady of Lurenbraum and progenitor of the Voldaren line."

Art by Eric Deschamps

Thalia was struck speechless for a moment. Floating in the air a stone's throw away from her was one of the most powerful vampires in Innistrad, rumored to be an eccentric recluse known for hosting extravagant parties at which she rarely made more than a brief appearance. And she was decked out in full battle array, the picture of elegant aristocracy mobilized for war.

With a deep breath, Thalia found her voice. "Greetings, Lady Voldaren. I'm Thalia, Heir of Saint Traft."

"Really? I met him once, you know. I must say, you do him credit, sitting there on your gryff with the spear of Avacyn at your side."

It was subtle, Olivia's reminder that she was far more ancient than Thalia could comprehend. A gentle warning, mixed with a note of what almost sounded like respect.

"What's this about, vampire? I'm not going to stand by while my soldiers become another one of your legendary Voldaren feasts."

"Relax, darling." She laughed, a musical sound that only made the situation seem more absurd. "As I said before, we have common cause. I think we're all here for the same purpose: to save the world. Since your precious angel is clearly in no position to do so."

Thalia bit back a harsh response. If the vampires were here to help, she could not turn them back. Yes, if any of them survived the march on Thraben, no doubt the vampires would turn on them then, hungry from the exertion of battle. But that was a purely theoretical problem, compared to the grim reality of the monsters shuffling toward the High City while they spoke.

"Fine," she said. "We'll save the world together. You with your army, I with mine. I can't ask my soldiers to fight alongside vampires, but we'll fight the same foes."

Olivia had drifted closer as they spoke, and now she swooped close enough to extend a hand. On Thalia's right, with the gryff between her and Avacyn's spear.

"No vampire bite or blade will draw human blood until this fight is through, Heir of Saint Traft. Are we in agreement?"

Not quite believing she was doing it, Thalia reached out and took the vampire's hand.

"No human blade will harm your kind. We agree."

Olivia dipped in the air and lowered her face to their clasped hands. She drew a deep breath of air through her nose—sniffing?—and then met Thalia's eyes. Her fangs showed clearly through her smile.

"Delicious," she said. One final warning, then she turned and drifted back down toward her vampire army.

Thalia shuddered and returned to her soldiers, trying to figure out what she would say to them.

Thalia rode for a time with her eyes closed, trusting her gryff to lead the way and alert her to danger. She withdrew into herself and communed with the geist who shared her body, and she remembered:

It was after she confronted Odric in the cathedral that she first met the saint, the geist. With nowhere to go, she rode out into the heath, off the crossways, until she stumbled on an overgrown path. Something drew her along its winding course, until she discovered an ancient chapel near the foothills that made their way up to the Geier Reach of Stensia.

A painting inside caught her eye. It showed Traft, she knew now, or his geist, standing behind a red-haired woman who held a sword in her four-fingered left hand. His hand was on her shoulder.

Art by Igor Kieryluk

That woman was the first Heir of Saint Traft, who as a girl had been captured and tormented by demonic cultists in order to lure the saint to his doom. The cultists had cut off her finger and sent it to Traft to ensure his cooperation in their wicked scheme. After the saint's death, he had kept a special watch over her as she grew into a great warrior and a slayer of demons in her own right. And as the angels had favored Traft, so too they had smiled upon her and fought by her side.

As Thalia gazed at the painting in that lonely chapel, the hazy form of the saint's geist shown in the painting seemed to move. His serene face turned toward her, his eyes met hers, and then his hand reached out toward her. Without hesitation, she took it, and it felt as solid as flesh and bone—but cold, so cold. Fear seized her, and she fell to her knees, looking away from those blank eyes, but he kept hold of her hand and stepped closer, as though he were coming out of the painting. He knelt to the ground in front of her, and his other hand gently lifted her chin.

"Will you take me in?" he whispered.

She nodded, he smiled, and her fear was gone. She took a deep breath and he filled her nose and mouth and lungs, cold fire burning her from the inside, and she threw her head back as he coursed through her veins, every inch of her aflame.

That cold flame had not left her in the months since. Most of the time, it was a sort of knot at the back of her skull, from time to time sending shivers up and down her spine and into her head, as the geist reminded her of his presence—in warning, often, or in anger. Sometimes, like when she had gripped Avacyn's spear, his fire coursed through her again, and it was no longer she who moved, but the geist that moved her.

He had carried her this far, she knew. He had stood with her when she confronted Jerren and the Lunarch Council. He had helped her gather these other cathars, so-called heretics, to fight the evils that beset the church from without and within. He would not desert her as she led them into Thraben. Somehow, he reassured her of that much, at least. But she could sense some hesitation, even from him.

Would his help be enough? He couldn't promise her that. But it was all the hope she had.

The gryff shivered beneath her, and she opened her eyes, looking around for whatever had disturbed it. The walls of Thraben were close now. The vampire army, which had slowly grown closer as they approached the High City, was close on their left flank now. It was no longer possible to evade the shambling horrors; they were all converging on the city, and fighting was spreading throughout the front of her column of soldiers.

But her soldiers were feeling the weight of it. She could see the wildness in their eyes, the desperation born of a growing conviction that the world's end was drawing near, that they were marching to an apocalyptic last battle.

Art by David Gaillet

She lifted her gryff to circle over the front lines, shouting words of encouragement to the desperate and despairing. But it was more than desperation, she realized. As awful as it was—fighting twisted monsters that had once been ordinary flesh, some of them once human—that wasn't the only thing pushing them toward the precipice of despair. There was something else, something she experienced as a sort of pressure on her mind. Forcing her mind to form strange thoughts, strange urges, strange perceptions. In the corners of her vision, monsters looked human and soldiers looked like monsters. The sky seemed to writhe with blue and mauve tentacles churning the clouds. The ground buckled beneath her, her gryff turned inside out, Avacyn's spear bent down to point itself at her chest—

No.

It echoed like a bell in her mind, a word of power spoken by the spirit of a long-dead saint. Her thoughts cleared, her perceptions returned to normal. Clarity.

But the soldiers below her lacked Traft's protection, and she could see the madness taking root in them as they stared around themselves in fear.

They're not ready, Traft whispered in her mind.

"It doesn't matter," she said aloud. "We have to do it now."

It will hurt them.

"This madness will kill them, or they'll kill each other. It's time."

Do it, then.

His fire coursed through her again, and she seized Avacyn's spear as she circled once more over the front lines.

"Cathars of Saint Traft!" she shouted. "The madness that has seized our world is pressing in around us. You feel it, I know. You're questioning your thoughts, doubting your eyes and ears. Listen to me!"

For some of them, she realized now, it was too late. She saw cathars writhing on the ground, clutching their heads or curled into fetal balls. Damn it, she had waited too long. But there were still cathars she could save.

"You know the geist of Saint Traft lives within me," she called, and as she said it, the geist made a nimbus of blue-white light shine around her. "Once he was Beloved of Angels, and the blessed ones shielded him as Avacyn's church once shielded us. But Avacyn is no more, her angels are lost to madness, and only the dead remain."

It was Traft who called them, and they answered his summons. Up from the ground, swooping down from the roiling sky, soaring toward them from the High City, came hundreds of glowing white forms. Out from the mausoleums and the Blessed Grafs, no longer bound by sacred wards whose magic had failed with Avacyn's demise, the spirits of the dead came to the aid of the living. Some rode on spectral steeds, some carried ghostly spears and swords, some were aged and battle-hardened, and some were little children.

Art by Igor Kieryluk

"Behold the spirits of the faithful who have come before us," Thalia shouted. Or perhaps it was Traft shouting with her voice. "Welcome them. Honor the sacrifices they have made so that we could fight today. Open yourselves to them, and let them shield you!"

And she watched her soldiers—the desperate, bedraggled, blessed cathars of the Order of Saint Traft—catch fire. Some of them, catching her meaning at once, spread their arms wide and embraced the geists that swept in and filled them. Thalia could see the holy ecstasy seize them, and the others quickly caught on. There were geists enough for her whole ragged army, and another army left over to march beside the living.

As the fire roared to life inside them, they surged back into battle, and piteous shrieks rose up from the front lines as they hacked and stabbed their way through the monstrous horrors ahead.

There are some who cannot invite the spirits in, Traft said, directing her eyes to the soldiers who were still clutching their heads or curled into balls.

She could save them. She could direct the spirits to possess them against their will, drive out the madness, clear their minds. Her stomach knotted with compassion and grief.

"No," she said. "I can't make that choice for them. The others will help them, as they are able."

She directed her gryff to the ground again, alighting between Grete and Rem Karolus. She could see the white fire blazing in Grete's eyes, but Rem was stony-faced and grim.

"No geist for you, Rem?"

The grizzled soldier shook his head. "Like putting a leech on your neck to keep the vampires away," he said.

She started to protest, nervous about what might happen if he lost his senses in the midst of battle—to him, and to the soldiers around him. Again, though, she could not force the choice. And if any soldier here could keep his head in all this madness through sheer force of stubborn will, it was Rem Karolus, Blade of the Inquisitors and Slayer of Angels.

Their march became one interminable battle, every step forward contested by some new horror. The twisted monstrosities—even the ones that still looked mostly human—fought like Somberwald boars, snarling and thrashing despite dozens of wounds before they finally fell to the ground and stopped their loathsome twitching. But the holy geists made Thalia's soldiers almost as fierce, and she saw grievously injured soldiers get calmly back to their feet as the geists within them closed their wounds and restored their strength.

She barely noticed when they passed through the Outer Wall, marking their entrance into Thraben. Just a passing thought—the end is near—flitted through her mind before she stabbed a creature that had once been a werewolf and then whirled to cut through a weirdly jointed tentacle that was groping toward her.

They were fighting shoulder to shoulder with vampires now, making their way through the streets of the city. The vampires made terrifying allies, showing the same frenzied delight in killing warped and corrupted humans that they did when the humans were pure and whole. Each remnant of a human face Thalia saw in a monster falling beneath her blade added to the burden on her shoulders, but to the vampires these creatures were just more prey. She even saw a few vampires pause to feed before continuing to press ahead. Fighting down a wave of nausea, she forced herself to look away.

A great open plaza stretched out before Thraben Cathedral, a place where in happier times great throngs of people would gather to hear the Lunarch give an address on holy days. Throngs were gathered there now—throngs of gibbering, squirming, eldritch things, locked in battle with what remnants of the High City's soldiery and the cathedral's guards remained. Thalia nudged her gryff upward and circled the plaza to take stock of the battle.

Desperate citizens swung shovels and scythes, trying to hold back gangs of twisted cultists. Valiant cathars charged in a tight wedge to break the ranks of faceless monsters, only to find themselves engulfed on all sides. A small pack of werewolves, led by two white-furred beasts, tore into the ranks of their utterly corrupted kin. A hulking skaab stood over the corpse of a wretched scholar, defending its creator with its last shred of strength. Death—so much death.

Art by Craig J Spearing

Circling back toward the advancing soldiers she had left behind, she saw a group of heavily armored soldiers wearing the heron masks of the Lunarch Inquisition. Their deformities protruded from under their hoods and robes, and they were encircling a group of terrified townsfolk. Thalia saw a few of the citizens fall to their knees, begging for mercy from the church that was supposed to protect them. And then she recognized Seeta, leader of the so-called Sinpurged. Sword in hand and anger blazing in her chest, she swooped down toward the blasphemous cathar.

Then she saw a jagged blade burst out from Seeta's chest, and the chief of the Sinplagued slumped to her knees. Behind her, Thalia saw the pale face of Olivia Voldaren smirking at her.

"Fine," she muttered, and she nudged her gryff upward again, scanning the chaos for Rem Karolus or Grete.

Why does that bother you so much? Traft's voice whispered in her mind. Your enemy is slain, but you wanted to do it yourself?

"I'm no saint," she said aloud.

Faces turned upward toward her, and she saw terror in the eyes of her own soldiers. Finally she spotted Rem, white-faced and wide-eyed. His sword clattered on the cobblestones and he pointed up—behind her.

She turned the gryff and saw the source of the terror. Drifting in the air in front of the cathedral was a huge abomination formed of twisted flesh, writhing tentacles...and feathered wings.

Art by Clint Cearley

The monstrous angel's two heads uttered a discordant wail that stabbed her ears and upended her equilibrium, and she had to clutch the pommel of her saddle to keep her seat. Below her, twisted monsters surged forward as uncorrupted humans clutched their ears or staggered back under a renewed assault. The angel-thing swept one of its thick lower tentacles through the throng in the square, sending humans and horrors alike scattering or crushing them to the ground.

If anyone was going to face this nightmare, Thalia realized, it had to be her. Her gryff's wings made it possible, which was more than anyone on the ground could say. She steadied herself in the saddle, adjusted her grip on her sword, and rose to the angel's eye level, above the broken roof of the cathedral.

Despite the creature's enormous size, its heads were no larger than Thalia's own, and some hint of their angelic features remained, including a tangled mat of reddish hair.

"Abomination!" she shouted, swallowing her fear and dread. She wanted to issue some kind of formal challenge, but words fled from her reach and she finally just swooped in to attack.

One of the angel-thing's impossibly long arms lashed out to bat her aside, but the gryff bobbed beneath it and Thalia slashed at it as she flew past. The two heads opened their mouths to wail again—one mouth just a gaping cavity in the creature's neck—but the sound was cut short as Thalia drove her sword into something like a shoulder where at least three arms converged on the creature's left side. At the same time, her gryff's beak tore at the knotted flesh on the side of one of those monstrous heads.

In response, the angel brought its other arm up and slashed a half-dozen finger-claws down her side and across her gryff's flank, sending them both hurtling down toward the cathedral steps. The gryff tried desperately to right itself as it careened downward, but one wing was clearly broken, and it managed only to put itself between Thalia and the hard stone steps.

Thalia's entire body ached, and her leg was pinned beneath the gryff at an awkward angle, sending jolts of agony up her side at the slightest movement. Her head was spinning. She lay it down on the stone and stared up at her doom.

It seemed fitting, somehow, that her end should come at the hands of an angel, an embodiment of everything she had given her life to serve. The angel's corruption seemed to mirror all the ways her life had gone wrong in recent months. The fused angels drifted down toward her, intent on finishing the work they had begun.

But before Thalia could lift a hand to defend herself, something bright interposed itself between her and the angel-thing.

"HELLO, MY SISTER," the angel-thing said in a horrific double voice that echoed with the resonance of untold eternities.

"You are no longer my sisters," a pure, clear voice responded. Thalia saw a figure in the midst of the light, an angel holding a scythe that's head was styled like a heron.

"Sigarda," she whispered. The archangel of the Host of Herons had never turned against humanity, even at the height of Avacyn's madness. Even now, she stood against her—sisters? That meant the fused angel-thing contained Bruna and Gisela, the archangels of the other two hosts. Despair settled into Thalia's gut like stone.

Art by Chris Rahn

"YOU SHOULD HAVE ANSWERED WHEN WE CALLED."

"So I could be part of this 'great work'?" Sigarda replied.

Sigarda was buying time for her to recover, Thalia realized. With all her remaining strength, she pushed the dead gryff off her leg, sending a nauseating wave of agony through her.

"YES. THE GREAT WORK NEARS ITS COMPLETION."

The angel-thing reached both of its enormous claws toward Sigarda, and four smaller hands close to its chest reached out as well, reminding Thalia strangely of a baby reaching for her mother.

"Your work here is finished, sisters," Sigarda said. "You have become what we were meant to destroy."

Thalia could feel Traft working within her, easing the pain, closing wounds, and even mending bone. If Sigarda kept her sisters at bay just a bit longer, Thalia would be ready to fight again. She looked around for her sword.

It was gone. The blow that smashed her and the gryff to the ground could have sent her weapon halfway across the plaza. How could she fight this thing with no damned sword?

"YOU CAN'T HURT US NOW, SISTER," the angel-thing said.

Sigarda raised her scythe, which caught an errant beam of moonlight and seemed to glow.

"I must," she said, and she swept the scythe in a huge, deadly arc across her sisters' arms and chest.

But one of those huge, strangely bifurcated arms snatched Sigarda out of the air. Thalia gasped in horror as the big hand carried the angel's struggling form to the strange, glowing maw at the angel-thing's chest, where the four smaller arms embraced Sigarda. Long tendrils of flesh wriggled out and coiled around Sigarda's arms, tying her in place.

"No, no, no," Thalia said. She couldn't stand idly by and watch the last sane angel get absorbed into that monstrosity. She cast her eyes around for anything that would serve as a weapon.

"WE WILL BE TOGETHER AGAIN," the fused angels said.

Traft directed Thalia's gaze to Avacyn's spear.

"It's too heavy," she said.

Not for us both, the saint's geist replied.

"Fine." She stepped around her fallen steed and bent down to pick up the spear. A chill spread down her spine as Traft's power coursed through her once more, protecting her from the spear's magic. And she shuddered in an instant of ecstasy as glowing, translucent wings spread out from her back, the blessing of some unseen angel.

I was Beloved of Angels, once, Traft reminded her.

The broken spear seemed almost to glow in the light of the torches and small fires scattered around the plaza. She grasped it in both hands and lifted it skyward.

As lightly as her gryff, her angelic wings lifted her into the air. Traft had been right, of course—with his strength aiding hers, the spear felt as light as her slender blade in her hands. Up she soared, to where the angel-thing held Sigarda, who was now barely visible beneath a layer of fibrous flesh.

When it saw Avacyn's spear shining in Thalia's hands, Bruna-Gisela uttered another piercing wail. As one of those monstrous claws swung at her, Thalia blocked it with the haft of the spear, then forced the jagged, broken blade down to bite into that sickening blue flesh. The wail changed tone, from grief to physical pain, and Thalia jabbed with the spear, hitting the same shoulder she had pierced with her sword.

The other claw came arcing toward her, and Thalia turned the spear to drive it deep into the flesh of what should have been a palm. She twisted and leveraged the blade to tear at the wound, cutting through the web of flesh and bone that formed the impossible limb.

Sigarda seemed to be regaining strength as her fused sisters weakened, struggling against the tendrils that held her in place. Thalia sliced at the angel-thing's chest, loosening Sigarda's bonds, then plunged the blade through the tangle of ribs and sinew into the red glow in the abdomen. She felt the blow in her own gut as she stabbed at the blasphemous angel.

Lashing out in reflexive agony, the angel-thing smashed Thalia with its less-wounded claw, sending her careening down toward the ground again. But this time her angelic wings brought her around in a swooping arc and up to the angel's back, where she drove Avacyn's spear through feathered wings and buried it deep into the spine and whatever organs filled the twisted thing's abdomen. Again, agony jolted through her own chest.

But the angel's awful wail ceased.

It twitched and writhed. Its monstrous claws flailed about, trying to reach behind it. Wings buffeted the air, and the tangled mass of tentacles that had been the angels' legs grasped at nothing.

Sigarda burst out of her sisters' chest smeared with blood and ichor, like an abhorrent birth, and crashed to the ground in the plaza below.

Thalia clung to the spear, riding it like an untamed steed as the angel-thing thrashed about in its death throes.

"Sister," the angel-thing croaked.

And it followed Sigarda to the hard stone of the plaza below, curling like a dead spider on the ground. Thalia rolled off its back and fell to the ground beside it, staring upward into darkness.

Sigarda's hand lifted Thalia to her feet, and her pain fled and her vision cleared. The blessed angel, the last archangel, smiled at her.

Victory—the word flitted through her mind, and she returned the angel's smile.

Then Sigarda's face grew solemn again, and she shook her head as though aware of Thalia's fleeting thought.

Thalia turned to survey the scene. The battle still raged, but a glance suggested that the tide had turned, that humans and vampires and werewolves fighting in an improbable alliance were driving back the gibbering horde of madness.

Then her gaze rose to the sky.

The thing in the air was impossibly huge. It looked vaguely like the fused angels, Bruna-Gisela. Its dome-shaped body was supported by a mass of strange tentacles, and a reddish light glowed at its core.

But there was no remnant of any natural life, let alone the beauty and majesty of an angel, in the form of this creature. Its existence defied the natural order of things, violated physical laws, and blasphemed against the sacred nature of life. Its presence was an invitation to madness, pressing into Thalia's mind like a dull knife despite the saint's warding.

As it approached, a tidal wave of corrupted monstrosities crested before it, smashing into the plaza and turning the tide once more toward annihilation.

Art by Magali Villeneuve

7

Battle of Thraben

By Nik Davidson

When we last saw Jace, he had just laid eyes on the third Eldrazi titan, Emrakul. Realizing the enormity of the situation, he planeswalked to Zendikar to rally the Gatewatch; it would take all of them to destroy the eldritch monstrosity.

Jace shuddered involuntarily as he opened his eyes on Innistrad. The air was quite a bit colder here. It had a different smell, too, a different feel. The scent was strange, almost metallic, and when he exhaled his last breath of Zendikar's air and breathed in Innistrad, he felt it. There was a thickness to the air here. That first breath hurt, just a little.

The sky was tearing itself apart. Storm clouds swirled, as if there were a gale in every direction, and no sunlight escaped the horizon. The plane's eternal dusk had given way to a purplish glow. His eyes didn't want to adjust to the dark; they fought him every moment of the way. He squinted toward the horizon, toward the hole in reality, and tried to focus. Focus. Focus. His mind felt heavy, here. Like a sack of wet rice on top of his neck. Sloshing, grinding, sliding away...

There was a chime in his mind. Or the memory of a chime. A reminder of himself, and his eyes cleared.

He stood atop a hill, looking down on the rolling fields that surrounded Thraben. He could see the city now, and half of it was ablaze. There were battles raging in the streets. Torches. Shouting. Screaming. He wasn't sure whether he was hearing the screams from this distance, or feeling them. And above it all, up in the sky...he couldn't bring himself to focus there. Not yet.

A second set of sounds brought Jace's focus to a more clear and present issue. Growling. Snarling. Eyes glowing a sickly green in the dark.

"Werewolves again," Jace muttered to himself. He reached out into the darkness and lightly touched the minds that he found there. Three of them, ravaged by madness and changed into something he could barely recognize. As they crept out of the shadows, he saw the werewolves clearly. Their fur was patchy, their skin infused with the same latticework pattern that he had seen all over the organic matter of Innistrad.

Jace made a call. There wasn't enough left of these minds to be saved. There was no subtlety in his mental assault; he grabbed ahold of their senses and overloaded each one—blinding light, deafening sound, smells so intense they choked on them. It wasn't pretty, but he needed to establish a foothold here for when the others arrived.

Art by Ryan Yee

Two of the werewolves whimpered and fell; they twitched, and then went still. The last of the three...laughed? He could feel its mind changing, adapting, growing in response to the assault. The mental connection broke, and he watched as the creature's skin rippled, its limbs lengthened, its claws elongated, and its skin oozed. Jace stumbled backward. Whatever he had done had triggered some sort of reflexive mutation. Now, he wasn't even sure what he was looking at.

With a quick gesture, he split into a dozen reflections, and the monster spent a moment sniffing the air before focusing in on his real body, the illusions ignored. Jace looked around for an escape route and found none. Options raced through his mind, and were discarded one by one. Jace's illusions, semi-substantial, tried to crowd the beast, buying him more time, until...

...a flash of light, the sound of a whipping blade and tearing flesh. The horror dropped into a mangled, whimpering pile. Gideon.

"It's fine, Jace. I've got your back."

Jace straightened his coat. "Did you get lost on the way? Make a stopover in Ravnica for snacks?"

"It's not easy following you to a place I've never been. Hmm." Gideon stared down the hill toward Thraben. If he was having a hard time with his senses, he wasn't showing it. "Bigger than the other two. And it's got quite the force between us and it. What's the plan?"

A heat shimmer appeared in the air, and a woman stepped out of it.

Chandra rubbed her hands together. "Same plan as last time, right? Fire? I guess that wasn't the plan at the time, but it did the trick. Usually does." She put her hands on her hips as she looked down at the chaotic scene below.

The hill rumbled slightly, the only herald of Nissa's arrival. She frowned as she knelt down, placing her palm against the ground. "The mana here is dark. Twisted. It's in the soil, the trees...Emrakul did some of this, but..."

"This is your first time to Innistrad, right? 'Dark and twisted' is kind of a regular feature." Jace continued, "So, we've basically got the same scenario as last time, with a couple minor wrinkles. Emrakul is moving on Thraben, and we need to get there first. Nissa will use her planar glyph to tap into the leyline network. Gideon will clear us a path to get close. We channel the plane's energy through Chandra, and she does her thing."

Nissa shook her head. "It's not going to work. The leylines have already been redirected. Into that."

Jace tried to force a grin. "Well, yes. The cryptolith network. They're focusing all the leylines toward Thraben now. That, plus the fact that Thraben is the densest population of life on Innistrad, will mean that Emrakul will almost certainly be drawn there. That center point should amplify the glyph's effects. Quite similar to the hedron network, actually."

"If we can get close enough to it. But if we get that close, Emrakul will destroy us." Nissa's voice was quiet, but firm. "And if we don't get that close, I'll be able to tap into one or two leylines from any other vantage point. Three at most. It won't be enough."

Chandra put her hand on Nissa's shoulder. "Hey. One leyline or twenty, you tap me in, and we'll make it enough."

Gideon sighed. "Nissa, do you believe you can do this? We're not going to try a plan that we're not all committed to."

Nissa picked up a handful of dirt and sifted it between her fingers. She glanced up to the faces of her companions. Gideon, concerned. Jace, impassive. Chandra, excited. She closed her eyes and listened for several long seconds. To her heartbeat, to the blighted soil beneath her, to her memories.

"Yes."

"Look at it, Gared. Pretty, in a way. Your world is ending." Liliana watched as Thraben began to burn and tentacles reached down from the storms to rake the earth below. The sky swarmed with angels, and the ground beneath the titan just swarmed. From this distance, she could make out only the movement, an unending, writhing mass of creatures, pressing as close to the source of the world's end as they could.

"Yes, mistress. S'what it does around here, mostly." The geistmage's apprentice, with his bulging eye, looked forlornly down at the chaos.

"Ah, there they are. See the fire and the flashes of light? Those must be Jace's little friends. Looks like they're headed straight toward the center of it all."

Gared tilted his head, an interesting effect atop his already asymmetrical body. "Yes, mistress. I couldn't help but notice, you've raised this lovely little army to help, but we're staying up here, and the others are down there."

"Hmm. I suppose that's true."

Chandra was screaming. The others couldn't tell whether they were screams of pain or joy or rage, they just heard the screams and felt the overwhelming heat. She was incandescent, an inferno that walked, and she projected fire in every direction, scorching her friends but charring wave after wave of the mutated remains of what had been the people of Thraben, just days ago.

Art by Chase Stone

The screaming stopped, and the fires went out. Chandra dropped to her hands and knees, and Gideon leapt forward to cover her. They were trapped in what had been a market square, two of the four entrances blocked by rubble and fallen buildings. A dilapidated, lattice-scarred tower leaned tenuously over the cobblestone road that led farther into the heart of the city—but both it and the road they had entered on were blocked by rank after rank of Emrakul's legion.

Some of them were still recognizably human. Their voices were a screeching whirl of screams and gibberish. Some of them were what remained of beasts, of angels, of things unrecognizable. Some moved with purpose, others merely lumbered and moaned, their limbs limp and their flesh melting like candle wax.

And behind them loomed the storm.

The body of the titan was still mostly hidden from view, but its presence was everywhere. Emrakul. The storm raged, and impossible forking lightning thrashed and slashed the city below. Tentacles would emerge from the black clouds, scraping low along the ground, rumbling as city blocks were reduced to ash and stone.

Art by Jaime Jones

"Options. I need options." Gideon surveyed the square, sural unfurled. "Nissa. Elementals?"

The elf shook her head. "I could call, but we wouldn't like what would answer."

Gideon grunted his frustration. "Chandra? You ready to go another round?"

Chandra was doubled over, hands on her knees, breathing hard. She raised a hand and gave a weak thumbs-up gesture. "Sure thing, boss. Just getting started." She coughed and straightened up—her face was covered in soot and ash, but her smile seemed genuine enough.

"Jace. What have you got?"

Jace scanned the area again. "We're not going forward. We've got a defensible open space to work with. I say we use the glyph here."

Gideon nodded. "Nissa, can you do it?"

Nissa knelt down, putting both of her palms on the ground. A green glow snaked up from the ground, wrapping her arms in a verdant light. "Two leylines. Three if I push."

"Do it." Gideon's voice held the slightest hesitation. "The rest of us, we need to cover her. The resistance we've faced this far has been incidental. I'm not even sure it's noticed us yet."

Jace gestured toward the tower that overlooked one of the entrances to the square. Two illusionary marks appeared on it. "Chandra, I need you to hit the tower here and here. When the lattice transforms stone, it is quite resistant to damage, but expands when exposed to extreme heat. That should topple the tower and block off the street."

"What?" Chandra glanced back, hands already ablaze.

"I read it in a book. Trust me."

Chandra thrust her fists toward the tower, and two arcing fireballs struck precisely where Jace had marked. Seconds later, the entire structure collapsed, blocking off most of the street as it crashed into the inn on the other side.

The market square came alive—new growth sprang from the packed dirt and cobblestones, and the air, sour and foul, cleared slightly. Nissa stood motionless in the center of it, as glowing runes appeared on the ground around her, snaking their way from her feet until the complex glyph was complete.

There was a shrieking sound from the hordes around them. As one, they turned and charged toward Nissa—and Gideon charged to intercept them. He hit the line with powerful vertical slashes, and drove his body into their ranks, golden sparks lifting into the night air as blows deflected off his body. He roared a challenge as he slashed in a wide circle, trying to inflict as much damage as possible and draw as much attention to himself as he could.

Art by Tyler Jacobson

But the creatures did not fall easily, and those that fell did not stay down. Even fully dismembered creatures stayed still for only a moment; they grew new hideous limbs from each fresh wound, and walked, crawled and skittered past, drawn directly to Nissa and the glyph.

"Nissa, are we ready? Because I really, really think now is a good time." Chandra paced at the edge of the flaring glyph, as Nissa muttered incomprehensible syllables, eyes firmly shut. Chandra gave a yell of warning to Gideon before washing the entire street in a wave of flames. She looked back over her shoulder to see Nissa reaching down into the earth and pulling up what looked to be a spectral thorned vine, wide around as a tree trunk. She strained to pull it up from the earth, and she gasped in shock as those spectral thorns cut into her arms.

Nissa grunted through gritted teeth. "Get...ready. Almost...there." She reached down again, and raised a second vine. This one pulled and buckled, thrashing back and forth in her grasp like a serpent. With a pained effort, she managed to wrap it around her waist as an anchor, and reach down to the ground for a third.

Chandra paced, not sure what to do next. There was nothing she could do for Nissa, and Gideon was doing what he could to stop a flowing mass of creatures moving their way. She glanced up, and immediately regretted it. Limbs, tentacles, and other lattice-wracked extremities were starting to climb up over the buildings and rubble, in every direction. Hundreds of them. She glanced back to Nissa, and watched her fall to her knees.

The third spectral vine was darker than the other two, the barbs more cruel, its motion more sinuous and chaotic. Nissa was trying to get it under control, but it had managed to wrap itself around her neck, and it looked as if it was trying to drag her down into the ground.

"Life cannot stop...even when it knows it must...even when it knows it is wrong! Alone and discordant! Even when it knows!" Nissa's voice echoed, her eyes glowed a sickly purple, and then she dropped limp onto the ground. The vines were gone. The glyph went instantly dark. And the hordes of creatures continued their approach.

"Fall back!" Chandra yelled as she rushed to Nissa's side, scooping up her head as gently as she could. "Come on, come on, you need to wake up!"

"There's nowhere to fall back to, Chandra!" Jace took up position next to the two, and reached down to touch Nissa's forehead. "She's still in there. Just a bit stunned. She'll be fine in a couple minutes."

Gideon came running back to the others, as the crowd of creatures slowly pressed closer. "I'll watch over her until she wakes up. You two planeswalk back to safety."

Chandra stood, hands ablaze. "Not gonna happen. We're all walking out of here together, or..." Her bravado faded with her trailing words.

"Or not at all," Jace supplied. "Together or not at all?"

Chandra opened her mouth to respond, then cocked her head to the side. "Wait...what is that?"

The Planeswalkers heard them before they saw them—growling, moaning, crunching, and tearing, as ranks of the undead spilled into the square. They moved in tight formations, throwing themselves, biting and clawing into the mutated creatures that surrounded the Planeswalkers, ripping them apart with terrible strength.

Art by Deruchenko Alexander

Necrotic flesh met mutated limbs in an explosive clash, both sides heedless of pain or losses. But the zombies moved with precision and purpose. When their ranks were shredded, they were immediately replenished. And when they reached the Planeswalkers, they parted, formed a defensive perimeter around them, and started pushing outward.

Then, their general appeared.

Art by Cynthia Sheppard

Liliana floated forth, arms spread wide, the Chain Veil hovering just beyond her fingertips. Her tattoos blazed with light and dripped with blood. At a casual flick of her wrist, bolts of necromantic energy swept in wide arcs, reducing the corpses of the mutated creatures to ash. All the cancerous growth, all the twisted vibrancy was simply snuffed out. In a field of unending, unnatural life, a sphere of stillness and death arrived, and there it reigned.

Liliana's expression softened from exultant fury to a demure smile in an instant, as she dropped gracefully to the ground. Her tattoos faded, and the Veil seemed to diminish. "Oh, Jace. I got here as soon as I could."

"What are you doing here?" Gideon was still in a combat stance, his sural flowing with imbued power.

Art by Eric Deschamps

"The nice lady with the uncomfortable dress just saved our butts, Gideon. Calm down a second." Chandra turned her back to Liliana and stepped between them.

Nissa stirred and struggled to her feet. "That...thing she carries. It's an abomination." Nissa flinched from the Veil, refusing to look anywhere near it.

Liliana's smile curved its way across her face. "That's a strange way of saying 'thank you, Liliana, you saved my life, and I'll always be in your debt.'"

Gideon grunted, and his sural retracted.

"Liliana, I'm...I didn't think I'd see you again. But you're here." Jace pulled back his hood, the glow gone from his eyes. The dark circles underneath them were plain to see.

"Eloquent as ever. Yes. You're rescued, you owe me, and now you should really planeswalk somewhere safe."

Jace shook his head. "We can't do that. We need to finish this. We're so close. And with you covering us, I think we can do this. I know we can."

Liliana rubbed her forehead. "This is not the time to be ridiculous, Jace. What we need to do is leave."

"What you need to do is take that cursed thing and go." Nissa stood unsteadily, but her sword was in hand. "I'll not fight alongside it."

Gideon raised a hand in warning. "You fought at Sea Gate alongside vampires, pirates, and worse, Nissa. We take the allies we can get, if they can be trusted."

"Ah, the meat can reason!" Liliana beamed.

"But I don't know if you can be trusted. Nissa's instincts are rarely wrong, and I'm inclined to agree with her. That object is...a problem. But I don't know you. He does." Gideon turned to Jace. "So you'll decide. Tell me, Jace. Can she be trusted?"

Liliana laughed, high and clear, before Jace could answer. "That's a ridiculous question, and you know it. Look around you. I snap my fingers, and you're all overrun. You are trusting me, right now. But if you won't leave, I can't force you. So tell me, brave heroes, what's your plan now?"

She looked to each of their faces. Gideon, exasperated. Chandra, exhausted. Nissa, furious. And Jace, pained.

"Oh, wonderful." Liliana smiled for lack of a better expression. "I'm sure this will end well."

8

The Promised End

By Ken Troop

Innistrad faces destruction. Emrakul has risen, and the Eldrazi titan has brought with her a plague of horrors and mutations that threatens to overwhelm all other life. The Gatewatch has assembled at Thraben, and the recent arrival of Liliana and her zombie hordes have bought them time and room to formulate a plan.

But will any plan be enough to conquer Emrakul?

Liliana

It was a pleasure to watch the so-called Gatewatch contort and agonize. Gideon's poorly restrained frustration; Nissa's discomfort; Chandra's impatience; Jace's pained indecision. Jace was in his favorite place—caught in the middle due to arbitrary restrictions he had made up, and wondering why life's decisions were always so difficult. You're never going to change, are you? Liliana couldn't tell whether it amused or disgusted her. Both, sometimes.

Art by Cynthia Sheppard

A moonfolk flew into the clearing, her eyes wide and breath short. She took no notice of the large ring of zombies protecting them from Emrakul's minions, though she did look up at the grand spectacle of Emrakul; it was impossible not to. She landed next to Jace, speaking rapidly though too quietly for Liliana to hear. She stopped talking in a way Liliana would have found confusing if she hadn't already spent a great deal of time with a telepath. She must be the moonfolk Jace had mentioned. Jace and Tamiyo continued their silent conversation, moving closer to one another as they touched minds. Liliana frowned. Another useless mind mage, just what we needed.

She wanted some time alone with Jace, to figure out what the endgame here was. Her zombies had brought a temporary respite. But they needed to get out of here, away from Thraben, away from Innistrad, away from Emrakul.

As she thought of the name, Liliana's eyes were drawn upward to the towering figure hovering outside of Thraben. Why is it just sitting there? The air felt heavy, stale. Fecund with the smell of...it wasn't the dead. Liliana was comfortable with the dead and their smell. But there was a rotten quality to this smell Liliana found troubling.

There was a sudden shifting in the air, the smell and pressure of a spring day before a thunderstorm, and in that shifting Emrakul unfolded. Its cloud burgeoned; its long spindly tendrils lengthened and multiplied, from hundreds to thousands, to tens of thousands, more. An invisible sphere of power burst from Emrakul, rippling and hitting each Planeswalker where they stood.

Nausea roiled her stomach; vertigo twisted her mind. She had known that sickening combination of despair and sickness only a few times in her life. When her brother Josu's eyes had opened lifelessly, jet-black orbs portending doom; when she had first beheld Bolas's baleful gaze, hearing his spiteful laugh as he promised poisoned redemption; when the Chain Veil's power had first coursed through her veins, splitting her skin and cracking it open like a dry husk to let the blood, her blood, seep through.

None of those moments compared to the wrongness she felt in Emrakul's presence. Liliana Vess had spent her whole life seeking not to die, and for the first time in her long existence she wondered if she had been pursuing the wrong goal. In the shadow of Emrakul's flowering, death seemed just another of life's superficial lies, a false hope poorly beating back the true horror awaiting all who existed.

Emrakul. Emraakull. Emraaa...

She shook her head with force, seeking to clear her mind. She had lived too long, overcome too much, to succumb now. We must flee this plane. This...it is insanity to stay. Not her thoughts, but the Raven Man speaking directly in her head, sounding...scared. Liliana took some pleasure in the fear. So you can feel fear. Her zombies moaned in unison, "Vessel of destruction. Root of evil. Flee." Liliana was startled. She was used to the Chain Veil talking nonsense about vessels and roots, but flee. Whatever Emrakul was, the Chain Veil wanted no part of it.

The pressure in the air thickened, inducing a headache that watered her eyes with pain. The other Planeswalkers crumpled, all except Jace, who cast some type of spell in response. She bowed her head, her agonies multiplying. Emrakul outside. The Chain Veil inside. The damned Raven Man, wherever he was. She would not succumb. These are my zombies, my Chain Veil, my head. Mine!

She stared at Emrakul, her fear receding, replaced by seething anger. How dare you...

There was another explosion of energy from Emrakul, a full thunderstorm that made the earlier outburst seem a brief spring rain. Liliana was forced to her knees as she screamed in rage. Her zombies moaned a single word.

"Em-ra-kuuuull."

Jace

The purple shadowed tower through rainy glass. Streaks fire heavy with top dark falling. Emrakul cackles thought with cold loop metal...

A voice cut through the chaotic ramble, a familiar voice he was hearing for the first time. This is not going well. I will not succumb to this. I am better than this. Jace breathed evenly and slowly. Thought cohered. He tried to recall the gibberish dominating his mind just seconds ago, but it had already vanished, evanescent dew melting with the dawn. He was at the top of a long, grand spiraling staircase, white marble steps lined with ornate blue trim. The staircase was brightly lit though there was no obvious light source, and it extended down far beyond his sight.

Above was a tall and airy stone tower. Closer to ground, it looked like his sanctum back on Ravnica. Large stone table with piles of books, maps, and several...contraptions that whirred and buzzed. Bookcases stuffed with books everywhere the eye could see, and he gazed at them longingly. It didn't just look like his Ravnica apartments...it was them, except back on Ravnica there was no palatial staircase spiraling down in the middle.

Art by Adam Paquette

And back on Ravnica there was certainly no monstrous force destroying his sanctum from above.

Hundreds of feet in the air above, Jace saw large stone blocks of the tower crumbling away, or grabbed and flung. The entire roof of the tower was already gone, revealing a darkened sky flooded with an ominous purple overcast. As Jace watched the destruction, he realized the purple overcast was not a cloud. It was a thing. A creature. The creature resolved into a gigantic purple cloud extending hundreds of wiggling tendrils. The tendrils lashed and writhed toward the tower, accompanied by flashes of lightning and deafening booms outside. The creature had a name...

Emrakul. The name sounded strange even as he said it, a word he should not know, a word he could not know. Or perhaps that was the word underneath the word...Jace paused, chagrined at how effortless losing his train of thought was. Focus. Emrakul. A...thing. An Eldrazi. The Eldrazi. Jace's mind struggled to encompass the nature of the entity. His head hurt, a dull, pounding ache that grew with each contemplation of the Eldrazi titan outside. So don't think about it. Where am I? What is this place?

More memories returned. He hadn't been in a tower. He had been in Thraben, besieged by countless hordes of Emrakul's minions. They all were. Gideon. Tamiyo. Nissa. Chandra. Liliana. She had made a surprise appearance, leading a host of zombies to save them from the cultists and creatures driven mad by Emrakul. Liliana came back. She...

A loud peal of thunder rattled outside and the ground quaked briefly beneath his feet. As the ground shook, Jace's head began to pound. Lightning flashed, illuminating Emrakul's tentacles as they tore off more huge chunks of the stone structure. The tower was large and massive, but Emrakul was dismantling it stone by stone.

A soft white light began pulsing deeper below in the stairway. The light beckoned. Normally Jace knew enough to distrust beckoning soft white lights in a place he did not know leading to even more places he did not know. But most normal situations did not have attacking omnipotent Eldrazi titans. The white glow looked like an increasingly intriguing option.

There was a bright explosion outside, a long, deep purpleness followed by a deafening roar of thunder. The entire tower reverberated as lightning struck it. Jace crumpled to the ground in pain, his head throbbing with agony. What is happening to me? And then another voice, his voice, but coming from somewhere outside, spoke with the force of command. Move. Move now. Go downstairs.

Jace looked up through the ruins of the tower into the ravening purple maw of Emrakul, its endless tentacles wrapping themselves around more and more of the stone bulwarks. He picked himself up off the floor and stumbled to the stairway. He decided the voice, my voice, was right. It was time to leave. He descended into the depths of the tower.

Liliana

Liliana's blood was on fire, her mind in shreds. One force kept her coherent—rage. Those are my zombies. Mine! You will not have them! Without conscious thought she drew deep on the power of the Chain Veil, and pushed back against the might of Emrakul. She could feel the Eldrazi's blighted touch, a touch now so powerful it affected even the dead. But even that baleful touch was no match for Liliana's necromantic prowess backed by the force of the Chain Veil. She felt her zombies return to her.

The power coursing through her veins was exhilarating. Each previous time she used the Veil there was agony and rupture, but somehow this time her rage inoculated her from the worst of the Chain Veil's injuries. Perhaps that is the answer to unlocking the Chain Veil. I never wanted it enough.

Art by Kieran Yanner

Voices still whispered to her from her zombies, and from the Veil directly in her mind. "Vessel of destruction. Root of evil." Those weren't the only voices she heard. The Raven Man added his stultifying tones. We must leave here. This is madness. I thought you wanted to conquer death. The entity you face here is older than time, and more powerful than you, even if you wielded a hundred Chain Veils! We must leave! The Raven Man tried to issue it as a command. Never had he sounded so naked, so vulnerable.

Liliana spared a glance at the other Planeswalkers. Chandra, Tamiyo, and Gideon were sprawled on the ground, unconscious. She briefly reached out with her power, but their forms did not respond to necromantic touch; they all still lived. Nissa was rooted in place, screaming, the words emanating from her mouth gibberish. Green and purple energy pooled around her, clashing, ebbing and flowing. Jace was the only one who stood and seemed to be conscious, though he took no notice of her. She noticed a blue shimmer around him, a penumbra that extended to all five of the other Planeswalkers. All except her. Is that what's keeping you alive?

The penumbra did not extend to her. But she didn't need his help. Liliana had known considerable power, power partnered with the wisdom and ruthlessness born from two hundred long years of life. But she knew none of that would have protected her from the mental onslaught from Emrakul. She would have been obliterated, except for the power of the Chain Veil.

Power she now wielded, and wielded gladly. She laughed with the thrill of it. It was the closest she had yet come to the nigh-omnipotence of her former self. I can do anything. Still the voices of the Veil whispered in her head. Vessel. Vessel of destruction. We must flee the World-Ender. The World-Creator. Vessel! The Raven Man's voice choked with panic. Listen to the Veil, you idiot! Flee! Her zombies. "Root of evil. Vessel of destruction. Vessel!"

Liliana laughed, a laughter suffused with rage and power. "I. AM. NOT. A. VESSEL!"

She shut down the voices of the Veil and the Raven Man both, silencing them abruptly. She could feel their fury and impotence as they railed against her. All that matters is my will. My desire. Nothing can stand before me. She tapped into the Veil, harnessing more power than she had ever dared before.

I don't belong to you. You belong to me.

She gathered the energies of the Veil, harnessed them to her own considerable power and experience. In the throes of such power she no longer felt Emrakul's mental assault.

She turned her full attention to the gigantic Eldrazi titan. As if it recognized her growing power, the titan was moving slowly in her direction. Everyone seems to be afraid of you, Emrakul. She laughed again, a cackle as she reveled in her power. No one thinks I can beat you. Let's find out.

Jace

As Jace descended he would occasionally glance up, but shadows obscured all but a few feet behind him. I guess these stairs only go down. He thought he should find being shepherded along an unknown corridor down into the depths of a strange tower alarming, especially accompanied by the continued assault and thunder he still heard above, but he was calm. Down here is definitely safer than up there.

The stone wall next to him began shimmering. As he watched, the stone turned to glass, or at least some type of transparent material. The entire wall next to him, from steps to ceiling, transformed into a clear pane. Through the window was a scene, like a diorama children would make for school, but this diorama moved.

The central figure in the scene was Gideon. He was squaring off against some kind of celestial being who towered over him. Literally celestial—the figure was made of a starry night sky. The celestial figure had two large black horns framing a blue, non-human face. He wielded an impossibly large whip with a human skull in the handle. Gideon looked suitably Gideon-esque, square jaw, golden sural, and gleaming armor intact. But the look on his face was not the Gideon Jace knew at all. This Gideon looked worried, almost scared. There was anger on that face...but also fear. Interesting.

Art by Peter Mohrbacher

Around Gideon stood the other members of the Gatewatch. Chandra, her hands and head blazing. Nissa. Even a Jace. Surely I'm taller than that? The celestial figure spread his arms out wide, whip to the side. He spoke with a deep, resonating voice that seemed to bubble up from the ground. "And what is it you, Kytheon Iora, most desire? What do you truly want?"

"No!" Gideon shouted, his face contorted in defiance and pain. "There is nothing you can offer me, Erebos, nothing! From you, all is poison."

The being, Erebos, raised his whip. "It is not an offer, mortal. Tell me true what you most desire or I will kill your friends, one by one."

Gideon's shoulders slumped, his sural retreated back into its sheath. He looked up at Erebos, his face a mixture of anger and despair. "I most desire..." he paused, drawing a deep breath, "I most desire to protect others, to save them..."

"You lie." Erebos's whip lashed out, and as it struck the Jace next to Gideon he disintegrated, his flesh dissolving upon its touch. I really don't like watching myself die. Gideon screamed and lunged, his sural flashing, but Erebos stood unmoved. He raised his hand and Gideon was flung backwards.

"You cannot defeat me, mortal. You never have. You never will. Tell me truth and I will let the rest of your friends live."

There was a loud peal of thunder outside, Emrakul, that's Emrakul, and Jace could not hear Gideon's reply over the din. Whatever Gideon's answer, Erebos was not satisfied. Once more the whip lashed, and now Nissa disintegrated with its touch. Gideon flinched as Nissa was struck down, but did not attack this time. Chandra stood there looking blank, her flaming hands at her side doing nothing. This scene is definitely not reality. Is it inside Gideon's head?

Gideon's voice crackled with anger. "I want to defeat you, to tear you down so you can no longer..."

"No. You continue to speak lies." Erebos's voice, in contrast, was placid as a graveyard. Another lash of the whip, and Chandra vanished. "Must you lose everyone before you acknowledge truth, mortal? All your stubbornness to what end? You are determined to feel the most pain." Erebos's whip danced with its master's touch. "What do you want?"

Gideon raised his head to the skies and screamed, "I want..." but before he finished his sentence the window went dark.

Jace stayed still, silent, stunned at all he had witnessed. Who is Erebos? What pain is Gideon going through? Jace had had no idea his friend was suffering this way. And my ignorance about Gideon is matched by my lack of knowledge of what is going on here. Are these dreams? Am I inside Gideon's head? The Emrakul above certainly seems real.

The shadows pressed closer to Jace. I need to keep moving. The answers are farther down. He had only walked several steps when another wall went transparent. This time the scene featured Tamiyo.

Art by Tianhua X

She sat hunched on a small workbench, poring over a large unfurled scroll on a dusty table. The sole illumination in the scene was a candle, but it gave off far too much light for its size. Behind Tamiyo were shelves full of books, and more piles of books beside them. Jace felt a nostalgic pang. To be surrounded by nothing but books and all the time to read them. That hadn't been his life for some time now, and wouldn't be again any time soon.

Blood began leaking from one of Tamiyo's eyes. It started with a slow drip, each drop hitting the table with a small plip. As she continued to read the scroll, the other eye began dripping blood as well, each drop alternating with each other. Plip-plip. Plip-plip. Plip-plip.

Jace watched in horror as flesh-like lattices began to grow over Tamiyo's eyes, covering them entirely. The mark of Emrakul. Jace had seen too much of Emrakul's signature over the last few days. The blood continued to drip through the lattices. Plip-plip. Plip-plip. Plip-plip.

The lattices blossomed elsewhere. Fleshy growths burst from Tamiyo's fingers, covering both hands in the weblike structures. The growths attached to the table beneath, sticking, binding her hands to the table. Now she could no longer see nor move her hands. The blood kept dropping from her eyes. Plip-plip. Plip-plip. Plip-plip.

As she lost the use of her eyes and hands, Tamiyo whispered throughout, though no audible sound emerged. The fleshy tendrils began webbing her mouth closed, lip tied to lip with each strand of Emrakul's web. Even once her mouth was sewn shut, the lattice continued to grow, to wiggle and writhe. The tendrils extended far out from her closed mouth, and now as the blood continued to drip from her eyes the tendrils would seize a drop, curling around it, wiggling as the blood seeped into its oily skin. Plip-wiggle. Plip-wiggle. Plip-wiggle.

Tamiyo was motionless, her eyes, mouth, and hands frozen. Jace had touched Tamiyo mind to mind, knew the essence of her better than most. Her ability to see, to speak, to write, these are the essential tools of her magic, her communication. These are what define her. She is being erased. Jace screamed and pounded on the window, but neither Tamiyo nor anything else in the room stirred. The window faded to opaque stone.

Jace slumped. What is this place? This cannot be the minds of my friends. Can it? The shadows loomed over him. He was tired, so very tired. He slowly picked himself up and continued his descent.

Liliana

This power. It is a revelation. All it had taken was Liliana's will. Her desire. For so long she had thought herself utterly pragmatic and driven to her cause. To not die. To kill her demon tormentors. But now she knew she had been unwilling to take that final step, to cross over the last barrier. I had restraint. How foolish.

In front of her loomed Emrakul. An Eldrazi titan. A creature older than time, if the voices in her head told truth. I think you are a thing. A powerful thing, but something that lives. And if you live, you can die. And if you die, another smile, then you belong to me.

The energies of the Veil writhed and bucked under her control. They wanted to be used to wither, to kill. Power is meant to be used. She gathered it, shaped it, and sent one coruscating blast of necromantic energy after another at the towering figure of Emrakul, hurling the titan back with their force.

There was a song in Liliana's head, a song blotting out all else. It was the song of power and it sang such a sweet melody. This is what I was born for. This is my destiny. Each blast that hit Emrakul left gaping trenches of scarred dead material, large tentacles the size of towers left shriveled and withered. Some of the material regenerated, but not enough before being hit by Liliana's next blast. For the first time since blossoming, Emrakul was shrinking. It was being thrust back. Liliana was winning.

Art by Anna Steinbauer

The Raven Man's voice cut through her delight, a cold splash of sewer water. You know not what you do, what you dare. You cannot hope to contain this power for much longer.

Liliana's scorn draped each word she thought back in reply. Do not seek to contain me with your small expectations, little man. Today is the day I destroy an Eldrazi titan. Why? Because I dare.

She wished the Gatewatch was conscious to watch her victory. This is what power looks like, you pathetic excuses for Planeswalkers. She flung more blasts at Emrakul, pressing her attack.

Jace

Jace was not surprised to see the another window appear shortly. This time it was Chandra. Or at least he assumed it was Chandra. She was a little girl, but the red hair and shape of her face still suggested the woman she would one day become. Chandra was surrounded by a menacing group of guards, their gear ornate and colorful, from a place Jace did not recognize. Her home. The guards raised their pikes, and Chandra was sobbing, tears fighting with gasps of breath for control of her face.

Art by Eric Deschamps

One of the guards, tall and spindly, stepped forward. His face had a wide smile on it, in cruel contrast to his awful words. "We killed your daddy, renegade. We killed your mommy. And now we're going to kill you." Jace suspected the scene wasn't real, just a nightmare in Chandra's head, but his fists still balled up. No one should have to endure this kind of pain. The guards moved forward with their pikes as their leader sneered, "And the best part, the absolute best part, is there is nothing you can do about it."

Chandra stopped crying and stared at her persecutors. A tiny wisp of flame flared from one eye. "You're wrong," she said, her voice not sounding like a child's at all. "There is something I can do." Her body was changing, growing, evolving before his eyes into the recognizable Chandra he knew. "Something I can always do. I can burn." Fire jetted from her head and hands.

She smiled. The guards backed away, uncertain. She took a step forward. "I can make you burn." The leader burst into flame. He screamed in agony. "I can make all of you burn." Now the other guards were on fire, their skin crackling and bubbling, their high-pitched cries piercing the sky. "I can make the whole world burn." Heat and light and fire burst forth, an incandescent whiteness of energy, enveloping and burning everything, including Chandra. Chandra screamed, though whether in agony or delight, Jace could not say.

Art by Steve Argyle

The window faded to stone, but Jace still felt the heat pouring off the walls. It was one of the first principles of illusions. Just because it's only in your head doesn't mean it can't kill you.

Gideon, Tamiyo, Chandra...but no Liliana yet. Urgency propelled him downstairs and he looked eagerly as the next window appeared. His face fell when he saw the figure behind the wall. Oh, Nissa. He tried not to be disappointed, though he found it hard to understand the elf Planeswalker.

The background behind Nissa looked exactly like the outside world—the dark, purple sky, the odd flashes of light, the looming shadow of Emrakul, Liliana and her zombies. Nissa stood in agony in the center. She screamed. She writhed. Twisting, contorting, shaking, but those were not the only injuries done to her. There was something...wriggling...on her hands.

Art by Dan Scott

As Jace peered closer, he noticed Nissa's fingers had tiny fingers growing on them, tens of tiny fingers extending out of each finger. And then he saw hair-thin fingers growing out of the tiny fingers. He shuddered, but as he saw her eyes he let out an involuntary scream. From each of Nissa's eye sockets protruded several tiny eye shoots, and out of each eye shoot grew several tinier ones. Green energy flashed out of her eyes and hands, but interlaced in the green was a dark, violent purple.

Emrakul is Emrakul is Emrakul forever.

Jace didn't know where the thought came from, but even in its nonsense it felt true. Forever and ever and ev...

"Negglish pthoniki ab'ahor!" gibberish words spouted from Nissa, or if not gibberish then no language Jace had ever heard. As she spoke, her head spasmed, and in between words her tongue would loll out of her mouth. What are those things on her tongue? Oh, no. No no no no. I am hitting the limit of details I want to notice. No, I am well past the limit.

Art by Steve Belledin

As nonsense and spittle spewed from her mouth, rational words began to infiltrate the gibberish. "Shigg epsi-everything chut'ghb ends! Gilma-everything chts-dies!" The spasms subsided, her voice gaining strength and poise. Now the energy emanating from her was all purple, a deep purple with no green to be found. She raised her head and arms to the sky and shouted.

"Growth! Growth is the answer! The only answer! Entropy cannot lose. But must it win? Of course sacrifice must be made. Why do they fight it? Eternity without sacrifice offers only the screaming torpor. Blood must be churned, churned thick. Why do they fear life? Why do they fear truth?"

Nissa uttering recognizable words made no appreciable impact on Jace's ability to understand her. Even though he knew it was useless, he reached to her mind to mind. Nissa, help me. Help me understand. What are you saying?

Nissa shifted and brought her gaze to meet Jace's directly through the window. She sees me. Jace shivered, frozen to the spot. He could not move, could not look away. Her eyes glowed darkly purple. She spoke directly to him. "I can do anything I want. Anything at all. Remember that. The only thing saving you is..." the purple glow faded, the nimbus around her dissipating, "...I don't want anything."

She stared at him for long seconds, her face distorted and grotesque as her extra eye shoots continued to squirm. The window mercifully faded to stone.

Jace remained frozen in front of the wall. He shook, sweat beading down his hair onto his face and the back of his neck. The shadows continued to press from above. How long have I been on these stairs? What is happening to my friends? Down still beckoned, brightly lit and pulling at him. But he didn't want to move. He didn't want to do anything. Sleep. I could sleep. I might not wake up, but would that be so bad? His eyes drooped, and a pleasant fuzziness crept over his mind. He sat on the stairs. I am so tired.

Drifting off to sleep made him think of Liliana. He didn't know where she was, or what she faced. She isn't here. She's not in this place. But if he acknowledged the truth, she never needed him anyway. "Sad. For a while. And then I'll get over it." That's what she had said back in her castle, comparing the possibility of his death to that of a dog's. A dog. Would she really not care any more about my death than a dog's? That can't be true. A dog. The thought gnawed.

Sleep, how could I possibly be thinking of sleeping right now? What is happening to me? He couldn't tell whether it was true exhaustion, or a more malevolent effect. Does it matter? The solution is the same. He stood. Keep going downstairs. Figure this out. Don't die. Beat Emrakul. He thought of Liliana as he continued his descent.

Liliana

The first sign of trouble was an interruption to her tempo. Liliana had never wielded so much energy before, and she had been able to fling blast after blast at Emrakul with each breath. Breathe, blast, breathe, blast.

But though her power didn't fail her, her body did. She hesitated for a second, took a long breath, and in that gap Emrakul surged, its body and tendrils regrowing at a faster pace than Liliana thought possible. Several thick tendrils lashed at Liliana only to wither and desiccate at the touch of her magic, but several more quickly followed. Where once each blast from Liliana drove Emrakul back, now it was all she could do to stand her ground.

You are mortal. You have limits. It does not. The Raven Man's voice stabbed her brain with cold whispers. Look upon this grass and dirt, you fool. You have made it your graveyard.

She screamed in rage as she let loose more blasts of power. The titan's advance halted in the face of such an onslaught. But seconds later the energy ebbed. Liliana took large gasping breaths and Emrakul's advance continued once more.

I am not going to die today, she snarled to the Raven Man, to the Veil, to anything that would listen. To herself. Emrakul and its tendrils continued their unceasing assault. I am not going to die today.

If you're lucky, Liliana, your death is now the best possible outcome of today. You have doomed us both. The Raven Man spoke without contempt, without hatred or fear. He sounded...resigned. For the first time since rescuing the Gatewatch, Liliana was afraid.

Jace

Jace expected another wall to turn transparent, to show him a scene from the mind of Liliana. What he did not expect was the stairway to end in a door.

It was a thick oak door, banded with iron, with no port or keyhole. Just wood and iron, framed in the same thick stone as the rest of the stairway. He put his hand on the door. A voice screamed, no no no no no no, and pure terror seized his brain. But the voice trailed off, the terror receding. Jace looked up the stairs. The shadows did not press closer but nor did they part to reveal the way he had come. If he wanted to progress, it was through this door. He pushed the door forward and stepped through.

The room was formless and colorless. Vertigo overcame him as his mind struggled to perceive the space. Jace felt the long pull of forever, an endless recursion looping into terror to never know the peace of oblivion to just to just to just...until reality snapped into place. The nothingness surrounding him materialized into a field of white.

There was an angel in front of him.

She approached, and Jace noticed the space slowly taking shape around her, around both of them. They were in a real place, a room, a copy of the sanctum he had first begun this bizarre journey in. His sanctum. The angel was tall, taller than any angel he had seen before, even Avacyn. And her wings were gigantic, thick and dense. They furled behind her almost like a mushroom cloud...

Jace broke out into a cold sweat pumped by a racing heart. No oh no oh no...

Her face was hidden by a large hood, but in very plain sight were the two swords she carried, one in each hand. Her tunic frayed at the hemline into ribbons, tens of ribbons, no, hundreds, and they seemed to multiply as Jace watched. They wriggled and writhed. As if they noticed Jace, the ribbons of her tunic probed the air in front of him, alive. If I scream, I don't know if I'll ever stop. So I better not scream. Would crying help? I'm open to crying if it will help.

Art by Daniel Ljunggren

Jace laughed in a combination of amusement and fear. I'm so glad I find myself funny. The laughter broke through the paralysis, sparking his mind. I know this angel. I have seen her before. Or at least he had seen statues of her before, back on Zendikar. "Emeria?" he croaked, the word sounding foreign on his lips.

She looked at him, but he could not see her face cloaked in the hood. Jace took careful note of the ribbons and the swords, but nothing moved to attack him. His confidence grew.

"Are you...are you...Emeria? Are you...Emrakul?"

"May I sit down?" The voice was a female voice. Light, almost airy. Jace might have even said it trilled, in different circumstances. Not these circumstances, though. Jace couldn't see any lips move through her hood to produce the voice, but it sounded like a normal voice. Normal-ish.

Jace was so busy analyzing the voice it took him a moment to parse what was actually asked. "You're asking me?" Of all the surprises of this day, getting asked a polite question should not have ranked high on the list. But it might be at the top.

"This is your home," a pause, "Jace. Jace Beleren." As she said "Beleren" it came out syllable by syllable.

I'm very afraid right now. I'm also so very curious. What an odd juxtaposition.

"I am just a visitor here. So, may I?" She stood waiting.

How much more surreal can this day get? He was confident he didn't want an actual answer to the question. Remember what's important—don't die. Figure this out. Beat Emrakul. His mantra. He added another sentence. Invite Emrakul for a cup of tea. He smiled, and the smile reached his face. "Please, by all means. Please sit down." Jace waved airily at the large stone table, and Emeria—no, I don't know what this is, stop assuming I do, the angel sat down at the table.

She sheathed both of her swords behind her back. When her hands came back to the table they were holding a large scroll, a scroll with iron bands. I've seen a scroll like that before. Where? "You do not mind if I work while we talk, do you?" Her lilting voice sounded like it could come straight from an Azorius guildmage wanting guidance on a point of protocol.

Embrace this surreality. Stop fighting it. See where it goes. "Of course, please. I would not want to keep you from your work." She nodded and unrolled the scroll. A creeping sensation nagged at the back of Jace's head. Where have I seen that scroll? But he could not place it. From somewhere a long stylus appeared, and she began writing in the scroll.

Jace cleared his throat. "Well, since we're, umm...you know, having a talk. Who are you exactly? What is this place? What is going on?" Jace could not afford to be picky about where to get answers from. He could not quell his normal instinct to mind-read, not knowing is so much worse than insanity, but there was...nothing. Nothing he could latch on to. Secrets are no fun when they stay secret. He was going to have to do this in the mundane style everyone else had to. Through words. Words with an Eldrazi titan.

"Everything ends. Everything dies. Wholeness is always behind us. Time points only one way." There were echoes of Nissa's earlier insane comments, but Jace didn't understand it any more coming from the angel. She didn't look up as she wrote, her hood obscuring whatever light voice uttered those strange words.

"Are you Emrakul?" Jace didn't know what he was risking, and increasingly didn't care. Caution is for those with a winning hand. "What do you want?"

She paused her writing, considering the scroll. "This is all wrong. I am incomplete, unfulfilled, inchoate. There should be blossoms, not barren resentment. The soil was not receptive. It is not my time. Not yet." The way she said, yet, sent a shiver through Jace's neck. She resumed her writing, blotting out a large section of dried ink.

"Enough!" Jace shouted. "You are here for a reason! You could kill me any number of ways, with your swords or your tentacles, but you're not. You're sitting here, uttering nonsense...why? I don't understand what you're saying and I don't understand what you want. Help me. Please." As Jace talked his anger cooled, but it was replaced by something even more useful. Focus. He felt a fog clearing, a fog that only in its recession revealed how much it was obscuring.

"Do you play chess?" The voice continued as if Jace had been spouting as much nonsense as she was. Jace was tempted to shout again, but didn't think it would do much good. Besides, he did play chess. He was quite good at it.

"Yes, I play chess."

"Would you play a game with me?" She stopped writing and rolled up the scroll.

"I'm not sure I have time to play..."

"If you win, this all stops. I will give you all the answers you want." She tucked the scroll behind her.

Jace suspected a trap, but he was really good at chess. "And if you win?"

"I am already winning, Jace Beleren. Let us play a game."

"Uh, there is one problem." Jace glanced around. In his real apartments back on Ravnica there was a chessboard, a quite fancy one he had been gifted by the Boros, but in this strange simulacrum, no such board was visible. "I, uh, don't seem to have..."

The angel waved her hand, and a chessboard appeared on the table taking up the space where the scroll used to be. The board and pieces were thick stone, solid with fine detail. Jace raised an eyebrow, but if the angel noticed, she made no sign. I suppose if she just limits herself to creating chessboards, we will be okay. "Shall we play?" She gestured toward the board. Jace's side was white, and he took the first move. Magnanimous of her.

"You will need to move faster, Jace. Time is running out." Faster? He was moving near instantaneously. She did not seem a particularly skilled player, and Jace began to see the outline of a possible checkmate in six or seven moves.

"Communication between us is difficult. I cannot talk to you. I do not even really know you exist. But you, your brain, it is very...adaptable." There, a blunder. He had mate in five moves. Confident of his victory, he paused. She was saying actual information he could use.

"So, then, what is all this?" He waved his hands around them. "What are you? How does my adaptable brain make this happen?"

"You know those answers better than I." She put her hand on a piece, hesitated. "Or, at least, a part of you does. How is your headache?"

How did she know about my headache? In truth it was reduced to a low residual throb, noticeable but not debilitating. "It's...it's fine. So you are not Emeria? Are you even real?"

"I was personified a long time ago. Forces cannot be reasoned with. Agency does not exist in propagating waves. If you take shortcuts to try and grapple with what you cannot perceive, cannot even comprehend, who am I to gainsay? No one. You. Perhaps."

The headache grew. Jace and the...whatever it was exchanged several more moves. Checkmate was a move away. The more Jace considered, the more this all possibly made bizarre sense. This was not Emeria. This was not Emrakul. This was his mind's attempt to make sense of whatever pressures or emanations he was feeling from Emrakul. He had to personify it to even have a chance of making sense of it. But to believe in that personification was to invite death. Or worse. The vertigo lurched. Forever and ever and ever and emer and emra...

Enough. He put his hand on his queen, moved it into position. "Checkmate." He smiled. He was not sure what winning this game meant, but it felt good to win, to win something. She stopped, looked at the board.

"So it is." She put her hands to her hood and lowered it. Jace flinched instinctively, suddenly certain he did not want to know what she looked like...but she looked normal. Like an angel. Like the statue he had seen back on Zendikar. He took a long, slow breath, exhaled.

One of the pawns beside his queen started to writhe and flow. Hands and a small stone sword appeared on the pawn, and it turned to stab the queen. The queen piece shrieked, blood pouring out of its side. It toppled to the ground, bleeding and shaking. Dying. The rest of the board was pandemonium as more of Jace's pieces transformed. Mutated. They attacked one another mercilessly, killing each other, until the few remaining pieces pirouetted to face the other side of the board. They now all held weapons, weapons dripping with blood, and began a slow march towards Jace's king, who now resembled nothing other than Jace himself.

Jace gaped at the chaos. "Wha...buh...tha...that's...that's not fair! You cheated! You can't do that! Those are my pieces!"

Art by Franz Vohwinkel

The angel's face began to melt, chunks of flesh sloughing off as the rest of her—wings, swords, ribbons, and all—began to dissipate into a purplish smoke. But the voice remained.

"They are all my pieces, Jace Beleren. They always were. I just no longer want to play."

There was a huge crackling explosion outside accompanied by a large grinding sound. The top of the room was torn away, revealing the now-familiar sight of Emrakul, the gigantic mushroom cloud with its hundreds of tendrils and flashing lightning, eating away at the room.

The voice continued, light and airy as a breeze. "It is coming, Jace. I am coming. Keep moving. Find your answers. But quickly. Time points one way, and it does so with hunger."

A door appeared at the end of the room, ornate with a bright blue glow behind it. Jace took another look at Emrakul above, and fled.

Liliana

Liliana did everything she could to stay alive.

She had been using some of her power to hold back the effects of using the Chain Veil. She kept her skin from cracking, her veins from spilling blood. In taking over the Chain Veil completely, she thought she had discovered the secrets to its true use.

She was wrong.

But as agonizing as her skin splitting and her veins rupturing was, it was better than oblivion against the onslaught of Emrakul. She still drew on immense amounts of power, but now all that power was put to one use. Staying alive for another moment.

Her moments were running out. As Emrakul lashed and flayed against her magic, she directed her zombies to attack. They bit, grabbed, struck against Emrakul, like fleas versus a storm, with similar effect. Zombies were destroyed by the hundreds under Emrakul's assault, and hundreds more disintegrated without touch as Liliana instinctively drew upon their animating magic to fuel another moment of survival.

Art by Deruchenko Alexander

If there was any consolation in her impending defeat, it was the blessed silence inside her head. There were no voices from the Raven Man, no chanting or whispers from the Veil. Even as her reality was blood and pain and a desperate fight to stay alive, her mind was hers and hers alone. There was consolation there, if she chose to take it.

A large tendril, thick as her torso, broke through and grabbed her around the waist. She screamed in rage and blasted through the tendril, its desiccated flesh sloughing off. She coughed up blood, swaying, even as more tendrils came.

She was going to die here.

She looked at the other Planeswalkers, their bodies still protected by the large clearing her dwindling zombies provided. Nissa was no longer screaming, but lay unconscious like the rest of them. Only Jace stood, the blue shimmer still in place protecting them from...something, but he didn't move, didn't speak.

"Jace!" Her scream produced no response. No sign of recognition.

"Jace, you bastard! You better be doing something useful!" That was all she had time as Emrakul pressed. Each moment mattered. That became her mantra. One more moment. One more moment. One more...

Jace

Jace flung himself through the open portal, seeking refuge from Emrakul's assault.

He was in a small, dark room, a copy of one of his innermost sanctums back on Ravnica. There, standing in front of him, was himself.

Art by Tyler Jacobson

With all the other insanity Jace had experienced since first waking up in the tower, facing himself was one of the more benign confusions.

"Oh, this should be good."

The copy didn't smile, didn't move. "You got here. About time. But I don't know you're me." He pondered for a moment. "Answer this riddle."

"What? I'm done with riddles. I need answers. What—"

"First, a riddle," the copy said.

"You must be joking. I'm not going to stand here and get quizzed by either a runaway tyrant version of myself or, worse, some malignant impostor who just wants to waste my time!" Jace ended his rant with an angry shout.

The copy stood there with a smug smile and a raised eyebrow. Am I really this infuriating? I am this infuriating. I need to work on that.

"It's only infuriating when you know I'm right. I need to know you're me." Jace wondered if there would be permanent consequences to punching himself in the face. Probably.

"How do I know you're me?" It wasn't the snappiest retort, but it was all he had at the moment. His brain was processing a lot right now.

"Because I'm the one with answers. You're wasting time, time we don't have." The copy tapped his foot in a way Jace recognized all too well. I don't know that I can ever interact with another human again. I'm too annoying to be with.

He slumped his shoulders and waved a hand. "Fine, ask away."

"No bigger than a pebble but my closing covers the entire world, what am I?"

"That? That's your riddle? Your security system to make sure I'm you? You must be an impostor, because I refuse to believe I'm that dumb."

"You still haven't answered the question. This conversation is going to end quickly if you don't." The copy's eyes glowed blue in a way Jace was perversely glad to find menacing. It's good to be reminded you can menace now and then.

"Pah. I thought I would have come up with something difficult. Eyes. The answer is eyes." Jace stared at his copy, and then blinked ostentatiously several times to illustrate the point. "I see the whole world. Now I don't. See. Not see. How could this riddle possibly have been useful?" The copy relaxed, letting go of whatever spell he had prepared.

And then Jace understood. The point of the riddle wasn't to see if he solved it. The point was to see how dismissive and incredulous he was at an easy riddle. He nodded. Okay, this is me. He knew the copy was thinking the same thing.

"Fine, I'm me. I mean, I'm...yes, we're each other. Probably. You promised answers." Jace reached out to read his copy's mind, but nothing happened.

"That's not how it works here. Here, we talk." Another coy smile.

"All right," Jace struggled not to clench his jaw. "Talk. Now."

The copy pondered briefly. "I still don't know all the things you don't know. Ask me questions."

"Where are we?" Jace wasn't sure it was the most pressing question, but he had been wandering this forsaken tower for the last hour, and he really wanted to know where he was.

"Really, that's the part you haven't figured out yet?" You condescending...Jace's anger was not abated by the fact that the condescension was coming from himself. And in that flash of anger he understood. Jace remembered.

Emrakul rising, flowering, blooming. Liliana had given them all a momentary relapse from Emrakul's minions with her zombies, but none of them were prepared for the rise of Emrakul itself. The physical signs were apparent, but the mental assault was the real danger. A pressure, a pain, unlike any other he had felt before. Tamiyo's chime trick instantly dissolved. There had been no time for a plan, no time for thought.

The spell he had cast was reflexive. One he had prepared a very long time ago, to shield his mind from imminent dissolution.

I'm not in a tower. I am the tower. Everything snapped into place. The scenes of his friends, the conversation with Emeria, even this conversation right now, all were taking place inside his mind, given sustenance and structure by the power of his spell. Welcome to residence Jace, everyone. Hope you enjoyed your stay. Based on the scenes he had seen in his friends' minds, he was confident no one had enjoyed it. But the alternative was oblivion, or worse forever and ever and ever and emer...

He shook his head rapidly trying to clear the fugue, noticing his copy did the same motion at the same time. The pressure from Emrakul was increasing. Jace looked up and noticed the top of the room shaking. It's attacking. It's coming.

"And you? Me?"

"Innistrad was a weird place. A dangerous place. As soon as I arrived I knew something was wrong. I set up some...fail-safes in the event of something disastrous occurring. Puzzles within puzzles, shadows within shadows. Emrakul is the scariest thing I, we, have ever faced. So I made a contingency plan to keep me separate from me. To work out what was really going on, and be able to stop it. Fix it. You know." And now he did know.

Art by Magali Villeneuve

He was so good at self-alteration. He shivered, wondering which him was the real Jace. The better Jace. Nonsense. It's me, of course.

"Hey there," the copy smiled. "Don't get ahead of yourself. You're only the second smartest person in this room."

"Enough." Jace's mind was starting to whir at a speed both familiar and comforting. "The plan. I better not have created you just for you to tell me a dumb riddle. We don't know how to beat Emrakul."

"Talk with Tamiyo. She was in the middle of telling us interesting things when Emrakul attacked."

"That's your useful input? Talk with Tamiyo?"

"No, my useful input is actually figuring out how to have all of us walk and talk and think normally even with the psychic equivalent of a Rakdos-Golgari kill-party times infinity hammering away at us. It's a fairly difficult trick, in fact."

"Oh. Well, thanks, me. Good job."

"Everyone is in pretty bad shape. But at least we will be able to think coherently. It's...not good out there. And there's another problem."

"What's..." even as he asked the question, the answer flowed in his brain. The two parts of Jace were merging, becoming one. There were words, but the words were spoken by each of them at the same time.

"Liliana is about to die." Jace dissolved the spell. The tower faded into reality.

Jace

He came back to chaos. Liliana was on the ground in front of him, unconscious, bleeding profusely from multiple wounds. Above them Emrakul hovered in her full unfolding, a bright lavender light glowing in the center of her body, the eye of her storm. Her tentacles, broad and thick, decimating what was left of Thraben.

Art by Jaime Jones

Liliana's zombies were a mere fraction of what they had been before Jace's spell. The humans and beasts infected by Emrakul's madness had started to mass again, threatening to break through. Fending off Emrakul's mental assault was not going to be of much help if her minions tore them to shreds instead.

The other Planeswalkers had regained consciousness a moment after Jace, staggered and disoriented. Jace funneled focus at his friends, clearing away the cobwebs of Emrakul's attack. Chandra, Gideon, Liliana's zombies need your help. We cannot let Emrakul's minions through. Gideon moved first, with a soldier's decisive speed. An image of Erebos's whip flashed through Jace's mind, but he shook it away.

Chandra paused. I can...I can still try to burn her. I got this. Her hesitation vanished, replaced by a natural confidence Jace found both appealing and mystifying. She doesn't play at confidence. It just comes to her. Weird, he thought to himself. Jace hesitated. Trying to burn Emrakul didn't feel right, didn't feel possible. But how could he be sure this wasn't just head games Emrakul was playing with him, with all of them? Emrakul had been in his mind. He had felt her power.

He cast his thoughts to the whole group, his spell of protection keeping their minds linked. No, Chandra. Emrakul is too big. Too powerful. We can't beat her that way. I'm not sure she can be destroyed.

Jace is right. Trying to burn Emrakul is throwing a torch into the ocean. It will not work. Even if all the leylines were available. She is too...vast. Nissa's voice sounded odd, distant. She was weaving vines, shoots, and leaves into poultices to wrap around Liliana's wounds, keeping her alive. Emrakul was there, at my awakening. At the moment of my spark. Perhaps it is fitting she be there at the end.

Oh, wow, you do not get invited to many parties, huh. Chandra's playful voice belied her words. Enough doom talk. More how-we-win-this talk, please. I'm gonna go burn things. Chandra ran to the outer ring of the zombie horde, her flames beating back crazed cultists.

Jace. Remember what Avacyn said. Tamiyo's voice, a light breeze on a sunlit shore.

An echo chimed in his head, a mad angel saying her last words to her creator. What cannot be destroyed must be bound.

Jace, that is the answer. That is what we must do. We cannot destroy Emrakul. We must bind her. Tamiyo's voice was insistent, clear. The Gatewatch had faced this same crux back on Zendikar, and there they had chosen destruction. But that was not a choice on Innistrad. Emrakul was beyond their powers. The only destruction in question was their own—along with everyone else on Innistrad.

How? Binding her may not be any more possible than destroying her. What prison could possibly hold her?

The same prison that held all of Innistrad's horrors for hundreds of years.

The Helvault? Jace was confused. Wasn't that destroyed?

Not the Helvault, Tamiyo responded. Where the Helvault came from. The moon. A silver moon. I have a binding spell. A powerful one. I can attune it to the moon. But it needs to be linked to Emrakul...

Jace's mind raced. They could do it. Jace was confident he could attach Tamiyo's spell to Emrakul. But they would need power, fuel for the spell. Nissa...

Nissa had been silent as she continued infusing her mana into the poultices wrapping Liliana. Liliana was breathing evenly, though still unconscious. Jace felt a warm surge of gratitude toward Nissa, but now he needed more from her. Far more. Can you power the spell?

Nissa's voice was cool, serene. No. There are so few leylines here I can touch. So few I want to touch. Jace paused, uncertain of what to say next or how to help her. But I owe you, Jace Beleren. I will try.

Owe me?

My mind was not my own. I was trapped in a darkness brought by her rising. I was subsumed by her, far too easily. It was not...pleasant. You rescued me from that horror. You have a gift for making difficult things so very easy. I will do what I can.

Jace sputtered. Um, thank you...it wasn't really me, I mean, I cast the spell, but I wasn't really thinking at the time, and I actually probably made it a bit worse because I didn't...

"Thank you" suffices, Jace. You also have a gift for making easy things so very hard. I am ready.

Jace didn't know how to respond to that, so he didn't. Tamiyo, are you ready?

Tamiyo had pulled out a scroll. Another memory flashed through Jace's mind. The angel took out a long scroll, a scroll with iron bands. That was where he had seen Tamiyo's scroll, in his mental conversation with Emeria. But the scroll Tamiyo had chosen did not have iron bands on it.

Jace had no more time to ponder the mystery. The space around them was shrinking. Gideon and Chandra were each holding off Emrakul's minions by themselves, but they couldn't be everywhere at once, and the zombies were close to being overrun. It was time.

I am ready, Tamiyo confirmed. She began reading her scroll. Jace couldn't focus on the words, he was lost in the details of attaching Tamiyo's spell to Emrakul, using the knowledge gleaned from Ugin and his own hedron manipulations back on Zendikar. A glyph flashed onto the moon, incised lines glowing bright against the silvery reflection. He had to fasten that glyph onto Emrakul, the presence of Emrakul.

Art by Ryan Alexander Lee

But the spell demanded power. Streams, torrents, of power. Nissa strained against the earth, her eyes a bright glowing green as she wove the polluted fragments of mana left on Innistrad into something Jace could use. Jace could feel her draining the leylines, looking for every last bit of energy. It was not enough. It was not going to be enough. Nissa stumbled to the ground, her arms flailing.

They were going to lose the spell.

As Jace struggled to keep the spell going, he lost mental contact with Tamiyo. Where she had been in his mind, there was now just a cloud, a dark gray fog he could not penetrate. Tamiyo pulled out another scroll, a long scroll, a scroll with iron bands, and began reading a second spell.

Energy flowed into Jace. He was in a wide river of mana, more magic, more energy than he had ever felt before. It felt wonderful. He took the magic, shaped it, each point on the glyph attaching itself to a node on Emrakul that Jace created on the fly. Jace unleashed the full power of the spell.

Light erupted from the moon.

A cold, silver beam struck Emrakul from on high.

It bathed the creature, enveloped it...and the creature stretched. Toward the light, toward the moon.

The distortion was physically impossible. Before Jace's eyes the shape of Emrakul arced through the light to the moon, stretching, stretching, and then...

...snapping.

Emrakul folded, collapsed. She crumbled like a thin parchment sprinkled with glass, compacting to nothingness in a way no creature Emrakul's size should. Or could.

The light winked out. Emrakul was gone. They had won.

The silver face of the moon glowered with the triangular patterns of the glyph. Branded. Scarred. Sealed.

For a moment, the only sound was the stirring of dry leaves in the wind. Next to him, Tamiyo dropped to her knees and vomited.

Liliana

She still lived.

She felt exultant. She had known delight many times before. The day she had regained her youth. When she killed the demon lords Kothophed and Griselbrand, hearing their death screams. Each of those moments had felt like cheating; the best kind of cheating, where you get away with it and still win at the end.

But this moment was even sweeter. Perhaps it was because she had truly known she was going to die. Perhaps it was because she had so rashly taken on Emrakul in her pride and thirst for control, and yet none of them would be alive had she not done so. Perhaps it was because there was no more Emrakul. Its taint, its taste, was gone from Innistrad, and everything was better in its absence.

Just thinking of Emrakul made her shiver. She had been so close to death. Or worse. She stared at the moon. May you rot there forever. Know the consequence of opposing Liliana Vess.

The assorted Planeswalkers had gathered at the close of a very long day. After the battle with Emrakul was won, there were still fires to put out, eyes to close, grief to console, wounds to heal...or not, in the case of much of the trauma. Liliana didn't much care. Every time she pushed the limits of the Chain Veil she felt empty afterward, as if a part of her was missing. It had happened so many times now she was not even sure she could identify what was absent anymore.

Besides, it didn't matter. She had had her fill of good deeds for quite some time. None of you would be alive if not for me. You're lucky I don't demand payment for my rescue of this world. Well, she would demand payment, but not now and not from anyone on Innistrad.

It was remarkable what imaginary obligations and loyalty made people do. Take the Gatewatch. They owed each other nothing. Literally nothing. And yet here they stood, fighting for each other, willing to die for each other. Liliana was used to the effect of such relationships; she depended on them, as long as they were with her zombies. That was a reliable power dynamic. But Innistrad had shown the limitations of her approach. Zombies were great servants, but there were certain tasks they couldn't accomplish. And fighting alone was wonderful...until it wasn't. When you weren't prepared for the unlikely, and there was no one to save you from the untimely.

Once upon a time recently she had thought to leverage the emotions Jace had for her. Or had had, if she must admit. He is just a boy. A boy, and I should know better. Jace had proven reliably unreliable, his recent success notwithstanding. What were you doing with your spell while I kept you alive? Trying to think Emrakul to death? While she acknowledged whatever he had done had worked, it did not dramatically improve her opinion of him. A boy. I should be done with you.

But here was an opportunity far beyond Jace and his limitations. Here was a group. A group of friends. Today was a revelation, a revelation of the power of friends. Manipulated correctly, friends were like better zombies. Helping you and saving your life because they wanted to, not because they had to.

What more could she do, with powerful friends like these? What more could she conquer, what more could she obtain? She smiled at the thought of it. They would not obey her direct orders, but did it matter? Jace wasn't the only child compared to her. They were all children. None of them had her centuries of experience, none of them had tasted the power she had, either before or now, none of them were as ruthless or focused as she was.

She didn't know where the Raven Man was. There was no sign of him inside her head or out. The Chain Veil was subdued. Today had been an extremely painful lesson in how unreliable a weapon it was. But when I have my own Gatewatch to heal me after every use...a thought for later. But she liked the sound of that. My very own Gatewatch.

Gideon had been rambling on and on to Tamiyo. The moonfolk looked sick, and Liliana could hardly blame her. Gideon was nice enough to look at, but she had known zombies who were smarter. Gideon was babbling something about the Gatewatch, and how they were just starting up their do-gooding, and wouldn't Tamiyo like to be a do-gooder too? Tamiyo shook her head, excusing herself, her eyes wide and frightened. It figured that a mind mage would be too fragile. Like Jace, useless.

Jace was looking at her, that puppy-dog look in his eye still. At least make up your mind, child! She bit down on her irritation. She needed him and his puppy ways here.

"Gideon." Jace's voice was tentative, slight. They talked quietly amongst themselves, and Liliana made sure to show no hint of the smile she felt. Yes, cloak boy, bumble your hesitant way toward your sincere desire to help me. It was clear Gideon was not happy about it, though. Though Liliana was not sure Gideon was ever happy about anything. You should at least delight in your youth and attractiveness while you still have it. Why are children so dumb?

Eventually the eye-candy approached. There were more do-gooder words about do-gooding, but Liliana was too focused on the oath to pay close attention. She had thought extensively about the right approach to the oath. Too sincere, too sugary, and suspicions would be raised—suspicions that would make her next steps harder. But too cynical, too revealing, and those suspicions would instead be confirmed. She needed a delicate touch, a hint of cynicism but with her heart clearly in the right place.

When Gideon asked her for her oath, she was ready.

Art by Wesley Burt

"I see that together we're more powerful than we are alone. If that means I can do what needs to be done without relying on the Chain Veil, then I'll keep watch. Happy now?"

She said it with a touch of a smile, but just a touch. Besides, her pleasure was genuine. The best lies always contained enough truth to slide through.

She was now a member of the Gatewatch. Futures unfolded in her mind, full of promise and ambition.

Jace

Jace was exhausted. It had been the longest day of his life, and all he wanted was to sleep; a sleep free of dreams or any thinking whatsoever.

But there was someone he had to talk to first.

He found her in the far outskirts of Thraben, sitting in the ruins of a small church. There were few buildings in Thraben left standing, and this church had not been spared.

Art by Vincent Proce

She just sat there, her legs crossed over one another, her eyes closed. Jace felt weird interrupting such a private moment. But he had to know.

"Tamiyo...? Are you...can I...?" Jace didn't know how to ask his question. Tamiyo opened her eyes, her face still full of the sickness and dread she had displayed ever since they finished casting the spell.

"What happened out there, Tamiyo? You were there, mind-linked with me, and then you...weren't. You vanished. What happened to you?"

Tamiyo sat there and began crying. Tears dropped from her eyes, one after another. Plip-plip, as they hit on the stone rubble beneath.

Her words came out staggered, halting. "Nissa had fallen. The spell was in danger of collapsing. I didn't know what to do, how to help."

Jace was surprised. "So Nissa generated that power by herself? Impressive. I had thought it was you, with the second scroll."

Tamiyo looked at him, sadness and scorn both in her eyes. "No. You don't understand. It was me. With the second scroll. That's where the energy came from."

"But that's wonderful! You saved us! You saved all of Innistrad, all of...everything! Is it because it was one of the iron scrolls? One of the scrolls you didn't want to open?"

"Just shut up, Jace! Listen, just listen. It wasn't me. It...she...took me over. Do you understand? It was not me! I was there, in my own body, helpless as she came in and took over. My eyes, my hands, my voice...she took them all over. They were not mine." Her cries became full sobs.

A voice came back to him, her voice as he had watched his chess pieces stab and kill each other. They are all my pieces, Jace Beleren. They always were. I just no longer want to play.

"I...I am sorry, Tamiyo. I don't know..."

"But that wasn't the worst part. The scroll I opened. The second one. You were right. I shouldn't have opened it. A promise made long ago, which one day I'll have to answer for. But the spell she read...it wasn't the original spell. The scroll she used, it cast...a different spell."

Emeria. From somewhere a long stylus appeared, and she began writing in the scroll. Jace began shaking.

"It was changed. How did she do that? How could she do that?" Tamiyo's voice was near panic. "As this monster took over my body and read a scroll, a scroll that should have brought devastation to everything on this plane...instead it fueled a spell that trapped herself here. How did that happen, Jace? Why did it happen? What did we just do?"

"I...I don't know." Jace had no more words for her. None for himself.

Tamiyo took a deep breath. "I told you before, Jace. Sometimes our stories have to end. Yet here we are, each seeking to prolong our story, no matter the cost. But what if all stories are just her story, all in service of some awful destiny waiting to unfold?" Tamiyo looked up at the moon.

"Did we really win?" Tamiyo's voice was no longer fearful, but plaintive. Jace had no answer. Eventually she rose and flew into the dark sky. There were no parting words.

Jace sat for a longer time still. He looked again at the moon in its silver luminescence, the glyph still brightly inscribed on its surface, a testament to what the Gatewatch had achieved. In that moon's depths was the most powerful and destructive force any of them had ever encountered. The angel's words stabbed in his head, daggers from a destiny unrealized. This is all wrong. I am incomplete, unfulfilled, inchoate. There should be blossoms, not barren resentment. The soil was not receptive. It is not my time. Not yet.

His spine was cold. It is not my time. Not yet. He dropped his gaze from the moon, and went in search of a safe bed to find temporary oblivion.