Dragon's Maze

Teysa sliced the air with her hand, directing bolts of darkness toward Jace and Emmara. With his own slicing motion, Jace counteracted the spells, never breaking eye contact with Teysa.

“You’ll do as I told you,” said Jace. “Or I could counter all your spells, pierce your mind, flip your allegiance as I did with your subordinates, and alter you to be a willing servant of Emmara and the cause of the Selesnya forever.”

“I’ll wait here,” said Teysa Karlov, letting her dark sun spell evaporate.

As they turned to head through the gate, Emmara grabbed Jace’s hand. As brief as it was, the touch felt peculiarly complex, at once breathlessly electric and yet the most natural thing Jace could ever conceive. She released his hand after a moment, and her eyes shone into his. As the two of them hurried under the archway, a thought came to Jace unbidden. It was the thought that, out of all the worlds he had visited, Ravnica might be one he could call a certain word, a word he believed only other people would ever use: “home.”

TEMPEST OF LIES

Jace and Emmara had passed through the Simic gate and now approached the zone of alchemical machinery and steam-driven arcana known as Izzet territory. Jace tried to watch the sky for the draconic shape of Niv-Mizzet, but he was oddly focused on how the strands of Emmara’s hair moved. A storm brewed over the Izzet area of the district, with attendant rolls of thunder, and drops had begun to spatter on the streets.

“Where did Vorel get off to?” Jace asked.

It felt strange talking with Emmara out loud. Somehow it was a bit embarrassing after all their mental speech. It was too real, too out in the open.

“I lost Vorel at the Gruul gate,” said Emmara. “Or rather, he lost me. Some of the Gruul seemed to know him. There may have been some bad blood there. But he made it out, I found out later. I saw him pass ahead of me just before running into the Orzhov.”

“And the other gates? How have you fared?”

“I’m in one piece,” she said. “I don’t think I’m winning this thing, though.”

A force of Izzet goblins came around the corner, recognized them, and charged at them with fire-tipped pole weapons. Jace pinpointed their minds as they rushed, and the goblins fell asleep in mid-charge, clanging onto the cobblestones in their bronze-colored metal armor. Jace walked on without breaking his stride.

“I don’t think you need to end up at the Forum of Azor first,” Jace said. “I just have to make sure you’re there, and in one piece. You’ll do the rest. You have a way of uniting people, of bringing them together. And I’m starting to see that that’s the most important thing in this world.”

“Jace,” Emmara said.

The way she said his name made him halt and turn to her.

“Yes?”

Her eyes searched his face, as if she sought for an answer that might be written there. For some reason, Jace thought of Calomir. He realized he had never actually met the man she had loved, that the real Calomir was a memory by the time Jace had met Lazav’s imitation of him. “I know all of this has been hard for you,” he said.

“Tell me you don’t have secrets from me,” she said.

“I …” Jace said, and stopped.

He saw the longing in her face. She had been through so much with Lazav’s deception, and she was still struggling to cope with the fact of Calomir’s death. She had been abandoned by her guild and left to fend for herself. She wanted so badly to put her trust in someone that it made Jace ache to see it.

He knew he kept so much from her, to shield her from the difficult realities of his life. He knew she could never know of his true nature, of the existence of other worlds beyond her own, of how strange and twisted his past was. But he longed to give her the reassurance she sought, to prove to her that she could trust him if only to prove to her that people could be trusted. She wanted to believe in people, and he wanted to give her the gift of one moment where she could feel she wouldn’t be betrayed. And at that moment, he wondered whether that trust wasn’t more important than the truth.

“I’d never keep secrets from you,” he said.

It stung to say, but her relief was his reward. She smiled and grabbed his arm, and for a moment, she pressed her smile into his shoulder.

Thunder pealed as they neared the Izzet gate.

“Let me check up ahead,” said Jace, feeling a tiny bit invincible. “I’ll come back for you when I know it’s safe, and we’ll cross through the Izzet gate together.”

Emmara arched an amused eyebrow.

“I know, I know,” he said. “You’re just as often the one getting me out of scrapes. But humor my protective instincts this time, and grant me this one.”

“Granted,” Emmara said. “But I get to choose how long to wait before I come bail you out.”

“Agreed.”

***