Dragon's Maze

“No!” Jace screamed, grasping his hair in his fists.

A blast of energy emitted from the bailiff, branching out as a stream of runes to all ten of the maze-runners. It wasn’t an explosion as Jace had expected; the bailiff’s magic touched each maze-runner at the center of their forehead, not destroying them, but granting something to each of them.

Jace instinctively examined Emmara’s thoughts. He felt the prize reach her mind as she felt it. It was the knowledge of a new spell, a terrible spell. It was the ability to cast a devastating wave of destruction throughout the city. Under Lazav’s influence, Emmara’s mind relished this new knowledge. It fed directly into her desire to hurt those around her, to punish the other guilds, to kill.

Quickly, Jace scanned the other maze-runners. They all had just been granted the same knowledge.

The bailiff hadn’t cast Azor’s Supreme Verdict. He had granted it to all the maze-runners at once. Each of them held the power to sweep destruction across the district.

MAZE’S END

Jace thrust forth with his mind, taking hold of the minds of all ten runners. He saw the impact Lazav had had on their minds. But even without the Dimir’s influence, each mind was a tangle of rage, blame, and frustration, each one shaped by its own set of experiences, informed by its own unique perspective on the world.

That was their strength and their weakness. Each of them viewed the world through their own lens, their own skewed perspective. He had to make them see each other. He had to make them see each other as he saw them—from the inside of their minds.

Jace used his own mind as a conduit, connecting all ten minds to each other. He used himself as a bridge just as he had with the family on Zendikar, demolishing the barriers between them, letting them see directly into one another’s souls. Varolz could sense the hotheaded frustration of Exava, who could directly perceive the militant zeal of Tajic, who could share the belligerent rebellion of Ruric Thar, who could see the passion for order and law in the heart of Lavinia. Each guild champion was flooded with the simultaneous thoughts and emotions of every other. They formed a ring of minds, a ring of hopes and beliefs and ways of life, a ring of lives.

The pain rose in Jace’s skull. Jace cried out, and the scream spiraled in on itself, shattering into a thousand pieces and crushing him from every direction. He had merged their minds, let them peer directly into each other, but it was unraveling his own mind in the process. He couldn’t perceive boundaries anymore, as he had broken them all. He had broken himself. He had fused all into one, but the cost was his own identity.

He heard an echoing voice, the voice of someone he knew, as if from a distance of years and a period of miles. The voice was saying a word, over and over again, a word that had meaning to him, but one he couldn’t remember.

It was the voice of the bailiff. The word he was saying was his name.

Jace opened his eyes. It was dark, except that the bailiff was looking down on him, his runes aglow.

Light erupted from the bailiff, and Jace’s body was scoured. He felt the light as a physical force pressing against him, pushing into him like a gale of wind—and then it pierced into him, penetrating his skin, ricocheting inside the boundaries of his body, tracing a skein of light inside him. It filled him, and consumed his vision, and the forum and the maze-runners faded away as the world flooded with light. The opaque whiteness was not blinding but soft, like diffused sunlight shining through a bank of fog. A low, composite roar suffused the air around him, like the sounds of thousands of overlapping conversations that were muffled almost to inaudibility. Jace floated, his skin tingling like the feeling just before his hair stood on end. He felt one with the distance, as though he could see as far as infinity, and reach out and touch the horizon with his finger.

Jace felt a presence at his side, and without turning he knew it was the shimmering form of the bailiff.

“Bailiff,” said Jace. Jace’s voice sounded strange, coming to his ears after a tiny delay, as if he were hearing his voice only in echo and not inside his own head. “I feel different.”

“You are different,” said the bailiff, as he rose.

“What has happened? Didn’t you deliver the verdict?”

“The verdict will not be necessary now.” The bailiff stood next to Jace, facing into the luminous fog, as if measuring the breadth of infinity. “The Guildpact has taken form.”

“It has? The Guildpact is in effect again?”

“The Guildpact has been realized.”

“Something’s different. It’s not the same this time.”

“The Guildpact of old was a spell, a spell designed to govern the interactions of the ten guilds. It was a powerful and far-reaching spell, but Azor speculated that it might one day fail. He created the Assessment to determine whether the Guildpact could take a new form. And it has.”

“The Guildpact has taken form—what does that mean?”

“It means you.”