Dragon's Maze

He didn’t have to return, of course. If he were caged on Ravnica, or if some mystical gravity drew him irresistibly back, then he would be released from the decision. But nothing was forcing him. He adjusted the makeshift bandage on his neck, which was beginning to soak through with a wet red stain. From this serene world, Ravnica seemed unreal, like a collection of vivid paintings he had seen once in a mad dream. He squatted down on the pebbles of the riverbank and used a stick to turn over the bones of whatever he had eaten the last time he was here. He wondered where his own body would eventually rest, and how alien it would seem, his haphazard bones a curiosity on a world without humanoids or perhaps even without bones. It was entirely within his power to do absolutely nothing, and to speak to no one for the rest of his life, and to contribute his alien bones here, to this world, to this stony riverbank.

He thought of Emmara and was immediately tempted to forget her face. He hadn’t intended to abandon her, but perhaps that was how planeswalkers survived. Perhaps that was how they prevented bonds with any one place or with any one person. They kept themselves cleanly separate, isolated, and their nature secret. Knowledge of other worlds would be too difficult for the planebound to understand. The people of Ravnica wouldn’t want to know that their own plane was only one speck in an infinite Multiverse. In a way, Jace was doing Emmara a favor. That was the best way for him to care for her, to keep her at arm’s length. If he allowed himself to want anything more, it would compromise his very identity as a traveler of planes. It would compromise who he was.

Jace watched the opposite shore across the river and tried to listen for evidence of some form of animate life. It was quiet to his ears, but with his mental senses he felt a wisp of thought, like faraway voices almost hidden in the wind.

He told himself to close his mind off, to keep himself isolated from the minds he sensed. But something made him reach out to them, to find their source. He could see no one in the ruined valley. It looked as lifeless as burned sand. He walked along the river and listened with his mind.

As he walked, the thoughts grew stronger. He could hear shreds of intelligent thought, strands of conversation. He spread out his consciousness, and found their source—the thoughts were coming from somewhere deep underground. He focused in on one of the minds, fearing that someone might be trapped below the ruined land. But there was fatigue in the person’s mind, and the dull ache of constant worry, but no panic. She was a woman of Zendikar’s kor race, sharpening a steel sword while talking with her family. They all lived in a dark, grimy cavern under the surface of the land. Her family had been forced to live there as disaster had come to their world. The woman had a determination to her mind, a self-enforced sense of hope that lay behind her constant reassurances to her children. She worried that she could not instill the same hope in her children, that despair would take them.

Jace concentrated, and spread his consciousness out to the rest of the subterranean family. The minds of the son and the two daughters wavered at the edge of despondency, having spent too many weeks without a view of the sun.

Jace hesitated. He was trying to stay disconnected, not to bind himself up with even more people struggling though their lives. But he felt for this woman and her family, and how the children might be able to make it through their plight if they could understand their mother’s force of resolve. He thought back to when he fought Ruric Thar, how he channeled all the minds of the Gruul warriors at once, how he let the communion of their thoughts flow through him. He reached out to all of the family’s minds at one time.

With concentration, he could do it—but it didn’t accomplish anything. He could feel all of their thoughts together, but they couldn’t hear each other. The communication was one way, from them to Jace only. Perhaps if he could get himself out of the way, let their minds flow into one another’s without him in the way. Perhaps if he could become a kind of bridge, and put them in contact with each other directly—

Jace grabbed his head and cried out. It felt as if his mind was coming apart, disintegrating from the inside out, coming unraveled. Concentrating on multiple minds at once was arduous enough, but letting the family’s thoughts channel through him and into each other’s minds shredded his faculties and caused him outright pain. It was worse even than the feeling of planeswalking; it was as if that form of mind magic was shredding his very soul. He snapped back his senses, disconnecting himself from the family and the family from each other, and after a few long heartbeats, the pain subsided.