Dragon's Maze

He stood there with his hands on his knees, alone at the cusp of the devastated valley, heaving breaths. His entire body throbbed, as if every part of him had tried to flee in a different direction all at once. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he felt he had touched something new in himself, and it almost killed him. He had attempted mind magic that was clearly beyond him, or perhaps it was inherently deadly, unable to be mastered. He never wanted to attempt that again.

Still, for a moment he had been that bridge. He had used his own mind as a conduit to let those people reach out to each other, and for a moment, the mother’s defiance flowed into her children in a way she had never been able to express, and their aching admiration of her flowed back. Jace had removed himself from the exchange almost entirely, but it somehow still made him feel intimately close to them.

Jace forced himself to turn his back on the valley. He stalked back upriver, thinking of the black void he had seen inside the mind of Calomir, or the creature that had his face. The Dimir shapeshifter’s mind had been unreachable, the perfect haven for secrets, the perfect foil for Jace’s magic. As Jace walked up the hill he also walked away from this world, his physical form inverting on itself and fading from Zendikar. His path of footprints in the riverbank came to an abrupt end.

THE PARUN’S PROXY

Jace materialized with his feet on worn stone, a quiet arrival. The spires and skywalks of Ravnica’s Tenth District soared above him, and pedestrians flowed around him. No one noticed his sudden appearance. The morning sun rose over a wide stone courtyard before him, an unusually open space in the middle of the district. Nine ancient obelisks surrounded the courtyard, each one marked with one of the guild signets—all but Dimir, which had once been an unacknowledged guild. At the base of each guild pillar was a kiosk where guild representatives handed out information about the guilds, and at the center of the courtyard, floating a few feet off the ground, was a massive stone dais. This place was the Forum of Azor, named after the founder of the Azorius guild, and Jace knew it was the endpoint of the maze, the finish line of the race that would soon be run.

Jace sensed the power contained here as a feeling of expectation, like waiting for a glacier to crack in the warmth of spring. The forum was the prize at the end of the labyrinth, an explosion of ancient power frozen in architecture and hidden in plain sight. The recruiters and guild hopefuls who lingered here didn’t seem to feel the power of the place. They treated it like any other public square in the Tenth, but the significance and concentrated mana of forum made the hairs on Jace’s neck stand on end. This was the center of all the lore that Jace had studied, forgotten, and relearned again, and this was the site of the ultimate prize that all the guilds sought. This was the place Jace had to understand, deeply and entirely, in order to make Emmara win.

For Emmara was the obvious choice. If any of the guilds had to take possession of the power embedded in this ancient place, the safest, least corruptible choice would be the Selesnya, the guild of life and unity. And if any of the Selesnya had to represent that winning guild, then Emmara should be the one to accept the prize. He knew she would do the right thing with the power contained here. He knew her victory was his purpose. All Jace had to do was give her all the advantages he could in the race to come. She would prevail, and perhaps the guilds wouldn’t resort to destroying each other.

Jace walked into the courtyard and beheld the floating monolith of rock that formed the dais. A staircase had been built to approach the dais, a blocky spiral around the rough slab of rock, so that the dais could be used for speeches or announcements. Jace climbed the staircase and stood on the dais. Prickling sensations spidered over his skin. The dais was like a bell that rang so low it couldn’t be heard, only felt. Jace reached his senses inside the monolith, trying to understand the source of the power. He needed to know what he would be handing to the Selesnya, to Emmara.

Jace couldn’t see into the interior of the floating slab of rock, but he sensed patterns within it—thoughtlike patterns. Mana flowed throughout the stone. Jace projected his mind into the space inside the rock and sensed a presence, a consciousness. The monolith was inhabited somehow. As Jace reached his senses into it, he perceived the shape of a human man in his mind’s eye. He wore layered robes in the Azorius style, like a guildmage or judge, but his skin was composed of coursing streaks of light. This man who somehow dwelled within the stone at the Forum of Azor had no eyes, as Jace perceived him. In place of eyes there were only empty holes in his face, and Jace had the sense that he could see through the empty eyeholes into the man’s hollow interior.