Torbern Iceclaw trudged his way through the damp muck, sinking at least to his thighs in the deeper parts of the bog. The canopy of the forest seemed to choke the sunlight from the air, reaching out to intertwine like greasy fingers from trees with bark so black they seemed to drink in light. He didn’t mind the darkness, as sight was only ever a secondary sense to a werebear. What he minded, was the smell.

    Torbern searched his mind for the appropriate words, and came up short. This had almost never happened to him considering the werebear prided himself on being a student of language. If he’d had to hazard a guess, though, Torbern would have said that the smell of the swamp was somewhere between last month’s rotten eggs, and the socks of a soldier after four days of forced marching through horse shit while suffering from a fungal infection. It was enough to almost choke the breath from his lungs.

    The werebear had trekked through swamps and bogs before, but this was something different. In his efforts to research the properties of the Aether, he had been tracking down leylines in order to further investigate how aetheric energy becomes mana. It had taken him quite some time to locate a plane that seemed almost untouched. The planes of the multiverse were limitless, stretching out into infinity. However, natural leylines of magic energy drew attention. Whether it be magic users of the native plane, other planeswalkers, or just the various beings of chaos that wander the Blind Eternities, leylines were always a source of contested interest. Finding an untouched leyline had been a stroke of luck and the fruits of a long time searching. Not to mention there was no guarantee how long this line would remain undiscovered.

    Torbern followed the flow of magic, determined to reach the source. He wanted to see for himself the point where the Aetheric energy of the Blind Eternities broke through into reality and spilled forth into the Plane as mana. This particular leyline was black, and the swamp was positively saturated with it. Torbern could feel the raw magical potential of the swamp as he moved through it. He could smell the mana in the air; black mana always seemed to smell of peat, swamp gas, blood, and rot. The entire swamp smelled like death.

    The hulking werebear shook his head, steeling his nerves. He was a Planeswalker, and prided himself on keeping a cool head. He could smell the denizens of the murk giving him a wide berth. Most animals are instinctive enough to know that picking a fight with a bear usually does not end well. Torbern trudged onward through the muck, thinking fondly of the insight he might gain at the leyline’s source, and of his next bath. The fur on his neck bristled at every shadow that seemed to move, or every distant splash of water. Everything about the swamp seemed oppressive.

****

    Grandma Swamp sat on a stump, looking around. Yes, this was perfect. So much raw, untapped mana waiting just for her. The best thing about it was, it was completely untouched. A raw, virgin oasis of black mana that was just rife for the taking. Oh yes, she would weave such malice with the inky magic of the swamp. She inhaled deeply, savoring the taste of the marsh gases. Everything was just the way she liked it. Foul, putrid, disgusting. Delicious.

    Something akin to a smile crossed Granny Swamp’s face. She closed her milky eyes and listened to the sounds of the swamp. Dead silence, music to her ears. She was utterly alone, and she could not have been happier. There wasn’t a single living thing for miles around, as she had made sure of it. From the birds in the canopy, to the snakes in the water, down to the smallest bug. She had shaped the ample amount of mana in the air into a poisonous miasma that permeated every nook and cranny to smother the life force of anything that dared breathe while Granny Swamp was around.

	Her wandering through the planes had been rewarded when she had found a leyline out in a far corner of the multiverse. A leyline! She would have been fine with a large swamp that was realities away from the nearest soul, but a leyline on top of it! Granny Swamp felt an elation well in her chest that was normally reserved for when she was cackling maniacally while her shadow imps took turns carving prayers to Rakdos on some helpless victim’s flesh with razor hooks.

	Her mind wandered back to her days in the Cult. They had certainly been fun, she held no regrets toward her years spent in the Carnarium. However, Granny Swamp had grown to enjoy her solitude. The noise of the Carnarium and general chaos of the Cult made her brain itch and her ears hurt. No, it wasn’t for Granny anymore.

    A shadow stirred near her, a shadow somehow even blacker than the ambient swamp. She snapped her head towards it so fast that it seemed that she was just suddenly staring at the shadow without moving at all. Her milky eyes were wide and demanding. She spoke no words, because she didn’t need any. Her gaze did her talking for her.

    The shadow imp seemed to shy away from her gaze. “Sorry to disturb you, Granny. But there is something you should know.” it said, its voice hisses and whispers in the corner of the mind. Granny narrowed her eyes. She was rueful that her moment was interrupted. How dare her familiars intrude on the only happy moment in recent memory that didn’t involve having to kill someone. Not that she didn’t wholeheartedly love a good murder, but it was always so messy. And loud. It always involved screaming. Why did they scream so much? Who were they screaming for? She already knew they were in pain, mostly because she was the one that was usually causing it. Granny had long since taken to gagging her victims. It prevented the headaches from listening to too much screaming.

    After a long silence and a glare that caused the shadow imp to reconsider his lot in life, Granny said “Show me.” The imp obliged and through the telepathic link Granny shared with her familiars, her mind ventured out into the swamp. It wasn’t long before she saw the problem.

    A bear walking on two legs. How absurd. Blegh, she thought. White fur. Too white. Stained with inky black thanks to the swamp water. Yes, that was better. The black. But the white. It was too bright for a swamp. What did he want, the white bear on two legs? Granny peered further, then her milky eyes went wide.
The leyline! He was following the leyline! No! This could not be! This SHALL not be!

	Granny Swamp narrowed her eyes, and ventured her senses further. The bear glowed with green and blue energy as he trudged along. Another Planeswalker. Damn it! A Planeswalker had found her leyline. Every bit of joy and elation flew from Granny swamp like a disturbed bunch of flies. Kill him. Yes, kill him. Get rid of him, and the leyline would be hers. She called her familiars back to her, and set to work gathering mana. She couldn’t say she had ever felt remorse or sorrow, but she did know that she wouldn’t have wanted to be the strange white bear on two legs after her ritual was done.

****

    Torbern had lost track of how long he had been walking through the swamp. Sunlight had long since given up on trying to break through the slimy canopy that locked the underbrush in a permanent twilight. The werebear’s breath came heavier as the bog slowly wore down his stamina. It had quickly become as if he was fighting the very swamp itself for progress on his quest, and Torbern had taken it as a sign that he had gotten close.

    Shadows do not cast a smell, and even a creature with good sight would have had an impossible time trying to discern the creeping tendrils that slithered under the bog’s surface. The barest ripple was the only warning Torbern had gotten before the tendril wrapped around his ankle, and wrenched sideways. The werebear felt himself thrown off balance, and he fell into the mire.

    The world of sounds and smells was replaced with the brackish bog water that filled Torbern’s nose, ears, mouth, and eyes. It felt like roots, but they coiled around him like a snake. They dragged him down to the floor of the bog, and weaved themselves over him like a net. Torbern brought his bruin strength to bear, but he could not overpower the mesh now pinning him under water, threatening to drown him in the muck and filth.

    Torbern thrashed, and felt his strength leaving him. He reached out to the mana in the roots, trying to coax them into obeying. Torbern expected to find some green in the plant life, but what he saw was pure black. To his planeswalker senses, the mana shone like black fire and rebuked his efforts to control it. His mind sensed around for any green mana, but found nothing but an oily black flame. There was no outside mana to call on, nothing to help.

    Torbern’s mind swam as his lungs screamed for air. Time seemed to slow down, but perhaps that’s what dying felt like. Green mana was supposed to be in the trees, blue in the water. There was an abundance of trees and water, but here there was nothing but black all around him. He floated in a void that encroached from all sides, the darkness waiting to swallow him into the murky abyss.

    His life played out before his eyes like a reel watched through smoky haze. The ancient planeswalker didn’t have an immortal consciousness anymore, so most of his memories had faded into the fog of ages. Names half-forgotten and places half-remembered danced before his eyes as his spark faded, smothered by the magic of the leyline and Grandma Swamp.

    Snow white filled his vision. Was this death? He felt the cold seize his heart. Memories of the Dominarian Ice Age came to him unbidden. He knew the snow, he knew the cold. It was as familiar to him as any home he’d ever known. Like a frog seizing a passing fly, Torbern latched onto this memory. He didn’t let it swim away like the others. He gripped it with all of his willpower, letting it fill him. He almost felt the snow crunch under his pawpads.

    A blue flame ignited in the midst of the black, pushing back the darkness as the memory surged through him. Torbern felt blue mana flow like a rushing river to fill his body as the memories burned into mana within his mind.

    With an effort of will, the blue mana coalesced underneath him, and burst. A wave of force propelled Torbern upward. Six hundred pounds of ursine muscle suddenly gained the upward momentum of a cannonball. Torbern felt his limbs wrench backward, and for a moment, he felt as if he might be ripped in half as the tendrils held him. Less than a second later, the tendrils seemed to snap like twigs and Torbern crashed through a nearby tree. He caused a wave of swamp water to ripple outward and he stood up out of the mire, gasping for breath.

****

    Granny Swamp seethed with fury. Why didn’t the white bear on two legs have the decency to drown? He was supposed to DROWN. Curses. Yes. Curses. She moved with a slithery gait that can only be described as a slink over so she could see where the bear had landed. She saw him gasping for breath, expelling swamp water from his lungs in hacking coughs. Oh good, she thought, the bog was doing its work to choke him. All he needed was a little more push…

    Granny Swamp moved her arms in complicated patterns, weaving the magic of the swamp into another spell before letting the mana slither off into the water like a snake. A gleeful expression crossed her face once more before she raised a hand up. Behind the white bear on two legs, a shadowy hand made of black mana rose out of the water.

    “Die. DIE. DIE!” cackled Granny Swamp. She always enjoyed a good cackle. The Cult was a firm believer that if you didn’t cackle, you weren’t doing it right. ‘It’ of course being anything and everything the Cult generally enjoyed doing. Rakdos Cultists never trusted anyone who didn’t find joy in a well-executed cackle. The white bear on two legs looked over at her cackling, just in time for the shadowy hand to pounce on it, driving it back under the water.

    Granny Swamp watched the bubbles and ripples as the white bear continued to fight. There was no fighting the swamp. The swamp would claim him, and she would finally have it all to herself. She could finally be alone.

    A flash of blue interrupted Granny Swamp’s musings, and she shrieked madly as she felt her spell unweave itself and dissipate back into the swamp as harmless mana. “No, no, NO, NO!” she shouted irritatedly. Blue mages, she thought, always a bloody headache. She saw another flash of blue, and suddenly the bear was standing on ice. He’d frozen the swamp water.

****

    Torbern’s breath came in deep, heavy gulps of air as he steadied himself after being dragged under the water for the second time. He had sent his mana to freeze the water. You could slip on ice, but you couldn’t be dragged under it and drowned. He didn’t feel any red mana, so he didn’t think any danger for it being melted under his feet. Maybe he could catch his breath now.

    He sniffed the air, and smelled something amiss. A smell that hung heavier than the swamps, brimming with mana. He focused his nose and his eyes onto the black-robed figure of Granny Swamp. He held up a paw. “Please...” he said between gasps. “I do not want to fight...”

    Granny paced back and forth, hardly acknowledging the bear. “Ruined… ruined ruined ruined...” she repeated in a mad sort of mantra. “You ruined it!” she said accusingly. Torbern took a step back. “I don’t know what you m-”

    Before Torbern could finish his sentence, he saw the flare of mana, and then the air filled with a poisonous, choking mist. He retreated to the edge of his frozen patch, conjuring up a wind to clear him a space to breathe.

    Granny Swamp advanced, seething with hatred and weaving more mana and more spells. Firing one after the other at the white-haired bear on two legs, she didn’t let him relent. This wretched creature that knew of her perfect swamp, he would bring others. Her solitude would be ruined, RUINED! Yes, the others would come and drive her off. No, he had to die. Dead lips do not spill secrets.

    Torbern was hard-pressed against the volley of black spells that whistled toward him. He burned through every kind of counter magic he knew, knowing that if one of the spells got through, it would mean the end of him. He dispelled the shadows she sent to bind him, he countered the volley of spells meant to eat at his mind and resolve. He had to leap to the side to narrowly avoid the spell aimed at his chest to stop his heart.

    His mana burned low, the memories of snow could only sustain him for so long, and he was hemorrhaging his energy just to avoid dying. Meanwhile, Granny Swamp only seemed to grow stronger. In this vast swamp, on top of the black leyline, and with mana saturating the air, Granny swelled with power and her spells only grew more deadly. Torbern had to push his luck for every spell Granny threw at him, but he knew that Granny only had to be lucky once.

    Knowing that his demise would come if he stayed, Torbern found a brief moment when Grandma Swamp paused to charge a powerful spell. With a heavy heart, he concentrated his energy, and Planeswalked far away.

    Granny Swamp unleashed her devastating spell, draining the life out of everything around her. It tasted delicious, but she knew she did not manage to destroy the white bear on two legs. She screamed in a frustrated rage, exploding with black energy and causing a shockwave to turn into an actual wave of swamp water around her.

    He had gotten away. The white bear on two legs had run. She couldn’t chase him through the multiverse, but this leyline was compromised. The white bear knew of it, and who knows how many others he would tell. Would he be back? Would be bring help to drive her off? How strong was his conviction to gain control of the leyline? Sure, Granny could fight back, but she had no desire to. She wanted a quiet place alone, not a bastion she had to defend. She turned and started walking away. No, this swamp wasn’t to be her home. She would find another, but it would take more wandering. With one last, solemn look over the leyline-infused swamp, she Planeswalked away.
“What a waste...”

****

    Torbern Iceclaw landed in the snow, breathing heavily. He’d retreated to a snowscape he knew to be mostly barren, and the glaciers underneath the snow would provide enough blue mana for him to go toe to toe with the witch if she followed him. He was no match for her in the swamp, but here she wouldn’t have near as much mana to sling at him.

    He quickly got to his feet, and readied himself. Only after a long silence where no one followed, did Torbern sink to his knees. He needed rest, he needed food. Mostly, he needed a warm drink and some sleep. He shook his head, gritting his fangs as he thought of the black leyline he wouldn’t get to study. He couldn’t take the witch in her own domain, and he didn’t know what it would take to drive her away. How hard would she fight to keep her swamp? He had no way of knowing.

    He took a deep breath, and resolved to continue his search for an uncontested leyline after he regained his strength. Heaving a sigh, and thinking about the waste of time the swamp had been, Torbern Planeswalked away.
“What a waste...”