reprise

The death and destruction are nothing to you now. Not with a mind’s eye that reaches out to other worlds. You’ll be seeing another iteration of this battle in your dreams. One starring the version of you that belongs here instead. You’ll witness the deaths of Domri Rade and Dack Fayden all over again. You’ll fight like you have everything to lose. Knowing you, you’ll come out impaled again.

But you won’t be in any shape to help clean up, there. No, that task falls to you, here. The Sage of Shadow, guardian of nightfall, caller of Horrorterrors and seer of secrets and untruths. Everything your sister wishes she could be. Hah.

As you watch members of the Gatewatch depart to bury the chestpiece of Gideon Jura, you stare around the battlefield. That hurts. That hurts a lot, and you’ll have to watch it again.

You hear the whispers of your patrons in your mind.

They tell you the names of the fallen. To the last. The civilians, the planeswalkers, even the eternals.

They aren’t malevolent, your patrons. Simply inscrutable to most people. You know their true motives and it puts you at ease with your twin’s fascination. It seems even they bid you to help, now.

It isn’t hard to channel the magic of song from your other self. A simple Darastrian trick, to hear your dreams tell it. You tap a drumbeat with your foot as you begin to pull aside rubble and debris. It brings your fellows to attention, and they follow along. It’s a reprise of a trick that other you pulled, to trigger unrest in a prison once. Same song.

You know that song well.

She didn’t know it, but that song was an echo across the multiverse. Your multiverse. It must have wormed its way into her head through a dream she couldn’t properly interpret, you wager. Come from another version of you, in another time, who also fought in an Old War a long long time ago. An anthem of rebels and a hymn of unity.

Chandra recognizes it. Your Chandra, not the Gatewatch member. Of course she would, she comes from that world. She comes from the place that song echos from.

After you whistle, she begins the verse.

When that happens, it’s only natural that the others follow. Then, soon, others who don’t know what they’re hearing. Just like before.

They need the solidarity now.