Nissa - Sort of Astral Projection

Nissa reopened herself to the surge of Kaladesh.

Aether lifted her over streets splashed with throbbing color. Throngs jostled and skipped along bridges and through squares pulsing with music and laughter, shimmering with joy. Sparks leapt into the sky above the river, trailing streamers of hissing glitter. They crackled and burst, blooming into flowers of red and yellow flame. The crowds along the water's edge gasped and cheered.

Down in the shadows, between glittering towers, the aether moved strangely.

An eddy formed, sinking and coiling into an alley away from the revelry. She let herself dance downward around it and poured her awareness into the weeds pressing earnestly through cracked cobbles. They surged into a carpet of night-flowers.

Wisps of aether streamed in from distant reaches of the city, far shores of the sky, and the blinding immensity that lay beyond Kaladesh. The energies blended, compacted, then puffed outward in a luminous cloud of blues—mid-morning sky, lagoon water, mountain root, sea ice, infant's eye. An exhalation of the world, a new young star throbbing quick, fierce, and steady.

The edges of the cloud darkened, solidified.

The crackling static within it quieted to a sizzle.

The aetherborn looked at their hands, then at Nissa's flowers.

Hello, child. Welcome to the world. She had no idea if vibrations of root and leaf could be understood by the newborn.

They held their new hands over a bloom, as if it were a candle's flame. From the sizzle of energy, patterns emerged, spontaneous and oddly familiar. Y-you. You? Are scented. You smell as if— smell like...neroli. They paused, flickers of lightning-thought shivering through their limbs. What's neroli?

Vertiginous déjà vu washed over Nissa. You have a wonderful adventure ahead of you, she told them.

***

RENEWAL