Planeswalking 2

“I’m ready,” he confirmed, “but I’ve never been there before.”

She nodded. “I’ll leave you a trail through the æther if I can.”

Jace took a deep breath. “Then let’s go.” She turned without another word and left to find her own solitude, leaving him to his concentrations.

He never knew how it looked to any other walker, how it felt, how it rippled through mind, body, soul, rigid past, uncertain future. He knew only that his own experience was as unique to him as the deepest meanings of his forgotten dreams.

To Jace, it began as a moment of sheer exhaustion, so overwhelming as to make death as welcome as sleep. His vision blacked out, his body trembled, wracked with vertigo as his conscious and subconscious minds merged, losing himself among a parade of personalities. He struggled to channel mana from across the Multiverse, compressing it into a point of singularity beyond perception, a tiny mote of metaphysical tinder.

And then in a single moment of exultation far greater than any physical pleasure, Jace Beleren was once more Jace Beleren; and Jace Beleren was once more a planes-walker. His Spark burned within his soul, and ignited the mana-tinder he had gathered.

The world erupted in an invisible flame, melting away before him until all that remained was a shimmering curtain of glowing smoke. With a single hand, he brushed the curtain aside, took a step, into elsewhere.

Jace Beleren was adrift in the Blind Eternities. The tides of creation washed over him, and he did not fall. He leaned without apprehension into the winds that blew from nothingness, spreading tiny particles of probability in their wake. He trod upon the surface of memory, climbed the slopes of tomorrows that had already passed. Toxic colors circled hungrily about him, winging their way through clouds of song, but they did not disturb his trek. Before his arrival and after his passing, they knew nothing but hue and hunger, wind and want—but for the endless moments he trod beneath them, they knew fear.

Jace’s eyes flickered every which way, so far as “way” had any meaning here. He sensed the shifts in terrain, and stepped across them carefully lest he fall into the roiling chaos that bubbled away beneath reality. Obstacles appeared before him—objects and animals and ideas—and he moved around them or slapped them down before they could warp his body or infiltrate his mind and consume his thoughts.

But always he kept a portion of his attention cast forward and downward. Ahead he saw a flickering road, a ribbon of fire that stretched into the distance. At its end was a burning husk, a dead tree that crackled and flamed but was never consumed, and he knew it was the Spark of the woman he followed. He wondered, briefly, what his own looked like to her, then swiftly gave up conscious thought and simply followed.

For a time he could not possibly measure, he walked in her path. It was a tenuous lifeline he followed, the burning line of footsteps she left behind, footprints that wavered and shifted and—a time or two—even rose and floated away. Tenuous, but it would suffice.

And finally he stood before a curtain of smoke, much as the one through which he’d stepped away from Ravnica, though the glow here tended more toward silver. Stretching forth his hand, Jace parted the curtain, and took one final step. He collapsed to his hands and knees, gasping, and found himself crouched in several inches of standing water, sinking slightly into the muddy bottom.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 13