The Spark

Freyalise’s image seemed lost in reverie for a moment, then she said, “After careful thought, I decided that the most fitting punishment would be to grant you the very power that you so condemned— to let you become a planeswalker.”

Jodah tried to turn back for the entranceway but found he was caught in Freyalise’s spell. He cursed. He would die while he was being lectured by a planeswalker’s phantasm! He could already feel the thunder of the last beat of his heart press against his chest with dull agony.

“Actually,” Freyalise smiled, pulling her chin down and looking all coy, “I got the idea seeing how you treated that Gerda woman. You punished her by giving her what she wanted but with enough restrictions to make her hate it. So, too, I’m giving you this gift, with the knowledge that you got it from me, and I expect you to learn how difficult it is to handle true power.”

Jodah tried not to think of the irony involved in this and was sure that this was exactly what Freyalise would want of him.

The Freyalise image raised her hand and opened her palm upward. Within it was a ball of coruscating colors, a rainbow sphere, which moved from one shade to the next effortlessly though each hue was pure and undiluted. It hurt him to look at the shimmering colors, and Jodah knew that these were true shades of the universe. These were the colors of magic.

“The spark,” said Freyalise. “The secret bit that makes planeswalkers what they are. A bit of my own power, a small percentage of my own infinity that I now present to you as a gift, in the hopes that it will spark your own transcendence into the state that I now hold.”

The brightly changing purity hurt Jodah’s eyes, and its radiance seemed to boil away the surface of his flesh. He tried to turn away and found he could not.

“Now presented, it will not go away,” said the image. “It will only grow until it consumes you. Embrace it now and find out what true power is. When I was changing the world, I could feel an unfanned spark nearby. Now I want to bring you over into my world.”

Freyalise smiled one last time. “I do this out of love and hate. You may thank me and curse me later.”

Then the image was gone.

The ball of pure color remained, so intense that the other furnishings in the room started to smoke and blacken, whiten, and redden, turning into pure colors as well under its baleful radiance.

***

The Shattered Alliance, Chapter 15