Teferi Reference - Phasing out of Zhalfir

Then, it was done. Neither blinding fire nor black portal shone in the sky. Neither Phyrexian fleet nor phoenix flocks circled there. The sorcerers of the Zhalfir Mage Corps stood on the plain, eyes lifted heavenward and hands applauding. It was as though they had just watched a fireworks show.

"What happened?" Barrin wondered aloud.

"Come," said Teferi simply, appearing out of nowhere to grasp Barrin's arm and drag him away in a spontaneous planeswalk.

The world folded around Barrin, spinning into chaos. As quickly as Zhalfir had flashed away, it returned, though now a mile below. Barrin floated in blue skies beside Urza Planeswalker and Teferi of Zhalfir.

"Very impressive," Barrin rasped. "Very, very impressive."

"Where did you put the energy?" Urza asked suspiciously.

Teferi shrugged. "I put it away for another spell."

***

"Oh, I do not do it single-handed. I've had the aid of thousands and the consent of millions. You yourself helped me harness the final measure of power to complete the spell. It is triggering even now below us."

Below, Zhalfir shuddered. Something passed over it- not over it, but through it. The same energies that had boiled through the doomed portal now shot through the land. Every rill was lined in scarlet ribbons of energy. Every field was sketched in shimmering white. The shorelines flashed waves of blue fire, and the veins of every woodland leaf glowed green. Then all was subsumed in a great colorless grid, as though the land and the plants, the animals and the people, were being caught in a vast blueprint.

"If spells can make ideas into reality, they can make reality into ideas," Teferi said quietly.

The transformation picked out every mote of Zhalfir. Lines fused. Grids merged. For one dazzling moment, all the colors combined into a blinding radiance. With a flash, Zhalfir was gone. Where it had been, only a red afterimage remained in Barrin's eyes. Then came a boom like a hundred thousand thunderbolts in synchrony.

Barrin blinked, struggling to see. Winds tore past him, but Teferi's magic held him in place. The red glow where Zhalfir had been faded to black-a black wound the size of the great land mass. It was bedrock. Teferi had taken the whole peninsula, a mile of air above it, and a mile of rock beneath.

The ocean stood for a moment in astonished walls all around. Then its green rim turned white. Water cascaded into the deep gash. The belly of the ocean slumped. The first gush smashed to bedrock and churned eagerly out across dry stone. The head of the flood was overtopped by new waves, which crowded the shoulders of the slumping water and poured into the cauldron.

Urza gazed in silent consternation at the churning sea.

Barrin gaped. "What did you do?"

"I saved my people. They dwell now in immutable ideas," explained Teferi.

***

Invasion, Chapter 9