Mind Reading 2

The dragon, however, did. He had one chance: He would have to look into the dragon’s mind before the gate closed, if he dared.

He dared.

Jace gathered his mana and fired his mind magic like an arrow. The spell sailed invisibly through the air to Niv-Mizzet and punched into the dragon’s mind. Jace knew he wouldn’t have time to root around through the lore that undoubtedly filled the ancient dragon’s memories, so he focused on one task: finding what Niv-Mizzet knew about the maze.

It was like falling into an inferno. Incomprehensible thoughts blazed past him. Wild theories, impossible experiments, and mad diatribes roiled like a storm around him, all set against the backdrop of thousands of years’ worth of memories. Niv-Mizzet had no surface thoughts. It was as if he had whirlwinds of competing ideas at all times, storm fronts of the mind crashing into each other, yet somehow all converging into coherent thoughts.

But as Jace’s spell took him through the dragon’s mind, he was able to recognize a pattern, like a single crackle of lightning that branched throughout the chaos. It was the dragon’s obsession with his project. In his mind, he called it the Implicit Maze, a puzzle carved into the face of Ravnica itself, a mystery he believed led to untold power.

Jace was consumed with the dragon’s fervor for the Implicit Maze. A thousand possible solutions churned through Niv-Mizzet’s mind. Endless routes sizzled and broke apart across his mental landscape. But Jace knew, as the dragon knew, that none of them were quite right.

And then Jace saw what he hoped to see. The dragon knew the prize behind the Implicit Maze. Jace saw it too, and realized the power of it. And then he understood why Niv-Mizzet had set his entire guild to the cause of solving it.

As the Izzet gate closed and Jace’s contact with the dragon dissipated, Jace sensed that his intrusion had been noticed.

***

Return to Ravnica: The Secretist Part 1, Chapter 1