Stone and Blood - Reunion

Nahiri cast herself through the chaos of the Blind Eternities, the space between worlds. She'd slept for too long, in a cocoon of stone. Allowed certain things to drift beyond her awareness. She'd already corrected the most egregious case of neglect, reinforcing the wards that kept her prisoners secure and consigning their servants to oblivion. Her own world was safe, at least for the moment.

Now it was time to call on an old friend, and restore something less tangible.

It did not take long before Nahiri sensed his presence and aimed for it, warping the world around her until she could stand beside him. Their friendship was ancient now, a faded relic, but Sorin Markov had been her first ally, and Nahiri would know him anywhere.

She stood, then, on a high bluff overlooking a dark and choppy sea. She had never been here, but nothing about it surprised her. Innistrad and Sorin had shaped each other, and the world seemed to suit him—brooding and dangerous, almost purposefully unwelcome. And the moon—there was something odd about the moon that rose above the water, something that tugged at her senses.

Sorin had never brought her here, but he had spoken of it in wistful tones. Had hoped, she knew, to call upon her to defend it—as she had hoped to call upon him to defend Zendikar. Neither had gotten what they wanted, in the end.

Sorin was not here.

On the highest part of the bluff, where she had sensed his presence, stood instead a massive, rough-hewn chunk of silver, forty feet tall at least. It had faces, but they were irregular and uneven, as though an amateur lithomancer had pulled it out of the ground and not yet bothered to smooth it out to a finish.

But it was finished—unquestionably, to her senses, obviously the end result of tremendous effort rather than a work in progress. It was not polished because the polish did not matter to whatever it was this thing was supposed to be. Or do.

And this—this thing—was what she had sensed. Not Sorin. The Thing had spoken to her, through the tenuous medium of the Blind Eternities, of him.

There was nothing on the bluff but the wind and the silver monolith, save a stunted tree with red leaves. She left the tree to its business and circled the tremendous chunk of silver.

Sides. It had eight of them, or perhaps seven, depending on how generous one felt as to the nature of an edge. But faces they were, deliberately shaped, almost like...But there were no hedrons on Innistrad, and Sorin had neither means nor cause to make them.

And like a hedron, the Thing was more than its physical substance. She tested it with her lithomancy, taking a sounding of the pure metal and trying to get a sense of its inner structure.

Nothing. Nothing at all. She could sense the grain of the bedrock half a mile below her feet, feel the slow and steady heartbeat of continental plates dancing their slow, inexorable waltz. But she couldn't see into this sliver of silver. Couldn't so much as scratch it. Her power vanished into it, like an infinite well. Almost like...but no. No again. It was not a hedron. Not here.

She bent and peered beneath the Thing, half expecting to see that it was floating above the ground. But it was rooted at the bottom, by a comparatively thin stem of silver not much wider than Nahiri herself.

She stood and continued her slow circle of the Thing, trailing her fingertips along it in lieu of the deeper investigation she could not seem to make. She didn't know how much time she spent examining the silver monolith, but the moon was higher in the sky when a familiar voice spoke from behind her.

"You'll have to forgive my rudimentary attempt at shaping stone, young one."

She spun. Sorin!

White hair, black coat, those strange orange eyes. How terrible his aspect, how dire his gaze—and yet she could not keep herself from grinning.

"My friend!" she managed to say at last. "You're alive!"

He smiled back at her, walked toward her, and put his hand on her shoulder. From him, it qualified as elation.

"And why would I be otherwise?"

She reached up to cover his hand with hers. She was awake now, her body suffused with the warmth of life. His fingers were as cold and dead as ever.

"You never came," she said. "On Zendikar, when I activated the signal from the Eye of Ugin, you never responded. I feared that—"

Sorin withdrew his hand, frowning.

"The Eldrazi have broken free of their bonds?"

"They did, yes."

"Where is Ugin?" he asked.

"He didn't come either," she said, trying not to let bitterness reach her voice. "But I handled it. On my own. With all the strength I could muster, I managed to reseal the titans' prison."

It struck her, suddenly, that she was now far older than Sorin had been when they had met. In her memory he towered over her, her ancient mentor, a thousand years her senior. Now, what difference did a thousand years make? They were equals. At least.

"When the task was done, I came to find you. I had to know if you still lived. And here you are."

Here you are. Her joy at seeing him faded. She had been worried, so worried—that something had happened to him, or that he, like her, had sunk into a millennia-long malaise. She had come here to find him, to save him—but he was not, evidently, in need of saving.

"So, where were you?" she asked. "Sorin, why didn't you respond to the signal?"

"It never reached me," he said.

"How is that possible?"

"Hmm," he said. Just Hmmm, with little interest and no urgency whatsoever.

He reached past her and pressed a hand against the surface of the Thing.

"You have dedicated yourself to watch over the imprisoned Eldrazi, and it became clear to me that my plane was in dire need of its own protection, particularly in my absence. This Helvault is half of what I created to serve as such a protection."


Helvault. She shuddered. It was a vault. What could such a thing be meant to store?

"It's not inconceivable," he continued, sounding bored, "that your signal from the Eye was unable to break through the magic that protects this plane."

Sorin's own spellcraft had kept her from contacting him? She felt a sudden sense of vertigo, and picked her next words with care.

"Did you know at the time that that would happen?"

"It did not occur to me," he said. "Though I see now that it was a possibility."

Stone and sky!

Early in their association, before she understood what he was, and what she had now become, he had asked her if she wanted to learn to fight like him. She'd said yes—and then he'd tried to kill her.

Or so it had seemed to her at the time. She realized, not much later, that he'd been holding back, attacking her physically when he could have snuffed her with a thought. She held her ground, briefly, until his heavy two-handed sword had caught her upper arm in a glancing blow with a sickening crack, and pain overwhelmed her senses.

Well done, he said, standing over her. You lasted almost six breaths. Yours, of course. Now get up.

Get up? she cried. You broke my arm!

So fix it, he said. He wasn't even looking at her.

Fix it? Fix it? How in the hells—

Only then had he finally explained to her that she was no longer mortal. That her body was a convenience, a projection of her will.

You should have told me that to begin with, she said, holding back tears of anger.

Ah, he said, in that bored but benevolent voice. It did not occur to me.

He was using that voice now, talking down to her. But the girl he had mentored was long dead, buried in a tomb of stone. Only a Planeswalker remained. And a Planeswalker would not be condescended to.

"A possibility? You risked my plane, and more." She could not quite keep the hurt from her voice. "You abandoned me."

Sorin waved a pallid, dismissive hand.

"I was simply taking the appropriate precautions to protect my plane. I hardly think—"

Oh, enough. More than enough.

"We had an agreement, you and I," she said.

He could not deny that. Five thousand years previous, Nahiri had agreed, reluctantly, to trap the Eldrazi on her own world of Zendikar. And for their part, the other two Planeswalkers who had helped her had given her a way to contact them if the Eldrazi ever threatened to break free.

For five thousand years, Nahiri stood watch over their monstrous prisoners. She had locked herself away in stone, watched decades and centuries drift past like clouds over the sun. Then the Eldrazi had tested the bonds of their prison and loosed their hideous spawn upon a world already changed by their presence, in ways she did not fully understand. Nahiri had awoken, broken free of her self-imposed isolation, and sounded the alarm.

No one had come. Not the dragon Ugin, whom she had never fully trusted, whose motives and origins were enigmas. And not Sorin—her mentor. Her friend.

She had dealt with the crisis on her own, at great cost to her world, far more than it would have cost had her allies honored their agreement. She still hadn't surveyed the full extent of the damage the Eldrazi had done to her world and its people before she had quelled their efforts. But she had done it, and when it was done she had gone to look for him, fearing for his existence.

And found that he had done worse than ignore her cry for help. He had blocked it out, to protect his own world from outside influence.

He turned his back to her.

"Don't dismiss this," she said. "I was willing to jeopardize my home by luring the Eldrazi to it. I promised to chain myself to Zendikar to watch over them as their warden. I spent millennia with those monsters. Do you know what that's like? All you had to do was come when I needed you."

The ground began to shake, the bedrock below them vibrating in sympathy with her mounting rage. Of all the stone and metal nearby, only the silver Helvault seemed beyond her reach.

"Don't presume to own my actions, young one. I am obligated to nothing. I owe you nothing! When your Planeswalker spark first ignited, it was I who discovered you. I could have ended you there, but I spared you."

He turned back to her, orange eyes full of malice, face inches from hers.

"I took you under my wing, and molded you into what you are," he said. "If you find it necessary to pester someone, go find Ugin. I have no patience for it."

No patience. No patience. Pain gave way to anger in a white-hot instant.

For five thousand years, Nahiri had kept watch over the Eldrazi—not just for her plane, but for every plane. For Innistrad. And once, once, in five thousand years, she had called on him to do nothing more than make good on a simple promise—a self-serving promise, one that he'd only made because it would keep his own world safe—and he had not. Just...not.

Her own patience was at an end, spent in endless vigil over the Eldrazi. She was done—done waiting, done pleading, and most of all done being treated like a child. If Sorin needed proof that she was no longer his student, she would have to provide it.

She called forth a column of rock from the depths beneath them—granite, old and strong. The earth heaved, and Sorin struggled to keep his feet. The stone column burst from the ground beneath her, carrying her high above him.

"I'm not going anywhere."

She pulled more rocks from the ground around her, sharpened into darts, swirling around the two Planeswalkers.

Sorin drew his sword.

"I never threatened you," he said, looking up at her. "Not once. If we are to be enemies, child, the blame falls solely at your own feet."

"I'm not a child," she said. "Whatever we were, surely you can see we're equals now."

There was a moment's hesitation—a hint of fear in those orange eyes, perhaps? A second spent weighing the possibility that she might be right, and his pride was in need of sharp correction?

"All I see is a tantrum," he said. "If you came to meet an equal, you should have come under truce, following the protocols for parley with a fellow Planeswalker."

"I came to meet a friend," said Nahiri.

"Then I see no grounds for complaint," said Sorin. "Friends deliver hard truths...do they not?"

Long ago, a foolish girl had called this wretched creature friend. As the last vestige of that youthfully sentimentality boiled away, Nahiri struck.

She hurtled down toward Sorin astride a fist of rock. She had no sword. She had no need of one. The ground itself was her weapon.

Sorin released a blast of death magic that caught her full in the chest, knocking her back. The stone column lurched backward, to stay under her feet.

Sorin vaulted off the broken ground and leapt straight toward her, teeth bared, sword glinting in the light of that strange, looming moon. She jumped from the column and landed on the ground in a crouch. Sorin hit the stone column feet first, ready to spring off of it and attack her again—but the stone column simply swallowed him.

She stood, fists clenched, squeezing Sorin in the stone.

Cracks appeared, first one, then several, shining with light from the vampire's magic. The column flew apart in a spray of light and stone as Sorin forced his way out. He dropped gracefully to the ground.

But he looked pained.

"I don't want your enmity," said Nahiri. "All I ever wanted was your help, Sorin. You made a promise. Come with me."

"Not now," said Sorin, with infuriating calm. "Later, perhaps. This is a critical time—"

"A critical time!" snapped Nahiri. "The Eldrazi almost escaped. You're thinking in terms of eons, but for all I know the Eldrazi are loose now. All that we worked for will be lost, your own plane will be in danger—don't you care about that?"

It hit her, then. The imprisonment of the Eldrazi had become her life's work, a constant effort that had kept her bound to her plane for almost her entire existence. But for him it had been an eyeblink—forty years of mild effort, five thousand years ago, in exchange for millennia of peace of mind. And now, with his new countermeasures, perhaps Innistrad wasn't in danger. Perhaps Nahiri and Zendikar and a hundred million carefully placed hedrons had served their purpose, in the mind of Sorin Markov.

She snarled and sent a storm of stone darts flying at him, each the size of her forearm and sharpened to a wicked point.

Sorin blasted a few of the shards to dust before they reached him, sent several more spinning away with a sweep of his sword, and grunted as three more pierced his body.

His eyes flared white, too bright, and a great weight settled on Nahiri's shoulders, forcing her to her knees. Everything was so bright—

She looked up.

The moon. He had called down a beam of moonlight, heavy as a boulder but with no substance whatsoever, to bind her. And finally, surrounded by its light, breathing in the scent of it, she understood what was so strange about Innistrad's moon.

It was made of silver. Like the Helvault.

Sorin pulled the stone darts from his body one by one, the wounds closing bloodlessly. He stalked toward her. But his footsteps were uncertain, his sword drooping. Had he become so decrepit?

Still, his magic was strong. The light bound not only her body, but her magic. As long as it held, she was powerless to affect anything outside its radius.

"Go home, Nahiri," he said wearily. "End this farce, and I will allow you—"

She dug her hands into the soil, extending her will not out, but down, and dove into the earth itself.

She sank down into a womb of stone, and for a moment she left behind her anger and Sorin's damnable arrogance and that strange and unyielding chunk of silver whose purpose she still couldn't grasp. There was only her and the stone, cut off from everything save the slow and steady heartbeat of the world, like it had been for five thousand years.

She could planeswalk away, return to Zendikar and to isolation. She did not, in fact, need Sorin's help. Not anymore. But leaving things unresolved here would be dangerous beyond measure, inviting retaliation. She really would have made an enemy, then. And she wouldn't leave while there was still a chance of preventing that.

Sorin's restless footfalls echoed above her, stalking toward the Helvault.

She shaped the stone beneath her into another pillar, thinned the rock above her to the consistency of water, and burst forth from the ground once more. Sorin had dispelled the beam of moonlight, and now had his back to the Helvault for some measure of protection.

She rose on her granite pillar, towering above him, pulling a swarm of stones from the ground and arraying them around her.

She didn't want to kill him. She didn't really want to hurt him. What she wanted was for things to be right between them, the way they had been. But for that to happen, she would have to earn his respect. And to do that, she would have to beat him.

He was leaning on his sword, now. If they agreed to treat one another as equals, it seemed she would be doing him a favor.

It wasn't right. He was too weak, weaker than he had been when she was young. She thought of how the Helvault had radiated his essence, and wondered just how much of himself he had poured into it.

She sent her pillar of stone gliding forward toward him. As she slid past one of the floating stones around her, she reached into it. It instantly heated, became molten, as the metals inside it coalesced in answer to her will.

She pulled a fully formed stoneforged sword out of the rock and kept advancing, until Sorin stood beneath her, gazing up at the sword's white-hot point.

"Sorin, you will fulfill your promise. You will return with me to Zendikar. You will help me check our containment measures, and ensure that the Eldrazi are secure. Only then can you slink away."

Sorin spat.

Then everything went bright again, brighter than the moon, and a shape came screaming out of the heavens. She glimpsed feathered wings and a shining spear before the figure slammed into her, knocking her off her pedestal. They tumbled together and slammed into the ground, where they carved a deep furrow in the earth. Nahiri's array of stones tumbled to the ground, her concentration shattered.

At last, lying on her back. Nahiri got a look at her attacker.

She was an angel, larger than life, with white hair and white skin and dark, expressionless eyes. Nahiri was being attacked by an angel.

Nahiri had met angels, on Zendikar. They were aloof, and could be fearsome, but they were protectors, creatures of justice and of good. And none of them that she'd ever met were stupid enough to attack a Planeswalker.

Before Nahiri could speak, before she could even fully process what was happening, the angel raised her spear. Its points shone like twin suns, blinding her.

She sank down once more into stone, felt the spear's points dig into the earth where she'd been lying.

No time for repose, this time. She burst from the ground in a spray of shrapnel, sword still in hand, and as the angel shielded herself from the blast of rock, Nahiri attacked. She swung the sword, which still glowed with the heat of its forging.

The angel raised her spear to deflect, just in time, and Nahiri attacked again, and again, and again, forcing the angel backward. She felt a dim sense of wrongness, fighting an angel. But no—the angel had attacked her, unprovoked. And why? To protect Sorin? She could scarcely entertain the thought.

The angel vaulted into the air—but not to retreat. She sprang forward, to get above Nahiri, to attack again. Nahiri rose again on a stone pillar, to force the angel either to flee or to return to the earth.

The angel settled again, but stood her ground. Nahiri kept up her assault. The angel was powerful, no question. But she was no Planeswalker. Nahiri struck again—

—and her sword stopped dead on Sorin's, thrust between her and the angel.

"Enough!" he panted. "Enough."

She stared past him, at the angel with the jet-black eyes. There was something familiar about the angel, something unsettling, though Nahiri was quite certain she'd never seen her before.

"What is this, Sorin? How did you bring an angel under your thrall? Who is she?"

"The other half," he replied.

His hand whipped out, lightning-fast, and closed around Nahiri's sword. His skin hissed and sizzled, but he didn't seem to notice. Nahiri's fingers were numb, her mind reeling. She still didn't understand. He lifted the point of his own sword to her throat, wrenched her blade out of her hands, tossed it away.

The angel landed softly behind Sorin, but he held up one hand, and she waited. An angel waited, for him!

"For what it's worth," said Sorin, "I never wanted this, young one."

Then Sorin raised his sword, lashed out with a beam of tarnished light, and pushed.

Nahiri flew backward and slammed against the silver surface of the Helvault. It was no longer hard and cold, but yielding. Welcoming. Pulling.

Strands of eager silver closed around her body, drawing her in. Shards of rock whirled through the air, the bedrock beneath their feet shifted at her rage, but the Helvault itself did not care.

"Damn you!" she screamed. "I trusted you!"

He loomed over her, now, the angel's wings spread behind him, and he spoke one last time before molten silver flooded her ears. He sounded almost sad. Almost.

"I never asked for your trust, child. Only your obedience."

Then the Helvault claimed her, and she vanished into a darkness vast and total.