Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [109]
The outburst of rage subsided, and became a simple breeze ruffling Ajani’s fur.
All the combatants recovered then, and attempted to rejoin their fight—but found that their mana bonds had all been severed. They had no mana to fuel their spells, and the essence of the dragons’ flames had drained away.
Smoke wafted from Ajani’s fur.
The dragons spiraled high up into the air, screeching in rage. Sarkhan slapped the flanks of the hellkite Karrthus with his heels, and the two of them veered away from the fight. All the dragons beat their wings hard, retreating somewhere in the direction of Jund.
A cheer went up among the elves and nacatl.
“Ajani, you did it,” said Zaliki. “I don’t know how you did it, but you stopped their magic.”
Ajani nodded, exhausted.
“And I can’t thank you enough,” said the dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas, as he appeared out of the sky.
BANT
Ajani watched with awe as the oily-scaled elder dragon descended from the savage sky above the mana maelstrom. The creature’s scales matched the dragonscale spheres he had seen used to sow chaos on Naya, but the sense of majesty Ajani felt radiating from the beast was the way he truly knew he faced the one behind the plane-spanning plot to create the maelstrom.
“Hello, little walker,” said Bolas.
Ajani had only a dim sense of the action around him, of the elves and nacatl attempting to attack Bolas. As Ajani had destroyed their mana bonds, the humanoids were powerless to attack him. Bolas looked from side to side as he landed before Ajani, killing dozens with a thought. Ajani saw elves, humans, and nacatl he knew dying by the moment.
“Retreat, all of you!” shouted Ajani. “Go!”
With Sarkhan’s dragons dispersed and the black dragon killing them at will, they didn’t need more instruction than that. All around the two planeswalkers, the armies fled in every direction.
“Ajani, don’t do this,” cried Zaliki. “Don’t put yourself in evil’s way.”
“Someone has to,” Ajani told her. “Go, Zaliki. Now.”
Goodbye, he thought after her as she reluctantly turned in the direction of Naya, and he watched her run out of the gorge with the Cloud Nacatl warriors.
Bolas watched them go, a bemused curl warping his lips. Then he turned his head to Ajani, the tiny nacatl before him, and folded his claws together.
THE MAELSTROM
You took a while to show up, little walker,” said Bolas.
“I need to stop overestimating mortals.”
“I’ve been looking,” snarled Ajani. “You’ve been hiding.”
“Hiding? Hardly. I’ve been a step away from you your whole life, little cat. Tantalizingly close. My door’s been wide open. But I don’t blame you for your clumsy mistakes. You’ve only just learned to take your first steps. To you I seemed so far away, so ineffable, so unreal. You didn’t even have anything in your experience to compare me to, did you? You had no frame of reference, no theoretical web in which to embed the monumental idea of me. So you couldn’t know. You were literally incapable of knowing. I’ve seen distances you couldn’t imagine—how could you? Your imagination has been closed inside the boundaries of a singular world. But it didn’t make sense, did it? Your brother’s death? The coincidences? The sums didn’t balance. Little Naya just was too shallow a bowl to hold all the facts.”
Ajani seethed. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Ah, but what now? What’s the next link in this chain, little walker? Will you get your revenge? Will you—kill me? Put your dead brother’s axe in my guts, and wiggle the handle till I’m dead? Stop me from fulfilling my goals here on your beloved worlds? And after that, what, march home a champion? I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be flip. It is very important to you, I know. But you can’t see. You can’t see how painfully trite you are. There’ll be no pathos in your death, Ajani Goldmane, no grand nobility. Only the shabby banality of a thousand indistinguishable upstarts.”
With that, Bolas flicked his claw,