Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [110]
“I’ve lived hundreds of your lifetimes,” continued Bolas. “I’ve survived more apocalypses than you’ve had chest colds. I’ve experienced more of this cosmos than any being there has ever been. And you think you’re going to stand in my way, matchstick? You think you’re the one to finally take me down? I can tell you now, if Nicol Bolas is to fall, it won’t be because of the likes of you.”
Ajani elbowed his way off his back into a sitting position. With his weight on one arm and blood dripping from his mouth, he spoke. “For being so old, you throw a tantrum like a child.”
Bolas snarled and snapped his arm back in the other direction. Ajani flew bodily across the gorge, slamming sideways into the ground again.
Ajani groaned and coughed blood onto the walls of the gorge. He searched his mouth with his tongue and felt two teeth loose, but clenched them into place with his jaw.
Bolas approached. “Again, you’re centuries too late to play the insolent, devil-may-care hero. It’s been done far too many times, and by better beings than you. It’s played out. You don’t have a million-to-one chance, little walker. This isn’t your once-in-a-lifetime shot at the hero’s truimph. This is you, flyswatted.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” muttered Ajani. “Your plan.”
Bolas grinned. “See how it pleads for additional moments? See how it strings together its last breaths, hoping to stall for time, so it can find that crucial way out of the impossible situation?”
“If I’m so insignificant, why the roundabout plot to kill me, Bolas? Why the spells carried by underlings? Why the white cat prophecies? If I’m nothing, why go to all that trouble? And if I’m not nothing, if I could represent some kind of threat to you, why be so coy? Why not just planeswalk to Naya and murder me in my crib?”
“You’re right, of course,” replied Bolas. “I am prone to theatrics. When one has no peers, one likes to entertain oneself, you see? It’s self-indulgent, I admit, but I do like to watch my own symphony play itself out.”
“No,” said Ajani, his mouth bleeding. “That isn’t why. That’s not why you sent all the intermediaries, why you had everyone do your dirty work but yourself. I think it’s because you’ve tasted your own mortality. You’re powerful, but you understand you have weaknesses. I can see it in you. Even you, ancient dragon, are afraid.”
Bolas’s cheek spikes fanned out, and his chest filled with rage. The energies from the whirling maelstrom lit him from behind, casting his face into blackness. He spread his wings out, looking like a god, and stretched his claws toward Ajani’s face.
But then he stopped and stepped back.
“Tut, tut,” he said. “You almost made me forget what I was here to do.”
Bolas turned and stepped into the center of the maelstrom.
Ajani shielded his eyes. The maelstrom exploded into a sphere of light, drenching the dragon planeswalker in waves of power. The force of the blast crushed Ajani into the wall of the chasm, feeling like a continuous barrage of electric shocks. There was either no sound, or so much sound that Ajani had gone deaf.
Unable to cope with complex thought, Ajani’s mind repeated one phrase over and over: He’s done it. He’s done it.
The explosion of power died down to a mere hurricane. Ajani’s sense of hearing returned: a thunderous, continuous roar. Ajani squinted into the light, and perceived the contours of a draconic being coiled into a fetal position.
The dragon moved within the radiance. Its wings opened; its arms and legs stretched out; its tail uncoiled and spread long and majestic; its head reared up to the empty sky; its mouth opened. It was unmistakably Bolas, but Ajani thought he looked larger than he had been, or somehow more grandiose. He had no scars or wounds, no frayed scales on his pinions, no scruffy patches at his joints. He was smooth, sleek, a study in armored scale stretched over lean muscle. He had become everything that his potential allowed him to be: he was a divinity of