Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [15]
Ajani just lay down on his bed.
Zaliki looked at him for a long moment from the lair entrance, and sighed. Then she left him alone.
JUND
In the two years Sarkhan had spent on the plane of Jund, he had seen dozens of dragons. He followed them with the eyes of a naturalist, watching their flight patterns and their eating behaviors, memorizing maps of nesting locations and broodmate relationships, judging the strength and heat of their dragonfire, and calculating their age, relative size, and approximate overall power. But he had never found the one.
Sarkhan was not a hunter by training. As an adolescent on a plane torn by the machinations of warlords, he had supposed his avocation to be war. He had fought in brutal conflicts across his home plane, tearing giant holes in the defenses of his enemies through a personal will and doggedness that his grandfather called “unmatched among our people.”
For a time, sick of the petty quarrels of the battlefield, he had joined a shamanic group dedicated to the veneration of dragons. From them he had learned of the dragons’ rage and uncompromising predation. But the dragons had been hunted almost to extinction on his plane. With no dragons to revere, he had returned to his war career, believing he would never feel the heat of dragonfire or the fury of those beasts of old.
Sarkhan’s might and legendary stubbornness had soon earned him accolades, rank, and a military force of his own. Expected to do great things in command, he had been put in charge of a massive campaign to defeat the forces of an enemy warlord. He had slain the warlord personally, but as he had surveyed the battle from the warlord’s tower, he had felt hollow, seeing the tiny ants scuffling below. Frustrated and seeking answers, he had entered a shamanic trance, just as his training had directed.
The spirit of a long-dead dragon had appeared to him, whispered a spell into his mind, and then vanished forever. With the incantation of the spell, a huge dragon made of fire had streaked out of Sarkhan’s body, and invaded the battle, blasting the battlefield with a torrent of fire. Fascinated, Sarkhan had watched as his men and those of his enemy were burned to cinders. It was a display of ultimate rage and power that surpassed everything he had ever seen. It had stoked a passion in him that had never before flared to life, and along with it, his planeswalker spark.
Sarkhan had been relieved of duty that day, but had not cared.
He had spent years traveling from plane to plane, hunting for the most monumental dragons he could find. He had given solemn obeisance to some that earned his respect. And he had killed some others that didn’t, believing that any dragon that fell to his humble human hands deserved to die, and that the way he would find the one, the ultimate expression of draconic glory, was by meeting his match.
He had never stayed on any plane longer than a few months until he found the primordial world of Jund. It was home to hundreds, maybe thousands of dragons—a more robust population than any other plane Sarkhan had seen. And yet, life teemed on Jund. All shapes and sizes of reptilian creatures, carnivorous plants, and a strangely ratlike species of goblin, thrived in the hot, volcano-driven climate. Taut and muscular humans swarmed over the plane, adapted to the constant threat of physical danger. And tiny fungal creatures tottered between the noxious pools of tar, apparently even lower on the food chain than the goblins. It was only the enormous buffet of life that could support the high density of draconic predators. To Sarkhan, it was paradise.
The upper atmosphere was thick with volcanic gases, a serious danger for any mountaineering. The