Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [35]
“The key is this: you don’t force away a greater threat. You appeal to its passions, its—”he thumped his chest with his fist— “innermost desires. You give it something that it wants more than killing you.”
“How did you know what it wanted?”
Sarkhan laughed. “Dragons always want the same thing,” he said.
With that, Sarkhan turned to the caldera. He raised his arms and staff high in the air.
“What do they want?” Ajani started to ask, but he stopped short.
A pillar of lava shot straight up out of the center of the caldera. It streamed vertically into the air, disappearing into the ashen clouds high above. Sarkhan’s face was red in the glare of the enormous beam of fire. His eyes reflected the pillar as two glowing, vertical stripes.
There was a roar high above. Ajani looked up to see a dragon circling the pillar—a different one from the one who had chased him—its wings almost grazing the surface of the lava stream. Then another dragon approached and began wheeling around it. And then another, and another. Soon the air was filled with dragons, all attracted to Sarkhan’s molten pillar of pure rage. They stacked up in tiers in the sky, in what looked to Ajani like a bizarre dance of giants.
Sarkhan turned his head back to Ajani. The man’s smile was too wide, his eyes too unfocused. “I see it now—I see what Rakka was after. There’s a greater power at work here, across your world and mine. This power can be yours, as well,” he said.
“How?” said Ajani.
“How doesn’t matter,” said Sarkhan. “How is details. It’s right here, plain as the volcano before us. Just go after what you want, and take it. And if there’s something in your way, you take it anyway. You blast through it, you push it out of your way, or you fly over it.”
Then, as if to prove his point, he leaped off the ledge into the caldera.
Ajani gawked as the man tumbled down toward the lava, a dark humanoid silhouette against the glowing red. But then he moved laterally across the lava, and eventually gained in altitude. As Ajani watched, Sarkhan sprouted leathery wings and became a huge flying creature—a dragon.
The Sarkhan-dragon spiraled around the pillar of lava a few times with the other dragons. As he flew, the pyromantic spell ended, and the pillar dissipated and sank back into the caldera. Ajani saw only a cloud of dragons—Sarkhan had become indistinguishable from them. The dragons began to break off one by one, heading off into the orange sky of Jund. Soon Ajani was alone with the volcano.
Ajani held his head in his hands. His mind swirled with thoughts that bled with pain and rage. Jazal is dead, he thought. And I’m in a world of fire. He was cut off from his home, and a man who might have understood how to get him back there had just turned into a monster and flown away. The heat from the volcano felt strangely soothing, a fuming salve to his pain. Ajani threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the entirety of the caldera.
He inched his feet toward the ledge. The heat on the tips of his toes was excruciating.
What was he about to do? Was he insane—or suicidal? The heat poured into Ajani, penetrated right through his skin, and sizzled inside his veins.
Jazal was dead, he thought, and he was as good as dead as well. His fate had already been decided. Why not make one choice he could actually control? If death was coming for him, then why not fly into it?
He took a step—
What am I doing what am I doing I’m going to die
As he fell, fumes from the caldera blasted up around him. They scorched his body and his soul, shredding him into pieces and reforming him, enveloping him in an eternity of fiery destruction.
NAYA
Smoke wafted from Ajani’s fur.
The smell of it woke him. He coughed. If he was dead, then the afterlife must smell a lot like his home jungle.
He sat up and looked around. He recognized the trees and the trails around his pride’s den. It was day. Some cinders were smoldering in his fur; he rubbed them out with his hand. The cinders and smoke kept him grounded—they forced him to remember his planeswalk to Jund, and convinced him it had