Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [37]
They came upon a bowl in the earth, an amphitheater carved into a grassy slope. Steps led down to a dais where an immense disc of white granite lay broken. As they approached it, Ajani saw the spiraling geometric shapes of the scratchforms gouged into it, a recording method only the shamans in Ajani’s pride had used. Jazal had been able to read some simple scratchforms, and had tried to teach his brother, but Ajani had always been more interested in developing his skill with the axe instead. The thickness of the disc came up to Ajani’s waist, and its diameter was thrice his height. A meandering crack divided the disc into two large pieces and many smaller ones, and seedlings and patches of moss had blossomed between them. The pattern of the scratchforms across the pieces was dizzying.
“The Coil recorded a way of life that was supposed to support freedom through law,” said the old woman. “When I was a girl, the hero Marisi smashed the Coil so that we all could recover what we had lost.”
“I can’t read it,” said Ajani.
The old woman put her hand on the disc. She ran her fingers over the scratchforms. “You don’t need to. You can feel what they represent, can’t you? There’s rage in your scent. I can sense you share in Marisi’s cause.”
“What I feel is not Marisi’s rage. I have my own.”
“Even better. Each of us needs our own burden to shove against. Each of us needs our own load to weigh us down. What have you pushed up the mountain with you?”
Ajani was beginning to wonder whether the old crone had anything left rattling around in her head. He looked at his hands. “I have nothing.”
“Nonsense. Tell me what you’ve brought with you here, boy. What burden do you carry?”
He said the first thing that came to mind, the only thing on his mind. “The death of my brother.”
The old woman hissed a laugh. “Death? It must be fresh for your scent to be so warm.”
“He was … murdered.”
“Ah, yes. Now I see. You have the blaze in you now. That’s good. Who killed your kin, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“The blaze demands better than that. It will eat away at you the longer you put it off. I see now why you’ve come. Say it.”
What was she talking about?
“Say it!”
“Say what, old woman? I don’t know what you think I was trying to—”
The woman sprang forward and clawed him suddenly, raking his bare chest with surprising viciousness. Ajani roared and instinctively fell into a battle stance.
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me what the blaze wants.”
Ajani didn’t know whether to leave or break her arms.
She raked at him again. He was ready for it and stepped out of the way, but her other claw slashed at his arm as he dodged the first blow. Blood oozed down his arm.
“Say it! Say it!” she cried.
“I don’t know what you want me to say!”
The woman pounced on him, sinking her claws deep into his chest. It felt like she were clutching his heart itself, coiling her claws around the still-beating organ and twisting it around in its cage. Ajani roared and seized the woman in his own claws, wrenched her free of him, and threw her.
She was light. She arced up and down and slammed her head into one corner of the Coil. She fell limp on the ground.
Ajani gasped and rushed over to her, cradling her in his arms. His blood was pumping, and his claws wouldn’t retract.
Blood oozed from a gash above one of the woman’s pupil-filled eyes. She came to, blinking and smiling. “Now you know it,” she said. “Now you can say it.”
Ajani’s nostrils flared with his brisk breaths.
“I will kill whoever murdered my brother.”
PART
TWO
NAYA
The dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas exhaled a sigh of black smoke. He had grown used to the chill, dead air of Grixis, and Naya’s cloud jungle felt intolerably hot. The sodden air clung to his skin and slithered through his nostrils. And the plane positively teemed with living things. Something was crawling on every part of him—a rodent of some kind, a bird,