Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [61]
“Hold me, please,” she said to her attendants.
Still chanting, two of the farseers knelt next to Mayael and held her arms. Another sat behind her, facing opposite, using her own back to support Mayael’s. Another girl held the back of her head, to catch her skull in the event of powerful whiplash.
Progenitus never granted tepid visions.
“O shrine of the Blinded God,” she began. “I, one of your children, come humbly seeking an answer to the visions I have seen of late. The sacred gargantuans have shaken the world with their footsteps. The humans burn with an aberrant bloodlust. The cat-folk mingle with evil magics. What is the answer? What meaning lies behind these events?”
Clouds crept into the edges of Mayael’s vision. She continued to stare directly at the eye, not attending to the pearlescent mists that heralded the Whitecover Gaze, the vision-state of all the elvish prophets. The chanters’ voices took on a muffled quality, as though traveling through layer upon layer of gauze, until she couldn’t hear them at all.
The clouds of white mist enveloped everything but the Relic, setting the hydra god in relief. Mayael could see only the hydra itself, not the stone in which it was set.
Then it began to move.
The god’s three heads moved independently, as sinuously as snakes, exulting in the power of movement. One head took on a golden sheen, standing proud and noble. Another simmered into crimson, its scales alive like fire. The center head turned an emerald green, reflecting the majesty of the jungle. The three voices of Progenitus spoke.
“Anima,” they said. “Seer of the elves, child of Naya. Why did you blind me?”
“It was not I who blinded you, lord. It was Cylia, the first Anima, who cast the poison into your eyes.”
“Then I would speak with her.”
“She is centuries dead, my lord.”
“Dead? What is death but a reticence to speak with one’s Creator? Her stubbornness will not be tolerated.”
“The signs I’ve culled of late have shown me troubling things. O Progenitus, what do you see behind them?”
“How can I know what you seek, blind as I am? Let us speak no more. I can tell you nothing—not until my wounds are healed.”
“How can I heal you, my lord?”
“I am not whole. I am not all of myself. I must be restored so that I might shine again.”
“Yes, lord.”
“Seek out the …”
“Yes? Seek out what?”
The hydra’s voices deformed strangely. “Seek out the white. …
The heads’ colors changed, blended and warped.
Something is deeply wrong, thought Mayael.
Nicol Bolas, Ajani thought. The being behind it all—a dragon, a creature that didn’t even exist on his world. It made a kind of sense. He looked at the bowl made from oily scales that distorted the light, an artifact created from the scales of a creature from a nearby plane. Ajani knew just where to find such a creature.
For the first time, he was planeswalking under no time constraint, under little emotional duress. He would take it slow. He’d get it right. Maybe he could even aim a little.
He sat in the jungle with his axe across his lap, closed his eyes, and envisioned Jund, the first world to which he had ever planeswalked. He recalled the thick atmosphere, the choking volcanic fumes, the furry goblin-creatures. He envisioned the dragons, enormous beasts of rage swooping down on him, unleashing furious gouts of flame to flay his charred skin from his bones—
He opened his eyes. Maybe I shouldn’t envision the dragons, he thought.
Concentrate.
Jund, a world suffused not only with mana of fire and mana of nature, but an unknown mana of death; a world without the mana of honor and order. It was a world like his own in some respects, if all that was solemn and reverent about Naya had been stripped away, and replaced with an obsession with entropy and decay. It was Naya’s savage, primordial twin.
Concentrate.
What would he find there? Even if he located a dragon, what would he do with that encounter? Look for one with a patch of black scales missing? Ask around for one who knew a Naya cat named Marisi? He was in way over