Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [99]
Zaliki reached out with her mind to all nearby available sources of natural mana. Her mind immediately touched a powerful source nearby, and she felt a surge of power—why hadn’t she felt this before? Instinctively she opened herself to it, letting the mana blossom inside her. With it she fueled a massive spell that summoned a charging gargantuan onto the battlefield, sending it directly at Marisi. The gargantuan shook the earth with its galloping footfalls, and warriors from both armies dove out of its path. In seconds the gargantuan head-butted Marisi with its bony facial plates, sending the cat flying. Marisi fell to the earth with a thud, and the beast slowed and stopped over his limp body.
Zaliki had time to stride over to Marisi and pick him up.
She held the nacatl up above her head in one hand, and looked down at all the warriors below. “Warriors! Stop this battle now! Marisi is a liar, and a warmongering fraud!”
The shouts in response were not what she wanted to hear.
“Kill the traitor!”
“In Marisi’s name!”
“Destroy her!”
One voice she couldn’t hear over the shouts was Ambassador Banat, yelling at her from the ground. “Zaliki, don’t!” he cried. “No more! No more magic! You’re destroying it!”
It would take one more display of force, Zaliki thought. She had to show her Wild Nacatl that their leader was mortal, and show them how serious she was about her cause. If she had to martyr Marisi, so be it.
“I believed in you,” she said to the nacatl in her hand.
“It’s not your fault,” said Marisi.
Zaliki drew on the powerful source of mana again, a dramatic draught of the energy. She channeled it into a spell to augment her own strength sevenfold. Muscles rippled throughout her already giant-sized body. She brought her arms back as if to clap her hands, and then brought her palms together, smashing Marisi between them.
The crowd gasped in unison.
Then, behind her, there was an explosive sound of stone cracking.
She turned to see the Tower of Qasal fracturing and crumbling apart.
NAYA
Bolas perched on a Naya mountaintop, surveying the world around him in a state of boredom. For a twenty-thousand-year-old dragon, he had precious little patience. Where was the signal flare? That aging leonin hero, Marisi, should have signaled him for their rendezvous. Bolas had seen nothing from him. The lack of information that presented was unsettling. Without his minions checking in with him, he had no eyes or ears on the planes other than Grixis.
Perhaps the attack on Qasal hadn’t gone well? If Marisi had failed at Qasal, then that meant the obelisk of Naya might not be free and functional. That would mean he would have to find and condition an all-new minion on Naya, and that could take days or weeks—time he didn’t have.
There was one way to find out. He closed his eyes and reached out with his inner senses. The planeswalker spark inside him connected with dozens of mana sources all over the plane, large and small. Gradually he perceived a web of interconnected fonts of mana glittering in his mind’s eye. He followed along them, looking for new sources of mana. He soon found it—a glaring new pillar of mana generation near the shrines of Qasal. That was it—the obelisk of Naya. It was active. Bolas could see that it radiated stable mana to the areas physically near it, but also that it channeled mana elsewhere in a steady stream. It was that stream of mana energy that made him smile.
Marisi had missed his meeting. That meant he was dead, or ready to accept death once Bolas tracked him down and punished him. But he appeared to have succeeded anyway.
Bolas summoned up a bit of the jagged local mana and planeswalked out into the Blind Eternities.
THE MAELSTROM
When Kaeda, the aven of Bant, awoke, his first thought was of his mission. How close was the Grixis army? Had they already passed him?
There was no sign of them, not along the route anyway. He must have been unconscious only for a short time.
He looked back, and saw the swirling maelstrom. Was it his imagination, or was it even bigger than