Journey Into Nyx (14 page)

A light shone up ahead, and she stumbled into a ruined temple at the dark heart of the labyrinth. There was a cracked fountain at the center of a circle of ivy-covered pillars. Gasping for air, Elspeth crouched beside its crumbling base. The inky black water inside the fountain began to ripple even though it hadn’t been disturbed. She glanced over her shoulder, but the Nyxborn hadn’t pursued her into the temple. She glanced at the water and saw Daxos’s face staring back at her. She cried out in surprise. She could still
hear the young girl’s voice on the wind:
Murderer. Murderer. Mon-ster
.

“You forgave me—did you know all along?” she whispered, as the image of his face dissolved into the distinctive shape of Kruphix’s Tree, which grew out of the waterfall at the edge of the world. Elspeth tore her eyes away from the vision as the wolves loped into view behind her. She readied her blade and turned to face her attackers, who had encircled her at the edges of the ruins. The nymph slid off the wolf’s back. She had a delicate build, hair that rippled like water, and her body was dappled with stars. When Elspeth come to Theros as a child, nymphs had helped her regain her strength. But this one glared at her with murderous intent.

“Heliod wants you to face his wrath,” the nymph said. “My master, Nylea, just wants you dead.”

The inky water in the fountain began burbling unnaturally. It sounded like a large object was rising from the depths. Whatever spell the nymph was casting, Elspeth didn’t wait to find out. She dived out of the way as tendrils of dark water snaked out of the fountain and lashed at her. She channeled her own magic to stamp the water back into the fountain. But as soon as the nymph’s spell failed, the Nyxborn wolves moved in and drove her closer to the fountain. Elspeth slashed her blade through the air, trying to keep them at bay, but they forced her toward the sickly water. She could hear the water again, rising behind her, reaching up to drag her down.

The piercing blare of a hunting horn rang from somewhere outside the temple. Immediately, the strange glassy walls that had transformed the forest began to melt away. With the nymph’s spell broken, the forest returned to its natural state, although the ruined temple was unchanged. On a treeless rise just beyond the crumbling pillars, Elspeth saw a small band of hunters shadowed against the sun. As they charged into the ruin, she realized they were not
humans. They were powerfully built leonins, a feline race who attacked with the fierceness of enraged predators. The Nyxborn wolves scattered in confusion at their unexpected arrival. Furiously, the nymph yelled commands in an unfamiliar language. Her voice was deep and primal, and it echoed between the sacred trees.

The leonins were undaunted by the number of Nyxborn enemies amassed against them. The warriors attacked the wolves with bronze sarissas and flashing swords. Elspeth struck the nearest Nyxborn wolf. She sliced open its flank, but the wound didn’t faze it. Hungrily, it circled around her, but before it could attack again, the hunting horn blew once more. There was a final flash of blinding light, and Elspeth closed her eyes against the mystical glare. When she looked up again, all that was left of the Nyxborn was dissipating smoke and shadows.

Elspeth lowered her weapon and bowed in gratitude to the leonin who had saved her life. These were the first leonin that she’d encountered on this plane. Like the leonins of Alara, they moved with grace, and she sensed a similar instinctual intelligence and empathetic nature. The battle was over, but the leonin warriors kept their distance. She stood silently and waited for them to make their judgment. Finally, a warrior with a golden mane and a crimson band of cloth across his chest approached her curiously.

“You’re Elspeth?” the warrior asked.

Shocked that he knew her name, Elspeth could only nod.

“She’s here,” the warrior called out. “You were right!”

He whistled and more leonins appeared on the crest of the hill beyond the edge of the ruins. They hurried down the slope toward Elspeth. With the sun at their back, she couldn’t see their faces until they reached her. The tallest one pushed back his hood. When she saw who it was, she wanted to cry with relief. Her old friend, Ajani, stood before her.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Ajani told her.

The leonin planeswalker had found her before, and he had never given up on her. No matter what she’d done, he wouldn’t turn his back on her. She stumbled forward into his waiting arms.

A
fter Xenagos ascended to Nyx, a ring of darkness appeared in the heavens. It occupied the edges of the sky first, like a black crown around the head of the world. But as the hours passed it expanded and traveled inward. It became a wheel of darkness that transformed the horizon into a threatening vision, even in the daytime. None of the gods could stop Xenagos’s creeping void, and many in the pantheon blamed the mortals for the satyr’s intrusion. There were rumors of a Nyxborn army amassing in the west and of shocking god-led violence in the cities. While Keranos expressed his displeasure by sending banks of roiling storm clouds to lash a world at war, Purphoros directed his rage at the sky.

Elspeth and Ajani traveled with the warriors to the leonin homeland, which they reached after a hard day’s travel. Known as Oreskos, the remote region was beyond Akros, but it was still on the edges of the vast Nessian Forest. Ruins dotted the rocky scrubland, and the party trekked along a timeworn road built by a civilization that no one remembered. Tethmos, the main leonin fortification, was in sight in the windswept valley below when they heard a rumbling in the distance. A pillar of fire blasted up from Mt. Velus, and the horizon shimmered with an ominous red haze. The firestorm intensified and the blasts of molten rock
skimmed the bottom of the roiling clouds, then tumbled down into the Nessian Forest. Smoke rose from the trees in the distance, and flocks of birds fled to the stormy sky.

“Purphoros is a fool,” growled Seza, a leonin warrior with mottled gray fur who was in awe of Ajani. Wherever he walked, she was like his shadow. “He might be aiming for Nyx, but where does he think his fireballs are going to land?”

“Purphoros doesn’t care who he hurts,” said Pyxathor, a leonin with a golden mane who seemed to hold some authority among the warriors. “None of them do. Gods of arrogance and fools.”

“Nylea is going to be furious with Purphoros for burning her forest,” Seza said. “That means more trouble for the innocents standing in her way.”

“Innocents?” Pyxathor asked. “Now you’re calling the humans innocent?”

“They say Nylea is mad with grief,” Seza continued. “She loved a mortal, and he was murdered. She won’t rest until she has her vengeance and the pantheon is restored to its natural state.”

Elspeth didn’t know who was saying such things, but she did know they were talking about Daxos. Weary from the journey and shaken at the mention of her friend, the world tilted sideways. Ajani, who was right beside her, reached out to steady her. He gave her a searching glance, but she said nothing on their final descent to Tethmos. The stone walls of the fort were covered with plaster and painted in gold and sky blue, a startling contrast to the bleakness of the day. Seza had explained that during times of peace, Tethmos had a small population. Most leonins were nomadic and visited the fortification only on special days. When the gods turned on the mortals, outlying leonin groups had flocked to the relative safety inside the walls.

When they reached the humble wooden gates, Elspeth
saw that tents and caravans lined the courtyard inside the inner bastion. There were so many packed inside the walls that it looked like the Endless Bazaar Elspeth had seen on the plane of Kodisha.

“Brimaz has encouraged his people to shelter here,” Seza said. “Some want to join the ranks of the humans. But others refuse.”

“Who is Brimaz?” Elspeth asked.

“Our king,” Seza said as the wooden gates of Tethmos closed behind them. “And I would address him as such. Only Ajani has first-name privileges.”

Ajani laughed. “Brimaz gets annoyed at such formality. He would rather you call him a brother than a king. Is there someplace we could impose on your hospitality, Seza? My friend needs rest.”

Within minutes, Elspeth was inside a cozy tent tucked near the outer wall. Inside, everything seemed to be made of pillows. Outside, the wind picked up, and an unseasonal torrent of rain drenched the land. She knew Ajani was brimming with questions for her, but thankfully he left her in peace. Elspeth crawled under layers of blankets and slept for hours.

The war council sat in a circle around an open fire pit in the king’s hall in the central bastion. They listened intently to Elspeth’s account of the devastating events she’d witnessed at the victory celebration. But she chose her words carefully and didn’t tell the assembly of leonins everything that had happened. She never mentioned Daxos or the circumstances of his death. There was no way to justify her crime. The right words didn’t exist, even if she wanted to try. An “Obliterator” meant nothing to a leonin of Theros.

“So Xenagos learned of you from Phenax,” the king said sadly. “May I see the weapon?”

Elspeth handed him her spear-blade. The king inspected it carefully before handing it back.

“A burden or a
Godsend
?” Brimaz asked. “I guess that’s yet to be determined.”

“Purphoros has ceased his firestorm temporarily,” Seza said. “All of the forest would have burned down if he had not.”

“Heliod strikes against Meletis, and part of Akros has been destroyed,” said an advisor on the other side of the circle. “Karametra shields Setessa from the gods’ wrath, but how long until Heliod convinces her to join them?”

“We must join the humans in their fight against the gods!” another leonin argued.

“Why should we help them, our former oppressors?” Pyxathor demanded.

Lanathos the Chronicler, an older man with cropped hair, sat near Elspeth. His neck and lower face were scarred with a webbed pattern that Elspeth recognized as mystical fire. Lanathos had been the victim of a powerful mage, and she wondered if the gruesome scars were the reason he lived outside human cities. King Brimaz seemed to hold the chronicler in great regard and often asked for his opinion or his recounting of historical events.

Lanathos leaned toward her and whispered, “The archon Agnomakhos and his human army cast the leonins out of Meletis. The leonin believe he did it with the blessing of the gods. It’s the subject of much debate.”

Around them, the leonins argued loudly until Brimaz raised his hands for quiet. He turned to Ajani.

“You’ve been quiet, old friend,” the king said. “You have both an outsider’s perspective and a friendship with Elspeth, who has inadvertently become the eye of this storm. I would welcome your counsel.”

“I have some sense of how Xenagos manipulated the metaphysics of this world to occupy Nyx,” Ajani said. The
leonins around the fire stirred. They wanted to ask for more details on how this powerful transformation took place, but their king was in the midst of a question, and so his advisors kept silent.

“Is it reversible?” Brimaz asked.

“Magic by its nature is mutable—it can be changed, dissipated, altered …” Ajani said. “I don’t know how, exactly, to correct this situation, but I’m confident that it can be done.”

“What did you mean, the metaphysics of
this
world?” Lanathos interrupted.

“The gods derived from people’s belief in them,” Ajani said. “If I had to name it, I would call it theogenesis, and it’s a mechanism of the natural world.”

Only Elspeth could see how he was skirting the issue of their plane versus the myriad planes he’d visited. Each world exhibited a unique presentation of mystical energy, and to Ajani, each world’s magic was like a treasured fingerprint.

“Are you saying they—they aren’t real?” Lanathos stammered. He was the only one in the room who seemed shocked by what Ajani was implying.

“Of course they’re real,” Ajani said. “From the moment they sprang into existence, they were real. A flame is a flame whether it came from flint or if it was breathed by a dragon. The moment of conception is less important than the act of creation itself.”