By Doug Beyer A tale of Alara
t's a strange time for the mages of Alara. As the war between the shards proceeds on all fronts, the study of magic deepens rapidly. New revelations have bred new magical specialties. Mages' new insight into their enemies has honed their spellcraft into tailor-made, shard-hating weaponry.
The elvish druids of the Knotvine Altar on Naya puzzle over the strange strains of mana twined around the three colors they're used to. Sighted-caste mages on Bant reread the old prophecies of the archangel Asha, looking for some magical defense against the rising tide of chaos and death. The archwizards of Esper devote their brilliance to researching the wild sorceries that continuously thrash their etherium armies, trying to stem the onslaught on their grid-lined home realm while simultaneously searching for the components for fresh etherium. Even the putrescent lethemancers and fleshwarpers of Grixis have found cause to broaden their scholarly horizons as they encounter new forms of mind and body to twist to their own self-serving ends.
One unassuming knight - dragonsoul knight - represents the vanguard of mystical progress on Alara. There are other beings who are more in touch with the Maelstrom, the swirling node of mana forming at the spot where all five shards overlap - for example, elementals and angels, whose existence is owed largely to the confluence of mana in that five-color storm - but no one has seen more of actual Alara at this point than this well-traveled knight. His travels have brought him perspective on the war, mana, and spellcraft of Alara that no one else has.
Knight's Departure
He never chose to leave Jund - he was forced.
He was a proud member of one of the human warrior clans, possibly the clan Tol Antaga led by the warrior champion Kresh the Bloodbraided—but he never charged with that clan into a hellkite's lair, where many of their number died. He may have met Rakka Mar, the elementalist shaman—but he never heard her fireside urgings to spread the warriors' Life Hunts into the foreign shards, the secret propaganda of the dragon Nicol Bolas. He may have scaled to the lava pool known as the Sweltering Cauldron or explored the cavernous depths of the Bloodhall—but he never drew a drop of mana from those places' rich stock.
He was reasonable with a polearm. He was passable at riding lizardback. He enjoyed a spar now and again with his clanmates, two warriors of good skill and excellent friendship. He never thought he would see beyond the borders of his own world, let alone see the contours of four others from that viewpoint up in his worn, scale-leather saddle.
When the Conflux came, it brought thunder with it. As a denizen of Jund, the knight had felt rumblings in the crust before, but this was different. Countrysides broke with splashes of lava. Ugly black towers burst up through the land, flooding the land with shambling creatures that looked more dead than alive. Shaggy behemoths lumbered along the mountain trenches, crunching Jund's teeming predator-web without regard. The lands of Jund sloughed off at the edges, sliding into new adjacent worlds, and great plates of those other worlds hunched their way into Jund.
The knight was hunting tar crocodiles when the shard-quake found its way to his part of Jund, the bejungled lowlands. He had heard of the phenomenon striking the lands farther out, so he knew exactly what to do when he felt the ground lurch. He steered his iguanar steed toward his two trusted clanmates, bounding through the razor-toothed foliage as fast as the lizard would go, ready to carry his two comrades-in-arms to safety.
He found them floating in the air, their mortal souls seeping out of their bodies.
Another force had moved into Jund even faster than the Conflux—the army of Zarratha, a lich lord from the necropolis of Unx, shard of Grixis. The souls of the knight's clanmates became fuel for the lich's undead forces, their vis harvested like mere wheat. As the bodies of his clanmates fell to the ground, two conflicting impulses struck him—to lower his polearm at the misshapen form of the lich and charge, or to run. The choice he made saved his life.
Escape Across Worlds
Mages in the time of the Conflux have some insight into what's going on. As their worlds' landforms change, they can sense the new mystical tang in the air, the psychic aroma of (to them) new types of mana. The knight had never had any shamanic training, and had no such mystical perception to help him make sense of what he saw as he fled.
Wherever he rode, he saw the forces of Grixis. Vampires stalked and circled like greedy dragons. Necromancer barons and their whip-stitched monstrosities pummeled the local viashino thrashes, harvesting their sturdy hides for further necromancy. The diseased, black-feathered kathari, silhouetted against Jund's volcanic sky in great swarms, out-scavenged the scavenger drakes, picking off the weakest goblins from the mountain heights.
Grixis was everywhere. So the knight fled in the other direction.
The knight felt something strange as he crossed over into the lands he would come to know as Naya. Even as a non-mage, he could see evidence of changes in the mana landscape, an experience even more bizarre than seeing the alien flora and fauna of Naya's overgrown jungles. Jund had never been privy to the power of white mana, but he could see it with his own eyes.
He saw it in the fighting styles of the Nacatl lion-folk and witnessed its power to protect the sunsail tents up in the elves' canopies. He had never seen spells that could create life energy itself or bind a pride of lion warriors into a single, efficient hunting weapon.
It was off-putting at first, but also strangely thrilling. Something within him stirred, the same feeling he had when he saw flights of dragons taking off and arcing across the heavens, their breaths carving ragged black scars in the ashen tumult. He mistook the feeling for wistfulness.
Farthest Shores
The knight headed on, propelled by the death and wildness behind him. He probably thought he was heading in a linear direction, getting farther and farther away from his native Jund as he crossed borders—but really he was on a long, slow round-trip. As he left the behemoths, Cylian elves, and noble cat-folk behind, he found knights riding cat-steeds, and huge rhoxes, and a race of bird-men. The influence of white mana was even more powerful here. And he found blue mana.
The feeling stirred again. He remembered a couple of years ago, when his clan met a man named Sarkhan Vol, a strangely-dressed shaman who seemed to know the minds of dragons. Vol was only with their clan briefly, but the knight had been taken with this man, who moved alone across the savage lands of Jund and shared the rage of hellkites. The knight felt now, in the presence of such diverse mana, that he had new perspective into the man.
He began to have strange dreams. They were night-terrors in which his body tore apart, revealing a fledgling dragon inside, a whelp that stretched its wings and flew away into the sky, trailing the knight's own blood. He always awoke screaming—awoke to the weird smells of Bant's meadows and the sea.
The knight headed on, into Esper, where the call of blue mana was strongest, and where he saw wonders he could never explain. He had never felt so far from home here, and unfamiliar passions warred in his chest. He had the dreams nightly now. All he knew to do was to drive on. What would the next world hold? How could it be stranger than the last? He could scarcely imagine.
The Eyes of the Enemy
Perhaps the plume breath of the beacon behemoth in Naya should have been a clue. Perhaps the locals' whispers of the Maelstrom should have made him realize what he would see next, or the surprisingly understanding glance from a wandering knight of Bant, whose shield was emblazoned with a prismatic pattern that felt oddly familiar.
But he was still surprised when he rode into Grixis. His lizard steed reared up, upset for the first time at the stench of a foreign land. He recognized the home-world that spawned Zarratha, the lich who harvested the souls of his clanmates.
The fires within him were stoked.
He rode boldly through Grixis, his polearm finding its way through many shambling corpses, the claws of his steed becoming sticky with ichor torn from the damned. When he slept, he only slumped in his saddle. The dreams were as horrible as ever, his fantasies of gory dragon-birthing mingling with the reality of the dead world around him. His iguanar knew not to pause. The two of them cut a swath, aiming for the familiar volcanic plumes on the horizon.
Then he saw them. His clanmates. Here in Grixis? Alive again? No. Dead. Forming the front lines for the lich Zarratha.
And that's the story of how Dragonsoul Knight, an unremarkable warrior of Jund, touched the five corners of Alara and used mana he never understood to unleash a raging power within him. It's the story of how the lich Zarratha perished under a siege of dragonfire, and the story of how a knight finally cremated his fallen friends, and returned home to begin a new warrior-clan, and a new life.