Return to Ravnica

He stared at his knees. The seams of his pants were worn. A rough scrape was visible through a hole in the knee, from his wandering through the district. He gathered himself up and tried to think his way through the glutinous murk of his memory. But the blankness persisted. He could recall a year ago, and several months ago—and then his mind slipped over patches of uncertain time. He could barely remember a day he had spent in that sanctum, or what had happened in the moments before Emmara’s apparent disappearance.

Jace pressed his palms into his eye sockets. He fought for breath, but could only find air in short gasps.

He opened his eyes and scanned around him. He could sense people walking across sky bridges in the towers of the Tenth, hear them shuffling past the alleyway, see them glancing his way. This place was not his adoptive home anymore, not a sanctuary against the vastness of the Multiverse. It was a labyrinth of accusing eyes. It struck him that he should simply leave the plane and cast himself into some other existence. For a planeswalker, retreat was almost always an option.

A window slid open in the wall four stories above him. A pair of hands reached out and dumped the slop from someone’s dinner—he hoped it was dinner—out of a pot. Muck dropped through the air and slapped against the pavement near him, close enough to splash his cloak. It was a bit of meat and tuber stew, cold but home-cooked—a sign of life and normalcy. He looked up to the window, where light shone out, the shadows of moving figures passing every so often.

Jace sent his senses up to that window, feeling out the shapes of the minds inside the building. Details flooded into his mind. He sensed two people, unguilded humans. They were a couple who owned a nearby bakery. The two of them worked different shifts. Jace couldn’t hear their voices with his ears, but he could read their words in his mind as they spoke them.

“You haven’t even said how it was,” one was saying.

“I don’t know,” said the other. “Long and dull, just like any other day. Business is better now that the guilds are back. But still not as many customers as I’d like if we’re going to pay off the new oven.”

“I meant the stew. You said nothing about it.”

Jace clung to their words, balancing the two minds in his consciousness, huddling around the warmth of their conversation.

“Well, it was cold. And the beef was stringy.”

“You were home late.”

“The streets were crazy. The guilds were out in force again tonight. Boros enforcers, Rakdos rioters … I could barely get home.”

Jace snapped his consciousness back to his own mind. He pitied this couple, two of the countless innocents whose lives were impacted every day by the activities of Ravnica’s guilds. His mind flashed with imagery of Rakdos freaks bursting into his room at the inn, with Emmara standing defiant before them. Were these actual memories or fabrications—his imaginings of an event for which he had only seen the aftermath? Jace put his fingertips to his temples and pressed, as if he could wring the thoughts out of his head, or as if he could plug the gaping holes in his memory. He stared forward at nothing, trying to ignore that the edge of his cloak was lying in an unidentifiable puddle.

He shoved his hands in his cloak, and felt something in his pocket. He took out the finely crafted wooden leaf that Emmara had given him. It had the faintest fragrance of Emmara’s skin. She had told him it was a way to contact her, but he didn’t know if she would be able to respond. He didn’t even know if it would tell him if his message had reached its target—whether Emmara was alive or dead.

He let the artifact balance on his palm. It was so delicate that it moved slightly with his pulse.

“I need you,” he whispered.

The artifact blazed with white light for a moment, the intricately carved veins shining like white-hot wires, and Jace felt a tingling on his skin. Then the artifact faded, the veins attenuating to threads as fragile as ash, and it crumbled in his hand.

He hoped she could hear it, wherever she was. He hoped that if she had heard it, she knew that it meant he would find her. At least if she heard it, he thought, it meant that he had said the words.

Then he reached into his other pocket for the novelty coin he had found in his ruined room at the inn. It might have been dropped by the attackers. He examined the smirking demon’s face on the token—probably a sign of the Rakdos, considering their association with demonic forces. He read the other side: RUN WITH THE ROUGH CROWD. Maybe it was a kind of rallying cry for the Cult of Rakdos, he thought, or a recruitment slogan. Or something else.

He stood abruptly. Suddenly, he knew where to look.

***