Disclaimer: All card names, non-original places and people are property of Wizards of the Coast.
Ancient Grudge
Soft and unsettling, the peals of the ghoul-caller bells started well into the celebrations, echoing mournfully over the fens of Gavony on the Feast of Goldnight. The answering tremors scrabbling at the mausoleum walls roused Grafwarden Carsten from his brandy and sent him reaching for his blessed crossbow. He felt safer in his gatehouse with it close, but the silver bolts seemed a vanishing failsafe as centuries of sigils and Avacynian wards all failed to quiet the dead stirring in their tombs.
Carsten had dealt with necromancers before. Usually a lone loose cannon, maybe two, they'd dig up a few graves and carry their prize back to the hills. They never tried anything like this, never on a holy day. He sprinted down the rows of grafstones, swerving and aiming his weapon wildly into space, but the ghoul caller was nowhere in sight, and the bells kept ringing. The hallowed earth shuddered and cracked under his feet as a pair of shriveled black hands clawed their way into the light. Shrieks, groans, and snarls rose in cacophony beneath the grafs, and Carsten, transfixed in horror, shot a bolt at the thing's skull as soon as it surfaced. His trembling hands misfired, and the bolt lodged in the zombie's festering shoulder with a sickening thud. Its desiccated face turned towards him and Carsten could have sworn it leered, its withered hands grasping at the earth for purchase as it struggled out of the grave.
He dashed for the gate, dodging the hands and mouths of the slavering undead that not even his blessed silver could banish back to the tomb. The hungry ghouls would head for the town; he bolted the iron gate of the grafyard behind him and prayed to Avacyn the thick stone walls would hold long enough for him to rally the cathars.
The dirt road into town seemed to stretch out over the moors for an eternity as Carsten ran and prayed, entreating the warrior angels of Flight Goldnight to arrive in time. Most necromancers wouldn't dare show their faces on the angels' feast day, when the sun didn't sink below the horizon and the whole flight passed over the earth in battle formation. He pushed himself harder for fear the necromancers knew something he didn't. Wards, amulets, blessed silver—even the cathars relied on these, and the most powerful wards at the church's disposal hadn't stopped the ghoul-callers from raising a zombie horde.
The midnight sun hovered low in the sky, lighting up the empty road as wild moors gave way to cultivated fields. The spires of the village houses, decked out in colored prayer flags, drew nearer with Carsten's every frantic step. A hymn to Avacyn rang out triumphantly from the orchestra arrayed in the town square, swelling in pitch as the grafwarden drew near. In front of the orchestral pavilion, villagers were singing, drinking, and dancing, celebrating the coming of the angels and a prosperous year on their farms with toasts and exchanges of gifts. Carsten touched the Avacynian shrine at the head of the road for good luck and shouldered through the crowd, belaboring and grappling his way toward the cathar outpost at the center of the mayhem. Gaining the door, he slammed it shut behind him and shouted over the din of carousing soldiers.
"Arm yourselves! We've lost the cemetery!" He leaned against the doorframe and caught his breath as the cathars fell quiet. "Ghoul-callers have raised the dead!"
A few drunken giggles punctured the silence. Zombie attacks didn't happen on holy days. The detachment captain looked up from her game of dice and slowly got to her feet.
"You're sure, Carsten? It wasn't just a body snatcher or an angry geist?" The soldiers shifted uneasily in their seats.
"Ghoul-callers, captain. I heard the bells and saw the corpses climbing out of the grafs. The old wards and sigils didn't do a thing, blessed silver didn't stop 'em, either."
She sighed, picked up her tricorn hat from its perch on the back of her chair and tugged it onto her head. Discipline was not the order of the day on the holiest day of the year; many of the cathars didn't even put down their drinks.
"Grab your weapons, soldiers. Gunter, take your squadron and head for the cemetery. The rest of you assemble out back."
Amid discontented grumblings about Carsten's ineptitude, the cathars threw on their armor, readied their blades, and organized in half-hearted formation on the side of town facing the cemetery. Whatever undead abominations might be dredged up out of the grafs would soon be laid to rest by the host of angelic warriors. No ghoul callers would dare sound their bells to raise the dead when the angels showed up.
The stench of putrefying flesh wafts over the broken stone collar of an Avacynian shrine at the entrance to a nameless little town on the fens of Gavony. Sorin has seen half a dozen such towns so far, emptied of living souls and rotting silently on the windswept moors. It doesn't seem to matter how many nameless horrors he banishes to the void; the people of Innistrad are being routed, driven before the ascending darkness to their last remaining refuge behind the high walls of Thraben. Avacyn, the archangel, the crown jewel of his creation, is missing from her post. The protective magic that hinges on her power has ceased to function. He cannot forgive himself for not having acted sooner.
It has been two days since he came home, but he has felt Avacyn's absence for much longer. He is busy, and the mess on Zendikar hasn't shortened the list of worlds he needs to save. But Innistrad is helpless without her, and he sees the fruits of his inaction in the bleached bones that blanket the square before him, in the charred spires of the blasted houses that jut into the darkness like the masts of a foundered ship. He stepped out of the Blind Eternities into Gavony thinking it would be safe. Now he wonders if even Thraben, with its army of cathars, can outlast the maelstrom that is soon to beset it.
In the ravaged hamlets and litany of corpses, he sees the awful zenith of Edgar's hypocrisy.
When Avacyn disappeared, Edgar should have stepped up as Innistrad's savior. Here was the perfect opportunity for the architect of one of its greatest evils to live up to his lofty words and shoulder the burdens he had thought to assign himself. Armies of vampires should have fought side by side with the cathars to protect humanity, with Edgar leading the charge to defend his reluctant subjects. Edgar Markov, sire of all vampires, Innistrad's erstwhile self-proclaimed messiah, should have owned a fraction of the responsibility he claimed to exercise by culling defenseless humans to sate his hunger.
Under no circumstances should he have rested on his laurels in Markov Manor, feasting on human blood while watching the world burn.
Edgar might have saved himself and his kin from Sorin's judgment, if for one critical moment his conceit might have been turned to the benefit of Innistrad's people. Had Edgar even once demonstrated the compassion he invoked to justify his debaucheries, he might have earned leniency for the Markov clan. Instead, he has arrived at the final test of his usefulness and shown himself for the selfish, depraved monster Sorin has always known him to be.
Sorin has already failed. He sees it in the ruins of this hapless village he should have protected. Edgar will pay for his refusal to lift a finger to do the same, and all his clan will suffer with him. Sorin has come home.