The Archaeologist
Faran's eyes, nose, and cheeks were met suddenly with the harsh scraping and battering of a sand-like substance being thrown through the air at hurricane speed. He turned away from the wind and dropped to his knees, pulling his thick coat closer around his body to protect himself from the coarse storm. He'd had the bad luck to arrive in the midst of one of this plane's famous – or infamous – salt storms, although exactly where he had arrived was uncertain. Despite learning as much as he could about the plane beforehand and attempting to prepare for the worst, it seemed he still wasn't fully prepared for the conditions.
He pulled down his goggles, lifted his hood, and tried to look around to get his bearings. Nothing but white and brown filled his vision, and when he accidentally turned towards the wind a degree or two too far, his wrapped coat, protective jacket, and shirt suddenly inflated and filled with the wind. He turned back as fast as he could, but he could feel his whole torso attire now filled with rough granules of salt, digging into his skin underneath all his layers. His thick woven trousers, buttoned into his specially-made socks, maintained a tight seal around his legs for now, but Faran had underestimated the force that the salt storms might contain and, based on the strain he was feeling between the trousers and socks, he might lose even that convenience given time.
Even if Ravnica wasn't a distant plane from Dominaria, and Dominaria wasn't the hardest planeswalk Faran had ever done, the storm made certain that he wasn't going to be going back until it abated.
He tucked his coat under his knees, removed a heavy woollen glove, and put a bare hand to the shifting ground. In the meantime, he may as well get started.
[-]
Although Ravnica was unaware of the existence of planeswalkers and the multiverse at large, that didn't prevent the plane from housing the largest concentration of planeswalkers known. Urbanity, convenience, civility, and relative stability compared to many other planes were all keys to this congregation of planeswalker activity, Faran had concluded, and having a planeswalker as the Living Guildpact of the plane certainly helped as well. Faran hadn't spent much time with Beleren, especially not recently; he seemed to have been spending increasingly more time unavailable to 'unofficial' visitors, which was the excuse that was usually used when one wanted to discuss planeswalker business with him. But the brief time that Faran had spent in Beleren's sanctum, particularly it's library, had resulted in discoveries that had… disturbed him.
Faran was a Ravnican citizen, born, raised, and educated. An unusually large portion of those walking the planes were as well, thanks to the high population density of Ravnica. That meant he had grown up and learned about a world that was entirely regimented, organised – structured. His youth consisted of a cityscape that stretched across the whole world, endless streets, spires, vast colosseums, schools, circuses that were always too loud and rowdy, well-kept parks, fountains, markets, abandoned quarters, ghost quarters (rarely the same thing) – and the guilds.
The guilds had fascinated Faran. Always. But it wasn't their current incarnations that most interested him. Even the Dimir with their secretive ranks – who had had to perform an impressively quick and transformative public-image campaign in order to fit in with the other guilds after their conspiracy to shatter the original Guildpact backfired – didn't hold his interest as much as his area of expertise: the history of the guilds, and of his world.
The common people didn't remember except in one or two vague and surreal children's tales, but Ravnica wasn't always the total cityscape it was today. In the distant past, thousands of years ago, the wilds that are now few and far between and served as the bastions of the Gruul had once dominated the plane, and it was the city that was the encircled habitat. The expansion of the city that came to define and become synonymous with the plane had written over much of that history, a history of barbarism converted into civilisation, the wilderness transformed into domiciles. Oceans were covered over by stone pavements and forgotten for millennia, forests were trimmed into orchards, mountains mined, then worked, then turned into the very spires that took their place.
And through it all, as far as Faran could determine from the fossil record he had spent his life building, right from the start of the city through to the creation of the Guildpact, to the dissension that broke it, to the modern day, there were the guilds.
[-]
There were fragments of history everywhere here, even beneath this arbitrary patch of ground being battered by a storm he had happened to arrive upon. They captured his attention, overcoming the attack of the withering storm: Strange shards of metal infused with mana, evidence of tissue that had decomposed but had clearly been altered, elements in the earth that marked the soil beneath the salt as having experienced climate shifts and a terrible explosion… or two?
No doubt that this place had many secrets in its past, so much it remembered, so many stories to tell. But most importantly, it had so much crucial information that had to be brought back to light. So that other places, other planes, might not become like this one; scarred, blasted, destroyed. Or worse.
He looked broader: warped helmets, breastplates, and swords were scattered around, well preserved for their age and use. Perhaps buried shortly after they fell? And mixed in among them – there! A clue to what he was looking for: metal and flesh twisted together, the very ground around it feeling tainted. Segmented, with claws and cutting implements at one end, the length of a man's spine…
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Faran became a member of the guilds as part of a joint project between the Azorius and Simic, with some involvement from a few of the more temperate Izzet scholars: a project to learn about the history of Ravnica from the land it was built on, search for fossils and relics that would shed light about the process of building their great city, the creation and evolution of the guilds. He found evidence of early Azorius law-magic in inscribed stones and slates, some of which even still had some mana in them; ancient attempts at bringing order to the world. Tools with shapes that hinted at a wicked edge – the start of the Cult of Rakdos, or perhaps a Gruul hunter's weapon? A fossil of a creature that was like no other, living or dead. Could it be a species that had simply gone extinct? Or could the Simic biomancy indeed stretch back that far? He'd even found a roughly-cylindrical band of metal as wide as a human's arm buried next to an ancient woman's grave that gave him a shock when he took hold of it to pick it up – an ancient Izzet gauntlet! Crude, his modern-day Izzet colleagues commented – but functional. He'd even discovered that the guilds weren't always 'the guilds' – once, they had simply been factions at constant devastating war that had slowed the growth of the city, and had only developed into the guilds after the signing of the Guildpact.
Although Faran started as just a young man working in the lowest rungs of the project, which was only meant to last eighteen months, in that time he'd proven his worth to the project, his passion for the subject, and his determination to keep the project going. And keep going it did; Faran rose to the position of Head Archaeologist after only a few years, partly in thanks to the first head leaving the project to return to his biomancy after the scheduled eighteen months were up. Faran was driven by his longing to understand what had made his world, the city, and the guilds. So much of Ravnica was new, and so much of it ancient, and so few people seemed to be investigating how it all came to be. He was glad to the man leading those efforts, learning, building a living history. He even seemed to have a unique knack for telling the location of artefacts buried under the ground, as if they were calling to him from their earthen slumber. He'd spent almost forty years digging beneath the streets and few remaining wild places of Ravnica by the time Jace Beleren became the Living Guildpact, ultimate arbiter of all conflict.
They hadn't been an entirely peaceful forty years, however.
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There wasn't just one Tingler fossil here – there were dozens, maybe even hundreds. Luckily, they all seemed inert; whether from damage, starvation, or loss of command was uncertain. Their centipede-like bodies that Faran had read of seemed to have rotted away, leaving only the metallic shell behind. Faran could see that several Tingler fossils were nestled among otherwise-complete skeletons, and an equal number of spines were scattered about, as if casually discarded by a careless owner. He shuddered.
Clearly this was in fact the site of a large battle during the 'invasion' - the amount of remains Faran could sense, even with the storm battering him, was expanding just as fast as he expanded his search. He noticed that many of the skeletons in this area were humanoid – but not quite human. He had also noticed the some of what he had initially assumed was salt was in fact ordinary sand. Perhaps this place had been a desert at some point? And beneath even the sand, already hundreds – even thousands – of years of history, he could sense something else-
The wind's direction shifted, and with a popping noise that would have been barely audible even without the storm roaring over it, the buttons snapped off of Faran's protective trousers, and his body was met with another blast of scraping salt. Faran cut off his search abruptly, turning himself to face away from the direction of the wind again and tucking his legs in front of him. Ouch… His back and legs started complaining. He wasn't as agile as he had once been. Now he was curled into a ball in the middle of a raging salt storm, and without even his studies for comfort. Not much more could be learned from the ground here.
Oh well. He could wait. Patience would see him through, just as it always had.
[-]
Investigating ancient ruins in the liminal zone between the city and a jungle known to be Gruul territory, even after twenty-nine years of work, was always a dangerous proposition, and Faran and his team knew they had to search fast, dig efficiently, and get out quick. The only reason they even ventured this close to such dangerous rabble was that this particular trail seemed to point the way to information on the earliest days of the city – the very founding of Ravnica itself. The buildings in this area of the city were either high walled, strongly built, or in ruins, thanks to the eternal difficulty of expanding into this particular region and the terrible beasts that emerged from it to crush the stonework or topple spires with their great wings.
The Simic scout-creatures on the ground returned unharmed, and Azorius sky-patrols over the area didn't reveal any large creatures stomping through the area, so Faran's team received the go-ahead to move in and begin their excavations – on a plot that Faran had selected himself. If he were to find evidence or records or artefacts regarding the founding of the city, it would not just mark him as one of the greatest scholars in Ravnican history, it would be a huge breakthrough in his and his people's own understanding of their world. To the common citizen, Ravnica was, always had been, and always would be a colossal urban expanse, where the horizon was as distant as the stars. Faran could tell any common shop keep about the earliest days of Ravnica, but it wouldn't have any impact; the average person wouldn't have their worldview changed just by descriptions, no matter how vivid and authoritative. But with an artefact from that time, something that embodied the start of the city in physical form, Faran could show the world the truth about the start of the city – that there was a start of the city – and with that evidence he could bring perspective to the guilds, and to the people. With the knowledge that Ravnica wasn't always as tamed and advanced as it was today, it followed that there might the potential for further growth, advancement – and civility. Perhaps, if the spread of knowledge and a respect for the past and future disseminated enough, it might result in the dissolution of degenerate guilds like the Rakdos and Orzhov, the Dimir and perhaps even the Gruul, guilds that looked only to the now or their own advancement. It might result in a new era of learning and enlightenment. That was Faran's ideal.
He knew he was growing older, and while he was by no means an 'old man', he also knew that you could only keep up strenuous physical activity for so many years. He didn't want to leave his position, and he certainly didn't want to give up archaeology, but as he grew older his legs became stiffer, his back ached slightly more after every dig, his arms were weaker – and he began to find grey hairs hidden in his beard. But he was determined to find this piece of the puzzle himself, while he could.
But Faran's dreams, his excavations, and his skull were nearly all crushed under the enormous feet of a Gruul Rampager.
Somehow, it had evaded detection from both the ground and air, slipped through the jungle undergrowth with an unerring silence, and happened upon the archaeological team, which was completely unprepared for an interruption of that… magnitude. Restraining charms and barrier spells cast by quick-thinking Azorius mages slowed it down just enough to prevent its charge from flattening every living thing in front of it, giving most of the team enough time to get out of the way, but Faran, who was on his own in the deepest part of the excavations when the Rampager appeared, was still trapped just below surface level when its foot plummeted into the pit, appearing to crush the man whose age had taken his agility from him and turning its charge into a high-momentum roll. Shield-cordons, boxes of tools, tables covered with encouraging finds, all were crushed beneath the beast's unstoppable bulk. The rest of the archaeological team fled as fast as they could, as they had agreed to in the case of trouble. Most looked out for the Head Archaeologist, trying to see if he was among them, if he had escaped the beast – or if he had been crushed by it. None found him.
Faran had stared death in the face, the weight of a monster falling down upon him. He thought of his work, his timeline, the history he had been building, his project, his clue to the founding of the city that he had been on the cusp of finding… it wasn't enough. Death couldn't take him now. It just couldn't. Not when he was so close.
He just about felt something touch his nose and his head press against the wall of the pit when the whole world seemed to shift, like water, and then the Rampager was gone.
So was the jungle, and the excavations, and the team, and the spires of Ravnica that had been just barely visible in the distance above the canopy.
Instead, rocks floated in the sky, and the horizon was as clear as day.
[-]
As luck would have it, the storm was starting to weaken. When he glanced up to try and get a sense of the terrain around him, he could begin to make out what might be mountains in the distance. They surrounded him, the rock emerging from the salt dunes in stark brown contrast to the white powder that covered the desert. He could feel the presence of a particularly ancient artefact nearby, on surface level, possibly hidden in one of the rock faces, but the storm was still strong enough to prevent any exploration.
There were no trees or any water in sight. No living thing had disturbed him since he had arrived. The mana in this place was still, leylines were avoiding it. It seemed this part of Dominaria truly was a wasteland. This was no place to build a base of operations; Faran needed resources, local helpers, a stable place from which he could operate across the plane.
Despite the size of Dominaria and the distances he would have to cross in order to leave this desert, Planeswalking away didn't appeal to him. He wanted to learn more about the landscape, not jump over it. He needed to see the world that had survived those terrible beings he now sought to combat, and so much more besides. He was here to learn what made it so resilient, so that it's resilience could be emulated across the multiverse, wherever it was necessary.
Food and water wouldn't be an issue; he'd brought bags of Simic engineered foods in the lining of his coat, designed to be nutrient-dense and long-lasting, and water he could coax from the ground or conjure up at will as long has he had access to mana. He'd brought clothes for all weather, from glaring sun to biting winds to high mountaintops to ocean expeditions, all stored on his person in one way or another. He'd even been loaned a small Izzet trinket for self-defence: a device that could throw lightning, capable of incapacitating anything the size of a man, and perhaps distracting or scaring off a larger beast. Faran had told the guilds he was going on an expedition 'into the deepest wilds, as yet unexplored'. Having a reputation for trustworthiness and dependability – and of long-term expeditions into the 'wilderness' – became useful at times like this.
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Faran's mysterious talents for locating relics blossomed into full magical ability with the ignition of his 'planeswalker spark', as the locals of that strange world had called it, along with several other abilities that might have made his expeditions on Ravnica from then on much easier, if using them wouldn't expose this strange, unheard-of spark to the always inquisitive guilds.
That new world, Zendikar, made Faran feel thirty years younger. An entire plane, it's whole history still largely unknown, covered across its entire surface in ruins, relics, artefacts, crypts and tombs, legendary locations whispered of children's stories, tales of gods, shifting ground and treacherous landscapes – and a culture built around expeditions and teams who would dedicate months to the efforts of exploring it. He would have stayed there forever, if he could.
As it was, he had to leave Zendikar not long after he first arrived there, before he even had the chance to go on a single expedition. As much as he wanted to, and as much energy and new life had been breathed into him by the discovery this new world, and countless other worlds as well, he knew he had to maintain what he had on Ravnica, at least. Although the importance of his home plane had diminished slightly in the grand scheme of things with the discovery of the greater multiverse, he still wished to hold on to what he had spent a lifetime building.
He planeswalked back to Ravnica, explained his week-long absence with a 'lost in the jungle' story and that he had now recovered and found his way back, and resumed his post. They'd tried to fill the role in his absence, but no one else seemed up to the job. His team, his family, and his friends, although a little confused as to his survival, welcomed him back with warmth and open arms.
Afterwards, he managed to subtly use his heightened sensing abilities to increase his rate and success of excavation, although his clue to an artefact from the founding of the city, which he returned his team to shortly after his return to finish off, turned out to be a dead end. But this didn't deter him: he had found a new lease on life, and it drove him to continue his endeavours more vigorously than ever! In between his more traditional Ravnican digs, he would walk to Zendikar to spend a week or two adventuring across the changing landscape, travelling with a team of companions, reaching an ancient ruin for them to explore and then returning with the spoils from within. To the expedition house guides and those adventurers looking for wealth, it was the riches stored in those places that was their motivating force. But for Faran, it was like starting again from when he was a young man, with a blank canvas on which he would be able to expose the history of the world. And Zendikar was so much bigger than Ravnica, with a history so much more varied. Ravnica's history, he had found, followed a fairly predictable arc of turning barbarity into civility, of the guilds interactions oscillating between co-operation and conflict. The meat of his work there was on the everyday details of life, and of intricate political intrigues. But on Zendikar, there were grand temples, ancient prophecies, vast catacombs to explore. It was all so different, and it made Faran forget about every small ache he'd begun to develop in his body, made him realise not a single grey hair on his chin meant a damn thing, not when he had what he had, knew what he knew. Not when he was learning so much.
When the Implicit Maze was discovered on Ravnica – thanks in part to clues tracked down by Faran himself - and Jace Beleren became the Living Guildpact of Ravnica, Faran quickly determined that Jace was also a planeswalker. Approaching Beleren unofficially, he introduced himself and his project, and explained his history (including his love for Zendikar, which he had taken a break from recently to focus on the maze), and Jace, evidently feeling magnanimous given his recent adoption of responsibility, offered him access to his personal library, which was under construction at the time of their meeting. Faran's reaction to another world to explore, that of a vast inter-planar library, was similar to his enjoyment of Zendikar, if more sedentary.
But Faran didn't find just histories and relics in that place of knowledge. He also found the Phyrexians.
Beleren had books that chronicled the history of a multi-planar war against monsters that merged flesh and metal using terrible magic and surgery, turning the very inhabitants and combatants of the planes they attacked to their side. He read of terrible centipede-like creations, Tinglers, that tore out the spines of humanoids and took their place, killing the soldier and taking control of their body. Biological warfare, plagues, terrifying and unreal monstrosities, and tales of the horror of the combatants who had to fight them to defend their homes. Mostly this war had taken place a very, very long time ago, on a plane Faran had learned to be a central one to the multiverse, a plane called 'Dominaria', but recently, much more recently, the Phyrexians had resurfaced on a metal world known as 'Mirrodin'. The Mirrans had fought for their world with the aid of multiple planeswalker allies but despite their greatest efforts Mirrodin had fallen, and had been renamed 'New Phyrexia' by its conquerors. Faran read in these books of how the Phyrexians were like a plague that adapted to its environment and corrupted everything it touched, how they fought like an inexorable tide; without fear, without losses, without morale or ranks, and how it's leadership always wielded vast power. There were hints about the Phyrexians creating portals that led from one plane to another, and something about a place called 'Rath', about which Faran could learn little.
Phyrexians were nightmares made manifest, nightmares that took control of those who tried to fight against them and turned them into nightmares themselves. They wielded bio-engineering, like the Simic, but their creations weren't just vicious predators – they were disease vectors for an unstoppable plague. Like the Selesnyans they sought to spread the beliefs that they were devoted to – but their beliefs were in implanting living beings with metallic parts and turning all worlds into a living torture they called perfection. Like the Izzet, they sought progress, but their progress only made their creations ever more twisted. There was nothing to be admired or learned from in Phyrexia. Only terrible power.
Despite all this, however, the Dominarians had somehow managed to fend off the forces of Phyrexia. And if Faran was interpreting the loose bits of knowledge he could glean from the confused and dirty pages of Beleren's books properly, even managed to destroy their home plane and kill their greatest leader.
Fearing that the monsters on New Phyrexia might one day find a way to escape their plane and invade the rest of the multiverse, and that they might find their way to Ravnica or Zendikar, Faran immediately set about making preparations for an expedition to Dominaria. The Phyrexians couldn't be allowed to proliferate to the point where there was no stopping them, and if the ruins of this ravaged plane were the place to find answers as to how to stop them, then he would go there and use every skill he had learned over his career, over his entire life, to uncover them.
[-]
The salt storm was almost over now. It still rushed past Faran's hood, and he still felt grains rubbing up against his skin, but at least he could stand without being knocked down now. He could see in the distance that there were indeed large rock formations scattered around the desert, and in the closest, the largest of them all, a large crack led into the cliff face. The storm quickly dropped to a breeze and the sun shone clearer, but the ancient presence Faran had sensed was hidden deep inside the mountain, and Faran could see no way in other than the split-open face of the rock.
Faran trekked across the now calm salt flats, his coat and hood shielding him from the new sun, while shaking the salt out from his clothes. He reached the crack in the cliff, which he could now see was easily wide enough for him to just walk into. Once inside the sun provided little light as the path of the fissure twisted and turned as it descended into the mountain. Salt had flowed most of the way into the fissure, but as Faran travelled deeper and began to descend the depths of salt quickly became a carpet, then a sprinkling, and then it was gone.
Casting an illumination spell, he now he was walking on solid rock, but continuing to descend, while the ancient artefact still beckoned to him. This deep in the mountain the air was still and silent – but whenever Faran would round a corner to continue the descent, he could swear he heard the sounds of swords clashing underneath the sounds of his footsteps, as though far away... or long ago.
The fissure in the rock had somehow snaked its way through the mountain, dropping below the surface and leading him towards the artefact's location. It was unlike any other geological formation Faran had encountered, even on Zendikar. He finally approached the place where the whispers of history were emanating from, and, exiting the fissure, he surveyed the chamber. On one end in the distance, illuminated by his magic, he could see a shallow ramp of granules rising from near where the fissure emerged hundreds of meters into the distance, slowly ascending to meet the top of the cavern. Perhaps this was the original entrance of this cavern, clogged up by salt? At the opposite and of the chamber lay the artefact, and Faran turned to face it.
'By Azor…' he whispered under his breath.
Faran found himself in front of an arch standing on a raised platform, the height of a centaur holding itself tall. It was covered in rust, and clearly truly ancient. Its appearance was unlike anything Faran had ever seen – but of course, he had no other reference for architecture on this plane. Faran connected the arch to the battlefield and instantly recognised it from the books as a place that was somehow crucial to the entire story of how Phyrexia came to be, and how Dominaria was saved.
It was a gate to Phyrexia itself, hidden within the Caves of Koilos.