Author's Note: I assume magic in the MTG universe to be land-based, hence drawing on the five colors of mana with their corresponding land types. I take the liberty of assuming that mages can draw on mana colors that do not match their exact geographical location (e.g. using blue magic while in a forest), as long as the appropriate color is present somewhere on the plane in question. The magic that will come into play in the rest of the story operates on this premise, but some chaos magic may still work its way in regardless.
Harrowing Journey
The driver pushed the emaciated chestnut horses as fast as they could go, snapping the whip at irregular intervals as the last traces of sunlight faded from the russet sky. Through the thin glass of the window, the stark skeletons of bare trees sped past Sorin's eyes as their road wound upwards into the mountains. The frail, pallid light of the stars was only intermittently visible through the haze in the air, and the new moon saw Stensia plunged into blackness now that the sun had set. With a muttered charm, the servant driver conjured a globe of light into the lantern hanging from the carriage roof outside.
"He knows a little practical magic," Runo explained, crossing his arms and leaning back into the cushioned seat. "How to conjure light, fire, that sort of thing. Not quite magister caliber, but more than adequate for a hired man."
Sorin nodded. "How long have you known about this?" He asked, his eyes fixed on the soaring mountain peaks that loomed in the teeth of the Geier Reach. The carriage jostled him against the wall as it struggled up the steep hills.
"Since last month," he admitted. "I thought Edgar had told you."
"That condescending speech of his was the first I'd heard of it. I don't like the idea of performing a summoning and a binding all at once, and not with all this secrecy. How powerful is the demon, exactly?"
Runo shrugged his shoulders and looked away uncomfortably. "He's quite strong, Sorin. That's why we have seven magisters to contain him. Just keep your wits about you, hold up your part of the wards, and everything will be fine."
The road was starting to narrow, and the withered trees thinned out in the rocky soil as the earth sloped steeply upward. If the provincial authorities had paid any attention to this stretch of road in the past few years, it didn't show it. The driver checked the horses' pace and steered them clumsily around a rut, lurching the carriage precipitously to one side before it righted itself with a thud.
Sorin grunted as he straightened himself up from the wall he'd been thrown against. The blue painted sides of the carriage pressed tightly around the two men, jostling them shoulder to shoulder as the vehicle bounced over the unkempt road. "Are we heading for a pass?" Sorin leaned an arm against the wall and examined Runo's impassive face. "I haven't traveled this road before."
"To be honest, I haven't either. Edgar picked the site, I think he said it was some sort of isolated clearing. You know how choosy he can be about anything to do with his projects."
"Do you know the demon's name?"
Runo blushed. "Yes, but I can't tell you. It wouldn't be wise to even say it before the wards are in place and we're ready to begin."
"He's that powerful?"
"I'm just being cautious. You can't be too careful on the night of a new moon."
His carefully chosen words got Sorin's hackles up. "Then why don't we postpone the ritual until the logical time for it: the full moon on summer solstice, when protective magic will be at its strongest?"
"It's Edgar's idea. Don't ask me why."
"If you don't trust him, why did you agree to help him summon a demon?" Sorin glared, righteous indignation causing his fists to clench.
"Because what we're doing tonight is the only way to save Stensia." Runo answered firmly. "I don't have all the answers, but you don't need to worry about anything going wrong. I know all the magisters personally. The seven who will be managing the demon are all competent, level-headed, and well versed in summoning magic. Vera Athelgard is leading the preparations and, trust me, nothing will go awry on her watch. She was the dean of magical theory while I was a university student in Thraben. She'll make sure all the wards are laid out properly."
The carriage pressed tightly against the mountain rock as the earth to one side fell away into an unfathomable cliff. Some pebbles knocked off the edge by the staccato beat of the horses' hooves tumbled down into the sightless dark. Ever upward they climbed, sweat flecking the horses' bony flanks as the driver's steady hands steered them away from the brink. Sorin stared out at the jagged mountains silhouetted against the darkness and touched the smooth red stone of his aegis for comfort in the gloom.
"It's going to be alright," Runo offered after a while. "The thirteen most powerful mages in Stensia can manage a demon and a river spirit. We aren't second-rate demonologists trying to summon a lord of the Ashmouth."
Sorin's sense of foreboding was not alleviated by the attempted jest. Runo was, to all appearances, as taken in by Edgar's scheme as everyone else was. For a moment, feeling more isolated than ever after listening to more of Runo's prevarications, he considered boycotting the ritual altogether. Let them summon their demon, he'd keep following the road into the next province and build a life for himself away from Stensia's famines and Edgar's machinations. But the consequences of doing so weighed heavily on his conscience. The ritual had been planned for thirteen mages. If something were to go wrong in his absence, if the demon were to break free and kill the summoners, or even rampage through Stensia, the weight of their deaths would stay with him for the rest of his life.
The two men sat in silence as the path leveled out a little and the bumping and shaking of the carriage quieted down. Outside the luminescent radius emanating from the servant's conjured light, the creeping darkness deepened to absolute pitch. The creaking of the axles and stamping of the horses' hooves were the only sounds apart from the whispered passage of the wind through the mountains' teeth.
Gradually, the barren rock gave way to the towering spires of old coniferous trees. Blighted like the rest of Stensia, their fallen needles formed a carpet on the forest floor as their bare brown branches jutted into the night. The ordinary chirping and chattering sounds of birds and animals were nowhere to be heard. Mountain streams and natural springs should have sustained these elevated woodlands as the fields withered and died, but the drought's grasping fingers had clawed their way to the outermost edges of the province and spared nothing within their reach. Runo sat perfectly still as they crossed the lifeless waste, the gold trimming on his blue coat shining faintly in the dark as it fell across his knees. He watched the road expectantly, following the careening sweep of the conjured light with eager eyes as it cast shadows through the forest. At the edge of the tree line, a battered wooden signpost pointed the way to Kessig. Sorin fidgeted uneasily at the indication of how far they had traveled. There should be no reason to hold the ritual this far distant from human habitation. If the magisters were as competent as everyone kept assuring him, the Markovs' basement should have provided enough space and privacy to carry the thing out successfully.
The driver gave a sharp tug on the reins, and the horses came to a stumbling halt. Runo leapt out the door and took stock of their surroundings, folding his arms impatiently across his chest. Sorin scooted over the seat and followed him out, wrapping his black coat tightly around his thin frame as his breath misted in the mountain chill. The smell of decaying plant matter hung thickly in the frigid air, and the moonless sky, broken up by the encircling mountain peaks, loomed black as the void. They had stopped at a crossroads, and the barren forest with its dead brown needles hemmed them in from every side. His blue-gold livery strangely out of place in the isolated wilds, the driver jumped from his seat and checked on the horses, soothing their agitated stamping with gentle touches and quiet whispers.
"This is the place, milord?" he inquired of Runo, stealing a glance at his master as Stormkirk paced slowly around the intersection of the two dirt roads.
"Yes, Martin. You did well getting us here so early. There'll be some extra pay waiting for you when we get home." He stared off into the distance, not meeting the servant's anxious gaze. Sorin surveyed the scene with apprehension, trying and failing to discern the location of Edgar's mysterious clearing from the line of the trees. That Edgar had picked a site so far off the beaten path boded poorly for his intentions. Sorin's hand strayed to the pendant of his aegis, but the comfort of the little ritual did not settle the nervous energy that hummed at the periphery of his aura.
A shrieking blast of wind shattered the stillness, and the horses snorted and thrashed in their fittings. As the lantern swung wildly in the upset, the blasted forest cast leering shadows at terrible angles in the sudden illumination. Malevolent black energy coalesced in the center of the crossroads, an awful niblis of malice wresting itself into physical form out of the void of the new moon.
"Watch yourself!" Runo barked at his servant as blue fire crackled at the tips of his fingers. Martin struggled to control the rioting horses with his shaking hands and cowered back. The crossroads geist was enormous, and the seething black hatred of its energy leant it power beyond the scope of an ordinary spirit. Its slitted red eyes burned like the brimstone fires of the Ashmouth and leered at the petrified servant with hunger. Sorin took a front stance before the emerging spectre and grounded himself in the earth, reaching deep into the dying lands of Stensia for pure white mana. The magical energy swept up in a rush through his core as he pooled it into his hands, shimmering white challenging the rotted black of the infuriated geist. In his mind's eye, he imagined the writhing tendrils of the dark spirit being swept up in a blast of his white energy and banished back to the void. He held the image in his sight, pouring all his willpower into its realization, and let loose at the geist the purifying mana converged in his hands.
"Exile." The command word he had learned so long ago flowed as a natural manifestation of his will, tearing into the seething body of the geist and sending it screaming into the ether. As the magical energies around the crossroads shuddered and settled back to stillness, Runo lowered the blue shields he had readied around Martin and turned back to Sorin.
"Nicely done," he complimented, straightening up and starting to regain composure. "You acted more surely than I. Perhaps Edgar was right to include you in this after all."
Martin had again busied himself attending to the horses, his hands running gently along their sweat-flaked flanks as he fought to keep them calm. "I don't expect there to be any more trouble," Runo told him authoritatively. "Stay with the carriage, point the way to the next group that comes through here, and sleep if you can." Martin nodded absently as Stormkirk cast an appraising eye over the forest.
"This is where we leave the road, Sorin. Follow me."
Runo led the way into the woods, snapping twigs under the fine brown leather of his boots as the mages moved deeper into the trees. As the lone lantern of Runo's carriage receded farther and farther behind them, he conjured another globe of magical to light to brighten their path through the dark shadows of the dead forest. Sorin was hopelessly lost, and the absence of the moon and stars left him with no means of orienting himself. How Stormkirk knew they were moving in the right direction was beyond him. The uniform desiccation of the earth left few landmarks, the dead brown trees and underbrush stretching endlessly off into the night.
"Stop!" The high, nasally voice came from just outside the scope of Runo's magical light, from a frail cloaked figure concealed in the shadows. "Your names, please," he demanded.
Runo held up his open palms in placation. "Is that you, Dragomir? Why don't you come out where we can see you."
The man who stepped into the radius of conjured visibility was short and squat, with plain green robes and a balding head framed by a fringe of greying brown hair. Sweat beaded across his brow as he struggled to summon green magic for a defensive spell; pale and sickly, the green fire trailed listlessly around his short fingers before sputtering out into the air. Sorin knew green mana, and the mages who drew on it, had suffered as the life and natural energy had slowly been choked out of Stensia by the drought, but the situation was obviously more dire than he realized. Runo laughed at the man's painstaking efforts.
"Dragomir, it's me, Runo Stormkirk. If you don't recognize me by now, your memory must be worse than I thought. This young man is Sorin Markov, Edgar's grandson. May we proceed to the ritual site now? Edgar sent us on ahead."
Dissipating the weak spell with a wave of his hand, Dragomir turned and motioned them to follow. "It's not far. Vera warned me to be careful."
"The lines of the circle are already drawn?" Runo asked, picking his way through the trees after the green mage.
"Yes, that's been taken care of. Don't disrupt anything," Dragomir ordered over his shoulder to Sorin as he pushed aside the spindly limbs of a dead tree. "Vera wants to purify each of us before we enter the circle."
That made sense for a summoning. Bringing excess magical energy into a summoning circle could be dangerous.
"All the preparations have been taken care of?" Sorin probed. The energy he had called on to banish the crossroads geist still hummed through his body, making him restless and wakeful in the night and eager for the challenge of the ritual. Dragomir kept wending their way through the forest.
"Yes, yes, everything's ready. Except for what Edgar's bringing himself," he added as an afterthought.
"What's my grandfather bringing?"
"Just some things for the altar." Dragomir sniffed, pausing as the murmuring of human voices up ahead reached them through the trees. "Not long now."
The green mage's offhand dismissal of Sorin's questions only heightened the latter's unease. The objects on the altar would be crucial to the success of the summoning ritual. There would be artifacts to amplify the lead mage's power and protect him, as well as offerings to induce the spirits into the circle. Since a demon was involved, the offerings were likely to be gruesome, but Edgar's extra precautions surrounding this centerpiece of the summoning were far from encouraging. The group continued in silence until the dead woods thinned out into Edgar's clearing.
The hushed voices they had heard at a distance fell silent at their approach, and seven heads turned to examine them as Dragomir waved them inside. The site was broad, spacious, and flanked by the towering peaks of several mountains that rose impassively into the sky. Dominating the center of the clearing, the magical circle had been laid out in measured lines of pure white salt that sparkled ethereally in the yellow glow of conjured light. Dragomir rushed over to the assembled group and scuttled back in the company of a tall woman who drew near to Sorin and Runo in a few powerful strides. Her long black robes fluttered out behind her over the frozen earth, and as she approached, the silver pentagram around her neck hummed with magical energy. She was Edgar's age, if not older, and a smile brightened the deep lines of her face as she embraced Runo in welcome.
"Runo, my old student. It's been too long. Don't suppose that two hundred page monstrosity of an incantation research paper ever did you any good as a priest?"
"It gave me something to apply myself to as a hot-blooded young mage," he answered, returning the gesture with an affectionate pat on the back. Dragomir excused himself with an obsequious bow and left to resume his post. "Vera, I'd like you to meet Sorin Markov."
The white-haired mage scrutinized Sorin with a critical eye. Her thin lips pursed in appraisal as her sharp brown eyes took in his haggard appearance.
"I've a great deal of respect for your grandfather, Sorin, and he tells me you know your way around a spellbook. Do you understand what you'll be doing tonight?"
Sorin struggled to give a truthful answer in spite of his limited knowledge. "I'll be holding the wards from one arm of the pentagram. That's all I know."
"And what kind of work have you done with wards previously?"
"I specialize in white magic. I've held wards for summoning rituals before, though admittedly never anything of this magnitude," he conceded.
Vera's angular, wizened face was inscrutable. "You'll have to weave your magic together with four other mages in the pentagram tonight. Can you do that?"
Sorin nodded. "I've done some work of that nature with my grandfather before. I can handle it."
"That'll have to do, then," she sighed. "You're the only one of the mages here whom I haven't personally seen do quality spellwork. I don't like it, but I'll take Edgar at his word when he says you're competent. I'll be leading our little group from the apex of the pentagram. You'll be standing at the lower right arm, next to Runo and across from Ivan Falkenrath. Stay focused, follow my lead, and you'll come out alright."
The old magister grabbed Runo's arm with one bony hand and steered him over to join the other mages, leaving Sorin alone with his thoughts. Isolated in the crags of the Geier Reach, the forlorn emptiness of the ritual space with its exact lines of salt and frightened magisters bore silent witness to the impending fruition of Edgar's designs. The mountain peaks pressed in on them from all sides, looming sentinels unresponsive to the preparations underway and the forces soon to be invoked. Sorin sat down on the hard earth and searched for his magical center, but its calm was elusive in the sibilant buzz of nervous energy that hung in the air.
The magisters held their breath as the snapping of branches announced Dragomir's scurried return to the clearing. He came at a run, his green robes smudged with the brown detritus of the forest and his wispy hair ruffled across the crown of his bald head.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he gasped, "I present to you the arch magister, Edgar Markov."
Ulquiorra9000- Thanks for reviewing! Glad you like the story so far. I briefly touch on pre-Avacynian beliefs in chapter three, but I hope to look more into it later once Avacyn comes on the scene. I imagine the conflict between the ascendant Church of Avacyn and the followers of the old gods must have been interesting to watch.