Planar Chaos
Portal Saga
Chapter 10: Meanwhile
"Thanks for helping me out with this, Marthel," Odom said as the two planeswalkers hefted several large boxes, staggering under their weight. "I can't really show my face around Nivix until I find a way to get that portal sphere from Rinok."
"No problem, but will Zegana take kindly to your primary offices moving into the Combine?" the dark skinned planeswalker asked, tossing his head to get a stray loc out of his eye.
"I'm as much of a member of the Simic as I am of the Izzet. She can't really do anything about it according to the bylaws on inter-guild cooperation. Besides, Zameck isn't my favorite of the guild halls, but she's the one who insisted my offices be there in the first place so she could keep an eye on me. Everyone who had a hand in Krajj or worked directly under Momir in some way has to be watched."
"Zarek must be so relieved you won't be around for a while," Marthel said. "You told me your last encounter with him went worse than expected."
"Better. Oh you should have seen the look on his face. He thinks that if Niv Mizzet finds out about other worlds that he'd flip his lid, but if there's one thing I've learned in my time on this plane, it's never underestimate the Firemind. You can't be fifteen thousand years old, be one of the original signers of the guildpact, and not know what planeswalkers are."
"So what exactly does Niv Mizzet want with the portal sphere anyway?" Marthel asked, shifting his weight to keep the boxes from tumbling down on top of him. I should have brought Nadia, he thought, she could carry this without any problem.
"Honestly I suspect he just wants it to have something rare and valuable. The Firemind is by no means an idiot, but he is still a dragon. I know he's been disappointed since Beleren solved the maze rather than Ral. Mostly it just makes him disappointed in Ral, especially after all that trouble with Melek. A rare artifact of unknown provenance or power could provide him with a renewed sense of relevancy and security."
Marthel screwed up his face in confusion. "When did you start getting into psychology?"
"Something I picked up from Ash. She borrows, I copy."
Something about the way he said it piqued Marthel's interest. "You haven't even heard from her since the maze? How long ago was that?"
"Two months, 15 days."
"You're keeping track?"
"Not consciously. Brobecue misses her, though, so it's hard to not acknowledge how long it's been."
"She'll come back, wherever she went to. She always does."
"I hope so."
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"Well look who's back after their long vacation," Mirko cried, smirking the insufferable smirk Lisandra had long wanted to wipe off of his face. She knew she was a far more suitable heir to Szadek than Mirko could ever be. Why he'd been selected by Lazav to run the maze, she'd never know.
Except she did. Her own kin had been chosen to be the Selesnyan representative, not that Emmara would ever acknowledged Lisandra if they met in public.
"It was not a vacation, Mirko. I have been working on a private project, and think I might be on the verge of a breakthrough."
"Regardless, your presence has been missed. Szadek is practically a ghost of himself." Mirko began laughing at his own joke. The ghost of House Dimir's former leader haunted the halls occasionally, less and less often these days, preferring to leave most of his ideas in Mirko or, increasingly, Lisandra's hands. She'd seen the factions forming for years between Lazav and dear departed Szadek's spiritual successors. It was only a matter of time before things came to a head.
"I miss my office," Lisandra said, ducking down to avoid one of Mirko's embraces. She skirted the edge of the wall, ready to duck and send him fangs first into the stone if he tried anything else. "Why can't you take a hint, Mirko," she mused to herself. "There are plenty of petty little mortals more interested in you than I am."
She rolled her eyes, unlocking the door to her office. Everything remained in its place, precisely as she had left it some indeterminable amount of time ago.
"You've been gone a while," her spectral benefactor said coolly, floating through the wall.
"It took me longer to get back than I anticipated," she said, deliberately vague. In death Szadek had lost some of the power he'd had in life.
One mortal and one spiritual pair of eyes swept the room, settling on a fly clinging to a moth eaten tapestry hanging behind Lisandra's favorite red leather wingback chair. A gift from a friend, that particular type of leather couldn't be found on Ravnica.
"Dahni, I know you're there." Lisandra sat down in her chair as she addressed the fly behind her. "Lazav will have to teach you better than that if you're going to pull one over on a couple of old pros."
The fly dropped from the wall, changing back to its typical form of an adolescent human. Little could be seen of his clothing other than an oversized cape made from the same material as Lazav's. It dragged the ground behind him.
"Dahnivan Trent," Szadek's ghost began, "did nobody teach you that it's disrespectful to spy on your elders?"
"Isn't that what this guild does for a living?" the boy quipped back.
"Yes, but we don't spy on each other," Lisandra said. "House Dimir is in a special place. Most people forget we exist, and those that know of us are few and far between. It takes constant work to maintain that place, and I'll not have some cocksure shapeshifting kid ruin that just because he's Lazav's pet project."
"Yes, Lisandra. Sorry, Lisandra," Dahni said, shuffling out of her office, hanging his head as he did so.
"No, I don't believe I was too harsh on him," Lisandra answered the spectral Szadek's unspoken question. "You know as well as I do this guild is fracturing." She rested her head in her gloved hands, almost forgetting about the Eyes of Phenax covered by said gloves. The layer of fabric did little to block the God of Deception's magic. A field of green and white flowers bloomed in Lisandra's mind's eye. A lone elf in a white dress with flowing blonde hair tossed by a strong wind stood in the middle of it. She recognized its facial features, not her sister's but her own. Lisandra immediately jerked her hands away with a hiss.
Szadek was gone. Lisandra at last had blessed silence and solitude, but now it would be spent pondering her strange vision.
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Sverre entered his lab once more, closing and locking the door behind him for good measure. Oona wouldn't be looking for him. The former Queen of the Fae had taken up afternoon naps during their residency in Helheim. Something about the ever present twilight that was only broken in a few places by shafts of sunlight leading to Medheim above made her drowsy, and Sverre had to agree with her. However, this was the only time he could be alone to continue his work. The sphere had escaped him, not that it would help him achieve immortality or godlike power, but there were other things he could do until the next ancient piece of planeswalker magic surfaced.
He felt the shifting of the earth. Ragnarok was coming, the tree was preparing itself to once again draw strength from Helheim to birth heroes and villains alike. He thought of the stone circles in the palace courtyard illuminated by the midday sun. The ancient etchings displayed in shadow against the bright blue of the stone described the process in detail and were possibly an anchor created by whatever made this plane, be it the Multiverse or a long dead planeswalker. Sverre had, as of yet, found no indication that this plane was artificial, but then again as the saying went "they don't make them like they used to."
AN: So I had to dive deep and do a lot of math for this, and all of the Ravnica stuff. Based on what I've found through the Wiki and stories (chiefly those featuring Argus Kos), humans appear to age around half as fast on Ravnica as in the real world and on other planes, likely due to the casing surrounding the plane in a similar fashion to the Shard of Twelve Worlds. Using math with the assumed figure of 112 for Teysa's age and the fact that she was around and an adult for the episode with Krajj and the Nephilim, the loose timeline I've found is that said thing happened roughly 50 years prior to the events of RtR block and everyone's favorite Boy in Blue becoming our Living Guildpact. Since this fanfiction picks up shortly after that occurrence with our main storyline and few one shot/backstories take place shortly before Krajj and, more often, shortly before RtR, I have some tentative grasp on ages. This is all until Wizards comes along and retcons it, of course, but for now it seems that Odom, as a character, is in the 60-70 age bracket, putting him physically at 30-35. Elf age timelines are harder to pin down, but it's safe to say Lisandra was at least a young adult before running out on her own and getting picked up by House Dimir.