Stone and Moon (Stone and Blood reimagining):
This is a retelling of the Stony and Blood story posted on
Disclaimer: All works belong to the respective owners.
One thousand years ago
At last the hedron was finished. Spreading her arms, Nahiri shattered the stone dome around her and took a deep breath of fresh air.
How long was I in there? she wondered.
She shrugged off the passing thought and raised her arms, lifting the hedron stone high overhead in one smooth motion. A mere thought was all it took to turn it on, to link up the broken lines of the hedron network and repair the Eldrazi prison.
She dropped to one knee and put her palms to the ground. She could feel the titans' movement slowing as the restored prison drove them back into torpor. More troubling, Zendikar itself was still reacting—not just in Akoum, as it had since the Eldrazi were first bound, but all over. Quakes shook the ground and reshaped the landscape, surging waves changed coastlines, mighty winds scoured the canyons. Zendikar was twitching at the sting of the Eldrazi, and she suspected it might be some time before it fell quiet again.
She let herself sink into the earth and emerged once more in the Eye of Ugin. Placing her hands on the keystone hedron, she assured herself that the network was restored. She thought about calling out to Sorin and the Spirit Dragon again, but she had taken care of the situation. Zendikar was safe again, thanks to her own efforts. She didn't need the others.
That didn't alter the fact that they hadn't come, though. They had promised to return to Zendikar when called, to help her maintain the prison that she had guarded for countless centuries. But they had forsaken her, and the Eldrazi had swept across Zendikar once more.
Other feelings she had were all but forgotten. Concern and anxiousness, swelled up in her heart and they made her smile even as they made her ache. They made her feel alive—the sensation of her heart pounding in her chest, the sound of it in her ears, the movement of her muscles as her brow furrowed and her jaw tightened.
What had Sorin been doing all the years she had been cocooned here in the Eye of Ugin? Was he still alive? Had he forgotten her and her vigil over Zendikar? Had he succumbed to the same apathy that had held her for so long?
She would go and find him. See what had become of him. See what he was currently doing.
And then she would return and walk among her people again, she would teach and laugh and love again, and it would matter again. It would all matter.
Nahiri laid a gentle hand on the wall of the chamber and it melted away as she opened a pathway through the Blind Eternities. The walls of the chamber became bleak cliffs in a desolate mountain range. She took a deep breath of unfamiliar air and stepped into this other plane, eager to find her oldest friend.
Nahiri cast herself through the chaos of the Blind Eternities, the space between worlds. She'd slept for too long, in a cocoon of stone. Allowed certain things to drift beyond her awareness. She'd already corrected the most egregious case of neglect, reinforcing the wards that kept her prisoners secure and consigning their servants to oblivion. Her own world was safe, at least for the moment.
Now it was time to find an old friend.
It did not take long before Nahiri sensed his presence and aimed for it, warping the world around her until she could stand beside him. Their friendship was ancient now, a faded relic, but Sorin Markov had been her first ally, and Nahiri would know him anywhere.
She stood, then, on a high bluff overlooking a dark and choppy sea. She had never been here, but nothing about it surprised her. Innistrad and Sorin had shaped each other, and the world seemed to suit him—brooding and dangerous, almost purposefully unwelcome. And the moon—there was something odd about the moon that rose above the water, something that tugged at her senses.
Sorin had never brought her here, but he had spoken of it in wistful tones. Had hoped, she knew, to call upon her to defend it—as she had hoped to call upon him to defend Zendikar. Neither had gotten what they wanted, in the end.
Sorin was not here.
On the highest part of the bluff, where she had sensed his presence, stood instead a massive, rough-hewn chunk of silver, forty feet tall at least. It had faces, but they were irregular and uneven, as though an amateur lithomancer had pulled it out of the ground and not yet bothered to smooth it out to a finish.
But it was finished—unquestionably, to her senses, obviously the end result of tremendous effort rather than a work in progress. It was not polished because the polish did not matter to whatever it was this thing was supposed to be. Or do.
And this—this thing—was what she had sensed. Not Sorin. The Thing had spoken to her, through the tenuous medium of the Blind Eternities, of him.
There was nothing on the bluff but the wind and the silver monolith, save a stunted tree with red leaves. She left the tree to its business and circled the tremendous chunk of silver.
Sides. It had eight of them, or perhaps seven, depending on how generous one felt as to the nature of an edge. But faces they were, deliberately shaped, almost like...But there were no hedrons on Innistrad, and Sorin had neither means nor cause to make them.
And like a hedron, the Thing was more than its physical substance. She tested it with her lithomancy, taking a sounding of the pure metal and trying to get a sense of its inner structure.
Nothing. Nothing at all. She could sense the grain of the bedrock half a mile below her feet, feel the slow and steady heartbeat of continental plates dancing their slow, inexorable waltz. But she couldn't see into this sliver of silver. Couldn't so much as scratch it. Her power vanished into it, like an infinite well. Almost like...but no. No again. It was not a hedron. Not here.
She bent and peered beneath the Thing, half expecting to see that it was floating above the ground. But it was rooted at the bottom, by a comparatively thin stem of silver not much wider than Nahiri herself.
She stood and continued her slow circle of the Thing, trailing her fingertips along it in lieu of the deeper investigation she could not seem to make. She didn't know how much time she spent examining the silver monolith, but the moon was higher in the sky when a familiar voice spoke from behind her.
"You'll have to forgive my rudimentary attempt at shaping stone, young one."
She spun. Sorin!
White hair, black coat, those strange orange eyes. How terrible his aspect, how dire his gaze—and yet she could not keep herself from grinning.
"My friend!" she managed to say at last. "How have you been?"
He smiled back at her, walked toward her, and put his hand on her shoulder. From him, it qualified as elation.
She reached up to cover his hand with hers. She was awake now, her body suffused with the warmth of life. His fingers were as cold and dead as ever.
"You never came," she said, a frown starting to form on her face. "On Zendikar, when I activated the signal from the Eye of Ugin, you never responded."
Sorin withdrew his hand, frowning.
"The Eldrazi have broken free of their bonds?"
"They did, yes."
"Where is Ugin?" he asked.
"He didn't come either," she said, trying not to let her annoyance reach her voice. "But I handled it. On my own. With all the strength I could muster, I managed to reseal the titans' prison."
"When the task was done, I came to find you. To see what you had become."
And here you are, Nahiri thought. But she frowned at Sorin. He was leaning on his sword, now. It wasn't right. He was too weak, weaker than he had been when she was young.
"So, where were you?" she asked. "Sorin, why didn't you respond to the signal?"
"It never reached me," he said.
"How is that possible?"
"Hmm," he said.
He reached past her and pressed a hand against the surface of the Thing.
The Thing radiated his essence.
"My plane was in dire need of its own protection, particularly in my absence. This Helvault is what I created to serve as such a protection."
Helvault. Nahiri shuddered. It was a vault. What could such a thing be meant to store?
"It's not inconceivable," he continued, sounding bored, "that your signal from the Eye was unable to break through the magic that protects this plane."
Nahiri regarded him.
Early in their association, before she understood what he was, and what she had now become, he had asked her if she wanted to learn to fight like him. She'd said yes—and then he'd tried to kill her.
Or so it had seemed to her at the time. She realized, not much later, that he'd been holding back, attacking her physically when he could have snuffed her with a thought. She held her ground, briefly, until his heavy two-handed sword had caught her upper arm in a glancing blow with a sickening crack, and pain overwhelmed her senses.
Well done, he said, standing over her. You lasted almost six breaths. Yours, of course. Now get up.
Get up? she cried. You broke my arm!
So fix it, he said. He wasn't even looking at her.
Fix it? Fix it? How in the hells—
Only then had he finally explained to her that she was no longer mortal. That her body was a convenience, a projection of her will.
You should have told me that to begin with, she said, holding back tears of anger.
Ah, he said, in that bored but benevolent voice. It did not occur to me.
That was thousands of years ago. It seemed that Sorin's personality had not changed.
A flare of light interrupted Nahiri's thoughts.
She looked up.
The moon. It emanated beams of moonlight, heavy as boulders but with no substance whatsoever. It was binding and strange.
As Nahiri observed Innistrad's moon she noticed something.
It was made of silver. Like the Helvault.
A rustle of sound drew her attention. Nearby, a group of humans were screaming in terror. Nahiri turned to see what was terrorizing them.
A larger group of figures advanced upon them. The figures seemed human. But, as they approached, she saw bloody protruding fangs.
Vampires.
Nahiri glanced at Sorin.
On any other plane, especially her own Zendikar, Nahiri would not have hesitated to help. Yet, this was his plane. Should she interfere?
Then everything went bright, brighter than the moon, and several shapes came tearing out of the heavens.
Angels.
Nahiri had met angels, on Zendikar. They were aloof, fearsome, and protectors, creatures of justice and of good.
Before Nahiri could even fully process what was happening, the angels aimed their weapons at the vampires. Swords and spears shone like suns.
Nahiri shielded her eyes. The light was too bright. When the light finally faded, she saw that the vampires had been blasted away, only their ashes remained.
Nahiri then realized something.
"Those vampires, aren't they your kin?"
"They are," Sorin said simply.
She decided to choose her next words very carefully.
"Sorin," she said slowly "Those angels, they destroyed some of your kin…"
Sorin did not reply. He simply looked into her eyes, as if she should already know the answer.
Nahiri couldn't say how long they fell like that, together, looking into one another's eyes. Finally, he spoke.
"Many eons ago, a famine swept this land. My grandfather searched for a solution and the one he came up with was brutal: to undergo a blood ritual that would give some of the people the ability to feed on blood. With this blood magic, my grandfather became the first vampire on Innistrad. Of course, my grandfather had already been looking for a method to achieve agelessness. The famine was a mere excuse."
Sorin leaned against his sword. He seemed tired.
"As vampires gained in power, humans dwindled. The vampires were too strong. In time, humans would be wiped out by the blood feeders, and once that happened, they would turn on their own kin."
It was uncharacteristic of Sorin to say so much. So Nahiri simply observed him, slightly intrigued.
Sorin regarded the angels, who have already started to fly away. Some remained to heal the frightened humans.
"Yet, these angels appeared. With their appearance, balance was restored."
Something felt wrong, but Nahiri could not place her finger on what it was.
"Balance?" Nahiri asked.
She paused.
The angels maintained a balance.
Balance.
Under Sorin's twisted beliefs, angelic protection would allow humans to prosper, and only then would vampires have a plentiful supply to feed upon.
To Sorin, the humans of Innistrad were nothing more than livestock.
Sorin allowed the destruction of his kin only so that they do not grow too powerful to upset the delicate balance of his world.
"How strange your world is," Nahiri said. Sorin merely grimaced.
Nahiri had enough.
She turned and cast herself back through the chaos of the Blind Eternities, the space between worlds to return back home to Zendikar.