Innistradi Gothic
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
Liliana Vess does some soul-searching.
It wasn't a straight road from Ravnica to Dominaria, from Dominaria to Fiora, or from Fiora to Arcavios. Planeswalking wasn't reducible to stepping on and off the various "roads" in the Blind Eternities, despite Jace's silly depictions of the act as such.
Nicol Bolas had been destroyed, but the burden of Gideon's sacrifice fell on Liliana's unbound soul. As she'd initially slipped by in her pacts with Kothophed, Griselbrand, Razaketh, and Belzenlok, she'd evaded grave cost. The difference was she wasn't trying to skip out on payment this time. She'd made her bed and was about to lie in it, except Gideon placed his hand on her shoulder and took Bolas' punishment for her betrayal of him for her!
Freedom could be a type of cruelty.
She was set free from her demons, from Bolas, and from the Chain Veil, but her personal demons lingered. The oldest of the Gatewatch before her unwilling treachery towards them – hundreds of years old – yet still a child afraid of her shadow!
Death was a shadow she would never not be surrounded by. Her perpetual accomplice, wherever she cast her gaze.
The past kept confronting her, though she did not wish to confront the past. Her brother's return as a lich – the consequence of her overreach and ascension – had made that all the more vivid.
Death was her weapon.
Death was what she feared.
Death was also her safe space.
Because of it (or in fear of it), she lived.
Because of her, Gideon was dead.
Beefslab, the heroic meatloaf, was gone!
It starts with one. You. She pinned the blame on herself. I tried so hard and got so far. But in the end, it doesn't even matter. Bolas may be defeated, but Gideon, he –! Why, Gideon? Of all people, why save me?
Liliana didn't go straight to Arcavios from Fiora. She found her way to Innistrad first. The destination of her first 'walk. Her home away from home.
Thraben, like Liliana, had fallen since she'd been there last. Were she not reflecting on the loss of life she wrought, she'd have seen the dark irony. A city delivered from the Eldrazi apocalypse by her zombies, then overrun with her elite once their mistress withdrew from the plane.
The city falling while the plane survived served as another reminder of her shortsighted self-centeredness.
"I'll keep watch. Happy now?" she recited her oath bitterly. "What a joke I am, Innistrad!"
Instead of sitting back in her manor or antagonizing the local necromancer who'd taken over her mass of zombies in Thraben, Liliana chose to stay in an empty ramshackle house in nearby Nearheath.
Feeling alone, she raised two corpses to listen to her problems.
Husband and wife or father and daughter. She hadn't a clue how they were related. She called them Aunt and Uncle Greyfeld, after the grey fields their house sat on.
She spent a minute dreaming the horror show that'd ensue if she left them loitering around the plot as she'd done with the horde in Thraben.
Aunt and Uncle Greyfeld loved dinner guests. They loved guests…for dinner!
The rotten reunion between the riffraff offered Liliana some diversion.
Before it smacked her like shock treatment.
Hang on! Aunt and Uncle Greyfeld's eyes were glowing green, not her traditional magenta/purple! Distracted with her thoughts, she'd tapped into the life essence spells of her school days as a Witherbloom at Strixhaven!
Subverting the laws of death wasn't an ambition limited to necromancy. Life magic could be wielded to similar or vastly dissimilar effects, provided you'd studied the relevant branches.
If she probed all there was to know, there might be something she could do. A spell to bring Gideon back!
Liliana had to fall to lose it all. But all was not lost, if she uncovered her answer at the Biblioplex on Arcavios!
Face it. Liliana Vess is Liliana Vess. Until harder lessons were learned, it was less painful for the death mage to chase unnatural solutions than accept culpability and what Gideon would have wanted, which were difficult.