Chapter 6

Welcome to the next chapter of MTG the next Titan, but first, reviews!

amaruq1419: Technically...the hydra is inside of him. Damion can summon her whenever he wants to but he is keeping her away for the moment until he really needs her. Enjoy the chapter!

Zebralord23: I thought the same thing, and was sad it didn't happen, glad you like the story so far. Enjoy the chapter!

And now onto the story!

Quick warning, there are some disturbing scenes later on, you have been warned.

Liliana

It was a pleasure to watch the so-called Gatewatch contort and agonize. Gideon's poorly restrained frustration; Nissa's discomfort; Chandra's impatience; Jace's pained indecision, and Damions...excitement. Jace was in his favorite place—caught in the middle due to arbitrary restrictions he had made up, and wondering why life's decisions were always so difficult. "You're never going to change, are you?" Liliana couldn't tell whether it amused or disgusted her. Both, sometimes

A moonfolk flew into the clearing, her eyes wide and breath short. She took no notice of the large ring of zombies protecting them from Emrakul's minions, though she did look up at the grand spectacle of Emrakul; it was impossible not to. She landed next to Jace, speaking rapidly though too quietly for Liliana to hear. She stopped talking in a way Liliana would have found confusing if she hadn't already spent a great deal of time with a telepath. "She must be the moonfolk Jace had mentioned." Jace and Tamiyo continued their silent conversation, moving closer to one another as they touched minds. Liliana frowned. "Another useless mind mage, just what we needed."

She wanted some time alone with Jace, to figure out what the endgame here was. Her zombies had brought a temporary respite. But they needed to get out of here, away from Thraben, away from Innistrad, away from Emrakul, and the other Titans soon to arrive.

As she thought of the name, Liliana's eyes were drawn upward to the towering figure hovering outside of Thraben. "Why is it just sitting there?" The air felt heavy, stale. Fecund with the smell of...it wasn't the dead. Liliana was comfortable with the dead and their smell. But there was a rotten quality to this smell Liliana found troubling.

There was a sudden shifting in the air, the smell and pressure of a spring day before a thunderstorm, and in that shifting Emrakul unfolded. Its cloud burgeoned; its long spindly tendrils lengthened and multiplied, from hundreds to thousands, to tens of thousands, more. An invisible sphere of power burst from Emrakul, rippling and hitting each Planeswalker where they stood.

Nausea roiled her stomach; vertigo twisted her mind. She had known that sickening combination of despair and sickness only a few times in her life. When her brother Josu's eyes had opened lifelessly, jet-black orbs portending doom; when she had first beheld Bolas's baleful gaze, hearing his spiteful laugh as he promised poisoned redemption; when the Chain Veil's power had first coursed through her veins, splitting her skin and cracking it open like a dry husk to let the blood, her blood, seep through.

None of those moments compared to the wrongness she felt in Emrakul's presence. Liliana Vess had spent her whole life seeking not to die, and for the first time in her long existence she wondered if she had been pursuing the wrong goal. In the shadow of Emrakul's flowering, death seemed just another of life's superficial lies, a false hope poorly beating back the true horror awaiting all who existed.

Emrakul. Emraakull. Emraaa...

She shook her head with force, seeking to clear her mind. She had lived too long, overcome too much, to succumb now. "We must flee this plane. This...it is insanity to stay." Not her thoughts, but the Raven Man speaking directly in her head, sounding...scared. Liliana took some pleasure in the fear. So you can feel fear. Her zombies moaned in unison, "Vessel of destruction. Root of evil. Flee." Liliana was startled. She was used to the Chain Veil talking nonsense about vessels and roots, but flee. Whatever Emrakul was, the Chain Veil wanted no part of it.

The pressure in the air thickened, inducing a headache that watered her eyes with pain. The other Planeswalkers crumpled, all except Jace and Damion, Jace seemed to have cast some type of spell in response. She bowed her head, her agonies multiplying. Emrakul outside. The Chain Veil inside. The damned Raven Man, wherever he was. She would not succumb. "These are my zombies, my Chain Veil, my head. Mine!"

She stared at Emrakul, her fear receding, replaced by seething anger. "How dare you..."

There was another explosion of energy from Emrakul, a full thunderstorm that made the earlier outburst seem a brief spring rain. Liliana was forced to her knees as she screamed in rage. Her zombies moaned a single word.

"Em-ra-kuuuull."

Jace

The purple shadowed tower through rainy glass. Streaks fire heavy with top dark falling. Emrakul cackles thought with cold loop metal...

A voice cut through the chaotic ramble, a familiar voice he was hearing for the first time. "This is not going well. I will not succumb to this. I am better than this." Jace breathed evenly and slowly. Thought cohered. He tried to recall the gibberish dominating his mind just seconds ago, but it had already vanished, evanescent dew melting with the dawn. He was at the top of a long, grand spiraling staircase, white marble steps lined with ornate blue trim. The staircase was brightly lit though there was no obvious light source, and it extended down far beyond his sight.

Above was a tall and airy stone tower. Closer to ground, it looked like his sanctum back on Ravnica. Large stone table with piles of books, maps, and several...contraptions that whirred and buzzed. Bookcases stuffed with books everywhere the eye could see, and he gazed at them longingly. It didn't just look like his Ravnica apartments...it was them, except back on Ravnica there was no palatial staircase spiraling down in the middle.

And back on Ravnica there was certainly no monstrous force destroying his sanctum from above.

Hundreds of feet in the air above, Jace saw large stone blocks of the tower crumbling away, or grabbed and flung. The entire roof of the tower was already gone, revealing a darkened sky flooded with an ominous purple overcast. As Jace watched the destruction, he realized the purple overcast was not a cloud. It was a thing. A creature. The creature resolved into a gigantic purple cloud extending hundreds of wiggling tendrils. The tendrils lashed and writhed toward the tower, accompanied by flashes of lightning and deafening booms outside. The creature had a name...

Emrakul. The name sounded strange even as he said it, a word he should not know, a word he could not know. Or perhaps that was the word underneath the word...Jace paused, chagrined at how effortless losing his train of thought was. Focus. Emrakul. A...thing. An Eldrazi. The Eldrazi. Jace's mind struggled to encompass the nature of the entity. His head hurt, a dull, pounding ache that grew with each contemplation of the Eldrazi titan outside. So don't think about it. Where am I? What is this place?

More memories returned. He hadn't been in a tower. He had been in Thraben, besieged by countless hordes of Emrakul's minions as the 3 Titans converged on them. They all were. Gideon. Tamiyo. Nissa. Chandra. Damion. And Liliana, who had made a surprise appearance, leading a host of zombies to save them from the cultists and creatures driven mad by Emrakul. "Liliana came back. She..."

A loud peal of thunder rattled outside and the ground quaked briefly beneath his feet. As the ground shook, Jace's head began to pound. Lightning flashed, illuminating Emrakul's tentacles as they tore off more huge chunks of the stone structure. The tower was large and massive, but Emrakul was dismantling it stone by stone.

A soft white light began pulsing deeper below in the stairway. The light beckoned. Normally Jace knew enough to distrust beckoning soft white lights in a place he did not know leading to even more places he did not know. But most normal situations did not have attacking omnipotent Eldrazi titans. The white glow looked like an increasingly intriguing option.

There was a bright explosion outside, a long, deep purpleness followed by a deafening roar of thunder. The entire tower reverberated as lightning struck it. Jace crumpled to the ground in pain, his head throbbing with agony. What is happening to me? And then another voice, his voice, but coming from somewhere outside, spoke with the force of command. "Move. Move now. Go downstairs."

Jace looked up through the ruins of the tower into the ravening purple maw of Emrakul, its endless tentacles wrapping themselves around more and more of the stone bulwarks. He picked himself up off the floor and stumbled to the stairway. He decided the voice, "my voice," was right. It was time to leave. He descended into the depths of the tower.

Liliana

Liliana's blood was on fire, her mind in shreds. One force kept her coherent—rage. "Those are my zombies. Mine! You will not have them!" Without conscious thought she drew deep on the power of the Chain Veil, and pushed back against the might of Emrakul. She could feel the Eldrazi's blighted touch, a touch now so powerful it affected even the dead. But even that baleful touch was no match for Liliana's necromantic prowess backed by the force of the Chain Veil. She felt her zombies return to her.

The power coursing through her veins was exhilarating. Each previous time she used the Veil there was agony and rupture, but somehow this time her rage inoculated her from the worst of the Chain Veil's injuries. "Perhaps that is the answer to unlocking the Chain Veil. I never wanted it enough."

Voices still whispered to her from her zombies, and from the Veil directly in her mind. "Vessel of destruction. Root of evil." Those weren't the only voices she heard. The Raven Man added his stultifying tones. "We must leave here. This is madness. I thought you wanted to conquer death. The entity you face here is older than time, and more powerful than you, even if you wielded a hundred Chain Veils! We must leave!" The Raven Man tried to issue it as a command. Never had he sounded so naked, so vulnerable.

Liliana spared a glance at the other Planeswalkers. Chandra, Tamiyo, and Gideon were sprawled on the ground, unconscious. She briefly reached out with her power, but their forms did not respond to necromantic touch; they all still lived. Nissa was rooted in place, screaming, the words emanating from her mouth gibberish. Green and purple energy pooled around her, clashing, ebbing and flowing. Jace and Damion were the only ones who stood and seemed to be conscious, though they took no notice of her. She noticed a blue shimmer around Jace, a penumbra that extended to all five of the other Planeswalkers. All except her and Damion. "Is that what's keeping you alive?"

The penumbra did not extend to her. But she didn't need his help. Liliana had known considerable power, power partnered with the wisdom and ruthlessness born from two hundred long years of life. But she knew none of that would have protected her from the mental onslaught from Emrakul. She would have been obliterated, except for the power of the Chain Veil.

Power she now wielded, and wielded gladly. She laughed with the thrill of it. It was the closest she had yet come to the nigh-omnipotence of her former self. "I can do anything." Still the voices of the Veil whispered in her head. "Vessel. Vessel of destruction. We must flee the World-Ender. The World-Creator. Vessel!" The Raven Man's voice choked with panic. "Listen to the Veil, you idiot! Flee!" Her zombies. "Root of evil. Vessel of destruction. Vessel!"

Liliana laughed, a laughter suffused with rage and power. "I. AM. NOT. A. VESSEL!"

She shut down the voices of the Veil and the Raven Man both, silencing them abruptly. She could feel their fury and impotence as they railed against her. "All that matters is my will. My desire. Nothing can stand before me." She tapped into the Veil, harnessing more power than she had ever dared before.

"I don't belong to you. You belong to me."

She gathered the energies of the Veil, harnessed them to her own considerable power and experience. In the throes of such power she no longer felt Emrakul's mental assault.

She turned her full attention to the gigantic Eldrazi titan. As if it recognized her growing power, the titan was moving slowly in her direction. "Everyone seems to be afraid of you, Emrakul." She laughed again, a cackle as she reveled in her power. "No one thinks I can beat you. Let's find out."

The ground suddenly shook as several large Eldrazi, very different from Emrakuls followers, rose up and looked down at them, they either had bone masks or large jagged black blades floating near them. Ulamog and Kozileks broods had arrived. Liliana grit her teeth before a blinding grey light caught her attention as well as the Eldrazi, Damion was lit up as a massive creature started to form around them. Despite being much smaller than it was on Zendikar, Damions pet hydra had arrived. Damion fell to his knees as the Hydra let out a roar that shook all of Thraben, it looked at Liliana for a moment before focusing on the Eldrazi charging towards them. It wasted no time in dealing with the Eldrazi before her zombies could even try.

Jace

As Jace descended he would occasionally glance up, but shadows obscured all but a few feet behind him. I guess these stairs only go down. He thought he should find being shepherded along an unknown corridor down into the depths of a strange tower alarming, especially accompanied by the continued assault and thunder he still heard above, but he was calm. Down here is definitely safer than up there.

The stone wall next to him began shimmering. As he watched, the stone turned to glass, or at least some type of transparent material. The entire wall next to him, from steps to ceiling, transformed into a clear pane. Through the window was a scene, like a diorama children would make for school, but this diorama moved.

The central figure in the scene was Gideon. He was squaring off against some kind of celestial being who towered over him. Literally celestial—the figure was made of a starry night sky. The celestial figure had two large black horns framing a blue, non-human face. He wielded an impossibly large whip with a human skull in the handle. Gideon looked suitably Gideon-esque, square jaw, golden sural, and gleaming armor intact. But the look on his face was not the Gideon Jace knew at all. This Gideon looked worried, almost scared. There was anger on that face...but also fear. Interesting.

Around Gideon stood the other members of the Gatewatch. Chandra, her hands and head blazing. Nissa. Damion, in his demonic form. Even a Jace. "Surely I'm taller than that?" The celestial figure spread his arms out wide, whip to the side. He spoke with a deep, resonating voice that seemed to bubble up from the ground. "And what is it you, Kytheon Iora, most desire? What do you truly want?"

"No!" Gideon shouted, his face contorted in defiance and pain. "There is nothing you can offer me, Erebos, nothing! From you, all is poison."

The being, Erebos, raised his whip. "It is not an offer, mortal. Tell me true what you most desire or I will kill your friends, one by one."

Gideon's shoulders slumped, his sural retreated back into its sheath. He looked up at Erebos, his face a mixture of anger and despair. "I most desire..." he paused, drawing a deep breath, "I most desire to protect others, to save them..."

"You lie." Erebos's whip lashed out, and as it struck the Jace next to Gideon he disintegrated, his flesh dissolving upon its touch. "I really don't like watching myself die." Gideon screamed and lunged, his sural flashing, but Erebos stood unmoved. He raised his hand and Gideon was flung backwards.

"You cannot defeat me, mortal. You never have. You never will. Tell me truth and I will let the rest of your friends live."

There was a loud peal of thunder outside, Emrakul, that's Emrakul, and Jace could not hear Gideon's reply over the din. Whatever Gideon's answer, Erebos was not satisfied. Once more the whip lashed, and now Nissa disintegrated with its touch. Gideon flinched as Nissa was struck down, but did not attack this time. Chandra and Damion each stood there looking blank, her flaming hands at her side doing nothing and his demonic features seemed like stone. "This scene is definitely not reality. Is it inside Gideon's head?"

Gideon's voice crackled with anger. "I want to defeat you, to tear you down so you can no longer..."

"No. You continue to speak lies." Erebos's voice, in contrast, was placid as a graveyard. Another lash of the whip, only it hit both Chandra and Damion causing them to vanish. "Must you lose everyone before you acknowledge truth, mortal? All your stubbornness to what end? You are determined to feel the most pain." Erebos's whip danced with its master's touch. "What do you want?"

Gideon raised his head to the skies and screamed, "I want..." but before he finished his sentence the window went dark.

Jace stayed still, silent, stunned at all he had witnessed. "Who is Erebos? What pain is Gideon going through?" Jace had had no idea his friend was suffering this way. "And my ignorance about Gideon is matched by my lack of knowledge of what is going on here. Are these dreams? Am I inside Gideon's head? The Emrakul above certainly seems real."

The shadows pressed closer to Jace. "I need to keep moving. The answers are farther down." He had only walked several steps when another wall went transparent. This time the scene featured Tamiyo.

She sat hunched on a small workbench, poring over a large unfurled scroll on a dusty table. The sole illumination in the scene was a candle, but it gave off far too much light for its size. Behind Tamiyo were shelves full of books, and more piles of books beside them. Jace felt a nostalgic pang. "To be surrounded by nothing but books and all the time to read them." That hadn't been his life for some time now, and wouldn't be again any time soon.

Blood began leaking from one of Tamiyo's eyes. It started with a slow drip, each drop hitting the table with a small plip. As she continued to read the scroll, the other eye began dripping blood as well, each drop alternating with each other. Plip-plip. Plip-plip. Plip-plip.

Jace watched in horror as flesh-like lattices began to grow over Tamiyo's eyes, covering them entirely. The mark of Emrakul. Jace had seen too much of Emrakul's signature over the last few days. The blood continued to drip through the lattices. Plip-plip. Plip-plip. Plip-plip.

The lattices blossomed elsewhere. Fleshy growths burst from Tamiyo's fingers, covering both hands in the weblike structures. The growths attached to the table beneath, sticking, binding her hands to the table. Now she could no longer see nor move her hands. The blood kept dropping from her eyes. Plip-plip. Plip-plip. Plip-plip.

As she lost the use of her eyes and hands, Tamiyo whispered throughout, though no audible sound emerged. The fleshy tendrils began webbing her mouth closed, lip tied to lip with each strand of Emrakul's web. Even once her mouth was sewn shut, the lattice continued to grow, to wiggle and writhe. The tendrils extended far out from her closed mouth, and now as the blood continued to drip from her eyes the tendrils would seize a drop, curling around it, wiggling as the blood seeped into its oily skin. Plip-wiggle. Plip-wiggle. Plip-wiggle.

Tamiyo was motionless, her eyes, mouth, and hands frozen. Jace had touched Tamiyo mind to mind, knew the essence of her better than most. Her ability to see, to speak, to write, these are the essential tools of her magic, her communication. These are what define her. She is being erased. Jace screamed and pounded on the window, but neither Tamiyo nor anything else in the room stirred. The window faded to opaque stone.

Jace slumped. "What is this place? This cannot be the minds of my friends. Can it?" The shadows loomed over him. He was tired, so very tired. He slowly picked himself up and continued his descent.

Liliana

"This power. It is a revelation." All it had taken was Liliana's will. Her desire. For so long she had thought herself utterly pragmatic and driven to her cause. To not die. To kill her demon tormentors. But now she knew she had been unwilling to take that final step, to cross over the last barrier. "I had restraint. How foolish."

In front of her loomed Emrakul. An Eldrazi titan. A creature older than time, if the voices in her head told truth. "I think you are a thing. A powerful thing, but something that lives. And if you live, you can die. And if you die," another smile, "then you belong to me."

The energies of the Veil writhed and bucked under her control. They wanted to be used to wither, to kill. "Power is meant to be used." She gathered it, shaped it, and sent one coruscating blast of necromantic energy after another at the towering figure of Emrakul, hurling the titan back with their force.

There was a song in Liliana's head, a song blotting out all else. It was the song of power and it sang such a sweet melody. "This is what I was born for. This is my destiny." Each blast that hit Emrakul left gaping trenches of scarred dead material, large tentacles the size of towers left shriveled and withered. Some of the material regenerated, but not enough before being hit by Liliana's next blast. For the first time since blossoming, Emrakul was shrinking. It was being thrust back. Liliana was winning.

The Raven Man's voice cut through her delight, a cold splash of sewer water. "You know not what you do, what you dare. You cannot hope to contain this power for much longer."

Liliana's scorn draped each word she thought back in reply. "Do not seek to contain me with your small expectations, little man. Today is the day I destroy an Eldrazi titan. Why? Because I dare."

She wished more of the Gatewatch was conscious to watch her victory. "This is what power looks like, you pathetic excuses for Planeswalkers." She flung more blasts at Emrakul, pressing her attack.

Jace

Jace was not surprised to see another window appear shortly. This time it was Chandra. Or at least he assumed it was Chandra. She was a little girl, but the red hair and shape of her face still suggested the woman she would one day become. Chandra was surrounded by a menacing group of guards, their gear ornate and colorful, from a place Jace did not recognize. Her home. The guards raised their pikes, and Chandra was sobbing, tears fighting with gasps of breath for control of her face.

One of the guards, tall and spindly, stepped forward. His face had a wide smile on it, in cruel contrast to his awful words. "We killed your daddy, renegade. We killed your mommy. And now we're going to kill you." Jace suspected the scene wasn't real, just a nightmare in Chandra's head, but his fists still balled up. "No one should have to endure this kind of pain." The guards moved forward with their pikes as their leader sneered, "And the best part, the absolute best part, is there is nothing you can do about it."

Chandra stopped crying and stared at her persecutors. A tiny wisp of flame flared from one eye. "You're wrong," she said, her voice not sounding like a child's at all. "There is something I can do." Her body was changing, growing, evolving before his eyes into the recognizable Chandra he knew. "Something I can always do. I can burn." Fire jetted from her head and hands.

She smiled. The guards backed away, uncertain. She took a step forward. "I can make you burn." The leader burst into flame. He screamed in agony. "I can make all of you burn." Now the other guards were on fire, their skin crackling and bubbling, their high-pitched cries piercing the sky. "I can make the whole world burn." Heat and light and fire burst forth, an incandescent whiteness of energy, enveloping and burning everything, including Chandra. Chandra screamed, though whether in agony or delight, Jace could not say.

The window faded to stone, but Jace still felt the heat pouring off the walls. It was one of the first principles of illusions. "Just because it's only in your head doesn't mean it can't kill you."

Gideon, Tamiyo, Chandra...but no Damion or Liliana yet. Urgency propelled him downstairs and he looked eagerly as the next window appeared. His face fell when he saw the figure behind the wall. "Oh, Nissa." He tried not to be disappointed, though he found it hard to understand the elf Planeswalker.

The background behind Nissa looked exactly like the outside world—the dark, purple sky, the odd flashes of light, the looming shadow of Emrakul and Liliana with her zombies. Nissa stood in agony in the center. She screamed. She writhed. Twisting, contorting, shaking, but those were not the only injuries done to her. There was something...wriggling...on her hands.

As Jace peered closer, he noticed Nissa's fingers had tiny fingers growing on them, tens of tiny fingers extending out of each finger. And then he saw hair-thin fingers growing out of the tiny fingers. He shuddered, but as he saw her eyes he let out an involuntary scream. From each of Nissa's eye sockets protruded several tiny eye shoots, and out of each eye shoot grew several tinier ones. Green energy flashed out of her eyes and hands, but interlaced in the green was a dark, violent purple.

"Emrakul is Emrakul is Emrakul forever."

Jace didn't know where the thought came from, but even in its nonsense it felt true. "Forever and ever and ev..."

"Negglish pthoniki ab'ahor!" gibberish words spouted from Nissa, or if not gibberish then no language Jace had ever heard. As she spoke, her head spasmed, and in between words her tongue would loll out of her mouth. "What are those things on her tongue? Oh, no. No no no no. I am hitting the limit of details I want to notice. No, I am well past the limit."

As nonsense and spittle spewed from her mouth, rational words began to infiltrate the gibberish. "Shigg epsi-everything chut'ghb ends! Gilma-everything chts-dies!" The spasms subsided, her voice gaining strength and poise. Now the energy emanating from her was all purple, a deep purple with no green to be found. She raised her head and arms to the sky and shouted.

"Growth! Growth is the answer! The only answer! Entropy cannot lose. But must it win? Of course sacrifice must be made. Why do they fight it? Eternity without sacrifice offers only the screaming torpor. Blood must be churned, churned thick. Why do they fear life? Why do they fear truth?"

Nissa uttering recognizable words made no appreciable impact on Jace's ability to understand her. Even though he knew it was useless, he reached to her mind to mind. "Nissa, help me. Help me understand. What are you saying?"

Nissa shifted and brought her gaze to meet Jace's directly through the window. "She sees me." Jace shivered, frozen to the spot. He could not move, could not look away. Her eyes glowed darkly purple. She spoke directly to him. "I can do anything I want. Anything at all. Remember that. The only thing saving you is..." the purple glow faded, the nimbus around her dissipating, "...I don't want anything."

She stared at him for long seconds, her face distorted and grotesque as her extra eye shoots continued to squirm. The window mercifully faded to stone.

Jace remained frozen in front of the wall. He shook, sweat beading down his hair onto his face and the back of his neck. The shadows continued to press from above. "How long have I been on these stairs? What is happening to my friends?" Down still beckoned, brightly lit and pulling at him. But he didn't want to move. He didn't want to do anything. "Sleep. I could sleep. I might not wake up, but would that be so bad?" His eyes drooped, and a pleasant fuzziness crept over his mind. He sat on the stairs. "I am so tired."

Drifting off to sleep made him think of Liliana. He didn't know where she was, or what she faced. She isn't here. She's not in this place. But if he acknowledged the truth, she never needed him anyway. "Sad. For a while. And then I'll get over it." That's what she had said back in her castle, comparing the possibility of his death to that of a dog's. "A dog. Would she really not care any more about my death than a dog's? That can't be true. A dog." The thought gnawed.

"Sleep, how could I possibly be thinking of sleeping right now? What is happening to me?" He couldn't tell whether it was true exhaustion, or a more malevolent effect. "Does it matter? The solution is the same." He stood. "Keep going downstairs. Figure this out. Don't die. Beat Emrakul." He thought of Liliana as he continued his descent.

Liliana

The first sign of trouble was an interruption to her tempo. Liliana had never wielded so much energy before, and she had been able to fling blast after blast at Emrakul with each breath. Breathe, blast, breathe, blast.

But though her power didn't fail her, her body did. She hesitated for a second, took a long breath, and in that gap Emrakul surged, its body and tendrils regrowing at a faster pace than Liliana thought possible. Several thick tendrils lashed at Liliana only to wither and desiccate at the touch of her magic, but several more quickly followed. Where once each blast from Liliana drove Emrakul back, now it was all she could do to stand her ground. The surge was to much for the hydra to handle and was pinned to the ground by Emrakuls tentacles and Damion fell to the ground seemingly unconscious.

"You are mortal. You have limits. It does not." The Raven Man's voice stabbed her brain with cold whispers. "Look upon this grass and dirt, you fool. You have made it your graveyard."

She screamed in rage as she let loose more blasts of power. The titan's advance halted in the face of such an onslaught. But seconds later the energy ebbed. Liliana took large gasping breaths and Emrakul's advance continued once more.

"I am not going to die today," she snarled to the Raven Man, to the Veil, to anything that would listen. To herself. Emrakul and its tendrils continued their unceasing assault. "I am not going to die today."

"If you're lucky, Liliana, your death is now the best possible outcome of today. You have doomed us both." The Raven Man spoke without contempt, without hatred or fear. He sounded...resigned. For the first time since rescuing the Gatewatch, Liliana was afraid.

Jace

Jace expected another wall to turn transparent, to show him a scene from the mind of either Damion or Liliana. What he did not expect was the stairway to end in a door.

It was a thick oak door, banded with iron, with no port or keyhole. Just wood and iron, framed in the same thick stone as the rest of the stairway. He put his hand on the door. A voice screamed, no no no no no no, and pure terror seized his brain. But the voice trailed off, the terror receding. Jace looked up the stairs. The shadows did not press closer but nor did they part to reveal the way he had come. If he wanted to progress, it was through this door. He pushed the door forward and stepped through.

The room was formless and colorless. Vertigo overcame him as his mind struggled to perceive the space. Jace felt the long pull of forever, an endless recursion looping into terror to never know the peace of oblivion to just to just to just...until reality snapped into place. The nothingness surrounding him materialized into a field of white.

There was an angel in front of him.

She approached, and Jace noticed the space slowly taking shape around her, around both of them. They were in a real place, a room, a copy of the sanctum he had first begun this bizarre journey in. His sanctum. The angel was tall, taller than any angel he had seen before, even Avacyn. And her wings were gigantic, thick and dense. They furled behind her almost like a mushroom cloud...Jace also took notice of a sleeping Damion near her feet.

Jace broke out into a cold sweat pumped by a racing heart. "No oh no oh no..."

Her face was hidden by a large hood, but in very plain sight were the two swords she carried, one in each hand. Her tunic frayed at the hemline into ribbons, tens of ribbons, no, hundreds, and they seemed to multiply as Jace watched. They wriggled and writhed. As if they noticed Jace, the ribbons of her tunic probed the air in front of him, alive. "If I scream, I don't know if I'll ever stop. So I better not scream. Would crying help? I'm open to crying if it will help."

Jace laughed in a combination of amusement and fear. "I'm so glad I find myself funny." The laughter broke through the paralysis, sparking his mind. "I know this angel. I have seen her before." Or at least he had seen statues of her before, back on Zendikar. "Emeria?" he croaked, the word sounding foreign on his lips.

She looked at him, but he could not see her face cloaked in the hood. Jace took careful note of the ribbons and the swords, but nothing moved to attack him. His confidence grew.

"Are you...are you...Emeria? Are you...Emrakul?"