“I knew what I would do if I came out of the Fire with my power intact,” she said. “And I didn’t want to kill you.”
He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I almost wish you had.”
“No,” she said. “I… can’t.”
He let out a long, slow, shaky breath. “You’d better go. No one else was willing to come down here so soon after the… after that. But they’ll come soon. They’ll attack if you’re still here. And I don’t want any more deaths here tonight.”
She looked in the direction of the steep tunnel of stairs that led out of here, knowing that soldiers would probably be waiting at the top. “I can’t leave that way.”
And it was the only exit-unless she grew wings and flew out of the gaping hole in the ceiling, high over the far end of the cavern.
“Were you planning to stay on Regatha?” he asked skeptically. “After this?”
“No,” she realized, “I suppose not. If the remnants of the Order think I’m alive and at the monastery, there’ll just be more trouble.”
It would be better if everyone on Regatha thought she had died in the incinerating blaze that had swept through the cavern.
“You should leave now,” Gideon said.
“You mean planeswalk?” she guessed.
“Start preparing,” he corrected. “After you’re gone, I’ll convince them you died here and your body is ashes.”
Chandra hadn’t thought this far ahead and, for a moment, she had no idea where to go.
Then she realized which plane she most wanted to find now. And, despite her weary, bloody, head-spinning, thirsty condition, she suddenly looked forward to the journey.
“Gideon…”
“I know where you’re going,” he said. “I know what you want.” He shook his head. “You won’t find it. But that won’t stop you from trying, will it?” He gazed at her without warmth. “You’re a fool.”
Anger flashed through her. She welcomed its simple, familiar heat. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about the night my family were burned alive in front of me.”
“I’m not interested.” He turned away from her.
She grabbed his arm. “The soldiers who killed them belonged to an order of mages that vowed to bring harmony, protection, and law to the land.”
He froze.
“Does that sound familiar, Gideon?” she prodded in a venomous voice.
He turned his head to look at her. His expression was a mixture of suspicion, shock, and revelation.
“I have faced what I did,” Chandra said, “and laid my ghosts to rest. But I will never forgive those men for what they did that night. And anyone who believes in the things they believed in is my enemy. Now and forever.”
His breathing was faster as he stared at her, taking in what she was telling him.
“I acted on that here, and I will act on it wherever I go. Do you understand me?” she said through gritted teeth.
“I understand,” he said at last, “what you’re telling me.”
“Then don’t get in my way.” She let go of his arm and turned away, eager to leave this place. Eager to leave him.
“Chandra.”
“What?” she snapped over her shoulder, afraid she would weaken if she looked at him again.
“We will meet again.”
She couldn’t tell if it was a threat or a promise. Either way, and against her will, she held it to her heart.
Chandra heard Gideon’s footsteps behind her, echoing softly in the ruined, charred cavern as he walked away. She didn’t turn around or look back. And when the echo of his footsteps ascending the stairs that led back up to the devastated Temple faded away into silence, she prepared to planeswalk again.
The threat of domination by the Order was ended on Regatha, and balance was restored. There would still be some friction among the hieromancers of the city, the fire mages of the mountains, and the green mages of the woodlands. But there would be no more threat of one group dominating the others. Not in this lifetime.
Now, as she sat down on the charred stone floor of the chamber of the Purifying Fire, Chandra turned her thoughts to the future. She closed her eyes, concentrating on her breathing as she prepared to planeswalk, and she imagined the rich and mysterious plane of Zendikar … which in her heart, she knew must surely exist somewhere in the vast and wondrous Multiverse.
As it turned out, the district of Avaric wasn’t any more appealing when one was drunk than when one was sober. The fog of irrimberry wine didn’t make the filthy cobblestones, the half-decayed roofs, or the sludge coating the roadways any more attractive; and the sweet aroma of that libation didn’t remain in the nose long enough to muffle the stagnant rot and the eye-watering miasma that passed for air. The rows of squat houses and shops leaned over the road like tottering old men, and the wide spaces between them resembled gaps left by missing teeth.
Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the entire evening was the surprising lack of mosquitoes. Normally the rains brought plague-like swarms up from the swamps and sewers that were Avaric’s unsteady foundation, but apparently even they were taking the night off for the Thralldom’s End celebration.
Kallist Rhoka, who had spent a considerable amount of coin on the journey to his current state of moderate inebriation, glared bitterly at his surroundings and felt that the world’s refusal to reshape itself into a passingly tolerable form was the height of discourtesy. Then again, the Avaric District wasn’t alone in its refusal to change its nature to suit Kallist’s desires or his drunken perceptions-and between the stubbornness of a whole neighborhood, and that of a certain raven-haired mage, he was pretty certain that the district would break first.
At the thought of the woman he’d left at the Bitter End Tavern and Restaurant, Kallist’s stomach knotted so painfully it doubled him over. For long moments he crouched, waiting as the knot worked its way up to become a lump in his throat. With shaking hands-a shake that he attributed to the multiple glasses of wine, and not to any deeper emotions-he wiped the pained expression from his face. Not for the first time, Kallist spat curses at the man who’d driven him to such a sorry state. Less than a year gone by, he’d dwelt in the shadows of Ravnica’s highest spires.
And now? Now the structures around him were barely high enough to cast shadows at all. Now he’d have had to actually live down in the sewers or the under-cities of the larger districts to sink any lower. It was enough to make even a forgiving man as bitter as fresh wormwood, and Kallist had never been all that forgiving. Still, it would all have been worth it, if she’d just said yes… Kallist, his wine-besotted mind swiftly running out of curses, stared down at his feet.
He couldn’t even see the normal color of his basilisk-skin boots, one of the few luxuries he still owned, so coated were they in the swamp sludge that always oozed up from between the cobblestones after the rain. The boots kept swimming in and out of focus, too. He wondered if he might vomit, and was angered that he might waste the expensive irrimberry wine he’d drunk. The notion of falling to hands and knees on the roadway was enough to steady him, however. He could still hear, ever so faintly, the singing and dancing of the Thralldom’s End festival, back in the direction of the Bitter End, and he’d be damned thrice over if he’d let anyone from the tavern find him pasting a dinner collage all over the road.
With a rigid, yet swaying gait that made him appear sober to nobody but himself, he resumed his trek. Avaric wasn’t really that large a place; none of the local neighborhoods were. It was a backwater district, surrounded by other backwater districts save for those few spots where the underground swamps pooled to the surface, ugly and malodorous cysts on Ravnica’s aging face. Those who dwelt here did so only because anyplace else they could afford to move was even worse, and a few small fungus gardens were more than enough to feed the lot of them.