Thraben Cathedral, Thraben, Gavony, Innistrad, Friday Night (Fandom Time)

[deathsmajesty]

The soratami had already been here longer than she had intended. She had already taken on far too many risks. But this was a world entirely off its axis, and she needed to know why.

Several logical lines of inquiry had proven to be dead ends. Some had been promising, but inconclusive. Her astronomical work was near-definitive, but the cause — the first cause — still eluded her. This was a puzzle box with a thousand panels, a riddle of ten thousand lies. She had never solved anything more challenging than this.

She had also never quit before finishing her work.

Her latest line of research had brought her to the cathedral, where the humans of Innistrad housed their oldest histories of Avacyn. The stories she had collected to date, individually, were fragmented and obscured, but she knew the music of stories. She knew which threads to tug upon, which leads to follow, to bring herself — gliding step by gliding step — to a shred of truth. She did not expect to simply discover what she needed written plainly in an old tome. She had heard many stories like that, but never lived one. Still, the oldest histories had the fewest opportunities for distortion; the fewest hands had been given the chance to twist the words toward their own purpose and effect. Avacyn. The world was off its axis, and she was Innistrad's core. The metaphor fit well enough.

The central library was just ahead. She started mentally cataloguing the stories she brought with her, trying to determine how best to deal with the locks that would likely be up ahead, when she noticed something amiss. The door was already opened a crack, and candlelight flickered from within.

She gestured, and a slight push of wind opened the heavy door a few degrees more. The well-oiled hinges parted further as she heard an unmistakable sound, a moment before her eyes confirmed it: a slumping body striking the ground, as if suddenly asleep. A librarian, aged, unarmed, and unarmored. And standing over him...two men. Planeswalkers?

She took in as much information as she could in the moments before she needed to decide to fight or flee. Other Planeswalkers were to be avoided in her work, almost at all costs. They were brash and unpredictable, and could carry the biases of any unknown world or means of thinking - they were, in short, a liability to a truth-seeker. These two appeared human, male, one still young, though the wisps of mana that surrounded him smelled of deception, and another older and his mana smelled stranger still, like flame and ice and storms. The younger male had acquired some local clothing, but decorated them with sigils that were clearly not of Innistrad - a curiously poor disguise, though the older was dressed like Innistradi nobility. Still, as odd as the older man's mana was, it was the younger that kept her attention. His eyes glowed, panicked, wild, possibly afflicted (a thought she had not considered - if a Planeswalker contracted this plane's madness, could they spread it to other worlds?!), and in his hands...her field notes. Another complication. She waited two more heartbeats and resolved to let him make the first move, though a scroll had already drifted from her belt and begun to unfurl.

She carried twenty-nine story scrolls with her this day, not including the three in iron bands--the ones that must never be used. Each scroll contained a story, and each story contained magic.

For a moment, the three of them stood frozen in the hall, waiting to see who would act first and what, exactly, they would do.

	It was, predictably, Jace. His eyes were confused. Then furious, terrified, curious, then they settled on something like recognition and relief. "You! It's you! You brought me here. No, not you, this, this journal. Your journal! You brought me here to meet? No, but how could you?" He trailed off, his eyes drifted toward the ground again, then snapped back to her, accusing. "You were watching me? You knew!" Then they softened again, now sad, pleading. "Help me. Can you? I think...can you help me? Help me." The last words were not a plea at all. A command, oppressively powerful and far too loud in this cathedral patrolled still by cathars and priests. It battered at her mind like wind at the shutters. But her mind withdrew to a far-off castle, and the winds could not reach her.
	It was, unfortunately, Jace. Ignis knew he should have stepped in before Jace's manic drive managed to sway yet another situation out of their favor, out of his hands, but attempting to keep up with this particular whirlwind had left him barely just glimpsing the possibilities before the other man was off and babbling. Even Ignis winced at that tone, without having been the target of it, and he sucked in a deep, bolstering breath, one of many he'd been taking as he sorted through what Jace had spoken. His attention shifted toward the quietly opened door. "...Tamiyo, I presume?" he ventured, trying not to let the small thread of hope he felt tie itself too tightly into a sense of relief. "Unless you're just another figment of his mind's eye, but I don't believe you are..." But, then again, it was seeming increasingly more difficult to know precisely what to believe by now.
	Four more heartbeats to think, then she smiled as peacefully as she could manage. With a thought, she covered these likely Planeswalkers in her veiling spell. "I am Tamiyo, yes," she replied. "Perhaps we could return from the library from which you both came? I have hidden us all with magic, but it will not stand up to much scrutiny, I am afraid." She slipped into the library, and once the doors were closed behind them, she pulled a different scroll from her satchel. She had never used this story in precisely this way, but a mad planeswalking telepath was a danger of the sort she had never contemplated. The story was one she gathered many, many years ago, from a world with five moons and gleaming metal as far as the eye could see. She opened it with reverence and began to read it aloud.
	It was a story about creatures called myr, and their origin, a tale of mind and identity and wholeness. Jace's eyes closed, and he took several deep, slow breaths, while a noise like a chime filled his mind. When his eyes opened again, they were calm. "Thank you. Wow. I...oh. Oh dear. Liliana..." He rubbed his head as if it had been struck, then looked sheepishly back to Ignis and then up at Tamiyo. "I'm Jace. And this is Ignis. We have your journal..." He offered it to her with both hands; she raised a thin palm, a gesture of polite refusal. "It led me here. Your calculations, your studies, the moon, it all made sense...or at least it felt like it did. I was affected and you...you fixed it. Somehow. I'm rambling. Probably sound almost as mad as I did before, I just...thank you."
	Oh dear. Liliana?? Any sense of calm and relief that Ignis may have felt from the apparently healing nature of Tamiyo's story was momentarily chased away with a grunt of distaste and irritation at that, but he was not able to dwell on it. Not when he was beginning to feel with far more certainty that this was not yet another of madness-muddled misappropriation of mana. "I daresay," he murmured, "you sound precisely as mad as you have for the entire shockingly brief amount of time I've known you, Jace." But that was a small matter to him now that there was, hopefully, someone else with passable intelligence in the room with again, and his attention was almost entirely on Tamiyo. "If you truly are the author of this journal," he said, "then surely you have observed this anomalous event more closely than most, and a bit of fortuitousness has finally come our way. Is that the reason why you're here now, as well?"
	"Indeed. But now I have a question for you." Tamiyo smiled serenely. "My field notes. I gave them to someone trustworthy, and now you carry them. Did you bring Jenrik to harm?" Jace shook his head. "No. But whatever happened to Markov Manor, he didn't survive it." She spent a moment in silent remembrance, but let no sorrow show on her face. "You need to leave. Both of you, but especially you, Jace. This place is dangerous, but far more so for one like you. Your telepathic powers carry with them a responsibility. If driven mad, the damage you could do across the planes would be immense, and it would be irresponsible of me to allow that."
	Despite himself, Ignis had to let out a faint snort, though the grip on his daggers shifted slightly. "Oh," he drawled, "good luck convincing him of that. We've been at that game for days now, and yet....here we are, still." And, oh, the exhaustion laced in that drawl was...truly understated, actually.
	"No, I understand, but..." Jace stopped suddenly. He'd been distracted enough by Ignis' jibe that had taken him a few moments to realize that Tamiyo had just threatened him. He raised his palms, and took a step back. "Tamiyo, I just want to help. We can save this place. Me and my friends, we can help you solve what's happening here, and help fix it. We've done it before...sort of." Tamiyo raised one white eyebrow and said nothing. "Listen, you and I both know that Avacyn is at the heart of what's happening here. Well, she has a mind, like any other being, and I can find out what's afflicting her. I can stop her, if it comes to that. And then we can move on to the next step in fixing this."
	Tamiyo's smile disappeared. "You know nothing, Jace. You suspect. You theorize. You have evidence, but it is far from conclusive. How much do you really know about Avacyn? Her purpose? You have no idea what would happen if Avacyn were destroyed. She wards the entire plane—have you ever heard of a planebound being interacting in such a way with the Multiverse? I will tell you this plainly, Jace: you know less than you are ignorant of, and I am not here to fix this world's problem. I am here to understand it. To chronicle it. To know the truth of it, and record that truth for all time. But this plane is likely doomed, and I have no intention of stopping it. It is sad, perhaps, to lose a thing of beauty, but, like the blossoms of an orchard in springtime, it is a temporary beauty. It is just one plane among countless. Planes are lost and renewed all the time. Your premises are flawed."
	As gratifying at it was to have Jace's ignorance called out yet again (despite it, no doubt, once again, entering one ear only to promptly exit the other), Ignis found the rest of Tamiyo's words far less pleasant to hear. He sucked in a small, tight breath, reminded yet again on why he had been so insistent and persistant on doing whatever he could to ensure the success of this one fool's errands. He could not lose Innistrad now. Not yet. "Tamiyo," he said, his voice low and quiet and careful, to maintain a calm he did not feel, evidenced by the current dreadful racing of his heart in his suddenly too-tight chest. "Is your premise not also flawed? If Innistrad is doomed either way, then why not pursue the course of action that offers some glimmer of hope, not only for this plane, but for countless others who may see her same fate? Blossoms in an orchard may fade, it's true, but if properly tended to, do they not also return again next spring?"
	Tamiyo's expression was unchanged, but her voice held a little more ice. "I have helped you, Ignis. I will offer a compromise. I will share my research with you, and you and your friends can use that information to help avert similar disasters on other planes, if it suits you. But I have recorded ten thousand stories about heroes, and a hero is merely a disaster with a point of view."
	The young human persisted. "Without conclusive insights from Avacyn herself, your research will be incomplete. Inconclusive. With my help, you will have the story in its entirety. And if I manage to stop Avacyn in the process, it wouldn't harm your work, and it could save countless lives."
	Curiosity. Just a touch of it. "A definitive understanding of Avacyn's current state would certainly be helpful, but I suspect that even if you were capable of entering such an alien mind..." "I can do it." Tamiyo found the human's arrogance equal parts charming and irritating. "If you try, her madness will consume you, as it did before. But...in theory, I could anchor you. Tether you to your sanity. But if I decide that we are in too much danger, you will break off the connection immediately, and we will retreat. It will also require that we connect minds on a very fundamental level. I will understand you, and you will understand me. And if I do not like what I come to understand, I will alter the terms of this arrangement again. You, for your part, will come to know precisely what I am capable of. Is this acceptable to you?" "I accept." Jace felt something like a chime ringing in his mind. A tone that was clear, serene, and pure. It was an invitation.
	In an instant, she knew him. But it was not a simple thing to know this human. His mind was powerful, but broken. Shattered into a thousand shards, each of them a different man, many of them trying to work together, but some of them...He had erased his own memories. He had destroyed his own truth. He had invaded the minds of the innocent, he had killed in anger, he had used his power for petty and selfish ends. Yet. He was capable of sacrifice, of bravery, and of understanding. He was willing to take on responsibilities. Too many responsibilities, perhaps, for one so young. Younger still, if you accounted for the years of his own life that he so roughly erased. His desire for truth was earnest, and his pledge to help the people of this place was pure. And he was about seventy percent certain he could manage to do what he had told her that he could.
	In an instant, he knew her. But knowing is not understanding. Jace had always held the soratami of Kamigawa in high esteem, their minds powerful and disciplined. He saw her life, and the contrast with his own was physically painful. Where he was untethered, she was safely anchored by family, tradition, and home. Home. An endless library, high in the clouds; the place she loved more than any other. The smiles and sweet familiarity of her family. Children. They could not fully understand the places she went when she left them, but their faces lit up so brightly when she brought them stories, impossible stories, told in the voice of truth from places they could never see. He'd felt her light touch in his mind, heard the sound of a windchime as she'd cleared away the detritus of Innistrad, and knew she was kind. He saw her burden. The terrible burden of knowing, and the need to protect truths too dangerous to be spoken aloud, yet too important to be forgotten. Three iron-bound scrolls, each with a power...
	And before she could reach to draw Ignis into this moment, she felt it. *Jace.* The connection changed, and the two Planeswalkers focused their consciousnesses back to the world they stood in. "My veiling spell has been pierced. And there is a powerful presence moving this way. We must go. I will attempt to communicate with Avacyn. Distract her. Emphatically distract her if I must. You will not have long to stop her before she kills us all."
	Jace opened his mouth to reply, as the world became a symphony of howling winds and shattering glass. The angel hovered, her massive wings stained with fresh blood, her spear molten and ablaze. The look on her face was one of restrained amusement. Tamiyo floated up to meet her gaze. The angel's wings displaced a gale; when the moonfolk rose, the air did not so much as whisper. "Avacyn. I am a visitor to your world, and I have been as respectful a guest as I have been able. I want nothing but peace and wellness for those you protect. As an angel, you can hear the truth of my words. How do you respond?" The angel's face twitched into the poorest mockery of any smile Tamiyo had ever known, and a clicking sort of laughter emanated from her, lips unmoving. Her voice was a pained scratch that brought to mind insects and fingernails. "How...do I respond? I am...to protect. From you. Intruder. Invader. Rotmonger. Impure! IMPURE!"
	Had Ignis heard some indication of Avacyn's arrival before Tamiyo's veil had been pierced? It was entirely possible. As she and Jace joined their minds, he trained his attention elsewhere, listening beyond what most people would, unfettered by sight or mental distractions, for anything that he might warn them about. And it would seem that he wouldn't have to. His lance had been readied, and just as his attention was snagged and he turned his head toward what he could swear had to be Avacyn's approach, he opened his mouth to call out to the others in warning, unaware of his mirroring of Jace's own reaction, only to have it lost in the shattering explosion. He sucked in a breath. His lance shifted with his stance, ready in his hands. He listened, he waited, honed in for that perfect moment. Not too soon, not too late, to determine first what Tamiyo and Jace might choose to do.
	"I see," replied Tamiyo, a waiting scroll unfurling. "That is unfortunate." She did not need to do more than glance at the words on the scroll. It was a lament, a song from an ancient world, where the cold and ice were as dangerous as any beast. A song of loss and regret, of winter's chill and an echoing loneliness. She knew each line of the song by heart.
	Avacyn lunged forward with a massive beat of her wings and Tamiyo slipped through the air, barely clearing the reach of the angel's burning spear. As Avacyn wheeled around in the eaves of the cathedral, Tamiyo let loose precisely targeted blasts of icy gale; a patch of feathers froze and shattered, white and red, falling like snow to the stone floors below. The angel dove through the air, faster this time, her spear swinging in a wide arc. Tamiyo glided forward, baiting the attack, then tumbled in the opposite direction, more freezing blasts pushing her clear of the spear's tip. She targeted the angel's right wrist, then the joint of the left wing. As she passed behind, again, the spot where the wing met the shoulder. Avacyn was faster, and a single strike of her spear would likely mean Tamiyo's end, but the angel fought enraged, and the soratami moved with deftly calculated precision—Avacyn's face showed no pain, no frustration, but her maneuverability began to suffer. She slowed, and as she did so, the cathedral shook with that impossible laughter, the chattering of dry bones and the clawing of a thousand rats.
	Tamiyo sent an urgent thought to Jace and Ignis, hidden down below. *She's adapting. We don't have long.*
	*Right.* That was all Ignis needed. *Then let's throw something else into the mix.* Hesitating not a moment more, Ignis launched himself into the air, springing off of his lance. The beating wings made it easy to track Avacyn's movements, the swinging of her blade additionally so. And while Tamiyo's use of ice made fire seem like a good match, it was electricity that rippled down his arm, into his hand, along the length of his weapon and gathering at its point as he took his aim and descended where he suspected the angel was heading, like a veritable lightning bolt crashing down from the heavens.
	*I'm close,* Jace told them. *Trying to dig into her mind. But it's difficult. She's the source of the madness among the angels. They synchronize with her somehow. And through her, the church. But...she's not the origin. She's being affected by something else, and--your book was right! She's still holding something else at bay. I can't see it, but I think if I push a little deeper...*
	It was possible that without the Tamiyo-induced impaired mobility, Avacyn could have managed to avoid the lightning bolt that was Ignis, but with it, there was no chance. He crashed into Avacyn, stopping that hideous, chittering laughter, as the angel absorbed the impact with a scream as the lightning rippled through her. The lance pierced through her side, blood raining down onto the cathedral floor, leaving the floor pitted and smoking where it spattered. For a few seconds as the lightning raced through her, freezing muscles and twitching tendons, they plummeted downwards on a fast-paced collision course with the ground. Grunting in pain, she bucked Ignis off her back and arced back upwards, gaining more air with several labored wingbeats. Then she yanked his lance out from her abdomen and let it fall through her fingers with another freshet of that burning blood, and then raised her own spear. For a moment, she was once again the guardian from the stories, the Avacyn that had been a beacon to the people of Innistrad. A blinding light shone from her, illuminating every corner of the cathedral, leaving her enemies recoiling from its power. The light burned on, pressing on the three of them like a physical force, driving Tamiyo back to the ground, driving Jace to his knees. The angel slowly descended, spear lowered at Ignis' chest, all her previous rage seemingly vanished--she was once more the picture of deadly grace and precision.
	*Almost...there...!*
	The swell of satisfaction at hitting this particular mark was immense, although Ignis regretfully nudged aside already envisioning Liliana's reaction to such a striking blow when he recalled it to her to take what Jace was telling them into account, but even if the man was actually providing anything useful, he couldn't focus on that right now too much, either. Decisive as he blow may have been, it was only just that: a blow, and he was already taking too long to exact his next one. Avacyn bucked him off just as he was about to pull back his lance, his hands slipping...and burning, even with his gloves...from the blood that had spilled onto it; he realized that he had to let it go if he wanted to land in any way that wasn't immediately debilitating. He threw his body back with the momentum, turning until he had a good control of the pull of gravity, and landed in a deep crouch. Immediately, though, he was back on his feet, throwing out his arm, channeling that energy, that magic slightly removed from his own innate abilities, the rippling blue light that gathered and formed into the Katana of the Warrior, as he listened past that familiar whooshing, glittering sound for where Avacyn had-- Had the light been so bright that even Ignis could see it? Sense it, in a way, that he felt he sometimes could back on Eos? Or was it just the impact of it, the sheer force of it, slamming into him, until he was back on the ground in the position he'd only just avoided being in a moment ago. Or, perhaps, worse, the impact causing the spectral sword to disappear almost as soon as it had appeared, and feeling that looming presence of the angel over him and the tip of her spear against his chest. "No," he groaned, fighting against the pressure keeping him down, to very little progress, and with calculations in his head about how much he could press into that speartip, if he had to, if it meant pushing through it. "Not. Like. This."
	"Foul thing," she hissed, raising her arm back to get enough momentum for a thrust. "Be cleansed." Her spear thrust down, aiming for Ignis' heart. And then she froze. The light persisted, but her motion stopped--the spear an inch from his motionless form...and there she stayed. No breath, no fluttering of feathers, complete stillness. But the immobilizing light kept pressing down upon them.
	"It's done," Jace said, wearily. "She's, well, not sleeping exactly, but it's the closest thing I could manage." "Jace, perhaps it's slipped your attention..." Tamiyo said, from her frozen vantage on the ground. "Working on getting us mobile again. But listen. I'm think I'm close to breaking through--to figuring out what's happening. I just need a little more time to work."
	Ignis had been bracing himself for the impact; he had saved just a small bit of energy to push against the unseen force holding him down to hopefully move just enough to mitigate the damage to a deeply crippling blow rather than an instantly deadly one (he'd surely suffered far worse before...). But the impact didn't come, and the sudden vacuum of quiet and stillness that filled his perception was deafening. He let out a staggering breath, attempting to move against the pressure a little more still, out of the path of Avacyn's spear. "There is no time!" he growled through the effort and strain of even gaining just a few inches. "Let us end this, while we still have a sliver of a chance!"
	"But-but--the mystery!" Jace cried. "I'm so close to cracking it--!"
	The air filled with the smell of rotting meat. Avacyn's light did not dim, but the sense of glory vanished from it; the light was cold, sickening, oily, and cruel. The angel rounded on Jace, Ignis seemingly forgotten, and she walked with purpose over to his crumpled form. "Defiler," she whispered, her voice the sound of skin crackling away to ash in the flame. "Thief. Pustule of corruption." She reached down and placed her hand on his chest. Anything else she might have whispered to him was drowned out by his screams.
	The link between their minds held up, and they could feel what Avacyn was doing to Jace. Layers of his consciousness had already been peeled away, flayed into insensate misery by the angel's agonizing grasp. But his mind was layered, protected, and the pain had not yet penetrated his deepest thoughts. *Tamiyo. The scroll. The iron scroll. You showed it to me. An old story. A powerful story. The survivors of a place that was lost...Serra's realm. That cataclysm, that power...the story fits. You know it does. You can stop this.*
	Even as she felt his agony, even as she felt him starting to die, with the knowledge that she would likely watch Ignis be slaughtered and then finally it would be her own turn, she did not hesitate in the slightest in her reply. *And then? She is still defending this world despite her madness. Did you ever make a promise, Jace? I made one, long ago. And promises aren't just to be kept when the keeping of them is easy. We make promises for times like this, when we desperately want to break them. No, Jace. The scroll stays closed.* Disbelief. Anger. *I'm sorry, Jace, Ignis. Sometimes, our stories have to end.*

[Taken, put into a blender, and then shaken from "Stories and Endings" by Nik Davidson. Many thanks to chef_chocobro for being an outstanding rockstar who willingly puts up with all of this nonsense, both IC and OOC. Previous post here, next post here. NFB, NFI, OOC is wonderful]