by John Delaney
Bolas roared in pain. The Talon Gates fell from his clawed fingers, and Leshrac heard the sweet hiss of corruption spreading across the dragon’s chest. Bolas shuddered and convulsed, for once on the receiving end of his own greatest weapon. If Leshrac’s stolen power was half as potent as it had been for the dragon, Bolas would not be able to sustain a single coherent thought. No thoughts meant no strategy, no mana, no spells, and no chance of survival.
Leshrac sharpened his other hand and plunged that into the dragon’s body as well. Bolas shivered and thrashed in the throes of a full-blown seizure, sending vast ripples out into the sea and more pieces of the cliffs splattering down into the newly created swamp. Leshrac pulled Bolas around so that the dragon was beneath him and forced them both down, crushing Bolas against the ground and driving his spike-arms in up to the elbow.
The damage done, Leshrac teleported to the edge of the shore and watched Bolas suffer. The scales on his chest and stomach were melting away, dripping down his body and falling to the ground below like filthy snow. The dragon’s paroxysm continued, diminished but still strong enough to lock all his muscles and send his eyes up into their sockets.
Leshrac converted his spikes back into human hands. He gathered an immense killing jolt of pure black mana and held it between his flexed fingers. He appeared in the air directly over the stricken dragon.
Bolas shimmered and vanished before Leshrac could strike. Leshrac paused just long enough to get a fix on the dragon’s flight, then planeswalked in pursuit.
No respite, he taunted. No quarter, no mercy. Run while you can, Nicol Bolas. I will always catch you.
A furious snarl was the only reply, but Leshrac heard weakness behind that hissing anger. He strove on after the dragon, slicing through plane after plane like a cold, reaping wind. Bolas was running very far indeed to escape him, all the way to the farthest reaches of the Multiverse.
The kaleidoscopic blur of colors and sounds resolved into a curtain of tawny clouds. The world below them was a vast field of stone buildings, a near-endless megalopolis of disparate architecture. It covered the entire visible surface of the globe so that the only part of the landscape that wasn’t paved or covered in masonry was the huge, miles-wide river that split the landscape in two, and even that was tied down by a complicated network of crisscrossing bridges.
The dragon floundered below Leshrac, several miles above the surface of the river. The Walker of the Night plunged down toward his enemy, unhurried but also unwilling to let him draw upon the river’s flow. Dark glee flickered across his face as he saw the dragon’s belly. Virtually all of his scales and much of the underlying flesh had already rotted away, and the corruption was still spreading.
The dragon’s eye flashed as Leshrac descended. Bolas swept his arm outward, hurling an crescent arc of his own blood at his enemy. Leshrac broke off, knowing all too well the volatile dangers in that steaming, red crescent, and before he could reassert himself Bolas planeswalked away.
Leshrac followed, his brain tingling from the scent of the dragon’s blood. He would drink deep of this rare beverage when the day was won, but for now he would have to be satisfied with its heady bouquet.
Planeswalking blind was always disorienting, but the uncertainty only lent flavor to Leshrac’s excitement. The dragon was dying on his feet and would keep running until those feet dissolved out from under him. When they did, Leshrac would be there.
He materialized over a broad, blue sea. Leshrac immediately dived down, unwilling to let Bolas get to the ocean. He would get a full sense of this new arena only after he had located the dragon.
He darted across the surface of the sea like a mad water strider, hovering in one place just long enough to verify there was no trace of his enemy. “Come out, O Bolas,” he whispered. Leshrac suddenly stopped. He extended his arms, and a waterspout rose up around him, churning the seas below. “Here I am,” he said, “mocking you.”
Leshrac gazed out from his hollow tower of seawater and scanned the nearby landmass. A huge, blue, stone castle stood on the shoreline, its glass and metal spires glittering in the afternoon sun. The fortress had been constructed to double as a port, its fortifications extending out past a large marina that was laden with light, fast ships. A bizarre, inverted mountain loomed on the horizon, its flat, wide base precipitously balanced on its single peak.
The open end at the top of his waterspout suddenly cinched tight. Leshrac smiled in the darkness as seawater roiled around him. He teleported just as a cobalt blue whip of light sliced through the column, so he avoided being cut in half. He also avoided the deluge that fell when the top half of the spout collapsed.
Leshrac appeared below the water’s surface, face-to-face with Bolas. He smiled. There you are. The dragon roared and slashed with his front claws, but Leshrac didn’t try to evade the blow. As he expected, Bolas planeswalked away before his claws came anywhere near.
Leshrac’s crown flared, throwing huge, steaming bubbled out into the ocean. He struggled to keep himself from losing sight of his goal, but the chase had become such sport that he half-hesitated to continue, yearning instead to savor the joys of victory as they came.
Before him in the water floated the lower half of Nicol Bolas’s left leg. Phage’s corrosion had eaten away its foundations on the dragon’s body. It was continuing to consume the leg itself, dissolving the tough, meaty morsel into a cascade of oily, black streams that floated down to the ocean bottom.
Delicious, he thought, and pressed himself back into action.
He followed Bolas to a strange plane, or rather to the void just outside of a strange plane. The realm hung like equal halves of the same exotic fruit, two tear-shaped bodies that together formed a perfect sphere. The sphere was cloudy, opaque as a bowl of ice water, and he could see no details beyond its component shapes.
The dragon had been here, briefly, but now he was gone. Leshrac searched for his quarry, delighting in the amorphous gobs of rotting flesh the dragon had left behind during his short stay. Bolas was growing weaker and easier to find by the second. Leshrac concentrated on locating the dragon but realized he was not alone.
Two fierce women appeared between him and the realm, armed with spears and long, powerful bows. They were almost twins, identical in nearly all ways beneath their resplendent armor. The one to his left had the aspect of a serpent, sharp and quick and deadly, while the other bore herself with the solemn dignity of a queen.
They crossed their spears between them and spoke in unison. “We are the guardians of this place. You are not welcome here. Begone.”
“Of course. I pause only to thank you for simplifying my hunt.” Leshrac once more restrained his natural desires. This hidden world fascinated him, as did its protectors, but these too would have to wait. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, departing with a wink and a sinister smile.
This time Bolas had ’walked nearly as far as he had at the start of this mad chase, but Leshrac could tell he was weakening. His progress was slow, and the blood trail was increasingly strong. Eventually he would not be able to run away, so all Leshrac had to do was follow him until he found the nerve to stand and fight.
He appeared over a dusky, green world that seemed permanently wreathed in twilight. There were no rivers or oceans here for Bolas to exploit. There was a small range of short, sturdy mountains and a vibrant forest, but the predominant power in the land below was black.
The moon emerged, and Leshrac saw a massive, black castle looming over the broad valley below. He looked more closely and saw thousands of people standing in organized ranks. They were sallow-skinned, feral-looking, and dressed mostly in rags. They looked up, directly at Leshrac, and he saw the moon glinting off their dull, yellow eyes and their sharp, pointed fangs.
The army of vampires did nothing but slaver and stare. They made no move to attack, did not react to the planeswalker at all, but many of them mewed and whined as they turned toward their leader. Leshrac did not recognize the huge giant in glea
ming, black armor, but he was very familiar with the warrior’s demeanor. His heart may have been noble once, and whatever remained of that heart broke every time he led his verminous legions into the field.
Leshrac grinned. Here was another distraction for him, another plane whose very nature might amuse and delay him. Bolas was becoming truly desperate, and he was even starting to repeat himself. If the pattern held, Leshrac could count on the dragon’s ambushing him any moment now.
True to form, Bolas appeared in midlunge, his wide-open jaws rocketing toward Leshrac on his thick, sinuous neck. Leshrac laughed as he allowed himself to be snatched up in the dragon’s jaws. Bolas bit down, crushing Leshrac’s body to paste, but the Walker of Night simply held his mangled form together and let it slide back and forth across the dragon’s palate.
Bolas coughed and spat Leshrac out, ejecting a ghastly torrent of dissolving flesh along with his enemy.
Leshrac reformed himself, clean and pristine among the cloud of gore. He looked upon Nicol Bolas and laughed. “This is pathetic, O Bolas. And disgusting.”
The dragon hovered on shaking wings. His lower legs and stomach were gone, eaten away by Phage’s caress. His chest cavity hung open, hollowed out and smoking, though his spine, wings, and tail were still intact. His right arm hung from its socket by a thin cluster of nerves and tendons that were quickly bubbling away.
The dragon’s face was terrible to behold. If hate were strength, if ego were power, there would be no way Bolas could ever be defeated. Alas for him, survival was rarely a simple matter of strength and power. Leshrac had both in abundance, but he had always done perfectly well with guile and preparation. “Now it ends,” he said, and he lunged at Bolas’s remaining limb.
Bolas pulled back, but Leshrac’s fingers dug deep into his hide. The dragon hissed fire and thrashed his maimed body. Smoke and black ooze poured out from under Leshrac’s fingers. The Walker of Night strained, clenched his teeth, strained again, and pulled the dragon’s arm from his body.
Bolas bellowed, and the ground below them shook. Leshrac bore the brunt of the storm and carelessly tossed the dragon’s arm over his shoulder. The now-limbless monster slithered like a snake through the night sky, frantically beating his wings for altitude. Leshrac watched him disappear, an unholy twinkle in his eyes as he tracked the dragon’s escape.
“Of course,” he said. “It’s only fitting.”
He ’walked back to Dominaria, to the shores of Madara overlooking the Talon Gates. The false swamp he had created still bubbled and spat, still struggled to finish sucking down the largest pieces of the shattered cliffs from above. The seas were white-capped and rough, the sky a muted, rusty red.
Bolas was here…or at least most of him was. He was still dissolving from the belly up, now reduced to a head, a spine, and a tail. The swamp sludge coated him, fouling his already-festering wounds and accelerating his painful liquefaction.
Leshrac conjured a solid bolt of pure black magic. He hefted it in his hand like a javelin as he settled onto the sodden ground, raising it to his shoulder as he proudly marched forward. He had done it. He had broken Nicol Bolas and had done so in such a way that he could still harvest most of the dragon’s immeasurable power. The mana bolt would kill his mind and shatter his consciousness so that Leshrac could sift through the remains at his leisure.
“So as you once did,” he said to Bolas, “I shall now do to you. You will die here, worthy adversary, and your essence will feed me for a long time to come.”
Bolas’s eyes twitched and rolled. One of the massive, yellow orbs oriented on Leshrac as the other independently flickered up to the death spear in his hand.
“Is that…for me?”
Leshrac nodded. Later he would think of something witty and cutting and claim he had said it to Bolas before he ended the dragon’s long life, but right now he was wholly focused on killing him.
The dragon’s other eye slid into place, perfectly in synch with its twin. Bolas smiled. “Foolish insect.”
Leshrac felt a terrible, ripping shock of pain through his chest. Bolas’s tail had curled up behind him and skewered him clean through so that its barbed tip protruded from his chest. The dragon didn’t suffer the effects Phage’s power or his own. The dragon’s body and mind were both unchanged by this latest direct contact with his foe. In fact, as Leshrac struggled to reassemble his mind, Bolas gave him a pitying smile.
“How—” Leshrac said, but the thought remained unfinished amid the sickening rush of pain that exploded through his body, blinding him and rendering him entirely incapable of conscious thought.
Bolas yanked his tail loose. He shimmered, and his body became whole again. He stretched his wings wide, flexed his thick fingers, and impaled Leshrac on the end of his tail once more.
With Leshrac helpless and twitching on the end of his tail, Bolas beat his wings and headed out to sea toward the broken spires of the Talon Gates.
“That relic you used to steal my power,” he said, speaking casually as if to a guest over dinner, “the mask of Night’s Reach. Quite a formidable tool.” He flexed his tail and swung Leshrac around to face him as they soared on. “You employed it expertly. You made a serious mistake, however. You used it against me.”
Bolas extended his hand with the palm facing up. Through red-tinged double vision, Leshrac saw another white, porcelain mask appear.
“Yours is a copy, you see. Whereas I have the original.”
Leshrac saw the mask clearly, the same one the dark spirit had worn when it hailed him on this very beach. The porcelain face was cracked down the middle and singed along one side. The upper-right quarter of the mask was missing, empty space stretching from the right eye all the way up to the mask’s outer edge.
“Part of her eluded me, as you can see. But I claimed this trophy and all the power it contains before she escaped.” His voice lowered and became a menacing growl. “You thought you could steal my power? That you could use it against me with an artifact subordinate to one I claimed by rite of combat? You’re almost amusing.
“I must give you credit though. You did separate me from my most treasured ability. But in using that mask to do so, you gave it right back to me. Your mask gave you my power, but my mask is greater than yours. Well played, Leshrac. But you have lost.”
Bolas’s tail lifted Leshrac higher so that he was face-to-face with the dragon. He slowly extended his hand, and the broken mask of Night’s Reach spun around so that its interior was pointed at Leshrac.
“Good-bye, Walker of the Night. We shall not meet again.” With that, the dragon thrust Leshrac and the mask together.
Leshrac screamed as the mask consumed him, drawing in his very essence. He felt his mind and his power contracting, compressing inside the artifact. He struggled against that terrible, undeniable pull. He fought to keep himself from being absorbed and contained, but he did not have the strength and could not muster the will.
The shores of Madara disappeared from his view. Then Leshrac saw and felt nothing beyond a endless field of pure, silent white.
Jhoira sat beside Radha on the carved-stone stairs that connected the cliff top to the beach. The warlord was whole again, and while that usually meant Radha was ready to start trouble, this time the spectacle of a planeswalker duel had been enough to keep her quiet.
Bolas had won, but that was far from a positive result. Venser stood at the top of the stairs. He had been ready to teleport them all inland if the duel became any more destructive. Now he kept watch with Teferi as Jhoira sat with Radha.
The titans had gone, but something grand was still happening in the skies over Madara. Jhoira saw vividly colored storm clouds roll in, accompanied by lightning and thunder. The clouds butted against each other, then separated, then flickered out of sight entirely. She caught glimpses of the dragon, his eye or mouth, or a flash of scaly tail, then at last the entire beast, whole and complete, large enough to fill the horizon. Bolas was performing magic on a massive scale, planes
walking in and out so quickly that he seemed everywhere at once. It went on for several minutes, and Jhoira wondered what the dragon was doing now that the duel had ended, where he needed to go now that he had returned to Dominaria.
The spectacle ended abruptly, and the storm clouds blew away. “He’s coming,” Venser said. Jhoira stood and stepped back onto the cliff surface as the others rose and followed her.
Nicol Bolas’s great, horned head ascended over the edge of the cliff. His body rose until the tips of his feet were clear, then floated toward them. Both fists were clenched around hidden items that he carried gingerly.
“Greetings.” Bolas’s voice boomed, but his tone was calm and relaxed. “I trust the custodians of Dominaria’s future are all well?”
“We are,” Jhoira said.
“Better now,” Radha said. She gestured to Dinne’s remains for emphasis and nodded up at the dragon. “Nice work.”
“Thank you. You did well yourself. Now. I had some business to attend to on this plane, but I am nearly through. I will complete what I have begun before I depart.”
Radha shrugged. “Don’t let us stop you.”
“I never considered it. First,” he said, extending his left hand, “I return this one to your company.” He opened his fist to reveal Jeska, still mired in a mound of hard, black mud. The Pardic woman’s eyes were open, but she made no effort to move or free herself. “She amuses me on many levels, but there is no place for her in my world.” He flashed them a smile and gestured so that the white mask Leshrac had used appeared before him and dropped faceup on the sand. “That belongs to her, if she’ll have it. With or without it, she might yet be of use to you. Or she might be a threat. I shall let her decide.”
Jeska floated down from Bolas’s hand and settled on the cliff top. Jhoira saw the dark looks from Teferi and Radha, but even the Keldon seemed to know this was not the time to reopen their grudges against the red-haired planeswalker.