Chandra
I tumbled out of the Blind Eternities and landed next to Gideon in a field of . . . wheat? Barley? Some kinda grain. It was really itchy. I stood up, pulling stalks out of my armor. The sky was so big, nothing but rolling hills and the odd rock pillar around for miles, and not a cloud anywhere in the sky.
All I could hear was the distant cry of a hawk and the wind smelled of rosemary. Just a few breaths and I felt my heart slow down. It was so peaceful, like a whole world of meditation before it gets boring.
“It’s beautiful here.”
Only then I noticed that Gids hadn’t moved. He was staring at his feet like he’d never seen them before.
“Hey, Gideon.” I waved a hand in front of his face. “Anyone home?”
“Oh?” He shook his head like a dog and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon “Sorry, I got distracted.”
“What’re you looking for?”
“There.” He pointed to the horizon and I squinted, trying to follow his arm.
“It’s . . . I think there’s some kinda building. There’s a hill in the way.” I looked up at him. “What is it?”
“Akros. The Kolophon.” He smiled, but I couldn’t help but think he looked kinda sad. “Home.”
Home. Home could be complicated, I knew that too well. He’d never talked about going back in all the time I’d known him, so there was probably a reason for him to avoid this Cacophony place. Maybe he had his own Baral. I’d never thought about that. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Yeah.” He squared his broad shoulders. “We’d better get going. It’s half a day’s walk from here.
I groaned and shouldered my own pack. “Guessing there aren’t any skyships on Theros.”
“There weren’t any the last time I was here.” Gideon set off towards the horizon. “Someone might’ve built one while I was gone, but I wouldn’t call it likely.”
“What about fleetwheels?” I set off after him. “Trains? Roto-Coptors?”
“There were wagons.” He continued to look ahead, but I could hear the smile in his voice and it made my heart glow. Not literally. My control wasn’t that bad.
“Tell me about Akros then. I’m trying to picture what kinda city could’ve made someone like you and all I’m coming up with is a gym the size of Ghirapur where everyone drinks eight glasses of water a day and skipping leg day can get you fired.”
“That’s . . . ” He stopped for a second, just long enough that I caught up with him. “Okay, that’s only a third of the city. There are things other than training yards there.”
I actually laughed. “I was joking you know. Mostly.”
“I know.” He clapped a big hand on my shoulder and I was reminded of how gosh-darn tall he was.
We talked for hours as we walked. It was something that we hadn’t really had time to do since Diraden, and we were both hiding things back then. He told me about his childhood on the streets of Akros, getting arrested for stealing food and spending years in prison while learning how to do law magic. It all sounded so like him, and yet not. Like he was describing the same Gideon I knew but there were pieces missing.
I was trying to find a good way to ask about that without sounding like a big moron when he held up his hand in a clenched fist. I’d never been good with the hand signals soldiers use, but I’d spent enough time around Gids and Nissa to recognize this one. ‘Shut up. Don’t move.’
My hair started to crackle like it does before it bursts into flames and I looked around nervously. Fields might be pretty but they burned like nobody’s business. That was a mistake I never wanted to make again.
A roar shook the ground. It sounded big, coming from the other side of the hill. Giant? Baloth? In the quiet that followed I heard metal clanging in the distance. I wondered which Gids had heard first.
Gideon set off at a run. I caught him at the top of the hill and saw what was making all the noise. It was a giant, but one of the smaller ones with only one eye. It was also green, which might be normal here. A group of twelve soldiers with spears and big round shields were dancing around it in the field below, stabbing at its feet and pulling back before it could stomp on them.
“Who’re they?”
“Stratians.” He drew his sword. “Soldiers of Akros.”
Friends, then. I looked at Gideon and nodded. Time to kill a big monster.
Gideon ran off down the hill towards the monster, his whole body shimmering with gold light. I followed behind him, far enough away that I’d be outside the big ugly’s range. I hoped so anyway. My armor’s good, not get-stepped-on-by-giants good.
The giant was looking at the soldiers, so Gids ran right up behind it and stabbed it in the leg. It let out another roar that I felt in my bones and backhanded him. There was a flash of gold light and he flew way over my head. Then the thing noticed me, and its black eye filled with hate.
That’s very not good.
It bellowed and swung a massive fist at me. I barely managed to scramble out of the way as a crater of dirt exploded next to me. I could feel the heat building in my chest, flames that wanted to be given life. No, I almost panicked. Not here.
The thing’s mouth gaped open, big enough to swallow a sheep. I turned tail and ran. My heart was hammering in my chest and before long I was gasping for air. I snuck a glance over my shoulder. Bad idea. It had fallen to one knee, but it scrabbled and dragged its bulk along with its huge arms and it was so darn big that it was gaining ground on me anyways.
Come on, I coulda sworn I saw it this way. I squeezed my eyes shut and ran. Wheat whipped at my legs, hard enough to hurt. Fear made the sun in my chest blaze but I clamped down hard, holding it in even when it boiled inside me. A picture of steam pouring out my ears popped into my head and it was so ridiculous I almost fell. Please don’t let me go out like that, some hysterical part of me thought. Here lies Chandra, who tripped over her feet.
Suddenly I couldn’t feel the long stalks of wheat against my legs anymore. My eyes snapped open. A road! I knew it was here! I skidded to a stop, my boots sparking on the cobblestones as I spun around. The giant was almost on top of me and it reared up to smash me under its bulk. Don’t think. Act.
I thrust my palm up towards the giant. The power in my chest wanted out, but this time I didn’t take the lid off. I just gave it a tiny hole. All that power bottled up with only one place to go. It rushed down my arm like a river. Only, you know, the fire kind. Like lava, but more flowy. For a second I saw the bones of my hand glowing through the metal gauntlet and then a stream of fire the width of two fingers shot out from my hand, so hot it burned blue like mom’s torch gauntlet.
The lance of fire hit the giant in the eye and burned right through. I caught a glimpse of its hideous puke-colored face blackening from the heat, then something important boiled in there and a big chunk of its head exploded. The giant collapsed like a puppet when someone dropped the strings, but I couldn’t stop the stream of fire. The power was too pent up, too volatile. It had to go somewhere. So I poured it all out through the torch-flame, shooting an eye-searing needle of blue fire into the sky until it burnt out and I felt all empty and wobbly.
I dropped to my knees in front of the dead giant and laughed. It was hard not to, after a rush like that. And I hadn’t burnt the fields even a little.
There were footsteps behind me. “Hey, did you see that Gids?” I turned to look, but it’s one of the soldiers. It was hard to make out much about him ‘cause the shield and the helmet covered everything. Which was the point of shields, I guess. And helmets. I’m not an armorer.
He looked from me to the dead giant. “You’re a flamespeaker.”
Is that what they call pyromancers here? “I think so? Sure, flamespeaker, let’s go with that.” Real smooth Chandra. You fit right in.
“Heretics, Captain!” He shouted without looking away from me, and the point of his spear came down over his shield.
That’s bad. I scrambled to my feet and backed away. “Gideon?” I really didn’t want to fight his friends.
“Here.” He stepped past me to stand in front of the soldier like a living wall. “What do you think you’re doing hoplite?”
The soldier-hoplite didn’t answer, just kept circling without lowering his shield or his spear. More of them formed up with him in just a few seconds, making a wall that looked way too stabby.
One of them with a fancy crest on his helmet spoke up. “You’re in Akroan lands. Identify yourself.”
“Kytheon Iora of Akros and Chandra Nalaar of Meletis. We’re on our way to the Kolophon.”
“Not with her you aren’t.” The captain pointed his spear at me. “I’m not letting any of Purphoros’s scum into the city.”
“I haven’t been home for several years. Has something happened that I don’t know about? When last I lived in Akros, Purphoros was worshiped below only Iroas.”
The captain let out a bark of laughter. “Everybody knows what happened. My say is final.”
Gideon did that thing with his voice where he gets so sincere that people want to roll over for him. “Even though she killed the Cyclops for you?”
“That’s the only reason you aren’t crow food right now.” He removed his helmet and gave both of us a long look. “You’re both going to turn around and head for the nearest border. You have three days to leave Akroan territory. After that the Alamon will have orders to kill you both on sight.”
My hands tightened into fists, but Gideon had already backed off. He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me away from the soldiers. “Don’t get angry,” He whispered in my ear. “We don’t know what’s going on.”
He’s right. But there was a knot of confusion and hurt in my chest. What the heck had they meant? I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t blurt out something dumb.
I managed to hold it in all the way until we’d gotten around the first bend in the road. Then the words came tumbling out. “The heck was their problem? You didn’t say anything about pyromancy being forbidden here, and I didn’t even burn anything I wasn’t trying to this time!”
“I noticed.” He smiled at me, broad and sincere. “That was well done.”
My cheeks felt like they were burning. Not actually. “What was that flamespeaker crap about anyway? And the whatchamacallit, Phosphorous?”
“Purphoros,” he corrected. “God of blacksmiths and fire. Flamespeakers are his priests. And yes, most of them are pyromancers.” His forehead became a maze of worry lines. “I have no idea why they would be barred from Akroan territory. Flamespeakers used to work side-by-side with the Stratians.”
I let out a long breath, trying to let the frustration flow out of me. It worked. Kinda. “So what now? Sneak back into the city? I can probably dye my hair black so we don’t stick out so much.”
He shook his head. “When Akros goes to war all foreigners are kicked out of the city and the gates are sealed. No one gets in without a captain’s seal. Even if one of my old friends has been promoted that high we have no way to find them. In all likelihood, they wouldn’t recognize me if we did.”
“So, what?”
“This road should lead us to the coast.” He squared his big shoulders again. “From there we’ll follow the shoreline to Meletis, the city of philosophers.”
“Oh. How far is that?”
He was quiet for a minute, and all I heard were our footsteps on the cobblestones. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “That field we arrived in was the farthest I’ve ever been from Akros. On Theros anyway.”
Great. I hung my head. You screwed this up already Chandra.
* * *
Gideon whirled the sling over his head, feeling the rhythm and the weight of it. The air filled with a quiet hum as the sling sped up. Breathe in, visualize. Breathe out, release.
The stone shot out from the sling in a high whistling arc and flew past the rabbit’s head. Then it slammed into the ground with an audible thud and the animal bolted, bounding into the underbrush before Gideon could load another stone.
He groaned and wrapped the sling around his arm. He’d never been a great shot with the weapon, and with the sun falling ever-closer to the horizon there was little point in hunting any longer. Planeswalking was chancy at the best of times, and this time the food he’d brought had turned to ash in his pack. It was an almost trivial problem, but it meant they had to hunt for their food until they reached Meletis and he’d been having terrible luck.
When he got back to their roadside camp he found Chandra staring moodily at a small fire, her knees curled up to her chest as she poked at the flames with a stick. She’d been in a dark mood ever since they’d been turned away from Akros that morning.
“Hey Gids.” She barely looked up. “How’d it go?”
“Not much luck. I’m pretty rusty with a sling. I did find these though.” He held up the three palm-sized clams he’d found in a tidal pool.
“That’s good.” She said listlessly. “We can do . . . stew, or something.”
He sat down across from her and started preparing the clams, placing them on a flat rock and then gently laying the rock in the center of the fire. Once they were cooking he sighed. “Is something wrong Chandra? You seem out of sorts.”
She didn’t respond for a while, staring into the fire. Its flames danced and flickered in her eyes. When she spoke her voice was painfully small. “I just feel so useless, you know? I’ve spent so long working on my control and I finally got to the point where it’s not stupid dangerous just to be near me. But it barely matters, does it? We got kicked outta your home because of who I am.” She dropped her head to rest on her knees. “Because of what I am.”
“Chandra, you couldn’t have known. I couldn’t have known.”
“So?” her voice was muffled by her knees. “People are always gonna be scared of me Gids. And most of the time I don’t care, I really don’t. But this time it cost us big time. You read that note too. We’ve got a month to stop this Nixilis butt, maybe less. And I cost us a bunch of that time. You don’t even know how long it’ll take us to reach Meletis. Theros could be dead by then, and it’s all my fault.”
“I don’t believe that.” Gideon got up and walked around the campfire to sit next to her. He hesitated, then rested a hand on her shoulder. She was trembling, not enough to see but he could feel it where they touched. “Chandra, listen to me. I’ve known you for a long time now, and I’m comfortable saying that I like my chances of stopping Ob Nixilis a lot better right now with you at my side than if you’d gone to Phyrexia and I had an audience with the King of Akros right now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right. I don’t. And we won’t know until this entire messy business is done. But I do know this. This is the path that we’re on now, and I don’t regret it.”
Chandra sniffled. “You don’t?”
“Not for a second.” He gave her a one-armed hug. “Now there’s something I want to show you.”
She raised her head out of the ball she’d curled up into. “Is it clams?”
“That too.” Gideon reached into the heart of the fire and plucked the first one out, golden light shimmering around his arm. “Theros might not have skyships or roto-copters, but there’s a wonder to this world that I’ve never seen anywhere else.”
“Oh?” a hint of the usual defiance had crept back into Chandra’s gaze as she took the scorching shellfish from him and slurped it out of the shell. “What’s so special?”
“Look up.”
Chandra raised her face to the sky and gasped. The last sliver of sun had fallen below the horizon, and Nyx reigned over the sky. Stars and nebulas swirled as if a frenzied god was painting a story in the sky, forming shapes of famous heroes and monsters one moment only to be completely reshaped the next. Nymphs danced across the horizon only to turn into a fearsome dragon that roared a blast of astral fire high into the sky.
That fire exploded into a cloud of smoke that obscured the rest of the stars, until the blue crackle of lightning lit it up from within and a boom of thunder shook the ground. The stormcloud doubled in size, billowing and reshaping itself into the form of a bearded man with a mane of stars for hair and eyes that crackled with lightning.
“That’s Keranos,” Gideon whispered. “The God of Storms.”
Chandra was staring at the sky with openmouthed wonder. If she’d heard him at all she gave no sign.
Keranos hurled a bolt of lightning far into the sky, disappearing over the mountains to strike some far-off target. Just then a snake so black it looked like a hole in the sky lunged and sank its fangs into the god’s arm. Instantly he evaporated into a stormcloud and the snake’s jaws closed on nothing. The single green star that marked the serpent’s eye swung around just in time for another bolt to lance out from the cloud and strike it. The snake bulged and took new nebulas into itself until it had taken on the form of a masked woman with a smoking bowl in one hand and a serpent twined around each arm. Pharika, God of Affliction. Gideon frowned. Since when are those two fighting?
The two gods battled and wrestled across the sky, changing forms so rapidly that Gideon could barely keep track. The lesser creatures of Nyx stayed well clear of the two titans, though once a celestial ox was struck by a stray bolt of lightning and vanished from the sky in a flash.
They were still fighting when Gideon fell asleep, Chandra’s snores rattling in his ear.
* * *
Elspeth sat in the deepest pit of the underworld, and she knew only peace.
The gloomy and oppressive realm that had become her home was a far cry from the sun-dappled glory of Bant, but in the end appearances were just window dressing. It was a luxury that Elspeth had found herself happy to surrender. The underworld might be cold and all but impossible to navigate thanks to the green-black miasma that hung in the air, but that mattered far less to her than the safety written into the very fabric of this reality.
No one would ever assault her new home, for there was nothing here worth taking. Her fellow spirits had nothing and desired nothing, except for the fools who pined for the world they’d left behind.
In emptiness, there was security.
And in that emptiness, there was little left to do but look back on her life. Elspeth had seen spirits driven to madness under the weight of their earthly failures. She’d been to that brink herself, wallowing in grief and her inability to save the people around her. Her fellow knights on Bant. The Mirran resistance. Even Daxos. They’d all fallen to nightmares and worse.
It had taken her far too long to realize that surviving didn’t make her guilty. Bant would have fallen with or without her. Time and again she’d tried to shoulder the burdens of an entire world, never seeing the folly of it. The disasters she’d attracted had been too great to hope to overcome, so there was no point in regretting her failure.
At least you finally got it right, she thought as she rose from her cross-legged seat in the lonely cave. You saved Theros from one disaster. The next one will be someone else’s problem.
Elspeth dusted her tunic off and walked to the pile of armor at the back of the cave. It held little value as armor anymore, but steel was a precious resource in the underworld because of how rare it was. She picked up the ruined breastplate first and ran her fingers around the edges of the jagged hole that punched through both the thick plates. She had a matching hole in her chest, a horizontal gash that cut her sternum in half and sometimes made her voice whistle when she talked. It should’ve caused her a lot more trouble than that, but the dead needed their spines intact about as much as they needed to breath.
Elspeth sighed and placed the ruined metal back against the wall of the cave. She had plans to repurpose the rest of her armor into various tools, but the breastplate was a reminder. Of what she had gone through. Of who she had lost.
She shook her head and picked up her greaves instead. It had taken her a long time to modify them to their new job. She’d sealed one end of the metal tubes shut with the pommel of her dagger and clipped a belt of chainmail links to the open end of each, leaving her with two large containers that were easy to carry.
Elspeth slung the strap over her shoulders and walked to the entrance of her cave. Her most precious possession leaned against the wall there, a walking staff of black wood she’d spent hours carving from the branch of a dead tree. She took it in hand and marked the only landmark she could see through the fog, a spur of gold that jutted out of the ground like a rhino’s horn less than thirty feet from the mouth of the cave.
She walked to it, turned back to memorize what the cave mouth would look like on the return trip and set off to the next landmark, this time a thin crevasse in the rocky ground. Traversing the underworld in this manner was a painstaking and slow process, but it was the only method Elspeth had discovered to avoid getting lost in the endless mists. Besides, she had no reason to rush.
It was impossible to measure time in the underworld, so she counted the landmarks she passed to track the distance. It took more than a hundred and seventy stages to reach a sandy grove at the base of a cliff. That probably made it little more than a mile from her cave, but with visibility this bad it might as well have been a hundred times that. Most spirits feared to move more than a few feet once they claimed a patch of rock as theirs, lest they get lost in the fog and lose everything once again.
Elspeth knelt and began scooping sand into her makeshift pack. Without the pressures of navigating the fog her mind was free to wander. As always her thoughts turned to her final days on Theros, the chaos caused by the false god’s ascension, her desperate foray into Nyx. Heliod’s final betrayal. Did I make a difference?
No. That wasn’t the right question. Her actions had changed the course of history on Theros. That much was unavoidable. The question that haunted her was far more sinister. Did I make things better?
That question had kept her at the shores of the river for months, begging newly arrived spirits for news of the surface. Finally she’d been forced to abandon that quest. At least in the short term things seemed to have stabilized, but eventually the news was flooded by new crises. During her darkest times Elspeth wondered if the so-called sleep plague had been her fault, whether Theros was doomed to face apocalypse after apocalypse until it finally broke because she was still drawing calamities to her, even from beyond the grave.
A moan sounded out of the fog. A fellow spirit, and nearby from the sound of it.
With her pack filled she set it aside and sat against the cliff, enjoying the cool stone against her back. Ajani had scolded her for that line of thinking, but her friend wasn’t here. She’d heard news of him only once, when an elderly priest complained of an albino leonin that had been inciting discord in the temples of Meletis. Hopefully her old friend found some measure of comfort that way, but Elspeth couldn’t bring herself to be invested in his quest.
I don’t blame Heliod, she thought. I’d already surrendered my life when he killed me. I just hope Daxos is happy. He deserved better than to get caught up in my wake.
Elspeth was gathering up her pack to go home when a spirit stumbled out of the mist and collapsed into the sand pit a few feet away. In life he had been a man of powerful stature, but in death his head was little more than a mass of ruined flesh and broken bones, as if it had been driven down into his body by a terrible blow. A low moan came from somewhere deep in his chest.
Elspeth closed her eyes. His problems weren’t any of her business. Everyone down here had regrets, and if he wanted to wallow in his that was his choice. She knew that was true, but the thought rankled her. Unbidden, the words of her knight-master sprang to her mind. To be a knight is to be a shield, standing between the people and the horrors that stalk them. Did it matter that the horrors were within his head?
She knew the answer.
“Hello there.” She crouched down next to the prone spirit. “What’s your name?”
“Vinack.” The spirit’s voice was muffled, though whether by the ground or simply because his mouth was buried somewhere in his chest she couldn’t say.
“Hello Vinack. I’m Elspeth.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I want to listen.”
He was silent for a few seconds. “Who says I want to talk?”
“No one, I suppose. And if you don’t want to I’ll leave you alone. But I’d have gone mad without someone to talk to when I first died, so I try to help people in return when I can.”
Vinack shook with laughter and pushed himself up into a sitting position. From this close she got a good look at the horror of gore and ichor that took the place of his head. “Help? Look at me girl. There’s no helping me.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Oh yeah?” his voice was sharp with belligerence. “I don’t have a bleeding head girl. What could be worse?”
“Have you ever met the spirit of someone who was torn apart by a hydra? The lucky ones still have an arm attached to their body. Most are just a pile of parts.
“Met many hydra victims, have you?”
“You find them all along the shore if you look for any length of time. Unless someone decides to move them they just stay where Athreos left them.”
He let out a booming laugh that was deadened by the fog. “I yield girl. Never let it be said that Vinack doesn’t know when he’s beaten.”
“I have a name.”
“I’m sure you do.” Vinack leaned against a boulder and crossed his hands behind where his head should have been. “I just don’t care.”
Elspeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re an ass.”
“Not denying it.” His voice grew wistful. “I wonder if things would’ve turned out different if I realized that early on.”
“You’ll never get an answer to that,” Elspeth said. “I’m warning you now, you can torture yourself with what-ifs and could-have-beens until you go mad. It’s easy to fall down that slope. It’s hard to climb back up it. Better to focus on the now.”
“We’re dead girl. The past is all we’ve got.”
“Walk with me?” Elspeth rose and offered and hand to the much larger man. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Vinack grumbled and cursed, but eventually he rose as well and followed her into the fog. They walked in silence for some time, until suddenly the burly man spoke. “What’s with the sand?”
Elspeth looked down at the greaves swinging from the chain around her neck. “My own little project, I guess. I‘ve been living in a cave for a while and I got tired of how hard the floor was. Eventually I decided to do something about it.”
“So you’ve been hauling sand across the underworld in your shoes?”
“Yes.” Elspeth stopped at a dead tree and scanned for the next landmark.
“But why?”
“Why not?” She shrugged. “I like having something comfortable to sit on.”
“Crazy girl.” She could picture Vinack shaking his head.
They both grew quiet again, though Vinack continued to mutter as Elspeth navigated through the fog.
“Aunt Elspeth!”
The shout gave her only a second’s warning before a broad form dove out of the fog and tackled her to the ground. Strong hands grabbed her wrist and tried to twist her arm around behind her back, but Elspeth rolled with the force of the tackle and after a brief struggle wound up on top of her attacker, her knee pressed firmly into the teenager’s throat and one of his arms trapped in a hold that would break his elbow if he tried to roll away.
She held the choke for a second to drive the point home, then released him and pulled the grinning teenager to his feet. “Not bad Thanasis. If you’d gotten your leg out faster I wouldn’t have been able to reverse your arm bar.”
“I’ll get you next time.” Thanasis clasped arms with her. “Oi, Pavios! We’ve got visitors.”
Another spirit walked out of the mouth of a cave hidden in the hill. Pavios was a touch taller than his bulkier partner and had the nervous energy of a flustered academic. “It’s good to see you Elspeth. I keep telling you to visit more often. We’d started to worry you’d gone off and joined the army of the dead without us.”
“And I keep telling you I don’t want to intrude.” Elspeth hugged the young man. “I enjoy my solitude. Besides, you two are happy here, you don’t need an old woman like me hanging around and making you both miserable.”
“You’re not that old,” Thanasis said. “Who’s the headless guy?”
“Thanasis!” Pavios slapped his partner on the shoulder. “Can you at least pretend like you have manners?” He turned to Vinack and bowed. “I’m sorry for his rudeness.”
“Um, don’t mention it.” He scratched at his bloody stump self-consciously. “I’m Vinack, since you all introduced yourselves. Would you mind giving me a moment with Elspeth?”
“We’ll be inside.” He threw an arm around Thanasis’ shoulders. “Come here mister pankration master, the adults need to talk.”
Elspeth waited until both boys had disappeared into the hidden opening to their cave before speaking. “What is it?”
“Why are we here?” the headless spirit hissed. “What’s the point of dragging me to see a couple of snot-nosed—” he cut himself off sharply.
“You needed to see that death isn’t the end,” Elspeth said simply. “And more than anyone else I’ve met in the underworld, these boys have made a life for themselves down here.”
Levi Byrne has been with the game since Worldwake and has a rabid love for fantasy writing that goes back decades. Despite some forays into Legacy he plays Commander almost exclusively, and has a love for the crazy plays and huge games that make Magic what it is. He was the go-to advisor of his playgroup on deck construction for more than five years before joining Dear Azami.