Dragon's Maze

MAZE’S END

Jace thrust forth with his mind, taking hold of the minds of all ten runners. He saw the impact Lazav had had on their minds. But even without the Dimir’s influence, each mind was a tangle of rage, blame, and frustration, each one shaped by its own set of experiences, informed by its own unique perspective on the world.

That was their strength and their weakness. Each of them viewed the world through their own lens, their own skewed perspective. He had to make them see each other. He had to make them see each other as he saw them—from the inside of their minds.

Jace used his own mind as a conduit, connecting all ten minds to each other. He used himself as a bridge just as he had with the family on Zendikar, demolishing the barriers between them, letting them see directly into one another’s souls. Varolz could sense the hotheaded frustration of Exava, who could directly perceive the militant zeal of Tajic, who could share the belligerent rebellion of Ruric Thar, who could see the passion for order and law in the heart of Lavinia. Each guild champion was flooded with the simultaneous thoughts and emotions of every other. They formed a ring of minds, a ring of hopes and beliefs and ways of life, a ring of lives.

The pain rose in Jace’s skull. Jace cried out, and the scream spiraled in on itself, shattering into a thousand pieces and crushing him from every direction. He had merged their minds, let them peer directly into each other, but it was unraveling his own mind in the process. He couldn’t perceive boundaries anymore, as he had broken them all. He had broken himself. He had fused all into one, but the cost was his own identity.

He heard an echoing voice, the voice of someone he knew, as if from a distance of years and a period of miles. The voice was saying a word, over and over again, a word that had meaning to him, but one he couldn’t remember.

It was the voice of the bailiff. The word he was saying was his name.

Jace opened his eyes. It was dark, except that the bailiff was looking down on him, his runes aglow.

Light erupted from the bailiff, and Jace’s body was scoured. He felt the light as a physical force pressing against him, pushing into him like a gale of wind—and then it pierced into him, penetrating his skin, ricocheting inside the boundaries of his body, tracing a skein of light inside him. It filled him, and consumed his vision, and the forum and the maze-runners faded away as the world flooded with light. The opaque whiteness was not blinding but soft, like diffused sunlight shining through a bank of fog. A low, composite roar suffused the air around him, like the sounds of thousands of overlapping conversations that were muffled almost to inaudibility. Jace floated, his skin tingling like the feeling just before his hair stood on end. He felt one with the distance, as though he could see as far as infinity, and reach out and touch the horizon with his finger.

Jace felt a presence at his side, and without turning he knew it was the shimmering form of the bailiff.

“Bailiff,” said Jace. Jace’s voice sounded strange, coming to his ears after a tiny delay, as if he were hearing his voice only in echo and not inside his own head. “I feel different.”

“You are different,” said the bailiff, as he rose.

“What has happened? Didn’t you deliver the verdict?”

“The verdict will not be necessary now.” The bailiff stood next to Jace, facing into the luminous fog, as if measuring the breadth of infinity. “The Guildpact has taken form.”

“It has? The Guildpact is in effect again?”

“The Guildpact has been realized.”

“Something’s different. It’s not the same this time.”

“The Guildpact of old was a spell, a spell designed to govern the interactions of the ten guilds. It was a powerful and far-reaching spell, but Azor speculated that it might one day fail. He created the Assessment to determine whether the Guildpact could take a new form. And it has.”

“The Guildpact has taken form—what does that mean?”

“It means you.”

Jace’s hair follicles contracted all over his body. He blinked several times. He took a long time to muster enough breath to form his next word.

“What?”

“You, Jace Beleren, are the living manifestation of the pact between the guilds. You are the Guildpact.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are the one who has proven himself the mediator, the one who can understand the perspectives of the ten guilds. So, like before, when the guilds clash, a code of law will arbitrate between them. The difference is that now, you are that law.”

“I can’t be.”

“Nevertheless, you are.”

“But I am not … I am not from this world.”

“Neither, as it happens, was Azor. But that criterion was not important to his Assessment.”

“It’s important to me! How can I leave again? How can I uphold—how can I be the Guildpact, here on Ravnica?”

“You have proven that you are the one capable of embodying the Guildpact. Your methods are up to you.”

Jace thought of all the maze-runners around him, back at the Forum of Azor, wherever that was from here. Of Emmara. “What happens if I die?”

“Then the Guildpact will be broken once again.”

“But if the Guildpact is a person, then it will be more fragile than before. All ten guilds will curry that person’s favor—my favor—or worse, they’ll try to kill me. They’ll send the plane back into brinksmanship and chaos.”

“Azor furnished me with a recommendation for the one who became the Living Guildpact.”

“What’s that?”

“The ability that earned you this prize is the one you must employ to maintain it.”

With that, the bailiff faded away into the diffuse light. Jace felt his presence fade.

And before he had time to take a deep, revelation-assessing breath, the light, too, began to fade, and the forum appeared around him once again. Jace lay on the central dais, physically unchanged but bestowed with a new status.

He was staring up into the eyes of a dragon.

Jace scrambled to his feet. Niv-Mizzet was perched just outside the forum, his enormous bulk settled on a nearby building. The maze-runners all looked up to see the encounter between Jace and the dragon. Lazav was nowhere to be seen.

The dragon craned his neck and angled his head to aim a squinting, uncertain eye directly at Jace, its vertical pupil taking in his every movement. A moist, transparent membrane closed over the eye and retracted again. “The Guildpact has been … restored,” said the dragon, slowly.

“Yes,” said Jace.

Niv-Mizzet breathed a trail of smoke out of his sinuses. He angled his head a fractional angle to the side. “The Izzet wish to declare war on the Selesnya,” he said, his great yellow eye twitching.

The dragon was gauging Jace’s reaction. “You may not,” said Jace quietly.

The spines on the dragon’s cheeks flexed slightly. He leaned in with his great neck, bringing his monstrous head right down by Jace’s face, dwarfing his entire body. Niv-Mizzet blew twin nostrilfuls of hot smoke at Jace, looking him up and down through the smoke. The smoke dissipated, and Jace resisted the urge to cough. The dragon then parted his lips, revealing great ivory teeth. “Very well,” said the dragon.

Niv-Mizzet backed away, straightened up, and spread his wings wide, roofing the entire forum. With one powerful beat of his wings, he lifted off the ground, blasting the area with wind. As Jace and the maze-runners watched, Niv-Mizzet climbed into the air. The dragon kept his head turned back, eyes fixed on Jace, until the moment that he pivoted and flew away over the Ravnican skyline.

“What just happened?” asked Ral Zarek.

Emmara was looking at Jace. “It’s as the dragon said. The Guildpact has been restored.”

Ral Zarek snorted. “What does he know about the Guildpact?”

“He is the Guildpact,” whispered Lavinia, her eyes wide.