Wait wait hold on, Bolas (now, apparently) set up Liliana's deals with the demons?
That's... I just...
What the hell have they done to this poor innocent storyline
-Liliana comes to Bolas all shriveled and old. She's all "Screw you dragon for being functionally immortal!"
-Bolas is all "Ha ha, you got old! By the way, we can fix that. I know some guys...."
-Then they go on a multiversal world tour to meet and greet some demons. We get to see Kothophed rip Liliana apart and rebuild her young again.
Quote:
ONCE, WE WERE GODS
More than a century later, an old woman stepped from one world into another. The years were a burden on her shoulders as heavy as her grief.
"You're late."
The rumbling voice greeted her before she had fully left the other world behind, and with her first step on the marble floor of the great hall, she felt it vibrating with the power of the voice.
"Not yet," Liliana said with a smirk. "Not ever, if you can help me as you promise." Gazing ahead at the prospect of death—as mundane a death as could be imagined, withering away from age—she had come to seek the aid of the one being in all the planes powerful enough to keep it at bay.
The floor shook again as the dragon chuckled, and Liliana turned to look at him—turned, and raised her head, and stepped back to see more, and still his enormity filled her vision. As vast as the hall was, the great, curled horns atop his head scraped the ceiling and his outstretched wings reached the walls on either side. She suppressed a scowl—Nicol Bolas was trying to intimidate her, to remind her who held the upper hand in their negotiations. Worse, it was working.
"I can help you, Liliana Vess," Bolas said. "But immortality is beyond the reach of us all, now."
"Says the thirty-thousand-year-old dragon." Liliana turned her back on him again, staring down at her hands. Creased and spotted with age, her skin hung loose on her bones. She stood as straight as she could manage, unwilling to display her body's frailty in front of the mighty dragon. But it was not just her body—her soul was a withered bloom, bereft of hope.
"How we have fallen," he said. "Once, we were gods, working our private havoc through planes known and unknown."
His words stung. They were Planeswalkers, not gods, but in those first years there had not been much difference. The spark that had ignited in her heart had unlocked greater power than she could ever have imagined, making her immortal and virtually omnipotent, putting the endless ranks of the dead firmly under her command. She had walked the numberless planes of the Multiverse for decades, exerting her will, her whims, on worlds that were powerless to resist her. Only one thing, in those days, had seemed beyond the reach of her magic: undoing what she had done to Josu.
Then the Multiverse reshaped itself, robbing her—and every other Planeswalker—of the godlike power they once had wielded. Some called it the Mending, as if something broken had been repaired, but to Liliana, it seemed the opposite. It broke her beyond any hope of repair. She had spent decades working to regain even a fraction of the magical might she had lost, and it was not enough—not enough to keep death at bay. Josu had promised that they would be together in death, sharing his eternal pain, and Liliana would never let the icy claws of death fulfill that promise.
"You have not fallen so far," Liliana said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.
"You did not know me at my height. I have lost more power than you could learn in a dozen lifetimes."
"Then give me a hundred!" Liliana whirled on him. "Look at me, Bolas! I can feel death breathing down my neck."
"Perhaps that is because it has been such a close companion all these years."
"Not a companion, a tool. Something to be inflicted on others, not embraced."
"I'm sure some of your old teachers would disagree." The floor rumbled with the dragon's amusement again. "Surely you learned from vampires when you went to Innistrad, studied with liches—the masters of necromancy. They would have you embrace death and move beyond it, not fear its approach."
As Nicol Bolas spoke, he lowered his head closer to Liliana's and turned so that she saw her face reflected in one huge, black eye—wrinkled and drawn, her beauty faded, the specter of death haunting her eyes, not too different from what she had seen in Josu's dead, black eyes all those years ago.
Liliana turned away. I am more than I seem, she reminded herself.
"A queen doesn't rule her people by being one of them," she said. "If I'd wanted to go down that path, I'd be on Innistrad right now, not here. So can you help me or not?"
"As I told you, I can put you in touch with the beings that can help you."
"Four demons, you said. And the cost is my soul, right? Payable upon my death?"
"It's not quite that simple."
"Of course not." Liliana sighed. "Nothing is ever simple with you, is it, Bolas?"
"On the contrary, many things that your mind can't even begin to fathom are quite simple to me."
She snorted. "Your modesty is truly breathtaking."
"A simple statement of fact, Liliana Vess. After all, you are merely human."
"'Once, we were gods.' I need that power back, Bolas. Power and youth and strength. Even if it costs my soul."
"Good." The dragon's breath was close, scalding the back of her neck. "But a soul isn't a trinket you can hand over to a demon, or an ember it can seize upon your death. You'll give up your soul, all right—because no one with a shred of soul could possibly undertake the tasks you will perform to pay off your debt."
Liliana tried to suppress a shudder.
"But why should that bother you," the dragon said, "after all that you have already done? You have studied with the greatest necromancers on all the planes. You slaughtered angels. And you bested the one who started you on this path. What did you call him? The Raven Man?"
Liliana nodded absently, thinking of her first encounter with the Raven Man, all those years ago, and the terrible events that followed. She had bested him, as the dragon said, but not killed him—not yet.
"Perhaps you have already given up your soul," Bolas said.
The prospect did bother her, Liliana realized with some surprise. Bolas was right. Since her first encounter with the Raven Man in the Caligo Forest, when she had embraced her power and let it steer her, her life had been one moral compromise after another, an inexorable slide into darkness. What was left that separated her from the wickedest villains in the Multiverse?
Just this moment, she thought, this one instant of hesitation.
Liliana turned and stared into the dragon's unblinking eye. "Let's get this over with."
Login
Register
Card Search
NGAWiki
Search
