Rain pours down on the memory of the Vrynian rooftop. The sphinx Alhammarret is loud in her ear, and every part of Vraska's body listens with unceasing attention.

"Step off the roof."

She walks to the edge, knowing exactly what she needs to do, is terrified to do it. The drop is far. A groan from the dying Alhammarret behind her roars through her ears. She knows she must jump. She must.

As she leans over the edge of the building, she sees a portal shining far below, a doorway just for her. Vraska lets out a shaking breath of relief. She was commanded to walk, but she was not commanded to aim, and so she aims.

Aim for the portal … Aim for the portal … She prays with a single foot dangling over the edge of the building, then clenches her teeth as she steps off.

As Vraska falls, she thinks of division. All the pieces of herself, all the parts she doesn't want to look at.

She thinks of the captain, the leader who spent a lifetime overlooked until a dragon saw her potential.

The Golgari revolutionary who fought tirelessly for her people, no matter the cost.

The compleated queen who blinded her foes for the cause of wearing another guild's robes.

The assassin who killed too many names for her to remember or question.

And that last part, that is the one that catches her attention. What love has she shown this aspect of herself? What gratitude can she give this part? Should she thank it for all the times she needed to kill? Should she remember, presently, how difficult and different that time in her life was?

In Vraska's mind, as she passes through the portal in a haze of blue light, she sees herself, the assassin, and invites her to join this fall.

Vraska tumbles, current self with imagined past, and as she sees her destination ahead, the assassin shares her wisdom.

We know how to gift a kind death.

Meanwhile, a boy walks on a hot night under a starry sky. This place is a trap, and he is the snare.

He feels ill. Disgusted with himself. This memory is one he has forgotten many times over, sometimes by accident, often on purpose. This part of him remembers, distantly, what his adult selves know, but mostly he remembers all the parts the rest of him shut away. The boy understands. His duty is to his task. His task is withholding the ugliest knowledge of all. He is the Soldier.

Above him the sky is broad, stretching from a massive bluff on one side of the horizon to a speck of a city on the other. Its spine is a series of massive metal rings, and they buzz with the energy of a skyful of storms. Their crackle is the only sound in the air. Here, it is nighttime, and surrounding the boy are fourteen canvas tents, two sets of shoes outside of each. A section's worth of horses is tied up in the distance, the embers of the army's fires cooling themselves to sleep. He is sick of this repeating nightmare, nauseated to have to keep walking by those shoes, those horses, this silence. The boy wishes for company. No one is awake except for him—a child, a soldier, somebody's son.

He has been trapped in this night, this forgotten-then-remembered-then-forgotten darkness. It is the memory he was most glad to be rid of, the one he shoved furthest down. Alhammarret's instruction was clear that night, and even now in this memory trap, he marvels at his efficiency. He changed the course of a war this night, not that it mattered. The boy, the Soldier, stands in the middle of the tents now with clean hands despite the filth weighing down his heart.

There are footsteps. He instinctively sweeps the area with the reach of his mind. Not a soul is alive except for the horses and her. His heart lifts. The captain can save him. She can rescue him from this memory. She can do anything.

The Soldier sees Vraska approaching and straightens into a salute. "Captain," he says, gesture precise. He's concerned by her response; his captain's face is sorrowful at the honorific.

Which Jace is this? he overhears.

The weapon, says the child soldier to her mind, and he feels her burn with pity. He's ashamed, retreats from her mind with the feeling of it, her sympathy a sadness cloying like clotted feathers. The Soldier is the least proud version of himself—the sphinx's prodigy, the sphinx's weapon. The spy, the assassin, though Jace would never voice that. He is the Jace whose childhood was stolen and whose reality was rewritten again and again. He is the boy in possession of godlike powers. He has not learned to hate them yet.

Which is why he needs his captain.

"I need help, sir," he says in a child's small and bashful voice. He can't be older here. This is how old he was when he was a killer. This is when he was least comfortable saying what must be said now. The silence of every set of bodies in every unmoving tent, the gargantuan number scribbled on a chalkboard, the face of every friend he ever hurt on purpose … all of it weighs on the boy's shoulders. He'd cry, but he has not learned to cry yet.

Instead, the Soldier is embarrassed. He sees the captain start to tear up when he cannot. He tries to stay calm and stands at parade rest. Hands at his back. Shoulders taut. Chin up. I am at the ready, he assures himself. I am at the ready.

She steps closer, and in the thin light of the moon and stars he sees the captain as he always did—a superior, a moral bastion, the arbiter of right and wrong. His embarrassment deepens, for he knows he is thin, reedy, young. He does not like being near his captain in this state. His cloak is dirty with travel and nothing else. He is profoundly out of place, just barely beyond childhood and surrounded by war. The Soldier watches his commander rankle at the stillness of the campsite, the silence, the tired bags under his own eyes, days of travel on his cloak but not a knife at his side, and feels her shiver with the memory of a personal nightmare: He does not need a knife.

"You don't have to call me sir," Vraska says.

"You're my captain." The Soldier glances at the tents to his right and looks down. "I failed you."

She kneels to look him in the eye and the Soldier feels small, so small. He does not know what the rest of his selves know. He doesn't matter to himself yet.

"What makes you say that?"

The Soldier holds his face still. In that watercolor world of night under a full moon, the boy whispers, "I'm the reason you couldn't love all of me. I didn't want you to see me, because all I'm good at is …"

He doesn't bother finishing. The twenty-eight dead soldiers in their tents who forgot how to breathe say nothing to his truth.

He … He is being held.

The captain embraces his shoulders.

The world is washed with blue and indigo. Passing clouds form inkblots on the ground, smear slowly across the canvas tents, and in the center of the camp, the boy is held tightly by his captain.

She says to him, "You are a killer worthy of the Ochran."

"Is that all I am?"

"It is enough for me to love you."

The clouds above part. Something fundamental shifts.

He inhales as a choke but dares not let his tears fall, instead voicing the cure to the fear at the root of his being. "I'm not all bad?"

His captain smiles, as if realizing something herself. "You're not bad because you are a part of him." Vraska's voice is gentle. She does not shape her words for the ear of a child. "I don't see a heartless murderer. I see a child with a powerful gift who grows into a man who refuses the subjugation you know too intimately. You're part of him, and I love you as I love him."

"I need help," says that most isolated, most fearful part of himself, for the very first time.

The captain's embrace is warm and gentle.

He lets a tear fall and gasps. "Can you love all of me if I'm in there, too?"

She tugs him even closer.

They hold each other for a while, adult comforting child. High above, the sky is clear; clouds vanish into the beautiful blue night with a sliver of a sweet-cream moon, and the valley is awash with starlight.

The Soldier feels electric, filled with a glowing discovery. He knows who could help. He considers, flips through theorems as quick as through a times table, deduces what will be left once the plan is complete, remembers … yes. There is someone who can help in just the right way.

"I will ask for help." The boy sniffs. "Thank you, Captain." He turns to look at the moon and knows the older parts of him are picking up on his plan.

"I don't want you to die," the captain says to his back. "And I don't want you to die suffering."

The boy shakes his head firmly and glances over his shoulder at her. "There's no such thing as death," he says with certainty. "Death is a change in state."

The part of Jace that he was frightened of the most walks toward his captain, and without another word, he soundlessly disappears his body and dives into her mind.

He watches through her eyes as she walks through the empty Vrynian camp, headed for the mage-ring at the far end, and he feels Vraska think on his words.

"When I was an assassin … my work was easier when I remembered that death is a part of life."

From the inside, the Soldier feels her make a discovery, glance at a part of herself she hasn't wanted to look at for quite some time. A part he understands well.

"I know what I can do," she says aloud, and from the interior of Vraska's mind, the Soldier sees old, dark aspects of her personhood blooming like Undercity roses in shafts of sunlight.

The Guildpact sits on his chair, at his desk, within his own prison, in the memory trap full of rubble. He is half sick of the unchanging disaster preserved outside his window like a dollhouse. The Chamber of the Guildpact still bears its immense scar, a hole gouged from stone and mortar, looking out over a sad and suffering Ravnica.

I was arrogant to think I could fix it. That arrogance may kill us all yet.

When a portal appears, he assumes it is the Theorist (again) coming to force him to check his work (again), but instead he sees tendrils, a steely gaze. Thank all the ghosts in the quarter—it's Vraska. He rises from his desk and nearly trips over the rubble on the ground as he races to embrace her. He has felt what the others were up to, sensed the other aberrations' plans as if overhearing a jailbreak through a wall, and greets the facilitator of his escape with awe.

"The Theorist has Jadzi," the Guildpact warns. "I can feel it. You won't get there in time. But the others might."

Vraska nods.

"You even found the Soldier?"

"He needed saving the most."

The Guildpact looks down. "I didn't want you to see him."

"I know, but he's you." She smiles. "Are you ready?"

The rain patters and flicks across the exposed wall. It isn't the catastrophe outside that draws his attention but the mass of wood in the center of his office.

The Guildpact looks at it as if it has insulted him personally. "I quit," he says to his desk. "The Guildpact is a law created by a delusional narcissist, and it's held together by stress sweat and ten thousand years of crossed fingers. I never wanted it, I wasn't good at it, and I hope Niv-Mizzet hates being the Guildpact as much as I did. In fact, I hope he spends the rest of his long, artificial life savoring its misery."

He spits on the desk, and Vraska makes a small noise of approval.

"Good riddance." The Guildpact lets out a long, restorative breath. "Dearest?"

Vraska stares at the desk and turns it to stone. They grasp one another's hands, savoring the moment.

At last, the man who was the Living Guildpact nods with satisfaction. He flips a rude gesture at the stone desk and vanishes into the safety of his beloved's mental embrace.

Something Worth Saving | Art by: Pindurski

The last aberration stands on an empty beach.

The Survivor has spent his time staring at the turquoise sea, listening to the rhythm of the water, feeling the sun warm on his back.

He can feel the others, what they're doing, where they hide. He sensed the plan as they sensed it in turn. The Survivor understands where it ends. He's been concealing their machinations from the Theorist. He orchestrates the plan, urges them to tell their keepers, Come to the Ixalan trap. Fight your way through the doppelgängers. We'll all go through the portal to the sanctum together.

Chandra, Ajani, Garruk (Garruk?), and Vraska will be here soon. And now it's just him, here, at the end.

He considers how to weigh his life now that there's nothing left to survive.

By his deeds? All that fills his mind is the pain he caused, the accidents he masterminded, and the loved ones he alienated. His heart sinks. He has lived valiantly, but he has prioritized the wrong things. Knowing more—to what end? Solving the unsolvable—who did he solve it for? His father's judgment still echoes in his chest. Selfish. Know your place.

By his choices? He chose poorly, continuously, aggressively. He was so certain of his capability that he never stopped to consider the broader picture. He sees his friends' disappointed faces. Emmara's. Kallist's. Gideon's. Nissa's. Ral's. Vraska's …

By his crimes. He sees Kallist's face in his mind, and it still feels like his own. His friend never deserved death. Nor did the people Alhammarret and Tezzeret forced him to hurt. And Vryn … He survived Phyrexia, but he did not defeat it. He still feels what it was like to jolt a battalion into a seizure. To coax a section of soldiers to die in their sleep. Yet … none of those weighs as heavily as the crime he chose. He was ready to trade all of existence for the possibility of a future. He created the conditions for Jadzi's death. Every part of him is steeped in regret.

When he hears Vraska's steps, he turns. She's holding her shoes, barefoot on the sand, walking toward him with a sad smile.

"Will you sit with me?" is all he can ask.

She's beautiful, there on the beach. Her leggings are rolled up, as are her sleeves. Scars shine in the light underneath. She looks like she's been crying. The Survivor is embarrassed that she weeps on his account.

Vraska nods and takes a seat by his side. The tide is coming in. They sit there for a moment, watching the water.

"I'm afraid to die," he confesses. "It will not be … easy." He knows what it looks like to kill someone with a telepath's gifts. He knows his death will be both necessary and miserable.

She places a hand on his thigh and says nothing. The sun is high overhead. The sand is warm.

She smiles. "The Soldier was enthusiastic about it. 'Death is a change in state.'"

The Survivor coughs a laugh. Vraska jumps a little at the sudden sound.

"Kid's smart." He smiles and leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

The air smells of the sea. Time feels sunny and languid, like this moment is a symbol of forever rather than a segment of time. Maybe they'll always be here, on this beach.

He pauses. He can't escape the thought that clings to his heart like a cobweb. "The other … The Warden meant it when he told you we want you to take credit for this. I don't want the drive that got me here to be rewarded."

Vraska catches his eye. "That's true selflessness."

He looks down, ashamed. "It's not. It's just honesty."

"You are who you chose to be. Not Jace Beleren, not the Guildpact, not the creator of a Multiverse, but a man who does what is right without glory." Her eyes are golden, beaming, and her face is as open as he's ever seen it. "I've never been more proud."

The Survivor swallows. Nods. "I'm glad you'll be with me, at the end."

Vraska takes his hand. "An older version of me would say your death is just. But I … I think I just want you to feel at peace."

This isn't what the Survivor was expecting to hear. His breath is shaky. His skin feels sunburned. He feels anything but peace.

He pauses, thinks, remembers. His heart warms. He sees the sea as it is—brilliant, boundless, endlessly changing, eternally in conversation with itself. A constant metamorphosis. Even when the tide is out, even when it's turbulent and impassable, even when it's at its most destructive, it is still the sea. His skin tingles with the sensation of grand praestigial magic in his body far away, just as his scars gleam white in the sun. The sea tumbles over each edge of the horizon in front of him.

He catches her eye. "I don't want to be at peace."

"Peace is dull," she agrees.

He nods, and easy as a sigh and a sideways memory, his existence clicks into place. "I'm in progress."

Saying it aloud feels right. He feels warm, nearly feels his heart beat fast. Yes. That's who he is. That's who he's always been, even when he forgot.

Vraska is still, but he can see understanding in her face.

"I love all of you," she says at last. "Your gifts, your faults … I fell in love with a man who knew nothing about himself, and I wish I could marry the man who knew every facet of his being, shadows and all."

He curls a finger around a tendril and kisses her softly. "Our souls to the stone and returned," he recites, a Vrynian prayer of betrothal on his lips. "Encircle our union and bind our futures, pleasant and painful, spouse to spouse, marriage to death."

Their kiss deepens, and their eyes meet.

"Promise me you'll be there for Tam," he says.

The Survivor stands.

He walks to the water's edge and hears Vraska follow. He steps in. The water is inviting, its shallows warm. Little fish flit by his nine toes. The Survivor feels renewed, as if he stands on the precipice of great change.

He feels Vraska take his hand in the water. She kneels, submerged slightly, and swims a little out into the cove. He smiles and follows.

They wade close together, and he cups her face. "I'm ready for death if you'll be there with me. You're my wife in all the ways that matter."

Waves lap at the rocks in the distance.

"Jace," she says. "I want to help you." She takes a deep breath. "I know what death you deal. Your passing will be excruciating. Let me at least gift you a kind death."

The Survivor doesn't hide his shock. How can she offer to involve herself like this? Then, after a moment of thought … How can she not? "Are you sure this is what you want?"

The gorgon smiles, and it meets her eyes. She says, in the fullness of who she is, "My gift is death. It's part of me."

His relief exits as a sharp breath, and he grimaces in thanks. He was terrified of what he knew he'd have to do, remembered how excruciating death at the hands of a telepath could be.

"I will be with you to the end of your days," he says. He holds her hand tight and leans in close, forehead to forehead. "I'm every time you feel curious. I'm every time you want to understand another's perspective." His voice is thin and emotional. "I'm every time you're unafraid to start over."

The sea sighs, and the tide encourages them to shore as they embrace one final time.

The Theorist is ready now.

His courage is held by a thin and precious chain. It hangs taut from what is left of his heart. He is going to kill the oracle. He is going to find a way to converge the Multiverses. He will succeed.

He stands on the balcony of the tower. He knows he is about to experience a harrowing psychic journey and would prefer not to pass through a wall. The sun is low with morning, the clouds blushing at the grim setup he has organized in the middle of the night. Below, the ground moves with activity, dozens of mage hunters circling the base in search of magic. Some reach claws upward; others buzz just above the surface. The Theorist wonders how well they will feast today.

Vraska, the one this Multiverse made, shakes out cloth on the tile. Her white cloak spreads wide behind her, and she squints her eyes in the morning sun. The Theorist feels … strange … to have her so close. Of all the doubles, she is the one who makes him most uncomfortable. No attraction exists between them, and yet Vraska's double stays nearby. Out of instinct? Loyalty? On the few occasions he's tried to speak with her about her past, he always leaves feeling like he's had a conversation with a construct. Vraska is not Vraska without something to fight for.

But this one has prepared a knife, and the Theorist knows that far below there will be beasts ready to dispose of the body once it is thrown over the side. He can do this. He feels ill, but his courage keeps him firm. This will work. Their math is sound.

"Bring the oracle," the Theorist commands.

This Vraska ducks inside, and the Theorist turns back to the horizon.

His world is one of sunrises. There is no darkness beyond that which he brings in, no pain for his people if they are incapable of fully feeling it. The Theorist feels brief discomfort looking upon his Multiverse. Aren't sunrises meant to be enriching? This one feels thin, like the veneer of an emotion painted on a wall. He tries to concentrate. He runs through his plan once more, feels the proof sink into his skin. But as he does, the math clicks together, the formula slides into place. Its order of operations leads to a realization, a revelation on sunrises and why this one is inadequate.

"There's no birdsong," he says aloud to no one.

Only the silent morning hears him.

His heart speeds. His hands feel clammy on the iron railing. He forgot to tell this Multiverse to create the trivial things … blackbirds singing, the sigh of wind. The Theorist realizes something the whole of him would have known instinctually—that the moments of birdsong and breeze are neither suffering nor joy. They are simply … now. This part of him never bothered with now.

What makes the sunrise matter? Irritating; he cannot remember.

"Sure you have enough of you to do this?" Jadzi stands bathed in sunshine, her chin tipped in challenge.

"I am certain," the Theorist says. "I needed to purify my state and free it of indecision."

"You really are chickenshit without the rest of you. You know they talk to each other about you, right?"

He rages his horror into submission. "Show me what you see!" His eyes flash, and he enters Jadzi's mind … and is overcome.

The Theorist barges into the oracle's perception and is immediately shredded by a dust storm of possibility. It is a vast desert filled with swirling sand, and obfuscated by the storm are visions of potential, the myriad ways their moment in the sunrise could play out. The Theorist sees what he saw before—a hundred options, a thousand outcomes. But the voice he hears over the storm carries one clear fact. He needs to kill Jadzi to do it.

The knife is in his hand. He won't know how to complete the merging without this step. She's right there. But he cannot muster the courage to kill. The part of him that could do it is gone.

"I think this may be beyond my expertise."

Jadzi laughs brightly. "Oh good! It's this timeline." Without hesitation, she grabs the knife from the table in front of her.

"Wait!" yells the Theorist. But through Jadzi's perception, the Theorist sees Chandra, Ajani, and Garruk enter the sanctum and bolt toward the balcony.

Jadzi doesn't stop. Her hand moves to her throat, and an instant later—

It's too late.

The Theorist feels his telepathic link to Jadzi tug like a fish on a line and unites in her pain as she cleanly slices the knife across her throat.

He cries out in agony, and in the privacy of her mind, Jadzi appears in the storm in front of the Theorist, smiling for her final psychic words. Her throat is cut; the bright red stands out in the storm. She takes the Theorist's hand, smiling, and the Theorist knows he is doomed.

"It's all so easy for you, isn't it?" she says, her throat gleaming with still-pouring blood. "You're the part that lacks perspective." The Theorist tries to pull away, but her grip is a vise. "Keep your lids open."

Prophesied End | Art by: A. M. Sartor
0017_MTGFRA_MainUP: Prophesied End

And as Jadzi's mortal body dies, the Theorist's consciousness is

Dragged

Back

To Creation

Sissoko's Law grips tight as he is launched from the balcony to the sky to the edge of the atmosphere to the edge of the vacuum of space and out into the Blind Eternities, crashing through Arcavios and the space that surrounds the plane, and all the Theorist can see is the sun hurtling backward again and again and again, ten thousand, ten million, ten billion times, until it is a solid golden hoop of chronologic impossibility.

It is a fact, he read in a book long ago, that when an oracle of Arcavios dies, they are hurled back to the creation of Arcavios, and sure as the sun screeches to a halt, he is catapulted even farther, straddling the Blind Eternities, careering backward into infinity, and he sees in front of him two planes colliding into one. Amid the chaos, formless Eldrazi horrors snake around the great ships that battle them.

This is how it happened, then. How two planes merged into one.

The Theorist sees it, feels Jadzi's consciousness evaporate and her hand release from his, feels the sensation of that hand flipping him an obscene gesture as it drifts into oblivion. And with her death, he feels a cosmic knowledge take shape.

I

I have

I have done it

I have witnessed the beginning

He says

To all of space and time

And when he looks inward

He sees himself

Or at least

The sliver of self that he can see

I shall be remembered for my gift to existence

Suffering ends at my will

All transforms at my will

The Theorist forgets sunrises. He forgets meaning. He forgets smallness. Suffering is an imagined state. What does pain matter to a sun? To the Blind Eternities? To the immensity of the Multiverses? He is beyond body and soul and spirit. The Theorist in this moment extends into a perception beyond perception. Behold what miracles he creates from ambition alone.

He observes how the Multiverse clicks and rotates and turns as a grand machine and sees how, in all the infinite possibilities of existence, there is always a way, always a means. All he has to do is be curious enough to find it, and once he does, he will understand.

He will understand

He will

He can

He can see it all

No one

No dragon nor dead man nor god has ever done what I have

The being that was the Theorist that was Jace is sated

I know how to overwrite the Multiverse

The Theorist returns, an infinity away, an infinity forward in time.

He lands back in his body and feels impossibly confined. The Theorist rolls out his shoulders and feels the atoms containing him. For a moment, he feels claustrophobic, not at the immensity of his sanctum and the looming net of mage-rings, but at the clumsy misery of existing in a body. He blinks away the space between his molecules and sets upon his task. "Now!" Chandra calls somewhere near his face, and his taste of enlightenment is instantly punctured by two intruders in his mind.

The aberrations. His selves. Not all of them, but enough.

They bombard his peace and charge into his body. They share his strength. Working together, they overpower him swiftly.

The Warden takes hold of his ambition, and the Theorist tries to explain that he cannot stop. He has to keep going. You don't understand!

The Clean Slate dives in, attempts to wipe away the knowledge of how to merge the planes, but the Theorist won't fall so easily. He takes hold of that thread of enlightenment he felt and catapults his mind outward.

The Theorist summons a barrier of sleep behind him, a line of torpor between him and his friends. He feels them halt in place, stand behind his line.

From beyond his body, beyond the barrier, he hears Chandra cry out, "He's already starting!"

And yes, he is. He has to. Jadzi was right. He sees the fleeting image that spurred her hand to reach for the knife. There is only one way this works. He must continue the plan. The Theorist laughs through his omniscience at the madness of it all, at how there is only one way, though he cannot see exactly how, and his laugh reverberates across dimensional reality. It is a future he can only begin to fathom.

For a moment, he wonders where Vraska is. But not for one second does he stop.

The Theorist feels for the edge of this Multiverse as if it were a great blanket, plucking at its corners and feeling space-time slide through his fingers. He tugs and pulls, dragging that great fabric over the hard stone of the old Multiverse. As he links the two, vertical threads tie upward and down, connecting one to one, each to each, world to world, atom to atom.

Overwrite the Multiverse | Art by: Ryan Pancoast
0059_MTGFRA_MainUP: Overwrite the Multiverse 0341_MTGFRA_ShwTower: Overwrite the Multiverse 0445_MTGFRA_SLBunFRA: Overwrite the Multiverse

And as he weaves, the inner attack continues.

The Theorist fends off sleep, a seizure, hallucinations of Azor, visions of Vraska bleeding on a Ravnican roof.

But he persists, following his proof and connecting the two Multiverses with a thicket of cause, and as he reaches his crescendo, the Theorist is hit with a wall of arresting synesthesia. For a moment, he staggers back to consciousness and nearly vomits. Language tastes like ammonia, and his own magic screeches like an injured dog.

Another aberration crashes in from the top of his mind, summoning plague and clouding his inner landscape with thick fog and forgetfulness. The Theorist gasps, terrified, uncertain who the dead body is on the floor or how he ended up on this balcony, but with significant effort clears away the fog and remembers he was supposed to be helping. He is a helper. No one knows it but him, but he is saving the day. He reaches with omniscient power and helps one Multiverse help another.

"Fight us, coward!" Chandra, again, from beyond the barrier of sleep he raised behind him.

The Theorist speaks, but all that comes out is a string of nonsense, thanks to the aphasia cast by one of the aberrations.

This needs to end. The Theorist wrests control, scrubs off the plaque, clicks his language back into place, shoves the two aberrations as far down into his psyche as he can. But just as he is about to kick them out, he feels them remove the barrier between him and his old friends, and the other Jaces vanish from his mind.

Chandra gasps. "Mine's back!"

Garruk only growls. The heroes rush the Theorist. Without a second thought, he flicks his hand, and his friends come to a halt, standing perfectly still.

The Theorist tries to compose himself. He lets out a shuddering breath. With half a foot still planted outside of both Multiverses, he looks at his friends with omniscient eyes.

"Thank me," he says. "I did it to help all of you."

"You did it to prove it could be done!" Ajani snarls.

But all the Theorist can do is shake his tired head. "It cannot be stopped now. I must finish it."

He flicks his hand, and a mage-ring for each appears in the center of the sanctum. From the shadows emerge the cryomancer Chandra, the veil-embraced Garruk, and the warlord Ajani. Each tackles their twin into a different portal.

The Theorist shivers. He returns to the balcony and avoids looking at Jadzi on the tile, surrounded by a pool of red. He holds his hands aloft, and with the greatest telepathy the Multiverse has ever known, he weaves two Multiverses together.

But as he finishes, he shivers.

He achieved omniscience.

It was easy.

It was so easy.