Chapter Text
Had he not materialized chest-deep in brackish water, Gideon would have fallen to his knees as soon as he arrived. He took his first, heaving breaths of Dominaria's air and grit his teeth so as not to gag. Swampland surrounded him, and the air reeked of sweet-sour rot. The trees here were black-barked and skinny and shot out of the fetid water in tight clusters. A few older, gnarled oaks stood here and there, but they were dead, or nearly so, and seemed to serve only as scaffolding for heavy moss and twining vines. Patches of mosses and dead, flattened reeds formed possible dry ground snaking through the bog.
The thick water transitioned smoothly to viscous mud, which had swallowed his sandals and now grabbed at his ankles. He was sinking, and Gideon realized dazedly that he would not be able to pull himself free. His wounded arm hung useless at his side, and his other could reach only a few of the thin, nearly branchless trees. He grabbed at one and pulled, but the supple trunk simply bent under his weight. He groaned. Blood from the claw-wound in his shoulder already soaked his side; he could not stay here.
He shouted, and winced as doing so caused pain to flare in his wound. Several ribs were broken, at the least--he could hear the edges grind against each other as his inadvertent movement caused them to shift. Still, no cause to worry yet--he had followed Nissa’s trail through the aether, and she must be nearby. She wasn’t the healer Ajani was, but she could set a simple fracture and stitch over a cut. There was no need to worry, not yet.
Sloshing behind him made him turn inasmuch as he could, and he waved with his good arm as he spotted Nissa picking her way over the wet terrain toward him. Her moss-green jerkin would have provided her excellent camouflage anywhere else, but here she stood out among the blacks and browns like a candle in the dark. Once he had spotted her, he could make out the dark form of Liliana trailing not far behind, her stained dress providing her better concealment, but despite the bright clothing favored by his other companions, he could see no one else.
Nissa's hands outstretched and slowly closed into fists. Pressure grew around Gideon's legs as she cast a spell to raise and harden the ground where he stood. He stumbled on the still-soft ground and fell to his knees, catching himself with his uninjured hand. The impact jostled his wounded shoulder; a sensation that was not quite burning and not quite freezing ran down his arm in a spasm.
He took a deep breath that wasn't as steadying as it should have been, then a second.
"He's been stabbed," Nissa said. She knelt in front of him, eyes wide, and ran a finger just above the rent hole in his armor. She turned to Liliana. "Help me get his armor off."
The two women unbuckled his breastplate and lifted it over his head; his shirt was simply cut off once it became clear that his injury prevented removal any other way, and Liliana used the fabric to fashion a makeshift sling while Nissa examined the puncture with a tendril of mana. At first, Gideon tried to help them, but it soon became apparent that he was most useful staying still.
"This is deep," Nissa said after a minute's examination. "I can slow the bleeding, but I don't think I can stop it entirely." She pulled a sprig of moss from a pouch on her belt and cupped it in her hands. She blew on it softly, as if it were an ember she was trying to relight.
"This will hurt," she warned apologetically, and she delicately pushed the ball of moss into the wound as far as her finger could reach, then laid her palm over his shoulder. At first, it felt only odd, a pebble trapped in a shoe, irritating but not exactly painful. Then the moss began to grow, and it was as if someone had reached into the wound with both hands and was trying to bodily rip his arm from the rest of him. Nissa misjudged, he panicked. She’d lost control of her spell, was tearing him apart, was going to kill him, and Gideon found he could do nothing but groan and gasp at the sensation, incapable even of forming words.
Then the pain plateaued and faded to something agonizing but not mind-destroying. Gideon shivered and slumped forward, forehead resting on Nissa's shoulder, simultaneously too hot and too cold. He wondered just how much he had bled--though diluted by swampwater, blood coated his chest and side and dripped onto Nissa's pants.
"...carry him?"
"No, not for miles. Not in this terrain."
"Can you conjure an elemental, then? There's nothing here intact enough to bother raising."
"The ground is...sick, but I will try."
"Well, it's that or leave him."
"I can walk," Gideon said, forcing himself to sit up and wipe the sweat from his face. “I can walk.” Nissa’s face said she wasn’t sure she believed him, but while pain made him feel weak, his legs were uninjured. He could make it to somewhere safer, surely. Time to move out, hoplite.
Nissa stood and offered him a hand, and then they walked, Liliana leading and Nissa beside Gideon to catch him should his balance fail. Their progress was slow, and would have been even without Gideon's injury--Liliana stopped often, looking for some waypoint to orient herself, and the swamp was utterly inhospitable, a twisted maze of semisolid ground and sucking mud with little to differentiate one from the other. All of the older trees seemed to be dead; Gideon wondered what blight had befallen them. Insects chirped, unseen, and now and again a lone bird cawed, but those were the only signs of animal life, and nothing here suggested people had ever passed this way before. The land was indeed sick, as Nissa had said.
Despite the apparent ill health of the swamp, the vegetation was thick, and Gideon could seldom see more than a dozen feet ahead. Blood trickled in a long, slow line down his stomach even with the dressing on his shoulder, and each breath caused an uncomfortable pressure in his chest. He counted his steps; when he could no longer remember what number he had reached, he set goals instead. Make it to that stump. Make it to that puddle. Make it to that purple flower. You'll rest when you reach your destination. For a time, this sufficed to keep him moving, but the increasing trembling in his limbs and the feverish chill he felt despite the humid air made it clear his endurance was reaching its end.
"How much further?" he asked.
"I don't know," Liliana answered. She was flushed with exertion beneath the mud and blood still streaking her face. She resettled her heavy skirts and shrugged. "It's been a long time since I was here. There should be a small town close by."
"I should scout ahead," Nissa said. "I can move faster than either of you."
"We shouldn't split up," Liliana said, looking at Gideon. "If Gideon needs help--"
But Nissa was already gone, running in an errant zig-zag as her feet sought the firmest ground. Liliana swore and leaned against a tree. Gideon considered sitting, but knew if he sat down he would not stand back up. They could not have traveled far, likely less than a mile, yet his legs wobbled as if he’d been running all day. Dread clutched darkly at the edges of his thoughts; he had kept it at bay during their march, but it caught him now. His heart thudded too-fast inside his chest, like a trapped bird.
"Why here?" he asked to distract himself.
"We agreed to regroup on Dominaria," Liliana answered shortly.
"No, why...here?" He nodded his head slightly, indicating the squelching ground around them.
She shrugged again. "It wasn't a bog the last time I was here."
"Oh," he said. The shaky feeling of exhaustion was transmuting into actual dizziness. He leaned against a tree, a blackened hollow dead thing that felt cool on his forehead, and closed his eyes. Nissa was fast; she would be back soon, with help, and they would be able to rest. He wished she'd hurry. He needed her to hurry.
A bird complained harshly somewhere up the tree. Liliana said something; her words wouldn't order properly in his head.
He fell.
This was not the homecoming Liliana would've chosen for herself. She was not a maudlin woman, and she certainly hadn’t expected her birthplace to be unchanged after so many years, but she had once known Caligo Forest better than she had her family’s manor house, and to see it so altered disoriented her. Once, she had known the exact location of dozens of plants; now she couldn’t say for sure how close they were to the town, reliant as she was on landmarks long dead and mana currents that had warped and shifted since she was a girl. She couldn’t even say for sure that there still was a town.
A raven cawed unseen, as if mocking her, and she looked up, scouring the thin canopy for sight of the thing. A visit by the Raven Man was the last thing she needed; he’d never appeared in front of another person before, but trust him to do it now and give her yet another sin in need of explaining.
“You can keep your opinions to yourself,” she told the unseen bird.
Something splashed behind her, and she whirled in time to see Gideon slip under the surface of the swamp and bob back up. She cursed and scrambled to the bank to grab him and pull him back onto the drier ground. Her shoes slipped in the mud at the water’s edge; the water grew deep quickly here, so that even a foot out she doubted she could stand. She grabbed at his waistband and pulled him closer to shore, then set her feet as well as she could to pull him back onto the solid ground. Nine hells, the man was heavy, and for a second she panicked that she wouldn’t be able to move him at all. She heaved, throwing all her weight backwards, snarling with the effort, and inched him up the bank, her task made slightly easier by the slick mud.
When only his feet still dangled in the water, she let go. Her arm burned under the skin; she’d managed to pull something dragging Gideon back ashore.
“Hey!” Liliana slapped his face lightly and called his name, and let out a shaky sigh when his eyelids fluttered uncertainly open. He muttered something indistinct; she ignored it for the moment, and turned instead to examining his wound, which had been jarred by the fall. Already it had been leaking slowly, despite Nissa’s attempt at packing it, and now the moss clump hung partially out, soaked with swamp water.
Liliana spent a moment cursing Bolas for being Bolas, Nissa for running off, Gideon for getting himself stabbed, the swamp for existing, Jace and Chandra for not being here when she could use them, all the while pulling the sodden moss from the wound. She could’ve fit her entire hand in it. Something pooled darkly inside it; she couldn’t tell whether it was blood or water or both. She had nothing to re-pack the wound with, no physical means of cleaning it, and no idea when Nissa would return or if she would come back with help.
In her youth, Liliana had trained as a healer, and--though she had kept her studies secret--she had started refreshing herself on the basics of healing magic. It seemed only prudent, surrounded as she was by people determined to throw themselves headlong into danger. She had imagined scenarios in which she valiantly, unexpectedly saved the day, impressing the Gatewatch and ensuring their continued loyalty to her. It was vexing that no one else was here to see it, but she knew what had to be done, and knew she had a decent chance of doing it successfully. Still, she hesitated. The last time she had attempted to heal someone, it had gone horribly wrong, and her imagination couldn’t restrain itself from an image of Gideon, twisted with malice, wrapping bloodless hands around her throat…
She blinked away the image and chided herself for being silly.
She sopped the liquid out of the wound with a bit of her skirt. It wasn’t clean, but nothing here was. Disinfecting the wound was the easiest part; the magic was not unlike the magics she favored for killing her enemies, simply aimed at much smaller targets. The actual healing proved more of a challenge. The power to kill, to unmake, to destroy, this all flowed easily for her, responding eagerly to her call and doing exactly as she bade. The power to heal had always been more finicky, stolid and disinterested and hot, and she took the time to gather her power carefully before she sent it flowing into Gideon, finding each broken blood vessel and teasing it back together with a flare of mana. The spell was one she’d learned centuries ago, one she’d practiced on scraped knees and cuts from childhood mishaps, but she had not had cause to use it in some time, and the exact shapes and forms of it wavered as she worked it, trying to hold the thing steady. She let the spell slip as soon as the worst of the damage was repaired; better to let the body heal itself than to continue with her uncertain magic.
Gideon had slipped back into unconsciousness, but his chest still rose and fell, so she let him sleep. No new blood seeped into the cavity, and Liliana could just make out the pale pink flesh where new, magic-forced tissue had begun to grow. She shook the heat from her hands and resettled herself on the driest ground she could find. They could rest until Nissa found her way back.
Perhaps she let her guard down; there was little living in the bog, only minnows and solitary birds, and Liliana was tired and had much to think about. Perhaps the trio was simply well-guided, familiar enough with the swamplands to avoid splashing in errant puddles. Regardless, Liliana didn’t notice the intruders coming up the same path she, Gideon, and Nissa had traveled until they had nearly reached the spit of land where she and Gideon sat. Another necromancer, with a pair of well-formed zombies in tow, all three of them sporting an insignia Liliana recognized with bitter memories: the Cabal, descendants of the same cult that had plagued her father’s lands when she was a girl, that had cursed her brother Josu with wasting sickness. How unfortunate that they had not died out in the intervening years.
Liliana rose with a snarl and a spell curled in her fist. The other necromancer, a short, pale man garbed in black robes, brought up his own hands to cast something, but Liliana had honed her skills under masters from a dozen worlds over the course of centuries. If Bolas wasn’t going to die today, something was. With a savage gesture, she wrested control of one zombie from its master and set it against the man. The zombie ripped out its master’s throat before he could launch his spell. He fell sideways, dead before he could hit the ground, blood sinking into the mud.
The other zombie stopped its charge. Its eyes burned yellow for a moment before it abruptly dissolved into dust. Liliana felt some cold presence attempt to reassert control over the zombie she’d stolen; out of curiosity more than anything, she relinquished control, and that zombie too disintegrated. She cast around, using magical and innate senses to search for more attackers, but the swamp now seemed as dead as before. A quick check of the necromancer’s pockets found nothing of note or value.
Still, better safe than sorry. Who could say what might have been watching through the zombie's yellow eyes? She returned to Gideon and jostled him. “Wake up. It’s not safe here.”
Gideon stirred reluctantly, murmuring something like I’m tired or let me lie here. She shook him again; his eyes opened, but she waited until they focused on her before speaking.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“Don’t think so,” he murmured. “Where are we?”
“I’m going to try something,” she said, ignoring his question. She had to get him moving.
The other necromancer was small enough that she doubted he could carry Gideon, but she raised him anyway. He could be her little bodyguard while Beefslab was out of commission. Then she returned to Gideon’s side and started a spell. She’d used it on Jace, once upon a time, when the two of them had found themselves in similar straits.
“Don’t struggle,” she warned.
The swamp may have been empty of corpses--well, except her new zombie friend--but it had no lack of spirits. She selected a weak one, something quiet and biddable, and had it connect itself to Gideon, spreading throughout his body, latching onto muscles and nerves. Then she directed it, forcing it to control Gideon’s body like a puppet, mana doing the work that blood and muscles no longer could. He rose stiffly to his feet, and either obeyed her direction not to struggle or was too confused or tired to mount a resistance.
They set off northwards, Gideon shambling behind Liliana.
It was warm and bright and soft; it smelled of fire and unfamiliar incense and soap; and he was so tired that, really, what harm was there in falling back asleep?
But he'd woken before, hadn't he? He remembered impressions, half-dreamt snatches of scenes. He'd woken many times, just for a second or two, and each time he'd made the same choice that tempted him now: return to sleep. It must be long past morning.
Gideon opened his eyes. It took more effort than it should have; his eyes were crusty with sleep, and fatigue weighed heavily on him. The room had walls and a ceiling of dark, varnished wood, but the midday sun streaming through the windows made the room bright. He was tucked into a bed, propped up on pillows, underneath a heavy woolen blanket. This was not where he'd fallen asleep, he knew, but his memory was patchy as to what he had been doing before he had awoken. His every muscle ached; there had been the battle, right? He pushed at the blanket, intending to sit up, but hissed and froze as moving his right arm caused shivery thrills of pain to cascade up and down his arm and chest, intense enough that he wondered how he'd managed to sleep at all.
"Careful now. If you undo all my hard work, I can't promise I'll save you a second time." Liliana appeared above him, leaning over the head of the bed.
Gideon made a noise, an attempt at a question that died inside his parched throat.
"In a minute." She walked around to the nightstand; pain flared in his stiff neck as he twisted to watch her. She took a pitcher from the bedside table and poured a drink, then took a pinch from a paper packet and crumbled it into the water. She handed it to him, reaching over him to place the tin cup in his left hand.
"Where are we?" he asked after he'd drained the cup. Numbness descended on him like a fog as the potion took hold; the pain was still there, distantly, but it was as if it were out of sight, afflicting a body that didn’t belong to him.
"An inn in the town a few miles north of where we arrived," she said. She took the cup from him and refilled it; this too he swallowed thirstily. "This is where I intended us to planeswalk in the first place, but, well, I haven't been here in literal centuries, so my aim was slightly off. Still--no harm done. You're welcome." She collapsed into a chair near the bedside in an exaggerated display of exhaustion. Her hair was pulled back, damp and curled from recent bathing, and she no longer wore the elaborate dress she had sported on Amonkhet. Instead she wore an ill-fitting, faded blue dress that had clearly been made for a woman larger than she; it sagged on her slight frame in a way that made her look like a child playing in her mother's clothes.
"Dominaria. We arrived in the swamp," he mumbled, forcing his memories to put themselves in the proper order.
"Yes. And then you fell face-first into that swamp. Warn me the next time you feel like fainting, would you?"
"Where's Nissa? And the others?"
"Nissa's around here somewhere. She needed ‘space to think'," Liliana mocked the elf’s airy tone. Her brow furrowed. "I don't know where Jace and Chandra are."
“We have to look for them,” Gideon murmured, but already his eyes were threatening to close against his will. Even speaking sapped what strength he had left, and while he realized he should feel alarm at the news, he was too drained to feel anything.
“You won’t be leading any search parties. You’re lucky you’re not dead,” Liliana said. “Nissa and I will take care of it.” But Gideon was too far asleep to answer or to hear her.
When he woke again, it seemed as if no time at all had passed, as if he’d merely shut his eyes for a moment, a blink. The reddish sunlight through the windows said that it was much later however, either dawn or nightfall. Gideon couldn’t say which.
“You know, you’re a very boring sleeper,” Liliana said. Once again, she came to the nightstand and fussed about mixing the bitter herb with water.
“How do you feel?” Nissa asked from the room’s other bed. She sat cross-legged atop the covers, her staff laid across her knees as if she had been meditating, but her face was creased with tension and dark marks marred the skin under her eyes. If Liliana looked like she hadn’t slept well, Nissa looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.
"I'll be fine," Gideon replied, closing his eyes. He could not remember a time he had felt so battered and exhausted; he had felt more alive running between the Eldrazi invasion on Zendikar and the goblin gang war on Ravnica than he did now. But while he could sleep for another week, he was alive, and the bed was comfortable. Liliana nudged the cup with the painkiller into his hand and he drank it slowly. The unappealing taste was more apparent when he wasn’t so desperately thirsty, but the same numbing fog settled over him in mere moments, and that seemed worth the taste. “Chandra? Jace?”
“I cannot find them,” Nissa answered quietly.
“Nissa searched the swampland where we arrived, and checked Chandra’s mother’s house,” Liliana expanded. “I went to Ravnica. No sign. Here, by the way. The innkeeper didn’t have anything that would fit you, and yours were ruined.” She tossed a bundle of clothing onto the bed; some of his spare underclothes that she must have found in his room on Ravnica, and a long, loose, sleeveless nightshirt he didn’t recognize.
“Chandra might have gone to Regatha,” Gideon said. He pushed aside the blankets left-handed, and shivered at the cool air. His right shoulder was encased in bandages that made moving the arm nearly impossible, and he didn't like to think what might be under them. The arm did not hurt at the moment, thanks to whatever herbal concoction Liliana had had him drink, but it felt strange, tingling and spasming all up and down its length. He sat up slowly and waited for the wave of dizziness to pass. Liliana made a show of busying herself with something at the hearth; Nissa simply traced the patterns on her staff with her finger. He heaved himself to a sitting position and fumbled one-handed with his shirt, managing after some difficulty to get it over both arms and his head, but the effort left him shaking and sweaty.
“I don’t know the way to Regatha,” Nissa said.
"We don’t have time to check every place they might have gone. We'll need to get moving in a day or two. Benalia City is two weeks from here on horse, and we don't have horses," Liliana said, lips pursed. Gideon, still shaking, managed to twist enough to pull on his underthings and tie them. He slumped back into the bed, desiring only to sleep. He considered whether he could planeswalk to Regatha, and quickly dismissed the notion.
“They were both injured. They might need help--” Nissa protested.
“It’s been two days. If they needed help either they’ve found it, or they’re beyond any help we could give,” Liliana interrupted. “We made arrangements to meet everyone in Benalia City. We’ll find them there.”
“We cannot abandon them!” Nissa exclaimed.
Liliana rolled her eyes. “We’re not abandoning anyone. We just don’t have time to search the entire multiverse--”
“It’s not your decision to make,” Nissa interjected.
“Fine! I’m going to Benalia City, you and Gideon can do whatever you want!” Liliana snapped. She sat down at the room’s small table, back to Nissa and Gideon, apparently done with the discussion. Gideon shifted uncomfortably, trying to think of something to say to diffuse the tension in the room, but his thoughts were sluggish and poorly formed, and he couldn’t find the words.
Nissa came and knelt beside his bed. Quietly, she said, "We need to talk about Liliana." Gideon turned to look at her, confusion plain on his face.
"Would you like some privacy, or were you planning to talk about me as if I'm not here?" Liliana interjected sharply from the table.
Nissa barely glanced at the other woman. "She sabotaged our mission on Amonkhet--"
"I did no such thing--"
"She lied about her demon. She pledged her allegiance to Bolas, in front of all of us," Nissa continued resolutely, ignoring Liliana. "We can't allow her to stay."
"I didn't 'pledge allegiance' to anyone; I surrendered, once it became clear the battle was lost," Liliana said. She turned around in her chair to face them, sour-faced. "I begged all of you to come with me. How is it my fault that the rest of you don't have the sense to run when you're beaten?"
Gideon pushed himself back into a sitting position and held up his good hand placatingly. He hadn’t given two thoughts to Liliana or her actions on Amonkhet since awakening; he’d barely had the wherewithal to think about anything. “Let’s discuss this calmly.”
"There's nothing to discuss," Nissa said. "She betrayed us. Chandra might be dead because of her!"
Gideon’s breath caught in his throat. Despite the potion-induced fog, a chill rose from the pit of his stomach and burrowed its way into his chest. It hadn't been Liliana driving the Gatewatch forward when it was clear they were too weary to fight. Liliana hadn't rushed into a battle with no plan. Liliana hadn't let her fury lead them into ruin. It would be comforting to lay all the blame for their disastrous rout at Liliana's feet. It would absolve him of his guilt. But the Gatewatch had been following his orders, not hers, and he knew better than to blame his failures on those under his command, no matter how convenient it would be.
If Jace--or, gods forbid, Chandra--was dead, it was his fault, and his alone.
"You're being unfair," Gideon said. He meant to say more, but his throat was suddenly thick and dry, and he wanted so desperately to sleep. How much blood had he lost?
Nissa stared at him, green eyes wide with some unstated emotion. She sat back on her heels and twisted her hands in her lap. "No. I don't think I am. She cannot stay."
Gideon had no answer; he made a few stumbling starts to explain why Nissa was wrong, how it was his fault, but his thoughts came too slowly and he couldn't order them into words.
"I swore an oath, just like you, and I intend to uphold it," Liliana said slowly.
"Do you expect me to believe you?" Nissa asked.
"I do," Gideon whispered, eyes closing, stamina utterly spent.
He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but he found himself startling awake, the vestiges of a dream leaving his heart pounding. The blanket was too heavy, holding him down, and he couldn’t feel his right arm. He spent a panicked, disoriented second imagining it had fallen off while he slept. His other hand, frantically patting, confirmed it was still attached, but it felt...odd, as if it weren’t properly connected to the rest of him. He forced his right hand to make a fist, and watched his fingers stiffly move without feeling them move.
“You alright?” Liliana asked from across the room. She stood by the window, arms crossed, a dark silhouette against the brightness outside.
“I don’t think so,” Gideon admitted. “I can’t feel my arm.”
“It’s probably just swelling pinching the nerve,” Liliana said quietly. “I asked around for a healer, but this backwater doesn’t even have a midwife.”
“Where’s Nissa?”
Liliana hesitated before answering. “Gone. Off to find Chandra, I guess.”
“She was angry,” Gideon remembered.
“She was. Probably best to give her some space to cool off.” Liliana spoke slowly, almost without inflection. “I think she’s mad at you too, now.”
“Sorry,” Gideon said.
She turned from the window then. Hidden in shadow, he couldn’t read her expression, but her bemusement was clear enough in her voice. “Not sure what you’re apologizing to me for.”
“It...it just needed to be said,” he replied, squeezing his eyes shut until stars burst behind his eyelids.
“Fair enough.” He heard her walk, her heeled boots clicking against the floor, and then the squeal of a chair being dragged out. “You should rest. We’ll deal with it later.”