MOXYMTG

DON’T FORGET FLINT: The people of Flint, Michigan still don’t have drinkable tap water, and Little Miss Flint wants to make sure people don’t forget. She’s running a fundraiser to sell 1,600 “Don’t Forget Flint” shirts aimed at keeping awareness of the water crisis in Flint fresh in people’s minds.

All of the proceeds from this fundraiser will go towards giving Christmas to the children in Flint, as well as to anti-bullying programs in Flint.

The Heretic

     “So it has been some time, then, since you last saw your aunt?” the head nurse said, sounding a bit confused.

     “My great aunt, and yes,” Liliana said, smiling as she lied. “It has been some time. I’ve been away for many years, you see, and I only just heard of her decline.” Liliana’s smile broadened. “Naturally, when I did, I came straight away.”

     “Ah, I see, I see,” the nurse said, sounding somewhat mollified. “You will have to forgive my surprise, my dear. It’s just that we were unaware that the revered mother had any family left.”

     “She does not,” Liliana said, “save for me.”

     A white-robed orderly was pushing a cart laden with strong-smelling medicaments down the hallway, so the head nurse and Liliana stepped to one side to make way.

     “My ties to the revered mother may be distant,” Liliana said, “but they remain very important to me.”

     “It gladdens me to hear that,” the head nurse said.

     They paused then beside a heavy curtain, drawn across an open doorway, and the nurse held up a hand in warning.

     “Before you enter,” she said, “I wish to steel you for what you may find. If it has been many years since you last saw your aunt—”

     “—Great aunt,” Liliana said.

     “Great aunt, yes,” the nurse said, before bowing in apology. “But, as I was saying, if it has been many years since you last saw your great aunt, then you may be in for a bit of a shock.” The head nurse paused, and appeared to choose her next words carefully. “Her mind is still clear, and her tongue remains sharp – or at least it does when she’s able to speak. But her health is in rapid decline. This latest stroke, in particular, has frozen much of her body.” The nurse shook her head, and sighed. “She tires easily, I fear, and she has little time left.”

     “That being the case, I will keep my remembrances brief,” Liliana said.

     “It would be for the best,” the nurse said, and nodded. “Still, I am sure it will do her a power of good to see you.”

     “Yes,” Liliana said, “I am sure that it will.”

     “Just ring the bell when you are done,” the nurse said, “and I will come and collect you.” Then she drew the curtain aside, and bid Liliana to enter.

     The room behind the curtain was small, and sparse. There was a window facing the courtyard, with the shutters drawn wide, to admit the fresh air from outside. There was a long, wooden chest – for bedlinens, most likely – and a half-moon table, fixed with screws to the wall. The on top of the table lay a pair of glass vases, filled with stems of red roses – one bunch a bit wilted, the other still fresh – which gave the room a splash of color and fragrance. The only other furniture was a three-legged stool, and the low, wooden bed.

     With her foot, Liliana drew the stool up next to the bed, but she did not sit. Instead, she stood, staring down at withered, wretched form of the revered mother, who lay helpless before her. The woman’s once-powerful face – which Liliana still saw in her dreams – had been split down the middle, so that, while the left side retained some ghost of its former authority, the right side lay sunken, and drooped, with a thin trail of spittle dangling from the corner of its downturned lip. The woman’s hair – which had once been black as nightshade – was wispy, and more yellow than white, like the color of old parchment, where it curls up at the edges.

     Liliana could sense the old woman staring up at her, from behind cloudy-white cataracts, and the revered mother tried to raise her head to get a better look at her visitor, but could not summon the strength.

     “You’ve aged terribly,” Liliana said, taking little pain to hide her delight.

     For a while, then, she fell silent, as she waited for the revered mother to speak. But the woman said nothing, and Liliana frowned.

     “You don’t recognize me, do you?” the planeswalker said, feeling a bit put out, before shaking her head. “But then, of course, you wouldn’t, would you? Not when you’re lying there like that, all shriveled up like a prune, and here I am, standing before you, as fresh as the day we met.” She again shook her head. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

     Liliana walked over to the half-moon table, where she drew one of the fresh cut roses from its vase.

     “Maybe this will refresh your memory,” she said, and, with a sharp flick of her wrist, she lashed long, woody stem across her open palm, so that it cracked like a whip. “Recant, young Vess,” she said, in a parody of the revered mother’s once-fearsome voice. “Recant!” And she lashed herself again.

     From somewhere behind the old woman’s cataracts, a glint of recognition flickered, where Liliana saw it, and smiled.

     “Ah,” the planeswalker said, “and now you remember.” She paused to suck at the sting on her palm, where a thorn from the rose had drawn blood. Then she slid the dying bloom back into the vase, where it stood out from the rest of the flowers – a patch of black among red.

     The revered mother opened her mouth to speak, but Liliana silenced her forever with a spell, and all that came out from her mouth was a low, lopsided rattle.

     “You had your chance to speak, long ago,” Liliana said. “Now it’s my turn.” And she sat down on the stool, leaning in close, so that the old woman had no choice but to look at her.

     Liliana’s palm was still bleeding, and she glanced down at the wound with a laugh.

     “Here I am, after all these years,” she said. “Sister Liliana, the little heretic – only not so little anymore.” She sucked at the cut, and smiled. “If heresy could be beaten out of a girl with stern words and a salted lash, then, my dearest mother, you would have done it. But I think we both know it’s not quite so simple as that, now don’t we?”

     Another unintelligible rattle came from the withered woman’s mouth, and Liliana patted the woman’s patchy hair in a facsimile of care.

     “You know what I remember,” she said, “when I think back to those days? I remember how terrified you were, by the darkness you saw inside me. And I remember how excited I was, about what I knew I could become, if only I could escape your strictures.” Liliana’s smile widened. “Well, it turns out we were both of us right. And there’s something poetical about that, I think.”

     Liliana sensed movement out of the corner of her eye, and she glanced down to see the revered mother’s functioning arm scrabbling for the bell pull. But Liliana brushed the old woman’s arm aside, and, gathering the bell rope in her own hand, she tucked it safely out of reach.

     “If only you knew the number of times I’ve thought about coming back to this world, just to kill you,” Liliana said, her tone of voice still friendly – for the sake of anyone who might be passing outside – even as her words grew cold, and sharp, like a razor glinting through silk. “You ought to be flattered, really, by the amount of thought I’ve given you in my dreams.”

     Liliana leaned in close, so that she whispered in the old woman’s ear.

     “But then I thought to myself: ‘No, Liliana, that would be to quick, and too easy. She doesn’t deserve as much kindness as that. How much better to let old age take her, instead? To let her wither away, to see her dignities stripped from her, one-by-one, until her last days are passed in pain and decrepitude, so that she will know the same terror and helplessness that you once felt?’” Then Liliana drew back, so that she faced the old woman, and smiled. “And, you know something, revered mother? I was right. This is so much better.”

     Liliana stood from the stool, and she smoothed-out her dress.

     “I’ll leave you to reflect upon that, revered mother,” she said. “And you will have rather a long time to reflect. I shall have a word with the nurse, on my way out, and I have several potions which I shall prescribe, with which she may keep you alive for some time.”

     Then Liliana shrugged, and pursed her lips in faux concern.

     “Of course, you can’t live forever,” she said. “That privilege, revered mother, is reserved for we few, and you are not among our number. But do not think that you will be free of me, when your time inevitably comes. For, you see, as the last of your living kin, I have made arrangements with the head nurse to collect your body from these halls, after you pass.” Liliana smiled. “And death, my dear revered mother, is only the beginning of your repayment to me.”

     Then she knelt down one more time, to whisper once more into the withered woman’s ear.

     “Which of us is God now, dear mother?” she said. “And which of us the heretic?”

     Then Liliana kissed the old woman’s forehead, and pulled the bell to call the nurse.

     Every night, she was asked the same question.

     The test – for what else could it be, other than a test? – always began with the moon at its apex. That was when the two silent monks – their cassocks blue-black in the halflight, their hoods always up – would rouse her from her bed. Their coming was inevitable as death, and – since the rooms in the abbey had no doors – there was nothing she could do to keep them out. The first night, when she had woken to the unexpected sound of their breathing in the room, and seen their shadow-lined faces staring down at her, she had started so violently that she had struck one across the mouth, and she might have turned her fire on them, too, had the heavy auras they bore not smothered her flame. Neither one of them spoke a word – not on that first night, nor on any other night since – they merely motioned for her to follow, and, through the cobwebs of sleep, she obeyed.

     They took her to the same place, always – up the seven flights of stairs to the abbess’s chamber, at the top of the western tower. But there, at the door, they waited, and motioned for her to go in alone. She always went in alone.

     And there – every night – the scene was the same. There was the abbess, sitting alone in the center of the room, cross-legged on the stone floor, and straight-backed, with her eyes closed, her head slightly bowed. The room had high, open windows, with taffeta curtains like ghosts in the nighttime air, and black basalt flagstones which glowed almost white in the moonlight, except where the abbess’s robes pooled like blood.

     Every night, the silence in the high-ceilinged room was so close, so complete, that – even though Chandra walked on bare feet – her footsteps seemed loud as thunder. And, every night, as she bowed before the abbess, and sat, she could feel herself being watched, even though the abbess’s eyes never opened.

     Then – every night – the abbess would ask the question, and – every night – the question was the same.

     “What do you see,” she would ask, “on the table before you?”

     There could be no question as to which table the abbess meant, for there was but one table in the room. There was no other furniture at all, save for the single, low table at the abbess’s side. A low, wooden table, made from polished black oak, and completely bare save for the one thing placed on its surface: a single, red candle, upon which danced a single, flickering flame.

     The first time she’d been asked the question, Chandra had felt sure that the answer was so obvious, that the whole thing must be a trick. Still, she found herself at a loss for what else to say, so, despite her conviction that she was being ill-used, she had told the abbess: “A candle.”

     The abbess had not opened her eyes, had not spoken a word – had not even seemed to move a muscle. But, somehow, she had made it known that Chandra’s answer was wrong, because the door had opened behind them, and the hooded monks had come in, and, taking Chandra by her elbows, they had led her back to her cell, where she had been left to ponder the meaning of the abbess’s question, until the next night, when the monks had come again.

     And since then – night after night – the ritual had repeated itself: the midnight visitation; the audience with the abbess; the little wood table with its single, lit candle; and the abbess’s singular question.

     Every night, it was the same question, and – every night – Chandra answered wrong.

     It didn’t seem to matter what she said, and she had said everything it had occurred to her to say: “A candle,” “a lit candle,” or “a flame.” She had tried every one of these – and many other variations, besides – and every single one of them was wrong. She had tried at first to keep track of the number of different answers she had tried, and found wanting, but she had long since lost count.

     That was one of the tricky things about her new life: time seemed to pass differently in the abbey, when it even seemed to pass at all. Monastery life had a regular, ceaseless rhythm to it – she worked, and she ate, and she slept – such that each day was much like any other, until they began to flow together into a single, undifferentiated haze. There were none of the variations of her old life, by which she used to mark the progress of time – no feast days or fast days, no fairs or festivals. There seemed to be no celebrations of any kind, such that, even if her name day had come and gone – and she no way of knowing if it had – no one would have said a word. And that was another thing which seemed to her to enhance her sense of the abbey as a place untethered from time, a place unmoored from the world outside: the heavy and pervasive silence. The monks never spoke, for they had sworn a vow of silence, and initiates like her were not to speak unless spoken to by an abbot, and the abbots seldom deigned to speak. Shorn even of the routine pleasantries of “good morning,” “good afternoon,” and “good night” – pleasantries which she had once found vacuous, and empty, never realizing the subtle part they played in tracking the passage of the day – she found herself feeling more adrift than ever before. And the work which filled her days was monotonous, and hard, only serving to heighten her sense of living in a dream. It was not that she was afraid of hard work – she had worked hard all her life – but it was the ceaseless, mindless drudgery of abbey labor that left her mind a tired blank at the end of each day. The monastery had been built high on the slopes of Mount Keralia – higher than anyone but goats had been meant to live – and the simple task of continued survival required concentrated and arduous labor from sunup to sundown. Plants struggled to grow at that height, water had to be carried up – even catching a breath was a challenge, from the thin air. The sun was bright in the day, and hot, but the nights turned bitter cold, and no fires were permitted for warmth, so that every night Chandra lay on the cold, stone slab which masqueraded as her bed, her fingers raw and bleeding, her bare feet freezing, her whole body aching, head to toe. Her body had grown lean and hard from labor, and she was stronger than ever before, which was some consolation. On the first night she had been asked the question, she’d had to pause twice on the seven flights of steps, just to catch her breath in the thin air. Now, when the monks brought her up to the abbess, and then back down again, she kept pace with them, stride for stride.

     But she was tired – perpetually tired – which made it hard to keep track of the days. And having each of her nights interrupted was not helping matters at all.

     Which was why Chandra felt at the end of her tether when she was brought before the abbess yet again, and when yet again she was asked: “What do you see on the table before you?”

     Chandra stared at the candle, where it flickered in the moonlight, until she was staring into the very center of its tiny, dancing flame. The heart of the flame was black, she was surprised to notice – a tiny sliver of shadow, at the center of a halo of light – and she found herself wondering how it could be that she had never noticed this before, after staring at that selfsame candle night after night after night.

     Still, as pleased as she was by this discovery – and she was pleased, for reasons which she could not fully articulate – her newfound sense of pleasure would not seem to help her with the task at hand, which was to answer the abbess’s question. And no matter how hard she tried to think of a new answer – a right answer – she could not think of a one, for she had already given every answer there was to give.

     Her mind, at last, was a blank. A perfect, formless blank. As empty as the little black shadow at the heart of the flame.

     She must have been silent for some time, then, because the abbess repeated her question: “What do you see on the table before you?”

     Feeling devoid not just of answers, but of everything, Chandra said to the abbess: “What am I supposed to see?”

     With the silence then having been broken, and the emptiness of her thoughts laid bare, Chandra felt herself relax, and exhale a breath she had not realized she had been holding, and she waited for the door behind her to open, and for the monks to take her away.

     But the door did not open, and the monks did not come. Instead, something happened which had never happened before: the abbess opened her eyes, and smiled.

     “And now, at last, you begin to understand,” she said.

     The unexpected sound of the abbess’s voice echoed round the high-ceilinged room, and Chandra realized with a start that she had never before seen the abbess’s eyes. They were deep, and brown, like dark pools, except that, from somewhere in their very center, a red spark seemed to flicker, like the ghost of a distant flame.

     “Understand what?” Chandra said, without really meaning to say it. She had no conscious awareness of having chosen those words, or having summoned them to her tongue. Instead, she heard them echo around her, as thought they had been spoken by someone else. But it must have been she who said them, for the abbess’s lips did not move.

     The abbess’s smile widened, then, and, with the merest nod of her head, she summoned the flame from the candle, and held it cupped between her two hands, where it pulsed and it glowed, growing brighter and brighter, until Chandra had to stare into the little black void at its center, just to keep from being blinded.

     “Now you understand that wisdom comes not from answering questions,” the abbess said, “but from asking them.” The abbess nodded, and the flame in her hands flared white. “Now you are ready,” she said.

     Chandra stared straight into the heart of the roaring flame, and – for the first time in a long time – she felt completely and totally at peace.

     “Where do we begin?” she said.

     The abbess just smiled.

Let’s test the waters. Answer the following questions: (if you’re so inclined)

2- He’s the last real magic character that’s been around since the beginning. The last link to magic as it used to be, the last link to elder dragons. Plus he’s a giant mega dragon and impossibly cool. better him than the goddamned eldrazi.

3- right now.

Avacyn - Fan art

Nuestra buena amiga Thalía Marroquín está en el GP Las Vegas como cosplay de Thalia. Es un gusto y honor compartir este momento con uds.