Cities of the Multiverse

The Grigori meets his master, the Restorer of the Laws, in open field, for he is in the middle of a military campaign against the tribes of the desert. The talk takes place whilst dining inside his pavilion, which is red, the color of his party, and somehow impervious to the horse smell permeating the whole encampment.

The Restorer is a man about forty, tall and blond, and is as perfect a listener as he is a horseman. Better than a centaur. He marvels, laughs at the right places and asks important questions about the details of peoples and places he knows very well he will never meet.

And as the Grigori speaks at length about the many planes he has visited, he cannot help to think how the army encamped outside waiting for battle is so insignificant compared to the Mardu hordes of Tarkir. How the greatest trees in the Restorer’s estate could be the roots of a zendikari bush and how the first city he saw -the party’s bitterest enemy- could be a Golgari Slum in a district of Ravnica. And how feeble the Laws Restored next to the Azorius Codex!

And the Restorer must think: why does the Grigori travel so much, and why does he always return to his native plane? What riches does he expect to get if he knows planes where wealth does not matter or what prestige at the service of a corner of the Multiverse almost nobody knows or cares about? What is there in any given plane for a planeswalker, why would they be a servant of anyone, bound by any law or master? What love could be fulfilling knowing for a fact that somewhere in the vast multiverse, by sheer number of people living in it, there is a partner so perfect is unimaginable and unfindable?

The City of Wonders is built at the convergence of the three most important rivers of the plane. However, these rivers are not important for the city: the aether filtering in from the Blind Eternities is.

Aether manifests itself in the atmosphere, in blue twisting swirls which power the whole city and its living beings. Trunks of trees form horizontal spirals to leach as much power as possible from the winds. Flowers bloom in bucket-shaped blossoms to collect falling aether rain. Inventors, who are almost everyone in the city, imitate with great enthusiasm those natural forms for being the most efficient and the most beautiful. Lacking formal religions, their faith lies in those meticulous precepts.

The Barony is immersed in a perpetual night, in which vampires proliferate. The seat of power is Sengir Castle, of dwarven architecture, and the only vestige of the race that once populated this lands besides their princess, who was a dwarf and is now vampiric and insane.

Of the Baron of the castle it is said he is the secret progenitor of all the vampires in the Multiverse, from the metallically augmented in Mirrodin to the aristocrats of Innistrad. Another rumor, perhaps truer, is that in the depths of the castle there is a portal to another world, which Sengir hopes to one day use to escape the plane and meet his children. In spite of all his power and all his magic, he is not a planeswalker, although he was a disciple of one long enough to know himself as prisoner as his subjects.

They build their houses inside wooden palisades, which can be used as heart-piercing stakes. The central square of each town is a cemetery, and it’s dead are at the Baron’s disposal. Villagers exist only to eventually man an undead army. A decree which demands ten lives for each fugitive and a troop of hunters who enforce it ensure that such is the case.

A ruin among salt flats is all that is left of the old capital of the Cabal. They were a religious order dedicated to the pursuit of wealth and desire in themselves, and maintained a rivalry with another order which held the exact opposite values. It was not that rivalry what destroyed them, nor their greed or anything similar. The Cabal’s is not a story from which moralizing messages can be easily extracted.

The main attraction of the city was its gladiatorial pit, the largest and most famous in the world. There, the Patriarch of the Order, he who was immortal and rotted everything he touched, presided over the fighting while his brothers and sisters collected bets or, at times, competed by invoking horrors straight from their own nightmares to battle. These so called dementia casters could never betray the Patriarch, since he was the only one who knew their secret names and therefore had them bound to his will.

The space between planes is called the Blind Eternities. It is an infinite sea of a colorless substance called aether which extends in all directions and proves fatal if touched by the uninitiated.

The planes of existence the Grigori visits more than islands are disturbances. They are connected by colored energy paths or ley lines, which conform the planes themselves when they converge in sufficient mass.

Otawara is a city built on the clouds and its people, the Soratami or Moonfolk, resemble in appearance not the bird but the rabbit. They are slim, with blue-gray skin and long ears that are tied for comfort around the head like turbans. They are famous mages and scholars.

Their queen has the gifts of clairvoyance and telepathy, but she is also mute and frozen inside a block of ice. The queen functions as a kind of metaphor for the Soratami belief that the most important truths cannot be communicated directly, at the risk of sounding like banal platitudes. Therefore, they codify their vast knowledge in the form of stories, which, like any story, can be interpreted in different ways.

The road to the City of Brass runs across an immense desert but has not been plagued by dangers for a long time. The Grigori found the owner of a caravan selling the name of the destination under both “the City of Brass” and “The Emerald City”, according to the recurring dream she believed the potential traveler had every night.

At the end of the -extremely comfortable- journey the second name gets its explanation: the high domes, the smooth walls and the strong doors that can only be opened by rubbing a golden nail twelve times are green with rust, the accumulation of desert salts carried by the wind. Inside, all the vampire bats have been hunted to extinction and the ominous lamentations of the invisible owls replaced by the exclamations of awe of the travelers who pay for the journey. They move among the permanent inhabitants, who have been paralyzed for countless years by some mysterious spell, and entertain themselves by pulling hairs and noses, without producing any reaction whatsoever from the locals.

The walled city of Thraben is built upon a plateau overlooking a lake where herons make their nests. The official religion teaches the faithful to fear the Night, and in order to combat that fear, each inner wall is dedicated to harboring a tamed version of what is considered Night’s most terrible dangers: captured and defanged vampires, impoverished merchants, children without fathers and chained werewolves.

The people of Thraben consider their city to be the heart of the world, and the only safe place in all it’s face, which is why the ruling clergy devotes itself only to the obsessive cleansing of the streets, which are indeed impeccable, like healthy veins ought to be.

The outer walls of Setessa are made up of natural vegetation, and those misty forests are populated with tiny cumulus of stars where the future can be read without major difficulty. However, the city's inhabitants rarely use that gift, since it is contrary to their firm belief in free will.

They walk barefooted through the narrow roads and rope bridges which connect the arboreal houses and temples, and their market knows no form of currency. They venerate the Four Seasons and Orphanhood, who are considered sisters. Lacking at the same time a general notion of parenthood, it falls to communal schools the responsibility to teach girls an art of war based on four sacred animals (the lion, the snake, the falcon and the fox) and to boys that they must forge their own path, even if it leads them far from the city. Those who stay, become animal caretakers.

My master’s estate is big -the Restorer of the Laws has many children and even more servants- but it is not particularly luxurious. The illiterate pawn who visits the manor must be able to grasp what they are seeing. If they were welcomed by the art of an alien culture or by materials they would not use when building their own house, they would not be able to see anything at all. That is, there would be no impression left on them they could later put into words upon returning to their village. They do not marvel at the unknown, which is indifferent to them because it is incomprehensible, but rather at the most numerous manifestation of what they already know.

The blind eternities recede and the Grigori arrives in Akrasa, the city where angels kiss mortals and mortals ride on lions. The streets are of a grass so green it rivals that of Your Excellency's estate and so sturdy lion paws do not disturb it in the slightest.