Return to Ravnica

Ral moved through the chamber, pushing aside curtains of hanging mosses and stepping over ancient, fallen columns. He knelt down to investigate something covered over with sickly roots. He pried a mossy tendril away from the lump and started backward. The gray face of a skull smiled through the foliage with a smattering of jagged teeth. Ral took a breath and let the fight-or-flight impulse fade.

He turned back to the others. “Are we ready?” he asked. “Skreeg, the mana coil. Charge it up, already.”

Skreeg placed a sculpture of spiraling bronze on the floor. The other Izzet wizard researchers surrounded the alchemical device and fussed over its operation. Gems of crimson and turquoise lit up along the artifact’s edge, and it began to hum quietly.

“Ready soon, sir,” said the goblin.

“Soon? Do you think the Great Firemind would be satisfied with soon?”

“I’m sorry, my colleague, but it takes some time for the coils to—”

“Connect it to a richer source,” Ral snapped. “If this chamber has one of the ley lines running through it, then there must be a font of mana underneath—an old source, probably unused for centuries.”

“There is indeed a deep source here,” said one of the other Izzet mages, her eyes closed.

“But the coils will overheat,” said Skreeg. “They’ll be plugged directly into the mana well. That much power—”

“Direct all of the mana into me,” said Ral. “I’ll be able to tell instantly if this is the line we’re meant to follow.”

An insectile chittering sound echoed from one of the ancient corridors that led into the chamber. The Izzet mages froze.

“Who’s there?” Ral called into the corridor.

He strained to see, but the light from their instruments couldn’t penetrate the dark. There was a sound of scraping, like eggshell against porcelain—and more chittering, this time accompanied by footsteps. Many footsteps.

“End your unnatural experiments,” hissed a voice from the gloom. “Forsake this place. The Guildmaster Jarad claims this territory for the Golgari Swarm.”

A small crowd of pale, dreadlocked elves and humans stepped into the light. Bits of bone and detritus woven into their matted hair clicked lightly. Their chitinous armor swarmed with tiny, riotous insects that moved in and out of the sheen of moss growing on their shoulders—a bed for sprouting fungi. Whether it was the Golgari themselves who had made the chittering sound or their bugs, Ral could not be sure. A few of them bore short blades, but most of them were unarmed: spellcasters.

The speaker, an elf woman, held forth a gnarled staff. She pointed the tip, which was decorated with a large rat skull, directly at Ral Zarek. “You. Vacate now.”

Ral swept his palm around him. “This is nothing but ruined, abandoned tunnel. No one owns this.”

“All that civilization discards, we own,” sneered the Golgari elf.

“Well, you’re going to have to scurry away to whatever crevices you crawled out of. The dragon Niv-Mizzet claims this area now—and any other scrap of unused turf he sees fit for the Izzet League.”

The Golgari’s complaints were subverbal, guttural. Ral thought he heard something that was almost a snarl.

“This kind of trespass would have been illegal under the Guildpact,” said the elf.

“Well, there’s no Guildpact now, is there? Run along. The dragon doesn’t like to wait for his discoveries.”

The elf shaman sneered again, but her face lowered, and she backed away. And with her, the rest of the Golgari retreated into the shadows. There was a final rattling sound as the shaman shook her rat-skull staff, then all was still.

Skreeg heaved a sigh into the silence. “Glad that’s over.”

Just as he said this, dark shapes jerked to life all around the Izzet expedition: skeletal remains shuddered to a standing position; heaps of refuse became fungal rot-horrors; decomposing moss wound with bits of bone to rise in multilegged form, uttering dark shrieks and brandishing claws of malice.

“Rot-dwelling sewer elves,” Ral cursed. He snapped his head to the other Izzet mages. “What are you waiting for? Destroy them!”

The Izzet rushed to conjure spells, but the Golgari refuse zombies sprang toward them with unnerving speed. The goblin Skreeg yelped as a zombie’s claws took hold of him and raised him toward a monstrous, devouring maw. Ral threw a bolt of lightning into the rotting creature, temporarily blasting it apart. Skreeg fell to the muck of the floor as the undead creature reassembled itself, inducing web-strewn remains to merge into its anatomy.

Ral grabbed the bronze cables from their experimental device and tried to use them as a weapon. He jabbed an undead horror with one, but the live cable barely singed its gray flesh. It would have stopped another creature’s heart, but of course the necromantic beast’s heart—if it even possessed one—was already stopped.

The zombie-things attacked in a swarm, cinching around the mages like a drawstring. Ral heard screams from his guild mates, and multiple tendrils began to lash onto his arms and neck.