"In the Aftermath"

Disclaimer: The author claims no intellectual property rights of any kind to characters, plot points, setting details, or any other idea used herein which originated in official Magic: the Gathering content (all of which belong to Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast). The author receives no financial benefit from the use of these ideas and has written this work for personal amusement only.

Author's Note(s)/Background: So what is this and why am I writing it? That requires a bit of explanation. I have generally been very impressed with the quality of writing and storytelling in the official Magic story in recent years. Among my particular favourites were everything to do with the Eldrazi, which have come into focus in recent releases (BFZ/OGW, SOI/EMN). Sorin Markov had already been a character I liked and wanted to see more of, and then in "The Lithomancer" and "Stirring from Slumber" Nahiri quickly became a favourite. Suffice it to say I have not at all been pleased with the direction their characterisation has been taken in in Shadows over Innistrad, and especially in Eldritch Moon (all the more frustrating because, aside from that, these storylines have been top-notch). Hence this.

My headcanon versions of these characters, and their portrayals in earlier stories ("Stirring from Slumber" especially), have a level of maturity befitting their great age and myriad life experiences. That is not borne out by their actions in later stories (beginning in "Promises Old and New" and "Stone and Blood", and continuing through the rest of SOI/EMN), in which they are generally impetuous, incommunicative, irascible, incompetent, and irresponsible (to remain within the letter i). And then from there it only gets worse, as we see Nahiri abandoning every principle and belief that made her who she was, and Sorin acting as if he hasn't any vestige of a brain in his head. So this is my attempt to redeem those stories, and the characters with them. This is an exercise in headcanon, an unrepentant "fix-fic", and comes in part from the mentality of an aggrieved 'shipper; consider yourself forewarned.

For background information and inspiration, I am indebted to vorthosjay on Tumblr; in particular, his posts "Reading Guide: Catching-up for Eldritch Moon", "Narrative: Nahiri's Motivation" and "Nahiri's Disappointing Endgame" (the last of which in particular I recommend, as it sums up a few major grievances I agree with). In addition, this could not have come together without my partner Loten, who beta-read multiple drafts and served as my sounding board.

In terms of timeline, I started writing this when "Saint Traft and the Flight of Nightmares" (EMN 06) was the most recently posted episode of Magic Story, under the assumptions that both Sorin and Nahiri will survive the conflict, and (as spoiled by the cards) Emrakul will have been imprisoned in Innistrad's moon by Tamiyo. The story takes place shortly following that event. I hope to finish and post this soon enough that, at the time of posting, it will still be "potentially consistent with canon" even if it is invalidated very shortly thereafter.

Summary: A conversation between Sorin and Nahiri, in the aftermath of disaster barely thwarted.

There was a chill in the night air, or what was left of the air, as Nahiri stood amidst a field of wreckage and stared up at the eerily glowing silver moon. She shivered. It would have been an unsettling sight even if she did not know what that moon now contained within it; she felt once again unable to comprehend what it was Sorin had loved about this plane of horrors, except perhaps in contrast to what it had become under Emrakul's influence, at her instigation. Lost in thought, she almost failed to notice him approaching, and would have entirely if not for the sound of his footsteps squelching through Eldrazi remains. She met his gaze reluctantly; she had never before seen Sorin Markov in such a state of dishevelment, nor walking with a limp using his sheathed sword as a cane, and found she took no pleasure in the sight despite it having been entirely her own doing.

"... Sorin."

"Nahiri. This is not a conversation you will escape from," he said grimly.

"... no, I hadn't imagined it would be. Unless you decide to kill me first," she said softly, lowering herself to sit on a chunk of rubble that was conveniently placed nearby. She barely felt anything more than resigned, now; if anything surprised her, it was only that he wanted to talk and hadn't killed her already. She would deserve it. "I'm not going anywhere."

"If I wanted to kill you, Nahiri, you would be dead. Though I cannot deny you have sorely tempted me. For now, that remains to be seen. At the very least, we are long overdue for a conversation. If I do decide to kill you, it will not be without you knowing the reason why."

Sorin took a few halting steps closer before sitting himself, on what looked to have been the remains of a well-built stone wall. Even in its current form, the lithomancer in her acknowledged the craftsmanship in it, and she almost felt sorrow to see it in its current state. Perhaps she would have done, if it were not merely another indication of what she had done to Innistrad; in that context, small details could hardly matter, she thought.

"Did you realise you were my inspiration when I created Avacyn?" he asked finally, as if he weren't sure where to begin. They did have a lot of history, she supposed. "Your plane had a protector, and I realised mine needed one, or at least a better one than me.* I made her after your image, and a small bit of mine. In a way, I suppose that made her our daughter. Or the closest either of us will ever come to one... and now she is no more. Your actions are responsible for that, yours and mine."

That was not at all what she'd been expecting him to say. Perhaps the small details could matter after all. "I have a hard time imagining worse parents than us," she said after a moment.

He laughed – or what passed for a laugh with him, at any rate, closer to a bark or a cough than anything else. "That was as true when we first met as it is now," he said eventually. "You remember well what I was like as a teacher."

It was her turn to chuckle. He sounded almost wistful, an unfamiliar emotion for him in her experience. He paused for a moment, looking at her as though he was not entirely sure what to say. When she also said nothing, he continued.

"Did you forget what it was like, back when you were young and we saw the Eldrazi devour plane after plane? I remember. I remember the horror in your eyes when you couldn't save a child, when I forced you to leave multitudes to their deaths and watch entire worlds crumble to nothingness so you and I could fight on. The Nahiri I remember would never have knowingly inflicted that on any world."

"And the Sorin I remembered kept his promises, but he was little more than a figment of my imagination," she snapped back.

"I made a mistake, and never received your message. I was perfectly honest when I said I hadn't anticipated that consequence. Somehow, that was enough for you to decide I deserved to die. Or perhaps it was that I wasn't apologetic enough to suit you? You'd known me for centuries; my personality should hardly have been a shock."

"Do you have any idea what it was like inside that bloody Helvault of yours, with nothing but demons and devils for company? For a millennium? Did you have any idea what it was you were condemning me to?"

"... I always meant to let you out, once you'd had time to cool off. If you didn't manage to escape yourself, which I honestly thought you might. But then as the years went by, I couldn't face my guilt for leaving you in there, and there was no way to release just you without everything else escaping... I think I lost track of time. Procrastination is an insidious enemy, to those as old as we. For whatever it's worth, I am sorry."

"You're sorry? That's all you can manage to say?"

"What else is there? I overreacted, but you provoked me to it. You were angry beyond reason – don't look at me like that, you know you were – and you were attacking me. I did not want to fight you, and I certainly did not want to kill you. Avacyn would not have held back for much longer, and I would no more have seen her kill you than done so myself. We neither of us were blameless, I suppose, but you left me little choice."

"Always the self-justification, Sorin."

"Would you have preferred to die?"

"What I would have preferred, Sorin," she said, gritting her teeth, "was for you to have kept your bloody promises." Even now, the thought of that encounter brought her blood near to boiling. "And now Zendikar is as good as gone, the Eldrazi are free and it was all for nothing. So what do you have to say for yourself, old friend? What could you possibly say? Even if I accept your excuses over ignoring and imprisoning me, how can you possibly defend yourself? Am I beyond reason to be angry over that? You and Ugin manipulated me into imprisoning them in my home, and abandoned me to the task of maintaining that prison. I thought perhaps it might be different if one of your homes were destroyed by those monstrosities."

"Ulamog and Kozilek are dead, and from what I understand Zendikar is already recovering. I doubt Ugin will be particularly pleased to learn that they were killed, but it is true; those young planeswalkers did it somehow."

"You had better not be lying to me."

"I have never lied to you."

Nahiri closed her eyes for a moment. What could she possibly say, if this were true? But then… that still did not answer the question of his own involvement, or lack thereof.

"You are still being evasive, Sorin. Where were you when they broke free?"

"Strictly speaking, they did not break free," Sorin replied softly. "The prison held, Nahiri. They were deliberately released."

"WHAT?"

"It was Bolas who engineered it, as far as I can tell.** He manipulated several planeswalkers into imitating our keys, and they set them free unknowingly. I tried to stop it, but I was too late. There were too many of them involved, and too delusional, and no time to explain properly."

"Bolas? Who is this Bolas?"

"Nicol Bolas. He is a dragon planeswalker, one of the last true elder dragons, and an old enemy of Ugin's. One of the most dangerous beings I know of. I have no idea why he wanted them released, or what he is planning. Nor do I know if Ugin knows. I do not even know if this so-called Gatewatch helped or hindered his plans by killing the two on Zendikar."

"We need to find out, and we need to stop him," she said, before she even realised what she was saying. We? She still reflexively thought of them as partners, even now?

"We, Nahiri? And why should I trust you, now? I confess for a time I even wondered if you were working for him. But you've never been able to lie to me, have you? I doubt that's changed."

"I don't think I have, no." She paused for a moment, digesting this. "You say you tried to stop it? Do you mean to say you were on Zendikar?"

"I went there when I sensed the disturbance at the Eye. After all, I knew you could not, and I had my suspicions about Ugin as well. I arrived too late to stop the first lock being opened, and my attempt to maintain the second was thwarted by local ignoramuses who refused to trust a vampire. You may want to ask Nissa Revane about that; she's proven useful enough since that I would ask you not to kill her, but her role in that incident did not exactly cover her in glory. I went in search of Ugin after that, but he was perhaps an even worse disappointment."

"How so?"

"Bolas nearly killed him in a battle on Tarkir twelve or thirteen centuries ago, and he'd been in convalescent stasis until I woke him. And then he refused to speak of Eldrazi without you present, and told me not to see him again until we had 'resolved our differences'."

"He's worse than you are!"

"And yet it was to Innistrad you brought Emrakul."

"And Innistrad will be her final resting place. May I say 'all's well that ends well', or will you kill me for it? I wish we had had this Tamiyo or someone like her when we first bound them. This prison is far more secure than ours, much as that galls me to admit."

"What was your plan, then, Nahiri? What were you going to do if you won? Suppose your plan had succeeded, Emrakul had eradicated all life on Innistrad and me along with it. Would you have left her free? Could you have done anything else?"

"I remember how to make hedrons. The structures I used to direct Emrakul – the locals have been calling them cryptoliths – they were a sort of inverted variant, actually, and as I designed them they could invaginate on command and become hedrons proper for a new prison.*** The leylines were already in place, so with a bit of time, it wouldn't have been difficult. But in truth, I don't think I expected to survive, or cared to."

"And this your revenge for my supposed irresponsibility! Look in the mirror, Nahiri! Look what you have done, in the name of avenging that promise. A promise I did my best to keep, for all the good that did. Can you live with yourself now? Can you honestly tell me you like the person you have become?"

"I know," she said sadly. "It was reckless and stupid. I freely admit it. My only excuse must be that I was not thinking clearly after so long in that prison, and then seeing them loose on Zendikar as soon as I escaped… I snapped. I was so angry." And I was already predisposed to be angry at you, after you'd imprisoned me, she thought but did not say.

Sorin looked at her oddly, then hesitantly reached out and took her hand, squeezed for a moment and let go. He sighed.

"You are not the only one who was not thinking clearly. Looking back, it is all too obvious. When I unmade Avacyn, I was forced to take back into myself the portion of my power I invested her with.**** I think some of the madness that was afflicting her came with it and affected me, as well. I would never have lost sight of the long term, otherwise."

"Lost sight of the –"

"I rallied the locals to fight a military campaign against you. Not against Emrakul and her thralls; against you. I gave up any thought of Innistrad's survival and focused only on that. I went directly for the throat when we fought. None of this is rational. None of this would I have done had I been in my right mind."

"Sorin..."

"Don't take this the wrong way, Nahiri, but are you certain your mind was entirely your own?"

"What do you mean?"

"The Eldrazi are clearly able to affect and manipulate minds. Avacyn was driven mad, and the denizens of this plane with her; they'd have torn themselves apart in paranoia even without the spawn and mutations. And those children mentioned Kozilek dominating minds on Zendikar. Your actions were certainly to Emrakul's benefit; it would not surprise me at all if she had been influencing you somehow. You have certainly not been yourself."

She stared at him in shock. "You would think I would have noticed."

"Neither of us is particularly gifted in mind magic, certainly not of a sort that would help; I am unsure. I did not notice any influence in myself either, but looking back nothing else makes sense. Something has changed since Emrakul was imprisoned again. Do you not feel any different?"

"I... I don't know. It's possible."

"Well, we do have a mind mage available. It pains me to admit, but we may need to consult Jace Beleren. Or Tamiyo, perhaps, if she has not yet gone."

She could not think of anything to say after that, not immediately, and fell into a contemplative silence, staring at nothing. Perhaps this could explain the overwhelming regret she now found herself feeling, beyond just having learnt new facts that implied her vengeance had been less than fully justified. She felt very small, and more than a little grateful to Sorin for being willing to listen to her. If she had not been kor, she might have expected her face to go red for the shame of it; in that moment, she was quite grateful for that quirk of physiology.

"Will you… will you think differently of me," she asked haltingly, "if it turns out that you're wrong, and I did this all myself?" It came out sounding like an apology.

"I should say yes," he replied thoughtfully, just as slowly. "That I should resent you. That I should wish you dead for all you've taken from me, and yet I can only think that even then I do not wish to lose you as well when we have so much history. What would I have left, then?"

"I don't think I deserve you."

"Let us say rather that we deserve each other, I think." There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice, enough to tell her that he knew that could be interpreted multiple ways, and meant all of them.

"Do you realise this may be the first time you've ever spoken to me as an equal?"

"You are my equal, now. You have lived hundreds of human lifetimes; certainly you are older now than I was when we first met! But then, I do know myself well enough to know that condescension is habit-forming."

She laughed. "At least you admit it!"

"You cannot tell me you've never felt the same impulse, surely. The planebound are all so provincial, even the immortals, and then of those who can planeswalk, few live as long as we. Look at those children, for instance – Vess is the oldest of them, at a scant few hundred. The others actually look their ages."

That should probably not have been funny, she thought, but she could not help grinning at him and feeling freer for it. There was something ironic that after so much anger, and everything they had done to each other, the prospect of restoring their friendship would be what comforted her.

"Speaking of shortsighted immortals," he said after a moment, "I suppose I ought at least to thank you for killing my grandfather. I was always a bit too sentimental to do it myself, I think, but it needed doing."

"Sentimental? You? Don't make me laugh."

His lips twitched into the barest hint of a smirk. Once again, they lapsed into silence, more companionable this time. She could not be sure what he was thinking, but all she knew at this point was that after all of this, she did not want them to go their separate ways again.

"Where do we go from here, Sorin?" she asked him eventually.

"I think you need to go to home," he answered, surprisingly quickly. "Go to Zendikar. Take Nissa with you, perhaps, if she will go. Go watch the plane recover, help the people heal and be healed yourself. I cannot come with you; there is too much I must do here. I cannot leave Innistrad until I am sure it will survive my absence. I am considering trying to recreate Avacyn; the mana that was her still feels as though it wants to take that form, though I am not at all sure how she will be changed by all of this, if she will even be herself at all.***** Or, for that matter, how the survivors would take her return…"

"I'm sorry, Sorin. I wish I could undo what I did to her."

"I believe you. I could almost wish I didn't, but I believe you. "

"And what of Bolas? We cannot ignore him."

"No, we cannot. I completely agree. I will have to consider what to do, and gather information; we should go to Ugin, together, once our homes are in better condition. Perhaps his perspective will prove useful. If not, the young planeswalkers may know something. I believe Liliana Vess has associated with him in the past… there may be something useful there, if she will cooperate."

"Well, it's a place to start, at least."

"Take some time for yourself, Nahiri, then come find me when you are ready. It will be good to work together again, but I think you need to take care of yourself first."

She thought for a moment. "At least I can finally put an end to yet another of my follies. The people of Zendikar will never again worship the Eldrazi as gods."

"What? Where did that come from?"

"It was what I told my people at first, so long ago," she sighed. "I wanted to keep things simple. Terrible gods were imprisoned in the world, and we must remember lest they escape and bring us ruin. Yet all they remembered was 'gods' and some fragments of names, they forgot everything important. Local cults spoke of 'Nahiri the Prophet'," she could not hide the disgust in her voice, "and across the plane even angels worshiped 'Emeria' and 'Ula' and 'Cosi' and various other mangled names while forgetting everything else I'd ever said. It made me so angry. Everything I'd worked for, everything we'd worked for, perverted utterly over the centuries."

"Ironic then that you would become Emrakul's prophet in truth, for a time."

She sighed. "Yes. But that came later; I first learned of those cults shortly before I confronted you, before you imprisoned me."

"Which makes your anger at me then more understandable, I suppose. I wonder if I would have responded differently, if I had known…" he said, trailing off.

"Well, it can hardly matter now, can it?" she asked. What could be the use of rehashing ancient history further? Odd that she should think this now, when she had so recently been determined to exact vengeance over exactly that history, and inflicted enormities on an entire world in pursuit of such. But the past was in the past, and could not be changed; all that could remain would be to learn from it, and to move forward.******

She must have vocalised at least some part of that aloud, because Sorin seemed to have heard her and responded. "Forward, indeed. I agree. I would propose a toast, but you've never shared my taste in beverages."

She smiled wryly. That had been an old joke of theirs, from the early days when she'd first learnt he was a vampire.

"Will you introduce me to this mind mage you mentioned, then? No sense wasting more time."

Jace Beleren could hardly believe his eyes when he saw the two people approaching him. Sorin Markov he recognised, but the other… she was an unfamiliar kor woman, but entirely consistent with what descriptions he'd had of the person who built the cryptoliths and summoned Emrakul to Innistrad. Which was yet another puzzle: everything he knew of Markov had the ancient vampire incredibly protective of his home plane (even Liliana, who feared very little, had urged him to be wary of that), and yet here he was associating with the very person who had deliberately endangered it. Not only associating, for that matter; Markov appeared to be injured, and allowing her to support him as he walked.

Several of his fears were confirmed when Markov imperiously informed him that his assistance was required, and proceeded to explain the exact nature of that assistance. Just lovely. Apparently these recent catastrophic events had been the result of some ancient lovers' spat, and his services were needed as a therapist. It was going to be a very long day; it was at times like these he most wished to be back on Ravnica, where the worst problems he could anticipate dealing with were guild disputes, assassins, and possibly the Izzet blowing up something they shouldn't have.

Endnotes

* I do not believe that Sorin would have waited five thousand years after the imprisonment of the Eldrazi to create Avacyn, even if it's been too heavily implied for me to ignore that that's when he created the Helvault (shortly before Nahiri became imprisoned in it, roughly one thousand years prior to current story happenings). I think it's even a stretch for him to have done so after the Eldrazi's imprisonment, despite having chosen for other reasons to say he did in this story, because he was already an old planeswalker by then and the longer he waited the more likely the vampiric overfeeding he intended her to check would have wiped out humankind on Innistrad. I suspect an early planeswalk of Sorin's took him to Serra's Realm, where he learnt the art of creating angels from her.

** I am not entirely sure how Sorin would have learned this, to be honest, but I do not find it particularly implausible that he would know.

*** In agreement with vorthosjay's argument in "Nahiri's Disappointing Endgame", I do not believe Nahiri would have unleashed Emrakul without at least some plan to deal with her afterward. To have done so would have put her in truly unforgiveable territory, and would go against everything we thought we knew about Nahiri's nature in the first place.

**** I find myself intrigued by the notion that, by vesting a significant amount of his power in the form of Avacyn, that power was not subject to the changes wrought by the Mending (I think if anything bears this out, it's the amount of power she is shown to wield in Avacyn Restored, which seems beyond the capabilities of post-Mending planeswalkers), and likewise by a similar speculation that Nahiri may have been less affected due to being in the Helvault when it occurred. However, I have no canonical justification for these ideas.

***** If Sorin were to later recreate her, I suspect Avacyn would be significantly changed; we could perhaps imagine this as an origin story or justification for the M15 Avacyn card (it's a core set, why can't it have been temporally ambiguous?).

****** Obviously Nahiri knows nothing of the events of Tarkir block, not that I think it would change much if she did (we're led to believe that that particular kind of time travel was a unique event that cannot be repeated, and for all anyone in the current/Dragons timeline can know, the prior/Khans timeline is nothing more than a delusion of Sarkhan's). I have no reason to believe that Nahiri should think history anything other than immutable, nor that she would be wrong to do so. (This is probably excessively pedantic of me to address, honestly.)

^^ I wanted to include something about the Ancient Fang (an artifact which can be used to mentally dominate and control vampires; Sorin confiscated it from Dack Fayden in the IDW comics), which Sorin should still have, and may well find useful in dealing with Olivia's ambitions and reestablishing order on Innistrad, but I couldn't think of a way for it to come up in their conversation.