//------------------------------// // Legends & Libraries // Story: My Little Planeswalker: Twilight's Spark // by Zennistrad //------------------------------// Twilight had been able to read the directory information easily enough, thanks to the aid of her translation spell. Even a first-level comprehend languages would allow her to understand any written language to be understood on a basic level, and the advanced fourth-level spell she’d invented was capable of more on top of that. It not only improved on the original by allowing two-way verbal communication, but also allowing her to instantly understand nuances and connotations that a direct translation would not have offered. Of course, given the ubiquity of the Equestrian language on her home plane, she’d never in her life expected to truly find a use for it. Come to think of it, she didn’t even need to use it in the human world, which was utterly bizarre. Why would they speak Equestrian? Maybe I should stop thinking of it as “the human world,” since humans are here, too. What did Sunset call it in the journal again? Anthropia? Twilight’s idle train of thought continued from there as she followed the directory map to the public section of the library, past the gargantuan bookshelves and massive study tables. All around her, white-robed scholars were thoroughly absorbed in their studies. A casual glance at the bookshelf labels showed that they were all legal reference materials. Given the hundreds of thousands of books and scrolls, it could only mean that the plane had a truly labyrinthine legal system. It was yet another curiosity that had wormed its way into her mind. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice the runes etched into the floor, which started glowing as her illusory body passed by them. Eventually following the directions led her to a small wooden door, where a small sign hung above indicated the entrance to the library’s public collection. As she reached out and grabbed the doorknob, she could feel herself beginning to shake with anticipation. She slowly opened the door, eager to see the treasures that awaited her inside. “...You’ve got to be kidding me.” The public section of the library was absolutely tiny, a single room barely any bigger than Twilight’s own bedroom. There were only seven bookshelves in total, three lining the walls apart from the door, and four more in the center, crammed around a single desk. The room was dark, with no windows or artificial illumination, and there was a thin layer of dust on top of every visible surface. Twilight stifled a cough as she entered the room. Seeing the public collection’s puny size was disappointing, but seeing its complete disuse was outright infuriating. The owners of the library had so much knowledge at their disposal, and not only did they gate off all but the absolute tiniest amount from the public, they considered the little that they did share a complete afterthought. Focus, Twilight, she reminded herself. Feeling the tension building within her chest, Twilight took a deep breath, briefly lapsing into a cough as the dust invaded her lungs. When she recovered, she promptly went over to the bookshelves, searching for anything that could give her information about the plane. Thankfully, her search proved to be fruitful very quickly. Browsing the shelves, she found several books on the plane’s history and geography that she could make use of. She sat down on the desk, and cast a simple dancing lights spell. Four glowing orbs appeared in the air, above the desk, two blue, one red, and one white, illuminating the space just enough for her to read. The plane she was currently in, she’d learned, was called Ravnica. The name was synonymous with its largest city, which since the ancient days had grown so vast that it encompassed nearly the entire world. Everything outside of it was a collection of loosely-organized urban centers; even the places Ravnicans considered to be wilderness remained covered in gargantuan stonework ruins. There wasn’t a single part of the plane that was not at some point touched by civilization. The very idea of a city taking up an entire world was mind-boggling, and Twilight struggled to think of how the logistics of such a world would be managed. She found her answer, more or less, in the ten guilds that ruled Ravnica. The first mentioned in her books were the Azorius. They were the same guild that owned and operated the library, and were the official government of Ravnica, or so they claimed. In particular, the silver-clad soldiers she had seen in the bar were the Lyev, the enforcing arm of the Azorius, while the white-robed scholars in the library were likely either part of the Sova or Jelenn, the judicial and legislative branches. Even from the most neutral descriptions, it was clear that they were above all obsessed with following procedure to the exact detail, and viewed the law not as a means to achieve justice but as an end in itself. To them, the law existed to enforce the law, and the more laws there were the better. Similar to the Azorius were the Boros Legion, a military organization that at times acted as a fierce rival to the Azorius, and at other times they worked together with them. But while the Azorius maintained their power through the construction of an impenetrable bureaucracy, the Boros were much more direct. Their military was highly organized and dedicated to keeping the peace, but procedure was ultimately considered secondary to asserting their own vision of justice. The history texts had described several notable times when they had clashed with the Azorius over disputes on how to enforce the law. The responsibility of Ravnica’s infrastructure fell on a guild called the Izzet. They were builders of roads, boilers, sewers, aqueducts, steam power, and many more of the technological innovations that drove Ravnican civilization. More than that, however, they were also described as researchers on the cutting-edge of magical study, always pushing the limitations of what could be accomplished with spellcraft. Twilight felt herself almost immediately fascinated with the guild, yet she felt a strong sense of apprehension reading all of the magical disasters that they had created... as well as a very uncomfortable familiarity. They had little to no regard for public safety, despite being responsible for many major public works. Food, meanwhile, was largely provided by the Golgari. At first glance they were utterly repulsive to Twilight’s sensibilities, a group largely consisting of necromancers and undead, feeding off of the waste and decay of the plane and using it as fodder for rot farms, which comprised an enormous portion of Ravnica’s agriculture. Yet the more Twilight thought about it, the more she became aware that it was a grim necessity: in a world with little arable land waste had to be recycled as efficiently as possible to sustain the population. Any efforts at conserving what little of nature remained in Ravnica fell into the hands of the Simic Combine, a group most accurately described as bioengineers. In the past, they were said to have repeatedly attempted to “improve” Ravnica by forcibly altering the genetics of others, even against their will. The thought was profoundly disturbing, but modern descriptions of the Simic showed that they had moved closer towards their original stated goal of conservation, though they were still widely known to create artificial lifeforms for that purpose. It had occurred to Twilight that the strange lion-centipede-frog she’d seen in the circus was most likely a Simic creation. Of course, the circus itself certainly wasn’t owned by the Simic. That would have likely fallen under the domain of the Rakdos, a demonic cult dedicated exclusively to reckless and often destructive hedonism. They were infamous among Ravnica for being murderers, torturers, thugs, and rioters, but very disturbingly they were also stated to operate large sectors of Ravnica’s entertainment industry, enough to fund most of the guild’s activities. The Rakdos owned or managed a huge selection of nightclubs, theatres, tattoo parlors, gladiator games, casinos, and even party planning services, the lattermost of which briefly brought an image of Pinkie Pie as a Rakdos bloodwitch to Twilight’s mind. She shuddered as she tried her best to discard the thought, hoping that she would never again imagine such a thing. In stark contrast to the self-destructive chaos of the Rakdos, the Selesnya were life-affirming and harmonious... at least, until Twilight cared to research them beyond her first impressions. Though they preached the sanctity of life, it was almost universally shown in historical records that they were utterly hypocritical, seeing their own troops as completely expendable in inter-guild conflicts. But most disturbingly of all, they seemed to almost universally frown upon the very concept of individuality, expecting their own guild members to abandon their personal identities and be subsumed into their collective. It had reminded her of Starlight Glimmer’s past actions, only somehow it managed to be several orders of magnitude more disturbing, as the Selesnya were one of the most powerful political forces in the entire world. Among the most alien of the guilds were the Orzhov, enough that they were difficult for Twilight to comprehend at first. Organized religion had always been a foreign concept to most of Equestria, and while ponies usually had some form of spiritual beliefs, it was generally no more than an afterthought in everyday life. The Orzhov were, on the surface, vaguely similar to the religious organizations that existed in several ancient cultures on her world, yet there was something distinctly different about them. In no culture had she ever heard of a religion acting as a bank or a credit-lending agency, and the idea of the Orzhov being either of those made her uneasy for reasons she didn’t fully understand. The Gruul Clans were, in many respects, the exact opposite of most of the other guilds, in that they weren’t really a guild at all. The historical records showed that they had once been in charge of preserving Ravnica’s natural lands, but their function was quickly subsumed by the Simic, and they were pushed to the fringes of society. What remained was a loose affiliation of clans that lived on the fringes of Ravnican society, actively rebelling against the inevitable encroach of civilization. Finally, there were the Dimir. The guild was far and away the most frustrating to research, as aside from a few brief references to them operating a network of spies and information brokers, there was next to nothing said about them at all. Most of the older books didn’t even mention that the Dimir existed at all, and some even went so far as to say that there were only nine guilds in total. Whatever they were, they had clearly gone through painstaking efforts to conceal as much information about themselves as they could. As Twilight continued to read about each of the guilds, there was a slow, creeping suspicion that she had planeswalked straight into a dystopian nightmare. Not a single one of the guilds was an entity she would trust with the power to rule an entire plane. Worse, she had quickly learned that the Guildpact, the magically binding document that kept them from all-out war, had been destroyed some time ago. Unless there was something she had missed, there was nothing that could prevent the guilds from destroying Ravnica if they came into conflict again. Before she could consider the implications any further, a loud knocking came in the door. Twilight opened her mouth to answer, but didn’t even get a chance to respond as a small squadron of silver-clad Lyev burst into the room, brandishing long polearms with silvery, triangular spearheads. The frontmost soldier was dressed in a slightly more elaborate set of armor than the others, the extra sashes seeming to indicate some form of authority. “Eep! I-I mean, hello! How can I help you, um... officer? Can I call you that?” “Silence, miscreant!” the leader of the soldiers spat. “You are under arrest for the unauthorized use of divination, evocation, and illusion magic on guild property!” “W-what?” Twilight immediately felt the icy grip of panic clutching at her lungs. Her imagination swirled with vivid images of punishments that the fastidious lawmakers could inflict on her. “Please, wait! I-I didn’t know!” Her words were summarily ignored, as the leader raised an open hand towards Twilight. His palm glowed with crackling blue magic, and a triangular rune appeared in front of it, the same symbol of the Azorius that adorned the library entrance. Twilight instinctively closed her eyes as rune shot towards her, and her body surged with pain as she was knocked to the ground. When she opened her eyes again, she found that both her illusion and her dancing lights had been dispelled, and her body was bound in a series of hollow triangles formed from magic, pinning her limbs to her sides. She desperately tried to call upon her magic, but another triangle surrounded her horn and cut off the flow of magic before it could materialize, sending a sharp spike of pain into her skull. Her entire body trembling, she looked up as the soldiers spoke to each other in the Ravnican language, no longer comprehensible to her ears. Their faces were inscribed with expressions of surprise and bewilderment, in stark contrast to the ironclad stoicism that they normally displayed. Finally, one of the soldiers approached her, pulled a sword from a scabbard by his side, and clocked Twilight on the head with the hilt. Her head spun from the impact, and Twilight promptly blacked out. ——————— Ral made his way to the Azorius library as quickly as he could without breaking into a full run. The speed at which he traversed the streets had prompted many a stare from the passerby, but he no longer cared to avoid attracting more attention than necessary to himself. Besides, he was an Izzet guildmage. People were going to think he was up to some something bizarre and potentially dangerous no matter what he was doing. The library was not, strictly speaking, off-limits to members of other guilds, but the disapproving glares he received from the many Azorius scholars as he approached it made it clear he was not welcome. There could any number of laws he’d never heard of that he’d likely break without even realizing, and the Lyev would jump at the first opportunity to arrest him under them. Yet still he pressed on, knowing that the trouble the equine planeswalker could cause was several orders of magnitude worse. His worst fears were confirmed when he approached the library entrance, and saw a squadron of Lyev arresters carrying the pony-like creature’s unconscious body out the door. He was too late. A rival guild had a planeswalker in their captivity, and there was no way he could even begin to approach the problem without inviting interguild conflict. Not without the help of the one person who could resolve such disputes. Ral’s lips twisted into a scowl. Beleren. It always has to come back to you, doesn’t it? ——————— Legend Lore 1U Sorcery Look at the top three cards of your planar deck. Put one of them on top and the rest on the bottom of your planar deck in any order. Draw a card. (You draw this card from your library, not your planar deck.) Planeswalking is not a task for the unprepared.