Jace shuddered involuntarily as he opened his eyes on Innistrad. The air was quite a bit colder here. It had a different smell, too, a different feel. The scent was strange, almost metallic, and when he exhaled his last breath of Zendikar's air and breathed in Innistrad, he felt it. There was a thickness to the air here. That first breath hurt, just a little.
The sky was tearing itself apart. Storm clouds swirled, as if there were a gale in every direction, and no sunlight escaped the horizon. The plane's eternal dusk had given way to a purplish glow. His eyes didn't want to adjust to the dark; they fought him every moment of the way. He squinted toward the horizon, toward the hole in reality, and tried to focus. Focus. Focus. His mind felt heavy, here. Like a sack of wet rice on top of his neck. Sloshing, grinding, sliding away...
There was a chime in his mind. Or the memory of a chime. A reminder of himself, and his eyes cleared.
He stood atop a hill, looking down on the rolling fields that surrounded Thraben. He could see the city now, and half of it was ablaze. There were battles raging in the streets. Torches. Shouting. Screaming. He wasn't sure whether he was hearing the screams from this distance, or feeling them. And above it all, up in the sky...he couldn't bring himself to focus there. Not yet.
A second set of sounds brought Jace's focus to a more clear and present issue. Growling. Snarling. Eyes glowing a sickly green in the dark.
"Werewolves again," Jace muttered to himself. He reached out into the darkness and lightly touched the minds that he found there. Three of them, ravaged by madness and changed into something he could barely recognize. As they crept out of the shadows, he saw the werewolves clearly. Their fur was patchy, their skin infused with the same latticework pattern that he had seen all over the organic matter of Innistrad.
Jace made a call. There wasn't enough left of these minds to be saved. There was no subtlety in his mental assault; he grabbed ahold of their senses and overloaded each one—blinding light, deafening sound, smells so intense they choked on them. It wasn't pretty, but he needed to establish a foothold here for when the others arrived.
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Two of the werewolves whimpered and fell; they twitched, and then went still. The last of the three...laughed? He could feel its mind changing, adapting, growing in response to the assault. The mental connection broke, and he watched as the creature's skin rippled, its limbs lengthened, its claws elongated, and its skin oozed. Jace stumbled backward. Whatever he had done had triggered some sort of reflexive mutation. Now, he wasn't even sure what he was looking at.
With a quick gesture, he split into a dozen reflections, and the monster spent a moment sniffing the air before focusing in on his real body, the illusions ignored. Jace looked around for an escape route and found none. Options raced through his mind, and were discarded one by one. Jace's illusions, semi-substantial, tried to crowd the beast, buying him more time, until...
...a flash of light, the sound of a whipping blade and tearing flesh. The horror dropped into a mangled, whimpering pile. Gideon.
"It's fine, Jace. I've got your back."
Jace straightened his coat. "Did you get lost on the way? Make a stopover in Ravnica for snacks?"
"It's not easy following you to a place I've never been. Hmm." Gideon stared down the hill toward Thraben. If he was having a hard time with his senses, he wasn't showing it. "Bigger than the other two. And it's got quite the force between us and it. What's the plan?"
