Five Planeswalkers allied as the Gatewatch. From Kaladesh, the pyromancer Chandra Nalaar. From Theros, the hieromancer Gideon Jura. From Zendikar, the elven animist Nissa Revane. From someplace he no longer remembers, the telepath Jace Beleren. From Dominaria, the necromancer Liliana Vess. With the aid of Tamiyo, a soratami scholar of Kamigawa, they defeated the eldritch titan Emrakul, sealing the entity within Innistrad's silver moon.
Three months have passed.
She knocked again, louder.
From the far side of the door came a thump and a muttered obscenity. After long seconds of fabric rustling this way and that, accompanied by sotto voce imprecations against these blankets in particular, bedding in general, and the entire profession of weaving by extension, the sounds of unsteady feet on hardwood lurched and swayed towards the door.
"Yeah. What. What?" a sleep-thick feminine voice mumbled from the other side.
"It's almost noon. You need to get up."
"Can't be noon. It's still too heavy out."
"Could you open the door?"
"No." A moment of silence, a sigh, then long seconds of loose-limbed scrabbling against the door lock. A final pause. "Wait. Didn't lock it. You open it."
She pushed gently, and the door creaked open, the movement of air rustling the dark silk of her dress. The woman collapsing against the doorframe on the far side was a chin-level explosion of sleep-mussed copper hair in a baggy nightshirt, its neckline untied and sliding off one shoulder. The light from the hall fell across one sunburnt and freckled cheek. She groaned and squeezed amber eyes shut. "Morning, Liliana," she mumbled into the door frame.
"Oh my," Liliana said. "You look terrible, Chandra."
Chandra smeared night sand out of one eye with the hand she wasn't leaning on. "Oh yeah? Well you look..." She dropped her hand and squinted at her blearily. Her eyelid twitched. "...Great, actually." There was a definite unspoken "damn it" at the end of the sentence.
"Why, thank you."
The only light beyond Chandra's shoulder was a sliver of blinding sun slicing between the heavy folds of drawn curtains. The bedroom seemed to have been ransacked by hasty goblins. Or possibly a bear had taken up residence. The blankets on the four-post bed were pulled off and trailing across the lacquered hardwood, leaving behind only a shambling fortress-pile of overstuffed pillows in the center of the mattress.
The desk was covered with dried-out paint bottles in several lurid colors, and one oversized, half-eaten cookie. There were piles of wadded-up clothes in two different corners. In the gloom, Liliana couldn't tell which was the clean pile. Assuming either was. In a third corner lay the charred remnants of at least two easels.
"I trust the evening was worth it?" Liliana asked. A breeze kicked through the hall, carrying the scents of sun-baked bricks and frying food, the susurration of crowds and the tinkling of bands in the square below. A strand of wayward orange hair wavered in the summer wind and fell across Chandra's eye. Liliana reached out and tucked it behind the girl's ear, tsking. It was dry as straw, the ends split. To be expected, perhaps, given its tendency to burst into flame.
"Stop that," Chandra said, waving away her hands. "I wasn't doing anything last night. Just went to watch..." she hesitated, amber eyes squinting off into the gloom of her bedroom. "Uh, some minstrels. Yeah. A tavern in—on Tin Street. They had, like...fiddles."
Liliana had met many terrible liars over the centuries, but impressively few could rival Chandra. She folded her arms across her chest and allowed one corner of her mouth to tilt upwards. "You went to see the Izzet air races."
