There was a sound like shattering porcelain and a splatter of meaty goo, and the Eldrazi dropped. The Eldrazi swiveled its bony face to look-or the eyeless equivalent-just as a heavy club came down on its blank white head. "Down, foul thing!" came a voice from his left. There was a thwack, and a flash of bright blue light. He was out of time, and exhausted from the climb, and all he could do was try to wedge himself between two of the sharp rocks and hope he could get a few good kicks in. With more time, he might have been able to confuse the creature long enough to get away-to try out tactile or auditory illusions that might misdirect it. With more time, Jace could have conjured up a more solid illusion. The Eldrazi tore through his illusion like it was paper and kept coming. Even his illusions seemed to falter against these otherworldly adversaries. Invisibility was useless against monsters without eyes. Sleep magic did nothing against things that didn't sleep. ![]() The Eldrazi's mind was as blank as its face, and none of his usual tricks seemed to work on them. Jace pushed himself to his feet, summoning an illusionary guardian. The Eldrazi was looking at him, its eyeless face swiveling to follow his movement. He rolled sideways and got to his hands and knees out of easy reach of the thing. He stumbled backwards but caught himself, one boot dangling out over the abyss. It was small, as Eldrazi went-perhaps as big as he was-and its blank, bone-white face was just a few feet from his. At last, hands aching, he hauled himself over the lip of the cliff. Inch by inch, handhold by handhold, Jace pulled himself up the rock face. The landscape had been rearranged when the three Eldrazi progenitors physically emerged from the mountain range known as the Teeth of Akoum, and neither Jace's prior experience nor Jori's knowledge could guide him. The Tuktuk tribe of goblins lived somewhere in this area, or had before the Eldrazi rose. Looming Spires | Art by Florian de GesincourtĪt the top of this cliff, if the mental map he'd pulled out of Jori En's mind was accurate, was what passed for even ground in Akoum, a vast expanse of jagged volcanic rocks and treacherous canyons. And anyway, a certain amount of wariness seemed rational, given that a fall from this height would certainly kill him, splattering him against the . . . But he knew how high up the cliff face he was, and looking added no useful information. ![]() He wasn't afraid of heights, not more than the average person. Jace Beleren wedged his boot against a jagged rock, pushed, and stretched, barely wrapping his aching fingers around the next handhold. Now, he must return to the Eye and unravel the puzzle of Zendikar's hedrons. Jace had been there once before, when he inadvertently helped release the Eldrazi. With all the scholarship on the subject destroyed in the fall of Sea Gate, Jace was forced to undertake a dangerous journey to the Eye of Ugin, the center of the hedron network. His immediate goal in coming to Zendikar was to solve a puzzle: the question of how the plane's floating stone hedrons had contained the Eldrazi, and how they might be used to capture-or kill-the titan Ulamog, who remains on Zendikar.
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