(Author’s note: This story takes place in 4562 AR, near the end of the Mending Era and shortly before the events of the March of the Machines set.)
The mountaintop was empty save for a single goat, until it wasn’t.
The arriving ‘walker liked to enter new planes in mountainous regions. It meant that when he finally reached his destination, he’d have less planebound distance to walk.
He began the routine he had practiced now for… hundreds? thousands? of trips across the Blind Eternities.
First, he felt the leylines of the land and the life around him. He liked to use his memories of the woods of Casindral for this – it helped him reflect on better times, when he was loved as much as he loved in return.
No. Not home. The mana here is too vibrant, too undisturbed.
Not for the first time, though, he considered, would I even recognize the mana of home if I was there? A thousand years is a long time.
He felt the goat’s presence, but no mark of another’s life entwined with it. Wild. Good. I’m hungry.
Satisfied that he was alone except for the goat – planeswalking into a town or city required a different routine – he engaged other senses. Smell and hearing, this time. He could not afford to look around until he was sure his movement would not cause a disturbance.
Nothing, which at this stage of his life was a good sign. There was a time when he’d have been pleased with whatever welcome the locals had for him, but now, he felt old and tired, and having a bit of a rest after a ‘walk stopped him from making avoidable mistakes.
Now he reached out again, using the tangy metallic memory of the Quicksilver Sea to tempt the goat closer.
Just a little closer.
When the goat was close enough, the planeswalker didn’t need his memory. The land he stood on answered his call, roasting his dinner to perfection.
“Gotcha,” the planeswalker whispered, chuckling to himself as he remembered a friend even older than him, thinking that after he found his home, he should head to Regatha to see if she’d lost her patience with her subterfuge there.
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Roast goat was not one of the planeswalker’s favorite meals – it was too lean and lacked flavor. He had collected an excellent array of spices and sauces from Kamigawa to help with the flavor, but he’d need to find a fuller meal during his week on this plane.
His hunger sated, he cast a spell of preservation on the remains of his meal in case more food was hard to find – a lesson he’d learned the difficult way on visits to more barren planes.
Then he began the next part of his routine – find someone to help.
The planeswalker had learned earlier – much, much earlier – that people like him could be… messy while traveling. As one of the planeswalkers he’d mentally characterized, affectionately, as the “children” of his kind had described it, they often did not mind the size of their feet. He was amused by this metaphor, not having feet himself, but recognized the message. The planeswalkers he knew from his home had used their power to accelerate a plane’s knowledge, heal its sick, and risk ruining an entire people for their own petty revenge. When you had power, you had to choose how to use it, and he chose to use his – diminished as it may be as of late – to help others.
He did not have to search long. As he found a poorly worn path down the edge of the mountain, he heard a gasp, then the sound of someone – human-sized – running away from him.
A gasp meant the person didn’t expect his presence, but the lack of a scream meant it wasn’t foreign – or worse, like it had been on Theros, unwelcome.
He inspected what tracks existed – human, elf, or possibly even kor feet – and began to follow them, so that he could at least ask directions to where he might be of use. They led him to a small house, in mediocre repair, with a pen for farm stock and a garden sized for a single family’s use. There was evidence that the garden had once been larger, but like the house itself, the needs of maintenance seemed to exceed the ability of the occupant to keep it up.
This would do nicely.
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The planeswalker approached the house gently, knocking on the door as quietly as he could. A middle-aged human woman opened the door, her eyes widening when she saw him, but this seemed to be surprise more than fear.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have nothing to offer you; my yield was low last harvest.”
“Nonsense,” the planeswalker said gently, bringing forth the cooked meat from his sack. “I do not come with a caravan, and I bring an offer of exchange of my own. I am a traveling mage of sorts, and I just need somewhere to rest for the next few days. I can rest outside your home, and in exchange, I can provide assistance to you or to those around you, including an evening meal tonight.”
She smiled, introduced herself as Kina, and stepped out of the way for him to enter. He tried, but found he could not fit through the door frame.
They shared the roast goat with Kamigawan spice in her fallow field.
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Conversation during the meal went as it always did the first day on a new plane; his host asked many questions he answered mostly truthfully – after all, “a very distant land” and “a different plane” are similar answers to the question “where are you from” – and he got (hopefully) more direct and honest answers from his host about her home.
Kina’s people seemed to be in a state of peaceful transition. In her youth, this land had been part of a prosperous nation with rigorous systems of laws, until the men responsible for serving the nation’s people decided that the nation should serve them instead. There had been a brief but extremely bloody war, and at the end of it, the survivors on this mountain had lost their stomach for nations and laws, preferring instead to make their own way from the land. There was little conflict over the land or its resources, for the land could support far more people than the war had left behind, and so the people focused their efforts on their work and only worried for their own safety from accidental injury and wildlife. The planeswalker knew how this story would one day end – a person or system would claim the right to be the nation’s descendent, and they would either come to retake the mountain, or decide that an agrarian community that did not so much reject its order as ignore it was not worth the effort to take.
But those were problems for another day, and Kina and her community had problems to take care of today. From what the planeswalker could tell, they were not the kinds of problems he was used to solving – problems created by people like him who viewed the planebound as things instead of people – but normal problems of daily living. Crops needed planted, goods needed transport, buildings needed repaired.
Good. He had accepted the responsibility of cleaning the messes his kind created on his travels, but he had come in his older age to like mundane work. It let him connect with the lands he visited and their people.
Besides, he was naturally inclined to be good at it.
The arrangement was made. He would stay at Kina’s farm for seven days. During that span, he would divide his time in service to the community – half helping Kina specifically, half helping others in the community. They had agreed that the next day, he would go into town with Kina and offer to do repairs on the building that had once served as a court, but now served as a community gathering space for weddings and other events too large for a single home to accommodate.
For the evening, the planeswalker could accept the luxury of rest.
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As the planeswalker prepared to sleep, he thought about his travels. Banished to a plane from which it would take a millennium to return. At the time, he thought such a banishment was a matter of distance, but ironically it turned out to be a matter of orientation – being able to find home more than being able to reach home. At this age, too, the specificity of the word millennium began to take on extra meaning. Was that an approximation, give or take fifty years? Would he return home any day now? Does the slowing of his journey since he grew weaker a few decades ago add years to the millennium?
He thought about another one of the “children” he encountered in his travels, a young woman similarly cursed to wander the planes. She was so sure that her travels would take her home, and he lacked the heart to tell her how long his wandering had been.
He thought of a plane he had visited ten years past, where he helped a blacksmith’s daughters run their forge. They had seen him for what he was and welcomed his aid, for their own father, another “child” of the planes, was like him and had not come home when expected when traveling through the Blind Eternities.
He thought of many others, people like him who had become lost in the vastness of the Multiverse, unable to find their way back to the people and places they loved.
Those he had long ago begun to think of as The Homeless.
But then he thought of a friend he had lost long ago, who had created her own home, lost it to corruption, and then found a new home in an unfamiliar land and among unfamiliar people.
Homelessness could last a long time, but forever is even longer for a planeswalker.
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The trip into town was uneventful – the road was safe despite its disrepair, and Kina was more than happy to share her memories of her travels on the road with her visitor.
The trip became more eventful, at least to the planeswalker, when they arrived at the meeting hall.
No.
“What is it?” Kina asked.
“What do you know about the statue of the winged lion on this building’s roof?”
“That’s the patron of the old empire, Ozur. Legends say that he blessed the original emperors to rule over the land, and every ruler we’ve had as far back as we know – until the War – claimed to take their authority and laws directly from him.” Kina gave the planeswalker a concerned look. “Do you know him from your travels?”
The planeswalker frowned. “I know of him, but we never met.” It’s that blasted sphinx. Again. Some planeswalkers – like the sphinx – made bigger messes than others, messes he could not hope to clean up in years of trying. They were why he behaved the way he did on his travels. Clean up as he could after others – planeswalkers if they’d been here, the local planebound otherwise. Help the plane’s natives in the way they want while he visited. Short stays – no more than a couple days, now closer to a week as he ages and gets less sure of himself. Nothing that makes anyone revere or worship you – just be a mysterious creature who roams the planes, fixing little things in little ways. Make impressions that are important to single people, but not to nations.
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The planeswalker could not repair what Azor had destroyed – he was far too late for that – but mending the meeting hall was well within his ability. It was a solid day’s work, and while he did so, he attracted a crowd. Some came to marvel at the strange outsider, who could cook a live goat with a thought but used hands and tools to fix a building. Others, possibly embarrassed that a visitor was doing the work of repairing their community, offered him their assistance. Using the strength of both his large physique and the combination of many human hands, they were able to finish the needed repairs hours ahead of when he had planned.
A farmer more prosperous than Kina – one who had a whole family to help instead of just his own hands – provided a feast for the planeswalker and his newly met friends to celebrate their accomplishment.
But two did not partake in the same revelry as the others.
Kina met the planeswalker outside the community hall, where he ate with comfort, but without joy. “We had a good day, but something bothers you. This reminds you of home.”
He sighed. “I do not even know if this reminds me of home, or the vision of home that I have created. I told you that I had traveled for a long time. Usually when I say that, people guess months or years.” Kina nodded. He went on. “It has been longer than that – centuries.”
Kina’s eyes widened. “How? I don’t know how long your people usually live, but centuries is… more than I could imagine. What do you do with centuries?”
He smiled, sadly. “Mostly, look for home, but also helping those I meet during my search. If I cannot have what I want from my life, the next best thing I can do is to spend the time I have making others happier in theirs.”
Kina put her hand on his shoulder. “Must you wander? We have plenty of land here, and the people would be grateful for your help. This can become your home.”
The planeswalker frowned and shook his head. “I tried that, once. The trouble with trying to make a place that is not yours into a home is that the more you try, the less it becomes the home of the people who are already there.
“I have been here for a day. In that time, I have roasted a goat and fixed a building, and people are grateful. By the end of the week, I will do more – I might till fields, heal the sick, laugh with children, mourn with widows, or build a road. And through it, this land will remain your home, but only because I am a visitor.”
The planeswalker sighed. “People like me loom large and fill the spaces we are in. It is easy to see that with me because I am physically large. But the way my kind fill spaces uses a different kind of largeness. Were I to stay here, in a world that is not my own, I would each day make it less like your home and more like mine, not out of intention, but out of an instinct to want the familiar. It is in our nature to bend the space around us to our will, and it has taken the practice of nearly a thousand years to be comfortable remaining a visitor to the lands I travel.”
“Wait,” Kina interrupted. “Did you say a world that is not your own?”
“I did.” The planeswalker pointed to the statue atop the meeting hall. “You asked if I knew the sphinx, and I said I knew of him. He and I are of the same kind – people who have the ability to safely travel between worlds. There are few like us, although some days I think too many. Each seems to have an agenda. The sphinx” – the planeswalker said this word with great derision – “thought himself a savior because he knew how to make people follow rules, and did this on many worlds, including this one. There is another, a dragon, whose horns deface entire worlds that he destroyed with failed contingencies and plots to seize and maintain his own power. Yet another, and artificer obsessed with war machines, whose ruined devices litter countless worlds and inspire countless archaeologists to become their planes’ own little warmongers. Worst, I think, was the one who treated people and their minds as an artist would a canvas, creating horrifying visions atop the ruins of their victims’ psyches.”
“Surely,” Kina offered, “not all your kind are like this?”
“In a way, they are,” the planeswalker replied. “Even when intentions are the best, we have a difficult time thinking of people living on a single plane as people – with their own agency, lives, and ambitions. I remind myself of that by spending only a small amount of time in each place, relearning how each plane’s people fit into their world wherever I visit.”
“Have you tried to show them your ways?”
“I have, but we are arrogant, and it is hard to change when those around you lack the power to tell you no.” The planeswalker became wistful. “My people – the people I belonged to before I became a traveler – had shamans who were able to purify the soul, show people the harm they had done, and offer them a means to repent. Sadly, it was a skill I never learned.”
The planeswalker sighed again. “In some ways, what we do is not very different that what your community does. You take the land you are on, domesticate its animals, control what plants grow, and move the earth to build structures. But you remake the land in your own image for sustenance and comfort, you do not do it with disregard for what you remake.”
Kina opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted by a loud cracking sound in the sky.
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The sound outside was loud enough that the revelers in the community hall emerged to investigate the commotion, which meant the entire town watched as an enormous tree branch emerged from a newly torn hole in the sky and planted itself in the ground a dozen miles away.
From that distance, those in the town could hear the metallic keening coming from the tree, although they could not make out any words, if the keening was even a language in the first place.
Kina looked at the planeswalker. “Is this one of your kind? Do you know what is happening?”
The planeswalker listened, sniffed the air, and turned as pale as his complexion would allow. “I do not think this is one of my kind, and I pray that I am wrong about what is happening.”
He looked at the assembled townspeople. “My new friends, I am deeply sorry. I know that you tire of war, but it seems that war has not yet tired of you.”
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The planeswalker didn’t understand, but smell was the one sense that never failed him, and the scent of oil on the wind was unmistakable. Phyrexians? He had been nowhere, nowhere, that had seen Phyrexians in over three hundred years, and now it was rare that a plane had even heard of them. But now they were pouring out of the sky like bees from a hive disturbed by a misplaced hoof.
The planeswalker thought about leaving early. It would be a strain, but for all he knew, the next ‘walk would take him home, and he could defend his people – the minotaurs, not the planeswalkers – and their mountains.
But he paused.
No ‘walk for the past nine hundred eighty years had taken him home, and even if it did, would he be useful? He had been gone so long that he no longer knew his home’s people, politics, or resources.
Besides, his home had other defenders they could call on. Feroz and Serra. Kristina, if she had stayed after his banishment instead of going home to Dominaria. He was even sure that Taysir and Ravidel would rather stand with Ulgrotha than see it fall to Phyrexia.
This place, however, had only him. And even though he tried to leave small hoofprints, this was a fight that required a stampede.
Sandruu had been without a home for almost longer than he could remember, but as he stood and roared a challenge to the invading hordes, he knew he could defend a home that could never be his.