Jace Beleren has the power to travel between planes of the Multiverse, but with this gift comes isolation. He is one in a million. He is a planeswalker. And he is on the edge of a mystery that could alter the face of his adopted home — a vast, world-wide city known as Ravnica — forever. Faced with a magical code that is built into the very foundations of the city-world itself, Jace marches into the numinous depths of Ravnica's underbelly in search of the promise of powerful magic. What he finds is perhaps more burden than boon. Once buried in past, the code resurfaces as Ravnica's power-hungry mage guilds, unbound by the Guildpact that had once maintained order, struggle for control of the plane. But in the drive for primacy, there is no neutral ground. Jace knows that he can't crack the code on his own, not while the guilds task teams of mages to unravel the mysteries, but he also knows that the danger of the quest is too great to...
Jace Beleren held a sheet of parchment up to the window. Huddled between much taller towers of Ravnica’s Tenth District, the building only reached a few floors up from street level, but a cold, evening light reflected off brick and stone through the glass. Smudged with ink and magically marked with his own unique mage seal, the parchment was covered in notes about the code he’d found. His handwriting had gotten progressively less sane–looking lately. The walls of the sanctum were papered with pages like this. Jace wondered when he had last washed his hair or had a full night’s sleep. He hoped the other researcher, a vedalken man named Kavin, hadn’t noticed that he had been staying at the sanctum building, sleeping only when unable to keep his eyes open any longer, not even walking outside to the marketplaces or street vendors in the surrounding district. His bed was a stacked pile of notes, his furniture was odd pieces of broken architecture collected from around the Tenth, and his main nourishment was the gnawed end of his ink pen.
The discovery—Jace’s current obsession—had come gradually. He hadn’t recognized it as a code when he saw it initially, and in fact had not even recognized any connection at all until he saw it manifest itself a few times around the district.
He had almost tripped over it, the first time. It was not out of the ordinary to see a group of Izzet guildmages unearthing a layer of cobblestone from the street. Their guild was tasked with the maintenance of much of the city’s magical infrastructure, and when he happened past them working along a road in the Tenth, Jace had all but ignored their work. But Jace saw that the Izzet mages had dismantled an ancient chunk of stone from the curb, and as they toiled away at a length of exposed steam pipes and elemental conduits, Jace noticed that the discarded piece of stone had a pattern carved into its underside. It had been worn from age and half-covered with cobwebs, but Jace could see a series of curved impressions running along its length, like a procession of geometrically perfect parentheses.
It struck Jace as curious that such care had been taken to carve a pattern on the underside of the stonework, the side that wouldn’t even be visible from the street. But he didn’t think of it again until the code returned in a new form.
An old and battered neighborhood of the Tenth was being excavated. Jace stopped and watched one day as a burly cyclops in crackling mizzium gauntlets demolished the remains of a textile factory. The cyclops lifted great slabs of stone and hurled them onto a rubble heap, presumably making room for some new Izzet experiment. Jace saw that the discarded stone was carved with a sequence of triangles.
Recognizing it as the code, Jace had kept the details from Kavin, his confidant and fellow scholar who had been of great help in tracking down other instances of the geometric patterns, taking rubbings, mapping the locations of their sightings, and occasionally covering for Jace as he snuck into guild-restricted territories to fetch more pieces of the code. But Kavin was a logical, practical man—not given to obsessive impulses. If Jace let on how much this code had seeped into every moment of his waking consciousness, Kavin would abandon the project.
Jace’s eyes stung. He squeezed them shut for a moment and rubbed his eyelids. They had plenty of samples, but no answers. The pieces didn’t fit. There were regularities and patterns within the sinuous shapes set in stone, but no sequence, no message. Something was missing.
There was a knock at the door downstairs.
In a forgotten chamber of the undercity, several hours’ journey below street level, an ancient brick wall began to glow. Blue lightning danced along the edges of the bricks. The old mortar smoked and sizzled. The wall exploded into the chamber, bricks tumbling into a heap, leaving a rough, oval-shaped hole.
The planeswalker Ral Zarek stepped through the hole he had just made. Dust curled in the sodden, rotting air as the instruments on his gauntlet twittered and spun, the remaining mana from his spell flickering out.
Ral winced and put a hand over his nose. He kicked a brick with his boot and snorted. “Ugh. Skreeg, tell me this isn’t the place.”
A goblin in Izzet armor hopped into the chamber, looking around with his hands clasped. The goblin rummaged through his pack and produced a newly-constructed Izzet mana-sensing device that he waved around the chamber.
“Yes!” replied Skreeg. “The concentrations are higher in here! This must be it.”
A group of Izzet mages followed Ral and Skreeg into the chamber, where they began scrutinizing their surroundings with analytical spells and alchemical devices, lighting the chamber as magical energies shone through the damp haze.
