Greg Weisman - War of the Spark: Forsaken

Numb.

She felt numb.

Maybe that was necessary right now, as she helped Arlinn Kord carry off the desiccated corpse of a man she barely knew, a Planeswalker named Dack Fayden, whod sacrificed his Spark and his life to save Ravnicato save the very Multiversefrom the dragon Nicol Bolas.

Now Bolas was dead, too. Like Fayden, he had ultimately lost his Spark to the Eternals he himself had created, and Kaya and all of Ravnica had watched him dissolve, disintegrate into ashes that blew away on the wind.

It had been a stupendous victoryand a costly one. Kaya was certain she should feel it more, both the exaltation of triumph and the pain of the losses that earned it.

Insteadas she and Arlinn lowered Dacks body onto an empty wooden board between the cadavers of Domri Rade and a viashino named Jahdeerawhat passed for her emotions seemed, what

Shrouded? Is that it?

Or was the metaphor simply suggested by the thin white sheet of spidery silk that the Golgari priestess, Matka Izoni, was rapidly weaving over all three corpses?

Kaya barely knew any of them. Rade had been an idiot and a turncoat. Jahdeera had followed him blindly. But Dack had been an actual hero, part of the team that shut down the Planar Bridge, stopping the flow of Eternals pouring into Ravnica from Amonkhet. From there he could have planeswalked anywhere. Instead, he chose to return and fight the good fight. To fightand then to die for having made that choice.

If I cant feel anything for himthen who exactly is wearing that silken shroud?

Kord turned around to fetch another corpse, but Kaya decided shed had enough of that grim work.

All around her, a joyous victory celebration had eruptedpunctuated by mourners crying over their very personal losses. Each extreme created contrast for the other. The elven girl climbing over the wreckage of Bolas fallen statue, and the human boy swinging from the branch of the fallen world-tree Vitu-Ghazi, seemed all the more carefree when set against the goblin mother and child desperately mourning over what remained of their husband and father, whose lower half had been crushed beneath the foot of the God-Eternal Bontu.