Liliana - Was a pre-mending 'walker

As Josu struggled against the press of undead flesh, something pulled at her from behind. Whirling around, she saw the ruins of her father's house change. The walls twisted and split, forming dark tree trunks under a shroud of black leaves. Clouds of dust became billowing fog, and the rubble-strewn floor turned into swampy ground strewn with dead leaves and gnarled roots. Her feet didn't move, but she felt that she was being drawn through unspeakable eternities, plucked from the world she knew and thrust into a whole other world.

Then her home was gone, Josu was gone, the zombies, everything she knew was gone, and she sank to her knees on the swampy ground.

***

"I can help you, Liliana Vess," Bolas said. "But immortality is beyond the reach of us all, now."

"Says the thirty-thousand-year-old dragon." Liliana turned her back on him again, staring down at her hands. Creased and spotted with age, her skin hung loose on her bones. She stood as straight as she could manage, unwilling to display her body's frailty in front of the mighty dragon. But it was not just her body—her soul was a withered bloom, bereft of hope.

"How we have fallen," he said. "Once, we were gods, working our private havoc through planes known and unknown."

His words stung. They were Planeswalkers, not gods, but in those first years there had not been much difference. The spark that had ignited in her heart had unlocked greater power than she could ever have imagined, making her immortal and virtually omnipotent, putting the endless ranks of the dead firmly under her command. She had walked the numberless planes of the Multiverse for decades, exerting her will, her whims, on worlds that were powerless to resist her. Only one thing, in those days, had seemed beyond the reach of her magic: undoing what she had done to Josu.

Then the Multiverse reshaped itself, robbing her—and every other Planeswalker—of the godlike power they once had wielded. Some called it the Mending, as if something broken had been repaired, but to Liliana, it seemed the opposite. It broke her beyond any hope of repair. She had spent decades working to regain even a fraction of the magical might she had lost, and it was not enough—not enough to keep death at bay.

***

LILIANA'S ORIGIN: THE FOURTH PACT