Deck # 16: Chiaroscuro (EDH / Commander)

Father Kelly Moriarty is Dr. Kylie Moriarty's half-brother and supernatural partner/opposite. It was difficult enough for him to contend all his life with being gay and a devout Anglican, let alone a curate and then a priest. Things became utterly beyond his control when not only did Kylie reveal, and practice, that she and her brother were natural magicians, but that she went out and used the magick all the time. He sometimes accepted it as part of his own nature, and other times fought it and tried to give it up. It would never leave.

Except for a few serious arguments, Kelly and Kylie never turned on each other for more than a few short months, mainly because he had to learn that he did not control her life. While he is usually her first lieutenant and top assistant when it comes to solving most non-scientific/medical issues, he does have his own life, his own duties - and a crumbling faith due to the political structures of his beloved church.

In a family of scientists, Kelly was incapable of following the science, being more severely autistic than his sister is. Instead, he sought relief in great British literature. One day, he encountered the King James Bible in a library and fell in love, less with the theology than with the poetry of the book. And that became his life until the founding of the Bre-ayne people. He tried to straddle the line between Christian cleric and druid in his sister's shadow, but it didn't work. He had to make a choice. Now that he's seen the ugliness of what politicking does to church leadership, the choice he's made is to become the full druid he was always meant to be.

Now, the condition. It's been several days since Dr. Moriarty disappeared, after losing her temper and giving in to her dark side for a second time. Kelly does not know what happened to his sister, nor it seems does anyone else. He knows about the battles she's been rather dragged into, and as a gatekeeper, he knows quite well what his spiritual opposites, the planeswalkers, are. In the last year, he's spent quite some time keeping most of them out of Planet Earth. He feels responsible for Kylie doing all the fighting, because he's the one who should have been doing it. Watching a benevolent woman abandon her medical career to get into fights she doesn't even want only grieves him all the more. Yet with her missing, he can sense an increasing number of planeswalkers now looking to use Planet Earth as a homebase, perhaps for a new war. He wouldn't put it past what's left of America to do this. It wouldn't be the first time they betrayed the rest of the world just for power that blew up, literally, in their filthy faces.

He doesn't know anything about the cloning, or the secret lab, or anything that went on on her private island. All he knows is that she is missing. So he does to the island to find her. Most of her clones have gone dormant, kept in stasis waiting for her return. He begins to pray. It doesn't capture the attention of his Anglican deity, but it certainly captures the attention of a clone of Avacyn, Angel of Hope. She had been left as a protector of the lab.

Misunderstanding Kelly, Avacyn awakens and introduces him to Heliod, God of the Sun. Upon learning that Dr. Moriarty is missing, Heliod awakens a selected army of the clones and promises that he will lead Kelly on a quest to find her and bring her home - except that he will not be able to traverse the powers of darkness without a guide. Athreos wants no part of this, so Avacyn offers Liesa, Shroud of Dusk. Heliod crafts Liesa, tells her the situation, and directs a search for Kylie.

Kelly is left astonished and amazed that any of this was possible. No wonder his sister chose, first science, and then finding that not enough, magic. The quest is on to find her and bring her home. Liesa, knowing that she is alive only to allow Heliod to search in darkness, produces demons she knows and can control as assistant guides, then offers a contract Kelly doesn't sign, but Heliod does, despite Kelly and Avacyn's pleas.

Yet, in the back of his mind, Kelly senses something is wrong. He doesn't know exactly why yet, but he can sense deception at work. It is then what Pharika appears, but only to him. She gives him a clone of Felidar Sovereign and Healer of the Pride, married now and part of a permanent medical team under Dr. Moriarty. Then Pharika tells Kelly that if he wants to find the doctor, he'll find her by following them along the path of healing, not the path of darkness. But that he must traverse the darkness anyway, for if she can no longer balance the light and the darkness, he must do so in her stead.

Before Kelly can ask any questions, Pharika leaves and the quest begins.