Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  Once her role was done…The thought echoed through Multani’s mind, bringing both comfort and sadness. His eyes, magnigoth knotholes within a face of shaggy bark, gazed out at Urborg. Bodies littered the tormented ground. Soot reached its tentacles to the sky. Air keened with ceaseless demon shrieks. It was an inauspicious moment for the great warship to come into being, and yet Weatherlight had been shaped toward this final hour, this darkest hour. Only the greatest calamity could call into being so great a miracle. Weatherlight would be used up in saving this world. There would no longer be ships like her, perhaps, but neither would there be need of them.

  That was the other sadness. Multani—who had shaped her from the Weatherseed, had healed her and rebuilt her—no longer was needed. Weatherlight was complete without him.

  She did not need him, but Yavimaya did. It was time he quit the great ship and returned home.

  In the midst of that dumbstruck host, Multani shifted to face Sisay.

  She looked up at the towering figure in wood, his bark-rough hands extended toward her. Without pause, she slid her own hands into his grip. Despite their strength, despite years of work with bristling lines, her hands were still smooth.

  Multani closed his fingers over hers. “Congratulations, Captain. She is a magnificent vessel.”

  Sisay’s eyes grew just slightly wider. Her dark irises glimmered. “I sense departure in your tone, Multani.”

  He nodded in affirmation and apology. “I am needed here no longer. I am needed again in my homeland.”

  There was no futile argument, no muttered regret—not with Sisay. “If your homeland misses you half as much as we will, yes, you must return. You have been more than a ship’s carpenter. Much more.” The words “mentor” and “friend” hovered in what she said. “I wish only that you could remain long enough to greet your former pupil, Gerrard, when we rescue him.”

  Again, the all-expressive nod. “You will rescue him. I can sense it. And when you do, give him my farewell.”

  She squeezed his fibrous hands. “I will.”

  A hand clapped him on the shoulder, a solid hand of living metal. Multani half-turned to see Karn standing before him. Eyes like fat washers met eyes like knotholes.

  “You are leaving.” It was a statement, not a question. “I will be missing the better part of myself.”

  A smile of genuine friendship filled the grains of Multani’s face. “You are missing less and less these days, Karn. You are transforming in tandem with Weatherlight. Already you have the bulk of ten men, and now you are gaining the soul of them too. The better part of yourself is still to come.” Multani rapped his fingers lightly on that massive metal frame, sending a chime tone through the silver golem.

  Behind Karn hovered Tahngarth and Orim, comrades in war. Multani’s gaze rested in silent farewell on each of them, and then beyond them, on the ghostly memories of Gerrard and Squee. Perhaps they were dead already. Perhaps all of them would die in the desperate days ahead. This good-bye would be a final thing.

  Multani gave a last nod to his friends and strode through their midst. They watched him go, their eyes darkened by his passing shadow.

  How strange that this man who lived in and for woodlands had grown so attached to this motley band of skyfarers. Multani quickened his steps on the mountainside. He ran down the slope. He pelted faster than any man could and faster still as a tumbleweed. Spreading his arms above him and tucking his legs below, he let himself roll. Multani bounded down shelves of obsidian and off twisted muscles of lava.

  In moments, he reached the forest at the base of the mountain and crashed among trees. The blows of trunks against his shoulders and back, the scratches of thorns along his arms and legs, the groping of vines across his every part would have destroyed a lesser creature. To Multani, this was the rough embrace of home. His spirit fled the magnigoth frame and plunged into prickly cypress and twining tendrils. He coursed through channels of sap, down into root tangles, across synapses charged with mud, and up adjacent boles. He shot skyward through the columns and blossomed out through the spreading branches. In moments, leaping needle to needle and leaf to leaf, he permeated the forest. Oh, to stretch, to breathe through endless stomata, to lift a hundred million seeking hands sunward….How he had missed this vital place!

  Like a dog amid clover, he rolled among the trees and remembered why he lived and what he loved. He peered out the wide-flung canopy of leaves at a sky crisscrossed with dragon engines and warships, with true dragons and angel warriors. A troubled place. A terrible, troubled place.

  Something massive blotted out the sun. It seemed a giant mountain had slid between Multani’s forest and the life-giving orb. Its shadow was cool and aching, and Multani saw its unmistakable outline.

  There, titan tall at three thousand feet, the magnigoth treefolk lord Nemata dwarfed these shagbark hickories. He had not risen here to threaten the stunted forest, but rather to rescue it. Like a man struggling to drive off a swarm of bats, the treefolk lord swatted boughs through a swarm of dragon engines.

  In seeing that grand figure, Multani remembered his true home, the body of his soul. Oh, to leave this doomed land for that safe one! Yavimaya had won her war. She was pure and powerful. Urborg would never be so. Even if the Phyrexians were driven out, the place would still belong to the dead and the undead. To fight such hopeless battles sapped the soul, and Yavimaya called to him.

  He tumbled toward shore, gathering the strength of the woods as he went. It would be a long leap to Yavimaya, on the other side of the world. The magnigoth treefolk had trudged for months across the ocean floor, churning the waters in their massive haste. Spirit was faster still.

  From the last shoots overhanging the last saltwater swamp of Urborg, Multani leaped. He traveled a gossamer highway of pollen. It stretched in a winding ribbon across the chanting ocean. Multani tripped across the spores, faster than wind. With each running step, his spirit crossed thousands of miles. The poisoned air of Urborg dragged away, replaced by the bracing air of the sea. And Yavimaya’s air was the freshest on the planet, so pure, so wet, so full of life.

  Another bound, and his spirit reached land—a land full of death. The Phyrexians had done their work here. Forests were chewed to pulp. Animals were slaughtered. Phyrexians loped, as gaunt and humorless as coyotes. Not a house stood whole. Not a person lived. And in the midst of the desolation—felled trees and felled bodies and feasting foes—Phyrexian troops bowed in adoring prayer. They did not go prostrate to the sun or an idol or a priest. They bowed toward Urborg, toward the man achieving the domination of the planet: Crovax.

  Suspended on pollen trails—there was not an unblemished blade of grass here—Multani sped across the blighted place and wondered: What is this hellish land, where good is gone and evil rules? At last he saw, and knew. There lay the fallen spires, the shattered walls, the gutted great houses, the slaughtered millions of Benalia City.

  Benalia City. This was once fair Benalia, ruled by the seven houses, the homeland of Gerrard Capashen. It had died fighting Phyrexians.

  Stunned, Multani drifted from the blasted place.

  At last, he reached the ancient forest of Llanowar. Ah, here would be relief. Multani had fought in the Battle of Llanowar, had closed the plague portals that destroyed her and infused the very forest with immunity. He and his allies had healed hundreds of thousands of elves and had begun to rebuild the ruined elfhames. Here, Multani would find succor.

  Except that beneath the treetops scuttled lines of black beasts. Like army ants they marched. Phyrexians. The forest might have been immune to the plague, but it was not immune to monstrous armies. They deployed from Benalia and invaded. While the ground roiled with the vicious invaders, the trees bristled with elf warriors. Shafts pelted down in a green hail on the monsters. One in five arrows cracked past carapace to find flesh. One in twenty actually scored a kill. For every one Phyrexian downed, nineteen more marched deeper into the wood.

  Multani almost dropped down the
n and there, cascading through the wood to rally it against its foes. He was sick to death of war, though, and what if such monsters trooped through Yavimaya? He could not fight every battle, and the Battle of Yavimaya was one he must fight.

  Racing through the treetops, Multani reached the farthest arm of troubled Llanowar. He plunged from trees to grasses. Simple grasses. They held none of the ancient complexity of a primeval forest, but they were vitally alive. To flow through them as he did was invigorating. They would give him the strength to leap across the ocean to Yavimaya.

  He did. Grass gave way to sand, and it in turn to blue deeps. Over it all, he flew in tumbling streams of pollen.

  At least the seas were safe. Phyrexians feared water, especially saltwater, because of its power to rust and corrode. Their plagues could not reach beneath the waves. Their soldiers could not conquer ocean canyons. Life beneath the great seas had been saved from the Phyrexian advance. Though spirits of forest and sea had long been foes of one another, Multani would not begrudge them their salvation.

  There, beneath the waves, a school of dolphins rose. Sunlight glinted across their gray flesh. They reached the surface and leaped. Only then did Multani see that they were not dolphins but merfolk, and that they were not living, but undead. Their backs bristled with infected metal spines—much like the spinal centipedes the Phyrexians had used on terrestrial species. Even beneath the waves, the monsters ruled.

  There, a black rill on the ocean—Yavimaya beckoned. If the Phyrexians had conquered Benalia and swarmed through Llanowar and even teemed beneath the sea, what hope remained for Yavimaya?

  Multani’s heart ached as he vaulted across the miles. He arrived headlong, ready for the worst. His soul slammed into the root clusters that reached into the churning sea. He plunged through them to the first of the great magnigoths on the edge of the island forest. Up to the treetops three thousand feet high, and there from leaf to leaf went Multani. He spread himself out through the forest, fearful of what he would find. His soul did not grow thinner as he went, but thicker, more powerfully infused with the land that was his home.

  In a hundred trees, in a thousand trees, in a hundred thousand…There were no plague spores here, no voracious troops, no gnawing machines. Only verdant life shimmered in everything. Ancient trees sank roots into watery caves and reached branches into gleaming skies. Among those boughs lounged great apes in gardens of fruit, and elves in aerial vineyards. Woodmen—onetime Phyrexians converted into defenders of the forest—crouched, watchful, in every crotch. Kavu meanwhile patrolled the endless trunks. Magnigoth treefolk stood at the ready, and in their root bulbs, druids chanted dark incantations.

  Multani fell into those placid trees like a man into a hammock. He felt the tensions of the last days of Urborg drip away from him. Dread and despair were gone. Ease and joy had returned. This was why he lived. This was what he lived for. Let the world go to the Nine Spheres; paradise remained in Yavimaya.

  Even as he hung there, engulfed in bliss, he knew the falseness of it. How could the denizens of this great forest rest while, half a world away, every creature fought for life? Worse, if those lives were not enough in the balance, paradise would remain nowhere on Dominaria. How long before the ships would return, before the merfolk zombies would arise? How long before the Phyrexians would sweep away apes and elves, Kavu and druids, and turn the woodmen back into monsters? It was the peculiar vice of forests to turn inward and give not a damn about what happened outside. Even as he lay there, ensconced in his homeland, Multani knew that to indulge such an impulse now would mean utter annihilation.

  He also knew what he must do. It would be his last great act in the war against Phyrexia. To expend such energy would leave his spirit dissipated for years, or decades, or centuries. He would use himself up in defense of his world. If he did this right, the world would no longer need miracles such as Multani.

  Until that moment, it all had been complicated. The bargaining between life and death is messy, but once a deal is struck, everything is simple. Yavimaya did not need him. Dominaria did. Gaea needed him. It was a small sacrifice to make to assure victory.

  Multani descended through the trunks of the trees. Heat and light receded. He reached to the root bulbs and beyond to the tangle of tendrils deep below. There, amid druidic inscriptions, Multani made his simple pact.

  Gaea, I call you. Heed my voice. I come not to petition your favor, but to grant my service. There came no response. There never did. Yet this time Multani knew beyond doubt that he was heard. You have countless defenders here in Yavimaya. They have won the peace the land now enjoys. But other lands languish. They need the giant spiders and elf warriors, the woodmen and Kavu, the saprolings and treefolk. They need them now.

  I will be their conduit. I know both lands and will connect them. I will bear through my being these defenders, that they might fight in Urborg. It is a task well beyond my power alone, but not if you will grant your aid.

  A final pause, for Multani at last sensed the magnitude of what was about to occur. I do not know what price I will pay, only that it will be a full and sufficient price. And so, before you grant my prayer, let me say simply, good-bye.

  The spell began. Gaea was impatient. Multani did not have to move from where he resided, there in the deeps of Yavimaya. He no longer needed to go to the forest, but it needed to come to him. And it did. Within a five-mile radius, every tree, every fey, every dryad and druid and denizen drew downward into the waiting soul of the nature spirit. As the forest had infused him before, it infused him again. One by one, like pages folded into a book, countless trees slid into Multani.

  While that corner of Yavimaya found its place in his mind, Multani found his place in a different forest. Cypress and palm, shot through with fetid water—he gathered to himself memories of that forest. The reality of the one overlaid the recollection of the other. Multani was the conduit. He spent himself to bridge half a world.

  * * *

  —

  Sisay clung to the helm of Weatherlight as the ship slowly lifted from the rugged ground. The volcano fell away. Chunks of broken rock pattered from the hull. Engines hummed with quiet fury.

  “I only hope we won’t need Multani,” Sisay said to herself, though the tubes carried her thought to the rest of the crew.

  “Of course we will need him,” Tahngarth replied sullenly.

  Karn responded, “No. We need neither Multani nor Karn now. Weatherlight is all.”

  “If she’s all, Karn, how about if we see what she can do?” Sisay asked through the speaking tube. “Full speed aloft!”

  In the instant before the engines kicked in, Sisay saw something strange—a whole forest of stunted growth had suddenly been replaced by a perfect circle of magnificent trees. Elves and apes, saprolings and giant spiders—all of them descended to battle. From among the lofty boughs strode treefolk, eager to fight.

  “That’s where Multani has gone,” Sisay said with a glad whoop. “He still fights beside us.” The sound was torn away as Weatherlight outran it, vaulting skyward.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Music of the Spheres

  Nothing was better than music, nothing. True, the world was full of wonderful things—torture and domination, revenge and persecution, cruelty and absolution—but music was the best. In his agonophone, Crovax had music and all the rest rolled into one.

  The great composer sat, ramrod straight, atop a cushioned bench. His head was bent in stern consternation toward a three-register console. His fingers caressed keys that themselves had once been fingers.

  It had taken a master craftsman months to harvest enough bones. Minotaur phalanges were the best, but the carpals of other species could suffice. Carefully dried, shaped, and polished, the bones were set into three keyboards. Next, the craftsman fashioned the mechanisms beneath each key, using humeruses and tibias for the larger pieces, and the fragile hammer, anvil, and stirrup for the workings. He perfectly adjusted the whole set, creating a masterpiece.<
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  Crovax had been so pleased, he immortalized the craftsman by upholstering the bench with his skin. Yes, he had been murdered, as had all who drew the eye of Crovax. It did not matter whether the evincar gazed upon his target with too much love or too much hate. The result was the same. In fact, the craftsman had gotten off easily. He hadn’t been executed by the agonophone.

  Crovax lifted his hands, spread talons, and brought them down in a chord of agony. He leaned back, drinking in the shrieking sound. Spittle-charged air blasted out at him.

  For each of the two hundred seventy-four keys on the agonophone, a victim lay in the ranks. These were the organ’s pipes. All the way up the wall, the victims lay, rank on rank. They were fastened in place at an angle that allowed the instrument’s flowstone needles to work. Whenever Crovax depressed a key—as he did now in tangled arpeggios that swept from the lowest tones to the highest—a mechanism activated a flowstone needle. It pierced the body of a given victim and spread within, doing things that assured the proper pitch, duration, and intensity. Often, for endless hours, Crovax tuned the machine. Often he had to audition new talent for the ranks. He had really wanted Squee to be his high C, but the goblin was tone-deaf, and too busy being chronically killed by Ertai to do the job. Crovax allowed Ertai his pleasures. The evincar had his own.