Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  Again, Crovax’s hands descended. Again, the jarring harmonies ripped outward. He had always loved music, from field melodies of plantation slaves to the excruciating rebbec his father played. Music was pure emotion. For the slaves, it had been misery. For Crovax’s father, it had been much the same. Crovax had reversed the equation. Now, pure emotion was music.

  He was feeling playful today, and the roving bass line told it. A succession of bellows and groans vamped across the lower keyboard while he positioned his right hand above. Claws clicked on bone. A shrieking melody began. His fingers ambled like a spider’s legs across the keyboard. The ranks replied with wails in augmented fourths and diminished seconds. The counterpoint of pain solidified into homophonic chords. Four voices, six voices, eight and ten—he outlined a thirteenth chord that shook the very rafters of the Stronghold. Ah, sweet discord!

  And yet, lurking behind that sound of ultimate dissonance, there was a profound harmony. Puzzled, Crovax stared up at the faces above him, mouths screaming. He stood up, his claws depressing the keys. He peered down the throats of the victims. One by one, he listened to them, and drew his finger away, eliminating the sound. Tones ceased in anguish up the chord. Finally, he withdrew the final note, and it echoed away.

  Still, the new harmony droned on, like a pedal tone. Crovax looked down. His feet were clear of the fibulas. He lifted his eyes to the black vault and stared at it. He sniffed. This sickening concord of sound did not come from within the Stronghold or the volcano. It came from beyond. And it was no true sound. It was a different sort of harmony—a natural music.

  Stepping away from his agonophone, Crovax strode out into the room. Behind him, the instrument settled in panting pain, like bagpipes deflating. Crovax paid it no heed. Instead he turned, seeking the pull of the music. There, north-by-northeast and some forty miles distant. The noise came from there.

  Crovax was no planeswalker—even Yawgmoth could not truthfully make that claim—but he knew magics that could even the odds. Lifting wicked claws, he drew his hand down his body. Tendrils of power bled from his fingers and enwrapped him. The energies coalesced into a beaming sac. It shrank to a shining star and rose, hissing through a crack in the ceiling. In moments, it emerged atop the Stronghold and coiled up through the volcano’s stack. The comet streaked from the caldera and stretched down the mountain in a long ribbon. It covered miles in seconds and suddenly was there.

  Though he had arrived with eager speed, Crovax lowered slowly, in shock. The bright ball widened and settled on the ground. Threads of power unwound. The spell frayed, and Crovax stood in an unreal place.

  Here, where there should have been deadwood swamps, was an overgrown jungle.

  Crovax stood on a root bulb that bristled with spikes. It butted against the roots of all the other trees around, completely blocking out the swamp. From those bulbs rose fat trees in dense brakes. Each tree was a world unto itself. On their trunks clung giant oozy things, seeming slugs made of sap. Higher still, in lofty crotches, lurked enormous lizards—the Kavu his folk had reported. They turned over in the sun and stared down at the single figure below them. Highest of all, three thousand feet above where he now stood, elves and apes bounded through the foliage like lice through matted hair.

  Who had done this? Who had the power to transform black swamps into green forests, and here—on Crovax’s own island! Urza was just now fighting for his life in Phyrexia, and Gerrard too. Freyalise and Windgrace and their pitiful band were pinned down in Phyrexia as well. Who could have marshaled such strength?

  Crovax’s eyes narrowed. He listened to the green harmony of flora and fauna, of prey and predator, and he knew: Gaea.

  Her minions—woodmen and Kavu, elves and apes and every other defender of the forest—descended to attack Crovax. The trees ran with lines of termites, except that these termites were huge and fleet. Elephantine Kavu bared horrid teeth and rushed down toward Crovax.

  He could have fled. The spell that had brought him was ready and waiting. But he was Crovax, and Crovax did not flee. This was Crovax’s land. He would defend it with the aid of his endless minions.

  Stomping upon the ground, Crovax called forth power. He flung his arms out to either side, claws opening like ghastly umbrellas. From fingertips, ebon power jutted and cackled. It lashed roots and reached beyond them, to the very soil—the remains of dead things. Where his black lightning struck, rotten flesh and buried bones rose. In moments, before the invaders could swarm him, they were swarmed by humus warriors.

  It was not enough for Crovax. He flung his claws out farther. Scintillating energies dashed up the mountainsides and into the woodlands. They struck Phyrexian bloodstocks, shock troops, scuta, and a menagerie of other horrors. Where the energies struck, they yanked beasts to Crovax’s side. It was summoning magic in its most direct and brutal form, and it provided Crovax a sudden army.

  Kavu launched themselves down the trees. They came to ground with teeth foremost. One crashed atop a shock trooper and chewed through. Another smashed its sagittal crest against the back of a scuta, cracking the shell and making its guts splatter. Where teeth did not come to bear, claws did. Massive fists tore apart bloodstocks. Lashing tails took out whole platoons of the dead.

  More clever Phyrexians—Crovax among them—simply sidestepped the Kavu. As a beast struck the ground near him, Crovax’s axe chopped its throat. Through the resultant gush he charged another Kavu. The evincar rammed his broad blade up the monster’s nostril, cutting through to brain. For good measure, he bit the creature’s eye.

  All around him, Phyrexians took heart from their commander’s example. They ripped open throats and plunged swords down ear canals and tore tongues from mouths. That was just among the Kavu—the first and the worst of the green attackers.

  Elves rappelled down long vines and dropped in the midst of the black host. They came with needlelike swords and shrieked their mothers’ names. One young warrior jabbed. The blade penetrated Crovax’s breastplate, pierced his innards, and jutted out his back.

  The evincar was singularly unimpressed. He grabbed the elf’s sword hand and wrenched the blade out of him. The follow-through snapped the man’s hand at the wrist. With a powerful yank, Crovax tore off the limb at the shoulder. The young fellow went down in a sloppy heap.

  These elves hadn’t swords but thorns, and they were not fighters but flowers. Crovax plucked them with glee. Soon, he had a head to join the arm in a bouquet, and then a leg, and another head. He danced through the battle. Woodmen clawed at him but could not bring him down. Nothing could. He was indomitable.

  That was when the first saproling fell. It was a gelid and slimy thing, as large as a rhino but with the consistency of pus. From a fungal pocket on the side of a magnigoth tree, the thing had been born. It dropped like a mucousy spitwad on the evincar.

  Crovax stood resolute as the ooze crashed atop him. His head cracked through the fibrous core of the monster, ripping apart its central nexus. Without that tissue, the saproling was little more than lutefisk. Crovax hurled his arms out angrily, ripping the innards from the monster. He roared, and his breath made a big air bubble in the cytoplasm. The bubble popped. The beast did too.

  The evincar emerged like a newborn, slick and bawling. Translucent hunks of the monster clung to his armor and melted slowly. He shook the stuff off, just in time for another saproling to crash down beside him and spatter him anew. Seeing a bloodstock trapped within the wet monster, Crovax sliced through the membrane with his axe. He reached in and yanked the bloodstock out.

  Two more saprolings wetly pounded the ground. Phyrexians and undead languished beneath them.

  “Fight, damn you! Fight! They’re just fungi!”

  “Yes, milord,” answered a shock trooper, “but fungi eat the dead.”

  Crovax assessed the situation. Hundreds of undead troops were not emerging from beneath the gushing creatures. They were dissolving. In moments, these vile bags of nothing would defeat his entire army.

&
nbsp; “How about dried phlegm?” Crovax hissed. He tilted his head back and drew into himself the power of the swamplands. It poured like black smoke from his nostrils and eyes and ears. It whirled in twin cyclones across his shoulders and down his arms. The power roared from his fingertips and slammed, hot and putrid, into the saprolings.

  Their jellylike flesh shuddered. It dried and cracked. In each crack formed rot spores. They ate through the flesh and widened the wounds. Hunks of saprolings split away from each other. They crumbled and became only powder on the battlefield.

  Crovax roared his triumph, only then seeing sure defeat. Though his rot spell had destroyed the fungal forces, it had also obliterated his own army. Fungus and Phyrexian were not far apart on the food chain, each vulnerable to rot.

  Kavu had survived, and elves and woodmen. They converged around the evincar of Rath.

  “Get back, or be slain, all of you,” shouted Crovax, but it was a bluff. He hadn’t the power to destroy all these beasts. “You are doomed!”

  The words suddenly seemed meant for himself, for he looked up to see a dozen more saprolings oozing from trees and plunging toward him.

  Before the slime sacs arrived, Crovax created his own sac. He lifted claws above his head and brought them down, slashing the very air. It bled power. Tendrils whirled around Crovax’s body, joined, and widened into a bright sac around him. The beaming thing stretched and thinned, needlelike. Saprolings crashed down. Unaffected, the filament slid skyward, seeking more Phyrexians, more undead, more troops.

  Crovax left, yes, but he did not flee. He was Crovax. This was his land. He went only to gather the tools of his revenge.

  CHAPTER 11

  How Lazy the Ages

  How lazy the ages look, scrolled out like that across our knees, time’s parchment rolled and folded in ancient dishevel, uncared for and unaccounted while we sought with anxious fingers this very moment among all moments. We can see them all, each scene on that scroll. They lie there visible before us, every word and face on the ratty roll of history. We see them all but focus our eyes on this moment and these two men: Urza and Gerrard.

  Gerrard’s halberd—long and wicked headed and murderous, an interpolation in steel of that singular weapon that makes all men men and makes all sons patricides—rams into the belly of his father. The blade bites deep. The mortal sweetbreads of Urza Planeswalker gush forth.

  We scream out our approval. Through a hundred thousand throats, we scream gladly, and on feet and hooves and claws we stand and crane a look. Urza has had this coming. For four thousand years, he has had this coming, and Gerrard is giving it to him. Gerrard is killing his father.

  Of course, Urza is not really the man’s father. Not biologically. Still, into some project somewhere in time Urza had poured an ounce of passion, the vital white fury of himself that contributed to form a new life that he would thereafter ignore and abuse and simultaneously hang all his hopes on. In that way, he is the quintessential father. He deserves the cut in the gut.

  Only it isn’t Urza who stands there with halberd rammed halfway through him, but a simulacrum of himself—a sandman fashioned of grains and thoughts. Not sweetbreads but grit sloughs down around the blade. The sandman falls, revealing its maker retreating toward another line of weapons.

  We shout another ovation, this one less bold but still glad. It is a clever turn for Urza, one of many, but still he retreats, and he robs us of blood sport. We want them each to kill the other multiply, but if Urza insists on skulking and playing with sandmen, even we shall lose interest.

  The black dragon upon our royal stand shifts and brings gleaming teeth to bear on the sandy arena. It fills our lungs with hot breath and hurls it out across the grounds. The incendiary cloud rolls mightily, striking and obliterating another set of sandmen, scouring the conjured redoubts, and purging the place of all ruined weapons. Only Gerrard and Urza and our own weapons remain. Even the sands are fused to obsidian. In the wake of our breath come our spoken words:

  “No more foolishness, Urza. No more fleeing this lad. The next kill will decide it. The next man slain will be dead forever, and his slayer will rise to our side.”

  He bows to us. There, in the desolation of the arena, with his own son circling him like a wolf, Urza bows to us.

  We gather up the scroll of time about us, fingers crimping and bunching centuries into inches. We hold this moment in our grasp—ash-blond Urza on a glassy field with his black-bearded son edging to destroy him. They are larger than life, but also are bugs scuttling across a glass dish. We seek a previous moment, a black and burned battlefield where Tawnos and Ashnod met, proxies for Urza and Mishra. Ah, here it is, and here, above and below, the faces of those two assailants, of ash-blond Urza and black-bearded Mishra.

  How lazy the ages, where every story repeats itself. Urza is Urza and Gerrard is Mishra. Yawgmoth is Yawgmoth and Dominaria is Rebbec. How lazy the ages!

  That is one moment we always hold in our hands, always stare at with copious eyes.

  We stand within the bright and beaming door, lord of a beautiful and bounteous world, our arms open wide to bring her in with us, our people all around us, welcoming. Where she stands is only tomb-darkness, the mirror pedestal, the clockwork guardians. Above her head, Halcyon evaporates. Solid rock turns to ash. White death descends, certain and inescapable. We stand at the door, calling, but she closes the door, shuts us away for five thousand years and ascends to doom.

  Oh, how we have hated you, Rebbec, darling. For an age of ages we have hated you. Though Urza has been our nemesis, you have been our truest foe. Urza opened the door that you closed. He admitted the world that you had shut away. You are the world witch. You are our shadow, drawing the life out of us, pretending hate is love, clinging to us only so that you could betray us. We slew the whole multiverse to purge it of corruption and raise it incorruptible, but you, Rebbec—you chose a different death. Death in white fire. How we have hated you!

  But who is this that presses me? When last we left Dominaria, it was a dead stone hurtling around a vicious sun. What is the world now? A throbbing, living thing. Who is this Gaea who throws off our Yavimayan assault and cures our Llanowar plagues, who plants new forests in Keld and raises a scion to fight for her? Who, but you, Rebbec? We know your works, your furious designs and redesigns, your relentless reaching toward light, your organic architecture. We know you.

  How did that white fire not purge you? When it wrapped around you, its chewing particles were themselves consumed. Instead of eating your flesh, your flesh ate the cloud and spread outward across Halcyon, the empire, the world. You did to Dominaria what you did to us—clung close in shadow, made hate seem love, and drew enough power to rule. While Phyrexia transformed us from a man to a god, Dominaria transformed you. A change of essence, a change of name, and the mortal Rebbec becomes the immortal Gaea.

  You remain the same. You have kept us out for nine thousand years, and now you marshal your every creature to keep us out another nine thousand. We know you. If Urza is father to Gerrard, Rebbec is mother to them both.

  Once we are finished toying with these two, we will climb all over you and destroy you. We will wrap our fingers around that heart of hate and squeeze until it turns to love and squeeze again until you are dead tatters.

  Pain, sudden and strange and exquisite, tears through us, bringing us up from reverie. We are on our feet, shouting in joy. They are slaying each other, and in the stands, no less. Gerrard whirls a gleaming halberd. Blood streams from the curled gnarls on it and sprinkles the crowd. Urza roars and catches the weapon on a massive trident. The tines twist to capture the blade of the reaching weapon. He yanks his trident to one side and, drawing a knife from his belt, lunges in an eviscerating stab. Gerrard follows his weapon and bounds aside, behind one of our heads.

  We feel Urza’s steel slice leathery flesh and crack through the temple bone and drive into our frontal lobe and split the bone on the far side to jut just above our eyes. We see our own blood
cascading down before us, and feel our limbs shudder and slump from the assault. We even hear our breath laboring raggedly, driven by a lower brain that lies tucked away beneath the assault. The pain is piquant and powerful as we die.

  It is only one of us, though, one out of a hundred thousand. No matter how many they slay, they will not slay us. Only one of these bodies contains our true locus, and they will never find it, and even if they could, they could never slay it. We will let them continue. These deaths, these incidental stabs or clumsy blows, they feel good, like the pain of picking a long and deep scab. We will let them fight among us. We will feel a hundred deaths. Each will only whet our appetite for the final death.

  Urza retreats among us. He flails. He is failing. His trident rises clumsily to deflect a rain of blows. The butt of it bashes the teeth from one of our mouths. They fall in a chunky hail onto our legs. We only bellow in excitement. Gerrard advances. His halberd slices down through our neck. Our head remains upright amid a hissing shower of gold. Then it sags and falls to one side.

  We have lived the ages for this moment—not only to witness the death of Urza or his progeny, but to die with them, over and again.

  Still, it would be sweeter if Urza fought. See how he retreats amid bristling shoulders, dodges behind scaly bulk? It is as if he does not hope to join us, to serve us, but rather to shelter beneath our wings. Unworthy. There is no shelter beneath the wings of Yawgmoth.

  We shall rouse him. One pointed utterance will put fire in him. Barrin, perhaps? Or Xantcha? Or Mishra? No. He did not love them. Urza has only ever loved Urza. He feels no pangs about failing others, only about failing himself.

  In our manifold voices, we cry out, “Fight, Urza! There is no sylex to save you this time.”

  He hears us. He listens as Gerrard’s halberd chatters across the tines of his trident. Gritting his teeth, Urza twists the fork. With one revolution, he traps the head of the halberd. With the second, he cracks the weapon’s haft. He yanks hard. The axe comes away from the rest. Discarding the shattered blade, Urza swings the trident toward Gerrard.