Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  Squee said only, “Oh.”

  There was no time for more. The entrance suddenly disgorged warrior after hypertrophied warrior. Il-Vec and il-Dal monstrosities.

  Snorting gustily, Gerrard scooped up the head of Urza Planeswalker. “Here we go again.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The Gutting of Phyrexia

  Four planeswalkers stood on the first sphere of Phyrexia. They had stripped away their thick suits and all-encompassing vines. The air blew sweet here. Grass waved in rolling hills to the distant low mountains. Dense forests bristled down to a wide plain. None of the planeswalkers needed environmental defenses here in the first sphere of Yawgmoth’s metallic paradise.

  Bo Levar’s wide-brimmed pirate hat had vanished, releasing tawny hair to his shoulders. His greatcoat had become a waistcoat once again. He had taken the opportunity to light a cigar and stood with it clenched in his teeth. Smoke billowed from his mouth, through mustache and goatee, and out into the rolling air.

  Just above him in the air hovered Freyalise. Slender and blonde and wrapped in her own downy nimbus, the forest lady floated just off the ground. The impenetrable riot of vines that had guarded her from Phyrexia’s worst environs had retreated into slender garments of green. She, like all of them, was eager to set off the final bombs and quit this place.

  In her shadow stood Lord Windgrace, again in man-panther form. His silken coat had returned, replacing the thick mat of fur, but beneath his coat, the heart of Taysir remained encased beside his own. Throughout all the bombing missions below, he had carried it dutifully. Even now beneath his pads, he felt the deep concussions of those explosions rip through the world.

  Commodore Guff had doffed his thick rubbers and donned his red waistcoat and breaches. With one hand, he idly twirled his mustaches. With the other, he held open a broad history written by King Famebraught the Ninth. The ancient dwarf king was one of the few outsiders who had ever returned from a journey into Phyrexia. As the commodore read with his monocled eye, his other eye stared beyond the gutter of the book to gaze at the city on the plains below.

  It seemed a mushroom garden, overspread with gigantic fungi of every shape and size. Pale domes with irregular contours joined one upon the other in infinite combination.

  Commodore Guff read: “‘And when Emperor Yawgmoth had opened the gateway to Phyrexia, he founded a city there, and he named the city Gamalgoth, which in the tongue of the Thran means “Creature Garden,” for here he proposed to bring whole new races into being. And he enlisted the great architect Rebbec and her husband, the great artificer Glacian, to design and build him Gamalgoth. It was a city of wonders, tucked beyond our world, a high heaven created within a deep and hellish hole. This was before the great war, and the eradication of the Thran. And should any of their kind survive, they survive in Gamalgoth.’”

  Guff closed the book. His chameleon eyes aligned and shone with uncommon clarity. “This city is among the most ancient in the multiverse—nine thousand years of continuous occupation. And we are about to destroy the damned thing.”

  Lord Windgrace nodded grimly. “It is a terrible war.”

  “Nine thousand years, destroyed in a moment,” Bo Levar agreed.

  Freyalise spoke with no compassion, no compunction. “Nine thousand years of vile monstrosity ended in a moment—I will be glad of it.”

  That was the end of that. Yes, Gamalgoth would go down to oblivion with all the rest of Phyrexia.

  “This will be our greatest fight,” Bo Levar said. “They have had a month to work over the bomb clusters, to realize they cannot diffuse or remove them without setting them off, and then to fortify against our return.”

  “Yes,” confirmed Lord Windgrace. “I have scouted. They’ve buried the bombs beneath a half-mile dome of concrete, hoping to dull the impact and keep us at bay.”

  Freyalise wore a wry look. “We need only chisel down through that dome, and when our labors grow near enough, they will set off the cluster.”

  Again, Lord Windgrace confirmed. “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go. I’m ready to be shut of this place,” said Freyalise, and she planeswalked, disappearing from their midst.

  Lord Windgrace gathered his leg muscles, sprang into the air, and was gone as well.

  Commodore Guff shoved the big book into an impossibly small waistcoat pocket, where the tome vanished utterly. “It’s been a rum go. Let’s close this chapter.” He pushed his hand deeper into the pocket, up to the elbow, and then to the shoulder. His head followed next, and his other shoulder. He even kicked up his legs, rammed them into the pocket and, before his rump could tumble to the ground, popped out of existence.

  “A rum go,” Bo Levar echoed, thinking instead of a tall ship filled with casks of liquor. He smiled and followed. His smartly cut clothes seemed to fold in upon themselves, and he slid into the cracks of reality.

  Though they had left one at a time, the four planeswalkers reappeared simultaneously in a floating ring above the concrete dome. It stretched across the heart of the city, engulfing many ancient buildings but protecting others from the inevitable blast. Even now through the streets below, Phyrexians trooped like black ants and climbed the rooflines to their ray-cannon nests.

  Take those out, Bo Levar mind-sent to his comrades, flashing them a mental image of the guns that wheeled upon them. I’ll begin with the dome.

  The thought was not even complete when Freyalise hurled her hands down toward two of the cannon bunkers. From her fingertips stretched coils of green force that struck the stony embrasures and erupted in tangled vines. The thorny thicket crawled vengefully over every inch of the gun and its crew and pierced the beasts in a thousand places.

  Lord Windgrace meanwhile had swept his clawed hand down before him, creating a veil of magic across his form. Scintillating energy sank into every crease and follicle and pore. He gripped this shimmering mantle, ripped it free from his body, and hurled it down into a second gun bunker. There, it became a simulacrum of himself, built on mana energy alone. The simulacrum landed, snarling, on the gun crew and began to rip them apart. Lord Windgrace meanwhile cast the spell again, preparing another spectral warrior.

  Commodore Guff’s technique was stranger still but no less effective. He skipped across the sky like a maiden across a field. Where she would reach into a basket of flowers and fling them gladly in her wake, the commodore instead reached into another book—a dull and overwritten and worthless book—and yanked out pages by the handful. He hurled the crumpled sheets down in rattling flurries within the gun embrasures, the streets, the windows….His propaganda leaflets were, in a word, haphazard. They were also lethal. Creatures angrily snatched those pages from the air and peered down at the writing there. Those who glimpsed a single word fell asleep. Those who glimpsed more died on the spot. It truly was a horrid book, and like all such books, its pages were endless.

  While the other three planeswalkers incapacitated the guns, Bo Levar turned his attention on the dome itself. He had no intention of chiseling down through a half-mile of cement. His blue mana magic suggested better options. Cement, especially new cement, contained lots of water. His mind tapped its potential, quickening it. Water shimmered and shook, breaking the bonds of lime that it had set.

  The dome’s peak began to run. Crisp cement became liquid again. Bo Levar deepened his focus. More water awoke. Gray rivulets turned to cascades. Days of labor poured away in moments. A moat of sludge formed around the dome and spread outward. It engulfed Phyrexians running to defend their city. It churned down adjacent streets. The mound flattened and sank.

  A few minutes, and the bomb cluster will be exposed, Bo Levar mind-sent to his comrades. Hold them off until then.

  An answering yelp came from Commodore Guff. A ray-cannon bolt had leaped up from a hidden embrasure, struck the upraised book in his hand, and vaporized every last, wretched word. It also had taken off the commodore’s hand at the wrist. His face flashed as red as his waistcoat, and in sheer fury he reg
rew the missing hand. With that new appendage, he reached up, snatched the monocle from his eye, and whirled it down at the offending gun. The little lens spun through the air, widening as it went and gaining a silver sheen. As if on invisible lines, the monocle slid down to clamp onto the muzzle of the ray cannon.

  It barked, hurling another beam. The light struck the mirrored disk and bounced back down the throat of the gun. The mechanism exploded, and the barrel curled like the peel of a banana.

  In an adjacent gun nest, where four cannons roosted in a long row, a mana projection of Lord Windgrace sent its claws through the neck of a Phyrexian gunner. Flesh sloughed from energy. The panther simulacrum leaped to the gun controls. It grasped a metal crank and spun it with preternatural speed. The cannon rotated laterally. The panther creature spun another wheel, bringing the barrel down to aim straight at the other cannons. It took only the quick squeeze of a trigger, and red rays bounded down the line.

  The first gun split. Its molten ends dropped away from each other. Rays shot through the gap to strike the next gun. It got off two more rounds before its bore melted shut. Its next bolt exploded within and threw molten metal in a wide sphere.

  The last gun spun about and drew a bead on the rebel cannon. Phyrexian crews unleashed a blistering salvo that pulverized the simulacrum’s cannon. Roaring their victory, the Phyrexians never noticed the ghostly outline of the simulacrum as it bounded from the destroyed gun to land among them.

  The mana creature slew the main gunner first. It rammed his body against the charge mechanism. A rising whine told of the energy building within, and of the inevitable explosion when no one remained to trigger its release. In moments, the panther’s claws made sure no one remained. It bounded away even as the device went critical.

  Watching the explosion, Bo Levar smiled. His expression only deepened as the tide of cement flooded the final two gun nests. It would be considerably easier to complete this task without having to worry about ray cannon bolts—

  Dragon engines! mind-sent Freyalise. With the words came an image—four black shapes jagging down from the mountains at the edge of the world. The mechanical creatures flew with amazing speed, outrunning even the war-shrieks from their gaping mouths. One for each of us. She whirled in the air like dandelion down and wafted out toward the dragon onslaught.

  While her hands began an intricate dance, her mind reached into the mana beneath her floating feet. Yes, Phyrexia was rich in the blackest of mana, but there was green here too. The metallic plants that proliferated across the first sphere partook in both colors, a fusion of antagonists that occurred nowhere else. If Yawgmoth could make metal grow, so could Freyalise.

  It was a simple spell, known by every novice green wizard. Gathering potent magics into her hand, she blew a cloud of mana spores upon the wind. They tumbled out before her, twining like a ribbon in air, and wrapped around the first metal serpent.

  Motes of power sank into supple scales and fine-mesh skin, into the cable-taut muscles beneath and the metallic bones that they moved. The dragon grew, parts expanding with disruptive force. Joints ground together. Wings seized up. Limbs grew too heavy to hold aloft. The dragon plunged from the skies as surely as if it had been slain outright. All twisted metal and tortured welds, the beast tumbled twice before it struck a building below. It cracked through the roof as if it were an eggshell and sent up an explosion.

  Lord Windgrace took on the second dragon. The panther warrior powered his spell with the black side of the spectrum. His mind summoned a thought, a simple but powerful thought discovered by the liches of Urborg. Their necromancies had captured the final idea that arose in every mortal mind as it winked from being, a thought that stilled flesh and awakened rot. Vultures, it was said, could hear that thought, and knew the moment to begin to feed. Had Lord Windgrace allowed the idea to come fully formed into his own mind, even he would have been slain. Instead, he brought it into being in the mind of the dragon engine. Its eyes went dark. Its limbs curled in death. It fell from the sky.

  Commodore Guff squared off against the third dragon engine—and nearly died. The thing swooped down on him and breathed a red gush of flame. In the moment before Guff was engulfed, he racked his brain for a form that would be impervious to fire. He thought of nothing, only the fire itself. It broke over him, consuming his flesh—no, not consuming it, for his flesh had in the last moment become fire. It was a hot but otherwise comfortable body. He felt like a man swimming in a large tub. Better still, he realized he could gather the flames into his body and thus increase it. In a moment, the holocaust that spewed from the dragon’s mouth took on the shape of a gigantic Commodore Guff. Eager to become even larger, the planeswalker shoved his burning hands into the dragon’s mouth and dragged himself down the serpent’s throat. He sought the white-hot source of all that flame and, reaching it, expanded hugely. There came a terrific popping sound, and the fiery Guff jetted out the back of a burned-out dragon husk.

  The last dragon engine belonged to Bo Levar, who had just finished washing away all the cement. He’d nearly depleted his mana reserves by moving that mountain, but a clever trick needed little mana. Glancing from the now-exposed bomb cluster beneath him to the hurtling figure of the dragon engine, Bo Levar made a series of mental calculations. He cast a simple summoning, the simplest summoning of all—to bring nothing into being. Directly in the dragon’s path, he summoned an inviolate singularity, a point in space that could not be occupied by any matter.

  The dragon crashed into the point, smaller than a pinprick. It clove through the creature’s metallic brain, folded up its neck like a limp chain, and ripped out its mechanistic heart. The dragon fell, the singularity remaining intact behind it. Bo Levar floated off to one side, giving room for the corpse to plummet atop the bomb cluster.

  The bombs went off. White energy blossomed below Bo Levar’s feet. It formed a set of new domes. Each expanded exponentially. Each pulverized everything it swept over. They spread with such blinding fury that in the first moment they swallowed a square mile. In the second they swallowed nine square miles. In the third, thirty-six. Then a hundred. Then two hundred twenty-five.

  Bo Levar and the others rose away from the explosions. They soared up from Gamalgoth, which disappeared forever.

  Blasts leveled the forests and reamed away the bedrock. The white, killing cloud boiled outward even as it sank through the devastation. A landmass the size of a small continent—the size of Argive of old—simply turned to nothing. All around the cracked edge of the blast, where the shell of the first sphere struggled to hold together, chunks of ground broke free and plunged into the second sphere.

  We’ve done it, came Freyalise’s thought in all their minds. We’ve destroyed Phyrexia.

  Even as she said it, the explosive cloud shifted enough that they could see down through the first sphere and the second to riven pipes in the third, and boiling blackness in the forth. Phyrexia was cut in cross-section like a half-demolished building.

  It’s not destroyed, Bo Levar replied. But it surely is gutted. It will take Yawgmoth aeons to rebuild it.

  Commodore Guff chuckled internally and thought, Ha! Little do these poor bastards know he has no plans to rebuild.

  What? chorused the other three planeswalkers.

  The commodore stared, shocked, at them. Did I think that out loud?

  Bo Levar fixed him with a level stare, quite a feat as the thinning atmosphere of Phyrexia whirled around him. What do you know, Commodore?

  Huffing into his mustache, the commodore said, Nondisclosure, my boy. I make it a habit not to discuss future events with those destined to live them out—

  Break the habit, interrupted Bo Levar. Why wouldn’t Yawgmoth want to rebuild Phyrexia?

  Why, it’s simple, the commodore said, blinking. Dominaria will be his new home.

  The four destroyers of Phyrexia traded heartsick looks. Bo Levar spoke for them all. Then all we’ve done is drive him irrevocably into our world. When the commodore
nodded grimly, Bo Levar said, Great. Let’s get out of here and get back to Dominaria—or shall we call it New Phyrexia?

  CHAPTER 23

  The Eyes of Urza

  Gerrard watched with seething hatred as Stronghold troops poured into the ruined throne room of Crovax.

  Ten, twenty, thirty; il-Vec, il-Dal, Phyrexian….The warriors seemed to note the absence of the room’s usual defenders and did not charge Gerrard. Instead, they fanned out along the rumpled walls. Or perhaps they grew wary after glimpsing what Gerrard held, the severed head of Urza Planeswalker. They all knew and hated that visage. Most likely, though, they hesitated when they saw the two halves of Crovax’s corpse. Anyone who could single-handedly slay Crovax and his retinue was a formidable warrior, was perhaps the new evincar.

  Gerrard sensed their thoughts—any true commander could read warriors’ eyes—and he knew the next moments would decide if he lived or died. Even with tenfold strength, he could not defeat a company such as this. There were easily sixty warriors now and more in the corridor. He could not defeat them, but he could cow them.

  Gerrard lifted his bloodied halberd blade toward the doorway and made a sweeping gesture.

  “Come in, all of you! Come pay fealty to your new lord!” He hung the blade at his waist, strode heavily toward the black throne and leaped up onto it. Grasping the high back with his free hand, he raised the head of Urza Planeswalker like a lantern. “Behold, my prey. First, I slew the greatest, most ancient foe of the Ineffable—Urza Planeswalker. In payment, the Ineffable granted me the power to destroy Evincar Crovax, and to take his place. Kneel before your new lord. Kneel before Evincar Capashen!”

  They did not. Glaives and cudgels gleamed in their hands, and defiance in their eyes. The il-Vec lieutenant who had gathered the other warriors spoke for them all through a mouth formed by facial wires.

  “Until we see proof of Yawgmoth’s favor, we will not kneel.”