Apocalypse
Page 21
They do. Every last particle does. It is my victory over Dominaria. They rise, so multitudinous, so multifarious, my children. I do not mean the Phyrexians, for they live already. I mean every dead thing across the planet. They are all mine, and they rise.
Life is so arrogant. It believes it rules the world, any world. But for every blade of grass, there are a million dead blades that have turned to dirt. Life is only a weak parasite on all-encompassing death. Now, death will throw off its passive mantle and rise to take back what belongs to it.
Dominaria, you are mine.
* * *
—
In Urborg it began.
Swamps, bottomless in muck, boiled. The dead things beneath the waters rose. Things took form. They did not reconstitute into the trees that once stood on and beasts that once roamed across the islands. Instead, they formed into creatures of humus, hulking and monstrous things with hunched backs and twisted limbs and eyes like snake holes. They were monsters of black peat and bits of bone. They churned up through entombing waters and clawed their way onto land.
A hundred thousand, a hundred million, they were. Swamps sank. Killing things plodded out of the muck.
There, they met terrestrial comrades. The thick humus of forests packed itself into stone-toothed warriors. Cypress needles bristled across the things’ backs. Slugs formed themselves into drooling lips. Eyes like blind mushrooms peered from faces of rot. They were huge, these shambling beasts, and they thundered toward the so-called armies of Dominaria.
They didn’t have to fight, but only trample. Elven arrows peppered the beasts to no avail. Mudmen swarmed the elves and buried them alive. Watery silt ran into the lungs of the thrashing fey, and red tides gushed from their dying lips.
The Metathran fared no better. It did not matter that the blue warriors drove home their powerstone pikes or that they clung with ferocity to the mudmen who fell upon them. They could not breathe ground. Buried in living muck, they suffocated.
So, what of the minotaurs? They swung their futile axes. The steel could not find true flesh, but only sank and stuck. The horned warriors fell as easily as their fainter allies, covered in rampant decay.
Even the magnigoth treefolk—even those massive guardians of the forest, three thousand feet tall and ferocious—how could they do battle? They drew sustenance from the black ground. Now it rose up against them. No longer could they suck water and nutrients from the dead. For them, the loss of rich soil was like a loss of air. They languished.
Up sluggish roots and shuddering trunks, mudmen climbed. Their feet dragged life out of the sap. Their hands blackened leaves, blinding them to the sun. The children of Yawgmoth rose to slay the creatures they had once nourished.
No longer would the dead lie in easy graves, to be pillaged by the living. Death would be subject no longer. Death would reign forever.
* * *
—
Benalia City had long been a Phyrexian bastion, the staging ground of a million scaly monsters. Now its population grew tenfold. The dead of the city, slain by their invaders, rose from piles of dry meat and white bone. The long dead, slain by the march of time, pushed their way up from the tombing ground. Even the rich soil itself rose to join the monstrous legions.
Above the gutted shell of the military brig, the skeletons of Lord and Lady Capashen returned to life. They riled on their gibbets like worms on the hook. Their teeth gnawed the ropes that dangled them. They plunged to the cobbled courtyard. There, the two potentates of Gerrard’s clan strode out in search of living flesh.
All around them was dead flesh. The whole city had died that horrible day when Tsabo Tavoc’s forces swept through. Now they rose to join the army of their slayers. Skeletons came first, their bones picked clean. From deeper spots shambled revenants in tattered bodies. From deeper still came zombies, pasty and corporeal.
The ground itself, soil that had hosted millennia of grasses, lifted in sod monsters. Hairy with stalks, bleak eyed and massive, they marched across the land.
They all marched. Benalia had fallen. There remained no prey here. To the south and east lay the lands of Llanowar. There, undead could eat elves and the ground itself could eat trees.
Yawgmoth had surely won. Dominaria was his.
* * *
—
From the forest crown to the Dreaming Caves, Llanowar seethed with monsters. Every pocket of soil animated into a scuttling creature. Every mushroom cluster combined into pallid monsters. Aerial roots snared Steel Leaf warriors. Slain giant spiders returned to life and prowled hungrily across the lands. Even the elven dead, buried with plague spores across their breasts, stirred and rose from the embracing ground.
This was where the miracle of Eladamri had begun. This was where the miracle of Orim’s Phyrexian inoculation had saved a whole forest. Now, what was it for?
Steel Leaf elves drowned in a wash of mud. Oriaptoric trees wilted beneath a black slurry. The memorial hall of Staprion caved and buckled.
Llanowar, once proud in its victory, languished in utter defeat. Death had come to the world of green.
* * *
—
These savage shores of Shiv, carved in perfect arc as by a celestial compass, were not immune either. Even clever Teferi could not save all this land from its ravishers.
Middens of bone and jerkied meat took new form. Dead goblins, Viashino, and dragons clattered up from mounds of their remains. They reconstituted themselves in wicked reflections of their former selves. Some were grotesque amalgams of all the beasts buried there. Slain dragons joined with the skeletons of their slayers. Even the first Rhammidarigaaz, entombed in lava, emerged. Riddled with holes, the monstrous Primeval shook out its ancient wings and lunged down the lava tube that led to the outer world.
* * *
—
Tolaria—that melted skull of an island—stirred with evil life. What Urza had given over for lost, Yawgmoth reclaimed as found.
In the molten hollows lay bones, Phyrexian and human and elf. They rose. Scholars and students cracked from the glassy ground that covered them. They lifted themselves, gaunt and alien, upon the hillsides. They stared out with empty-socket eyes at a world they could no longer comprehend. It didn’t matter. Within their very bones, they sensed the truth. They fought for Yawgmoth now.
Wickedest of all were the three that rose from adjacent graves near the sea. Rayne was the first to emerge, lovely in middle age, the ageless wife to the ageless Barrin. He lifted himself next, only a specter. His physical form had been blasted away. Worst of all, though, was the blonde-haired corpse that stood beside him. Her belly was eaten away by black plague, but her face, even with sunken cheeks, still showed the beauty she had carried in life. Hanna.
Yawgmoth had denied her true life, had dangled her like a prize before Gerrard only to haul her away afterward. Now she lived again, if only as a dry corpse. She, her father, and her mother set out across the blasted landscape, looking for someone to kill.
* * *
—
All across the globe, they rose. Urborg, Benalia, Llanowar, Shiv, Tolaria, Jamuraa, Keld, Vodalia, Yavimaya—every land everywhere bubbled with the rising dead. None could escape the tide of Yawgmoth. His initial invasion, with plague ships and cruisers, had been only a preparation for the Rathi overlay. The Rathi overlay had been only a preparation for this worldwide acquisition of all black mana. And this worldwide emergence was but a prelude to the true, horrid, beautiful power to come.
* * *
—
It is time. I have waited an eternity for you, Rebbec. You closed me out of Dominaria ninety centuries ago. As I grew to become a god in Phyrexia, you grew to become a goddess in Dominaria. Don’t think I don’t recognize you, Gaea. Don’t think I don’t smell your scent and know who you once were and know who you once opposed.
I held you to my heart, Rebbec, thinking you loved me, but you made hate seem like love. It was a trick you’d learned from me. Now I reciprocate.
Do you see me, gentle mind? Do you sense what I am? Your eyes no doubt will think me only a black cloud of soot. There is so much more to me, though. My very touch is death. My very scent is decay. My very sight is reanimation. I ooze out across the throne room, my soot fingers toying with the dead ash that lies there.
My soul drifts room to room. A mogg guard crumples onto its face and slowly settles like a melting dessert; an il-Kor cook slumps over his steaming griddle and allows his flesh to fry into place; an il-Dal warrior finds his armor turned to graphite and then finds nothing.
That’s what I do. I roll out like the angel of death and decimate whole armies. They fall to bones on the ground and rise again a moment later.
Oh, it is good to rule Dominaria. And through the world, I will take possession of you, my sweet lady, my Gaea, my Rebbec!
CHAPTER 25
Weatherlight Gains a New Crew
To any other race, this boiling sea of lava would have been hell. To Sister Dormet and her fellow rock druids, it was more like heaven.
They stood on the welling tide of molten rock. Their hands clutched the hilts of their hammers, which in turn rested on the bubbling stuff. From their mouths rang songs that summoned the power of the world and made the dwarfs indestructible.
All around, magma mounded. Columns of superheated stone shot upward. Some licked the flowstone core of the Stronghold. The lower mechanisms were half-melted, half-caked with basalt. New stalactites clung all across the base of the fortress.
For every glob of rock that struck the Stronghold, a hundred assaults came from above. Rathi beasts thronged the rails and hurled whatever came to hand—shattered hunks of wall, dungeon slops, even the occasional mogg. All cascaded toward the ring of dwarfs. Few of the attacks reached their targets. Most materials flash-burned to nothing as they fell. Only hunks of flowstone plunged onward to crack against the stony dwarfs and bound away. Other, more determined attacks came from artillery nests along the Stronghold’s perimeter. They had been designed to put down riots in the mogg warrens and so consisted of heavy crossbow entrenchments. Bolts darted down toward the dwarfs, struck them, and pinged away like so many bothersome flies.
Sister Dormet raised her gaze, just in time to catch a quarrel in the eye. Its angry metal rang off her sclera and ricocheted down to plunge through the flood of magma. She glanced toward the teeming decks of the Stronghold.
A new group had arrived. From this distance, they seemed no less savage than the Rathi monsters, but there was something different about them: blue skin, elven angularity, horns too white and proud….
Sister Dormet smiled through her song.
Eladamri and his coalition forces had emerged from the depths of the Stronghold. They fought on two sides, hemmed in by beasts. The warriors nearest the rail beckoned outward, as if summoning someone—or something.
The rock druid lifted her gaze higher still. There, in the yawning darkness, hovered a great red eye. No, it was not an eye, but the hull of a ship. It circled slowly, banking toward the coalition army.
Eladamri had heeded Sister Dormet’s warning. He and his troops would escape the conflagration after all. The rock druids were prepared to die and slay any in the Stronghold. It made Sister Dormet glad her friends would live.
* * *
—
“We all gonna die!” shouted Squee, in the midst of the coalition forces.
It didn’t take a military genius to see that he was right.
Gerrard’s army was trapped. Minotaurs and elves fought off a blackguard of il-Vec warriors on the left. Keldons and Metathran battled a division of il-Dal warriors on the right. The prisoners in the middle darted into combat wherever they could. Gerrard and Sisay meanwhile leaned precariously over a rail that glowed with blistering heat. They frantically signaled Weatherlight, which fought storms of volcanic air. The ship seemed hardly able to stay aloft, let alone fly to their rescue.
The most ominous sight, though, was reserved for Squee, in the rearguard. The coalition army had just ascended a long passageway, at the base of which rolled and coiled and coalesced a sooty cloud.
“What de hell is dat!” Squee squealed, pointing at the inky murk. No one listened.
In frustration, he kicked the dead body of a mogg. It tumbled patiently down the long flight of metal steps. Squee watched it go, seeing its blood paint patterns on the mesh. At the foot of the stairs, the body lulled into the black flood. Its flesh melted away from gray bones. Then the corpse sank to nothingness.
“What de hell is dat stuff?” Squee repeated to himself. He crouched, waggling his fingers before his face. “Melt skin to nothin’…melt goblin skin to nothin’—!” His ruminations stopped as something rose from the brackish cloud. It was the mogg—or something worse, made out of the mogg’s flesh. As ugly as the creature had been before, it now was downright hideous. Rotten muscle hung from chalky bone. Empty eye sockets glowed with unholy green light. Fangs seemed all the longer for the gums eaten away from them. Claws raked the steps as the creature ascended.
“Gerrard! Sisay! Anybody!” Squee called as he backed involuntarily into the crowd. “We gots trouble!”
* * *
—
They haven’t gotten far. Look at them: saviors of Dominaria? Skittering rats!
Gerrard Capashen stands at the rail like a maiden beginning a voyage, waving tearfully to her beloved, hand clutching no phlegmy kerchief but rather the phlegmy head of a planeswalker.
There is Sisay, improved by deprivation in my dungeons. My, do her muscles cord as she gestures for help. How they will cord when my presence touches them. They will turn to jute strings.
What of Karn, the glorious silver man? I had made him into a ball-peen hammer to smash goblins. What a bloodless, feinting thing he was then. He seems to have learned my lessons—pulling arms from their sockets and heads from their necks. I taught him to damn the comfort of peace and wallow in the ecstasy of war.
Is that the mighty Tahngarth, so incompleat, so brawny and twisted and half-done? He should have let me finish with him. Now I will finish them all.
I rise. My black heart is yet pouring from the portal behind me. The core of my being still emerges from Phyrexia. Enough of me is here, though—one talon is enough of me to slay these tiny things. Hatred boils up in me. Hatred and something born of hatred….
Figures take form. They are no longer moggs or il-Vec or il-Dal. They have the pelts of vampire hounds, the black blood of spider women, the fangs of pit fiends, the claws of vat priests. Where their eyes should be are only holes lined with teeth. Born of my boiling hatred, they are my brain children, and they will tear apart these pallid heroes. I will feel every slash, every blow. I will taste every victory, as I taught Tsabo Tavoc to do long ago. And when they are felled, every last one, I will lick across their corpses. Their defeat will assure me the world.
I rise, and before me rise the howling hordes of my hatred.
* * *
—
Another jolt shook Weatherlight. Orim clutched tightly to the helm, in part to keep from being thrown down, but more because she wanted answers.
What is it? Plasma bolts? Bombards? I don’t see anything hitting us. What’s hitting us?
The ship replied, Thermals, off the magma below. Every second, another cubic mile of lava wells up into this chamber, and a cubic mile of air roars out the top. As that air goes from cold to broiling, it grabs us and shakes us like a rag.
“Great,” Orim hissed under her breath, not wanting the ship to hear.
Weatherlight was too busy anyway, bucking under a new assault. Her brave young crew dangled and jerked in their gunnery harnesses. Below decks, the other skyfarers were beans in a maraca.
Can’t we do something? Orim asked, turning the wheel in a vain hope to bring the prow toward the Stronghold.
Gerrard and Sisay and everybody are down there. They’re dying.
The ship’s response came with great effort. Could you fight a battle during an earthquake?
The analogy struck Orim. Air was Weatherlight’s medium, as ground was the medium of human warriors, and water the medium of the Cho-Arrim. Air and water were both fluid, though, both dynamic, capable of great turbulence, and of great calm. If only Orim could use her water magic to aid the ship.
She spit on her hands, taking a tighter grip on the helm. Don’t worry, she told the ship, the spittle is more conduit than anything.
Before a reply came, Orim was deep in meditation. Her mind flowed out into Weatherlight. She was a gossamer presence, drifting through the core of the ship and bringing it the ancient wisdom of the Cho-Arrim. Orim evoked a memory of calm—the Navel of the World—where wellsprings sent pure water down over ancient stone. Here it was that Cho-Manno had hidden with his people from the onslaught of the Mercadians. In a place such as this, Weatherlight would hide from the buffeting heat that sought to destroy her.
The ship understood. Kindred souls need only a few words to share a great thought. Weatherlight remembered the lagoon and the Navel of the World. She made her own memory of that place into a reality.
A shift envelope seeped from the grains of Weatherlight’s hull. In this envelope, Weatherlight created a calm, cool, placid sky all around herself. While the rest of the volcano boiled, Weatherlight floated in tranquil air.
Orim opened her eyes, somewhat surprised by the peace that filled the ship. The air even smelled like the forests of the Cho-Arrim—verdant and warm, laced with silver fire. The young crew hung in awe in their gunnery harnesses. They breathed again.