Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

* * *

  —

  It was good to have rock beneath one’s hooves again. It was even better to charge across that rock, axe in hand and foes aplenty stretching to the sea.

  Grizzlegom had begun this charge on the slanting gangplank of Weatherlight. The extrusion leant its slope as well, but the true speed came from Grizzlegom’s angry heart. He sensed it. They all did: They fought the battle of the Apocalypse.

  And what strange harbingers were these mudmen, these golems. They seemed like Mishra’s mud warriors, raised out of antiquity to terrify posterity. Grizzlegom knew how to fight Phyrexians. He understood their voracity. But who knew how to fight mudmen?

  Whirling his battle axe overhead, Grizzlegom bowed his head and bulled into the things. Their flesh was soft but dense, like clay. Grizzlegom’s horns rammed a pair of them. Pivoting his weight, he rose and shook his head. This was a lethal tactic that normally slew both foes at once.

  This time, as the bodies folded and tore, loose chunks of humus clambered all over Grizzlegom’s shoulders and neck and snout. They squeezed themselves into the minotaur’s nose and mouth to suffocate him. They combined to form strangling fingers at his throat. They rolled into eyes and wormed down ears.

  Stomping his fury, Grizzlegom hurled away what remained of the clay corpses. He spat out the chunks in his mouth, shook away the bits in eyes and ears, and snorted magnificently to get rid of the plugs in his nostrils.

  All around him, the other minotaurs were similarly plagued. One whose entire head had become encased in the torso of a mudman collapsed under the weight of two more that piled on him. He struggled out of the cluster and gasped a single breath before more beasts fell on him. They buried him alive.

  Even as Grizzlegom escaped the suffocating stuff, his axe bit deeply into the pile. The blade struck on horn, and Grizzlegom reached in with his free hand. Two more cuts opened the ground enough that he could haul the bull’s head forward—far enough to see that he already was dead.

  The living ground wrapped itself around Grizzlegom’s hooves. Hacking and stomping, he struggled for a hard crust of soil just ahead. If he and his troops could reach that patch, they could survive.

  Across that way, Keldons advanced. Indeed, they sprayed oil and fire before them. The intense heat baked the ground and any mudmen on it. The arts of fire were well known to the Keldons, for in their cold climate, fire was life. In this infernal climate, the same held true.

  Mudmen dragged Grizzlegom down to his hocks. He used his axe like a climber’s pick and pulled himself free. Another mudman landed on his back. He hurled it away and scrabbled onto the baked ground. As he rose, he pulled two other minotaurs to the solid ground. There, the three fought and slew, waiting for the rest of their platoon to join them.

  If these monsters rise everywhere, thought Grizzlegom as he cut the head from another golem, our world is indeed doomed.

  * * *

  —

  While minotaurs and Metathran died in living graves, mudmen swarmed up the stomping magnigoth treefolk. Lashing roots only stirred the golems more deeply. They rose, depleting the soil. Magnigoths sank until their roots languished on bedrock. Worst of all, though, the creatures that climbed those massive boles ripped away foliage as they went. With no soil beneath and no leaves above, the titanic treefolk would soon be dead.

  Except that Eladamri and his elven warriors fought just as fiercely.

  The Seed of Freyalise stabbed into a golem’s back and hauled himself up by the sword. Catching a handhold on the thing’s shoulder, he chunked a foothold out of its wounded back. He vaulted up the tree’s bole and split the head of the mudman. It fell backward. The riven clay tumbled down a cliff of rugged bark, broke into pieces on the spiky root bulb, and spattered to the ground. Fragments sprayed across the pyres there. Keldons had built the fires to bake monsters into ceramic. They would not rise again.

  Chain rattled past Eladamri, paying out as the toten-vec sank its blade into the bark above. Up that chain climbed Liin Sivi. The mud beneath her fingernails and the murder in her eyes told of the golems she had already slain. The dun-coated bark above told of those she would destroy next.

  “Who raises these beasts?” she wondered breathlessly. She took a handhold, yanked the toten-vec free, and hurled it up to transect a golem.

  Eladamri shrugged. “Some planeswalker or some god.”

  “Mortals against gods,” Liin Sivi snorted. “It would be nice, just once, if the gods were on our side.”

  Something drew Eladamri’s attention upward, past the golem-crowded tree bole, past the shredding crown of the tree, and to the blue sky beyond.

  “They are,” he said with sudden certainty. “They are.”

  CHAPTER 27

  When Gods Do Battle

  The devastated spheres of Phyrexia disappeared. Reality folded around the planeswalkers. For a blinking moment, all that existed was Freyalise in her downy nimbus, Bo Levar in his captain’s cloak, the panther warrior Lord Windgrace, and Commodore Guff, stripped of his rubbers.

  Then, in place of a destroyed Phyrexia appeared a destroyed Dominaria.

  Each tortured rill bore a thousand claw marks. Each twisted valley held a million bones. Every last speck of soil had been scraped away, every swamp flooded, every tree felled. In their place, endless armies fought. In flesh gray and blue, in fur brown and white, they battled Phyrexian soldiers and things made of mud. Middens of bodies piled up. Between the rows of the dead, the living fought.

  Even magnigoth treefolk languished under the tide of monsters. A shattering boom resounded below, and the land jumped as one of the treefolk lords fell beneath its assailants.

  “Urborg, but it is all too much like Argoth,” Freyalise said quietly. An angry light shone in her gaze.

  Commodore Guff lifted a bristling red eyebrow and said, “You were at Argoth?”

  “No, but I knew Argoth. It was a profound loss. This too—” She gestured toward the dying magnigoths. “This too…”

  “This will not be a loss,” growled Lord Windgrace. “This is my home. I have fought this battle for centuries. I will not lose it in a day.”

  So saying, he dropped from the sky. He fell not as a stone would, but with preternatural speed. Pivoting to lead with his forelegs, Lord Windgrace reached toward a knot of Metathran and minotaurs, sorely pressed below.

  Commodore Guff watched him go and clucked quietly. “Too bad.”

  Bo Levar turned a questioning gaze on him. The commodore blinked behind his monocle, coughed into his hand, and said, “What?”

  “What’s too bad?” asked Bo Levar.

  The commodore pointed his finger emphatically, as if realization floated on the air, and he was trying to pop it. “Oh. Yes. Too bad. Too bad that he’ll be killed.”

  Bo Levar’s eyes grew wide. “He’ll be killed?”

  Guff nodded, smiling absently. “Us too. Everybody. Everything.”

  “What?” chorused Bo Levar and Freyalise.

  The commodore seemed taken aback by their vehemence. He patted the pockets of his tunic. “Well, I’m sure that’s the way I approved it.” A smile of discovery came to his face. He dipped fingers into a small watch-fob pocket and pulled out an impossibly large book. It had once been a three-volume work, though the commodore had inexpertly joined their spines with shiny gray tape. He flipped open the grand tome and paged through.

  Among scrawled pages, Bo Levar and Freyalise glimpsed sketches. Some were almost unrecognizable. Some were terrifyingly clear. A few showed the Nine Titans. One even showed Taysir dead. Bo Levar and Freyalise stared openmouthed as the commodore flipped to the page he sought, very near the end of the volume.

  “Ah! Here!” he poked the open page. “The death of Windgrace. He gets blown up from within by a lich lord. Too bad, that. And you die.” He pointed to Bo Levar. “And you.” He pointed to Freyalise. “But only when Yawgmoth emerges and takes over the world.”

  “Takes over the world!” Bo Levar said. “You approved
this?”

  The commodore’s confusion turned defensive. “What else? Yawgmoth’s a right bastard. Who could believe that Gerrard could stop him? Ever hear of suspension of disbelief, old man?”

  Bo Levar scowled at his longtime friend. “You can’t do this. You can’t destroy Dominaria—”

  “I’m not doing it!” protested the commodore. “The author and his characters are doing it.”

  “A history that compels reality!” Bo Levar said. “We’re the characters. You have to let us decide this. For once, just once, trust the characters to find their own way.”

  The commodore said, “I knew you would say that. It’s written right here—”

  Bo Levar jabbed the commodore’s chest. Through clenched teeth, he hissed. “You start erasing from that passage forward. There’s no time. You free us up to win this thing, or lose it—but lose it on our own terms—or I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Of course you won’t. You’ll be dead.”

  The pirate grabbed Guff’s tunic. “Do it!”

  “I don’t have an eraser.”

  “You’re a planeswalker! Conjure one!”

  “No,” snarled the commodore. “It’s artistic integrity.”

  Lost for words, Bo Levar seemed about to pop a blood vessel. He jiggled, his face swollen with anger.

  From behind him came a quietly sardonic voice. “I assume, then, you remembered to move your library safely beyond the Nexus. It’d be a shame for the Dominarian Apocalypse to destroy all your books.”

  Guff silently mouthed, “All…my…books…” An enormous eraser suddenly appeared in his hand. “Bother!”

  “Good,” Bo Levar said. “Start with this conversation and erase all the way to the end. Make sure you don’t miss anything, and don’t stop until you’re through. Otherwise—all your books…”

  “Every goddamned book,” he echoed, nodding feverishly. “Every buggered befuggered one.” With that, the commodore ‘walked away from the midair conference.

  Though he had utterly disappeared, the final two planeswalkers sensed that he was nearby, madly erasing. There came a sudden blurring of recent memory and the vertigo of doubt. The past became a sinking slough. The future became a soaring sky.

  Bo Levar smiled as he felt his fate unwritten, moment by moment. He turned toward Freyalise, whose inscrutable visage had not changed a whit, and said, “Well, milady, let us be at it.” He bowed deeply.

  She who was accustomed to floating above the ground answered, “I go to aid my people. Where do you head?”

  Bo Levar shrugged. “I’m a mariner. I fight best at sea.”

  “But the battle is on land,” Freyalise pointed out.

  “I’ll see what I can do about that,” replied Bo Levar enigmatically. Then he winked away.

  Freyalise sniffed within her thistledown aura and said, “Sailors.” Next moment, she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Freyalise reappeared in the midst of a vertical battle.

  To every side towered the sluggish trunks of magnigoth treefolk. With roots plunged into rich, wet humus and leaves raking the bright sky, the forest guardians were nearly unstoppable. But their leaves had been shredded, and the shredders were warriors formed from the very ground that once nourished them. Even now, mud golems coated the boles thickly, clambering over one another to shred bark and snap branch.

  The treefolk had defenders too—Eladamri, a platoon of elves, a small army of woodmen, saprolings, and the ever-voracious Kavu—but these mortal defenders died in their scores and could do little more than burst apart immortal golems. Some baked to clay. More—many more—reformed and rose again.

  Freyalise was unglad. She had spent an ice age being unglad, and had become unwilling to spend even a few moments in the same state. This was soil, humus, ground—the dead stuff meant to give life to flora and fauna. Instead, it gave death. There was no greater crime, stepping outside the wheel, reviling the natural order. Mud that would not nourish. Freyalise knew a few tricks to bring this stuff back in line.

  Her hands and arms, curled beside her heart, slowly opened outward like the petals of a flower. She extended her reach in silent splendor, and something that seemed yellow pollen drifted out from her. Where those glowing points of magic lighted, they burned through mud golems and penetrated until they reached the molds and lichens that dressed these magnificent trunks. Growth came abruptly to those tendrils. Mudmen lost hold of the boles. They plunged away in great clumps of twenty or thirty, still clinging to the flourishing lichens that had grown beneath them. The beasts struck the ground and spattered, but the moss was not finished. It doubled and trebled and rolled out until it had sucked every last water drop, every last nutrient from the mudmen. They turned to dust.

  Freyalise did not yet smile. This was only the beginning.

  Her magic fertilized a hundred million aerial plants. Their long white roots snaked downward. It seemed the great magnigoths were letting their hair down. Each tendril descended hundreds or thousands of feet until it struck the crawling masses of mud. There, they burrowed like maggots, plunging through dead flesh to seek the living core and take over the whole. The slim fibers thickened upon their rich diet, dragging the vitality out of the ground. As thick as ropes, as thick as men, the vines dragged free, and golems sloughed away in flakes of emptied ground.

  Freyalise still did not smile. Her spell had yet to work its greatest effect.

  Golden motes of power struck the very roots of the magnigoth treefolk. Each tiny particle of light was like a season of sun. Each mote of magic was like a billion grains of peat. Each droplet of the lady’s will was like a water table thousands of feet deep. The spell awakened the slumbering giants. Roots once stilled on bedrock moved. Fists of tree fibers opened into angry, seeking hands.

  While below, the striding organs of these treefolk gained new life, the same miracle began above. Glowing particles of magic sank into the stomas of the last leaves and permeated their flesh. Irresistible magic coursed down the network of veins. From leaf to twig and twig to branch and branch to bough and bough to bole, vitality spread. The heads of the great trees shook. Broken boughs fused. Stripped branches budded and bloomed. Where once ruin had ruled, tender green shoots emerged to grab the sun and pull its power into the treefolk.

  The wave of rejuvenation swept down from the treetops and up from the roots. Mud golems fell in ashen rain all around. The great defenders of Yavimaya rose from the sloughs that had claimed them and advanced across demonic lands.

  Freyalise smiled. Then she was gone, ‘walking to another dying wood.

  * * *

  —

  It was a strange scene, but ever since Bo Levar had thrown in his lot with Urza Planeswalker, he’d gotten used to strange scenes.

  Metathran fought below, blue shoulders rippling beneath clinging muck. They seemed creatures caught in quicksand, except that this swallowing earth was alive and had risen up a volcanic mountainside to slay a whole division. While a thousand Metathran thrashed amid mudmen, one Metathran stood in rigid attention atop a rocky outcrop.

  Bo Levar stood beside him, caster of the spell that so thoroughly controlled the warrior. The sea captain smiled grimly, shaking his head at the Metathran’s latest attempt to jiggle free.

  “Relax. I’m on your side.”

  “Then why prevent my return to battle?” the Metathran gasped out.

  Bo Levar blinked, and his expression showed that he had suddenly realized the simplicity of his captive. “Because if I let you join them, you would die with them. I want to save all of you—”

  “Yawgmoth!” blurted the Metathran. “That’s what Yawgmoth would say.”

  “Yawgmoth?” Bo Levar thumped his captain’s uniform. “You think Yawgmoth dresses this well? You think Yawgmoth dresses at all? Listen, I just need to know one thing—can you guys survive water? Lots of water? A flood?”

  “Never reveal a weakness,” the Metathran recited.

  Bo
Levar could not help laughing. He gazed up into the empty heavens and sighed, “Can I get some help here?” Turning back to his captive, Bo Levar said, “Look, since you’ve got blue skin, I assume you can function in water—but I’ve got to know because I want to save you guys and kill these mud things. Oh, why am I wasting time—?” Bo Levar made a sign in the air, and magic energy drifted from his fingers into the gaze of his captive.

  A light of belief twinkled in the Metathran’s eye. “Part of our makeup comes from the blood of blue dragons.” He flipped his eyes up toward the sigil tattooed across his forehead. “This is the name of the blue dragon sacrificed to bring us into being. We are told that we can always go aquatic to escape a futile battle and emerge again to fight elsewhere.”

  Bo Levar nodded and slapped the Metathran on the shoulder. “See? That wasn’t so hard. All you needed was a little coercion.” No sooner had his hand left the warrior’s shoulder than Bo Levar stepped out of existence.

  He reappeared in a nearby place—a depth of ocean a hundred miles away. Near Urborg, atolls kept the sea at a few trifling meters, but here, the water was a mile deep. Here, Bo Levar appeared a half mile down.

  It was dark and cold, and the pressure would have instantly killed a mortal. These were Bo Levar’s seas. He had learned to trust them. Ever since Argoth—ever since the mortal Captain Crucias had ridden out that horrible, blinding storm and become the planeswalker Bo Levar—he had never again mistrusted the sea. Now Bo Levar reached out with his hands, his power, to take hold of a cubic mile of ocean. It was twenty thousand tons of water—more than could be hauled by the combined armadas of the world, and yet a manageable payload for a single planeswalker. He took hold of that water. It welcomed him as all banal things welcome the enlivening touch of the divine. Bo Levar planeswalked back to the embattled hillside.

  A legion of Metathran had battled twelve legions of mudmen there. Suddenly, though, the battle was underwater. Metathran thrived in water—so he had just learned—whereas mud golems turned to silt and then nothing. The vast cube of water stood there a moment on the volcanic hillside, solid and transparent like a hunk of gelatin. Then gravity took its toll. The corners and edges of the cube turned to whitewater. The heights of it slumped and curled down in great waves. The sides bulged and broke upon the hillside. The vast belly of the wave remained intact and, pregnant with darting blue shapes, rolled gently toward the sea.