Planeshift
Page 1
“You know it’s suicide….” Sisay’s voice came in the tube.
“What’s suicide?”
“A head-on assault against twenty dragon engines.”
“Yeah,” Gerrard shot back, “suicide for them.” He glanced over his shoulder and sent her a smile. It was not the careless grin he used to give. Something had died in his eyes. Not something but someone. “Is the mighty Captain Sisay afraid of death?”
“Not afraid of it, but neither am I eager for it.”
“It’s time somebody brought death to account,” Gerrard said, as he faced forward. “I’m that somebody.”
Planeshift
©2000 Wizards of the Coast LLC.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering, their respective logos, and all character names and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.
Cover art: Brom
Internal art: Brian “Chippy” Dugan, Dana Knutson, Todd Lockwood, Anson Maddocks, r.k. Post, Mark Tedin, and Anthony Waters
First Printing: February 2000
eBook Publication: March 2018
Original ISBN 9780786918027
Ebook ISBN 9780786966448
640-C5607000-001
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v5.2
a
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Map
Chapter 1: Every Claw, Every Fang
Chapter 2: The Urborgan Beachhead
Chapter 3: He Has Commanded Their Worship
Chapter 4: The Uniter of Keld
Chapter 5: Of Metathran and Merfolk
Chapter 6: The Dragons Primeval
Chapter 7: In Hateful Skies
Chapter 8: In Company of Titans
Chapter 9: Among the Dead, Friends
Chapter 10: Elves of Skyshroud, Elves of Keld
Chapter 11: Metal With Memory
Chapter 12: The Dragon of Yavimaya
Chapter 13: The Warrior’s Feast
Chapter 14: The Battle on the Ice
Chapter 15: New Troops for Urborg
Chapter 16: In Yawgmoth’s Workshop
Chapter 17: The Twice Dead
Chapter 18: Twilight Falls
Chapter 19: Homecomings
Chapter 20: The Dragon of New Argive
Chapter 21: A Commingling of Flesh
Chapter 22: The Bowels of Phyrexia
Chapter 23: Predator as Prey
Chapter 24: Down the Forgetful Tide
Chapter 25: The End of Bargains
Chapter 26: Among Immortals
Chapter 27: A Calling Card for Crovax
Chapter 28: The True Warriors of Keld
Chapter 29: Life Must Ever Battle Death
Chapter 30: The Soul Bomb
Chapter 31: Before the Throne of Crovax
Chapter 32: When Gods Awaken
Chapter 33: Where All the World Fought
Chapter 34: In Waving Fields of Grass
Chapter 35: The Mortal Flaw
Chapter 36: To Bow Before Yawgmoth
Chapter 37: A Highway in the Sky
Dedication
To Scott McGough,
for his valor against filthy rutting lich lord bastards
Acknowledgments
As Yawgmoth will let you know, Dominaria is no easy world to invade. I couldn’t have laid waste to every continent and killed every hero without the help of many colleagues and friends.
Thanks go especially to Jess Lebow, Scott McGough, Daneen McDermott, Tyler Bielman, and Bill Rose. I’d also like to thank Mary Kirchoff and Peter Archer, who made sure the Phyrexian payroll arrived in time to keep the monsters fighting. And of course, I want to thank the fans, every last one of whom is now a subject of the dread lord Yawgmoth. It’s been nice conquering you.
(I know some of you hope Urza and Gerrard can pull this thing off in the next book, but don’t count on it. Yawgmoth and I go way back.)
CHAPTER 1
Every Claw, Every Fang
Multani traced the damage done by the ray cannon blast. The bolt had struck Weatherlight’s hull where the figurehead should have been. It had torn a wide gash through seven inches of solid magnigoth wood and had vaporized the first forecastle rib. In the hold beyond, the energies had hit an ensign’s pack and burned it and its contents away to nothing. If not for that pack, the bolt might have ripped on through a bulkhead and into the crew’s berths. Even so, the damage was severe.
Multani did not peer at the hull breach as would a mere man but felt it from the inside, for he was a nature spirit. He had no true body outside of plant life. He took his form from wood grain. Cellulose fibers were his muscles, heartwood his bones, sap his blood. His true home was the forest of Yavimaya, where he lived in the endless magnigoth trees. That homeland had won its battles, so Multani had taken up residence in the living hull of Weatherlight. Her battles were only beginning.
Multani moved through the wood. The laceration seemed a wound in his own flesh. It brought pain, of course, but it also empowered him to heal the ship.
Charcoal sloughed from the edges of the breach. Sap oozed out in golden beads. Dead wood grew green. New fibers extended into the emptiness. New rings appeared where old ones had been burned away. The growth of centuries replenished itself in minutes. Soon, the first forecastle rib was solid again, and the seven inches of magnigoth gunwale above it had filled in. The rent was healed.
Multani continued his work. What was a ship without a figurehead? Wood flowed with waxlike ease, seeming to pour itself into an invisible mold. A torso took shape, feminine and muscular. A pair of powerful arms swept dramatically backward. Wood formed a long mantle of hair that twined vinelike about strong shoulders. A face—beautiful, mysterious, and clear eyed—appeared within those rampant locks. Any crew member who gazed on that face would have thought the features belonged to Hanna, former navigator of Weatherlight. Certainly, Multani had used Hanna as a mental model. The woman he sought to represent had Hanna’s strength and courage and could borrow Hanna’s face, for she did not have a face of her own. The woman was a goddess so had no face and all faces.
Residing in every vital impulse of the living grain, Multani shaped the likeness. He was sculptor and sculpture both. In mere moments, the masterpiece was complete. He did not need to step back to examine his work. He inhabited it and knew its perfection.
It was just as we
ll. He could not have seen the figurehead anyway. Beyond the bow of Weatherlight was only desert darkness. The ship rested on her landing spines in the midst of sandy Koilos. All around her spread a slumbering army. The festival lanterns had been extinguished. The torch stakes had long since burned out. Not a fire smoldered among the coalition forces. Soldiers—Metathran, human, and elf—slept in their tents. Dragons slumbered beneath the canopy of stars. They slept like the dead, though these were, in fact, the survivors. These mortals had stood against hundreds of thousands of Phyrexian monsters, only later to be laid low by a three-day victory celebration. Wine and revelry. Mortals must be allowed their excesses.
Multani was no mortal. While elves sang, Multani had mended a shattered keel. While humans danced, Multani had grown longer, stronger spars. While Metathran slept, he had fashioned a glorious figurehead, which, in desperate straits, could be a brutal ram for the ship.
Hanna, is it? came a voice in his mind. The words rumbled like a distant waterfall. It was Karn, peering from the ship’s forward lanterns. As Multani lived in every wooden part of the great ship, Karn lived in every metallic one. A golem fashioned of silver, he was the ship’s engineer and, in some ways, the ship’s engine. The face is certainly Hanna’s, but the hair…?
Yes, replied Multani. Smooth, hard magnigoth bark thickened across the figure. It is Hanna, and it is not.
Who then? asked Karn.
It is Gaea, the world soul, Multani responded reverently. This is her war. It is she who is squared off against Yawgmoth.
There was silence for a time. Karn was as much an immortal as Multani, and together the two had been reshaping Weatherlight. Through intuition and inspiration, they transformed her toward her final configuration. She was to be the ultimate weapon in this ultimate war.
It is a good change, Multani.
Thank you. No sooner were these words formed than something shifted in the gloaming darkness beyond the ship, something massive. Did you sense that? Multani asked.
Yes, was all Karn said. There was no time for more. Already he was drawing back from the main engine core. Metal conduits slid free from the neural nexuses of his hands. He broke mental contact with the engine. Massive and slow, the silver man rocked back on his heels. He rose, a bit unsteadily, and turned to climb to the deck.
Multani was faster. He withdrew from the figurehead and coursed up through planks to rise on the forecastle deck. He assembled a body for himself out of a splintered rail and the living hemp of a frayed rope. Fashioned of plant life, Multani stood at Weatherlight’s prow. With knothole eyes, he stared out across the desert of Koilos.
Around the ship in every direction spread dark tents and drowsing soldiers. They numbered fifty thousand. Their empty wine jacks and strewn armor told of the recent revels. Beyond the encamped armies stood the nine metal giants that had helped the army win the Battle of Koilos. These titan engines seemed gods of old, poised at the rim of the world. As huge as ships, as deadly as armies, the titans had left their gargantuan footprints across this barren wastes. Imbedded in those footprints were carapace and bone, all that remained of the creatures that had opposed them. Now the titan engines stood empty, staring darkly at the camp they guarded.
The sudden, massive shift had not occurred within the sleeping camp nor among the titan engines. It had happened beyond them, on the sere rills of Koilos. Though morning was still hours away, an otherworldly red light gleamed on the distant horizon. It lit the eastern hills, and the north, the west, and the south. The full compass of the desert glowed with that horrible light.
A word came to Multani, a word he had sensed in the dying mind of a Phyrexian invader: Rath. It was more than a word. It was a world. It was a twisted other-world built of flowstone, forever expanding, forever mutating into a perfect match of Dominaria. The Lord of Phyrexia had made Rath and filled it with machines of war and demon armies. But why?
Karn strode up behind Multani. Weird light glinted from the silver golem’s burly shoulders. Eyes like fat washers peered out at the feverish hills.
Karn rumbled, “It’s the planeshift. It’s the overlay.”
“The overlay?” Multani echoed hollowly.
“The Rathi overlay. A world of monsters is fusing with our world. Rath is overlaying on top of Dominaria,” Karn replied quietly. “We have no time.”
Karn cupped thickset hands around his mouth. His jaw dropped open. From the cold hollows of his chest came a terrible sound. It seemed the toll of a gigantic bell.
“Awake, Dominaria! Dread is upon you!”
The sound tore out above the sleeping army. It riffled the tents like a cyclone. Elves clutched their ears. Humans lurched up from bedrolls. Metathran staggered into the light of the unnatural morning. The roar crossed the camp and echoed from the circle of titan engines, awaking lights in their skulls. It bore onward over empty sands and into the glowing hills. There it met another roar, more horrible, more inhuman.
No one who had survived the Battle of Koilos would ever forget that sound—a Phyrexian battle cry. When last they had heard it, the noise had risen from hundreds of thousands of fiendish mouths. This morning, it rose from millions.
That second roar woke any whom Karn had not. Every last soldier yanked on clothes and armor, belted on swords and fetched up pikes. Trumpets sounded to-arms. Fighters scrambled to their divisions. Metathran warriors formed up on Commander Agnate. Elves flocked to the banner of Eladamri. Humans and Benalish irregulars streamed toward Weatherlight herself. The once-still camp boiled in confusion, but one fact was clear. They would all be at war again in mere moments.
From the chaotic camp rose a singular figure: Urza Planeswalker. He soared into the air. His lightning-bright robe trailed magnificently away beneath him. Under a mantle of ash-blond hair, Urza’s eyes beamed like twin stars. In one hand, he clutched a gnarled war staff set with glimmering gems. His other hand cradled a sphere of shimmering blue power. That enchanted orb drew him up above even the heads of the titan engines. It also sent his voice out to the armies forming up below.
“Behold, Dominaria. The foe!”
The words were like a thunder stroke. The coalition forces turned to see.
Beyond the shifting legs of the titan engines, Phyrexians took shape. They resolved out of the red haze. In the front ranks came shiny-shelled beasts that seemed gigantic horseshoe crabs. Behind them charged biomechanical centaurs with four arms and glinting pikes. Next came enormous fists of muscle that galloped hungrily forward, floating beasts the size of clouds and the configuration of jellyfish, ambling artifact engines that bristled with blades, and every other imaginable death. All of them approached at a heady charge. They would reach the encamped armies in moments.
Urza’s voice rang from above. “Koilos is ours. We have won it. We have destroyed the portal from Phyrexia. That victory can never be taken from us. Koilos and Yavimaya and Llanowar are ours. We have broken Yawgmoth’s hold. His world cannot overlay completely on ours. These are our strongholds. Koilos. Yavimaya. Llanowar. From these we will win back the rest of the world—for indeed, the rest of the world is lost. Even now, the plane of Rath overlays it. Even now, the denizens of Phyrexia are as plentiful as the denizens of Dominaria. Every native claw, every native fang must fight, or die….”
A savage shout rose from the fifty thousand coalition forces there—not a war cry but the half-shriek of a trapped animal. As Urza continued his harangue, the troops rallied as best they could.
The Metathran—who were forty of the fifty thousand there—formed a wall of powerstone pikes and glinting armor. Commander Agnate stood in the vanguard. His pike was set and his jaw as well. The tattoos that marked his forehead and cheeks were drawn in tight drums. He had lost his blood brother in the Battle of Koilos, and now, staring down the converging armies, he knew he would lose himself.
The Steel Leaf elves of Staprion gathered around Commander Eladamri. He w
as Agnate’s equal in battle prowess and strategy. Square jawed and sharp eyed, Eladamri and his lieutenant Liin Sivi had fought their way out of Rath once. Now Rath had come back to them. They beheld old terrors. The savage-shorn elves around them had never before seen the red and tortured world. They nocked arrows to long bows and braced for the charge. Through slitted goggles, the Steel Leaf elves gazed at their coming doom.
The dragons had been slower to rise than their warm-blooded allies. As they roused, the old antagonism between the disparate nations had slowed them too. Only the ancient Shivan fire dragon Rhammidarigaaz could unite them. He stood in their midst, his wise eyes drawing them. The staff he held shone with a crimson power that warmed the cold-blooded beasts. The magic talismans around his neck sparked with possibility. Rhammidarigaaz need not speak a word. He only spread wide his wings and heaved himself up into the air. A surge of leathery skin, and another, and he lifted away from the ground. Like a startled flock, the dragon nations took to the air. They circled the camp, preparing for the all-out onslaught.
The Benalish irregulars meanwhile had crowded about Weatherlight. Most of them were human warriors, rescued from the military brig during the initial attack on Benalia. Many others were military prisoners of various configurations, goblin and ogre, dwarf and reptile, porcine and bovine. Lastly were Tolarian helionauts and the pilots of Benalia’s ravaged air defenses. These troops lacked the precision of the Metathran and elf forces, but they knew how to fight with their backs to a wall, and they believed in this ship and its commander: Gerrard.