More soldiers approached across the bridge. They whooped in excitement and called out to their comrades.
“He is here. The Uniter has returned!” The warriors of the Skyshroud converged on that single, ancient tree and the man who once had called it home.
Lieutenant Allisor lifted his head. His breath had condensed on his leaf-scale breastplate, and it began to freeze. “We will follow wherever you lead. We will obey your every command. Only tell us, Eladamri—what shall we do now?”
The Uniter kept his head bowed. What could they do? Move the forest, tree by tree, to some warmer place? Carry the sea in buckets down beneath the sun? He was a Uniter, not a god.
He was not a god, but he was the scion of a goddess.
Eladamri stood in the midst of the throng. Already, the aerial bridges groaned under the weight of arriving warriors. Clear eyed at last, he gazed out at the gathering might of his nation.
“Skyshroud elves, I have returned to you, yes, in our most desperate hour. I have been called the Korvecdal, the Uniter of peoples. I shall need now to become the Uniter of worlds.
“Rath is gone. Our world—the only world we’ve known for a thousand years—has now melded with this world. Our home is now this icy wasteland. I do not know where lie the ranges of the Kor and the Vec. I do not know where burn the forges of the Dal. I do not know if they will survive this invasion of world on world. But I know that we will survive.”
Lifting his hands to the heavens and flinging back his head, Eladamri called out in a loud, clear voice, “Freyalise, Lady of Llanowar, Matron of the Steel Leaf elves, I summon thee—I, who became savior of Llanowar, I, who am called Scion of Freyalise.”
She did not so much arrive but appear. First her wide, beautiful, capricious eyes hovered in the midst of the bowed multitude. Then her lips took form, smiling wryly. Flesh filled in the rest of her face and rolled down her slender neck and out into shoulders. Graceful arms formed from those shoulders and a slim torso in foliage armor. Even when her legs took shape, she did not touch ground but floated inches above the wood.
Eladamri had glimpsed her during the revels at Koilos, but now, to face her here in his dying homeland, he could not stand. He sank to his knees and bowed his head. His folk did likewise.
Freyalise drifted over to him. Her hand reached gently outward and stroked his braided hair.
“You have summoned me, Elfchild?”
Lifting his face, Eladamri stared at her glimmering eyes. “Yes, my lady. I have called you to collect on a debt you owe me.”
A flash of pique lit the planeswalker’s eyes. She seemed both angered and amused.
“What debt could I possibly owe you?”
“You needed a savior for your people of Llanowar, and you made me that savior. You made me what I was not—your scion—that your people might be saved. As you have made me your son, I claim you as my mother. As you have used me to save your people, I claim the right to use you to save mine.”
“Use me?” she echoed.
He could not tell if his statement flattered or infuriated her. “Or perhaps you haven’t the power….”
“Haven’t the power?” she repeated irritably. “Do you know that once I cast a spell to turn back the eternal ice? Once I freed the whole world from the grip of winter?”
Eladamri smiled, knowing he had her. “Then it would be a simple thing for you to cast the same protection over this single forest.”
All the amusement was gone from her features. “You presume too much, Elfchild. You are wrong to think that I would be indebted to you or to anyone. You are wrong to believe that you could use me. You are wrong to suppose that being my scion was a duty rather than a privilege.”
His head bowed, Eladamri said, “Forgive me….”
She waved away the apology. “It is the eternal burden of mothers to forgive—or so I have heard. I forgive you, Elfchild, and I will grant your request.”
The air was suddenly hot and wet. The frost on armor melted and ran. Ghosts of steam settled back into the water below. The furnacelike winds of Rath moved once again among the cerema trees.
“You have saved us. You have saved us all,” Eladamri said.
“I have not saved you,” Freyalise said, “only protected you from the ravages of this place. Those ravages include the native warriors here—Keldon warlords. The Skyshroud Forest will be forever warded against them. But that is all I can do. You still must save yourselves. If the elves of Rath have arrived here, the Phyrexian armies have arrived as well.”
“Could you ward them from the forest?” Eladamri asked.
“I cannot. They made Rath. It was their world. If you would save the Skyshroud from them, you must do it yourselves—or better yet, ally with the Keldons and do it together. After all, Eladamri, you are the Uniter.” She smiled at him.
Returning the look, Eladamri asked cheekily, “Why ally with Keldons when I am the friend of a planeswalker in a mechanical combat suit?”
“Because I must return to the engine,” Freyalise replied. Already, she was fading from view. “I’ll remain as long as I can, but Kristina and I go for a worse fight.” All that remained now were her eyes and lips. “You have quite a fight before you.”
CHAPTER 5
Of Metathran and Merfolk
Sea winds hurled back Agnate’s silvery hair. Waves parted around his feet and rolled in dual wakes out behind him. In one blue-skinned hand, he held his powerstone pike. In the other, he clutched a long pair of reins, woven from kelp. The reins extended taut down into the turbid sea and attached to a pair of harnesses. The greater dolphins that wore the harnesses swam in precise synchrony beneath the glinting tides. Agnate stood upon their backs. All around him, his Metathran army rode the glorious beasts. They and Gerrard’s Benalish irregulars and Voda merfolk surged toward the main isle of Urborg.
It felt great to be in battle again.
The fight for the outer isle had not been a battle but a slaughter. The Phyrexians had stood as if in a trance as Agnate and his Metathran army clove their heads. No adversary should die that way, but Agnate had been ordered to take the isle. With the help of Weatherlight and the titan engines, he had. It had been a military necessity to win an Urborgan beachhead from which the true battle could be launched.
“Prepare for landing!” Agnate shouted. He lifted high his powerstone pike. Corded muscles rippled beneath his shoulder tattoos.
Behind him, forty thousand other weapons rose—battle axes, swords, maces, tridents. As metal filled the air, so did a battle cry. It was a deep and pure sound from countless throats, queer like the drone of war pipes. It echoed from the shimmering sea and mixed with roaring billows.
Another call answered beneath the waves. Leviathan songs bellowed through the deeps. Grampuses and cachalots twined their mournful howls. Humpbacks and rorquals added angry shrieks. Porpoise whistles and dolphin clicks, sea cow moans and otter growls—every denizen of the deep came in company of their rulers, the Vodalian merfolk.
Not only did sea creatures bear forward the amphibious assault, but they also prepared the shore. Any Phyrexian who strayed too near the sea was dragged below by tentacles and ripped apart by fangs. In saltwater marshes lurked lightning eels. In freshwater streams flashed schools of piranha. Swordfish and hammerheads and rays made certain Agnate and his troops could come to ground at a run and drive far inland. In their wake would rise the conch-armored Vodalian warriors, who would hold the beaches.
While the music of the deep played beneath Metathran feet, another song swelled the skies. Weatherlight was the chorus master. From extreme distance, she sang among the clouds. Her fluted figurehead piped shrilly. Her ray cannons moaned. All around her, lesser craft made their own music. Helionaut rotors drummed the heavens. Jump-ships coursed on keening wings.
The whole world rushed to purge Urborg of Phyrexians.
A
gnate raised a cheer as Weatherlight roared by low overhead. Cyclones churned the water in her wake. Her gunwales blazed. Energy melted Phyrexians in their trenches. It ripped out gun embankments even before they could hurl flack. Weatherlight shot over the shore and strafed the swamps. Her aerial armada flanked her. Helionauts peppered the woods with exploding quarrels. Jump-ships wove among trees and flushed monsters from hiding.
“Charge!” Agnate shouted.
The Metathran’s turn had come. On dolphin back, they surged to shore. Sand churned in the water as grampuses and cachalots beached themselves. Blue warriors leaped from their backs and ran up the berm. No Phyrexians stood on the beach, slain already by sea monsters or the aerial assault. In the swampy wood beyond, though, they were thick.
Powerstone pike before him, Agnate charged through a curtain of moss. In the darkness, something leaped toward him. His pike smashed into it. The blade chewed its way through flesh. Agnate had only a moment to glimpse the creature—a scab-skinned warrior with horns protruding from shoulders and skull—before the dead thing fell against him. He let go of his pike—it would eat its way through the shuddering corpse—and drew the battle axe from his belt.
One sloshing step deeper into the wood, and the axe cleft through the head of another monster. It had been a goat-skulled thing. Now it was only a warm mass in the swamp. In the follow-through of his swing, Agnate stooped to snatch up his powerstone pike. He glimpsed a huge and leathery fist falling on him. He set his pike in the muck.
The fist descended like a hammer. Agnate sank down away from it. His pike rammed between scaly knuckles. It ate through the flesh stretched there and burrowed upward. With a shriek, the monster hauled its bloodied hand away. Only then did Agnate see what it was.
The gargantua reared up between the trees. It was a meaty beast, twice the height of a mammoth and eight times the bulk. On two hulking talons it stood, its belly scales drawn tight in a shriek of agony. It clutched its wounded fist and bellowed through fangs.
The gargantua was a mountainous monster, and mountains were meant for climbing.
Agnate swung his axe like a pick, chunking a foothold in the monster’s leg. He stepped onto the broad blade and flung himself upward. One hand grasped the leathery wattle beneath the beast’s throat. The other yanked the axe from the creature’s leg.
With its healthy claw, the gargantua reached up and grabbed the Metathran commander. Its fingers flexed around him. In moments, his macerated flesh would spew out between those claws….
Agnate clutched his axe beside him. The blade bit through the gargantua’s scale and muscle, down to tendons. They snapped like cables under pressure. Hot oil gushed over Agnate. The beast’s claws went slack. Agnate slipped downward.
The gargantua wasn’t through with him. Between its injured hands, it caught him. Though claws dangled limply from its palms, the pressure of those arms was inescapable. The gargantua lifted its captive to its fangy mouth.
Agnate struggled to yank his axe free, but it was pinned at his side. Noxious breath billowed over him. He kicked furiously, trying to escape. It was no use.
The gargantua’s jaws dropped open. It shoved its prey within. Fangs shuddered. Blood gushed hot up the beast’s throat and out across Agnate. It was not his blood but the Phyrexian’s.
Suddenly free, Agnate hurled himself from the beast’s jaws. He fell toward the swamp, not even trying to get his feet beneath him. As he plunged, he saw a gaping hole in the beast’s chest, and he knew what had happened. The powerstone pike had eaten its way down the arm of the beast and out the elbow. It had jutted out only to pierce the monster’s chest. In moments, the pike had chewed into the gigantic heart of the thing. It died where it stood, its own oil-blood gushing up its neck.
Agnate landed on his back in the swamp. Gripping his axe, he got his feet beneath him and lunged away—only just in time.
The gargantua fell like a tree. Wind rushed up around it, escaping the enormous bulk. It struck the swamp with a huge splash and sank into the deep muck. A gassy sound came as it settled.
Struggling out of the mud, Agnate fetched up against a tree. All around him, Metathran ran onward through the swamp. They fought and felled Phyrexians.
A rattling sound came from the back of the gargantua. The powerstone pike that had killed it dug its way out the spine.
Agnate shoved away from the tree, hung his axe from his belt, and strode to the fallen beast. He climbed onto the island of its hunched back and grabbed his pike.
Through torn curtains of moss, Agnate glimpsed merfolk warriors on the sand. Seawater streamed from their chitinous armor. They walked on fins transformed into legs. In their hands, they held wickedly barbed tridents. Some had killed Phyrexians already and hurled their bodies to the sharks.
“Good,” Agnate huffed as he strode down the length of the gargantua. There was no point advancing unless the rear was secure. Flinging mud and blood from his arms, he loped forward through the marsh.
The initial fury of the charge was gone. Now all that remained was grim-jawed killing.
A Phyrexian scuta, seeming a giant horseshoe crab, scuttled through the marsh toward him. Water churned off its black skull shield. A once-human face stretched absurdly over that contorted bone. Two long, barbed legs lashed out. One grasped Agnate’s thigh. It yanked, intent on pulling him beneath its shell. No man dragged there would ever emerge.
With a single swipe of his axe, Agnate severed the first limb and leaped over the other. A mud-slick boot caught on the brow ridge of the beast. Agnate vaulted to the creature’s back. He heaved the axe down overhead. It cracked the shell and bit shallowly into the brain. Agnate hauled sideways on the haft and cracked the wound wider.
The scuta bucked, struggling to throw him off.
Agnate yanked his axe free, hauled it high, and buried its head in the same wound. The cut went deep this time, severing a critical nerve nexus. The scuta slumped in the swamp.
Agnate leaped from its back. His powerstone pike was tucked under one arm, and his axe swung overhead. He ran onward. Mud sucked at his boots but couldn’t slow him. No foes moved among the trees ahead. Glistening-oil gleamed in rainbows atop the swamp water, and Phyrexian corpses littered the ground. There were plenty of blue-skinned corpses there too, but the Metathran had won this swamp.
With a high-pitched whistle, Agnate signaled the merfolk to advance and hold the terrain. Meanwhile, he and his troops charged onward.
The ground rose. The dead trees fell away. Reeds crowded the banks of the wetlands. Agnate labored through them into a true jungle. Though other Metathran had gone before him, hacking at the man-sized leaves and thick green stalks, the brake was still a visual wall. The shouts and screams ahead told of a fierce battle in the wood.
At a full run, Agnate chopped away a thorn vine that barred his path. He plunged from the relative cool of the swamp into the steam heat of the jungle. His second stride flushed a swarm of mosquitoes from the undergrowth. In moments, they covered every inch of his exposed flesh. Only the mud saved him. He rubbed his face. His hand came away slick with his own blood.
Just ahead, the line of charge had stalled. The Phyrexians were making a stand—a suicidal stand against this many Metathran. They wanted to channel the advance, but why?
Whistling a complex signal to the Metathran with him, Agnate hung his battle axe on his belt and slung the powerstone pike over his shoulder. Then he took to the trees. He climbed. It was the unenviable limitation of most warriors to think only in two dimensions. Agnate and his brethren had been trained to battle in three. Like a troop of arboreal primates, they clambered up the green stalks all around.
Quickly, the roar of battle dropped away below them. The vines provided natural ropes, reaching to the first canopy. Tree to tree, the Metathran advanced. It was another world up there, a battlefield the Phyrexians had ignored. Unopposed and unnoticed, Agnate and
a scant dozen others picked their way over the battle lines.
Below them, the fight was ferocious. To one side crowded the scaly and scabrous hordes of Phyrexia—to the other the blue muscles of the Metathran. Where the two sides met, blade and claw tore flesh from limbs. Bodies mounded. Already the dead lay in a broad U shape, with more and more Metathran flooding into the center.
Agnate hurled himself across empty air to a tree beyond the battle line. Scaling to its upper crotch, he ran out along a thick bough and leaped to an adjacent tree. Ahead the boles dwindled into a swamp—broader, deeper, more horrid than the first. Not even dead trees stood in the black water. Nothing wholesome could live in this slough. Nothing lived—but much had died. The air was rank with the gases of decay. Giant flies swarmed above bubbling pockets. Skeletal figures lay in the brackish water.
“Channeling us toward a swamp?” Agnate wondered to himself. Then he saw why.
In the center of that putrid swamp circled three grotesque figures. They had once been Metathran and still walked upright, but there the similarity ended. In place of feet they stood on scabby stumps. In place of hands they had vicious claws. Their heads had been flayed of skin and jutted forward on long, grotesque necks. Where the necks joined their shoulders, a great mass of pulsing matter sprouted. The stuff was barely contained within a sac of veins and membranes. Agnate had been trained to know what those globular spores were and what these creatures were bred to do.
“Plague spreaders,” he hissed.
These poor souls had been turned into living colonies of contagion. Their brain stems were infected with a strain of plague that formed an unwholesome pocket of spores. Blood vessels and support structures grew to nourish the pestilence. When fully ripened, the membranes would split. Wind would carry the contagion out to slay any Metathran for miles around.
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