The Thran

by J. Robert King

Yawgmoth smiled, his eyes swimming with dreams. “It will be a world of progressive generation—of phyresis. It will be a world called Phyrexia.”

  The city was prepared for war. Ray cannons surmounted each of the five aerial gates. A great spherical boulder was positioned to close the ground gate. Ballistae along the rest of the wall bore powerstone-tipped bolts that could shatter an enemy ship’s engine core. New hyperbolic mirrors hung from each side of the extrusion, with crews trained to focus mirror-array beams on ground armies. Every day, more caravels were requisitioned and retrofitted for air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. The Halcyte guard had doubled in size, each soldier groomed for fanatical loyalty and trained in the use of Glacian’s arsenal of new weaponry. The health corps were equally numerous, well equipped, and driven. They moved among the populace administering serum, clearing out the final few cases of phthisis, and stockpiling contagions for use in strafing runs against the invaders. Halcyon’s artificers worked day and night on designs Glacian had left for a powerstone charging machine. When activated, such a device would charge an empty powerstone, absorbing the life force of every plant, animal, and soldier in a large radius.

  Halcyon was not the only city braced for siege. The four other loyal city-states—Nyoron, Seaton, Phoenon, and Orleason—were similarly accoutered and entrenched. Each could withstand the full fury of the Thran Alliance—as the barbarians called their motley force. The Thran Alliance wanted Halcyon and her champion, Yawgmoth. They would send only token forces at the other city-states. Once those forces were overrun, Yawgmoth would call his loyal eugenicist soldiers from the cities to converge on the barbarian army. The war was as good as won already.

  Yawgmoth’s greatest weapon of all was the single powerstone he held in his hand. The size of two clenched fists, the crystal was perfectly formed. Its facets were flawless and manifold. Its core was as dark as the Blind Eternities. This crystal would capture the essence of his paradise world and carry it into the Caves of the Damned. There the stone would be split, creating a permanent portal from Dominaria to Phyrexia.

  Dyfed stood beside him in the core of Phyrexia. The stench of death was gone. The oozy corpse had been cleared away. No trace of the dragon’s crumbling bulk remained. Yawgmoth and his healing corps had meticulously catalogued each tissue. Bits of the planeswalking beast filled the old infirmary in the city. The sphere it had ruled had been scoured. Not a fragment of the world’s former master remained. Yawgmoth was the master of Phyrexia now.

  “You’re certain you want to perform the ritual?” Dyfed asked. “A mortal man might not survive the onrush of energies. Only a planeswalker—”

  “Planeswalkers, mortals…” Yawgmoth dismissed. “I have dissected the planeswalker who ruled here. I’ve peered into every tissue, parsed every organ. There was not a single mystic part. He was a biologic creature, as am I. It was this chamber that made him a god, and this chamber will make me its god also. I will survive.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I have felt it,” Yawgmoth replied. His voice rang with metallic grandeur as he paced outward along the sphere. He walked until he stood on one curved wall, perpendicular to Dyfed. He crouched, his hand fondly tracing across the inner belly of the sphere. “I felt it. As I tricked each scale free of the dead creature, as I conveyed each sinew outward, I felt the hunger of the chamber grow. Piece by piece, it lost its last master. Piece by piece, it has accepted me as its new master.”

  Dyfed crossed arms over her chest. “You will be a conduit for every energy in the world. Actuality and potentiality will pass through you to imprint the stone. Once begun, the power surge will continue to completion—even if you are burned away in the process.”

  “I have already become a conduit for these energies. I can see through the eyes of the serpents on the first sphere. I can sense each ember lying dormant in the fourth-level furnaces. I can course along the crystalline base of the oil sea. I can make the world breathe and cease breathing.”

  “But you aren’t a planeswalker, Yawgmoth,” Dyfed reminded.

  Yawgmoth’s eyes flashed, and he stood. “I will become one.”

  “You cannot become one,” Dyfed said. “It is something a person is born with. It is a seed of greatness. Only one in a billion has it. The seed is not in you.”

  “How do you know?” Yawgmoth demanded, striding down the wall toward her.

  “Because planeswalkers can sense it in others. It is a smell of destiny.”

  Yawgmoth’s lips drew to a straight, white line. His eyelids quivered tautly. “You are wrong about me. I am destiny incarnate. I will change the world for all time. I will change the Multiverse.”

  Dyfed flashed a cocksure grin. “All right. You want to be a god. Let’s see how well you do. I’ll be back to pick up the stone—if you survive.” She disappeared, leaving Yawgmoth alone in the inner sanctum.

  The moment she was gone, the chamber took hold of him. There was no physical change. The sphere remained intact, but muscles of magic converged around him and lifted him high. It was like being caught in the convulsion of a gigantic heart. The intense pressure burst his mind wide open. He spewed out through the arteries and vessels of the world. He moved through the labyrinth of pipes on the third sphere. His consciousness flowed through serpent waters and leapt among flea machines. Thoughts tricked along electrical conduits and rolled through cascades of oil. Forests became neural networks. Fault lines became creaking joints. Moraines became muscles.

  His former body was but a ruptured skin, and then even less than that—not even a memory. The world was his body. It had always been. It would always be. The cosmologies of human minds were simplistic figures drawn in dirt. Immutable morality became an ooze of chemicals across cell membranes. No single thought held before that moment was large enough or loud enough or true enough to remain in Yawgmoth’s transformed mind. Every mote of dust was part of him, every creature was his to command. He could comprehend the whole in a single thought and could sense any single particle by merely willing it.

  He breathed. The world breathed. Ten thousand furnaces fired on the fourth level. Soot rolled from a hundred thousand chimneys on the second. The sun intensified above the first. Cyclones spawned and danced across the world, tickling it savagely. A sudden terror welled in every beast and plant across the spheres, a terror that gave way in the next moments to trembling ecstasy.

  They knew. The dying world knew it was no longer dying.

  We are alive. We are alive! WE ARE ALIVE!

  It was recognition and adulation and obeisance all in one.

  The world flooded through him and into the crystal he held. All that was real etched its perfect replica there.

  Suddenly, the world retreated around Yawgmoth. He shrank. The sensation was like plummeting from a great height. The mind that moments before had comprehended a whole universe now resided in the minuscule brain pan of a normal man. Something had intruded between the god and his cosmos—something or someone.

  He realized his hands were empty. The powerstone was gone. Yawgmoth staggered, going dizzily to his knees.

  “You needn’t bow before me,” Dyfed quipped, suddenly beside him. “A simple thanks would be enough.”

  Gritting his teeth, Yawgmoth gasped, “I had no intention of bowing before you.”

  “You survived, Yawgmoth,” Dyfed said evenly. “That is good. I’ve come to fetch you. The permanent portal is open. I cracked the stone atop a mirror pedestal. Nothing could close the portal except an identical charged powerstone placed on the pedestal.” She offered him a hand, and he took it.

  Before he could rise, Dyfed pulled him away from the world. They sailed through empty spaces—the planeswalker tall and regal, and the erstwhile god crouched and dizzy. In moments, they arrived on the first sphere. The Blind Eternities fell away, leaving Yawgmoth and Dyfed to stand on the grassy plains beside the gorge forest. Just before them yawne
d a large, round doorway into darkness.

  Dyfed gestured through it. “Beyond lie the Caves of the Damned.”

  Letting go of her hand, Yawgmoth strode through the scintillating curtain of darkness. He stepped out into a night-black cave.

  Directly before Yawgmoth stood the pedestal Dyfed had spoken of—a low platform edged by mirrors. The light of Phyrexia shone dazzlingly from it. On the far side of the pedestal sloped a large book made of steel and glass. It was carved with strange glyphs—planeswalker spells that anchored the portal in space and time. The whole assemblage was connected with radiating wires to the ceiling of the cave.

  It was an elaborate contraption, but it had a simple purpose—to open a permanent portal between Dominaria and Phyrexia. The mirror pedestal was a giant lock, and in the midst of its wires lay the key—the broken powerstone. Though Yawgmoth had once infused that stone with the essence of a whole world, the crystal now lay black and empty in ragged halves atop the pedestal.

  Yawgmoth reached past the wires. He touched the stones and felt their smoldering heat. A few final sparks of power jittered along edges of crystal. Taking a deep breath, he lifted the two halves of the sundered crystal. There was no sense allowing someone to duplicate the stone and close the portal. Yawgmoth placed the halves in a pocket of his robe. He would have to hide these husks in a safe place.

  “A safe place…” A sharp-toothed smile broke across his face.

  There came a whispering moan from the cave beyond. Yawgmoth lifted his head and made out the source of the sound.

  The next cavern was crowded wall to wall with watchful, fearful faces. They peered out of utter darkness. Their eyes squinted against the glow that enveloped him. Beneath slitted eyes were cheeks ravaged in phthisis. Patients lay in their treatment capsules—a cemetery of open caskets, the dead awaiting resurrection. Among the capsules stood armored and veiled health corps workers. They were accoutered in the same smooth white metal as the capsules. Patients and healers waited in silence. They waited to enter the sun-bright door.

  Yawgmoth lifted his hands before them. He shouted in a voice that was half laugh, “Welcome, my children! Welcome to Phyrexia!”

  * * *

  —

  Yawgmoth was a study in long-suffering sympathy as he sat on the metal catwalk beside Glacian’s healing capsule. Above the white scarf that protected mouth and nose, Yawgmoth’s eyes were grim slits. His hands hung in resignation between his knees, and he stared at the emptied frameworks all around him. The quarantine cave had been vacated of all its other patients and seclusion caskets. Every last one was en route to the new infirmary. Every last one except Glacian.

  “—says he is no longer willing to submit to these…unusual…procedures,” Rebbec delicately translated to Yawgmoth. She, too, wore a mask to protect her from the contagious man. “He says he is done with skin grafts and needles and…enzymatic salves.”

  “He would be dead were it not for them,” Yawgmoth objected, eyes fixed on the healer’s bag at his feet.

  “You and your eugenicist monsters!” slurred Glacian nonsensically. “You and your mad scientists! I’ve seen the hack-sawed limbs. I’ve seen the faces stitched back together. I’ve seen the abominations you hide away in these living sarcophagi!”

  “He says he’s finished with the healing corps. He says he doesn’t want any more treatments. He says he wants his machines hooked back up,” Rebbec said.

  “His machines are powerstone-driven,” Yawgmoth protested. “They were killing him. Haven’t you told him about the new infirmary? Haven’t you told him about the new world?”

  Exasperation pinched Rebbec’s face. “Of course I’ve told him. He doesn’t believe it. He thinks it’s just another of your tricks.”

  Yawgmoth stood suddenly, looming over the figure lying—leprous and pathetic—within the treatment capsule.

  “There are oil baths. Glistening oil. It soaks into skin and reconstitutes it. It gets into the blood and helps to draw powerstone radiation away from tissues. There are new procedures. Some patients are stronger than ever before. There is even a promising new therapy—implanting an uncharged powerstone into the thigh muscle to draw excess energies into it. Those with the implants have been virtually healed. Their own immune systems are redoubled. They are growing new skin, new muscle, new tissues. Some are even getting taller—”

  “No more!” hissed Glacian. “You’ve already dragged me down to this crypt. You’ve already flayed my life away tissue by tissue. You can’t take me to another world and make me a monstrosity!”

  “He says he doesn’t want to go,” Rebbec said.

  Yawgmoth stared a moment longer at the ruin of scabs and scales within the hermetic folds of the capsule.

  “Well, I was going to wait until you were in the infirmary to tell you the good news.”

  “What good news?” Rebbec asked.

  Yawgmoth glanced at her. “I think I might have discovered why your husband hasn’t responded to any of the treatments that have worked for others.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” growled Glacian. “He has no cures. Only death!”

  “Hush. I want to hear this!” she told him. “What is it, Yawgmoth? What have you found?”

  “Nothing! He’s found nothing!”

  “It goes back to the infection. He was stabbed by Gix with a charged powerstone.”

  Glacian spluttered, “Yes! Gix! Your henchman!”

  “Hush,” Rebbec insisted.

  “And the powerstone imploded shortly after it was removed from the wound,” Yawgmoth continued. “It was damaged in the attack. A sliver of that stone might remain in him, a charged sliver. Perhaps that is why his degeneration has continued. The sliver is contaminating him. If I could just reopen the wound and remove it—”

  “There is no sliver!” Glacian roared.

  Rebbec looked at Yawgmoth, her eyes searching. “You really think this is true? You really think a hunk of charged stone remains in him? You really think that removing it could make him better?”

  Yawgmoth’s eyes were utterly serious. “I do.”

  Drawing a deep breath, Rebbec whispered, “I don’t want him to feel any pain.”

  Yawgmoth nodded. He reached into his bag of implements, slipped gloves onto his hands, and pulled forth a readied needle bladder. With a swift, expert motion, he jabbed the needle into Glacian’s hip and squeezed.

  “I can’t believe you let him—” Glacian slumped, as if dead, his eyes rolling back in lidless sockets.

  Rebbec released a small cry and leaned over her husband’s face. Her fingers hovered fretfully just above his ravaged features. She wanted to close those rolling eyes—could not stand the look of them—but she knew better than to touch him.

  Meanwhile, Yawgmoth busied himself over the scar on Glacian’s abdomen. The wound had closed and reopened numerous times over the years, and it cracked like a milkweed pod splitting open. Yawgmoth pulled, revealing a mounded bolus of pus. It was packed and curdy beneath the infected spot.

  “I’ll have to widen the cut,” Yawgmoth said.

  Rebbec turned her eyes away. “Whatever you need to do.” She stooped to pull another pair of gloves from the medical bag and donned them. Gently closing her husband’s eyes, she caressed his scaling face. Soft tears dropped onto his pillow. “It’s going to be all right, my love. He’s going to heal you. He’s going to heal us all.”

  Yawgmoth worked busily. He was gingerly removing chunks of white-and-red fibrous material from the wound. The pocket of infection had formed beneath the muscular wall of Glacian’s abdomen, packed in beside his internal organs. Yawgmoth scooped the last of the material free, snatched up a fistful of gauze, doused it with alcohol, and swabbed out the interior of the bolus.

  Despite the tranquilizer, Glacian bucked in the healing capsule.

  Rebbec hugged his jiggling head and w
hispered soothing words.

  Yawgmoth finished with the gauze. Rebbec glimpsed a large powerstone in his hand—perhaps a light source—and then Yawgmoth craned over the suppurating sore, peering in. He gave a small gasp of discovery and seemed to reach one arm in, almost to the elbow. When he drew it out, blood streamed along the hairs of his arm and beneath the insufficient glove. Between two fingers of the glove, he clasped a glowing sliver of powerstone. Its gleam was dimmed beneath a sinewy capsule that had grown around it. Sanguine mucus encased the sliver. Through its sheath, the crystal glowed.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is what has been killing your husband.”

  Rebbec stared at the flesh-encapsulated stone. Hatred and hope warred in her eyes.

  “He’ll get better now, you watch,” Yawgmoth said as he set aside the sliver. Already, he had pulled a needle from his pack, threaded it, and was stitching up the wound. “You watch.”

  Yawgmoth was clutched in the heart of his world, soul and essence transformed. He was not simply in the heart of it, but in every extremity as well. He was the blood of it. His consciousness coursed potently out through his world. It was his love, this place—this beautiful, vast, powerful place. It loved him as well. They were one, he secure within the core of the world, and the world enlivened by the aching ecstasy of him.

  He loved the coiling hillsides of the first level, the serpents that wove themselves among the sinews of the land, the snaking rivers, the scaly leaves, the lithe and curving backbones of the hills….

  He loved the vast new infirmary, taking shape even that moment as his mind breathed through its winding halls. Rebbec had done well. Her building designs had instinctively captured the heart of the place. Unlike her Halcyon designs, which strained toward the sky in futile longing, these structures melded with the ground. There was no longer need of ascension. Paradise lay all around. The great hall of the infirmary had the tapered form of a lizard’s ribcage, with slender arches meeting overhead in a long and sinuous vault. The phthitics eating within were like creatures living in the belly of a great beast—and so they were: the great, benevolent, bountiful beast Yawgmoth. Their healing capsules were no longer caskets for the living dead. Now the white chambers lay stacked and decorous beside the infirmary, eggs in a serpent’s nest. The folk within, like wurmlings growing fangs and wings, were being healed of their phthisis.