The Thran

by J. Robert King

  “This is our moment. The long stairway of history at last gives out onto the broad paradise of destiny. We are stepping through the doorway of futures.

  “Of course these armies have come. Of course they want to slam that door in our faces, trap us in with them, drag us down those stairs we have so tirelessly climbed, haul us down to their Caves of the Damned—but that is not where we belong.

  “We are no longer among the damned. We have risen out of disease and death into life. We have cured the phthisis that ravages the rest of the world, and now we are curing ourselves even of mortality. From a great distance, you saw the Phyrexian guard. You saw they have the strength of ten mortals. You saw they could fight on when mortals would die. From a great distance you saw the new immortals, and soon they will not be distant. Soon you will be among them and be one of them. They are our destiny.

  “This is our moment, citizens of Halcyon. Rise with me into the bright future. Fight beside me against the covetous past.

  “I call all those not actively engaged in the defense of the city—I call you to enter Phyrexia now, to join the legion of angels. Shuck the mortal coil and dress yourselves in immortality.

  “We are ascending. We are becoming Phyrexians. We are becoming gods.”

  * * *

  —

  The sirens had been sounding for hours. Not a soul remained in the temple. Everyone had cleared the streets.

  Many civilians descended to the cave beneath the city and from there to Phyrexia to enlist. Others fled to their homes. Those who had shutters secured them. Those who did not nailed tabletops over their windows. The Thran soldiers were coming—that was the explanation they gave to any Halcyte guards who happened by. Soon not a civilian soul remained in the streets or the temple.

  Not a soul except Rebbec. She slouched within the temple’s uppermost parapet. She had not moved since the stone-charger was detonated. The horrible sight of it, the terrifying quake, the blast of sound—it had knocked her to her side, and she had not risen. She had glimpsed the mayhem in the all-seeing facets of her temple. The image of Yawgmoth came next, and his voice boomed from the altar out across the world. He urged the people to become what they had beheld.

  Rebbec already had. She’d become what she’d beheld, and she’d beheld atrocity.

  “There you are,” came the dulcet voice of Yawgmoth behind her. He’d climbed the stairs that led to this secret parapet. “You need to come down. It will not be safe for you up here when the siege begins.”

  Rebbec turned and looked up at him. He was magnificent, dark and battle scarred in the rubefacient light of dusk.

  “It has never been safe. Only now, I recognize the peril.”

  Yawgmoth smiled dazzlingly. He crouched beside her. The smell of smoke and sweat suffused his clothes. He rested a hand on her shoulder.

  “It is easy to climb if you keep looking up. It gets hard only when you look down.” The dying sun gleamed in his eyes. “Now you’ve looked down and seen how far you’ve climbed. It is deep and dark, and it is behind you. You’ve looked down and gotten spooked—”

  “Not just spooked,” Rebbec interrupted. “It isn’t just dark down there. It’s horrible. Look at the people we’ve killed. You can’t even look at them. They’re gone, wiped from the world.”

  Yawgmoth’s brow knotted. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Yes, I did. I’m implicated in all of this. The city I’ve built. The husband I’ve helped invent weapon after weapon. The man I’ve guided to the pinnacle of Halcyon—”

  Laughter interrupted her, not derisive but open and easy. “You think too much of yourself. You think Glacian would not have made weapons without you?”

  “Who else could understand him? Who else could interpret for him?”

  “You think I would not have ascended Halcyon without you?”

  “Who else could understand you? Could interpret for you?” Rebbec said. She shook her head. “All this talk of ascending—you learned that from me, but you improved on it. I used hope, but you used fear. The Halcytes arose out of fear.”

  “What does it matter why they rose?” Yawgmoth said. “They rose.”

  Rebbec flung her hand out toward the battlefield, the scoured earth, and the wide, shallow trench. “This is why it matters. This…”

  Yawgmoth’s face was dusky. “You’re tired. You aren’t thinking straight.”

  “I’m thinking straight for the first time in years,” she said, turning to push his hand off of her shoulder.

  Instead of releasing her, Yawgmoth slid his arm around her back and slipped his other under her legs.

  “This is what I have done for our city, our people.” He stood, raising her from the cold crystal and cradling her in his arms. “I’ve lifted them. I’m still lifting them. I’m carrying them away from danger and into hope.” He descended the parapet stairs.

  Rebbec studied his face. His brow and jaw were so strong, girded in shadow. She saw the sky in his eyes. Distant clouds scudded through the last shreds of sunlight. Hundreds of dark ships circled out among them. Every once in a while, a ray cannon on the wall would discharge. A golden beam flicked outward to dissipate before reaching the Thran ships. Nearest of all, hovering in a weighty halo above the city walls, was the recharged and reprovisioned Halcyte fleet.

  Rebbec slumped hopelessly in his arms.

  * * *

  —

  Halcyon was ready.

  The Null Sphere turned every Thran artifact creature against the invaders. The battle was fast and furious. Blood and bone mixed with oil and steel. The Null Sphere glared balefully at the crimson battle. From that metal moon, Yawgmoth reached down to clutch every Thran machine. He did not released them until thousands of artifact creatures and Thran troops lay in broken pieces on the desert.

  Since the skirmish, Phyrexian warships and ray cannons kept the Thran fleet at a radius of four miles. Halcyte guards controlled the city. Phyrexian guards controlled the under-city. Rebbec rested in her home. Glacian languished in his cave.

  There was nothing more Yawgmoth could do in Halcyon, and so he worked. His laboratory was Phyrexia. The plane was suffused with power, shunted down from the lofty Null Sphere. Yawgmoth made use of every erg.

  On the first sphere, Commander Gix enlisted the hundreds of citizen volunteers who had come to become Phyrexians. Most could not imagine the vast alterations in store for them. Once the changes began, none would want to return to the former weakness.

  On the second sphere, artificers worked frantically to build more stone-chargers. Yawgmoth allowed the corners of his mind to aid these endeavors. He spent only enough thought on them to keep the workers hard at their tasks.

  Yawgmoth’s true attention was spent in the fourth sphere laboratories. There, the vat priests had set aside their work on phyresis in order to study virulent plagues. Yawgmoth wanted a contagion that could infect hundreds of thousands on the plains but would never rise to Halcyon. The priests experimented with diseases that could survive only in desert heat, or that could be packed into powder bombs, or that would affect only non-humans. Lord Yawgmoth had shown great foresight to keep the barbarian emissaries alive for such experiments. By replicating Glacian’s life-sustaining machines, the priests had assured that each ambassador could suffer many deaths before his or her body gave out entirely. It had been a bit of poetry. The emissaries had brought a deadly message to Halcyon, and now they would bear back an even deadlier one. Perhaps eight ambassadorial coffins to the eight allied nations would be the best way to send specific plagues to minotaurs, elves, dwarves, cat folk, and humans.

  Clutched in the heart of Phyrexia, Yawgmoth smiled. That would be lovely, indeed. A shudder of delight moved through him and through all the world.

  Then there was someone with him in the inner sanctum. No one came here. No one knew the way in. No one was welcome here, and yet s
omeone was with him.

  He did not withdraw from the clutching heart of the world. He wanted to remain a god, for he knew who this must be.

  Hello, Dyfed.

  “Hello, Yawgmoth,” she said, her voice steely in the darkness. “I noticed you’d gotten yourself into a war. I wondered how you fared.”

  Well enough, as you can see. Yawgmoth could sense her presence there in the inner sphere, like the pressure of a tumor in his head. Well enough.

  “Yes,” she replied. She walked. Her feet made a slow, clicking, maddening noise on the shell. “You are doing well enough. But what about your people?”

  My people? The Phyrexians?

  “Your people, the Halcytes. The Thran. Your people and my own people.”

  They are doing well, as you can see.

  “I can see nothing of the sort. There is tyranny. There is civil war. There is genocide,” Dyfed responded. “I should have listened to Glacian.”

  Listened to Glacian?

  “He knew who you were from the beginning, Yawgmoth. He knew what you were capable of. He warned everyone—his wife and me too—but we all thought he was deluded,” Dyfed said. “Your lies cannot hide the atrocities any longer.”

  What atrocities?

  “This phthisis, for one. It was never contagious, as you well knew. You used it to quarantine your enemies and promote your friends. You even learned how to infect a healthy body, so that you controlled who was stricken and who was healthy.”

  You are just another skeptic. I have healed the phthisis.

  “You have devised a remedy that gives you complete control over your people. Heal the body but possess the soul.”

  I am not harming anyone—

  “You’re harming everyone. The only ones you cannot harm are the ones I took away from you—the Elder Council.”

  You took them! Where are they?

  “They are safe.”

  Why have you come here?

  “I made you a god, and I can take away your godhood.”

  Yawgmoth was silent for a time. He felt Phyrexia drawing back from him. He felt Dyfed’s mind forcing its way between him and his world. From the thousand places it roamed in Phyrexia, Yawgmoth’s mind withdrew. He shrank and coalesced from divinity to humanity. In moments, he stood beside Dyfed, in the midst of that dark space.

  “I suppose you can do whatever you want.” He smiled grimly. “You are, after all, a planeswalker. I am only a man—and your prisoner. I thought perhaps I was more. I thought perhaps I would save my people.”

  “The true planeswalker among you, a nascent planeswalker, will rise to save your people. But you will come with me. You will surrender Phyrexia and Halcyon, end this war, and come with me to the Thran Allied Council. Not another life will be lost in this war, unless it be yours.”

  Yawgmoth tilted his head. “I cannot escape you, but you should know other lives will be lost. Even now, the eight ambassadors who came to Halcyon from the allies—they live on the fourth sphere but only by the exertions of my mind. If you take me out of Phyrexia, those eight will die.”

  “No, they won’t,” Dyfed said bitterly. “My magic will heal anything short of phthisis. They won’t die. They will return with us and tell of your atrocities.” She grasped his hand.

  Suddenly, they were on the fourth sphere.

  The place was infernal. A red glow filled the world. Giant furnaces reached from the rankled ground to the smoke-shrouded ceiling above. Huge flashes of fire illuminated the horrible place. Humans were utterly dwarfed by the massive mechanisms, but the vat priests of Yawgmoth were no longer exactly human.

  Red robed, masked in black, they were impossibly tall and impossibly lean. Eyes glowed in the dark. Razor-tipped fingers moved dexterously across instrumentation. Their own flesh had been transformed by their dark sciences. They swooped up around the new arrivals. Yawgmoth waved them back. When they recognized their master, the vat priests backed away, bowing deeply and fearfully.

  Their retreat revealed rows of huge glass vats. Each vat was illuminated below, each filled with a golden oil, and each occupied by a naked, transforming creature. Human forms gave way slowly to monstrous forms. Fangs replaced teeth. Claws replaced nails. Barbed whiskers replaced hair. Horns grew from bone.

  “What is this?” Dyfed gasped.

  “This is the future. This is power perfected,” he said quietly. “But you aren’t interested in that. You came to see the ambassadors. Well, here they are.” He gestured to a bank of vats behind him.

  Dyfed moved forward, astonished.

  Unlike the gradual transformations occurring with the vatted humans, these poor creatures had been cut up and sewn back together brutally and mercilessly. Eyes had been sewn into the belly of the dwarf. Fingers had been grafted to the forehead of the elf. A duck’s wing replaced one of the minotaur’s arms. A mechanical head had replaced the cat woman’s skull.

  “I cannot heal these…these…I never thought—”

  “Precisely,” Yawgmoth said.

  He drove a dagger into Dyfed’s forehead.

  One hand clutched her hair, holding her upright. The other gripped the dagger’s hilt, waggling it back and forth to scramble her brains.

  “You never thought, and you will never think again. With but a thought, you can jump from place to place, can heal yourself or others. If I pith you, though—if I continually scramble your brains, you cannot think. The best you can do is struggle to reassemble your skull. Meanwhile, I can keep you here.”

  He nodded to his priests, who swooped silently up around him.

  Yawgmoth cradled the trembling woman against him. He worked the dagger back and forth. Its blade cracked against the sides of her skull. A red-gray ooze trickled down her nose. Yawgmoth bent and kissed her.

  “You see, my dear, the brain is the seat of thought. Every human faculty has its organ. Remove that organ and you remove that faculty. Even planeswalking. There is an organ in you, my dear, that makes that a possibility. I am going to cut you open and find it and remove it from you and graft it into me. I am going to be a planeswalker, and you—you will be just another hunk of meat in the vats.”

  Thran-Phyrexian War, the Last Days: Battle of Halcyon

  All through that black night, Halcyte ray cannons sent bolts stabbing out at the circling Thran fleet. Orange beams flashed into being and disappeared. Only occasionally did they strike a ship and even then were too weak to destroy it. They only thumped hollowly and sent up vapor from heated wood. Still, these attacks kept the Thran fleet at bay. Cannon fire created a four-mile-radius dome into which Thran forces dared not enter. Meanwhile, Phyrexian mirror crews focused moonlight to test their aim. Once the sun rose, beams of solar radiation would rake the battlefield and pop Thran ground troops like ants under a lens.

  The Thran were busy too. Crews spent the night rigging smoke vents at the prows of ships, for thick smoke absorbed ray cannon blasts. Thran foot soldiers meanwhile polished their armor and shields to gleam like silver. Cuirasses, helms, gauntlets, shields—they would be mirrors scattering the sunbeams focused on them. Other soldiers, dressed in black, struggled across the nighttime desert toward the mirror arrays. A few escaped notice and smashed portions of the array. Phyrexian guards, in turn, smashed them.

  The most secret crew of all was Halcyte, led by Yawgmoth aboard the war caravel Yataghan. A large ship wreathed in sails, Yataghan circled tightly amid sixty-three caravels and twelve merchant ships pressed into service. Each was loaded to the deck with bombs. Each carried three implosion devices, some with crystals still hot from the mana rig forging process. There were also traditional powder bombs in massive supply. Last of all, filling up what space remained, was quarried stone. Even a pebble falling from four miles in the air could kill a man. A larger stone could smash the power core of a ship.

  Yes, four miles in the air. No one flew t
hat high. The air there was so thin, men fainted and even died. It was so cold that all exposed skin cracked and froze in a matter of moments. Eyes bulged in their sockets. Brains bulged in their skulls. Madness and death ruled those heights. The Thran fleet would never expect Yawgmoth to rise above his own dome of defense and drop bombs in a ring on them.

  For four hours, Yawgmoth’s fleet circled tightly above their bejeweled city. They rose little more than a foot per second. The glow of their engines was masked in bright flashes of cannon fire. The crews were told to stay on deck as long as they could stand it, to breathe deeply and let their bodies adjust to the thinner, colder air as they rose into it. When they could tolerate it no longer, they donned leather jackets and drew the hoods around their faces so that they could re-breathe their own air as much as possible. After that, they garbed themselves in the silver armor of Halcyte guards. The form-fitting suits had been modified to squeeze the wearers’ legs and force blood up into their brains. The armor also rhythmically compressed and decompressed lungs. When even that was insufficient, the crew were to retire below decks into sealed rooms where pots of water were boiled to help thicken the air. They were abjured to endure wracking headaches by thinking of Halcyon and those they loved. They were commanded to channel their pain toward the Thran fleet laying siege below.

  It worked for most. By the time the Phyrexian fleet had reached an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet, only a few hundred crew had fallen unconscious, and only thirty-three had died.

  Yawgmoth did better than most. In Phyrexia’s embrace, he had been transforming himself—stronger muscle, thicker bone, sharper wit, lack of fear. From the flying bridge nestled high beneath the wreathing sails, he relayed his orders through a speaking tube.

  “Command the fleet…to fan out in…assigned minutes of arc…across the desert. Sail to assigned coordinates….A flare over Halcyon will mark the fourth watch…in the gloaming dawn…drop payloads.”