“Of any one?” she asked, changing the question. “Of every one. All of them. From Rorry all the way back to Jaffrey’s first son. They’re all in her and more.” She felt a moment of pity that Karn could not remember Therri’s progenitors, but then a spike of curiosity wondered at how he had come by asking such a question regardless. How many could he remember and compare her to?
There was no time to ask as Karn stepped forward into a new hole broken in the Serran line. A small, stoop-shouldered creature, more artifice than flesh, sprang for the opening and was slammed back hard by the golem’s shield. It scampered back, hiding behind the legs of a guard elite. The golem thrust his mace forward like a spear, the large spike on its top piercing the slender ribcage area and winning only a thin trickle of oil.
The creature’s slender arm shot out, raking scratches across the golem’s near-invulnerable silver form. Its other arm, covered with a variety of blades, tubes and strange artifice, slashed inward as well but was fouled by a spear thrust from one of the Serrans. The Phyrexian turned against this new opponent, tearing past spear and shield and through the Serran’s chain mail. It ignored Karn’s attacks, determined to put an end to one of its enemies.
Lyanii leapt forward, shouldering aside her own man and taking his place before the onslaught of fast, lethal metal. Karn continued to rain sledgehammer blows against the Phyrexian’s back and side. Lyanii’s sword kept time with the creature, turning aside its hard-hitting blows with inches to spare. Then the Marshal missed.
The beast’s slender arm sneaked past her guard, piercing the armor that shielded her right hip and digging slender talons in bone-deep. Lyanii fell back, rolling away from the creature’s grasp. It bought her time, seconds only. She knew she wouldn’t rise back up on the wounded limb. The Phyrexian followed, ready to finish her off. It would have, except for Karn.
The golem cast away his shield, wrapping his large hands about the reinforced shaft of the spiked mace. He came at the Phyrexian with an overhead rounding blow that caught the armored creature at the upper curve of one shoulder. The guard stumbled to its knees. Karn spun around, placing his weight and incredible strength behind another blow that buried several points into the Phyrexian’s small face mask. It toppled back, screeching in a sound that reminded Lyanii of sharp claws drawn over a board of slate.
Karn helped the Marshal back to her feet, lifting her one-handed. Lyanii winced putting pressure on her leg. “Can you stand?” he asked.
Can we stand? That was the question haunting Lyanii’s mind through the shroud of pain. For the second time in her long life—the first being on Serra’s plane when her people had been subverted by Phyrexians and led against their own—the Marshal felt doubt in battle. This was what she had been created for by Serra. It was all she knew, and it wasn’t enough.
Lyanii shrugged off the golem’s help, anger at her own weakness making her abrupt. “I’ll be all right.” She exhaled a short exclamation of frustration. “We’ll make it,” she answered her own question, regaining control of her emotions.
Shouts of confusion and fear now erupted from the center of the Capashen lines. Lyanii grabbed up her main standard, planted nearby, ready to signal her next order. Her battlefield experience whispered the reason behind the upset even before word finally reached the Serrans. Gavvan Capashen had fallen! Slain by a monster, the word said. The Capashen middle sagged, Phyrexians pressing forward. Lyanii paled, recognizing the beginnings of a rout and knowing the slaughter that would follow.
She remembered that she had sent Therri straight into its middle.
* * *
Therri Capashen had been close enough to see her brother fall, his personal guard holding the center of the Benalish line, the Capashen standard driven into the earth while Gavvan lent his own sword to the fight. Never one to sit back, he shared the danger and inspired those around him with his heroics. With sweeping arcs he took the spindly, mechanical arms off a Phyrexian warrior, the edge of his sword striking sparks against the black armor. Spraying oil, the creature fell back and one of the ornate-armored guard moved up into its place.
Gavvan wasted no time with this one, pulling the short rod from his belt and thrusting it forward. An ancient gift from Master Malzra, artificer and matchmaker, the rod was a Capashen heirloom. Malzra had promised it a defense against violent artifice, though it should be used sparingly. One of the Phyrexian guards, so much metal crafted toward lethal intent, seemed close enough to the old artificer’s description. The creature’s slender arm, slashing in toward Gavvan’s throat, froze immediately as if the metal joints suddenly fused. The abomination shuddered to a stop. It became a frozen statue on the battlefield, and her brother simply shoved it aside. As it crashed to the ground, its animation stilled forever, the clan leader’s personal guard shouted out a cry of, “Gavvan!”
Except her brother had not noticed the malformed, black-flesh creature stalking the lines and moving against his position. If he had, he ruled it a minor warrior due to its lack of metal armor. Its bloated chest rippled and pulsed as it moved forward on thin legs. Large, hook-shaped claws trailed near the ground at the ends of long arms. Glistening crystal eyes glowed a dull orange as it riveted its gaze on Gavvan. Therri simply knew that this creature needed no armor and that it hunted her brother.
“Gavvan!” she yelled in warning, pushing frantically past other Capashen warriors and laying about with her sword when the enemy pressed in too close. One long Phyrexian blade snaked through to slice away part of her leather armor, scoring a shallow cut along one arm. Therri ignored it. “Gavvan, no!”
In the other shouts of the Clan Leader’s name, Gavvan missed the warning. The creature leapt forward over the last twenty feet, legs driving out as if it was some kind of titanic insect. Before landing it already began to spew a dark, sludgelike substance that stuck to Gavvan’s arm and chest. The chain mail protecting his body held up, but the leather strips on his arm began to smoke at once. Gavvan had time for a single backhand slash at the monster. His blade hardly cutting the tough, wrinkled flesh over one shoulder, and then it stuck fast. Twisting violently to one side, Gavvan’s sword was torn from his grasp.
The Phyrexian craned its head forward. Its chest heaved, and its throat expanded. A torrent of black sludge belched over Gavvan’s face and shoulders. The young clan leader screamed, hands clawing at his own face as exposed skin began to blister and smoke. Blinded, thrashing about in pain, he made an easy target. The great, hook-shaped claws seized Gavvan, lifting him from the ground, and with a violent scissorslike motion left him in two large pieces, dead.
Therri stood in shock, the battle forgotten as she stared at the ruin of her brother’s body. So close—she’d been so close to helping. If she’d taken a horse from Lyanii’s flank…if she hadn’t wasted valuable seconds in any of four different fights along the way.
The Phyrexian army pushed forward, now spearheaded by the monstrous beast that killed Gavvan. Suddenly, Therri realized how close they were to a full rout as news of her brother’s death swept the lines and demoralized the Capashen. These black creatures, never skilled in working as a coherent unit, were pushing forward singly to exploit the sudden shift. Beneath Therri’s doubts and recriminations she found a spark of rage, which she fanned until it warmed her entire body. She knew these things for the evil they represented, preying on a moment of weakness engineered by some kind of special monster.
Springing forward into the monster’s path just as it set upon one of Gavvan’s personal elite, Therri parried an attempt to fasten those hooked claws into the soldier and watched for her opportunity. She had recognized the nature of the creature’s movements necessary to call up its terrifying weapon. There again was the bellowlike force of its bloated chest and expansion of the throat as it craned its head forward. Gavvan’s sword was still stuck in its shoulder, a warning against any slashing attack. Instead she ducked into the creature, risking its claws as she drove her sword forward with all her strength into its throa
t. She left it there. Sludge leaked out down the blade. She danced back, avoiding the claws that suddenly flailed about as if possessed of their own mad intelligence. No weapon, Therri wrenched the nearby Capashen standard free of the ground. Reversing it, she bore it back at the Phyrexian like a spear, its ornate tip aimed unerringly for one of its crystalline eyes. The dull orange gem shattered, and she drove through into the head. Leaping up behind the attack, she rode the creature backward and into the middle of the Phyrexian line.
Therri counted herself dead. Perched atop the creature’s bloated chest, disarmed and surrounded by the enemy, she expected a finishing stroke any time. She didn’t care, having avenged Gavvan, having blunted the Phyrexian advance. Then a black-armored warrior to her right stumbled and fell—one arm missing and its chest pierced by a sword. The sword was still held by the Capashen warrior she’d saved seconds before. Only a fraction behind were two more of Gavvan’s personal guard, driving in on her left and pushing the enemy away from her. She took quick stock of the battle. The four of them were a tight knot in the midst of the Phyrexian line.
Wrenching Gavvan’s sword free, her own covered by too much of the burning sludge, Therri also took hold of the Capashen standard and pulled it from the creature’s head. She waved it crisply back and forth, the white and gold ensign fluttering and snapping. Three men to her force and clan still in danger of rout, Therri accepted the only option left to her.
She led them forward, on the attack.
A sea of raging energies broke over Urza in a kaleidoscopic wash. It permeated his mind and nearly drowned his consciousness. As certain as Urza was that there must be a fundamental pattern to this chaos, underlying everything, it remained of such a magnitude that even the planeswalkers could not comprehend it. Propelling his mind through the chaos on will alone, the ‘walker was trailing a Phyrexian. He followed a dark beacon—the characteristic pattern left by a Phyrexian portal device. He pursued a trail left by the creature he now pursued—and would destroy.
The negator had ambushed him. Its teeth were blunt, unusual for a Phyrexian, and set at wide irregular intervals. With every breath those teeth rang out with energy-disrupting force. The hisses and screeching that made up Phyrexian speech formed partially translated in Urza’s mind, drawing a shadowy lethargy over the ‘walker’s thoughts. Urza still remembered how he had stood there, only vaguely aware of the mounting problem.
With a voice able to whisper a numbing darkness into his mind, the thing had been on him with little chance to prepare. Except for that strange new power, the negator had relied on physical assaults and an old system of burning fluid. The storage tanks were not even protected by the desiccated flesh covering the rest of its deformed body. The skin was simply split open in three places, and tanks were buried partway into its frame. Metal-braided tubing connected the tanks to a shoulder-mounted weapon. It was an older negator, set after him long ago. Hardly a match, especially once Urza had used his staff to knock away half of the creature’s lower jaw. Without its siren’s sound, the negator had chosen flight—to report its partial success back to its masters, no doubt.
Urza was not about to allow that to happen. His mind piercing the veil, Urza drew his body into form and set foot down upon a strange plane. For a moment he thought he remained partway into the chaos between worlds, the steel-gray skies cascading with the same energy as did the void. The clouds were real enough, roiling in strange winds, and the ground firm beneath his feet—though he sensed its potential for treacherous footing. The dull tan stone stretched in seamless perfection over a rough plateau and then fell down an impressively long and steep mountainside into the deep valley below. The mountain ended only a few hundred yards above him at a sharp ridge. Halfway up that slope the negator had paused, dark eyes staring back at the enemy who had trailed it.
Urza drew in the winds, striking them by will to fit his own pattern. The wall hammered into the Phyrexian, driving it back downslope. Its progress thwarted, the creature spun and leapt for the ‘walker—and died mid-flight, a summoned phantom snatching it up in a large mouth of teeth and shredding desiccated flesh away from a metal-reinforced skeleton. Black, decaying meat clinging to few metal cauldrons and a few dull gray bones rained to the ground.
Yes, it was an older creation of Phyrexia, not too dissimilar from what he might have seen in the days he traveled with Xantcha. So many worlds traveled then, he explored the planes of the Dominarian Nexus and out to the fringe of the multiverse itself. Now this world—a world he had never ‘walked before. The chaotic sky lacked a sun, and the ground, this strange stone, was not true soil but manufactured.
Welcome to Rath, planeswalker.
Distracted at the importance of his discovery, Urza did not immediately question the appearance of a new voice. This was a created plane, like Serra’s Realm—like Phyrexia.
“Rath is an artificial plane,” he said, answering aloud.
That is correct.
Urza now realized that the voice sounded within his mind, not his ears. He guarded his thoughts, wary once again. His expanded consciousness identified the intrusive thoughts as a simple voice, unable to read his mind but “heard” through the same function that allowed him to speak in anyone’s language. “Where are you?” he asked, finding no places a body could hide.
Lost. And not even you can redeem our bodies, Urza, if Urza Planeswalker you are. Look above you. Look beyond.
Above him Urza saw only the sharp ridge and heard the cut of wind slicing over it. “Look beyond,” the voice had said. The powerstones burned within his eyes, replacing the illusion of mortal blue as he concentrated his preternatural senses. He saw their outlines, spectral dances of energy, sometimes twisting into a simple globular pattern but more often holding a humanoid shape with arms and legs and head. There were three of them, then ten, then fifty. Similar to his own form of pure energy, but they were so much more basic in nature. They swam along the ridge, unthreatening.
“I am Urza,” he admitted cautiously, continuing to tap the mana of traveled lands should he require the power. “How do you know me? And who are you?”
Who else would bring war to Rath rather than await Rath to bring war to him? We are the Soltari. One of the patterns of energy pulsed. I am Lyna.
The Soltari. From the depths of his memory Urza recalled the name, a small city-state of Dominaria, which mysteriously disappeared back in the days when he and Xantcha had worked to free Efuan Pincar from the Phyrexians, over two hundred years before his founding the first Tolarian academy. Lost, Lyna had said. Lost between worlds!
Urza had no need of bending to the ground. His contact with it allowed his consciousness to work against the strange stone—to test its properties and sense its purpose within the plane of Rath. He could feel the movement far below, spreading outward to the distant horizon. It was a flow of malleable stone, able to hold back the energy curtains and force a new plane into existence—able to penetrate the veil and rip pieces of Dominaria away. What had Lyna said? Rather than await Rath to bring war to him? The planeswalker leapt into the air, flying above the ground as he rushed for the summit—the direction from which the strange stone flowed.
He found himself on the volcano’s rim, staring down into an incredible caldera. The base of which was spanned by an incredible fortress tower. Dark metals gleamed beneath eerie lightning. This place was obviously Phyrexian in architecture, and it had to be the nerve center of Rath in that the stone radiated outward from it as it continued to push in all directions. Urza reached down through the fortress, testing the production of the strange stone. He felt the tremors shaking beneath.
It can overlap Dominaria. Lyna again. Such has been done many times. We were the first, and the only failure that cost so many lives, though with any transfer some are lost. They wander Rath or their own lands, always apart. You will destroy this place?
Though he had contemplated just that, now the ‘walker shook his head in a silent negative. “No,” he finally said. “It do
esn’t feel as if I can.” He looked hard at the fortress below. “Different from Serra’s Realm,” he said, thinking aloud. “It will not collapse so easily. The stone holds the curtain back—it would take massive destruction of the land itself, of the world.” Then the purpose of Rath hit him—a hard cruel blow to his mind. “This is their staging area for the invasion. No portals. From here they hope to set entire armies across the world.”
You must destroy this place—the Stronghold. We have worked to distract the overseers here. We have pushed at the equipment over great amounts of time, but our work is too slow. They will finish soon.
“No,” Urza said, offering a grim smile. “Not soon. I felt your work beneath the fortress. The equipment is weakened and being run too hard. Artifice requires more care—a lesson the Phyrexians will learn without my help. It would be better if they never knew I was here.”
You will simply leave then? This was no judgment, just a clarification from Lyna.
“I will, but you are welcome to return with me.” Urza felt again at their energy forms, certain his strength could pull them across a short ‘walk between planes. “I cannot give you back form, but I can return you to Dominaria. And when the time is right, I might be able to give you revenge.” How many years had these people waited? A millennium?
We would like that. Phyrexia has much to answer for.
Urza couldn’t have agreed more.
* * *
The lingering scent of dinner, grilled swordfish from the leftovers that Barrin had walked past in the kitchen, told the mage he hadn’t missed the meal by more than thirty minutes. That was subjective, of course. Having just come through the timelock, Rayne would have actually finished hours before Barrin ever left real time for their shared home. The wonders we have done here on Tolaria, he thought, not a little bitterly. For the sacrifice of one meal, Barrin had been able to spend a full day with Urza.
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