Planar Chaos

by Timothy Sanders

  Teferi bowed. Without another word, he tugged his staff free of the mud and shuffled away.

  Jodah watched until he could no longer see the planeswalker’s once-gleaming white and blue robes. He turned and busied himself with the mouth of the tunnel, his keen mind already sorting through the steps he’d need to take to reach Skyshroud. He closed his eyes and extended his hands, drawing upon his memories of home and the evaporating mana supply those memories afforded him. Concentrating, he pushed the magical force into the liquid over the tunnel’s entrance, extending the passageway out and west toward Keld.

  He had lived long enough to see crises come and go. He had learned one thing for sure in his four thousand-plus years: people were the important thing, the living and vibrant part that gave life real value. If one planned to save the world, one must not lose sight of the individuals who made it worth saving.

  Then Jodah stepped into the tunnel, the liquid cap shimmering like a thing alive.

  It was midnight over Skyshroud when Jhoira arrived. The moon hid its face behind a cloud, but Freyalise was surrounded by a green eldritch glow that illuminated the forest’s edge.

  Skyshroud itself had not changed since Jhoira was last in Keld, but the surrounding areas were very different indeed. Just weeks ago a huge saproling thicket encircled Freyalise’s home and carpeted the forest floor. Now that thick, green tangle of grasping vines and half-sentient bodies was dry and brittle, dying in the cold. The desiccated remnants of the lush, green undergrowth were now little more than tinder waiting for a spark.

  Freyalise marched to the edge of the forest and extended her arms. Jhoira followed, so as not to be left in the dark, but she stopped shy of the planeswalker. She had no desire to be caught in the backlash of whatever magic the patron of Skyshroud was casting.

  Jhoira saw movement deep inside the forest among the wasted, broken trees. She peered closer, not ready to believe her eyes. She would never have imagined Freyalise tolerating the slivers, let alone summoning them to her side. Just the same, the woods were teeming with the insectlike monsters, thousands or perhaps tens of thousands strong.

  She took an involuntary step back in the face of the slivers’ incessant chattering and clicking. The smallest was no bigger than a songbird, and the largest was as tall and broad as a bear. They had been bred by Volrath in the harsh proving grounds of Rath, where they had developed a highly coordinated hive-mind that went far beyond simple cooperation, beyond even symbiosis.

  They had been designed to display a wide range of magical abilities within a single hive. Over the course of a hundred forced generations of abuse they had acquired the power to share those abilities. Anything a single sliver could do was instantly transmitted to every other sliver nearby. A fire sliver sitting next to an armored sliver magically yielded two armored fire slivers. If there were a dozen or a hundred, all acquired the same combination of powers. The biggest slivers shared their strength, the lightest ones their speed, and the deadliest ones their lethality.

  “Stand still, Ghitu.” Freyalise did not turn when she spoke. “I am not yet in complete control of the swarm.”

  Jhoira watched as Freyalise gestured dramatically with her arms, guiding the innumerable masses of sharp-bodied vermin like an orchestra conductor. When Freyalise raised her arms, the slivers mounded high on top of each other. When she spread her hands wide, they dispersed among the trees. When she pointed, they swirled toward her target like the thin end of a cyclone.

  Freyalise held her position, arms gracefully extended until the clicking and chattering had faded to a dull, muted drone. Then Jhoira stepped forward. “My name is Jhoira, Lady.” She spoke calmly. “How shall I address you?”

  Freyalise exhaled and lowered her arms. She slowly turned, half-facing Jhoira, and said, “I already like you more than your mentor. You have far better manners.

  “You may call me Freyalise, Jhoira. I have brought you here to assist me, but you are not my slave. I need your ingenuity, your confidence, and your personality—and for that you must be free to speak and act as you see fit.”

  Jhoira bowed her head. “My purpose has always been to seal the rifts. At Shiv, at Skyshroud, at the Stronghold, and wherever else they are. If that is your purpose I will aid you however I can.”

  “My purpose is to save this place. The elves here are my children, and without Skyshroud they have nothing.”

  “Skyshroud will not be safe until the rift is sealed.”

  “I accept that. But I am weaker now than I have been for a long, long time. I am barely able to keep the slivers focused on these cold-weather Phyrexians. Had I begun years ago, by now I might have been able to act as their queen instead of their handler.”

  The planeswalker’s shoulders slumped slightly, and she seemed for the first time like an ordinary mortal, and a weary one at that. Jhoira felt a surge of sympathy for the stern woman, but she pushed it aside and said, “What must I do?”

  Freyalise did not answer immediately. She stared vacantly out into the depths of the forest for a few moments. When she did speak, her lips barely moved. “Later,” she said. “Right now you must move out of harm’s way.”

  The planeswalker tossed her head. Jhoira rose gently but swiftly into the air, climbing as high as the tallest trees in a matter of seconds. Under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant sensation, but Freyalise’s melancholy troubled Jhoira even beyond the other considerably weighty matters that burdened her.

  The moon emerged, its eerie silver light revealing a good deal more of the forest below. Jhoira gasped: along with thousands of slivers, the forest was crawling with Phyrexians.

  The sleek, steel machines were smaller and more refined than the ones she knew, but they were unmistakably forged in Phyrexia. The moonlight glinted off their silver-blue bodies, and Jhoira smelled the unmistakable odor of the glittering oil that was their fuel and life’s blood.

  The sights, sounds, and smells of the merciless invaders filled Jhoira with sudden rage. She had spent the first half of her long life either preparing for them to invade Dominaria or battling to keep them at bay. She had captained warships against them, designed and built special weapons to destroy them, taken up sword and spell against them on the battlefield. She had even tried ignoring them, avoiding them in order to protect what was most precious to her at the time.

  It never mattered, none of it. Her careful planning and diligent work, useless. Her defensive postures and offensive actions, all of it as fruitless and thankless as trying to scoop out the ocean with a spoon. No matter how thorough their preparations, how firm their resolve, or how complete their victory, Phyrexia always returned. The Lord of the Wastes had been gutted, broken, and bled dry during the Invasion. Yawgmoth was dead, yet here his presence was felt in this throng of mechanical nightmares that could not and should not exist, his will as malicious and destructive as ever.

  For perhaps the first time since Teferi had started them on this complicated path of universal salvation, Jhoira forgot about the larger dangers and focused on the conflict in front of her. Maybe she hadn’t ever made a difference when it came to protecting her home, but by the Nine Hells, she would watch and relish the spectacle of Freyalise defending hers.

  The planeswalker appeared below, halfway between Jhoira and the ground. She was still gesturing at the slivers and wordlessly moving her lips. The green light around Freyalise intensified, adding to the moonlight and making the forest as bright as a struggling sunrise on a cloudy morning.

  Jhoira could see the largest of the slivers from her vantage point and so was able to extrapolate the entire swarm’s appearance. Though they shared abilities they tended not to change their original form, so the smallest ones were every bit as tough and strong as their larger hivemates. They were all sharp-nosed and angular, with hard exoskeletons and two supple tails. Each of the shelled monsters was shaped like an arrowhead and moved swiftly on multiple sets of legs. They charged across the forest floor and up the sides of Skyshro
ud trees, and some even soared through the air. Freyalise must have instructed them to cover high and low ground together, else the entire swarm would have been airborne.

  The patron of Skyshroud danced below Jhoira, swinging her arms to direct her voracious army. The slivers streamed toward the Phyrexians, curling around the trees as they closed on their enemy.

  The Phyrexians showed no fear when the first wave of slivers burst through the thinning underbrush, not even as the slivers plowed straight through their first line of defense. Jhoira heard the sickening crack of living shells mix with the awful shrieks of shearing metal as insect and artifact shattered against each other. The Phyrexians did not withdraw; the slivers did not relent.

  The mad rush continued, scores of slivers bursting and dying as they dashed themselves against their foes. Phyrexian armor was proving more durable than the slivers’ chitinous outer covering, so it required five or even ten slivers to seriously damage one invader. Jhoira did not see head-on conflict as a winning strategy, but Freyalise’s forces outnumbered the Phyrexians twenty or thirty to one, and the planeswalker clearly felt her losses paid for themselves in damage done.

  The swarm abruptly changed tactics and direction, veering off from the phalanx of metal monstrosities on each side to cordon off any escape. Three huge slivers lumbered out to meet the invaders, one with spikes along its shell, one with huge, rounded hammerhands, and one with the long, sharp horns of a prize bull. As Jhoira watched these three changed shape, melting and morphing into ghastly amalgamations of all their physical attributes.

  A humanoid Phyrexian and a spider-legged war engine rushed out to meet them and were promptly speared by horns and battered to pieces. The fallen invaders gushed blue-white foam and black oil tinged with gold. An earsplitting shriek rose up from the spider engine as it died and the Phyrexian assembly responded, surging forward and burying the large sliver trio under blue-steel bodies and sharp, razor teeth.

  Freyalise cast her arms wide and brought her hands together in a thunderous clap. The smaller slivers around the perimeter all swelled at once, doubling in size and splitting their shells to reveal whole new ones below, each glistening wet and crimson-colored. The mucouslike slime bubbled and steamed away as the horde closed the circle and rushed in on the Phyrexians there. Metal joints and servo-powered limbs struck back, but Freyalise’s swarm was too big and had too much momentum. They crushed the Phyrexians against each other, mashing themselves against the invaders without respite.

  Freyalise whistled and pointed with her index finger. Four small slivers soared down from the treetops, each with three hollow horns across their wedgelike faces. The open-ended horns left drops of a smoking orange substance in their wake, each drop igniting when it hit the forest floor. The triple-horned slivers flew into the tangled mass of invaders and defenders, striking the melee precisely the same distance from each other.

  The thin, orange gel splattered across the red slivers’ bodies. There was a sizzle as the saplike substance ate through sliver shells and an implosive whump as the entire assembly ignited.

  The Phyrexians were caught in the middle of a hundred exploding bodies and a deluge of sticky, flammable goo. Freyalise crowed in triumph as she watched the Phyrexians stagger, soften, and fall. The planeswalker’s howl echoed Jhoira’s exultation—the slivers and Phyrexian invaders were both spawned by the Lord of the Wastes, yet she had never seen two tools of Phyrexia’s malice used so efficiently against each other.

  Freyalise did not celebrate long. Her skin shifted to the bright red of a salamander as she dropped down to less than twenty feet above the flaming pyre. The patron of Skyshroud clapped again. To Jhoira’s total surprise, the larger-horned, spiked, hammer-handed slivers pushed their way free of the burning Phyrexians piled on top of them. They lurched through the intense flames, almost totally ignoring the inferno, and with each step Freyalise’s face became a deeper and angrier red.

  At the perimeter of the battle, the trihorned red slivers also rose again, regenerating amid the ovenlike heat that popped Phyrexian chassis like chestnuts. Even those insects that had been splintered and broken in the initial assault were recovering, their split shells spontaneously mending and their broken limbs reattaching themselves.

  Jhoira began to see the beauty of Freyalise’s plan. So long as one sliver maintained the ability to restore itself after lethal injury, Skyshroud had an inexhaustible supply of feral warriors to battle the invaders. No matter how many slivers were killed or how brutally, every one could be restored to rejoin the battle over and over again.

  The initial force of Phyrexians now had less than half its original number standing, and many of those that remained were badly damaged. The swarm changed tactics again, dropping to the ground behind the three largest and charging in on foot. It was jarring to watch a bug-thing no larger than a fox topple a ponderous, bottom-heavy Phyrexian scuta, but it was stupefying to watch the same bug shatter the shield bearer’s thick carapace as if it were made of glass.

  It was also exhilarating. The smallest sliver was no less physically powerful than the largest, and Freyalise had turned that to her advantage too. The Phyrexians’ cold machine logic dictated that they kill the biggest threats first, and by concentrating on the three massive slivers they left themselves wide open to destruction by the more numerous small ones.

  Freyalise rose higher into the night sky. Jhoira leaned forward as much as she could from her airy perch and watched, riveted, as Freyalise began to spin.

  Skyshroud’s patron quickly disappeared in a swirl of rushing air and magic, her body surrounded by a solid wall of wind and clouds like the eye of a hurricane. Jhoira heard a clear, strong voice ring out over the vortex as Freyalise sang. Fiery red sparks lit up the whirlwind’s exterior as they were carried around and around by its momentum.

  The slivers in the forest below ran rampant, pushing in on the Phyrexians from all sides. Jhoira gaped as the insect monsters mutated once more, shape, size, color, and physical attributes all shifting so quickly that she could scarcely track the changes.

  The end result was quite clear, however. The enraged mass of flying, exploding, regenerating, flame-spewing, hammer-handed, trihorned slivers covered the invaders five deep in a seething pile. The slivers clicked and hissed and chattered, forcing themselves ever downward until they were all spread out evenly on the surface of the ground. They had either consumed the Phyrexians or pulverized them down to a flat pile of debris and slag.

  Freyalise paused, then crossed her arms. She turned up and smiled savagely at Jhoira, sharing her victory with the Ghitu observer. The planeswalker extended her gloved hand and waved, bringing Jhoira instantly down to the ground. Seconds later, Freyalise herself appeared next to Jhoira, her skin still vivid red, her arms still crossed, and her teeth still clenched in grin of well-won victory.

  “Magnificent,” Jhoira said. She bowed. “I congratulate you, Freyalise. I am awed.”

  Freyalise’s voice came with a sharp edge. “When you see Radha,” she said, “tell her about the battle she missed.”

  Then Freyalise’s exposed eye rolled up in her head. As Jhoira cried out and rushed forward, the patron of Skyshroud toppled backward onto the ground and landed heavily in the brittle, brown-gray remains of the saproling thicket.

  * * *

  —

  Freyalise awoke near sunrise. Jhoira was sitting next to her when the planeswalker opened her eyes, watching over Freyalise as she rested and recovered her strength.

  The patron of Skyshroud’s metal-and-gemstone eye patch flickered a few seconds before her eyelid did. The fair-skinned woman looked at Jhoira without recognition for a few moments, then Freyalise shimmered away into a cloud of green-gold dust. She reappeared moments later, upright but unsteady on her feet. She stared at Jhoira silently for a long time as the sky grew lighter. Eventually, she spoke.

  “I am almost done, Jhoira. I cannot continue this indefinitely,” she said.

  Jhoira nodded, hesitant to
reply. Freyalise’s pride was both her strongest asset and her most dangerous shortcoming. It was not wise to challenge her even if the planeswalker herself had opened the door to such talk.

  “You were brilliant just now,” Jhoira said. “They won’t be back soon. If you could reserve your strength until then…”

  Skyshroud’s patron shook her head. “Preserving this place for so long has left me almost completely bereft of strength. Between the Gathans, the cold, the Phyrexians, and the rift, I cannot sustain myself much longer…nor my home, nor the slivers.”

  “Are they still a danger without your guidance?”

  Freyalise shrugged wearily. “Who can say? They are almost mindless. They respond to anyone with the magic and the will to command them.”

  The planeswalker’s final words before she fell came back to Jhoira. “You need Radha.”

  Freyalise’s jaw tightened at the mention of the Keldon elf. “She was to be my champion. She had the magic, and she definitely had the will. But that will also made her useless to me, causing her to follow her own path of blood and carnage.”

  “Can you reach her? Can you convince her that this fight is as much hers, as much Keld’s as it is Skyshroud’s?”

  “No one has ever convinced Radha of anything Radha didn’t want to believe,” Freyalise said. “Except you. I watched with keen interest and no small amazement when you shut her down and brought her to heel.”

  Jhoira coughed uncomfortably. “I don’t know that I accomplished any such thing. All I did was distract her.”

  “You are too modest,” Freyalise said, and her tone was not approving. “You impressed Radha and got her attention, and you did so with sharp words and a thimbleful of fire magic. Once I had enough fire mana to boil an ocean, but Radha never accepted me as her leader, much less as her goddess.”

  “Where is Radha now?”

  Freyalise face reddened. “She has gone to Parma. When it became clear that Keld was freezing, and the early winter went beyond even a berserker’s tolerance, she led her warhost to north into the frozen wastes.”