“Easily,” came Karn’s reply. “Weatherlight is an energy funnel. What pours into her intakes, what flashes through her powerstone arrays, what rolls from her cannonades, all of it is channeled energy.”
“You’ll kill yourselves doing this,” Urza said in his final protest.
“That’s the one thing our plans have in common,” Gerrard said. “Captain Sisay, lay in a planeshift to the Null Moon. Bring us out at maximum velocity one mile above the dark side.”
“Aye, Commander,” Sisay said. She spun the wheel and drew it toward her.
Weatherlight curved into a steep climb. She accelerated in the ascent.
The crew clung to their posts. On every rail, knuckles grew white. Lips drew back from teeth, and eyes opened wide.
They left behind the black stain of Yawgmoth, spreading across the world. They entered cerulean spaces.
“Hang on!” Gerrard called through the speaking tube.
Time and distance stretched absurdly. If Gerrard had said more, the words would never have crossed the gap, would only have snapped back into his teeth and tangled there. Gerrard tightened an already brutal grip on the target handles of his cannon. He braced his feet on the treadles and pumped madly.
The prow, with its Gaean figurehead, clove through the fabric of the sky. Weatherlight planeshifted. Empyrean spaces unraveled, leaving her in the Blind Eternities. Beyond her shift envelope, the violent energies of the multiverse coiled and spun and snapped. Within that envelope, the crew braced themselves.
As quickly as the chaos world emerged, it disappeared, leaving only eternal blackness, beaming stars, and a huge gray moon. The enormous orb swelled.
“Collision course,” Sisay announced.
“Gunners, carve a corridor!” Gerrard commanded.
A long, peeling blast burst from his weapon. It roared past the shift envelope, across yawning space, and impacted the moon’s superstructure. Girders melted. Plates buckled and dissolved. Grates vanished. The salvo cut a long swath across the side of the great sphere. More fire, from Tahngarth to starboard and Karn at the centerline, poured down upon the sphere. It carved more holes. The blast marks fused. Large hunks of metal sank away into the white interior. Still, it was not enough. A long, thick section of metal jutted directly before Gerrard. He swung his cannon toward it, but the ship closed too quickly. In moments, they impacted.
Thran metal was nothing to the god-hardened head of Gaea. She butted the section, cracked through, and plunged into the beaming whiteness within.
And it did beam—millennia of white mana. It was not opaque like milk or paint, but luminous like fire. Radiance rolled beyond the shift envelope, gleamed from the ship’s armor, coveted the fire of the afterburners. On her unstoppable quest, the ship ripped through an old power conduit. The severed halves of the cable split and fell away. In ghostly lines appeared ancient causeways, networks of repair nodes, and a command core at the center of it all.
“Hold your course,” Gerrard ordered as he squinted toward the command core.
The hulking orb grew until it filled all of Weatherlight’s fore. Without slowing, the skyship struck the node. It cracked through. Out tumbled command chairs and mana-preserved mummies—the bodies of the ancient Thran controllers. They had ridden this great orb beyond the reach of air, but even in dying, their forms had been preserved. Now, they fluttered behind Weatherlight as Serra’s angels once had done.
“Take us out of here, Captain,” Gerrard said. “Take us back to our world.”
Through ravening light, Weatherlight plunged. Power poured through her, annealing her metals, aligning her crystals, purifying her humors. The great ship channeled that power.
Light erupted from the forward cannons. Rays soared together in a shattering constellation. They punched through the outer shell of the Null Moon. More charges leaped in long lines. The great sphere cracked from within. It opened, disgorging its fiery contents.
Weatherlight followed the cannon blasts. She shot through the ragged rift and plunged. All around her, white mana cascaded in a wide curtain. She drew it down.
She was no ship now, not even a living ship, but rather a god descending in glory. Her raiment lit the heavens brighter than the sun. Beautiful and gossamer and voluminous, those robes trailed her downward. In their very purity, they would slay the Lord of Death. They would slay Yawgmoth.
CHAPTER 29
The Doom of Dominaria
Mudmen tumbled in a ragged rain all around Eladamri and Liin Sivi. Sword and toten-vec, the two advanced up the swarming bole. Their troops—savage-shorn and sharp-eyed—clambered up to every side. They had cleansed the lower reaches of the magnigoth treefolk. With Keldon fires below and moss spells above, the defenders at last were finishing off the monstrosities.
Battered treefolk began to move again. Massive boughs flexed. Tendrils brushed along mud-choked bark. Branches raked through the mudmen. The beasts broke apart and fell. Mad roars began deep within the treefolk, resonating in black hollows and rising to vault from open mouths. With the shouts came the shattered bodies of more mud golems, those with the temerity to have climbed down the throats of the beasts.
Eladamri gave his own howl. He lifted his sword arm high into the air and waved it. “The treefolk awake! The defenders of Gaea fight again!”
All around, others took up the shout. It was a glorious sound in the midst of mud and blood. Glorious and all too short-lived.
A new storm loomed. A black cloud rolled out beneath the sun. It cast deep darkness down across the magnigoth treefolk and their defenders.
Eladamri looked up. He sheathed his sword—this was no foe that could be killed with a blade—and reached to pull Liin Sivi beside him. She, too, stared in dread at the inky sky. It seemed a pit opened above them. Steel Leaf elves gaped through foggy goggles. Skyshroud elves remembered the muscular skies of Rath. The truest realization came among the treefolk. With the chlorophyll retinas of their myriad leaves, they saw.
A death wail rose from the mouths of the magnigoth treefolk as Yawgmoth struck them. His soul, a black pyroclasm, dipped down and smashed into the trees. They lurched under the blow. Massive boughs bent like grasses before a gale. Eladamri and Liin Sivi clung to the reeling bole. Here and there, an elf lost hold and plummeted toward the fires below.
The magnigoth guardian shuddered erect again. Its top was eaten clear away. Yawgmoth had dissolved all. The wail turned to screaming as treefolk died. Yawgmoth coursed down their bark, stripping it with his very presence. He sluiced into the open mouths of the creatures, swirled in their hollows, and brought death.
Eladamri felt the transformation under his fingers—vitality draining from wood. The tree that he and his troops had saved was dead now forever. Eladamri’s own death approached from above. The black cloud boiled eagerly toward them. Eladamri gazed at the ground—too far to drop, and mantled with Keldon fire. He and Liin Sivi together had survived two separate assaults on the Stronghold, plague bombs in Llanowar and sand worms in Koilos, a battle on the ice and the very coming of Keldon Twilight, but they would not survive this dark hour.
“There is a place for dead warriors,” he said heavily to Liin Sivi. “I will see you there. We will find each other.”
She leaned to him, kissing him one final time. “This is the place for dead warriors—the battlefield.”
Eladamri wore a grim expression. “Yes. Now, we need only choose—death by Yawgmoth, or death by fire.”
Liin Sivi smiled, an all-too-rare expression. “If I can defy that monster one final time—” and she let go of the tree bole.
Eladamri too let go. He was surprised how easy it was. Together, they fell, dropping as quickly as Yawgmoth did.
Staring in surprise, the elves watched them fall, and then they let go as well. In opening their hands, some of those warriors released a millennium of life. Strange how happy they were, falling with their commanders between rising fires and plunging blackness.
They struck, and it was d
one. Nothing remained for Yawgmoth except those raging fires below and the gray-faced tenders of the flames. He struck them brutally and snuffed them, flame and Keldon, elf and Vec, as one.
* * *
—
How this panther warrior fought! His eyes stared death into the mudmen. They dropped in smoldering piles. He leaped over their dead forms, twenty at a bound, and roared. From his jowls rolled clusters of spells, devised to battle undead. One coiling sorcery struck a mudman and shredded it down to sand. Another flash-evaporated the water in a golem. The creature exploded, ripping apart a score more of the monsters. A third spell awoke fungi across a platoon of mudmen, turning them to piles of truffle. What creatures he could not slay with glances and roars, the panther man slew with claws and fangs. Even now, he impaled two beasts while biting through the head of a third.
Commander Grizzlegom was proud to follow this otherworldly fighter. Never before had Grizzlegom been modest of his axe’s power, and truth be told, it cleft these creatures with a deadly vengeance. But while he killed them singly only to watch them rise again, this panther man killed them in droves and forever. Beyond the tawny shoulders of the cat warrior, perhaps a hundred mudmen remained to the hilltop. If the coalition forces gained that high, rocky ground, they could defend it against all comers.
“Break through! To the heights!” roared Grizzlegom, lifting his axe overhead. His free arm signaled his Metathran troops to break away and flank the main army of mudmen. With utter precision, the blue warriors veered from their course and climbed toward the summit. Meanwhile the panther man, Grizzlegom, and the minotaurs carved through the main contingent of golems. “For Hurloon!”
“For Hurloon!” echoed his troops in a deafening yell. The sound mounted among them, strengthening each individual with the power of the whole. Mortal foes would have been shaken by the tumult, but these mudmen were earless, soulless things.
Grizzlegom punctuated the cry with a bisecting chop of his axe. The halves of the golem fell. The commander’s recovery stroke was too slow to catch the next beast. Instead, he rammed the axe haft into its forehead. He trampled it down. Now his weapon was truly fouled. As he wrestled it from the gripping mud, he slashed a clear path with his horns. More mudmen fell on his broad shoulders. They clawed fingers of rot through his hide, opening foul wounds. Grizzlegom shook them off like a dog shaking away water. He felt his blood—hot and red—washing the infection from the wounds. That was their true deadliness, the creeping plague.
Even if the defenders destroyed this army of humus warriors, there would be more and more eternally. They could no longer trust even the ground beneath their feet. The very world they had fought to save now had turned against them. What good was high ground when all ground belonged to Yawgmoth?
Another roar from the panther warrior brought Grizzlegom from his reverie. He looked up past the sloughing remains of his last kills and saw mudmen fall to ash. They could not stand before the cat man’s magic. The water steamed from them, and they flaked into gray nothing. A broad avenue opened in their midst, leading to the rocky summit. Better still, the Metathran scrambled up the slope and planted their powerstone glaives as though they were flags of dominion.
Grizzlegom gave a roar. Hooves pounded through dead golems and ash. In moments, all the minotaurs advanced. Only those on the edges of the battle still dismantled their foes. The rest charged up the rocky slope toward the Metathran and victory. The blue warriors stood there like angels, bright in a world of dun.
The sky turned caliginous behind them. Something came with the inescapable velocity of death—
A black cloud struck those proud warriors and engulfed them. They shrieked—Metathran never shrieked, fearless and selfless. Now they did, emitting the inevitable sound of a living thing at the moment of death. The shriek lasted only a moment before it disintegrated along with the vocal apparatuses that produced it.
Grizzlegom halted. His troops faltered. Even the panther warrior stopped in his tracks. All took a wavering step back as that blackness flooded down the hill toward them.
The panther warrior spun, claws extended. Streamers of sorcery dragged over the minotaurs on that hillside. Magic took hold of them all, and just before the presence of Yawgmoth could dissolve them to nothing, they disintegrated and were gone.
The black cloud swept down the hill, killing even the mudmen who struggled to rise. It poured across the battlefield and down toward the open sea.
* * *
—
A hundred miles beyond the Urborg chain was a deep cleft in shallow seas. This shadowy place had always been a haven for life—whether conch or urchin, crab or merfolk. As artists had once fled the oppression of old Vodalia, so too they fled the oppression of the Etlan-Shiis and settled here, founding the Eliterates. These folk sought only beauty in an ugly world, and they created it in this cleft. Now it was all about to be swept away.
Bo Levar grieved. In his full captain’s regalia, he hovered above the rolling billows. The noonday sun cast his shadow down through crystalline waters and onto one side of the artists’ colony. His dark semblance, enlarged by the water, had become a matter of speculation among the merfolk below. Even now, they gathered in furtive groups and pointed through the rolling tides at the visitor, wondering what evil his presence foretold.
Bo Levar wondered as well. Perhaps Yawgmoth would have slid smoothly above this paradise, never noticing it in his quest for greater lands—except that a planeswalker hovered protectively above it. On the other hand, perhaps Yawgmoth would have sunk himself in the waves and slain every tender creature below. It was too late now to second guess. Every person—even planeswalkers—must choose at some point to stand against evil or let it roll over him. Bo Levar had chosen both.
Here was the problem. The Eliterates had fled to this spot from all the oceans. If Bo Levar removed them to some “safe” place half a world away, he would be stealing from them their haven. Yawgmoth was coming to all the world. Would it be better to die in one’s heaven or to live in one’s hell?
Even that was not the whole of the problem. Bo Levar had become a planeswalker in the same all-consuming explosion that had made a planeswalker of Urza. As a mortal, his name had been Captain Crucias, and he had led sight-seeing expeditions to Argoth. The sylex ended that enterprise. The explosion had blinded Crucias and destroyed his ship, but it had done one other thing—it had ignited the planeswalker spark in him. He had been old then, ready to give up, and had suddenly received the blessing—or curse—of an eternity.
That eternity was up. Bo Levar was done. He had buried his daughter Nuneive four thousand years ago. He had spent the time since in amassing an empty fortune. Oh, and there was one other thing—he’d destroyed Phyrexia, with the help of three friends. But Bo Levar was done. The question was, how to spend his soul? A life was not something to be sacrificed lightly, especially not an immortal life. The best answer Bo Levar could devise, even after four centuries, was to sacrifice himself in defense of beauty.
That black cloud, rolling from the decimated island, looked all too familiar. Such a shock wave had made him. It might as well unmake him too. He watched it come. Here was the glory of deciding his own time—determining how he would go and what of his power would remain. The spell-work that would make it all a reality had already taken effect.
A globe of magical energy spread from him, out in a shallow dome above the sea and in a great, sweeping, all-encompassing sphere beneath. Every soul among the Eliterates would forever be guarded from Yawgmoth and his minions. Any Dominarian creature who ventured therein claiming sanctuary would find it. Here was the sweetest provision of all: Though the volume of the globe was constant, the space within was not. A room could hold a whole palace. A palace could hold a whole city. A city could hold a whole nation, a whole world. As many as flocked to the Eliterates, seeking beauty and safety, they would find it. The place would make room for them.
It was no small miracle, one worthy of an immortal sacrifi
ce—one worthy of Nuneive.
Bo Levar opened his arms, welcoming the blackness. His shadow below made the same gesture. Some would think he summoned a spell. Others would guess he heralded them. Still others would remember his posture and make it the eternal emblem of salvation. In truth, Bo Levar only spoke to his whelming slayer.
“You think you’ve won, Yawgmoth, but you have not. You cannot. The rest of us have done what we have done—glories and atrocities—within the game. You have stepped beyond it. You would destroy not only us, but the game itself. In doing so, you lose forever. You cannot know every card, and you certainly cannot guess at the ones in my hand.”
Modest final words for a modest man. The black cloud struck him, swept over him, dismantled him. It burned away his mustache and goatee and captain’s cloak. It curled skin and flash-burned muscle and pulverized bone. But somewhere hidden in the depths of that flesh was the spell-soul that had created them. It spread now, creating something new. As clear and solid as diamond, the sphere took shape. It formed itself from the backward-arching remains of that winnowed figure. By the time his physical form was gone—and that was mere moments after Yawgmoth struck him—his metaphysical protections were complete.
Yawgmoth swirled across the dome of air, but could not penetrate it. He coiled along the sphere of waters, but could not break through.
Within, like fish in a bowl, the merfolk quailed and wonder at the salvation wrought for them.
* * *
—
Bo Levar had chosen rightly. Yawgmoth swarmed all the world. He reached from Urborg to the cleft of the Eliterates in mere minutes. It took him hours to grasp the rest, but grasp he did.
In far Keld, he reached the steamy Skyshroud Forest. Freyalise had arrived there, hoping to protect her folk. There was no hope beneath the clawing cloud of Yawgmoth.
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