Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  In Hurloon, Lord Windgrace had brought Grizzlegom and his forces to what little remained of their homeland. At least they had escaped Yawgmoth, he thought—and thought wrongly. They stood in the ashen ruins of Kaldroom as the sky turned to utter black.

  Above Jamuraa, the Presence of Yawgmoth passed.

  Across Tolaria he soared.

  Over the ruins of Benalia he went.

  Through the sands of Koilos….

  Yawgmoth reached across the whole of Dominaria and clutched it to himself with the cold and insistent hands of a rapist.

  * * *

  —

  Urborg—ever the darkest of islands and now swathed wholly in the presence of the Ineffable—could not glimpse its coming hope. It shone high in the sky—too small, too distant, too uncaring to pierce this death-shroud.

  Such is the way of hope. It begins at furtive distance, too high to be seen. As it pours itself down, though, the white cascade traces a line across the black sky. Patiently, inevitably, it bridges heaven and earth. And when at last it arrives, hope comes with a vengeance.

  CHAPTER 30

  Chiaroscuro

  Like a blazing comet, Weatherlight dived. Mantled in a white-mana cascade, she plunged toward everlasting blackness. That’s all that lay below—the eternal shadow of Yawgmoth. The dark god had spread across the whole world. Not a scrap of Dominaria showed its true blue beneath the killing grip of that thing. Yawgmoth had taken it all.

  Gerrard gripped the gunnery traces—all that held him to the shrieking vessel—and gazed grimly at the world. Perhaps Urza had been right. Perhaps saving half of Dominaria would have been better than this, than saving none of it. His hands sweated on the fire controls. Already, he’d fired a couple shots, though they had shrunk to minuscule insignificance against that black globe. It was as though they did not drive toward a world, but toward a hole where once a world had been.

  Still, Gerrard had only to look behind him to glimpse the hope of that world. White energy fumed and boiled, as wide as the Null Moon itself, as wide as the central isle of Urborg. Poured down Yawgmoth’s throat, how could this power fail to slay him?

  “How close are we, Sisay?” Gerrard asked. His voice rang hollowly through the tube, small within the roar of mana.

  “Five minutes closer than the last time you asked,” she replied.

  Gerrard took no offense. They were all on edge. He watched the shift envelope rattle and redden with the first touch of rarefied air. In another few minutes, the shield would grow blazingly hot. “And we’re still on course for Urborg?” he pressed.

  Sisay replied simply, “Yes.”

  “I want to make sure we blanket the island, especially the Stronghold volcano. I want to kill that bastard with one blow.”

  There came a pause. “I’m doing my best, Commander. It’s no easy thing to pilot a comet. We’re pushed more by the cloud than by our own engines. All I can do is keep us trim and centered in. If you want pinpoint accuracy, I’ll need Hanna back.”

  That stung. Gerrard turned his gaze toward the bridge.

  Sisay winced. “Sorry,” she said through the tube. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Gerrard replied, “We all want her back—”

  “I’ll give you the next best thing,” she said, her face brightening. “Weatherlight says we’re dead on. She says she’s looking through Hanna’s eyes, and we’re dead on.”

  Gerrard smiled, though he felt no gladness. In a bleak voice, he muttered, “What else does our good ship tell you?”

  “Not much, Commander. She’s pretty busy right now with Karn. It’s one thing to have to steer an asteroid. Its another to have to channel its power. But if anyone can do it, Weatherlight can. Weatherlight and Karn.”

  * * *

  —

  In the first chaotic moments after Weatherlight emerged from the riven moon, the ship summoned Karn to come below. He felt the plea in his feet and answered the call. He was little use on the amidships deck anyway. No gunnery harness could have held him in place.

  Clinging to the ship, Karn crawled to the main hatch. He flung open the door to see four human faces within, staring in shock from what had once seemed a safe haven. Karn pulled himself through the opening and closed it behind him. Hand over hand, the silver golem climbed down the companionway stairs, now standing on end. At their base, he reached the engine room. Prying open its door, he eased himself inside.

  The familiar air—hot and steamy, with a hint of brimstone and steel—enveloped him. Below lay the engine—the fearsome engine. Once he had known every rivet of that machine, but now it had grown beyond him. Still, these were desperate times, and Weatherlight needed him. Lowering himself gently onto the aft manifold of the device, Karn released his hold on the door-jamb. Under his feet, he felt Weatherlight’s heat. Karn climbed carefully down one side of the engine until he reached the pair of hand ports where once he had flown the ship. Kneeling there, Karn inserted his massive hands. He took hold of the control rods within. Microfibers tickled along his fingers. The filaments slid into his joints and made contact.

  Karn! Thank you for coming.

  He nodded, steam glinting darkly on his forehead. “I thought perhaps you could use some help.” Yes, the ship replied simply. “May I cross over, then?”

  Yes.

  Karn closed his eyes and let his consciousness drift down his arms, into his hands. He felt the new solidity of the engine, the power that pulsed ceaselessly within her fuselage. As impressive as that power was, it was nothing beside the mana energy all around the ship. The tips of the spars and the cannon barrels and every extremity of the ship glowed with ball lightning. The white mana sought a conduit inward, and if it found one, the whole of the engine could be destroyed. There was the great dilemma. The very force that Weatherlight was supposed to guide and channel could also tear her to pieces.

  Death is a fearsome force, spoke the ship into his mind.

  It was Karn’s turn to be laconic. “Yes.”

  You were born mere decades before Urza charged the power core.

  “Yes.”

  We are twin creatures, millennia old, except that you have been aware all that while. I have been waking for mere days. The ship was pressing toward a thought, an idea wrapped in regret.

  Karn’s mind slid through Weatherlight’s conduits and peered from her optics. “In a sense, I lived before that even. My affective cortex came from Xantcha. In a sense, I lived for a thousand years before my body was made.”

  The question is not whether all this power will destroy my core—for it will. The question is, can I kill Yawgmoth before I am slain?

  “Yes,” Karn affirmed.

  It is the right thing, to be unmade in such a battle, to slay Yawgmoth even while being slain oneself. Who can argue such choices?

  A sharp pang moved through Karn, and he tried to divert the conversation. “When we reach the proper altitude, our first job will be to arrest this descent and take up position directly above the volcano. To do that, we’ll have to engage all engines against the mana tide.”

  Perhaps having had only days to live will make it easier to give it all up—easier than being a creature such as you, millennia old….

  “The trick will be to slow down gradually enough that the crew will not be harmed and yet abruptly enough that we won’t be dashed against the mountain.”

  Xantcha did the same thing, you know, Karn. She stood within the pouring radiance and let it consume her and let it close the portal to Phyrexia.

  “Once in place, you will stand on end at full thrust, your air intakes filling with mana, which will be focused in your powerstone core and emerge as a single slaying column from your exhausts. Surplus energy will pour from your cannons and lanterns and even your wings and spikes. You will stab Yawgmoth in a hundred places, pinning him down, and the central column will impale his black heart and kill him.”

  Yes, Karn. All of that is obvious. That’s not why you were summoned. You came here to g
rant just one assurance—

  “I’ll do whatever I can.”

  Grant me the fate of Xantcha, that when I am immolated in the coming flame, something of me will remain in you. Karn’s voice rumbled like thunder. “I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  Above the black world plunged a white star. She outshone the sun. She outraced the moon. Her train was majestic, glorious. Her power was inexorable. It seemed she would spend herself in her headlong plunge, impacting the darkness below. Instead, she slowed and stopped.

  Here, in midair, she would do battle.

  The train of her gown, dragging for thousands of miles through the heavens, billowed down around her. She pivoted. Her god face rose away from the netherworld, as if she spurned the creature she was about to fight. While gleaming veils enfolded her, the star lifted her face toward the sky.

  She spread quicksilver wings. White mana struck them and bounded out in a wide dome. It seemed gossamer, this energy, but where it struck the black presence, it cut like steel. The reflection off her wings cut a circle two hundred miles in diameter. It boiled away the darkness and sliced through to the churning oceans below.

  She was not finished. Her arms reached out—the seven arms of a goddess—and hurled white surges into the cloud. Where those slender pulses struck, darkness recoiled, giving views to the ravaged ground. One arm swept along a shoreline and showed the breakers crashing there. Another caressed a volcanic hillside, scouring the rocks until they shone like gemstones.

  Still she was not finished. The star took a breath, a deep breath of the white-mana cascade. Power surged through her pure soul. It channeled out beneath her in a shaft of light so bright it cast shadows on the shattered moon.

  This power did more than tear holes in the blackness. It obliterated it entirely. Wherever it struck, four square miles of darkness evaporated. The killing beam strolled its way through a salt marsh, up a rankling hillside, and toward the volcano at its peak. Soon it would strike the center of the cloud, the core of Yawgmoth, and would save the whole world.

  * * *

  —

  Gerrard clung on for dear life. He could do little else.

  Radiance suffused everything. It shone through his closed eyelids. It baked the base of every pore. It tricked past clenched teeth and down a closed throat to glow in his lungs. White blindness. He saw everything.

  In the swimming flood of light, the whole of his life gleamed—the battles on Dominaria and Mercadia and Rath, the years of reluctance, the betrayal of Vuel, the centuries when the pieces that were to become him wormed their way through a thousand forebears. The light showed him everything.

  All his senses brimmed full. His flesh tingled numbly, so shot through with pressure and heat that he could not tell if he were in agony or ecstasy, burning or freezing, crushed or stretched. Though he knew he was strapped to his cannon, he simultaneously walked distant glades and fought distant wars.

  In his ears rang every voice, every song, every sob he had ever heard. The air smelled and tasted of honey and offal. Sensation crowded through him. He feared it would tear him to pieces and at the same time hoped it would make him whole.

  Such is the delirium of clinging to a manifesting goddess.

  * * *

  —

  He had grasped the whole world. He had sunk his talons in and was tightening his grip—and then, out of the sky, this agony!

  It was she. Only a goddess could appear that way, in blazing glory above the world. How had Gaea transcended herself? How had Rebbec risen from the ground that she infested?

  Then he remembered. The Thran Temple—the pinnacle of Rebbec’s architectural achievements—a building built on clear air. Of course. She was forever transcending herself. And what else could that be but the radiant temple that she had sent from Halcyon? Where had it spent its eternities, packed with refugees? Had they learned to build cities within the powerstones, as Glacian had threatened? Had they waited all this while just above Dominaria for Yawgmoth’s return, so that they could descend and slay him?

  Of course. Rebbec was his shadow. She never fled far. She always waited for him. She lingered near to stab him when his back was turned. Of course.

  And it nearly worked. He had fallen for it again. How had he discounted that bitch? Some had even told him that she was dead. Dead? Then who was this that rained killing fire down on him. Rebbec! Damn her.

  It had nearly worked, but she had left him a back door. Yawgmoth would not relinquish the world, no, but he would send the core of his being back to Phyrexia. Gutted though it was, the spheres at least were safe from this radiant witch. While his soul dwelt there, his fists could still hold and strangle and kill Dominaria.

  This was the best of all plans. He would escape through the Stronghold and destroy the portal from within. Then, in safety, he would finish off this world.

  Bolts struck him, tore through him, destroyed his darksome flesh—painful, yes, like the bite of a scourge, but not deadly. Rebbec was a hive of hornets. She sent white mana wasps down to sting him. Oh, she would pay. She would pay!

  Yawgmoth gathered the core of his being. It coursed through the black cloud, well out of harm’s reach. With the speed that had borne him around the world, Yawgmoth gushed up the mountainside. Rebbec still hadn’t found the caldera—stupid girl! He poured himself into it like blood down a drain. His being sloshed over the edge of the central pit, and he rolled toward the Stronghold.

  Too easy—

  Except that there was no Stronghold. Where once it had been now stood a lake of lava, bubbling and red and rising quickly. Yawgmoth could not swim through this burning stuff. Worse, if it had flooded the Stronghold, it poured even now through the open portal in the throne room and into Phyrexia.

  Attacks from above and below! How had the bitch arranged for—?

  He saw them, in a ring atop the lava flood. Rock druids! Dwarfs! It was absurd for the Lord of Phyrexia to be defeated by stone kickers. He might not be able to swim through lava, but he could easily enough obliterate a circle of dwarfs.

  Yawgmoth gathered the core of his being into a dense black fist and lunged for that pathetic circle.

  At the last, he shied back. One of the creatures was lit by a sudden, oracular light. A white beam broke over the dwarf. It widened into an arc that splashed across three of the beasts.

  Peering toward the top of the volcanic shaft, Yawgmoth saw the source of the light.

  Rebbec! She had lured him here to trap him! Her light struck and transformed these dwarf minions. No longer seeming crude piles of stone, the little folk became radiant creatures. Taller, more slender, with clothes and skin that shone. White dwarfs! What witchery!

  Ah, but this changed nothing. There were a thousand vents out of these volcanoes. She could not trap him. The sealing of his portal meant only that he could not retreat from Dominaria, that he would remain here and fight with every fiber of his being. It only assured that Dominaria was his now and forevermore.

  Gliding away from the light, Yawgmoth coursed along the wall. In easy moments, he found a network of cracks that breathed fresh air. He sieved through them and out upon the mountainside.

  He fairly giggled as he withdrew the core of his being from Urborg. This was all the better. He would lurk just beyond her reach while his endless black arms lashed up to drag Rebbec from the skies.

  Yawgmoth slipped away, just out of the carved perimeter. There, in safe darkness, he stared at the gleaming spectacle. With an almost casual gesture, he summoned a legion of tentacles in the cloud beneath Rebbec. She could sever many of the reaching arms, but not all. In time, one would lay hold, and then another, and a third, and she would be dragged down to utter oblivion. The last hope of Dominaria would die in a black fist.

  Yawgmoth laughed lightly.

  Gargantuan arms erupted from his black soul and lashed the beaming goddess.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Choice of Heroes

  Gerrard was lost. Su
ffused in brilliant light, clutched in an implacable grip, immersed in the music of the spheres, he had grown insensate. The powers that battled above and beneath him were gods, and he a mere plaything. There was nothing left for a hero to do but wait until good won and evil died.

  Hanna was here. She filled his memories. That’s where he lingered, in memories. Karn was here too, the silver guardian who protected him. He protected Gerrard from the Lord of the Wastes, a bogeyman in countless stories. Those were glorious days, safe and happy and easy. Gerrard walked back through them with Hanna at his side.

  Into his dreaming, something intruded. A great black tentacle lashed out of the sullen pit. It hadn’t the slick substance of an aquatic limb. This was muscular darkness. It slapped up through the glad glow and lashed his leg and dragged at him. Something else pulled him the other way, something that held him around his shoulders and chest. They fought, this tentacle and the straps. They tore at him.

  In that violent sensation, he surfaced from the oracular dream.

  Gerrard did not open his eyes. Even with them shut, his head ached from the glare. Through his eyelids, he saw shapes and forms—the upended deck of Weatherlight, the dark bulk of his cannon, the tangle of gunnery traces holding him—and there, what was that? A long, black limb dragged at him.

  Cold and biting, it slithered tighter around his leg and yanked.

  “Something’s got me!” Gerrard called. His voice echoed meekly in his head. It could not batter past the storm of sound. Even his enhanced muscles could not match the power of that limb.

  Another tentacle lashed across the deck and wrapped around a baluster. It pulled so hard, the support came loose along with half the rail.

  “Something’s got us!” Gerrard shouted toward the speaking tube.

  A voice answered, not from the tube, but from a corner nearby. “Yawgmoth. He drags us downward.”