Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  A strange light had entered Karn’s eyes. He stared at the Weatherseed as though it were his own affective cortex. In a way, the heart of Xantcha and the heart of Yavimaya were much the same. They would give life to Urza’s machine.

  The master held the Weatherseed high and strode to a clear oval of grass. “From this seed, through the aid of Multani, the ship’s hull will grow.”

  So saying, Urza drove the wedge down into the soft earth. His arm disappeared to the elbow. When he drew forth his hand again, black soil clung, crumbling, all around it. He looked at the wound in the grass, seeing even then the forest spirit moving to weave the spot together. Urza stepped back as a bright cloud of shimmering creatures approached. Faeries. They strode from the woods, their very presence setting a hum in the air. They bore with them leaves folded into little cups. Gathered dewdrops glistened in each cup. As the faeries walked past the site, they poured the cool water onto the ground. The creatures bore their empty cups back into the woods as a continuing stream of their comrades followed with more water.

  Once the line of cups ceased, other faeries marched out of the woods. Accoutered with slim battle blades and carapaced armor, they were stern-eyed and martial. They surrounded the spot where the Weatherseed had been planted, faced outward, and planted pikes.

  Dumbfounded, Terd watched the fey creatures parade into position. The goblin wore a beatific grin on his face. His hoary claws twitched as though he wished to pluck at the faeries, but he resisted.

  The Viashino, meanwhile, were watching the ground where the seed had disappeared. Already, silent and slender, a shaft had grown up from the mended hole. It spiraled up into the light, sending yellow leaves out to gather sunshine. In moments, the leaves deepened to green and proliferated. Twigs sprouted. swelling into branches. The small sapling shivered in a breeze that only it sensed and rose upward.

  Urza made a gesture. With slow magnificence, the ethereal ship tilted, its prow rising into the air and its stem swinging down to hover over the growing tree. Soon, the great vessel stood on end. The questing boughs of the tree reached up to it, running along the metal plates and lines of force like rose branches up a trellis. They would spread out along the enchanted framework, taking inspiration from its design, melding without conforming.

  All the while, quiet lingered in the glade. Urza’s footsteps seemed loud as he retreated toward the tent. No one watched him, their eyes and minds and hearts captured by the spectacle of the ship taking form before them—the conjoining of mechanism and blossom, of artifice and nature, of history and destiny.

  “Even now, the goblin tribes, once at war with Viashino and Ghitu and drake—”

  “And each other!” shouted Terd. The group responded with laughter.

  “And each other—these creatures are working on the matrix of a powerstone that will drive this great, saving machine.”

  Terd released a whooping cheer, which was taken up by Glosstongue and the Destrou chieftain, then spread to the rest of the crowd. There was accord in that sound. For a moment, they had ceased to be Viashino and goblin, human and machine. For a moment, they had become the voice of Dominaria. The cheer rolled out through the forests and startled birds from their placid perches.

  The sound died away, and Urza spoke again. “To complete this great ship, I will need all of you, my allies, my friends. The Phyrexians are gone now from Tolaria and gone forever, but they are not gone from our world. Even now, they are taking over a world connected to ours, one step away from ours. I need your help to build this ship, but I also need your help to save another realm, for if it falls, so shall we.”

  Monologue

  Well, I suppose I should have expected it. I’m the one who set this ball into motion. I am the one who insisted that Urza regain his past.

  He began the road back to sanity when Xantcha provided him a facsimile for his brother—Ratepe. It was when this second Mishra died, again in an attempt to rid the world of Phyrexians, that Urza at last accepted the truth of his brother’s death. He had begun to regain his sanity.

  Then came the explosion of the time-travel machine. That blast did to Tolaria what the Brothers’ War had done to Terisiare. In the dark hours after the blast, I had thought Urza was lost for good, but the death of Tolaria at his hands worked on him just as the death of Ratepe had. At last, in present-time microcosm, he had a facsimile of his past-time, macrocosmic mistake. With the destruction of the first academy on Tolaria, Urza began to understand the destruction of Argoth caused by the sylex and by the decades of war that made the sylex necessary. Urza returned to Tolaria to rebuild, to face the children of fury. He was nearer to sanity.

  There was more penance to do. In its destruction and resurrection, Tolaria allowed Urza to make amends with the human world for the crimes against Argoth. He yet needed to be reconciled to the natural world.

  Then came Yavimaya. Urza had gone there to seek the avatar of the forest, an entity that could grow the hull of his flying ship. What he got instead was a five-year penance for the agony of Argoth. Yavimaya remembered Argoth. Multani remembered Titania. He recognized Urza and made him pay for his past. In purging the guilt of Argoth, Multani returned Urza’s sanity. And with his sanity, Urza could at last destroy the Phyrexian children of fury in his midst.

  I’ve tried to tell him he is well, now. I’ve tried to tell him there is no more need to venture into the past, that now is the time to focus on the future. He only shakes his head and speaks of leading Phyrexians to Serra’s Realm.

  That will be Urza’s next journey, perhaps his last. If K’rrik is to be believed, Phyrexians are there among the angels. I cannot imagine how Urza will survive, trapped between angels and devils.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  Once again Urza descended. It was his preferred approach when arriving in unknown and hostile territory, and Serra’s Realm, as it had devolved in the last few centuries, was indeed unknown and hostile.

  It was still an empyrean skyscape, an arcing firmament stacked with rafts and mountains of cloud. Now, though, the once-blue sky was tinged in yellow and gray. A brimstone stink of Phyrexian glistening oil filled the air, and the realm’s illusion of limitlessness had fallen away like a tattered robe. Heaven seemed cramped. The curve at the edge of it was just perceptible. The angel realm had once been a place of white cloud mesas, with large garden berms drifting placidly among them. Now the great berms had disintegrated into small clods, some only the size of shacks, and the sublime mountains had tumbled into pessimistic hills. Their color was muddied too, as though they were losing their quintessence and transforming into dirt. All the lines had been blurred. Every constitution was diluted. Each ideal was debased.

  Phyrexians were here. They excelled in such transformations. Urza turned a slow spiral as he descended. Gemstone eyes marked out signs of habitation. At one time, the realm had needed no dwellings, for there was neither cold nor rain, night nor predators, and the very air nourished any who breathed it. Then, the only structures were built for sake of art or philosophical contemplation—pillared gardens, ivy-covered amphitheaters, high halls of state, groves of mana stones, galleries beneath the whirling heavens. Now many of those edifices clung in broken ruin to disintegrating clods of ground. Buildings not firmly rooted had fallen away in the tumbling chaos. Their foundations jutted like shattered teeth from rolling chunks of ground. Among these foundations new structures had been fashioned that seemed more the beige hives of mud-daubers than the homes of angels. They were hard-packed outside, and inside delved into spinning darkness—entrenchments against inclement weather and sudden night and marauding predators.

  Phyrexians were here.

  The smoke that rose from some of these deep hovels told of fires within to heat and dry the dark, cold spaces. The scent of flesh on that smoke told of creatures being hunted and slaughtered and eaten. No longer was breathing sufficient to sustain life. Now life had
to be stolen from others who had it. Angels lived upon mortal flesh. The plane, once a living creature in its own right, had died. Every tissue and corpuscle of its being struggled to survive—preying on neighboring cells, drawing nourishment from the decaying body all around.

  Phyrexians were here. They had killed the plane and taught the dying to eat the dead.

  Only one fine structure remained, Serra’s Palace. Urza glimpsed the palace, floating distant and dark within the gray sea of sky. It looked like an inverted question mark, a fact that had seemed fitting when Serra resided in the crystal aviary at its pinnacle. She had devoted herself and her realm to the constant debate of perfect society, perfect virtue, and perfect beauty. Questioning and discussion were an inescapable part of her realm. Now, though, the inverted question mark of the palace symbolized a place adrift, constant questioning become eternal doubt. It no longer meant debate, but confusion.

  Toward that sign of confusion, Urza floated. As he neared the spot, he saw that it glinted more with rusted steel than silver. Its great banks of golden glass were shrouded in an orange grille, spiked and forbidding. Its ivory pilasters were chipped and yellow. The windows of its fanciful turrets had been knocked out to make space for batteries of ballistae and barracks of angel warriors.

  These latter flooded out upon the acrid air, approaching the invader.

  They were led by three archangels. Gigantic eagles’ wings bore these creatures hurtling forward. In their hands glinted magnaswords. Single-edged and curved at the tip, the blades were halfway between scimitars and axes. A carapace of massive silver plate armor covered each of them, and a skirt of metal mesh trailed behind. Silver masks hid their faces. In the wake of these three fierce defenders came a contingent of thirty-some warrior angels. Smaller and more lightly armored than the archangels, these creatures nevertheless bore wicked-tipped lances, round bracers, and expressions of fanatical loyalty.

  Urza watched as they came. He readied the supernatural defenses of his planeswalking form. He would not fight these creatures, but they might fight him. Even if he could survive such a conflict, there would be more forces in the palace—archangels, angels, the Sisterhood of Serra, human warriors, and the citizens of the realm. He would have to win past them all and do it without fireballs and killing, to reach the embattled creature at the center of this collapsing plane. He had come not to conquer but to ally.

  They swarmed up around him. Wings beat the yellow air. The three archangels formed a triangle that hemmed him in, and angel warriors orbited in a large sphere all around. Droning wings almost drowned out the stentorian command of the lead archangel.

  “Approach no farther,” the archangel said from behind the mask. Cold, ruthless, and almost metallic, the voice was neither male nor female. “You are uninvited.”

  “I am Urza Planeswalker,” the man responded, his white robes of state stark against the brown clouds and fetid winds.

  “We know,” the archangel replied. “We remember the smell of you.” The comment was spoken matter-of-factly, without humor or malice.

  Urza’s lips tightened. “Yes, but I do not recognize the smell of this place.”

  “Much has happened since you came. Much has happened because you came.” With or without inflection, the implication of this statement was clear.

  “That is why I have returned,” Urza replied. “I have come to help restore the realm to its former splendor.”

  “It is not your concern, Planeswalker,” the archangel said. “It is not your war.”

  “It is if I become your ally.”

  “Lady Radiant needs no allies.”

  “Radiant? Yes, I remember her. So, Radiant is in command now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she needs no allies?”

  “Yes.”

  Urza cast an ironic glance around at the devolving realm. “It would seem to me she could use whatever help she could get.”

  “That is not for you to decide.”

  “Nor for you. Take me to her,” Urza said in sudden command.

  “You are uninvited.”

  “I could merely ‘walk there.” Urza lifted his hands threateningly to either side, and the sphere of angels widened just perceptibly. “I am Urza Planeswalker.”

  The angry buzz of wings deepened. Angels nervously fingered their lance hafts. The lead archangel drifted toward Urza. From behind its mask, air emerged, hot and steely.

  “Come with us.” The creature backed away from the planeswalker, its unseen eyes remaining ever on him.

  Without further word, Urza followed through the droning air. All about him, angels hovered in static threat. Their shadows, pale and diffuse in the sickly glow of the sky, passed languidly over Urza as they went.

  Ahead, the dark, overturned question mark grew. With each moment, its transformation was more apparent. Ogee arches above landing platforms bore boxy portcullises like iron false teeth. Fine traceries had been removed to make room for bulky grills. Crystal mana collectors had been replaced here and there by smoking chimneys. Lines of soot traced across buttresses, and blast points showed where the palace had sustained attack.

  “Your palace has become a fortress,” Urza noted, and he remembered a similar transformation of his academy.

  “Only a temporary measure,” the lead archangel said, maintaining his backward flight. “but, as you can see, the defenses are warranted.”

  Urza could see. He imagined Phyrexians swarming the palace, riding on their wicked skyships or flying on wings of steel. He could imagine salvos of bolts arcing from the engines and smashing against the floating city, could imagine angels much like these pouring from the shattered windows and staved walls. There was war in heaven, and he had brought it.

  “Yes. Warranted. That’s why I want to speak to Lady Radiant. Her foes are my foes. I know of the monsters lurking here, and I have armies of my own to help destroy them.”

  Behind its quicksilver mask, the archangel did not respond. It merely drifted backward, without apparent effort, toward a large landing platform at the base of the inverted question mark.

  The platform jutted like an angry jaw from beneath a dark archway. Its edge was ringed with curved horns, the teeth of a great carnivore. A few flying machines hung in dock around it. Clusters of figures stood in their midst. Three were archangels and another handful of angel warriors. Most of those on the air dock, though, were moiling crowds—angels and humans. They clustered together like fearful sheep. Guards strode around their group and jabbed with the butt of their spears. Some of the humans, packs on their backs, staggered up a wobbly gangplank and onto a waiting air boat. Meanwhile, in sad knots, angels broke from the rest, laboring out into empty air.

  “Who are they?” asked Urza on the final approach to the landing.

  The archangel before him sank lightly to stand on the crowded platform. Other angels around alighted as well. “Refugees, mostly, fleeing the rebels of the far reaches. They have come to the city for protection, but we have no room for them. Others are dissidents, heading for exile.”

  Urza nodded, setting feet to ground. The marble floor felt gritty, scored with stone chips broken off in some recent assault. “To what plane will they be exiled?”

  “They will remain on this plane. No one leaves the realm, not even dissidents.”

  “And what of planeswalking visitors?” Urza prodded.

  “Radiant awaits above,” the archangel declared.

  Walking backward in the midst of the landed flock, the angel guided Urza into the once-great city. The divine figure moved with a smooth ease, as though its feet still did not touch ground. It floated beneath yawning embouchement where refugees and dissidents huddled and brimstone breezes blew.

  The spaces within were vast, dwarfing even the mob of angels around Urza. Tall, slender columns held aloft vaults of stone. When last Urza walked these halls, those va
ults rang with lyric music and the sounds of lively debate. Now they roared with the shouts of sparring soldiers. Along the walls, rank upon rank of stone golems stood in mute insolence, ready to slay any army that might land upon the platform. The windows behind them were covered in black iron, giving the place a cave-gloom.

  In the center of the main plaza, a great fountain stood, five stories high and ornately carved with angelic figures. If Urza remembered from his last visit, the statuary depicted the great virtues of Serra’s Realm—Art, Discourse, Freedom, and Peace. No water flowed over that fountain anymore, though, and the figures representing these virtues stared out from beneath great rags of dust. At their feet, martial mounts—griffons and pegasi—drank from a half-full, stagnant pool.

  Beyond the fountain, a great amphitheater sank into the floor. Urza remembered the glorious wall of golden glass that had stood beyond it. A rubble-and-mortar bulwark now sealed off the rear of the theater, protecting its users from aerial attack. A platoon of human holy warriors used the site. Before them paced an archangel, its sexless voice instructing them in techniques for cleansing and sealing off Phyrexian catacomb complexes.

  “—want to be certain none of them survive. Do not assume that any number of spell blasts will cleanse a warren. Enter, but do so with caution and in teams. Once within, there will be burned bodies. Make certain they are dead. Behead them. Do not let a single neck remain intact. Black mana spells can bring them back, even so. They heal with preternatural ease. Do not assume a warren is cleansed simply because all visible foes are dead and quiet. Search every space. They hide like rats. Look for secret chambers. Look especially for their offspring. These will be hidden best of all. Kill them. Behead them. Let not a single one remain, or it will become twenty and return to slay you. Use your soul torches to make certain the job is accomplished….”