Time Streams

by J. Robert King

Urza stood in Gherridarigaaz’s saddle. The Tolarian drakes had plunged out of the battle there, where the swarm was thinnest. They had tumbled away into the gray-blue depths and, some mile below, flashed out of existence entirely.

  Only a mile below…

  The plane had shrunk considerably before their arrival, but it was dissipating even more quickly now. Urza drew hard on the reins, sending Gherridarigaaz into a blistering attack. Angels tumbled from the dragon’s blazing onslaught, white and inconsequential like popped maize from a steaming kettle. They, too, dropped away and disappeared in the ever-nearer edge of the world.

  With every angel death, the plane was collapsing. The more fiercely the drakes battled the main army, the less time any of them had. Soon the mana depletion would reach a critical threshold, and then the collapse would take only moments. Any living thing left in the plane would be destroyed.

  “Hold fire!” Urza commanded the drake. He reined her in a huge circle. “To Rhammidarigaaz, to Barrin!”

  The dragon entered a shallow dive that would speed her toward her son and his rider. Angels flung themselves in dense clouds about her, but she held back her killing breath. Magna swords shrieked across her armored hide. Some bit through the enchantments and sliced open long rents. Urza’s magic healed them even as they formed, letting not a whisper of air spill from the drake’s wings.

  Even so, agony won through. Gherridarigaaz roared, smoke trailing from her jowls. She barely contained the fires that ached to spew forth. She focused her fury instead on the battle ahead and on Rhammidarigaaz caught in it. Another three surges of wing brought her to soar just beneath him.

  Urza shouted toward Barrin, saddled above, “Break off! To the Weatherlight.”

  In a flash, they were past. The drake sliced through air and angel both as they made their way along. Air made small booms at the trailing edge of the drake’s wings. The thickest swarm of warriors fell away. Gherridarigaaz punched through the final wall of them and shot into the gray spaces beyond. Ahead lay the Jumbles. At its distant end hung a large floating isle, and on it glinted the lights of Weatherlight. Those lights were dim beneath the gold and white shimmer of angel warriors and soul torches.

  Another army.

  Urza urged his mount to greater speed. Even as they closed on Jabboc Isle, he could see the advancing curtain of chaos at the edge of the plane.

  There was less time than he had thought.

  * * *

  Jhoira helped a staggering old man into the hold of Weatherlight. He was garbed in tatters, his face drawn into a scowl of concentration, his eyes turned down from the loud battle that raged only a thousand yards aft. How anyone survived in the Jumbles was a mystery to Jhoira, let alone how an old, infirm man had. How old had he been when he was cast into that world of flotsam? Perhaps he had lived in the isles for years, perhaps all his life.

  “Quickly, please, Grandfather,” she urged gently, “and move as far aft as possible.”

  “Is there sunlight where we are going?’ the man asked, tottering a moment on the steps.

  “Yes, sunlight, water, forests—everything,” Jhoira assured as the man moved forward. She stared across the bow at the snaking column of refugees.

  There were too many of them. They were too slow, too weak. Beyond their desperate cave-colony, the crackling wall of chaos verged nearer and nearer. Soon it would not matter that there were too many of them. Soon the edge of the plane would begin its disintegrating march across the isle.

  Matters aft were just as grim. The falcon engines fought fiercely, dropping angels from air atop the front line of ground combat. The ranks of runners thinned, their crossbow quarrels already spent, their scythe blades snapping out to trap their foes. Orange explosions crackled out along the line. Clutched together, angels and machines both blazed into nothing.

  Soul torches fell to ground at the front and crackled and spat, absorbing the hundreds of souls that perished there. The infernal devices blazed, white hot.

  The mathematics was against Jhoira. Even if each machine destroyed one warrior with its blast, Radiant could overrun them with hundreds more.

  “Karn, can you muster enough power to use the ray weapons?” Jhoira called.

  The answer sounded dour and hollow. “I have barely enough power to lift off.”

  Jhoira stared at the infernal line of battle and considered. She had been told, as commander of the ship, she was not to leave it, but if she didn’t, there might well not be a ship to leave. They needed to charge the stone, and only a thousand feet away, power lay sparking and crackling.

  “I’m going to get some torches,” Jhoira told Karn, her voice hushed. “I’ll bring back as many as I can carry.”

  Karn’s response was slow—too slow—but Jhoira did not need to hear it to know what it was. He as much as forbade his captain.

  It is mutiny, pure and simple, thought Jhoira ironically as she dropped amid the lines of scorpion engines, marching into oblivion.

  A scraggly figure leapt from the rail to land at her side. “You need fighters, I think,” Terd said, matching her stride for stride.

  “You’re right,” said Jhoira kindly.

  “The more torches, the better,” added another familiar voice. Diago Deerv blinked placidly at their looks of surprise. “After all, my folk built half this ship.”

  Side by side, the woman, the goblin, and the lizard man waded forward through the press of metal, heading toward the burning front.

  * * *

  The Phyrexian smashed atop Barrin, breaking ribs and flinging the man from his drake saddle. The Mage Master of Tolaria tumbled across the dragon’s spread wings and fetched up, broken, in the crook of one reptilian elbow. His mind whirled, unable to fasten on anything. Wind roared over him. He clung to the drake’s wing, shaking his head to clear it.

  Gorig crouched on the saddle, jowls drawn back in a dagger-toothed leer. Long, barbed legs drew up beneath the insectoid creature. The twelve soul-stealing ports along its manifold torso flared in hungry anticipation. Its wings spread outward, and again it lunged.

  The first blast of air over Barrin brought with it thought of a spell. He summoned his memories of distant Tolaria and hurled before him a wall of air. The creature smashed heavily against the sudden gale. Gorig roared. It tumbled helplessly backward, away from the mage master and his mount.

  Rhammidarigaaz rolled beneath the turbulent barrier. Barrin could only cling raggedly to the drake’s wing. Rhammidarigaaz pivoted and soared out from the angel swarm. His fiery breath carved an avenue of soot and burning flesh before them. Barrin could not care. He could only hold on, inching slowly back toward the saddle.

  “Urza ordered the retreat,” Rhammidarigaaz gasped out between breaths. “Weatherlight is under attack.”

  Barrin nodded dizzily. He clawed his way back to the saddle and clung, gulping ragged breaths.

  A ferocious roar came behind them. The bright blaze of the wall of air shattered. Out of the heart of that conflagration came the shrieking Phyrexian. Gorig soared, faster than even the archangels who followed in a shrieking cone behind. Devil and angels alike, every last staff and wing and magna sword was intent on destroying Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria.

  He could not care. He could only hold on and stare at the battle that raged around Weatherlight. If he reached Urza, the ship might be saved.

  Monologue

  Death is not so horrible a thing when one is broken and clinging to the burning back of a fire drake and plunging through a heaven that seems in all ways hell. Death is not so horrible at all.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  The front lines were thick with angels and scorpion engines, so thick that Jhoira had to battle her own forces to reach it. From behind she grabbed a scorpion’s stinger and let the darting tail fling her up onto its back of metal carapace. She caught a foothold and sent her sword swingin
g into the epaulet of the angel warrior before it.

  The creature was fast. His soul torch clattered up and hurled her blade to one side. He followed the stroke with a dagger slash. Jhoira reared back from the strike. She kicked the creature’s dagger hand, spinning him to one side, and stabbed with her sword. The angel grasped his side and whirled. The soul torch swung in a blaze toward Jhoira’s face. She staggered, trying to bring her sword to bear, but she was too slow. With a white-blue sizzle, the torch impacted. Jhoira instinctively crumpled atop the scorpion’s back and cradled her face, expecting to find only charred tatters of flesh. Her skin was whole and healthy.

  The torch had impacted the scorpion’s intervening stinger. The metal tail thrust back the magic brand. It slid from the angel’s grasp and toppled. The sizzling tip of it fell against the wound in the angel’s side. In a white-blue flash, the creature’s soul was sucked away. Lifeless, the angel collapsed. The torch flared.

  Jhoira scrabbled across the scorpion’s back and snatched up the torch. She lifted it, just in time. The brand blocked a descending magna sword. The broad blade clattered aside and sliced deep into the scorpion’s back plate. Jhoira rose. An archangel towered over her, struggling to wrench its magna sword from the collapsing scorpion. She rammed the white-hot tip of the torch up beneath the archangel’s silver mask, catching it in the fold between throat and jaw.

  The archangel shuddered, caught between a snagged blade and an incandescent death. Then, in a terrific clamor of wings and armor, the creature convulsed its life away. The torch shuddered and trembled as it drew in the powerful being’s life-force. Jhoira gritted her teeth in determination to hold on to the too-hot handle. A roar erupted, fury and agony embodied, and death clutched the archangel. Its own soul torch dropped, and Jhoira let go of her dagger to catch it. Meanwhile the angel toppled back, a great tree falling in a forest. Its wings cleared a broad path beneath it.

  As Jhoira caught her breath, she saw Terd scurry out upon that fallen giant and snatch up three more torches lying among the angel dead. They were overflowing with power, having drawn into themselves the souls of hundreds of warriors. Terd used the ragged end of his tunic as a hot pad to grab the torches. He scuttled back just as another angel descended to strike him down. One wave of the three sputtering brands pushed the creature back among its cohorts.

  Jhoira grabbed Terd’s collar and hauled him away from the front.

  In his turn, Diago caught Jhoira’s collar and hauled her back. Moments later, a fireball struck the spot where she and Terd had been, driving the destroyed scorpion into a blackened crater.

  “I have two torches,” Diago gasped out as he drew back his comrades in retreat. The lizard-man’s scales stood on end in the heat of battle. “You have two torches, and the goblin has three. That should be enough. We have to get back to the ship.”

  “Yes,” Jhoira agreed, breathless from fighting and from holding onto the cometary torches. “Back to the ship….This will be enough to get us flying…shoot some deadly shots….Maybe even to planeshift.”

  Jhoira looked toward the ship. It was a carnival-lit hulk on the hillside, beside the glowering caverns of Arizon and the black masses of refugees, crowding into the ship. Behind that tableaux, the curtain of chaos gnawed at the edge of Jabboc Isle.

  “Maybe even to planeshift….”

  * * *

  “Cease this battle!” Urza cried imperiously. His figure blazed with light aback Gherridarigaaz. Dragon and rider descended in a column of mana energy before the storm of angels and falcons.

  “Cease this battle or be destroyed! I am Urza Planeswalker!”

  “Tremble before him!” came a voice in mocking answer from among the angel horde.

  Radiant emerged. Her figure was lit with an incandescent heat equal to Urza’s. A group of archangels accompanied her, four before, four behind, and four more around the ruler of the realm. Her appearance brought a sudden hush to the battle lines. She was strange-eyed, beautiful, and terrifying.

  “Tremble before this petulant god-child, this despoiler of worlds, destroyer of planes. Urza has come, my children, and when Urza comes, death always follows.”

  “I have come to take you out of death. I have come only to carry away those I call refugees, those you call refuse,” Urza shouted from the hovering drake. “Let us leave in peace, and we shall kill no more.”

  “It is too late for bargains. Your war is collapsing our plane around us.” She gestured with her war staff toward the advancing curtain of chaos. “You come first bringing Phyrexia, and you come last bringing destruction.”

  Urza lifted his own battle staff. “Forgive, fair lady. I brought Phyrexia here, true, but you have given it a home in your war minister, Gorig, and throughout your court. The very spells you created to drive the stink of Phyrexia from your palace are the spells that allowed Phyrexia to dwell there and surround you and turn you against your own people. Your plane shrinks not because of me, but because of these soul torches of yours, harvesting the life of your people, your plane, for Phyrexia. That is why chaos threatens. That is why your plane is dying.”

  In the echoing stillness of the battle, whining servos and pulsing wing beats gave the air a dead drone. Beyond that sound hovered the approaching rumble of matter giving itself over to chaos.

  “Come with us, all of you. Come with us to another world. Come where all who are good can live and where Phyrexians, beneath the Glimmer Moon, will die. Come with us, Radiant. Cease this senseless war, and come with us.”

  She seemed to consider, her face for a moment lovely amid swirling hair and wings of light. Then she spoke, and death followed her words. “Kill them all. To a man, kill every one!”

  Radiant herself made good the command. She hurled a wall of force from outstretched fingers. The vast wave of energy ate the very air. It arced toward Urza, too fast to stop, too huge to escape. It would not kill him, but it would stun him long enough that angelic death could fall on him from the sky.

  Gherridarigaaz rose. The ancient fire drake spread her wings in a giant shield before Urza. He had to cling to her back not to be thrown from the vertical saddle.

  The blast struck Gherridarigaaz full in the belly and chest. Scale and skin and muscle disintegrated. She dissolved away as though in acid. Ribs hung for a moment, vacant of flesh, and then dripped into white smears. Gherridarigaaz released one last, long wail before lungs and throat and head all were gone. Wings, too, vanished. By the time the wave spent itself, all that remained was spine and shoulder blades and half a pelvis.

  She had sacrificed herself. It was the highest honor among lizard folk.

  Urza escaped the tangled traces of the saddle just before Gherridarigaaz’s remains plunged away. He roared too. He roared as though she were his own mother.

  The time of negotiation was done.

  The time of moderation and sanity was finished.

  The time of killing had come.

  Gathering magical might. he hurled himself at the tyrant of heaven.

  Radiant was ready. She hung in the skies, savoring this moment. Her eyes gleamed madly in the fray. Lithe hands swept out to her sides and forward, as though in a curtsey. Her fingertips trailed long lines of archangels in their wake. They converged on Urza.

  Heedless, he shot toward her. With a thought, his flesh turned adamantine. Magna swords fell in a flurry upon him. Their broad blades rang and clattered. His head smashed them back like a soaring cannonball. What archangels managed to hold onto their blades shuddered in nerveless jangle. Others lost their swords. A few even lost their arms. Urza blasted past them all and ran headlong into Radiant.

  A lesser being would have been torn in half by the attack, but Radiant had been waiting for this moment. She dodged back in the instant of impact, grabbed hold of the rocketing planeswalker, and with a surge of her wings, hurled herself along with him. She clawed at his face, seeming surprise
d at its impenetrable warding. Then, hands soft as silk clutched his sides, and lightning arced from her fingertips. It traced out nerve and muscle and bone, a storm within the planeswalker.

  He trembled, enervated. Electricity possessed his every tissue. Aside from spasms, he could not move.

  Smiling bitterly, Radiant carried him above the boiling cloud of angels and falcons and into the wheeling heights. “You are not welcome here, Urza, not now, not ever.”

  Those soft hands turned iron hard. She flung the paralyzed man upward, into the descending ceiling of chaos above the realm. As he went, the last jags of lightning danced across his frame. A white tempest cycloned from her upraised hands. The storm bore him fistlike into the shredding curtain. Urza smashed into the verge. He dissolved away. Chaos grated muscle from bone. He was gone as quickly as Gherridarigaaz had been. The wind dissipated, and Urza Planeswalker was not even a stain on the dark chaos.

  Radiant shook her head and brushed her hands off.

  Something suddenly was between those hands. Urza took form against her. One hand caught her beneath the jaw. The other arm wrapped her waist. No longer adamantine, those limbs were still implacable, inescapable. He flipped her over and dragged her back down into the roaring battle, down toward the struggling refugees and the battle-torn ship. He forced her to gaze at the sight.

  “Look, Radiant. Look who you are killing. Look what you’ve become.”

  “I know what I am,” she gasped out. “I know what you are too.”

  She cast a quick series of spells, prepared and laid aside for this very moment. All defenses were stripped from Urza’s head. Her fingers grew as long and sharp and curved as daggers. She drove them into his skull. They punched through bone and into his frontal lobe.

  Urza roared, reconstituting shattered bone and ruptured brain.

  She was not done, though. Her fingers curled into claws. She raked through gray matter and shattered sinuses and optic cavities. She scooped up the gemstones that were his eyes. With a brutal yank, she hauled them forth.