Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Blind and gaping, his head staved, Urza struggled against tumbling walls of pain.

  He clutched to her. She was all that kept him aloft.

  He had to heal.

  He had to rebuild his being.

  He could not. Part of that being—the only part that was not a mere projection of his mind—had been ripped away. Those gems defined him. They were at the heart of the Brothers’ War: Mightstone and Weakstone. They had been his eyes since the blast at Argoth. They had been his eyes since he had become a planeswalker. They were at the heart of his madness, his power.

  Even in his dying agony—for, yes, he was dying: his power was also his weakness—Urza realized how like Karn he was. They were both defined by stones set in their heads. Both lived with them and died without them. Mightstone and Weakstone—they were Urza’s affective and cognitive cortex. Without them, he was destroyed.

  Radiant knew it. With relish, she hoisted the gory things overhead, beyond Urza’s feeble reach, and she actually laughed. “Gorig had told me about these. He had told me you were like Xantcha. She had had a Phyrexian heart, and you have Phyrexian eyes. I told Gorig I needed only look into these eyes to know that you were mad, that I was right. Yes. This is my moment of triumph. I’ve found the Phyrexian in my realm, Urza. I’ve found the Phyrexian, and it is you.”

  She smiled, a faint and wicked thing that Urza could no longer see.

  “I’ve won, madman,” Radiant said, staring into the glimmering crystals. In their bloody facets, the battle below played itself out. “My work is done, Gorig will finish off your forces and our rebels. He will cleanse the realm. That is his job. He will even capture your ship—what a curiosity! And with these powerstones—the Eyes of Urza—I will restore my heaven.” A thought occurred to her. “Funny that you tried to destroy my world to charge a powerstone, but in the end it is your powerstone that will save it.” She glanced down at the convulsing body of Urza, clinging to her in its death throes. “I rather like whispering these things into your dying ears. Perhaps I will take you with me. Yes, no better way to assure you are dead.”

  So saying, she cast a final spell and disappeared from the decaying heights of her plane. She took with her the Mightstone and Weakstone and the dying body of the planeswalker.

  * * *

  Before Weatherlight’s bow roared a wall of absolute destruction. Entropy ground rock and grass and tree to nothing, nothing at all. Behind the ship’s stem roared another wall—angels turned demonic, rending the machines thrown hopelessly against them. Both walls advanced, closing in on the ship and her overflowing hold.

  “There’s no more room!” shouted Terd from the hatch. His webbed foot stomped on the shoulder of one refugee as if he could pack them more tightly.

  “Then let them stand on deck,” Jhoira replied testily.

  She lifted the third soul torch over the exposed conduit. They’d had to tear up planks beside the wheel to find where the lines of power descended to the crystal. The ship had shuddered with each stripped board, as though it felt the wound in its very being. Beneath the planking ran a channel of metal sinews, like an exposed nerve bundle. It led down to the powerstone in the core of the engine. Taking a deep breath, Jhoira lowered the sizzling torch so that its butt contacted the conduit. With a lightning jolt, the torch emptied its charge, and the tip of it went black.

  “How is that?” Jhoira called down the speaking tube to Karn.

  “Better,” came the metallic reply. “Almost enough to lift off. We’ll be top heavy. We’ll need more power to keep the ship upright. How many more?”

  “Two more torches,” Jhoira said, casting the emptied one aside and lifting another.

  “No, how many more refugees?”

  As energy surged into the conduit, Jhoira looked at the almost-full deck and the crowd struggling to reach the ship. “Too many. Too many.”

  “They’ve broken through!” shouted Terd. He clung to the rails of the ship and pointed at the sky. Angels flooded down in a great storm. “Permission to fire? Permission to fire!”

  Jhoira fitted the last torch into the slot. “Fire! Fire!”

  Between goblin fingers, fog-lanterns rattled violently. Their parabolic plates slid into position. Twin red beams stabbed out from them and tore into the cascade of angels. Fire erupted among them. The down-rushing wave faltered a moment. Roars of rage turned to howls of despair.

  Jhoira glanced over her shoulder. The final hundred passengers were rushing up the gangplank and packing themselves in on deck. In moments, the ship was fully loaded. “Castoff the gangplank. Castoff the grapples. Draw the anchor. Prepare for liftoff!”

  Power surged blue-white through the exposed conduits. Jhoira backed away. She caught hold of the ship’s wheel and shouted, “Take us up, Karn! Bring us around in a quick turn to port, heading one sixty-five, thirty-one, sixteen. Lantern-rays, clear us a path through the battle. Hold on!”

  A tremor of anticipation moved through the crowd and through the great hull itself. The tremor turned into a rumbling groan. The engines below decks growled to life. A grinding noise rose between landing spines and ground. Knees buckled under the first jolting advance of the vessel. Ponderous and clumsy, Weatherlight nosed up and away from the rocky niche where it had sat. Energy coursed in dazzling rivulets along the exposed conduits. The prow curved dangerously near the advancing curtain of chaos.

  “Hard to port!” Jhoira shouted.

  The ship listed away from ravening oblivion. The refugees crouched on the deck clung tightly to the rails and each other. With a magnificent roar, the ship nosed up and away from the planar envelop. A ragged cheer moved wavelike across the deck until the new danger came to the fore. Flights of angels and archangels converged on them, magna swords swung toward the refugees like scythes to heads of wheat.

  “Down, everyone!” Jhoira ordered, her voice raw. “Fire at will.”

  Beams of killing light erupted from shuddering lanterns and cut jagged lines across the vanguard. The acid atomizer dissolved away any creatures that lingered. Angels tumbled from the skies, their spirits whirling ghostlike from their riven forms and into the soul torches along the ship’s hull. With each new life, Weatherlight gained speed.

  Still, the beams did not catch them all, and angels poured over the rails. Refugees shrieked. Magna swords sliced into them. Red fountains erupted.

  “Glasspitters fire! Beams fire! Fight, all of you! Fight!”

  Swords and belaying pins and chains—the crew led the charge. Viashino and goblin and human, they fought. Great blasts of molten glass belched out from the bombards, catching and slaying angels in their hundreds. Rays of crimson light burned through feather to muscle to bone. Still they came. Out of the throat of heaven came the killer angels. Spirit after spirit poured from sundered bodies into the torches, into Weatherlight’s powerstone. Out of it flowed red beams that slew all the more. Every death fed the killing machine.

  “Faster, Karn!” Jhoira shouted. “Punch through them. Planeshift speed!”

  There came no answer from the speaking tube, only the roar of engines and the hot smell of heat-stressed metal.

  * * *

  Radiant reappeared in her throne room, her sanctuary. Ever since Gorig had cast mirror spells on the windows, this room had become her refuge. Now into her refuge, she had brought the dying form of her foe and the gems that were his life.

  It was a simple enough thing to decide what to do with Urza. She stripped him from her waist and tossed his crumpled figure to a nearby platform. She wasn’t much interested in Urza anymore. He had been merely the package that had carried these stones. Now, broken open, he lay discarded on the floor.

  These stones, though…Radiant lifted them in a gory hand. She had not spent the energy it would take to transform her fingers from the dagger-claws they had become. She rather enjoyed them in their fierce aspect. They looked so powerful l
ike this—reflecting the gentle glow of the stones and mantled in the planeswalker’s blood.

  Radiant glanced up. The mirrors were full of her glimmering victory. From every angle, the darkness gave back fragmentary visions of her beauty. A forest of eyes gazed at her—no longer merely her eyes, but the Eyes of Urza too.

  “You were like Serra, weren’t you?” Radiant said. Her quiet voice echoed ceaselessly off the dark mirrors. “You could see in this room—even when the windows were lenses. You could make sense of the visions of this throne. Of course you could. Your eyes had a facet for every window, and now your eyes are mine.”

  Urza did not move. His sundered head leaked blood and brain onto the floor.

  “Gorig will be sad he was not here to collect your soul,” Radiant said wistfully. “Ah, but I have your eyes. Such beautiful eyes.”

  The crystals rolled languidly apart on her hand. She saw only then the ragged point of fracture between the two stones. She had known the Mightstone and Weakstone were halves of a whole, but seeing how they might be joined intrigued her. Taking one crystal in each hand, she studied them.

  “It looks as though they fit together just like—this—”

  * * *

  Breath failing, strength failing, Barrin had crawled to the saddle of Rhammidarigaaz and strapped himself in. The young fire drake struggled toward one army of angels and away from another. Before him, a refugee ship fought through the battle, mantled in spectral lights. Behind him a furious demon labored at the head of a hellish legion.

  It was a unique vantage there, suspended in the relative calm between two deaths, between pain and despair. Barrin knew he was done for. He could not fight. He could not escape, but he did have one final spell and the power to bring it into being. The question remaining was one of timing and focus. What would be the best use of the spell? Perhaps he could compel Radiant to kill Gorig, or Gorig to kill Radiant, or an archangel to make a suicide stand to cover the ship’s retreat.

  Gorig was more than a Phyrexian monster. He was the soul battery.

  Suddenly Barrin knew what he would do. He rolled onto his back. Gorig labored down toward him out of the darkening heavens. The beast’s torso blazed blue-white in anticipation. There was a simple ratio—something about the velocity of A minus the velocity of B divided by the distance between them over against the velocity of B plus the velocity of C divided by the distance between them—something Urza could have calculated with a mere thought. Barrin was more mage than mathematician, and he had trouble breathing, let alone calculating. Instead, he simply waited until the demon—eyes ablaze and dagger-teeth drooling over the mage master’s legs—hovered just out of reach. Summoning the last bit of his strength, Barrin cast a ray of command.

  The fury in the beast’s eyes shifted from Barrin down to the approaching Weatherlight, down to the main deck, where the captain stood. With new, ardent speed, the Phyrexian monster dropped into a dive and screamed his way toward the beleaguered ship.

  * * *

  Mightstone in her right hand and Weakstone in her left, Radiant slowly brought the two together. As the rough facets of the split edges approached each other, the light in the crystals redoubled. They suddenly glowed brightly in her hands. They cast her shadow, giant and menacing, through the aviary. In a million mirrors, Radiant glimpsed herself transfigured by the light.

  A glinting smile crossed her teeth. “Such power. Such power.”

  She brought the stones closer together. Light flared brighter still and brought with it heat. Intense beams leapt out of each facet of the stones. They struck silvered glass and ricocheted through the aviary. The vast structure seemed the interior of a giant gemstone, glimmering brilliantly around Radiant. Light bathed every dark corner. It shone across the ruined gardens below. It danced on bodies of dead birds. It gilded the still form of Urza Planeswalker. Refulgent, nimbic, luciferous, radiant light.

  “If they were lenses instead of mirrors,” Radiant mused idly, “all this light would spill outward and be lost. But, clever me, it remains here. It is mine.”

  She turned the Weakstone slowly, matching its fracture marks exactly with those of its brother. With a final slow ecstasy, she eased them together….

  The stones never touched. Lightning awoke between them. The glare was blinding. The heat was incinerating. The crystals, glimmering faintly when apart, were holocaustal together. Their effulgence filled every mirror. The light had nowhere to go. Each moment grew exponentially brighter. Each instant grew exponentially hotter.

  Radiant tried to pull her hands apart, but the stones called to each other. They burned out her eyes.

  “I’m the mad one!” she gasped.

  Next moment, it did not matter. Angel flesh seared away. Angel bone exploded. Blood flash boiled. Innards puffed into black smoke that itself was bleached white and then dispersed altogether.

  Radiant was gone. The lantern in darkness had burned herself out from within.

  Someone else was there in her place. Someone hovered there, the embodiment of the stones, the creature created and sustained by them. It was the conflict between those stones—the world-shattering conflict of irreconcilable opposites that were even, so halves of a whole—that granted Urza life. It immolated his old flesh, and in the same flash, fitted him with a new body, a glorified body. It formed around the locus of his being. It formed around the stones that were his eyes.

  And next moment, the core of heat and light could no longer be contained. Every mirror in the mile-high atrium shattered. Hunks of silvered glass flung outward and crashed into the grids and plates Gorig had said would save Radiant. They buckled out and flew away, insubstantial as paper. The blaze followed them. It arced through air. It filled the yellow and shrinking skies.

  Urza gazed out through the blinding brilliance. He saw the explosion peel back the skin of Serra’s Palace. He saw it pulverize walls within. He watched as blast lines punched holes deep into the floating citadel. Shattered and crushed, the palace listed slowly. Streamers of force tore through its web of levitation spells. The place released an horrific moan and rolled over. The massive hand of gravity tightened its fingers around the thing and dragged it downward. It receded. A coiling sea of smoke trailed behind it. The broken hull soon seemed only the falling, spinning seed of a maple tree.

  Then it struck the rising floor of the plane. Chaos swallowed it whole.

  All around Urza, the edges of the blast were disappearing against the closing. Before the tide of destruction could sweep him under, Urza stepped from the dying realm.

  * * *

  Only moments after the deafening explosion that destroyed the palace, Jhoira heard an even more ominous sound. Through the groan of overheated engines and the shriek of dying refugees and the howls of rabid angels, she heard a high, keening wail. Something was falling out of the sky, too fast to avoid. She looked up. The meteor hurtled through the angel throng, ripping wings from bodies and rending anything it stuck. It grew larger, its maniac teeth glinting in the moment that it hung above deck. Its eyes were yellow as lemon wedges.

  With a sudden, horrific boom, the demon creature struck the white-hot powerstone conduits. Its head was pulverized by the impact. Its wings peeled away, but the thing’s massive metal torso remained. The soul-portals on either side of it flared, emptying their charges into the engines.

  Weatherlight lunged forward. The beam weapons stabbed out with twice their previous intensity. Whole flights of angels disintegrated. Souls en masse flooded into the flashing torso. The ship gained speed. Angels flung themselves away from the juggernaut and hovered in stunned terror in space for a moment before realizing the curtain of chaos had closed on them.

  The plane was disintegrating. The point of critical collapse had been reached. Nothing would stop it now.

  The white mana that rained from the folding skies poured into the powerstone of Weatherlight. Every creature caught by t
he advancing curtain turned into a spiral of life-force, which was drawn into the sparking torso of the beast, into the engine.

  Jhoira could do nothing but stand and stare in grotesque fascination and awe.

  The angel armies fell back as the refugee craft sped into the clear space beyond.

  To starboard appeared Rhammidarigaaz, with Barrin lashed to him. There was no sign of Urza. Unless the dragon flew just above the ship at the moment of planeshift, it and Barrin would be left behind.

  “Planeshift before final collapse!” Barrin shouted. “Any mortal left in the plane will die!”

  “I know! I know!” Jhoira returned. “You hear that, Karn! We need full speed! We need it now.”

  “Too many passengers,” Karn roared from below. His voice was strained, as though he propelled the ship by main strength. “Too much weight!”

  Before the bow, another army of angels hung. They were disintegrating before another collapsing edge of the plane. And suddenly they were gone.

  Only the Weatherlight and Rhammidarigaaz remained in the collapsing plane. Curtains of chaos closed ahead and behind them.

  “Now or never, Karn!” Jhoira shouted.

  They reached the wall. The prow of the ship sank into chaos and dissolved. In the breath afterward, the ship and all those aboard were gone.

  * * *

  The invasion force had been gone eight hours, and the sun had at last quit the skies over Tolaria. The crowd that had had gathered for Weatherlight’s launch had remained, but their high spirits had dissolved. The festive morning had given way to a speculative noon, which in turn surrendered to a fearful and prayerful evening. Night now lay full and cold over the academy walls. Someone had fetched candles from the great hall, but a mocking wind put out the hopeful little lights moments after they were coaxed to life. A few lanterns had replaced them, glaring baldly across the mulling multitudes. The quiet prayers were becoming whispers of doubt.