The Thran
Page 1
“Fire!” the Thran garrison commander shouted. His words broke through a new malaise. “Fire!”
Bolts tore across the staging ground.
One struck a Phyrexian in the gut. The metal tore straight through him. The gray-muscled warrior did not fall, did not even slow. He came on.
They looked even more like giant spiders as they approached. Inhuman skulls, sagittal crests, horns, fangs, cords of gray muscle—yes, these were monsters not men.
The Phyrexians breached the garrison’s outpost. They did not fight with swords. They needed no weapons. They were the weapons.
THE THRAN
©1999 Wizards of the Coast LLC.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering, their respective logos, and all character names and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.
Cover art: Gary Riddell
First Printing: December 1999
eBook Publication: March 2018
Original ISBN 9780786916009
Ebook ISBN 9780786966387
640-C5599000-001
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Part I - The City
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II - The Nation
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part III - The World
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part IV - The Multiverse
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks go to Jess Lebow for terrific editing and camaraderie, Scott McGough for deftly balancing continuity and creativity, Daneen McDermott for insights into mana rigs and iconic races, Peter Archer for constancy and vision, and Mary Kirchoff for contracts and cut checks. I couldn’t have made it without you guys. Thanks!
In Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich who survived a real-life Yawgmoth
Thran-Phyrexian War Day One:
The Battle of Megheddon Defile
The morning dawned hot on Megheddon Defile.
It made little difference to the Thran army’s vanguard. Dwarves, they loved rock and heat. Their faces seemed graven from stone. Their skin had the same rusty hue as the cavern walls that rose to either side. These were elite mountain dwarves, two thousand of them. Dust-colored canvas flaps draped their plate armor, shielding it from sunshine and eyes above. Similar cloth encased the broad blades of battle axes. Long shafts let these heavy weapons walk themselves, butts sending up puffs of smoke beside iron-shod boots. Dwarven Commander Curtisworthy ran a strict division.
Humans marched directly behind the dwarves. Though tall, brooding, and hearty, they were out of their element in mountains and desert. Many were the levies of tribal warlords on the opposite side of the globe. Thran commanders and troops marched in their midst to insure that the barbarians would follow orders. All the humans, Thran and barbarian, had bravado. Or it might be called arrogance—or belligerence. Whatever it was, they wilted in the heat of marching through the mountains. The forty thousand human infantry shuffled along with the tired resignation of prisoners. Even the twenty thousand horsemen gritted their teeth and draped wet veils over their mouths to keep the dust out.
The elves were worst off of all. Far from the seclusion of bark and moss, they languished beneath the glaring sun. They had abandoned their leafy garments and wrapped themselves in white robes—one part desert burnoose and one part grave cerements. Elven hands extended from the retreating folds, skin burned and leathery. The anger in those haunted eyes had become despair. The elves had gradually fallen back to the rear of the column, too slow to keep up even with the dwarven vanguard, too weary to fight any but a rearguard action. Still, the elves numbered ten thousand, and many were mages and healers. As long as they could cast spells and heal the sick, they would aid the army greatly.
One flank of the column was guarded by lizard men. Though silent and sullen, these fighters were canny in the rocky confines. In a single moment of scurrying steps and lashing tails, all ten thousand of the Viashino could disappear within the crevices that lined their path. Fanatically loyal to the war beys among them, these reptiles would be more at home on Halcyon’s volcanic extrusion than Yawgmoth himself.
To the other flank of the column marched the finest warriors of the united army—minotaurs. More determined and hearty than dwarves, more massive and violent than humans, more implacable in battle than Viashino, minotaurs were born for war. Though dust dulled their armor from jambs to randers, every minotaur eye gleamed bright with bloodlust.
Throughout the column, marching among soldiers of flesh and bone, were artifact warriors. Mantis warriors with flex-steel abdomens, metallic serpents with razor mandibles—on needlelike legs they scuttled, on grinding treadmills they lurched forward. The college of artificers had never supported Yawgmoth and had stockpiled war machines beyond his reach. When war inevitably erupted, the artificers made their machines readily available to the allied effort.
Best of all, some three hundred war caravels cruised above the defile. Their sails raked batlike beside their long, sleek hulls. They cast blessed shade down on the languishing elves.
They were ready for war. The Thran Alliance, they called themselves—the five outer city-states of the empire joined with representatives from the rest of the known world. They had come together to fight a single man—Yawgmoth.
He was no man, but a monster, a cowardly monster. At Phoenon six months before, he had struck out of the blackness of night. He had bombed his own people to keep them from joining his enemies. He had fought and fled. Vicious and treacherous, ruthless and bloodthirsty, he was no less than a demon.
A fiendish cry came from the dwarven vanguard—somethi
ng half shriek and half ululation. Humans and elves, minotaurs and Viashino lifted their eyes. The army had just rounded the last bend in the Megheddon Defile. Beyond the canyon walls opened a broad desert plain. On the opposite edge of that sere space jutted a tall plateau, the volcanic extrusion of Halcyon. It seemed a wall standing in the desert, fifteen hundred feet high, with the great city crowding the plateau atop it. Once the capital of the Thran Empire, now Halcyon and every soul in it belonged to Yawgmoth.
The demonic cry repeated itself, pouring from throats human and inhuman and echoing through the rocky mouth of Megheddon itself. It was as though the allied armies raised that fiendish cry to summon the demon from his lair.
* * *
—
Yawgmoth heard the summons. He sat placidly within an armored sedan chair at the head of his Phyrexian army.
They waited silently in an underground chamber dug to slant down into the desert floor. The wide mouth of the cavern was draped in pale muslin to blend with the sun-bleached soil. It would be nearly invisible to the advancing army until the contingent had marched past. Three other such bunkers flanked the marching ground, and a fourth natural cavern lay in a cluster of rocks at the base of the Halcyte extrusion. At Yawgmoth’s command, the curtains would fall from these bunkers, and the five thousand warriors waiting within each would surge forth into the bare flanks of their foe.
For now, though, Yawgmoth waited. He heard the demon summons, but he did not answer it. He was no demon. He was a god.
The last six months had proven it. The canny Lord of Phyrexia had many surprises waiting for the Thran Alliance. Smiling, Yawgmoth leaned back in his sedan chair.
“None of my adversaries will survive this battle.”
Even now, his enemies strode out upon the plains. They were as bold as wolves—and why not? Led by dwarven elite, flanked by minotaurs and Viashino, guarded from the skies by three hundred war caravels, supported by mantis warriors and scuttling creations of nebbish artificers—why wouldn’t they be as bold as wolves? They even howled like wolves.
Hearing their insolent whooping was almost enough to make Yawgmoth trigger the attack too soon. He would not be goaded into such a mistake. This had been too carefully planned. There were appropriate steps.
Among the marching legions drifted the vast shadows of Thran ships. While the army had coursed through the defile, these ships had remained in a column above, shading them from the glaring sun and any possible attack. Now, the shadows, smooth and silent as schooling leviathans, began to slowly drift apart. No doubt the ships would circle the city, just out of range of the ray cannons on her walls, and demand surrender.
“We’ll see who surrenders.”
Yawgmoth reached into a flat box that held a small, three-dimensional schematic of the battlefield. At strategic points in the miniature defile and flatlands, tiny powerstones glimmered. Yawgmoth touched a certain crystal imbedded there. A high whistling sound answered the motion. He smiled.
The marchers howled once more before the sound broke through. Then the army of the Thran Alliance heard it. It was a piercing whistle, and it seemed to come from the very sun. Soldiers squinted up toward the sliding bulk of their warships, trying to see past.
In a heartbeat, the whistle became a shriek. There was no mistaking it. The allies had heard this sound before at Phoenon. There, ships had soared into being out of blind midnight. These ships came out of the very eye of the sun.
“The one place to hide in a brilliant sky is just beside the sun,” Yawgmoth said.
Phyrexian warships in their scores swooped down beneath the Thran aerial armada. Ray cannons flashed aboard Yawgmoth’s ships. They tore holes in Thran hulls. They burned away Thran soldiers.
Barbarians cowered. The air over their heads teemed with streaking Phyrexian ships. Humans and elves dropped to their faces. Dwarves stood against the onslaught, some flinging ineffectual axes skyward. Minotaurs also raged against the storm of ships. Some of their blades actually connected with the hulls, only to be flung back in a lethal rain.
Splinters and smoke boomed from the Thran fleet above. A shower of charred bodies and weaponry plunged out of the shredded craft. In the wake of the shrieking Phyrexian ships, the battlefield was littered with wreckage and death.
Yes, it was a battlefield now. There could be no doubt of it.
War caravels crashed to earth. They fell in a regular rhythm, like the footfalls of a running colossus. With each pounding report, soldiers were crushed in their hundreds.
“Easier than I expected,” Yawgmoth murmured.
Then the unthinkable—cannon fire raked out across Phyrexian vessels. Their decks blasted open. Their hulls shattered like walnut shells. They fell from the sky, eight of them cut down in a moment.
Yawgmoth saw. A battery of his own ray cannons had been salvaged from the Battle of Phoenon and mounted beneath Thran war caravels at the back of the allied column. His hand reach into the schematic, signaling the next onslaught.
Even as Thran soldiers dragged themselves from beneath burning warships and struggled to cover, the ground came suddenly and horrifically alive. The soil opened beneath their feet. Some fighters fell, legs consumed to the knee by the ground itself. Others reeled back from one treacherous well only to stumble into another. They tumbled, hands, heads, and knees jutting into razor-edged holes. Horses, too, went down, hooves caught and hobbled immediately. Whatever dropped into those holes never emerged again. With a sound like shark jaws snapping closed, scythe shutters clamped down on whatever meat and bone presented itself.
Motors spun. Blades met. Blood fountained. Warriors shrieked.
They staggered back, limbs cleanly shorn shy of the knee, across the ankle, above the elbow. Some did not stagger back—those whose arterial lacerations emptied hearts and heads and bodies in one brief gush.
“My beautiful sand crabs,” Yawgmoth sighed happily, reaching into his box schematic to touch another powerstone. “Arise!”
Dismembered corpses moved grotesquely. The ground under them mounded up. From hundreds of wells in the sand, metal monsters emerged. They seemed gigantic crabs of steel, sloughing grit from optic arrays. They had been buried just beneath the surface, and holes in their backs had opened to swallow and shear off the limbs of the Thran soldiers. Many sand crabs obliviously carried corpses on their metal carapaces. Others bore only the gory trails left by severed limbs. A pair of snapping claws proceeded each beast. Scuttling legs clawed their way from the holes. Pincers caught and minced flesh.
Those who fled—barbarians and elves—only stumbled onto more sand crabs. Most held firm. Humans and dwarves and minotaurs were glad to have a foe to fling their blades at. That was as much harm as they could do to the artifact creatures. Swords clanged impotently on armor. The attacks did not slow the quiet and efficient machines. Artifact creatures hewed Thran like machetes hewing cane.
At the rear of the Thran lines, elves unleashed spells. Desert scrub brush grew rampantly, miring sand crabs and minotaurs alike. Artifact engines rusted away to dust, but so too did dwarven axes. Summoned creatures appeared—ferocious bears, giant spiders, timber wolves—but none were a match for these sand crabs; none were meant for desert battle. Only the scuttling scavenger folk in their filthy multitude made any headway. They and their specialized hex-irons and crowbars could strip an artifact in a gasp. Of course, with sand crabs, those who stripped the machine were also stripped by it. For every sand crab disabled, scores of scavengers died.
Yawgmoth enjoyed the spectacle a moment more before touching the five stones that summoned the five divisions of the Phyrexian army.
Sand-colored canvas fell from the trenches. Silver-armored warriors marched grimly forth. They seemed machines themselves. Powerstone swords and axes gleamed hungrily in their hands. These were the Halcyte guards. They strode as they had been trained, not breaking ranks, hewing their way through any
impediment—wood, steel, brain, bone. Their natural fanaticism was overlaid by a war spell. They would not pause. They would not surrender. They would not stop until their foes were dead. Minotaurs and dwarves were cloven in half. Silver armor grew red as the allies died.
“They really had no chance,” Yawgmoth said, a touch of false sadness in his voice.
To the north and south formed unexpected things. Tan as the desert floor, serpentine shapes rose and twisted and swelled. Cyclones? The dust devils lingered beyond the armies, gaining speed. Their wavering columns darkened, seeming to solidify.
With pernicious intent, the twisters converged on the marching Halcyte guard. Those who strode doggedly onward were caught up in the winds and flung away.
“So, the elves brought something useful after all. A pity more of them won’t live to witness my next surprise.” Yawgmoth touched a dark, slender crystal in the box schematic.
From the cavern at the base of the Halcyon extrusion, at the heels of the marching guard, came a massive figure. It climbed from interior spaces. Forged of black metal, it seemed an avatar of the dark cave itself. As the figure rose into the light, its form became clear. Its sloped head was the size of a mammoth. Its jaw was hinged beneath scimitar teeth. Hunching shoulders emerged next. Simian arms swung beneath, with massive hands large enough to grasp and crush ten men. A metal-plated torso, a sinewy pelvis and crouched legs…
“A behemoth!”
The name of the thing whispered up from a thousand lips, terror breathing through the air.