Kreig carried the tattered and blood-stained colors of Varden. The other witch king’s warhost no longer existed, all survivors having pledged their loyalty unto death to Kreig. He had come to the council as the greatest warrior—the greatest witch king—ever known. Dressed simply in ceremonial leathers, his chest and arms bared to the cold, he walked over to the wall, withdrew a spike from his belt, and used it to stab through the heavy cloth and into the wall. Never before had a warlord’s crest been displayed here among the spiked standards of every nation the Keldons had ever fought against. It was both proof of victory and threat to those who would stand against him. Kreig nodded to Gatha, and the two walked straight over to the lowermost tier. Kreig mounted it first, staring down those nearby, and then turned to offer Gatha a hand in aide.
Where the mage may have come into his own power here in Keld—able six months ago to stand up before a furious Varden and believe himself sacrosanct—here his nerves sang tightly for the role Kreig expected him to play. The witch king did not need to include him but did so for an old promise made by Trohg himself. Shrugging aside the offer of assistance, Gatha mounted the tier and stared directly at the warlord to his immediate side. The Keldon stood, his massive frame towering over Gatha, but after a quick glance to Kreig he averted his gaze and stepped back, leaving room for Gatha to stand as an equal—as doyen, one of the leaders of Keld.
Gatha swallowed a tight knot in his throat, his mouth dry and scratchy for lack of spit. For the first time ever the council hall did not seem cold, a full-body flush warming him.
Kreig, however, was not finished. He stepped upon the next tier, then the next, again meeting no challenge.
On this third tier a crippled warlord rose, his age impressive and showing in the weathered face and slightly stooped shoulders. One arm had been replaced by a stabbing sword, his left leg a sharpened stump of metal.
“I do not speak against you, Kreig,” He thrust the bladed hand toward Gatha, “but he does not belong there.”
Gatha knew that those warlords crippled in battle still retained their place. The council of the aged was given weight in all deliberations, but in the end the strong ruled. Kreig locked gazes with his elder.
“He is here because my great sire, Trohg, promised that one day Gatha would sit on the council. I am keeping that promise. Gatha has proven himself as the greatest ally of the Keldon nation. My victories are his victories.”
Kreig’s death would likely be Gatha’s own as well. The mage was again thankful for his hoard of slow-time water. Now he was merely gambling on Kreig’s martial prowess. His entire life in Keld had been a gamble. At least here he had loaded the dice.
The elder glanced away first. For his challenge, he decided to step down a tier rather than be thrown down later. The warlord next to his abandoned seat, though, rose and drew a dagger. No words passed nor needed to. Kreig leapt for him at once, taking a savage slash to his side but fastening his hands about the other man’s neck. Muscles bunched on his shoulders. A sideways twist and the other man’s neck snapped with a bone-crunching sound. It echoed in the chamber. Kreig threw him from the tier.
A warlord doyen—no witch king this one—rose beyond him. Kreig moved forward, and the other dropped back into a defensive stance. The witch king paused, then walked forward slowly and with great deliberation to each step. He stopped barely a foot from the other warrior, hands at his sides and eyes boring into the other man’s face as if daring him to strike first. Brutal seconds passed, and then the warlord broke away his gaze and bowed his head in surrender unable to bring himself to follow through on the challenge. He also demoted himself to the second tier. Kreig continued to stare down at him. Still there were no words spoken but some subtle body posturing that Gatha could not quite follow. The warlord stepped back down to the first tier, and Kreig turned his attention back to the final level.
Behind Kreig, the doyen shook themselves into a new structure of power. With three vacancies now on the third tier, a witch king from the second tier stood and moved up next to Kreig. Toward the dominant witch king he kept eyes averted and head slightly bowed. To his right he stared his neighbor in the eye and then sat. No one challenged. Another rose from the first tier and took a seat in the second. A few of the younger but stronger witch kings replaced older warlords higher up as well. To Gatha’s eye, it became apparent who supported Kreig and who was simply bowing to his greater strength.
Kreig ignored it all. With deliberation he stepped up to the fourth tier, holding only six chairs—one of them his usual seat on the council. One witch king stood in challenge. At this level none carried weapons, considering it beneath their martial prowess. The fighting was brutal and silent. Kreig held up under a stiff-hand blow to the throat and a rib cracked by a knee body blow, giving as good as he received. Finally he managed to catch his opponent on the jaw with his elbow. Kreig picked the stunned man up by shoulder and crotch and threw him from the tier, his skull caving in when it dashed against the hard floor below. The witch king then picked up his own chair and threw it down after the body, leaving him no actual seat. He stepped up into the open space where no chair had ever been placed and where, by his action, none ever would. This place of power was his by right if no one challenged.
No one did. The four remaining doyen who sat on the high tier averted their gaze, and Kreig’s power was assured. Again the doyen maneuvered around to fill vacancies. No fights marred the quiet. The others did not presume to compare their ability with Kreig’s glorious rise. They recognized and honored Kreig’s strength—and Gatha’s, the mage realized, remembering how Kreig had shared all victories past and future.
It was a feat never before managed, an event out of legend. Kreig had taken the uppermost level. From before recorded time the promise had come down: When the Necropolis below the council hall filled with the warlord dead, they would all rise in an invincible army and sweep Dominaria. The warlord who sat the final tier would lead that army. Gatha had never understood if that warlord would be one of the dead, the greatest of them all through history, or whichever warlord had seized the position for the great event. Here, with the mage’s help, it seemed that Kreig might be able to await that rapturous time.
Davvol stood on a small rise that he’d shaped up from the mountainside’s easy slope of dull tan flowstone. His flying disc rested upon the ground behind him—a black altar guarded by two Phyrexian soldiers standing a silent guard. On the horizon the great volcano that held the Stronghold thrust its imperial presence into that chaotic sky. It dwarfed the mountain on which he currently stood and reminded Davvol of that which he ruled.
A cutting wind sliced through the gaps in his armor, breathing chills against his grayish flesh and billowing his cloak out behind him like the leathery wings of a giant bat out of nightmare. The cold also gripped at his head, squeezing it in an invisible vise, except where the black Phyrexian skullcap armored and protected it even from the elements. A Coracin physical characteristic—in his mind, a defect—was that the bone plates in their wide skulls never quite closed and so left a vulnerable spot over the brain, a vulnerability that Croag had agreed to remedy, as Davvol’s mind was of importance to both Davvol and the Phyrexians. Only one feature to the skullcap bothered him: The small circular indentation high over his forehead. Phyrexians did not adorn their work with art or meaningless design. That indentation had a purpose, which Croag had not seen fit to pass on and Davvol preferred not to draw attention to by asking.
“You intend to attempt a transfer.” Croag’s voice squealed and cracked behind him. This was not a question. Croag obviously knew.
Davvol looked over his shoulder, his black eyes guarded against his surprise at being interrupted here. The member of Phyrexia’s Inner Circle stood next to the steward’s disc, a portal still opened behind him and flashing as Davvol’s soldiers passed through and away—back to the Stronghold, no doubt. Now Davvol frowned. The soldiers were a precaution since the Vec had been known to roam far from their underground city sear
ching the landscape. Of course, Croag could easily handle anything a common soldier could, but those guards were his, to be dismissed only by Davvol himself.
“I am considering it,” he finally admitted.
“It would be better if your troops did not see a failure.” Croag glided forward slowly, the metal bands that formed his semblance of clothing rasping against each other. Croag carried his staff today, a twisted metal creation with no apparent purpose. Davvol knew better than to assume such was true. “Failure is too often the genesis of recycling. You might weaken their loyalty to you.”
Croag had done him a favor? Perhaps. Davvol did not blind himself to the possibility that Croag might be concerned that the guard witness his success. The centuries were stacking up behind the steward of Rath, and with each passing year he accumulated more data through which he better understood his position and that of those around him. Davvol smiled, thinking that none of his race could ever have hoped for such a long life holding the power he did. He would gain more so long as he maintained appearances and worked carefully.
“My appreciation, Croag. I hadn’t considered that.” Because he truthfully hadn’t considered failure as an option, “What would happen to the subjects if a failure occurred in mid-transference?” Would the Phyrexian even know?
“They would be gone,” Croag said simply. “Lost between worlds. It has happened before, yes. During the first steward’s reign.”
That told Davvol quite a lot that he hadn’t known before, the most important, of course, being that Rath’s rulers had changed in the past, and by extension could easily be changed again in the future. The thought bred hope and concern both. He turned to the task at hand, staring down the slope at the smooth wash of flowstone.
Davvol mentally reached back to the Stronghold. There the great control machinery for transference currently lay dormant, though it, like the flowstone, was attuned to the mental commands of both Davvol and Croag. The machinery sparked to life with his mental touch. When Rath was complete, ready to provide access to Dominaria for the armies of Phyrexia, this great machinery would overlay one to the other, the mutable quality of flowstone bridging the gap between planes in one final expenditure. Until then, the ease of a transference was limited by many factors, the closer to Rath’s final form, the better. The size of the attempted transference and physical distance from the Stronghold’s control machinery made a difference as well. The only variable was apparently the strength of mind of the steward or evincar. As always, Davvol trusted his mental abilities.
First in the valley, he sensed the machinery powering to life, softening the flowstone over an area measuring in square miles. Pressure built within his mind, an avalanche of malleable stone poised overhead, threatening to engulf him. Just beyond the promontory the land sank as if undermined by some great cavern beneath. Edges to the valley appeared as flowstone sloughed downhill.
As the flowstone continued to evacuate, the machinery built up the lower sides and generally shaped the valley into the picture Davvol held for it—slightly crescent shaped with weathered southern slopes and a steep cliff face to the north. His consciousness plunged into the land, following the forces at work. The pressure eased, the incredible raw weight of the flowstone falling away as the valley took its basic form. The machinery then began to pull details from Davvol’s thoughts—from the memory of his trip to Dominaria. The seeker opening the portal for him had promised the perfect site, enclosed and isolated, and such had been delivered. Davvol spent days memorizing the finer detail, from the spicy pine scent to the cool touch of dew-laden fern. Now he transferred that detail to the Stronghold’s control machinery, and again his mind strained under the weight of his undertaking. Flowstone leapt up in columns and spikes, filling out to become trees and bushes and grass. They stood in frozen relief, a true-to-life forest valley apparently sculpted from simple sandstone.
Only it was not so simple. It was an incredible display of power, both from Davvol and from the flowstone itself.
The process continued, memory becoming reality in this artificial valley. Now buildings rose up, adding to a renewed mental weight. Never before had Davvol felt his mind so completely at work, the machinery simply taking all he allowed. He saw animals in the forest and people on the streets and walks between buildings. They moved—were alive—and many stared up into a sky turned suddenly dark. Voices cried, shouted, and screamed. Davvol stood on the threshold of worlds and planes, looking between the chaos of the multiverse as the great machinery folded one into the other. The people were aware of Rath, of him, and many fell to the ground out of abject fear for what they could not understand.
Several hundred lives, the town residents, were but tiny sparks within his consciousness. The true life carried across the hole he had opened in the void, their sobs and screams of terror piercing the background roll of Rath’s eternal thunderstorm. Their tormented cries distracted Davvol, forcing the machinery to pull stronger at his mind. Slowly Rath’s steward sank to the ground, his hands splayed down against the flowstone promontory as he came to his knees under the stress. Still he did not take his eyes off the valley, then the pressure receded, and the forces raised by the machinery brought Davvol back from the threshold. The tortured wailing faded. He felt a few small sparks of life evade his final grasp. Some were lost in the chaos between Rath and Dominaria.
It was done.
A deer sprang nearby, jumping from verdant valley to the lip of Rath’s unnatural flowstone landscape. It froze in fright then scrambled back to the safety of trees and undergrowth. Far in the distance, carried to Davvol by the final vestiges of his connection with the Stronghold’s control machinery, came the terrified cries of people now gazing into an unfamiliar and hostile sky of dark clouds and vivid lightning. These were the newest residents of Rath.
Davvol smiled fully. These people would be taken as slaves. Davvol planned to accelerate the schedule and bring Rath closer to the point of final convergence, then Rath itself would cross the threshold and merge with Dominaria, bringing with it the armies of Phyrexia. Davvol would rule Rath and open the way for Phyrexia. He saw no other future. Even Croag would admit this now.
When he turned back Croag and the portal were gone. Davvol stood alone over his valley, left with his creation. The steward laughed, his harsh voice carried away on the sharp wind. That was fine by him. He felt no desire to share the moment, preferring the solitude of his success—his first success, but certainly not his last.
* * *
Storm clouds over Benalia hid stars and the blurry reflection of the Glimmer Moon. The Null Moon, a hard point of light often mistaken for a bright star, had recently cleared the overcast horizon. Only one being in the Capashen village of DeLatt knew the Null Moon’s exact position, no need of direct sight to sense the satellite. Its lips curled back revealing a feral smile of sharp, gnashing teeth. Thunder crashed, shaking clay tiles and rattling window panes.
The blackness that formed inside the small courtyard had little to do with the dark Dominarian night. Pale gray flagstones reflected a cascade of lightning into the most remote corners. The bright wash bathed everything in a preternatural glow for one split second, except the round portal of pitch dark that sat tucked behind a wall of hanging plants. The home of the village magistrate framed three sides of the courtyard, the fourth opening up onto a wrought-iron fence with a gate offset on the right-hand side. An engraved metal shield over the gate offered a welcome to those who passed within. Though the gate remained locked, three figures moved among the shadows of the courtyard. Lightning flashed again, the scar standing out in the dark sky for a long second as violent thunder assailed the earth.
Croag already felt at home here. The electrically charged air felt invigorating, reminding the Inner Circle member of Rath and certain portions of Phyrexia—and something more, a sense pulling at Croag’s mind in a way that more closely spoke of home and kindred. He could detect the barest scent of glistening oil—the scent exuded by meat once bathed in
the vats. Croag chattered a brief acknowledgement to the seeker who had found this place. The minor Phyrexian stepped back with a groveling bow, taking a subordinate position to Croag and Davvol.
Davvol studied the surroundings, no doubt committing every last detail to his extraordinary memory. Croag did not mind—encouraged it, in fact. Davvol proved ever more useful as the centuries played out. Though he had yet to kill Urza Planeswalker, his improvements to negators could not be gainsaid, and his management of Rath was adequate, if uninspired. He had surprised Croag those months ago, able to guide a transference between Rath and Dominaria. That was not to say that the Inner Circle member considered the other dangerous. Davvol displayed no real aggression or ambition, not in any way the Phyrexian could gauge at least. Perhaps in another century or two he could be trouble, but who could plan so far ahead when today there was so much to accomplish?
A twinge, more direct this time, centered Croag’s attention toward a pair of glass-paned doors. “There,” he said, a simple screech of sound. It pointed one skeletal finger.
Rath’s steward squinted in the direction, unable to pierce the gloom so deeply as Croag with his uncompleated eyes. “Where?” he asked as more lightning streaked across the sky. “The doors?” He moved off, his armored boots scraping against flagstone.
Croag moved quietly, making only his usual metallic rasp and the occasional scrape of metal bands against stone. With the booming thunder and a damp wind rattling the metal gate, the sounds of their passage should go unnoticed. If not, there would be one less Dominarian. Davvol tried the door latches, and they opened easily on well-oiled hinges. Croag was the first through, shredding the diaphanous white curtains as he passed. He moved directly to the side of a bed on which an old man slept. Weak and frail looking, as were most Dominarians, Croag found it difficult to reconcile the dark call that pulled him toward the human. He was not a sleeper but something very similar.
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