Alara Unbroken

by Doug Beyer

  The bed skidded toward him.

  Mubin blurted out three select and deeply obscene words. For a moment, he actually hoped there were no clerics within earshot.

  He would have to do it carefully. If he could lean in to the bedpost, and pull himself close enough to the post to push most of his weight down onto it, he could lift himself instead of just moving the bed. He pulled hard.

  His upper half rose fairly easily, but as soon as he began to budge his lower half, it became far harder. He grabbed again, hand over hand, and lurched his weight up the corner of the bed. He hung on to the top of the bedpost, supporting his weight solely with his arms, his legs dangling limp.

  He would drop soon. It was now or never.

  With only a quick glance over at the window, he lunged. He successfully grabbed the windowsill and slumped against the wall, pulling hard to prevent his body weight from dragging him right back down to the floor again.

  Would he be able to manipulate the window latch while holding his bulk with one hand? He craned his neck to see. Of course, there was no latch on the window—it was just a simple pane of thick glass fused into the frame. That made the decision easy, then.

  He let go of the windowsill with one hand, and before he fell to the floor, he made a fist and smashed it through the window. The crash made an exquisite sound, an unmistakable sound of emergency and desperation that rang out across the meadows around the tiny recuperative cabin. He caught his weight on the window opening, his wrist crunching against broken glass. He hung there for a moment before his arms gave out and he collapsed back onto the floor in a painful thud, his hand bleeding.

  Nothing. Then, footsteps came faintly, then stronger, crunching up the trail outside.

  The door unlocked and opened. A cleric looked in and surveyed the scene. He found the bed pulled diagonally out of position, the bedclothes off kilter. He found Mubin sitting under the window in a heap, his hand balled in a fist, trickling blood.

  “Get me a wagon,” Mubin said.

  Shock slowed the cleric’s response. “What?” he finally said.

  “I said, get me a wagon.”

  “You can’t … You need your rest. You’re supposed to—”

  “As a paragon of the Sigiled caste, and as a knight of the Order of the Reliquary, and as a nobly-appointed scholar and champion of the Blessed caste of Bant, I command you to bring a wagon, right… now.”

  The cleric blinked. “Yes, my lord, right away.”

  He ran off, and Mubin allowed himself a sigh of relief.

  NAYA

  At Mayael’s behest, the godcaller elves had assembled a host of Naya’s gargantuan beasts. The colossal creatures had trampled a clearing in the wood, letting the sun shine down upon them with no canopy in the way. The destruction of the trees had affected some elvish residences, but Mayael, as the spiritual leader of the elves, had insisted. She looked down on the assembled throng from the sunsail tents that served as her chambers, listening to their grunts and bellows echo throughout the jungle.

  Her attendant entered, the girl’s hands clasped in disquiet.

  “Anima,” said the attendant. “May I have a word?”

  Mayael looked up. “Of course, Sasha.” “This is wrong,” whispered the attendant. “Forgive me,” she added hastily.

  “What is?” asked Mayael. “Speak up.”

  “No, it’s not my place.”

  “I can’t have you holding something from me, Sasha. Loose your tongue.”

  “I—I know you’re … You believe in what you’re doing, Anima. But I can’t help feeling that this is wrong. Assembling this army is … blasphemy. The gargantuans are not ours to order around like this. They’re Naya’s gods. Who are we to send our gods off to fight some unknown war for us?”

  “They’re not fighting it for us; they’ll be fighting it with us. And it’s not for some frivolous cause. Do you think I would call them this way, were these not the direst of times? This is the word of Progenitus! This is a time of prophecy, the crux of the meaning of our very civilization. This is the time that we need the gargantuans most, and they need us.”

  “But what if we’re wrong? What if this is not the way?”

  Mayael’s eyes narrowed. “My vision said it was. Now who’s being blasphemous?”

  “I’m sorry, Anima. Of course you know best.”

  Mayael’s face relaxed. She sighed. “No, I am sorry. Here I ask you to tell me what you’re thinking, and then snap at you for telling it. The strange thing is, you’re mirroring my very thoughts. I know this war is far away from us, and that we’ve seen no evidence of it. If it turns out there’s nothing behind my fears, then I risk singlehandedly alienating us from the gods. And yet, if it is true that war comes to Naya, then of course I’m hesitant to call the gargantuans to perform such a dangerous task. You see? You’re sensing the same problem that I’ve been wrestling with since the vision at the Relic. If we don’t act, all could be lost. If we do, all could be lost. If I seem not myself, it’s because these burdens weigh heavily on me.”

  Her attendant nodded. Mayael’s eyes still had some of the white clouds in them from the day at the Relic. Did she still see the vision, even in her waking life?

  They heard a chorus of upset snorts, and then shouting. They looked down at the army of gargantuans. The beasts were skittish, braying and scuffing the ground with their massive claws, tearing great gouges in the earth. The godcaller elves were yelling and pointing off into the circle of sky above the clearing.

  There was a cloud of small shadows in the sky. Creatures were flying toward them.

  “What is it? A flock of birds?” asked Sasha.

  “No. Bigger. Far bigger,” said Mayael.

  “Are they a threat? Something we should worry about?”

  The look on the Anima’s face gave her the answer.

  “Your clarion, Anima.” Sasha indicated the long trumpet hanging from the tree trunk nearby.

  Mayael didn’t respond. The flying creatures neared. They looked like winged lizards—but as large as a god.

  Sasha shook her mistress’s shoulder. “Anima, sound the clarion!”

  Mayael stared up at the flyers, her eyes clouded with white. For Sasha’s mistress, the visions of prophecy and her everyday vision had become one and the same.

  Sasha raised the clarion, put her lips to the mouthpiece, and blew as hard as she could.

  NAYA

  Sarkhan surveyed Naya from his perch on the back of the hellkite, Karrthus, at the lead of a flight of other dragons. Seas of green raced below them, the heads of trees rippling in gentle winds. Mist-rimmed mountains moved slowly in the distance, like the bald heads of stern giants who watched them streak across the sky.

  Karrthus flew ahead of the rest of the flight. Sarkhan felt the dragon’s arrogant pride at being the head of the pack, which stoked his heart. What greater joy could one feel, man or beast, at being used for one’s true purpose? And what greater service could he himself provide, than to crush a world with the unleashed power of a flight of dragons?

  “Let’s start with this valley of trees, Karrthus,” said Sarkhan.

  Karrthus inhaled, and blasted a cone of fire down on the trees. His dragonfire coated the canopy branches, swallowing them in fire instantly. The dragons behind them followed suit, breathing fire at random. Occasionally Sarkhan would look back to see birds flying out of the smoke of the burned areas, or arboreal mammals skittering away from the swathe of fire the dragons left in their wake. Most of them died, roasted alive when the flames spread hungrily outward from the flight’s streak of fire.

  Sarkhan didn’t bother trying to establish mana bonds to the place. The world of Naya surged with mana of nature and growth, but the charred remains of his forest fires would stifle the mana production there. Besides, he thought, why stop the fun? He was making his mark.

  As the flight approached the edge of the valley and the wall of mountains, he willed Karrthus to turn back around. The dragons’ wings tilte
d and grabbed full sails of air to shoot up into Naya’s sunny sky, then curved back around to do another pass.

  That’s when Sarkhan saw the first signs of Naya’s resistance.

  Three woolly-furred behemoths had risen above the treeline to bring their massive hooves down on the fires. Their bulk was so vast that they stomped the fire out even as they crushed the trees that were its fuel.

  That would not stand.

  “Karrthus,” he said, “someone’s trying to interfere with our plans. Let’s interfere with theirs.”

  Sarkhan led the flight of dragons straight at the behemoths. They did a single breath pass, strafing the beasts and the trees around them with cones of fire. The last dragon in the flight strafed a little low, and one of the beasts was able to thrust its head into the air, catching the dragon with its nose-horn. The horn tore a generous wound in the dragon’s chest, sending it diving into the trees. The dragon crunched through the branches and broke a few solid trunks to splinters before it came to a rest against a fat splay-rooted tree, dead.

  The behemoths shook their shaggy coats, and the ashen cinders broke off them, leaving their skin smoky but unburned. At Sarkhan’s signal, the dragons circled back around.

  “Karrthus, avoid the one with the nose-horn. Dive on that one, there. The rest of you, more fire! Attack at will!”

  The other dragons laid into two of the behemoths with a combination of fire breath and swooping attacks with their talons. Karrthus dived, then flipped his body toward the beast with a sudden, great flex of his wings. Sarkhan clutched at his bindings as the dragon’s body lurched, barely holding on. Their victim roared and tried to bite at the dragon, but Karrthus’s talons clamped into its back. Then Karrthus gave one, two, three mighty wing-strokes, and heaved the behemoth into the air. It wriggled like a fish in a bird’s claws, but couldn’t pull free. Sarkhan gave no orders, but Karrthus knew what he was doing. He flew up, up, up, and then as the hellkite’s wings were about to fail from the strain, he released the beast. It actually rose briefly, flung in a modest arc, but then plummeted silently, falling away in a slow motion tumble. Sarkhan didn’t see it land in the jungle, but the impact caused a tremor wave that radiated out through the valley.

  As Karrthus wheeled around, Sarkhan looked back at the other dragons, to see one behemoth have a chunk bitten out of it, and the other get burned to a crisp by two streams of fire breath. The beasts fell, and the dragons reassembled into a flight with no further casualties.

  “Serves those things right,” Sarkhan said. Where did these beasts come from, he wondered? He knew they were allied with those who occupied the central part of Naya.

  “Come on, my pets. We’re going to pay the elves a visit.”

  THE MAELSTROM

  At the heart of Alara, above a spiral-shaped depression in the crushed earth, floated a sphere of energy. It was much bigger than a grain of sand; it would be an armful to a human, if it were able to be held. Misty lines of color spiraled into it from all directions, and the colors churned inside of it. Slowly, day by day, battle by battle, spell by spell, it grew.

  JUND

  Ajani’s native Naya had tropical jungles, but Jund’s forests were a primordial, carnivorous morass. Kresh and his warriors had their weapons out, and were hacking at the snake ferns that were trying to wrap around their ankles and the carnivorous orchids that kept biting them with sticky thorn “teeth.” Some sort of chameleon latched its tongue onto Kresh, but he sliced it cleanly in half and kept moving.

  Ajani walked among the human warriors behind Kresh, their braid-haired leader. He cleared his throat. “So … You’re sure it’s this way to this woman, Rakka?” Ajani asked.

  Kresh stopped and took a casual look around, as if the question hadn’t occurred to him. “We’re not far,” he said, and continued walking.

  Kresh didn’t seem the least bit curious where Ajani had come from, or what he was doing on his world. He seemed perfectly content to let Ajani stay a symbol, a spirit guide, rather than a person unto himself.

  “What’s Rakka like?” he asked the warrior leader. “Should I prepare magic for her?”

  “Just know this: Rakka is a traitor. Her heart is strong and fickle—a dangerous combination. But you’re our talisman, white cat. You’re our pole star. You’ll sway fate’s favor in what I’m sure will be a mighty battle.”

  The warriors grunted in agreement around them.

  “I doubt I’ll sway any such thing, Kresh. I do not wish to be anyone’s talisman. But I’m glad to have you by my side.”

  Ajani couldn’t figure out the human, Kresh, leader of the Antaga clan. The man had a sureness of self that seemed out of place in Jund, where danger stalked everything that breathed every moment of the day. He made no plans—he just seemed to take every moment as it came, confident in his ability to conquer each moment after the next. Ironically, nothing seemed to surprise him because he never formed any prior expectations. In a way, it was an admirable quality, Ajani thought, if occasionally jarring to be around.

  “The dead have begun to walk the earth,” said Kresh flatly, looking ahead. “Get your weapons ready.”

  A group of humanoid corpses shambled toward them, their putrid flesh hanging from their bones, their mouths distended, and their eye sockets rolling with expressionless orbs.

  Ajani gripped his axe. They looked like awful parodies of human beings, and some other creatures Ajani couldn’t recognize. It must be magic related to the creatures that killed Jazal.

  When the undead creatures saw them, they stopped shambling, and charged.

  ESPER BANT FRONTIER

  The demon Malfegor delighted equally in causing as much misery to his own forces as to those he conquered with his army. He enjoyed pulling on the metaphorical strings of power that branched out below him, reveling in the grim puppetry of the undead. If he weren’t heading where he was heading, he would almost feel happy.

  Esper had been something of a joke. Still flush with black mana to fuel his dark heart, its shard was conveniently structured around systems of control—hierarchies of mages and sphinxes—as if the place had been designed for a demon’s whip. He wrested control of Esper’s forces away from its mortal masters with only a modicum of torture and the simplest of promises, with few exceptions. One high-minded sphinx managed to meet his blazing glare and resist his temptations of power and corruption. Although Malfegor successfully slew or tempted away all of the sphinx’s underlings, the creature did the smart thing—it fled with its life, disappearing into Esper’s sculpted skies.

  Truly, if he had to march across an entire world to get to Bant, Malfegor thought, then Esper was the world that he would choose to form the bridge. By the time he reached the frontier area where the crystal-sand dunes of Esper began to bleed into the fields of Bant, he had

  doubled the size of his army. Etherium-infused drakes and sludge striders made admirable shock troops. And those human and vedalken archmages, properly tempted out of their mortal souls, made excellent lich lieutenants. He liked how their metallic enhancements exposed their minds to him, framed in etherium tracery. It let him observe directly the torment caused by his rule.

  But he couldn’t truly enjoy the march, due to its ultimate destination. The lands of Bant were not new to Malfegor, for he was a truly ancient demon. He remembered Alara when it was a single, complete world centuries before, and he had ruled with impunity then. He remembered when Alara split in five, tearing one aspect of Alara away from another, casting him into the depths of that subworld Grixis. And just before the world broke asunder, he remembered facing and destroying a beautiful archangel with a shining sword, in all his demonic life the one being who had come closest to slaying him.

  GRIXIS

  So this is the plan, Levac? Sit here and have this baby in this hovel, while the world shakes outside?” Levac and his wife Salay had spent countless nights wandering Grixis’s network of tunnels. They had eventually settled in an abandoned hermitage much smaller than the st
ronghold at Torchlight had been; but the wards were active, and the undead hordes had seemed to pass it over.

  “No. I’ll figure something out before the baby’s born, Salay,” said Levac. “But even if we’re forced to have it here, you don’t have to worry. I’ll protect you and the baby.”

  “Like you protected Vali?”

  That stung. It had been days or weeks since Vali disappeared into a mob of the walking dead. His screams had been the music of Levac’s nightmares every night since. He thought he might actually be handling it worse than Salay, but he kept those emotions to himself.

  Levac had never told his wife that Vali was still moving, still calling to him, when he ran away. The worst part was that he couldn’t tell her that he knew that Vali had become one of the undead.

  “I’ll get us out of here. Things will be better. Tomorrow we make for the glow on the horizon, or the next day.”

  Grixis’s sky had always been a tangle of electrical storms. But after a series of tremors in the earth, the far horizon had glimmered with an eerie blue light. The clouds in that direction were bright white and regular in shape, sliced evenly along invisible lines. It looked like a doorway into paradise, a promise of something better than their desperate lives, a promise of something better than Grixis itself. The thought that Levac’s world might have an exit had forestalled his despair as they waited underground.

  “You keep saying that. ‘Things will be better. Tomorrow we’ll escape.’ Why the hell haven’t we gotten out of this place? Tomorrow I’m leaving, with or without you.”

  It’s what it feels like when a marriage is fraying, thought Levac. Back when Grixis was the only life they knew, back when they were certain that humanity would become extinct by the rotten hand of the undead, he and his wife were as close as two desperate people could be. Things had changed, and with the chance that they could get out of Grixis entirely, everything ignited a bitter argument. Even the rumor that other living humans—thousands of them—lived in the worlds beyond wasn’t enough to bring hope to their days.