Magic the gathering time.., p.17
Magic the Gathering: Time Streams (Artifacts Cycle Book 3), page 17
Urza, who could drink down languages like water, knew what he said.
"Children of Phyrexia, scions of the greater god Yawgmoth and his son K'rrik, newts and negators and spawn of time, behold the man who brought us here. Behold the man who opened for us the gateway to this new paradise, to Dominaria-"
This statement was punctuated by a brutal lunge from the pincered beast. Rent viscera spilled in a fetid flow on the floor. A throaty howl erupted from the gathered throng. Even as the monster withdrew and K'rrik began again to speak, Urza's innards writhed on the floor. They drew themselves by force of will back into the murdered man.
"He has a long, honorable history of aiding our coming domination. In the caves of Koilos, he and his brother Mishra sundered the powerstone that had locked us away from Dominaria, thus opening the way for us. During Urza's subsequent war against his brother Mishra, followers of our patriarch Gix were welcomed into both armies, and Gix even made a Phyrexian out of Mishra. When Urza learned of his brother's conversion, he was so delighted, he loosed a catastrophe across Dominaria to slay its greatest armies, sink its mightiest nations, and soften the way for us to invade. He forsook his world, his trusted associate Tawnos, and even his own son, Harbin, all of which we have inherited."
"Harbin!" Urza cried out in despair, just before his gut was ripped open again and there was no breath left to scream.
"Allying himself with our comrade-the newt Xantcha-Urza traveled to Phyrexia under the pretense of war. In truth, he was drawn to us like a gnat to a great lantern. He desired to join us, to become one of us. To show his good faith, he led an army of us to the Realm of Serra, where we initiated a war of conquest that brings the angel realm to its knees even now. He betrayed the woman who healed him and gave us her plane as a trophy."
The hisses and groans of delight almost drowned out the sound of spilling blood.
"Now, our eternal champion, our spy in Dominaria and throughout all the planes has come to us. He has come to pay homage to Yawgmoth and the Son of Yawgmoth-K'rrik. He has come to grant us the world! He has given us his brother, his associate, his son, his best friend, and now, he gives us himself. Once he is dead, no one on Dominaria can stand against us."
Into the roaring ovation came a high-pitched whistle. The keen was omnidirectional and ear-splitting. Those Phyrexians with ears clutched them in sudden reflex. Those with knees crumpled to them. Even the massive pincer beast fell back, its fistlike head clenching and flexing beneath the onslaught. Only two creatures remained upright-K'rrik and his captive. Together they saw a vast silver corona slice through the time envelope and shriek toward the rim of the arena.
For one flashing moment, the machines were etched vividly in the sky-a circle of razor beaks and raptor talons and wings that glared like lightning. They crossed paths in a vast spiral and, in precise succession, punched one after another into the beasts at the base of the arena.
One monster's inch-thick skull shattered like glass as a falcon smashed into it. Another was split open from neck to navel and spilled gray-blue organs out over its shag-furred lap. Beside that creature, a crane-necked monster was undone when a falcon bit through its neck in a shrieking pass. The creature's eyes darkened, and its head tilted and dropped away like the crown of a felled tree.
Whenever a falcon tore cleanly through a beast, it would continue on to attack the next one, killing two or three in progression. Whenever a falcon was caught in a particularly resistant ball of muscle or cage of ribs, its wings stabbed outward. Spinning saw blades emerged from its frame to mince whatever meat lay about. Phyrexians penetrated by falcons jittered in death spasms, their punctured bowels or chests or brainpans boiling with vicious motion.
In an instant, the three hundred beasts in the lower seats were slain. They crumpled and jittered and spilled downward in a wave of death that crept visibly up the arena. Falcons darted like electrical jags from beast to beast, dropping them wherever they stood. More metallic birds roared in and impacted.
In the second instant, the remaining seven hundred Phyrexians took up their own defense. They swung blades and clubs to bash the birds from the skies. The tide of slaughter slowed but did not stop. The shriek of silvery wings was joined by a manifold roar of fighting and dying Phyrexians.
In the midst of it, tied to the obsidian post, Urza at last recovered fully from the pincer beast's attacks. His abdomen reassembled. His flesh knitted in glowing health. He lifted his head. The jackal-headed spiders cowered back from the quicksilver cyclone that ravaged the stands all around. With a summoning of will, Urza reached out to the mountains of Tolaria and drew from them the power for four spells. A red flare arced out from Urza, burning away his ropes and impacting the pincer beast. He amplified the kindled blast with his own mounting fury. The massive monster went to shreds of meat before him, blood extinguishing the fires there.
The jackal-spiders pivoted in sudden amazement.
Urza flung out two other spells, fireballs splashing across them and sizzling them away. His own figure steaming with the rage of the moment, Urza stalked past the smoldering heaps of his attackers, seeking the Phyrexian at the heart of all this.
But K'rrik was already gone.
* * * * * Karn plummeted.
He passed the ravening time envelope. It tore futilely at his wires and conduits. Heat sparked across his frame. His orientation meters went haywire, and he could not distinguish up from down, past from future. Then, in a sick rush, he was through and plunging into the fast-time gorge.
That was the worst feeling of all. Something in Karn responded to that place, something at the core of his being. Though he sensed the reek of oil-blood and decay in the air, though he saw the wicked outline of the monstrous city below and knew Urza was there somewhere, trapped or dead-still there was a harsh rightness to it all. It was a vast, desolate beauty that he could not help being drawn to. At first, he could not imagine from where rogue feeling arose, but then he knew. It was the core of his being. The powerstone that provided him mind and heart and soul, it had come from these monstrous creatures. Karn had come from here.
Karn landed in a brackish lake. Filthy water coursed into every seam and hollow of his body. He struck the muck bottom-bones and decay over bedrock. Heaving himself upward, Karn stood and discovered his head cleared the surface. The rock wall of the gorge towered before him. He turned, for the first time clearly seeing the demon city Kerrick had built.
From a volcanic outcrop at the base of the canyon rose a bristling collection of towers, walls, spikes, and battlements. The gorge walls all around the city stared out at it with deep, black mines, like mourning faces, twisted and dribbling. The waters where Karn waded teemed with ravenous creatures, many of which even now converged and nipped at his silver frame. Above the city, clouds of mechanical falcons circled in a great storm.
Urza would be at the center of that storm.
Ignoring the snapping jaws and battering tails, Karn trudged toward the city.
* * * * * The tide had turned. Most of the falcons were spent. Many Phyrexian negators remained. Urza's enchantments were used up. The artifact creatures he had summoned were being dismantled in the claws and fangs of his foes. Over grisly steppes of dead, K'rrik's nation converged on the center of the arena to slay Urza.
He could perhaps muster the strength to planeswalk, though the trip would merely take him to some other dark corner of the time rift. There he would die when K'rrik returned. Better to fight now and decimate his forces.
Suddenly, into the bleeding, black arena came a silver figure- Karn. He advanced in his slow and ceaseless way, casually tearing arms and stingers and tails from his assailants and continuing on. They swarmed him, but he carved a path through them. They piled on him, but he dug his way out.
An infernal court came with him. Smoke bombs struck among the advancing circle of Phyrexians. Shrapnel sprayed out in a killing ring. More glistening oil mixed with what already painted the seats, and here and there it caught fire.
Urza gazed up through the rising ring of sulfur smoke. There frozen in time above the gorge was the figure of an ornithopter. It hovered low over the temporal envelop. Urza thought he could make out the shadowy figure of its pilot. Better still, uncoiling in silvery promise from the craft came a slender metal cord. It looped down into the time rent, unwrapped, and swayed within paces of Urza.
Suddenly, the silver man was there, too. He clasped the strand in one powerful arm and caught up his master in the other.
How slowly they rose above the shrieking hordes. Thrown scythes and arrows pinged from Karn's skin or buried themselves in Urza until he could will them outward again. Soon, though, they were beyond reach of any thrown weapons, and then beyond even the few ballistae that were still operational. They took one final glance at the shrinking city of devils, littered with the remains of his falcon engines.
"I've only given them more metal ... more powerstones ... to fight us," Urza gasped out grimly.
Then the coruscating edge of the rift enveloped them. Monologue
Even as I flew them from that vile gorge, I knew this meant full-scale war. We would have ten or twenty years to ready our arsenal. K'rrik would have one or two centuries. But all-out war would certainly come.
And this time, the battlefield would be all Tolaria.
- Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria
Part III JOURNEYS
Chapter 12 It was a decade later when Malzra called them together in the new Hall of Artifact Creatures.
This hall was no mausoleum and no mere museum. It was a working laboratory, a robotics infirmary, an assembly line, a military staging ground, and a tutorial hall that offered instruction to humans and artifacts alike. Karn's touches were apparent throughout the place. No machines were interred here. The exhibits contained only living, active mechanisms, which spent periods of voluntary deactivation on view. The plans of the various inventions were stored in an archive along one end of the huge chamber, available to scholars, students, and artifacts themselves.
The command center for Malzra's island defense lay here as well. As a result, the place bustled even in the depths of night. Some of Malzra's runners and scorpions were stationed here permanently, and a puma reported in each afternoon, but the main body of machine defenders were stationed remotely around the island. A hundred of the troops were posted in fast-time curtains around the academy. They could leap from cover even before an assault could commence. These machines were rotated into and out of service every day, due to the ravages of fast time. Another hundred served in slow-time curtains-the long-term defenses. They were rotated into and out of service twice a year.
"Between them and our corps of sorcerers, led by Mage Master Barrin, the island's defenses are complete," Malzra said as he paced before the wall of schematics. Mechanical and biological troops were laid out in ink and paper in this private corner of the Hall of Artifacts. "Five hundred large-scale artifact creatures, seven hundred and fifty new falcon engines, a fleet of thirty ornithopters, and even a new dirigible."
Barrin, Jhoira, Teferi, a handful of senior scholars, and Karn sat in the tutorial space and studied the layouts, though the island's defensive systems were well known to all of them. Malzra's presentation was quickly becoming a tedious review.
"In the past five years, we have repelled five Phyrexian incursions and slain over a thousand negators."
"We know," Jhoira reminded him impatiently. "We were the ones who fought those battles.
Malzra turned from his pacing and glanced up, blinking. "There will be more. The creatures will be deadlier and more numerous. With ingenuity, foresight, and grit, the systems we have developed should be enough to repel these attacks. For the time being, the island is safe-"
"Master Malzra," Jhoira interrupted, "we know all this."
"I hope so, since I am going away," the man said quietly.
That brought back the attention of everyone but Barrin. The mage master leaned back in his seat in appraisal, watching the response of the others.
Jhoira stood, alarm in her voice and on her face. "You're leaving? Again? What about the Phyrexian gorge? What about concluding all the business of the academy?"
Barrin rose as well. "He is going on academy business. As to the Phyrexian gorge, Malzra has spent the last half hour reviewing the defenses and our tasks in maintaining and upgrading them."
"That's not what I am talking about," Jhoira said, crossing arms over her chest. "He has unfinished business-"
"Our senior student is reminding me of the 'children of fury,' " Malzra said, cutting through Jhoira's objections and Barrin's apologies. "She is reminding me of my pledge to clean up the messes of my past-chief of which would seem to be this time-torn isle and the monsters I brought here-"
"And the children you brought here-"
"And," added Karn quietly, "the machines you brought here-"
"Thank you," Malzra said not unkindly to the added comments, "but in the way of young folk, you have underestimated my capacity for pernicious destruction. No, the ills I have done here are nothing next to the ills I have done elsewhere, in the world at large."
He walked back to the drawings, reached up with hands that seemed almost to glow in that dark comer of the Hall of Artifacts, and drew down a large pallet. Behind it lay a map of the Phyrexian gorge. Lines of lead detailed the woundlike fissure-dark and narrow, overrun with evil.
"This is our most up-to-date rendering of the gorge." With a sword-sized pointer, Malzra gestured at the drawing. "Here is the gladiatorial arena, and here, the palace of K'rrik, and here, the breeding laboratories. In these hovels beside and beneath the water, K'rrik's minions dwell, nearly a thousand strong, the number growing by ten each day. Unless extinguished, they are fomenting a threat that will one day overrun the whole island."
With a swift and fierce gesture, Malzra tore down the map, revealing beneath it a much larger schematic-what looked like a series of nesting dolls in cross section.
"This is Phyrexia-nine stacked planes, one within another. This top layer is the only one where a human might survive, for a few hours. It is inhabited by dragon engines, some five hundred feet in length, and creatures discarded as useless, creatures that would make our runners and pumas and scorpions seem like mechanical fleas. The dense forests in this region are made of semimetallic plants-poisonous, with razor-edged leaves-that grow in the light of the ceaseless lightning storms that fill the soot-black sky. Each layer downward grows worse-with mutilated priests, demon hordes, witch engines, titanic worms, poison and acid and fire. At
the base of it all, there is a figure deeper, darker, more hideous than any Dominaria has ever known."
To himself, Barrin whispered a name. None heard that name, but the look of solemn dread on his face made the others wince.
"I have awakened this creature. I have drawn him here. That is how deep and ancient my mistakes are. I am responsible for the plague of Tolaria, yes, but also for the gradual collapse of a realm of angels, the long ice age of this world, the destruction of Argoth, and the very introduction of evil into the world. That is the scale of my failures. All of that is what I strive to undo. K'rrik is a nightmare, yes, but one man's nightmare. K'rrik's lord is the nightmare of a whole world-a corporate, unconscious, and universal terror. As certainly as K'rrik is arming himself to take over this isle, the creature I will not name is arming himself to take over our whole world."
There were no interruptions now, only sober eyes.
"To fight such a creature and his millions of minions, I need ... we need a much different arsenal. I go to begin work on it," Malzra said.
At last, Jhoira had regained her voice. "How can you be responsible for all that? How could anyone be responsible for all that? Even if you were responsible, how could you-or any mortal man- hope to undo all those evils? You would have to be Urza Planes-walker to have any hope of-" She broke off mid-sentence, her horrified glare of comprehension bringing paralysis to her whole being.
"Nevertheless, I must go," Malzra said, "and I go alone, for now. It is a very dangerous place I am going. In time, if I am successful, I will bring all of you with me to help."
Trembling, Jhoira had regained her seat. "You're not going ... you're not going to Phyrexia."
"No," said Malzra fondly.
He crossed to Karn and reached out toward his neck. For a moment, the silver man withdrew as if fearing the master would unlatch his skull piece and deactivate him. Instead Malzra lifted a pendant from the golem's neck and held it out before them all. A lizard-shaped trinket of very hard metal dangled, glinting, in the dark air.
"Not Phyrexia. I'm going to your homeland, Jhoira. I'm going to Shiv."
* * * * * Urza descended. It felt nice not to have to walk. It felt nice to indulge himself in the luxuries of being a planeswalker, to forget about the worrisome business of feigning breath and blinking, of being asked to join in dinners. For him, eating was only a nuisance. Despite his many almost limitless powers-stepping plane to plane with little more than a thought, casting all colors of magic at high levels, living beyond the terrors of ravaging time, seeing to the essence of things, smelling Phyrexian blood at a hundred paces- portraying a convincing human was a task that was at once vexing in its minutia and exhausting in its limitations. It was a small and tedious job, but a necessary one.
Except in times like these.
Urza descended past great rafts of sulfuric cloud and banks of rusty steam. His ceremonial robes shrank inward about him, becoming a suit marked with drake-feather pads to deflect the volcanic heat of the landscape. His sandals transformed into thick leather boots that laced to the knee. Hair braided itself tightly to his head, proof against stray fingers of flame. He needn't enter a landscape this way, dropping from such a height, but he wanted to survey this land before alighting upon it. And, frankly, he enjoyed the ride.
