Invasion cycle book iii.., p.24
Invasion Cycle • Book III • Apocalypse, page 24
Beside the captain, Eladamri fought furiously. Here was a man who had battled on and beneath the ice of a Keldon glacier. Now he fought in the heart of an Urborg volcano.
His anger seemed only stoked by the heat. His blade darted like a stooping falcon. It decapitated one foe, and the elf's stomping boot removed the life within the severed head.
His sword then switched back to drive through the empty eye of another undead thing. Unnatural teeth shrieked
along the steel as he drove the tip through bone and brain and all. It fell to the ground. Eladamri leaped atop it. The Seed of Freyalise bashed her foes down to humus.
Liin Sivi fought with equal rage. Her toten-vec lodged
in the breast of a Phyrexian trooper. Even as the monster toppled forward, Liin Sivi yanked the blade free. Its lethal chains rang bell-like as they tugged the edge from riven pates. She grasped the weapon out of the air and brought it chopping through the neck of another attacker.
In stark contrast to her elegant swordplay, Tahngarth
spitted beast after beast on his twisted horns. He seemed to know that these monsters were the grasping limbs of
Yawgmoth himself, and took great glee in goring them and whipping his head until their dead insides were mush.
Karn was perhaps the most amazing. His massive fists
became tandem cudgels. Claws and fangs did nothing
against Karn, only added hash marks recording his kills.
One died as his fingers closed on its spine. Another ceased to be when huge palms converged on either side of its
head. A third and a fourth expired under stomping feet.
Whatever else he had become, Karn had learned the power of war.
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J. Robert King
It would not be enough, though. The black cloud
disgorged warrior after warrior, an endless troop of them.
Worse, still, the cloud itself rose. With each lapping
second, it enveloped another stair tread, one step closer to dissolving Gerrard and his heroes whole.
"Done for!" shouted Squee.
Tahngarth hissed, "Not yet!" and his striva drew an exclamation point down through a monster.
Gerrard shouted, "What can we do? His supply of dead is endless." "We can fight and fall as heroes," Liin Sivi responded sharply. A quick glance at her hawk eyes showed that she was not kidding. Her hand-held toten-vec flashed like a machete. "We can kill them before they kill us."
A massive boom behind them preempted further
discussion. Gerrard turned and smiled. Weatherlight had pulled up along the rail and dropped her gangplank.
Prisoners raced up the striated wood to the relative safety of the ship. The coalition army dwindled between their
pressing enemies.
"Get aboard," Commander Gerrard shouted, waving his troops up the gangplank. Yes, it meant he was particularly vulnerable here upon the deck, but to one side stood
Eladamri and Liin Sivi, and to the other Grizzlegom and Sisay. How could he wish for greater allies against evil?
"Get aboard, all of you. We're getting out of this place."
* * * * *
The song resounded in Sister Dormet's throat, and her
eyes filled with the glory of Weatherlight's departure.
Heavy laden as of old in Serra's Realm—even the rock
druids knew that story—Weatherlight drew away from the
Stronghold. So hasty was her retreat that the massive
gangplank that had ushered all these refugees aboard
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toppled toward the lava below. Its wood caught fire only halfway to the magma and burned away completely before
it struck.
Sister Dormet could only smile. The rest of Weatherlight and her new crew lifted away from the doomed Stronghold.
Already, lava inundated the lower levels. Flowstone
nanites melted into the slurry of magma. The rising tide of red had engulfed the dungeons and laboratories, recently vacated of victims. Vat priests burned like wicks among churning tides of stone. With every second, another cubic mile of the stuff boiled upward, summoned by the chants of the dwarves. Soon, all the Stronghold would be lost.
Even in this moment of joy, as the horrid fortress sank beneath incinerating waves and Weatherlight fought skyward above, something terrible began. From every
porthole, from every colonnade, a black cloud issued. It was darker than ink and coagulated the very air. Something
emerged from the doomed station, something or someone
who had planned this moment for millennia. It was
unmistakable, the black cloud that rolled out and up and obscured all.
It could only be Yawgmoth, come to possess the world.
Sister Dormet lowered her eyes. The chant on her lips
grew desperate.
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J. Robert King
Chapter 26
Straggle for the Very World
Weatherlight rose through a black, incinerating space.
Though her lanterns sent out shafts of light, they extended only a few thousand feet before being swallowed in shadow.
A cone of sooty rock surrounded them. An impenetrable
cloud welled below. A disruption field lurked above.
Gerrard stood at the prow rail, the head of Urza lifted before him. "What do you see, Urza?" he asked urgently.
"1 see blackness," he replied raspily, "as do you."
To starboard there came a snarl. Tahngarth stood in his gunnery traces, shoving the fire controls upward. The
barrel jabbed down toward the moiling cloud. His fingers squeezed. The cannon spoke. Its now-familiar radiance
stabbed out. Blinding and blistering, the column of energy plunged to the cloud. It struck. Light splashed into the blackness, which seemed to bubble around it a moment.
The charge spent itself. It disappeared beneath the
tenebrous vapor.
"That will do no good," Urza said quietly.
Tahngarth glared at the head. "It felt damned good."
Another charge plunged from his weapon.
Urza's voice was weary. "Natural light—no matter how intense—is no match for preternatural darkness. You can't kill him that way."
"Him?" Gerrard echoed.
"That is Yawgmoth."
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Gerrard stared into the pit. His eyes narrowed angrily.
"We escaped his world, so now he is entering ours." A smile spread grimly across Gerrard's lips. "I'm not out of tricks yet."
He strode to his radiance cannon, wedging Urza's head
into its tripod base and strapping on the traces.
Into the speaking tube, he called, "Sisay, take us up through the disruption fields. Weatherlight, do whatever magic you did to get us through before. Everybody else—
hold on."
"You heard that, folks," Sisay called back. She clutched the helm all the tighter. "Grab hold of something." She spun the helm and pulled back on it.
Weatherlight banked and ascended. From the Gaea figurehead, a scintillating aura emerged. It danced out along the rails and gleamed as it went. The energy traced every line of the ship, every fold of armor. Reaching the stern, power expanded outward into a shift envelope.
Energy picked at the disruption field. It teased away the warp and weft of magic, tearing and tattering. Weatherlight clove upward into the field. Its riven strands dragged like fringe across the shift envelope.
On deck, Gerrard, Tahngarth, Karn, and Squee
watched in slack-jawed awe as the ship moved through the barrier.
Their fingers lingered in the fire controls of their
cannons, though their eyes roamed the hissing magic.
"Wonder if this'll stop Yawgmoth," Gerrard muttered.
Urza's head replied, "Don't count on it."
As if she breasted a wave, Weatherlight drove her prow through the disruption field. Light broke over them ahead, a thin, gray light, but light all the same. Weatherlight emerged into the fire-scored throat of the volcano. The few remaining Rathi cannons began unloading on them.
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"Don't worry, old man," Gerrard said, not unkindly, to Urza. "Yawgmoth's just a genie in a bottle. All I need is a big enough cork." He nodded toward the top of the shaft, where a plague engine drifted massively within a Phyrexian armada. "And there it is." Leaning toward the speaking tube, he called, "Brace yourselves. Sisay, full aloft."
"Aye, Commander!"
Even as she hauled on the helm, the ship's engines
purred. It was a throaty and confident sound. The vessel seemed almost to stretch on her keel as she jagged toward the sky. Ray cannons were too slow. She slipped through their red fingers.
Gerrard pumped the foot treadle of his cannon and
swung it fore. "Tahngarth, Karn, take a bead on that thing."
"Aye," Tahngarth replied. The charge mounted in his weapon.
Karn at amidships followed the ship above. "We can shoot it down, but how can we make sure it plugs the
hole?"
"That's where Sisay comes in," Gerrard replied, spitting on the gun's manifold and seeing the stuff boil instantly away. "She's gonna drive the thing down there." Gerrard paused, listening for the wail of incredulity.
Sisay surprised him. "Fine. I'm spoiling for a good fight."
Weatherlight vaulted from the mouth of the volcano.
She leaped up the sky. Above her, the plague engine
blotted out the sun. Huge and black and scabrous, that
vessel seemed a looming storm cloud. Weatherlight darted beneath like silver lightning. Then came the thunder.
Four cannons boomed. They turned the air white.
Blasts converged with a will. They jabbed beneath bristling horns and rammed into the superfluid cisterns beneath.
Metal dissolved. It rained down amid a gush of green fluid.
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Apocalypse
Engines all along the port side sputtered and failed. Smoke puffed from dead innards. The ship began to list. "Take out the starboard side!" Gerrard commanded. He hurled
another wall of white beneath the craft.
His shot was joined by a swarm of bolts from the other
cannons. Hot fire raked beneath the craft, a more oblique angle as Weatherlight neared it. En route, the beams incinerated a tangle of enormous pipes, ripped through
blast armor, and at last reached the starboard cisterns.
Energy poured in, and green fluid poured out. The
mountainous ship turned and began to plummet.
"It's all yours," Gerrard shouted to Sisay as Weatherlight drove up abreast of the plague engine.
"Not all!" Sisay replied in warning.
Black-mana bombards hurled webby death out across
the air. Tahngarth's gun ripped a hole in the destructive curtain, but not enough of a hole. The other gunners were too slow and the ship too fast. Weatherlight plowed into the killing web.
Gerrard and Tahngarth ducked, bracing against the lash
of energy. It never came. Gerrard glanced up to see ropy strands of black mana dragging across the ship's shift
envelope. "Great job, Weather light!" he whooped. In answer, the ship slipped out of the killing goo, topped a tight arc, and clove down on the plague engine. Gaea led the charge, wearing the fearless face of Hanna. Down
through a forest of spikes she drove. Her ram smashed into the solid spine of the ship. Magnigoth wood pounded metal armor. Her engines engaged. For the first time since her transformation, Weatherlight truly roared. Incredible force hurled the ship down against the plague engine and hurled the plague engine down as well.
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Gerrard floated up weightless in his harness as the
vessels plunged toward the volcano. His face grew peaked.
"Can you see the hole, Sisay?"
"I can't," answered the captain, clinging to the helm,
"but Weatherlight can. She's running things now."
Gerrard nodded, looking out past huge, curving horns
to armor plates that swarmed with Phyrexians. He pivoted his gun around and vaporized a whole platoon. They
became smoke that fled upward with awful speed. "You think she'll know when to pull up?"
More cannons brought death to more monsters as Sisay
said, "She'll know."
A bank of cloud swept up around them, and suddenly
the horizon appeared in a full circle.
"Any moment now, Weatherlight," Gerrard murmured to himself. "Let's not be overdramatic." The rest of the fleet spun so high above, they seemed mere specks. "Any
moment—"
Weatherlight broke free. The forest of horns dropped
beneath her. She leveled and rose. The plague engine
plummeted. Dust glittered between them in rushing air.
The Phyrexian ship struck the volcano's peak. The edges of the superstructure peeled up in a circle, shoved by the rim of the pit. The rest of the engine slumped in the hole, a perfect plug.
"Ha!" shouted Gerrard. "So much for Yawgmoth!"
Though Urza's head was turned toward Gerrard, he
seemed to see with other eyes. "He needn't emerge to have won."
Gerrard stood up, gaping over the rail. He had been so
intent on the plague engine, he had not noticed the world all around.
It was utterly devastated, stripped to bedrock as if a
sylex blast had scoured the land. The topsoil was gone.
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Apocalypse
Swamps had sunk away into the sea. The oceans had
advanced. Coalition armies entrenched across the land
were inundated. The surf churned their bodies.
"What happened?" Gerrard wondered aloud.
New armies of Phyrexians occupied the land. Massive
creatures in dun and black, monsters scrambled over rocky embankments and marched down volcanic ravines. In their wake, they left elf troops slaughtered en masse, or Keldons buried in tall cairns of mud, or minotaurs mired in sudden bogs.
Even as Weatherlight soared by overhead, a division of Metathran battled the lumbering warriors. Though
Metathran axes carved ferociously into the front, though limbs fell from the creatures, their numbers never seemed depleted. The monstrous armies only advanced, grasping
Metathran in bare hands and ripping them apart.
"Where did they come from? How did they take so
much land?" Gerrard growled.
Urza stared baldly at him. "Don't you understand? They are the land, the humus—all things dead. Yawgmoth has
raised them here. He has raised them here and throughout Dominaria. He animates the very soil against us."
"Our place is down there," said a deep voice at Gerrard's shoulder. He turned to see Commander
Grizzlegom. The minotaur had climbed on deck and strode, as sure-footed as a mountain goat, to Gerrard. Beside him stood Eladamri and Liin Sivi. Decision shone in their eyes.
Grizzlegom spoke for all of them. "We're not skyfarers.
We're infantry. We can't do any good on this ship, but
there's plenty of good that needs doing below. This is our world, Gerrard. You have to let us defend it."
Gerrard stared at each commander in turn. His face was
grim, and the courage in their eyes made him clench his jaw. "It'll be suicide. How many troops do you have?"
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J. Robert King
Grizzlegom shrugged, as if numbers were meaningless.
"A handful of minotaurs, the same of Metathran, elves, and Keldons—"
"A handful," Gerrard interrupted.
"Plus two hundred prisoners released from Phyrexian dungeons."
Gerrard shook his head, "Why would they fight?"
Grizzlegom wore a blank expression and repeated the
words slowly. "Prisoners ... from ... Phyrexian ...
dungeons."
Urza said, "Let them go, Gerrard. This ship and her crew have a no-less dangerous destiny ahead."
Gerrard nodded. "It has been an honor to fight beside you, my friends."
"An honor," Grizzlegom responded, bowing his head.
Eladamri and Liin Sivi nodded their assent.
"Take us down, Sisay," Gerrard called into the speaking tube. "A flat, rocky spot away from these mudmen."
"Thank you, Commander," said Grizzlegom.
Gerrard's voice still rang with command. "Tahngarth, Karn, Squee—let's pave a landing strip."
His gun lit. A white beam stabbed down. It reached
across the rumpled rocks and splashed over a regiment of the mud creatures. In kiln heat, their flesh steamed and dried. Hardened shards peeled away and tumbled to the
ground. More fell. The beasts on the periphery of the beam merely crumbled. Those in the core exploded, showering
the ground with hot mud. Four more guns fired. All around Weatherlight, monsters became ceramic statues, or crumbling piles, or nothing at all.
A basalt extrusion provided a wide and lofty platform.
The plateau formed a black silhouette in Gaea's eyes as the ship eased down to it and slowed. With a gentle settling motion, the craft landed upon the stone.
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Apocalypse
No sooner did Weatherlight sigh on her landing spines than the spare gangplank slid across her gunwales and
boomed in place. A moment later, the brave coalition
forces of Dominaria marched down to certain battle and
certain doom.
* * * * *
It was good to have rock beneath one's hooves again. It was even better to charge across that rock, axe in hand and foes aplenty stretching to the sea.
Grizzlegom had begun this charge on the slanting
gangplank of Weatherlight. The extrusion leant its slope as well, but the true speed came from Grizzlegom's angry
heart. He sensed it. They all did: They fought the battle of the Apocalypse.
And what strange harbingers were these mudmen, these
golems. They seemed like Mishra's mud warriors, raised out of antiquity to terrify posterity. Grizzlegom knew how to fight Phyrexians. He understood their voracity. But who knew how to fight mudmen?
Whirling his battle axe overhead, Grizzlegom bowed his
His anger seemed only stoked by the heat. His blade darted like a stooping falcon. It decapitated one foe, and the elf's stomping boot removed the life within the severed head.
His sword then switched back to drive through the empty eye of another undead thing. Unnatural teeth shrieked
along the steel as he drove the tip through bone and brain and all. It fell to the ground. Eladamri leaped atop it. The Seed of Freyalise bashed her foes down to humus.
Liin Sivi fought with equal rage. Her toten-vec lodged
in the breast of a Phyrexian trooper. Even as the monster toppled forward, Liin Sivi yanked the blade free. Its lethal chains rang bell-like as they tugged the edge from riven pates. She grasped the weapon out of the air and brought it chopping through the neck of another attacker.
In stark contrast to her elegant swordplay, Tahngarth
spitted beast after beast on his twisted horns. He seemed to know that these monsters were the grasping limbs of
Yawgmoth himself, and took great glee in goring them and whipping his head until their dead insides were mush.
Karn was perhaps the most amazing. His massive fists
became tandem cudgels. Claws and fangs did nothing
against Karn, only added hash marks recording his kills.
One died as his fingers closed on its spine. Another ceased to be when huge palms converged on either side of its
head. A third and a fourth expired under stomping feet.
Whatever else he had become, Karn had learned the power of war.
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J. Robert King
It would not be enough, though. The black cloud
disgorged warrior after warrior, an endless troop of them.
Worse, still, the cloud itself rose. With each lapping
second, it enveloped another stair tread, one step closer to dissolving Gerrard and his heroes whole.
"Done for!" shouted Squee.
Tahngarth hissed, "Not yet!" and his striva drew an exclamation point down through a monster.
Gerrard shouted, "What can we do? His supply of dead is endless." "We can fight and fall as heroes," Liin Sivi responded sharply. A quick glance at her hawk eyes showed that she was not kidding. Her hand-held toten-vec flashed like a machete. "We can kill them before they kill us."
A massive boom behind them preempted further
discussion. Gerrard turned and smiled. Weatherlight had pulled up along the rail and dropped her gangplank.
Prisoners raced up the striated wood to the relative safety of the ship. The coalition army dwindled between their
pressing enemies.
"Get aboard," Commander Gerrard shouted, waving his troops up the gangplank. Yes, it meant he was particularly vulnerable here upon the deck, but to one side stood
Eladamri and Liin Sivi, and to the other Grizzlegom and Sisay. How could he wish for greater allies against evil?
"Get aboard, all of you. We're getting out of this place."
* * * * *
The song resounded in Sister Dormet's throat, and her
eyes filled with the glory of Weatherlight's departure.
Heavy laden as of old in Serra's Realm—even the rock
druids knew that story—Weatherlight drew away from the
Stronghold. So hasty was her retreat that the massive
gangplank that had ushered all these refugees aboard
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Apocalypse
toppled toward the lava below. Its wood caught fire only halfway to the magma and burned away completely before
it struck.
Sister Dormet could only smile. The rest of Weatherlight and her new crew lifted away from the doomed Stronghold.
Already, lava inundated the lower levels. Flowstone
nanites melted into the slurry of magma. The rising tide of red had engulfed the dungeons and laboratories, recently vacated of victims. Vat priests burned like wicks among churning tides of stone. With every second, another cubic mile of the stuff boiled upward, summoned by the chants of the dwarves. Soon, all the Stronghold would be lost.
Even in this moment of joy, as the horrid fortress sank beneath incinerating waves and Weatherlight fought skyward above, something terrible began. From every
porthole, from every colonnade, a black cloud issued. It was darker than ink and coagulated the very air. Something
emerged from the doomed station, something or someone
who had planned this moment for millennia. It was
unmistakable, the black cloud that rolled out and up and obscured all.
It could only be Yawgmoth, come to possess the world.
Sister Dormet lowered her eyes. The chant on her lips
grew desperate.
246
J. Robert King
Chapter 26
Straggle for the Very World
Weatherlight rose through a black, incinerating space.
Though her lanterns sent out shafts of light, they extended only a few thousand feet before being swallowed in shadow.
A cone of sooty rock surrounded them. An impenetrable
cloud welled below. A disruption field lurked above.
Gerrard stood at the prow rail, the head of Urza lifted before him. "What do you see, Urza?" he asked urgently.
"1 see blackness," he replied raspily, "as do you."
To starboard there came a snarl. Tahngarth stood in his gunnery traces, shoving the fire controls upward. The
barrel jabbed down toward the moiling cloud. His fingers squeezed. The cannon spoke. Its now-familiar radiance
stabbed out. Blinding and blistering, the column of energy plunged to the cloud. It struck. Light splashed into the blackness, which seemed to bubble around it a moment.
The charge spent itself. It disappeared beneath the
tenebrous vapor.
"That will do no good," Urza said quietly.
Tahngarth glared at the head. "It felt damned good."
Another charge plunged from his weapon.
Urza's voice was weary. "Natural light—no matter how intense—is no match for preternatural darkness. You can't kill him that way."
"Him?" Gerrard echoed.
"That is Yawgmoth."
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Apocalypse
Gerrard stared into the pit. His eyes narrowed angrily.
"We escaped his world, so now he is entering ours." A smile spread grimly across Gerrard's lips. "I'm not out of tricks yet."
He strode to his radiance cannon, wedging Urza's head
into its tripod base and strapping on the traces.
Into the speaking tube, he called, "Sisay, take us up through the disruption fields. Weatherlight, do whatever magic you did to get us through before. Everybody else—
hold on."
"You heard that, folks," Sisay called back. She clutched the helm all the tighter. "Grab hold of something." She spun the helm and pulled back on it.
Weatherlight banked and ascended. From the Gaea figurehead, a scintillating aura emerged. It danced out along the rails and gleamed as it went. The energy traced every line of the ship, every fold of armor. Reaching the stern, power expanded outward into a shift envelope.
Energy picked at the disruption field. It teased away the warp and weft of magic, tearing and tattering. Weatherlight clove upward into the field. Its riven strands dragged like fringe across the shift envelope.
On deck, Gerrard, Tahngarth, Karn, and Squee
watched in slack-jawed awe as the ship moved through the barrier.
Their fingers lingered in the fire controls of their
cannons, though their eyes roamed the hissing magic.
"Wonder if this'll stop Yawgmoth," Gerrard muttered.
Urza's head replied, "Don't count on it."
As if she breasted a wave, Weatherlight drove her prow through the disruption field. Light broke over them ahead, a thin, gray light, but light all the same. Weatherlight emerged into the fire-scored throat of the volcano. The few remaining Rathi cannons began unloading on them.
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J. Robert King
"Don't worry, old man," Gerrard said, not unkindly, to Urza. "Yawgmoth's just a genie in a bottle. All I need is a big enough cork." He nodded toward the top of the shaft, where a plague engine drifted massively within a Phyrexian armada. "And there it is." Leaning toward the speaking tube, he called, "Brace yourselves. Sisay, full aloft."
"Aye, Commander!"
Even as she hauled on the helm, the ship's engines
purred. It was a throaty and confident sound. The vessel seemed almost to stretch on her keel as she jagged toward the sky. Ray cannons were too slow. She slipped through their red fingers.
Gerrard pumped the foot treadle of his cannon and
swung it fore. "Tahngarth, Karn, take a bead on that thing."
"Aye," Tahngarth replied. The charge mounted in his weapon.
Karn at amidships followed the ship above. "We can shoot it down, but how can we make sure it plugs the
hole?"
"That's where Sisay comes in," Gerrard replied, spitting on the gun's manifold and seeing the stuff boil instantly away. "She's gonna drive the thing down there." Gerrard paused, listening for the wail of incredulity.
Sisay surprised him. "Fine. I'm spoiling for a good fight."
Weatherlight vaulted from the mouth of the volcano.
She leaped up the sky. Above her, the plague engine
blotted out the sun. Huge and black and scabrous, that
vessel seemed a looming storm cloud. Weatherlight darted beneath like silver lightning. Then came the thunder.
Four cannons boomed. They turned the air white.
Blasts converged with a will. They jabbed beneath bristling horns and rammed into the superfluid cisterns beneath.
Metal dissolved. It rained down amid a gush of green fluid.
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Apocalypse
Engines all along the port side sputtered and failed. Smoke puffed from dead innards. The ship began to list. "Take out the starboard side!" Gerrard commanded. He hurled
another wall of white beneath the craft.
His shot was joined by a swarm of bolts from the other
cannons. Hot fire raked beneath the craft, a more oblique angle as Weatherlight neared it. En route, the beams incinerated a tangle of enormous pipes, ripped through
blast armor, and at last reached the starboard cisterns.
Energy poured in, and green fluid poured out. The
mountainous ship turned and began to plummet.
"It's all yours," Gerrard shouted to Sisay as Weatherlight drove up abreast of the plague engine.
"Not all!" Sisay replied in warning.
Black-mana bombards hurled webby death out across
the air. Tahngarth's gun ripped a hole in the destructive curtain, but not enough of a hole. The other gunners were too slow and the ship too fast. Weatherlight plowed into the killing web.
Gerrard and Tahngarth ducked, bracing against the lash
of energy. It never came. Gerrard glanced up to see ropy strands of black mana dragging across the ship's shift
envelope. "Great job, Weather light!" he whooped. In answer, the ship slipped out of the killing goo, topped a tight arc, and clove down on the plague engine. Gaea led the charge, wearing the fearless face of Hanna. Down
through a forest of spikes she drove. Her ram smashed into the solid spine of the ship. Magnigoth wood pounded metal armor. Her engines engaged. For the first time since her transformation, Weatherlight truly roared. Incredible force hurled the ship down against the plague engine and hurled the plague engine down as well.
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J. Robert King
Gerrard floated up weightless in his harness as the
vessels plunged toward the volcano. His face grew peaked.
"Can you see the hole, Sisay?"
"I can't," answered the captain, clinging to the helm,
"but Weatherlight can. She's running things now."
Gerrard nodded, looking out past huge, curving horns
to armor plates that swarmed with Phyrexians. He pivoted his gun around and vaporized a whole platoon. They
became smoke that fled upward with awful speed. "You think she'll know when to pull up?"
More cannons brought death to more monsters as Sisay
said, "She'll know."
A bank of cloud swept up around them, and suddenly
the horizon appeared in a full circle.
"Any moment now, Weatherlight," Gerrard murmured to himself. "Let's not be overdramatic." The rest of the fleet spun so high above, they seemed mere specks. "Any
moment—"
Weatherlight broke free. The forest of horns dropped
beneath her. She leveled and rose. The plague engine
plummeted. Dust glittered between them in rushing air.
The Phyrexian ship struck the volcano's peak. The edges of the superstructure peeled up in a circle, shoved by the rim of the pit. The rest of the engine slumped in the hole, a perfect plug.
"Ha!" shouted Gerrard. "So much for Yawgmoth!"
Though Urza's head was turned toward Gerrard, he
seemed to see with other eyes. "He needn't emerge to have won."
Gerrard stood up, gaping over the rail. He had been so
intent on the plague engine, he had not noticed the world all around.
It was utterly devastated, stripped to bedrock as if a
sylex blast had scoured the land. The topsoil was gone.
251
Apocalypse
Swamps had sunk away into the sea. The oceans had
advanced. Coalition armies entrenched across the land
were inundated. The surf churned their bodies.
"What happened?" Gerrard wondered aloud.
New armies of Phyrexians occupied the land. Massive
creatures in dun and black, monsters scrambled over rocky embankments and marched down volcanic ravines. In their wake, they left elf troops slaughtered en masse, or Keldons buried in tall cairns of mud, or minotaurs mired in sudden bogs.
Even as Weatherlight soared by overhead, a division of Metathran battled the lumbering warriors. Though
Metathran axes carved ferociously into the front, though limbs fell from the creatures, their numbers never seemed depleted. The monstrous armies only advanced, grasping
Metathran in bare hands and ripping them apart.
"Where did they come from? How did they take so
much land?" Gerrard growled.
Urza stared baldly at him. "Don't you understand? They are the land, the humus—all things dead. Yawgmoth has
raised them here. He has raised them here and throughout Dominaria. He animates the very soil against us."
"Our place is down there," said a deep voice at Gerrard's shoulder. He turned to see Commander
Grizzlegom. The minotaur had climbed on deck and strode, as sure-footed as a mountain goat, to Gerrard. Beside him stood Eladamri and Liin Sivi. Decision shone in their eyes.
Grizzlegom spoke for all of them. "We're not skyfarers.
We're infantry. We can't do any good on this ship, but
there's plenty of good that needs doing below. This is our world, Gerrard. You have to let us defend it."
Gerrard stared at each commander in turn. His face was
grim, and the courage in their eyes made him clench his jaw. "It'll be suicide. How many troops do you have?"
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Grizzlegom shrugged, as if numbers were meaningless.
"A handful of minotaurs, the same of Metathran, elves, and Keldons—"
"A handful," Gerrard interrupted.
"Plus two hundred prisoners released from Phyrexian dungeons."
Gerrard shook his head, "Why would they fight?"
Grizzlegom wore a blank expression and repeated the
words slowly. "Prisoners ... from ... Phyrexian ...
dungeons."
Urza said, "Let them go, Gerrard. This ship and her crew have a no-less dangerous destiny ahead."
Gerrard nodded. "It has been an honor to fight beside you, my friends."
"An honor," Grizzlegom responded, bowing his head.
Eladamri and Liin Sivi nodded their assent.
"Take us down, Sisay," Gerrard called into the speaking tube. "A flat, rocky spot away from these mudmen."
"Thank you, Commander," said Grizzlegom.
Gerrard's voice still rang with command. "Tahngarth, Karn, Squee—let's pave a landing strip."
His gun lit. A white beam stabbed down. It reached
across the rumpled rocks and splashed over a regiment of the mud creatures. In kiln heat, their flesh steamed and dried. Hardened shards peeled away and tumbled to the
ground. More fell. The beasts on the periphery of the beam merely crumbled. Those in the core exploded, showering
the ground with hot mud. Four more guns fired. All around Weatherlight, monsters became ceramic statues, or crumbling piles, or nothing at all.
A basalt extrusion provided a wide and lofty platform.
The plateau formed a black silhouette in Gaea's eyes as the ship eased down to it and slowed. With a gentle settling motion, the craft landed upon the stone.
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No sooner did Weatherlight sigh on her landing spines than the spare gangplank slid across her gunwales and
boomed in place. A moment later, the brave coalition
forces of Dominaria marched down to certain battle and
certain doom.
* * * * *
It was good to have rock beneath one's hooves again. It was even better to charge across that rock, axe in hand and foes aplenty stretching to the sea.
Grizzlegom had begun this charge on the slanting
gangplank of Weatherlight. The extrusion leant its slope as well, but the true speed came from Grizzlegom's angry
heart. He sensed it. They all did: They fought the battle of the Apocalypse.
And what strange harbingers were these mudmen, these
golems. They seemed like Mishra's mud warriors, raised out of antiquity to terrify posterity. Grizzlegom knew how to fight Phyrexians. He understood their voracity. But who knew how to fight mudmen?
Whirling his battle axe overhead, Grizzlegom bowed his
