Chapter 5.

Of Metathran and Merfolk.

Sea winds hurled back Agnate's silvery hair. Waves parted around his feet and rolled in dual wakes out behind him. In one blue-skinned hand, he held his powerstone pike. In the other, he clutched a long pair of reins, woven from kelp. The reins extended taut down into the turbid sea and attached to a pair of harnesses. The greater dolphins that wore the harnesses swam in precise synchrony beneath the glinting tides. Agnate stood upon their backs. All around him, his Metathran army rode the glorious beasts. They and Gerrard's Benalish irregulars and Voda merfolk surged toward the main isle of Urborg.

It felt great to be in battle again.

The fight for the outer isle had not been a battle but a slaughter. The Phyrexians had stood as if in a trance as Agnate and his Metathran army clove their heads. No adversary should die that way, but Agnate had been ordered to take the isle. With the help of Weatherlight and the t.i.tan engines, he had. It had been a military necessity to win an Urborgan beachhead from which the true battle could be launched.

"Prepare for landing!" Agnate shouted. He lifted high his powerstone pike. Corded muscles rippled beneath his shoulder tattoos.

Behind him, forty thousand other weapons rose-battle axes, swords, maces, tridents. As metal filled the air, so did a battle cry. It was a deep and pure sound from countless throats, queer like the drone of war pipes. It echoed from the shimmering sea and mixed with roaring billows.

Another call answered beneath the waves. Leviathan songs bellowed through the deeps. Grampuses and cachalots twined their mournful howls. Humpbacks and rorquals added angry shrieks. Porpoise whistles and dolphin clicks, sea cow moans and otter growls-every denizen of the deep came in company of their rulers, the Vodalian merfolk.

Not only did sea creatures bear forward the amphibious a.s.sault, but they also prepared the sh.o.r.e. Any Phyrexian who strayed too near the sea was dragged below by tentacles and ripped apart by fangs. In salt.w.a.ter marshes lurked lightning eels. In freshwater streams flashed schools of piranha. Swordfish and hammerheads and rays made certain Agnate and his troops could come to ground at a run and drive far inland. In their wake would rise the conch-armored Vodalian warriors, who would hold the beaches.

While the music of the deep played beneath Metathran feet, another song swelled the skies. Weatherlight was the chorus master. From extreme distance, she sang among the clouds. Her fluted figurehead piped shrilly. Her ray cannons moaned. All around her, lesser craft made their own music. Helionaut rotors drummed the heavens. Jump-ships coursed on keening wings.

The whole world rushed to purge Urborg of Phyrexians.

Agnate raised a cheer as Weatherlight roared by low overhead. Cyclones churned the water in her wake. Her gunwales blazed. Energy melted Phyrexians in their trenches. It ripped out gun embankments even before they could hurl flack. Weatherlight shot over the sh.o.r.e and strafed the swamps. Her aerial armada flanked her. Helionauts peppered the woods with exploding quarrels.

Jump-ships wove among trees and flushed monsters from hiding.

"Charge!" Agnate shouted.

The Metathran's turn had come. On dolphin back, they surged to sh.o.r.e. Sand churned in the water as grampuses and cachalots beached themselves. Blue warriors leaped from their backs and ran up the berm. No Phyrexians stood on the beach, slain already by sea monsters or the aerial a.s.sault. In the swampy wood beyond, though, they were thick.

Powerstone pike before him, Agnate charged through a curtain of moss. In the darkness, something leaped toward him. His pike smashed into it. The blade chewed its way through flesh. Agnate had only a moment to glimpse the creature-a scab-skinned warrior with horns protruding from shoulders and skull-before the dead thing fell against him. He let go of his pike-it would eat its way through the shuddering corpse-and drew the battle axe from his belt.

One sloshing step deeper into the wood, and the axe cleft through the head of another monster. It had been a goat-skulled thing. Now it was only a warm ma.s.s in the swamp. In the follow-through of his swing, Agnate stooped to s.n.a.t.c.h up his powerstone pike. He glimpsed a huge and leathery fist falling on him. He set his pike in the muck.

The fist descended like a hammer. Agnate sank down away from it. His pike rammed between scaly knuckles. It ate through the flesh stretched there and burrowed upward. With a shriek, the monster hauled its bloodied hand away. Only then did Agnate see what it was.

The gargantua reared up between the trees. It was a meaty beast, twice the height of a mammoth and eight times the bulk.

On two hulking talons it stood, its belly scales drawn tight in a shriek of agony. It clutched its wounded fist and bellowed through fangs.

The gargantua was a mountainous monster, and mountains were meant for climbing.

Agnate swung his axe like a pick, chunking a foothold in the monster's leg. He stepped onto the broad blade and flung himself upward. One hand grasped the leathery wattle beneath the beast's throat. The other yanked the axe from the creature's leg.

With its healthy claw, the gargantua reached up and grabbed the Metathran commander. Its fingers flexed around him. In moments, his macerated flesh would spew out between those claws....

Agnate clutched his axe beside him. The blade bit through the gargantua's scale and muscle, down to tendons. They snapped like cables under pressure. Hot oil gushed over Agnate. The beast's claws went slack. Agnate slipped downward.

The gargantua wasn't through with him. Between its injured hands, it caught him. Though claws dangled limply from its palms, the pressure of those arms was inescapable. The gargantua lifted its captive to its fangy mouth.

Agnate struggled to yank his axe free, but it was pinned at his side. Noxious breath billowed over him. He kicked furiously, trying to escape. It was no use.

The gargantua's jaws dropped open. It shoved its prey within. Fangs shuddered. Blood gushed hot up the beast's throat and out across Agnate. It was not his blood but the Phyrexian's.

Suddenly free, Agnate hurled himself from the beast's jaws. He fell toward the swamp, not even trying to get his feet beneath him. As he plunged, he saw a gaping hole in the beast's chest, and he knew what had happened. The powerstone pike had eaten its way down the arm of the beast and out the elbow. It had jutted out only to pierce the monster's chest. In moments, the pike had chewed into the gigantic heart of the thing. It died where it stood, its own oil-blood gushing up its neck.

Agnate landed on his back in the swamp. Gripping his axe, he got his feet beneath him and lunged away-only just in time.

The gargantua fell like a tree. Wind rushed up around it, escaping the enormous bulk. It struck the swamp with a huge splash and sank into the deep muck. A ga.s.sy sound came as it settled.

Struggling out of the mud, Agnate fetched up against a tree. All around him, Metathran ran onward through the swamp. They fought and felled Phyrexians.

A rattling sound came from the back of the gargantua. The powerstone pike that had killed it dug its way out the spine.

Agnate shoved away from the tree, hung his axe from his belt, and strode to the fallen beast. He climbed onto the island of its hunched back and grabbed his pike.

Through torn curtains of moss, Agnate glimpsed merfolk warriors on the sand. Seawater streamed from their chitinous armor. They walked on fins transformed into legs. In their hands, they held wickedly barbed tridents. Some had killed Phyrexians already and hurled their bodies to the sharks.

"Good," Agnate huffed as he strode down the length of the gargantua. There was no point advancing unless the rear was secure. Flinging mud and blood from his arms, he loped forward through the marsh.

The initial fury of the charge was gone. Now all that remained was grim-jawed killing.

A Phyrexian scuta, seeming a giant horseshoe crab, scuttled through the marsh toward him. Water churned off its black skull shield. A once-human face stretched absurdly over that contorted bone. Two long, barbed legs lashed out. One grasped Agnate's thigh. It yanked, intent on pulling him beneath its sh.e.l.l. No man dragged there would ever emerge.

With a single swipe of his axe, Agnate severed the first limb and leaped over the other. A mud-slick boot caught on the brow ridge of the beast. Agnate vaulted to the creature's back.

He heaved the axe down overhead. It cracked the sh.e.l.l and bit shallowly into the brain. Agnate hauled sideways on the haft and cracked the wound wider.

The scuta bucked, struggling to throw him off.

Agnate yanked his axe free, hauled it high, and buried its head in the same wound. The cut went deep this time, severing a critical nerve nexus. The scuta slumped in the swamp.

Agnate leaped from its back. His powerstone pike was tucked under one arm, and his axe swung overhead. He ran onward. Mud sucked at his boots but couldn't slow him. No foes moved among the trees ahead. Glistening-oil gleamed in rainbows atop the swamp water, and Phyrexian corpses littered the ground. There were plenty of blue-skinned corpses there too, but the Metathran had won this swamp.

With a high-pitched whistle, Agnate signaled the merfolk to advance and hold the terrain. Meanwhile, he and his troops charged onward.

The ground rose. The dead trees fell away. Reeds crowded the banks of the wetlands. Agnate labored through them into a true jungle. Though other Metathran had gone before him, hacking at the man-sized leaves and thick green stalks, the brake was still a visual wall. The shouts and screams ahead told of a fierce battle in the wood.

At a full run, Agnate chopped away a thorn vine that barred his path. He plunged from the relative cool of the swamp into the steam heat of the jungle. His second stride flushed a swarm of mosquitoes from the undergrowth. In moments, they covered every inch of his exposed flesh. Only the mud saved him. He rubbed his face. His hand came away slick with his own blood.

Just ahead, the line of charge had stalled. The Phyrexians were making a stand-a suicidal stand against this many Metathran. They wanted to channel the advance, but why?

Whistling a complex signal to the Metathran with him, Agnate hung his battle axe on his belt and slung the powerstone pike over his shoulder. Then he took to the trees. He climbed. It was the unenviable limitation of most warriors to think only in two dimensions. Agnate and his brethren had been trained to battle in three. Like a troop of arboreal primates, they clambered up the green stalks all around.

Quickly, the roar of battle dropped away below them. The vines provided natural ropes, reaching to the first canopy. Tree to tree, the Metathran advanced. It was another world up there, a battlefield the Phyrexians had ignored. Unopposed and unnoticed, Agnate and a scant dozen others picked their way over the battle lines.

Below them, the fight was ferocious. To one side crowded the scaly and scabrous hordes of Phyrexia-to the other the blue muscles of the Metathran. Where the two sides met, blade and claw tore flesh from limbs. Bodies mounded. Already the dead lay in a broad U shape, with more and more Metathran flooding into the center.

Agnate hurled himself across empty air to a tree beyond the battle line. Scaling to its upper crotch, he ran out along a thick bough and leaped to an adjacent tree. Ahead the boles dwindled into a swamp-broader, deeper, more horrid than the first. Not even dead trees stood in the black water. Nothing wholesome could live in this slough. Nothing lived-but much had died. The air was rank with the gases of decay. Giant flies swarmed above bubbling pockets. Skeletal figures lay in the brackish water.

"Channeling us toward a swamp?" Agnate wondered to himself. Then he saw why.

In the center of that putrid swamp circled three grotesque figures. They had once been Metathran and still walked upright, but there the similarity ended. In place of feet they stood on scabby stumps. In place of hands they had vicious claws. Their heads had been flayed of skin and jutted forward on long, grotesque necks. Where the necks joined their shoulders, a great ma.s.s of pulsing matter sprouted. The stuff was barely contained within a sac of veins and membranes. Agnate had been trained to know what those globular spores were and what these creatures were bred to do.

"Plague spreaders," he hissed.

These poor souls had been turned into living colonies of contagion. Their brain stems were infected with a strain of plague that formed an unwholesome pocket of spores. Blood vessels and support structures grew to nourish the pestilence. When fully ripened, the membranes would split. Wind would carry the contagion out to slay any Metathran for miles around.

That's why Agnate's army was being channeled to this swamp-so that it could be decimated in one stroke. In moments the Metathran would break through the wall of Phyrexians and rush to their doom.

It was a clever trap, but Agnate was a clever mouse. Signaling to his troops to remain where they were, Agnate climbed down the tree. The stench of the swamp grew more potent as he descended. At ground level it was nearly unbearable. He crept to the bank of the marsh and knelt. From his belt, he produced flint and steel. They were the only weapons he needed.

Leaning above the fetid waters, he struck the metal against the stone. A single spark leaped away. It twisted in a bright spiral down toward the water. The spark grew. It ignited the thick swamp gas. Blue fire swelled outward. In a moment, the whole swamp went up. From where Agnate stood to the far sh.o.r.e, it all erupted in azure flame. The heat flashed away his silver hair. The roar hurled him back against a tree. He struck it and fell, but as he did, he saw the three plague spreaders riling in agony. One of the amazing properties of glistening-oil was that, when heated to a sufficient degree, it became extremely volatile.

Three blinding flashes burst into being in the center of that blue flame. In the afterimage burned into Agnate's mind, he saw the plague spreaders' skeletons still standing, all blood, all flesh, all plague burned away.

Agnate rolled to his knees, catching his breath. His folk would break through any moment. He would need to be ready to lead them on. Standing, he drew his battle axe and whistled his warriors to him.

Chapter 6.

The Dragons Primeval.

As the overlay began, Rhammidarigaaz, lord of the dragon nations, roared a warning into the charnel skies of Koilos. Phyrexians were coming. His wings spread upon the hot winds. Powerful legs hurled him aloft. Muscles surged. The great serpent rose patiently skyward. Leathery skin caught the broiling air and flung it down in twin cyclones.

The rest of the dragon nations followed. The dragons of Shiv, Darigaaz's own volcanic breed, were first to launch themselves in the wake of their lord. After them leaped the dragons of ancient Argive, alabaster creatures that were more at home among clouds than sand. Like predators after prey, the swamp dragons followed. Their black scales glimmered in the storm of dust, and their eyes gleamed blacker still. The serpents of the forest lunged upward next and spread their cobra cowls out to catch the wind. Last of all, the sea dragons, who languished in this desert heat, vaulted toward hints of blue.

It was an awesome spectacle. These thousand dragons were the greatest warriors of the wide-flung dragon nations. They spiraled into the sky above human and Metathran and elf allies, above Phyrexian foes.

On the horizon, Phyrexian dragon engines approached. They were merely glints of metal now but in moments would tear apart their fleshly kin.

Darigaaz and his folk would fight fiercely but would die today.

It is a shameful thing you have done, Rhammidarigaaz, said a voice that coiled through his head, shameful to bring the dragon nations to the desert to be slain.

Even as he labored higher, Darigaaz glimpsed who it was that spoke-a G.o.d among dragons. Tevash Szat. He lingered below in his jet-black t.i.tan suit. Of the nine engines, his was the most draconic, with a fangy head, scaly armor, and barbed tail. Urza had designed the suit especially for the reptilian planeswalker, but the longer Szat inhabited the machine, the more he mutated it.

Darigaaz returned the thought. You too have come here, Tevash Szat, to die in the desert, I never go anywhere to die.

Neither did we, Darigaaz replied. We came to fight for our world.

Szat was snide. Your world? You do not fight for your world. You fight for a mortal world, a world of humans and elves and dwarfs and minotaurs. A sadness entered the planeswalker's thoughts. Dominaria has not been our world for ages of ages.

I haven't time for wordplay, Darigaaz thought as he reached the peak of his climb. I have a war to win.

I agree. Let us be done with word games and begin our war.

Bolts of black power emanated from the t.i.tan engine and ripped the air all about Darigaaz and his flying folk. The energy literally tore the sky open. Through rents in reality, an unreal world of chaos shapes and hissing forms appeared. The tears grew wider. They joined. Holes opened in the sky. Serpents banked to escape the shredding reality, but the disintegration was too rapid. The beasts flew into chaos.

Just before the last tatter of sky disappeared, Tevash Szat in his ebony engine leaped in among them.

Darigaaz knew this place. The Blind Eternities was Urza's name for it. To Darigaaz it always had seemed the formless alb.u.men of an egg, the seeming nothing out of which scale and claw, heart and brain would take shape.

I know your thoughts, Darigaaz, that these folk are your folk. I know your heart, Darigaaz, better than you know it yourself.

Why do you take us from battle?

I take you to a truer battle, to one you must win.

Suddenly, the Blind Eternities congealed into a coastal range of volcanic mountains. Lava pumped from dozens of cones. Steam and sulfur jetted into yellow clouds. Basalt channeled molten rock into the sea. Ash made false ground above boiling calderas. Obsidian glinted like gla.s.sy jewels in black hillsides.

The place had all the sights and smells of Darigaaz's homeland, Shiv, but nowhere in Shiv were there sheer cliffs beside the sea. Nowhere did the ocean cut so long and perfect an arc into the land. It was as though a gigantic spoon had scooped out a precise hunk of land, letting the sea flow into the s.p.a.ce.

The dragon nations circled in confusion above the strange spot.

Here is where you must begin your true war, Darigaaz. Battle for your home.

This is not my home, Darigaaz replied.

Look again. This is what is left of your home, of Shiv, after Teferi took what he wished.

Teferi, yes. Knowing of the coming invasion, the planeswalker Teferi had phased out most of the lands of Shiv-the mana rig, the tribal territories of the Ghitu, and even many of the dragon kingdoms. This was all that remained. Down there, among those sea-shorn mountains, was Darigaaz's own aerie. This place was his home.

Teferi was wise, came the mind of Tevash Szat. His t.i.tan engine floated effortlessly in the midst of the circling beasts. A hundred thousand Phyrexians just now are shark food. Their portion of Rath overlaid not on land but in sea. But there are tens of thousands of others that ravage your homelands, Rhammidarigaaz. Will you let them destroy it, or will you fight for dragons as you have fought for mortals?

Only then did Darigaaz truly see. Figures marched across shoulders of pumice. They trooped like ants over crater rims and swarmed the boulder piles where goblins dwelt. They climbed cave walls to kill Viashino mystics. They marched up lava tubes to slaughter the dragon enclaves within.

Roaring again in command, Darigaaz led his folk in a long dive toward the land. The Shivan dragons soared with alacrity behind him. The others-this was not their home-hesitated. A glare from Szat sent them after their brethren.

Darigaaz angled down toward a column of Phyrexians. They marched across a narrow isthmus between two boiling seas of magma. At the far end of the land bridge lay a Viashino village. There Phyrexians slew lizard men with impunity. But not for long.

Darigaaz dived. His wings rattled with the searing wind. The pendants at his neck sparked scarlet energy. He gathered spells for the coming a.s.sault. In the elder dragon's wake, a score more of his folk sliced the air. Wind whistled from their scales. Their mouths gaped in exertion. Between spiky teeth glowed the fires they stoked in their bellies.

The Phyrexian column turned to look upward. They saw. Some stood their ground. Others stumbled back and fell from the sides of the isthmus. They plunged into the magma seas and their blood ignited immediately. Blue flames lined the land bridge. The rest of the column bolted for the Viashino village.

They wouldn't reach it.