J                       J. ROBERT KING
                       "Time Streams"

       (Magic: the Gathering. Artifact cycle. Book III.)


                         Prologue

    Urza says he's sane. Perhaps he is. Measures of sanity
among planeswalkers are hard to come by. He has lived for
over three thousand years. He heals by merely willing it.
With a thought, he steps from world to world to world. His
very appearance is a matter of convenience, clothes and even
features projected by his mind. How can conventional notions
of sanity apply to a planeswalker?
    Perhaps they cannot, but his madness began before he was
a planeswalker. Three thousand years ago, a mortal Urza
battled his mortal brother. Their sibling rivalry turned
fratricidal. So began the Brothers' War. In his rage to kill
Mishra, Urza enlisted the armies of the world, sank the isle
of Argoth, gutted the continent of Terisiare, and wiped
whole nations from the globe. He ushered in an ice age. In
repayment for all this madness, he became a planeswalker.
    Urza says he regrets the destruction. True regret would
be a good sign.
    It wasn't regret that later sent Urza on his own private
invasion of Phyrexia. It was revenge for his brother.
Somehow, Urza convinced himself he hadn't killed Mishra,
that the Phyrexian Gix had done it. True, Gix seduced Mishra
with promises of awesome power and in the end transformed
him into a monstrous amalgam of flesh and artifice. But Urza
was Mishra's slayer. Not in his mind, though.
    In the mind of madness, Urza blamed Gix and plotted to
get even. His motive was mad, and his invasion madder still.
Urza attacked Phyrexia-one planeswalker against armies of
demonic monstrosities. He lost, of course. He couldn't
defeat a whole world and was nearly torn to pieces trying.
    Tail between his legs, Urza retreated to Serra's Realm,
a place of angels and floating clouds. There he convalesced,
but he never truly recovered. Madness still haunted him, and
so did Phyrexia. Gix followed on his tail. No sooner had
Urza left Serra's Realm, thinking himself whole and hale,
than Gix and his demons arrived. A war began in heaven. That
place, like any other where Urza had chosen to dwell, was
decimated. Centuries later, it is still shrinking in its
long collapse.
    When I point out these mad indiscretions, Urza shrugs.
He claims he regained his sanity after all that. He credits
his newfound perspective to Xantcha and Ratepe-"two dear
friends who sacrificed themselves to slay the demon Gix,
close the portal to Phyrexia, and save my life. To them, I
am forever grateful."
    True gratitude would be a good sign, too.
    Urza has never, in his three millennia of life, shown
true gratitude nor had a "dear friend." I have known him for
three decades. For two of those, I have worked side by side
with him at the academy we established here on Tolaria. I am
not his dear friend. No one is. Most of the tutors and
students at the academy don't even know his real name,
calling him Master Malzra. The last person who was close
enough to Urza to be a dear friend was his brother, and
everyone knows what happened to him.
    No, Urza is incapable of regret and gratitude, of having
dear friends, not that there haven't been folk like Xantcha,
Ratepe, Serra, and I, who genuinely love the man and would
give our lives for him. But he seems incapable of returning
our affection.
    That's not enough to declare him insane, of course. As I
said, measures of sanity among planeswalkers are hard to
come by, but there is something mad about Urza's blithe
belief that Xantcha and Ratepe sacrificed themselves, that
Serra's Realm and Argoth sacrificed themselves, that Mishra
sacrificed himself.... It seems everyone and everything Urza
claims to care about gets destroyed. And what does that mean
for me, his newest dear friend?

                           - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                        Part I
                    SCHOOL OF TIME

                       Chapter 1

    Jhoira stood at the edge of her world. Behind her lay
the isle of Tolaria, its palm forests and lecture halls
overrun with magical prodigies and clockwork creatures. It
was a realm of ceaseless tests and pointless trials and
worries and work, lots of work.
    Before her lay the blue ocean, the blue sky, and the
illimitable world. Clouds piled into empyrean mountain
ranges above the shimmering sea. White waves broke on the
ragged rocks below. Beyond the thin, brilliant line of the
horizon, the whole world waited. Her soul mate was out there
somewhere, she dreamed. Everything was out there-her
homeland, her parents, her Shivan tribe, her future.
    Jhoira sighed and slouched down to sit on a sun-warmed
shoulder of sandstone. Sea winds sent her long black hair
dancing about her thin shoulders. Breezes coursed, warm and
familiar, through her white student robes. She'd spent many
hours in this sunny niche, her refuge from the academy, but
lately the hideaway brought her as much sadness as joy.
    She'd been at the academy for eight years now, learning
all she could of machines. A prodigy when she arrived,
Jhoira was now a formidable artificer. She was also a woman,
or at eighteen nearly so, and was weary of the school and
the kids, of brimstone and machine oil. She was sick to
death of artifice and illusion and wanted something real-
someone real.
    Jhoira closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath of salty
air into her lungs. Her soul mate would be tall and bronze-
skinned, like the young Ghitu tribesmen back home-keen-eyed
and strong. He would be smart, yes, but not like Teferi and
the other boys who tried to get Jhoira's attention through
juvenile antics and unsubtle innuendoes. He would be a man,
and he would be mysterious. That was most important of all.
She could not be in love with a man unless, at the core of
his being, there was mystery.
    She opened her eyes and shifted her weight, one sandal
sending up a puff of dust. "I'm a fool. There's not a man
like that in the world." Even if there were, she'd never get
to meet him, not while she was stuck on this blasted island.

                       *****

    Standing, the silver man awoke. He had moved before, had
walked and spoken before. He had occupied this enormous body
of metal, peered out of its silvery eyes, and lifted things
in its massive hands. Before it had been always as if in a
dream. Now he was awake. Now he was alive.
    The laboratory around him was bright and clean. Master
Malzra liked it clean-clean but cluttered. One wall held
hundreds of sketches and refinements of sketches, some in
ink, some in lead, some in chalk. Another bristled with
specialized implements- metal lathes, beam saws, injection
molds, presses, rollers, bellows, drills. A third wall bore
racks of cogs and struts and other mechanical castings. A
fourth held ranks of assembled mechanisms. A fifth-very few
of the school's rooms were square-allowed egress into the
room. In the center of the space, a great black forge rose.
Its smokestack climbed up and away through the dome above. A
second-floor gallery ringed the fringes of the room. Up in
those balconies even now, young eyes peered down on the
result of Master Malzra's latest experiment. They peered
down on the silver man.
    The silver man peered back. He felt frightened, awkward,
shy. He wondered what they thought about him-wondered and
cared in a way he never had before. Everything was like
that. He had seen this laboratory many times before, but he
never would have used terms like clean and cluttered and
bright to describe it or the man who had created it. Now the
silver man perceived more than just things. He perceived the
organization of things, their disposition, and what they
implied about their creator. The laboratory was a study in
the mind of Master Malzra-ancient, obsessed, brilliant,
tireless, preoccupied, short-sighted, grandiose....
    Master Malzra, meanwhile, studied him. The man's gaze
was penetrating. Folds of aged skin drew up skeptically
beneath one eye. His nostrils flared, but he didn't seem to
breathe at all. One soot-blackened hand trembled slightly as
he raised it to scratch his ash-blond beard. He swallowed,
blinking-but with eyes like that, as hard and sharp as
diamonds, it seemed he didn't need to blink at all.
    "Any noticeable change in the probe's energy profile,
Barrin?" Malzra asked over his shoulder.
    It was a strange greeting. The silver man felt somewhat
offended.
    "A reasonable enough question," came the response-from
Malzra's second, a master mage. Barrin stepped from beside
an injection mold. He wiped grit from his hands with a white
cloth. "Why don't you ask him?"
    Malzra blinked again. "Ask whom?"
    "Ask him," the mage repeated, quirking one corner of his
mouth. "The probe."
    Malzra pursed his lips. He nodded. "Probe, I am Master
Malzra, your creator. I wish to know if you notice any
change in your energy profile."
    "I remember who you are," responded the silver man. His
voice was deep and resonant in his metal form. "And I notice
a very definite change in my energy profile. I am awake."
    A sibilance of voices came from the balcony.
    Malzra seemed almost to smile. "Ah, you are awake. Good.
As you are doubtless aware, we've made some modifications to
you, hoping to enhance your performance, your intellect, and
your capacity for social integration." He ground his teeth
and could not seem to come out with anything else. Malzra
glanced back to Barrin for help.
    The mage-lean, middle-aged in a white work smock-
approached. He patted the silver man's shoulder. "Hello.
We're glad you've woken up. How do you feel?"
    "Confused," the silver man heard himself say, then in a
voice of wonder, he went on. "Everything seems to have a new
dimension. I am filled with conflicting information."
    Barrin asked, "Conflicting information?"
    "Yes," replied the silver man. "I sense, for example,
that though Master Malzra is your superior in rank and age,
he often defers to you due to his social disinclinations."
    "Social disinclinations?" Barrin prompted.
    "He prefers the company of machines to that of people,"
clarified the silver man.
    Titters of humor came from the gallery. Malzra's
expression darkened as he glanced up.
    The probe continued, "Even now, I perceive that my
observation, though accurate, displeases Master Malzra,
amuses the students, and embarrasses you."
    Barrin flushed slightly. "True enough." He turned to
Malzra. "I could run some magical tests, but even without
them, it's clear the intellectual and emotional components
of the implant are functioning."
    "Only too well," responded Malzra ruefully, to the
delight of the watchers in the gallery. "Still, I would be
just as glad for further tests of these components to occur
outside of my company."
    "In other words-?"
    "Send out the probe. Let it interact with the students.
We can monitor its progress," Malzra instructed.
    Barrin looked levelly at the probe. Wisdom and magic
danced in the man's brown eyes. "You heard what he said. Go
out. Explore. Meet some people. Make some friends. We will
recall you when we are ready for more experimentation."
    The silver man acknowledged these instructions by moving
toward the door. As he shuffled past lathes and drill
presses, the probe marveled at the resentment he felt toward
his creator. Malzra had referred to him as an "it." Barrin
had referred to him as "you."
    As if reading his mind, Barrin approached the silver man
and patted his shoulder once again. "You were right about
Master Malzra's 'social disinclinations,' that he likes
machines better than people. What you didn't seem to
recognize is that he got flustered in dealing with you."
    The silver man's response was sullen. "I recognized that
all too clearly."
    "Yes," Barrin said, "but that means he doesn't think of
you as a machine, not any longer. To him, you are becoming a
person."
    As the probe and the students filed out of the
laboratory, Barrin drew Urza to a wall of sketches. There,
in diagrams of lead and ink, the silver man was detailed,
inside and out.
    "Well, you were right," Barrin said quietly. "Xantcha's
heart was the key. Her affective and intellectual cortexes
must be intact, as you had thought. We can be thankful that
none of her memories remain, or her personality-apparently.
Still, I have to wonder about the wisdom of placing what
amounts to a Phyrexian matrix into the head of your most
powerful and advanced creation. I could have achieved the
same effect with an animation spell-"
    The master waved off the comment. "I wanted to achieve
sentience through purely mechanical means. Besides, there is
nothing Phyrexian about the heart crystal anymore. There is
not even anything of Xantcha left in it-just enough of a
matrix to allow logical, emotional, and social learning."
    Barrin winced slightly at the man's choice of words.
"Yes, well, that's the other matter. What we've got here is
no longer just a machine. You know it, and I know it. So
does the probe. You gave him emotions. You need to
acknowledge those emotions. You need to respect those
emotions." Only a blank stare answered him. "Don't you see?
This is not just a probe anymore. He is a man-no, more than
that-he is a child. He'll need to be guided, nurtured-"
    The master looked stern. "I wish you had brought this up
before. We could have devised a rubric for handling this
aspect of the probe's development."
    "That's just it," replied Barrin. "You can't devise
rubrics for this kind of thing. You can't chart it out in
blueprints. You have to stop thinking like an artificer and
start thinking like a-well, like a father."
    "I was an orphan at twelve. Mishra and I both. We turned
out all right."
    The mage snorted just slightly at that. "If you wish, I
will act as the probe's mentor in your place, but in time
you are going to need to create that bond yourself. And that
will mean telling him who you really are-telling him he was
created by Urza Planeswalker."

                       *****

    Master Malzra's laboratory had been daunting enough for
the silver man and his new intellectual cortex. The
corridors and spaces beyond the lab-tutorial rooms, lecture
halls, surgical theaters, wind tunnels, test chambers, and
countless more laboratories-were overwhelming. In gazing at
these elaborate structures, the probe understood at last
what a school was: a building designed to aid in gaining new
knowledge, communicating it to others, and applying it in
invention. This was a revelation. His creators needed to
learn. They were not all-knowing angels, driven by logical
necessity and an apprehension of the ascendant good. They
were ignorant animals, ennobled only by their insatiable
curiosity, and some were less ennobled than others.
    "I'm Teferi," offered a boy who capered into the silver
man's path and stopped stock still, as if daring the half-
ton creature to walk over him. "I'm the magical prodigy." He
followed the introduction with a snap of his fingers,
sending blue sparks bursting through the air.
    The probe stopped in his tracks and crouched slightly to
get a better look at the young scholar. Teferi's face was
small, dark, and impish. Tousled black hair jutted wildly
about his gleaming eyes. He wore the manifold white robes of
a Tolarian student. At his waist, a leather sash held his
personal array of crystals, wands, and fetishes. His feet
were bare, in defiance of school policy, though his toenails
bore strange legends in bright, glossy paint. He held one of
his hands out formally toward the probe.
    The silver man extended his own massive hand and lightly
shook the boy's whole arm. "I am Master Malzra's Probe." No
sooner had he taken the boy's hand than the probe noticed a
strange, stinging jolt in his silver hide. "Your handshake
is shocking."
    The lad pulled his hand away and shrugged, seeming
somehow disappointed. "Just a spell I've been working on.
Knocks people on their butts. Not golems, I guess. Say, what
kind of a name is Master Malzra's Probe, anyway?"
    "It is the only name I have," replied the probe
truthfully. Teferi's face rumpled, and he shook his head.
"Not good enough. You've got a personality now. You need a
real name."
    Other young students were gathering in the corridor
behind Teferi, and they leaned inward, anticipating
something. "I am unfamiliar with naming procedures." Teferi
gave a confident smile. "Oh, I'm quite familiar. Let's see.
You're big and shiny. What else is big and shiny? The Null
Moon. Why don't we call you the Null Man?" The students
laughed at this suggestion.
    The probe felt a sense of irritation. "That sounds
unsatisfactory, null means nothing. Your suggestion would
imply I am a nothing man."
    Teferi nodded seriously, though a smirk played about his
mouth. "We can't have that. Anyway, you aren't really a man.
You're an artifact. Arty would be a nice name for you. Arty
the Artifact."
    The probe could not determine any reason to reject this
suggestion-aside from the chuckles of the students. "Arty is
a name used among humans?"
    "Oh, yes," replied Teferi enthusiastically, "as a first
name, but most humans also have a last name. Let's see, you
are silver. What else is made of silver? Spoons are, and
since you are large, we ought to name you after the largest
spoon-a ladle, or perhaps a shovel. Thus, your full name
should be Arty Ladlepate or Arty Shovelhead."
    These young folk seemed to giggle at any and every
suggestion made to them. The silver man became less
concerned about their amusement. "Whichever name sounds more
pleasant to human ears-"
    "Oh, either name will bring a smile to anyone who hears
it. Still, Ladlepate sounds a little too uppity, as if you
were putting on airs. Shovelhead is much more accessible. I
vote for Arty Shovelhead. What say the rest of you?"
    The gathered students cheered excitedly, and the silver
man could not help being swept up in the mood. At the
moment, any name seemed better than no name.
    "I shall then be Arty Shovelhead," the probe said
solemnly.
    "Come along, then, Shovelhead," said Teferi grandly,
gesturing down the corridor with his boyish arm. Streamers
of conjured illumination fanned out from his fingers. "I
have much to show you."
    The crowd of students surged up around the probe and
dragged at his cold metal hands with their warm fingers. He
plodded along among them, careful not to step on their feet.
    The entourage of children led the probe along as though
he were a visiting dignitary. They arrived first at a large
dining hall with ivory rafters and soaring walls of
alabaster. Beneath this white vault were long, dark tables
crowded with more students who bent above bowls of gruel and
platters of hard crackers and cheese.
    "This is the great hall," narrated Teferi. "This is
where we students eat. The food is specially prepared so
that nothing about it could distract us from our studies.
Notice the bland colors and mean consistency of it all? The
flavors are even more indistinguishable. No one could gnaw
on one of those crackers and spend even a moment to
contemplate its nonexistent virtues."
    The probe could tell that this boy had an acute grasp of
the truth behind appearances. "Master Malzra must care
greatly about your studies."
    Teferi laughed, though the sound was rueful. "Oh, yes.
He nurtures our minds like a farmer nurtures grain. He heaps
manure on our heads, knowing we will rise up through it,
despite it, to bear richly, and then he comes along with a
scythe and cuts our heads off to nourish his own appetites.
It is a fine arrangement, depending on who you are." He had
said this last bit while leading the probe and his
companions down the passageway to another chamber, similar
to the first, except that the vault overhead was dark, and
the students at the long tables were crouched over sheets of
paper, quill pens scraping fitfully across them. "Here is
part of that diet of manure I spoke of. These students are
copying plans and treatises of Master Malzra, Mage Barrin,
and other scholars. It is in sedulously copying the
scribbles of our betters that we become consummate
scribblers ourselves."
    The probe was appreciative. "What do these plans and
treatises describe?"
    "Machines, such as yourself. Gadgets, mainly. He's got a
whole mausoleum-um, that is, museum-filled with artifact
creatures. You'll be there too, soon enough. Master Malzra
has a very active imagination and puts it to great use
devising elaborate means to save himself a little bit of
labor. He has created numerous devices to more quickly and
efficiently cook the gruel and crackers, to more effectively
limit the freedom of those under his command, to more
completely defend all of us against external foes so that he
alone can torment us."
    The silver man felt uncomfortable with this new line of
thought. "External foes? What foes does Malzra have?"
    "Oh, everyone is against him, or didn't you know?" said
Teferi lightly as they moved farther down the hallway. He
idly conjured a small knife, whirled it deftly between his
fingers, and then dispelled it. "At least that's what Malzra
thinks. He's got clockwork creatures and actual warriors
roaming the walls around the academy at all hours, and clay
men tramping through the woods by the sea, and gear-work
birds that spy on the island. I myself have never heard of a
single real enemy, but Malzra spends so much time creating
these machines and recreating them and perfecting them,
there must be something more than psychotic paranoia at the
root of it, wouldn't you think?"
    "I suppose so," the silver man answered.
    They came to another room, this one filled with
dissected hulks of metal, leaning clockwork warriors,
dismantled machines, piles of rusted scrap iron, and at the
far wall, a great open furnace. Workers on one side of the
blazing forge shoveled coal into the flames and pumped
massive bellows. Workers on the other side dumped bins of
spare parts into great vats of molten metal. Throughout the
rest of the grimy chamber, students moved among the ruined
machines like vultures picking at a battlefield of dead. A
shiver of dread move through the probe.
    Teferi noticed the impulse and smiled grimly. "See,
Arty, even if Malzra has no other enemies, his old creations
could easily turn on him. They should. They certainly have
reason to hate him. Malzra quickly tires of his playthings.
I can imagine a legion of metal men such as yourself
learning that Malzra planned to melt them down. They could
escape across the sea. I can imagine whole nations of
clockwork creatures who have fled their creator only to
muster themselves in hopes of returning and killing him."
    The silver man was aghast. "How could an artifact
creature ever seek to destroy the artifact creator?"
    "Give it a year, Arty," Teferi said lightly, though none
of the students laughed this time. The boy patted the
golem's arm. "Give it a year-two at the outside, and you'll
be facing that fiery furnace. It's the way of artifice. When
you're in pieces in that room, then ask yourself what you
think about Master Malzra."
    Jhoira was again in her rocky haven from the world. She
spent less and less time in the academy and more and more
time here, dreaming of far-off places and futures-
    A white flapping motion caught her eye. There along the
shore, between two fingers of stone, something was moving.
It looked like a seagull's wing, only too large. A pelican?
A white sea lion? Jhoira blinked, rubbing her eyes. The sea
and sky were dazzling here. Maybe it was only a glaring bit
of foam.
    No, it was more than that. It looked like fabric-perhaps
another student? Jhoira slid from the sandstone ledge and
eased herself down the tumbled hillside. One edge of the
white fabric was tied to something rigid-a spar. It was a
sail. Jhoira descended more quickly. Her sandal soles slid
on pea-gravel and sand. She thrashed past a brake of grass
and clambered down the cleft between two wind-carved stones.
    The space gave out onto a wide beach of beige sand,
broken by rills of craggy black stone. Above one such rill,
a lateen-rigged sail jutted flaglike from a shattered wooden
hull. The impact had staved the boat's prow and splintered
the timbers amidships. Since then, the rocks had chewed away
at the frame, each new wave grinding the hull again on the
ragged stones.
    Jhoira approached cautiously. So few ships arrived at
Tolaria. Most were the academy's own supply vessels,
captained by seamen hand-picked by Master Malzra. The island
was too remote, too removed from trade routes to attract
other ships. This boat must have drifted for some distance
off course before crashing. Perhaps it was abandoned.
Perhaps its crew had been washed overboard. Jhoira craned
her neck as she neared, looking for signs of life in the
ruined hulk. Her sandal prints filled with salty water
behind her. She reached the stony outcrop and climbed up
above the pitching wreck.
    It was a small craft, the sort that might have been
manned by a crew of five or a crew of one. The deck was in
disarray-lines lashing loosely, small barrels rolling with
each sea surge. The hatch was open, and in the dark hold
Jhoira glimpsed gulls fighting over bits of hard-tack that
had spilled from broken crates. The mainmast was cracked,
though it still held aloft the raked sail, and the
mainsail's sheet was cleated off, as if the boat had been at
full sail when it struck the stone. It must have run aground
last night, when the Glimmer Moon had been obscured by a
midnight storm. The bow was gone entirely, but the stern
remained. A narrow set of stairs led downward to a small
doorway. The captain's quarters would lie beyond.
    "What are you doing?" Jhoira asked herself worriedly as
she clambered down the boulder where the ship was impaled,
lifted one leg over the starboard rail, and hauled herself
onto the pitching deck. "This thing could come loose any
moment and roll over and drag me out to sea."
    Even so, she crawled forward, reached the set of stairs
that led down to the captain's quarters, and descended. She
pulled open the red door and cringed back from the hot,
stale air within. The space was dark and cramped. With each
wave surge, the floor clattered with junk-a map tube, a
lodestone, a stylus, a wrecked lantern, spanners, a slide
rule, and other indistinguishable items. To one side of the
cabin, a small table hugged the wall. To the other were a
pair of bunks. The bottom bed held a still figure.
    Dead, Jhoira thought. The man lay motionless, despite
the tossing sea. His face was tanned beneath curls of golden
hair. His jaw was shaggy with a week's growth of beard. His
hands, large and strong, were laid across his chest in the
attitude of death.
    Jhoira backed away. Perhaps this was a plague ship, this
man the last to succumb, with no one to throw him overboard.
She'd been a fool to climb aboard.
    Then he moved. He breathed, and she knew, even if he was
plagued, she could not abandon him. Without another moment's
hesitation, Jhoira crossed the crowded cabin, stooped beside
the bunk, and lifted the man. She had always been strong.
The Ghitu of Shiv had to be strong. Shifting the man to her
shoulder, she struggled out of the cabin and up the stairs.
Navigating the rubble-strewn deck with a man on her shoulder
was difficult, and Jhoira stumbled twice. Gritting her teeth
in determination, she made the rail. With a heart-rending
leap, she reached the rock and clung there.
    As if shifted by her jump, the broken craft heeled away
from the crag. A wave crashed into it, lifting it up, and
with a briny surge, the boat scraped up toward Jhoira and
her charge. She clambered to a higher spot on the rock. The
wave tumbled back from shore, taking the hulk with it. The
mast rolled under and snapped like a twig. Shroudlike, the
sail wrapped the splintered boat as it heaved outward on the
retreating wave. Broken barrels and other debris boiled in
the wake of the boat.
    Panting, Jhoira watched the broken mass of wreckage bob
out into deeper water. The next wave rolled it once more,
and then the ship disappeared. For some time she could see
it, moving in the undertow like some white leviathan.
    Jhoira waited for a break in the waves and climbed down
from the stone. She crossed the sandy berm, tempted to set
the man down there. A darting glance up at the hilltop told
her that no other students or scholars had seen the
shipwreck or knew of the man, but others might come soon.
The man would be as good as dead. Malzra did not suffer the
arrival of strangers on his island paradise, and the
students were sworn to report any such castaways they
discovered. Jhoira planned to report this one, of course,
but she didn't want anyone else to know about him-not yet.
    Strong though she was, the climb from the shore to her
hideaway was a hot labor. When she arrived, she laid the man
down on the sunny stretch of sandstone where she had spent
so many afternoons. She checked for breath and pulse, found
both, and set a hand on his brow to check for fever. He felt
warm, though that might have been only from the sunlight.
There was a better test for fever. Her heart pounding, she
leaned over and kissed his forehead.
    "Hot. Yes. Very hot," Jhoira said breathlessly.
    She removed her outer cloak, snagged a bit of scrub, and
propped the fabric up over his face, shielding him from the
sun. She retrieved a small canteen from her belt, parted the
man's lips, and poured a cool trickle of water into his
mouth.
    He was beautiful-tan, strong, tall, and mysterious. That
was the most important thing of all. The last drops fell
from the canteen.
    "You stay here," she whispered, patting his shoulder.
"Don't let anybody see you. I'll go get more water and
blankets-supplies. I'll take care of you. Stay here."
    Heart fluttering in her breast like a caged bird, Jhoira
hurried away from her secret spot and her secret stranger.
    Her footsteps had hardly faded beyond the rocky rise
when the stranger's blue eyes opened. There was a gleam in
them, something vaguely metallic. It might have been only
the silver shimmer of clouds reflecting there, but there
might have been something else to that gleam, something
mechanical, something menacing.

                         Monologue

    At last, Urza has done it, making a machine that really
lives. He's been working for three thousand years to devise
such a thing. Now that he has one, he doesn't know what to
do with him.
    The silver man is engineered to let Urza return in time,
even farther back than those three thousand years, to the
time of the ancient Thran. Urza hopes the probe can reach
the time of that ancient race, some six millennia in the
past. If Urza himself could reach such a time, he could
prevent the Thran from transforming into the race of half-
flesh, half-machine abominations that seek to destroy life
on Dominaria, thereby rectifying the error he and his
brother Mishra made in opening the doors to Phyrexia.
    I've pointed out that unmaking the Phyrexians is
tantamount to slaying all of us who have lived in this world
since their creation. Still, Urza would rather wipe the
slate clean than deal with his past-just as he did at
Argoth.
    The disturbing thing is, he is making all the same
mistakes over again. If he could only have embraced his
brother instead of attacking him-if he could only have
apologized for his arrogance and obsession and been
reconciled-the Brothers' War would never have been fought,
the brotherhood of Gix would never have gotten a foothold in
the world, and Argoth and most of Terisiare would not have
been destroyed. If he had worked with his brother instead of
against him, combining their genius and the power of both
halves of the stone they had discovered, the pathway from
Phyrexia might have been cut off the very day it was
accidentally opened.
    Reconciliation is not in the man any more than regret or
remorse or friendship. Every sin of omission Urza committed
against his brother, he repeats now against his own students
... and his newborn silver man.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 2

    The students were gone from the laboratory. Only Master
Malzra, his trusted associate Barrin, and the silver man
remained among the dark implements and ubiquitous sketches.
    "You've learned much in your first day," said Barrin
gently. "We have been observing, remotely. You have
interacted well."
    "I have a friend," the silver man volunteered.
    A creased smile played across Barrin's face. "Yes.
Teferi, my prodigal prodigy-we know about that."
    "He told me many things," the probe continued. His voice
was edged with suspicion. "He explained the academy to me.
He has named me Arty Shovelhead."
    The mage sighed in irritation. "Teferi is a brilliant
young mage- my most promising student-but he likes to stir
up trouble. He makes things twice as hard for himself, and
three times as hard for everyone else-"
    "Teferi is a good first friend," interrupted Malzra with
uncharacteristic alacrity. He glanced between the silver man
and the man of flesh, then seemed to withdraw behind his
glimmering eyes. "After all, Barrin, you said the probe has
emotions-needs friends."
    "Yes," the mage said, diverting the conversation at its
awkward turn. "Master Malzra is eager for you to begin the
experiments you were created to carry out. That's why we
called you back this evening."
    Barrin moved to one wall, opened a small hatch, and drew
forth a long pole three times his height. At the tip of the
pole was a small hook. Barrin hoisted the hook to the
ceiling, engaged it in a hidden slot, and pulled downward
once. A large panel in the dome shifted and then slowly
separated from the smooth curve. On hydraulic rods, the
panel eased downward from the dome. A large, complex machine
of glass cylinders, metal casings, and snaking tubes
emerged. Lamplight glowed from the descending apparatus, ten
times more massive than the silver man himself.
    "This is a time field distortion device," Master Malzra
explained. "It is powered by four separate sources of
energy-thermal, mechanical, geomagnetic, and of course,
Thran. The thermal component provides a molecular time
clock, an exact measure of the temporal vector, calibrated
in atomic vibration per second. The mechanical component
rotates the unit about its axis, thus creating beneath the
device a cone of radiation within which the temporal
distortion will manifest. The geomagnetic component provides
precise coordinates of longitude, latitude, and altitude for
the origin and destination points. Thran powerstones, of
course, provide the main drive of the machine."
    The silver man wondered aloud, "What is this ...
machine?"
    "A time machine," Barrin explained. "Actually, it
provides travel through time and space both. Tonight we plan
to test only the temporal components."
    "You wish me to operate this machine?" the probe
guessed.
    "We wish you to travel in it," Master Malzra replied.
"The current design plays havoc with biological creatures.
Any organism with a heartbeat, respiration, a sequential
digestive tract, and a network of neural pathways that rely
on chemical reactions is ill-adapted to time-field
distortions."
    "They die," Barrin explained. "Metals are much less
susceptible to temporal stresses. Silver, of all metals,
showed the least resistance. That is why you are made of
silver. That is why you were made-to travel through the
portal and report back what you have discovered."
    The silver man approached the dangling device. His eyes
traced out a circle on the floor beneath the massive
machine. "Teferi told me about this. Every machine is made
for a specific purpose. Every machine is made to defend you
and the academy against... external foes."
    Master Malzra's eyebrows rose. "Teferi knows that much?"
    "Everyone seems to," the silver man said.
    "Well, then-yes," the artificer said. "This is part of
that defense. You must not divulge the information we are
relating to you-"
    "Of course not-"
    "We intend, in time, to send you or another probe or
perhaps eventually a person back to the time of the Thran,
to divert them from the path that led to these-external
foes."
    "Send me or another probe...." echoed the silver man,
thinking of the fiery furnace, heaps of scrap metal, and
workers with shovels.
    "This is all utterly secret, of course," Malzra said.
    "Yes," replied the silver man.
    "Tonight's regression will be nothing so grand," assured
Barrin, apparently sensing the probe's hesitancy. "If things
go well, you will return in time perhaps as far back as this
morning."
    "What must I do?" the probe asked.
    "You must stand here, within the circle," said Master
Malzra. "That is all. You will stand and wait while the
machine does its work. When the time regression slows, you
must step from the circle to arrive in the former time. You
will remain somewhat out of phase in the former time-you
will be able to see your surroundings, but no one will be
able to see you. This is to protect the time continuity. As
the particles of your being gradually align themselves with
your surroundings, this out-of-phase effect will lessen, and
you will become visible. Whether in phase or out, you will
be able to affect your environment, but we ask that you make
no significant alterations, again for sake of temporal
integrity. We will control your return trip from this end.
When you are drawn back to the present, you will make a
report of what you have discovered. Do you understand?"
    "I understand," the silver man said flatly. "It is my
purpose. It is why I was made."
    Barrin eyed the silver golem narrowly and shook his
head. He turned to Malzra and spoke quietly in his ear. "I
don't like it. He's been traumatized by Teferi."
    Malzra laughed quietly. "You are traumatized by Teferi."
    "His emotional cortex is too new."
    "He exhibits the correct emotional response to Teferi."
    "I tell you, I don't like it."
    "He understands. He knows this is the reason he was
made."
    "What if he meddles in the time stream?"
    "Then we'll draw him back through, and we'll know he
isn't sufficient to the task."
    The silver man stood silent while the men spoke, his
acute senses picking up every word.
    "I understand you are eager, Malzra, but we have time.
If our experiments work, we'll have all the time in the
world. Testing a living creature is not like testing a
machine. You can't just dismantle a creature, insert new
parts, and start him up again-"
    "On the contrary, that's what we did just this morning,"
Malzra finished, turning away from his associate. With a
curt gesture, he said to the silver man, "Into the circle
then. The power-up phase will take us a few moments."
    Wordless, the probe stepped into the circle and stood.
He could feel the silent, magnificent weight of the time
machine hanging above his head. From the precise center of
the floor, he watched Malzra and Barrin.
    Barrin used the same hooked pole to trigger a hidden
panel in the floor. A trefoil section of stone shifted
aside, and an array of consoles rose into the room. Copper
coils and pulsing tubes spilled from beneath the control
panels. Barrin checked the various conduits where they
connected with the floor. Malzra meanwhile worked
adjustments to levers and switches.
    Fluids began to move through the tubes. A low hum
started among the great glass cylinders. Brass fittings
buzzed. Even the dome itself rumbled with the mounting
sound.
    A high-pitched whine rose to echo through the lab, and a
thin red beam stabbed from the base of the machine. It
lanced through the charged air, just past the silver man's
shoulder, and neatly struck the circle scribed on the floor.
The ray fluttered a moment before sweeping in an arc. It
looped the golem once and sped in its course. In moments,
the single spinning beam had widened into a crimson cone
that enveloped him.
    The silver man stood there, bathed in lurid light,
watching his creators. The men were busy at their consoles,
drawing up one energy source and leveling off another,
directing the beam in its spiraling crescendo, configuring
the coordinates of space and time.... Light intensified. The
artificers' endeavors slowed. The whining hum reached a
peak. Master Malzra and Barrin soon moved not at all, frozen
in space ... or time.
    The probe understood. The roaring machine and its
whirring cone of light had teased the cord of time down to a
frayed nub, and then to nothing. With rising fury, the
device plucked at the packed skein of past moments. They too
began to unravel. No longer motionless, Master Malzra and
Barrin moved backward, undoing all they had done. Their arms
darted with strange jabs like scorpion tails. More than
that, the silver man also moved, or his past self moved. It
trudged backward out of the circle just as he had trudged
forward into it, only minutes before.
    Within the cone of regression, the present-time silver
man watched in amazement. His doppelganger conferred with
Malzra and Barrin. Their words were lost to the hum of the
machine, but the sense of them was clear-reversed syllables
that did not inform or enlighten but rather disinformed and
obscured. All the while they spoke, the ghost golem knew
less and less, and the ghost time machine retracted into the
dome above. When the brief conference was done, the past-
time golem staggered backward toward the door, ignorant of
the hidden machine and all that had been said.
    The regression accelerated. Barrin and Malzra scuttled
backward about the room, dismantling things, forgetting
conversations, reducing conclusions to hypotheses,
surrendering step by step the whole march of time. Soon they
moved too quickly to seem anything but man-shaped blurs,
then were gone entirely. The lab was dark and empty for some
time, except the occasional jag of a mouse backing fitfully
across the floor.
    Eventually the two scholars returned, drawing after them
a backwash of assistants and tutors. The galleries above
flooded with eager, watchful eyes. The past-time golem
trudged backward into the midst of it all. His return was
heralded by nodding heads and hands coming sharply away from
each other, drawing a brittle ovation from the air. The
artificers themselves formed a retreating pocket of space
into which the golem walked. He reached a designated spot
and settled into immense inertia. There was another time of
questions.
    Malzra, with a suddenness that seemed almost savage,
reached toward the probe's neck, performed some quick
manipulation, and shoved the creature's head back on its
shoulders. In a moment more, he lifted the metal skull-piece
cleanly away.
    Within the time machine, the silver man stared, stunned
to see his own being so quickly and easily dismantled. The
body yet stood, though the casing of the head lay now, as if
discarded, on a side table. The inner workings of the
golem's head were laid bare. Cogs and cables gleamed beneath
a low set of struts. Light leaked through the whole mass.
Malzra was busy tugging at a central silver case, the
movements of his fingers awakening twitches in the
creature's vivisected frame. Another two jiggles and Malzra
drew forth the case. He opened it. Inside lay a dark stone
the size of a child's fist. He removed the crystal. All
final signs of life fled the creature.
    The silver man watched in amazed dread as Malzra held
high the stone. Gulping backward laughter came from the
gallery. Malzra shouted something that ended the jollity and
retreated to a table where he positioned the stone in a
metal case.
    The students in the gallery began to move. Malzra and
Barrin busied themselves setting tools into cases and
rubbing smears of oil from rags onto their hands. As the
room slowly emptied, the dissected golem merely stood,
lifeless and headless in the midst of it all.
    The regression slowed. The time-traveling silver man's
hulk smoldered-heat from temporal stress. He stepped from
the coruscating beam. Around him time resumed its forward
march. The students headed back into the gallery. The
scholars unpacked their tools and wiped their hands clean.
    Out of phase and unnoticed by them all, the silver man
approached his headless predecessor. He stared into the
vacant silver case jutting from the golem's neck. He reached
up to his own neck, wondering where the catch was that would
allow his skull-piece to be lifted away. His mind, his
emotion, his very essence could be hauled up like a hunk of
coal and displayed. He was a mere amusement for children.
They had called him friend, but in truth he was only
Shovelhead. Without that dark stone, he was not even that.
The silver man stared into the undeniable image of his own
death.
    The regression was done. He was suddenly yanked from the
time stream and back again, bathed in that rapacious red
glow. Master Malzra summoned him to the present.
    The silver man arrived. The beam skittered and danced
away, withdrawing into the machine overhead. It too
withdrew, trailing gray tendrils of smoke from the temporal
stress it had endured.
    Barrin and Malzra stood, blinking, at their consoles.
Tentative, the two scholars released the controls beneath
their fingers and approached the probe.
    Barrin spoke first. "Are you well-?"
    "Are you capable of rendering a report?" Malzra
interrupted.
    "My frame is quite hot," the silver man responded, "but
I am capable, yes."
    "How far back did you go?" Malzra asked.
    "Back to this morning, to the time of my awakening."
    "Excellent," Malzra said as Barrin noted the response on
a sheet of paper. "And did you touch or move anything in
that time?"
    "I touched only the floor, with my feet, and moved only
myself."
    "Were you approached by anyone, or was there any other
indication that your presence was noted?"
    "No."
    "What did you observe?"
    This answer would not come as readily as the others.
    "I observed myself dismantled. I observed the core of my
being removed. I observed the small, dark, fragile thing
that is my mind and self and soul."

                         Monologue

    The first day of life is always the hardest, to be
dragged from whatever warm, safe womb in which one is
conceived and then thrust into the cold glare of the world.
There is much to adjust to- breathing air instead of liquid,
for one; being naked and prodded and scrubbed, for another.
Worst of all, there is that moment when the cord is cut, and
one is suddenly and irrevocably alone.
    It is in recognition of such traumas that mothers' arms
are made.
    You have no mother. You have no father, either. You have
a pair of creators, but that is not the same. Neither of us
knows how to comfort and protect you. If you need too much
nurturing, we may even consider you defective. Perhaps it is
because you were designed to be a tool, a weapon-not a
person. Perhaps it is because we have not expected to have
to save you. We were hoping you would save us.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 3

    It had been nearly a month since Jhoira had observed the
lab session in which the silver man awoke. She could
remember each detail of Master Malzra's technique. She'd
spent the intervening time studying powerstones, like the
one placed in the golem's head, and poring over the
artifact's design sketches. All of it was preparation for
the design debrief she would be required to give. It was the
price paid by all the elite students invited to observe the
procedure. There remained only one more task before she was
ready to write her report-actually interviewing the machine.
    She sighed with dread and tapped her fingers idly on the
plans. She had hoped to derive a satisfactory description of
the golem's intellectual and emotional performance from
these plans, her research on Thran powerstones, and first
hand observation of the refit. None of these things
explained its-his-apparent logical and affective capacities
though. She would have to interview him.
    Jhoira glanced in surrender at the ceiling of her
dormitory cell. Interviewing the machine meant winning past
his self-appointed wrangler, Teferi. The boy-and at
fourteen, he was only a boy-was one part prodigy, one part
prankster, and one part pervert. Unfortunately all three
parts were madly infatuated with Jhoira. She had done her
best to discourage his advances, but he didn't notice subtle
rebukes, and he considered unsubtle ones only affectionate
horseplay.
    If she told him she wasn't interested, he would pledge
to make her interested. If she said she hated him, he would
respond that hate and love were only a hair's breadth apart-
and speaking of hair's breadths, could he have a breadth of
hers? She had the inkling that he had made several attempts
to devise a magical love potion to win her over.
    Just thinking about the young man-the boy, he was only a
boy-exasperated Jhoira. She stood from her desk and paced
the small, spare room she occupied in the academy. If only
Teferi could glimpse a real man, could glimpse the man she
had found at the seaside and had provisioned and kept secret
in her stony hideaway ... No. Nobody could know about
Kerrick except for her. That's the way it was and the way it
should be. Jhoira sat down on her cot and stared out the
window of her cell. Beyond the pitching treetops and the
tumbled boulders lay the shore and her secret love.
    She shook her head to clear it. The sooner she
interviewed the silver man, the sooner she could finish her
report, and the sooner she could rejoin Kerrick. Snatching
up a sheaf of paper and a lead nib, Jhoira made her way
through the door and out into the academy to hunt down the
silver man.
    She found him in the great hall, crouching to sit on a
stump that had been hauled in specifically for him after he
had broken three of the academy's benches. He looked
dejected, hunkered down at the end of a table. Teferi held
court beside him, and a passel of the prodigy's devotees
clustered in a laughing bunch around. Carrots were on the
menu today, and Teferi had discovered that by levitating
them into various holes in the golem's skull, he could
create comical ears and a long twisted nose. To these
alterations came others-oily lettuce in an improvised head
of hair, and large, bulging eyes made of hard biscuits
rammed into the machine's eye sockets.
    Jhoira shook her head as she approached. If reports were
right, this machine was fully aware. He knew what was being
done to him, and he cared.
    "Does Master Malzra know what you are doing, Teferi?"
    The boy looked up, his impish features lighting up when
he caught sight of her. "Hello, Jhoira! Have you met Arty
Shovel-head?"
    "Does Master Malzra know what you are doing?" she
repeated angrily.
    The fourteen-year-old affected a smug superiority. He
nodded toward the mirrored loft where Malzra and Barrin
often took their lunch. "Master Malzra is keenly interested
in all of my adventures. I'm Barrin's magical prodigy. Of
course they know what I am doing."
    "This artifact creature is self-aware, Teferi. He
thinks. He has feelings. You can't just toy with him like
this."
    "I can, and I do," replied Teferi. He levitated a pair
of radishes to make them hover like earrings on either side
of the golem's head. "What fun is it to toy with someone who
doesn't have thoughts and feelings?"
    Exasperated, Jhoira flung out her hands. "Anyway, I need
to interview him."
    Teferi smiled. "Go right ahead. I'm his interpreter-
right, Shovelhead?"
    Behind his mask of biscuits and carrots, the silver man
remained silent.
    Reaching out distastefully, Jhoira drew a dripping leaf
of lettuce from the creature's head, slug-trails of salad
oil glistening across his shiny brow. "Did you ever think
you might be damaging him, might be destroying him? This is
sensitive machinery."
    "Master Malzra wants it tested," Teferi replied glibly.
He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back on the
bench. "I'm just giving it a rigorous exam. If you're
jealous, I could arrange a rigorous exam for you, back in my
cell." His friends chorused a thrilled oooh at the
suggestion.
    Jhoira flushed. "I'm not interested in little boys-" she
countered, savagely knocking the biscuits from the silver
man's face. The golem sent her a look of lost misery "-not
interested in tiny, mean, little boys who cut the eyes out
of sparrows and stomp roses into the ground and empty their
bladders on anything beautiful and good.
    That's what you are, Teferi-you're not even a nasty
little boy, but an infant who can't control his own body,
can't recognize anybody else as real, can't do anything but
whine and cry and soil yourself and everybody around you.
You're going to have to do lots of growing up before you'll
be anything more than a squalling baby." Jhoira punctuated
this tirade by yanking forth the variously placed carrots.
    Teferi was silent. His face grew pale, as though the
flush of Jhoira's features sucked the color out of his. By
the time she was finished, his lip was quivering. His eyes
were as wide and staring as the biscuits on the floor.
    Jhoira reached down, gently, regally, and took the
silver man's hand. "Let's go. I have a lot of questions to
ask you."
    The probe rose, as though his half-ton bulk could have
been lifted by her one slender hand. Looking back over his
shoulder, the silver man followed Jhoira, dejection and
confusion in his bowed shoulders.

                       *****

    Barrin was nettled. He let go of the rail that
overlooked the great room and paced in front of it. Through
a, one-way glass enchanted by the mage himself, they had
both witnessed the incident with the carrots and biscuits-
and hundreds of other pranks Teferi had played on the
hapless golem. These occasions seemed only to mildly amuse
Urza. They made Barrin furious.
    "I can't understand why you allow it!" he stormed. "Here
is the first truly living artifact creature you have
created, and yet you surrender him to the depredations of
that... that vulture!"
    "Living things have to live, Barrin," Urza said calmly.
"If Teferi breaks down the probe, we'll know it needs to be
redesigned."
    "Breaks down? Redesigned?" Barrin raged. "That's not
what you do with living things. They have to live-as you
said. This golem of yours is only a month old. Give him
time-"
    "Time is all I give him. We'll attempt another
regression at the end of this month," Urza said, heading
toward the chamber door.
    "Meanwhile," said Barrin grimly, "I'm going to ask
Jhoira to look after him, to keep him away from Teferi. I
really don't understand why you refuse to let me expel that
troublemaker."
    Urza turned back in the open doorway. "I keep him here
because he is a magical genius-driven and destined to
greatness. He may be a social nuisance, yes, but I was one,
too."
    "You still are," Barrin observed tartly, "but Teferi's
more than a nuisance. Jhoira said it best. He's selfish.
He's dangerous. He hurts people without thought or apology.
He takes no responsibility for his actions. I don't care
about his potential. Until he grows up, he will leave a path
of destruction in his wake."
    "You have said the same of me before." Urza blinked,
considering. "Yes, I keep Teferi here because he reminds me
of me."
    Jhoira ushered the silver man into her room. He had to
turn sideways to fit through the arched doorway, and once
within, merely stood there, as stiff and fearful as an
adolescent boy.
    "It's all right. I'm not going to bite," Jhoira assured.
She gestured the golem in so that she could swing the door
closed behind him.
    The click of the latch made the room feel even smaller.
Despite his stooped shoulders and silent demeanor, the probe
seemed especially massive in that moment.
    Jhoira skirted around him and busied herself tidying the
room. "It's not much, I know, but it's all I need and
private." She snatched up a conspicuous undergarment and
secreted it within a basket in one corner. "Here's my bed,"
she continued, nervously straightening the slate-gray
blanket on it and fluffing the pillow, as though she
expected the silver man to lie down on it. "Here's where I
keep my clothes-the student robes hanging in that bone-
inlaid wardrobe there, and my knockabout clothes here in
this drawer. That's one drawback to being made of skin.
You've got to cover it all the time."
    That felt forced. Jhoira reminded herself this was a man
of metal, no more interested in her undergarments than a
doorknob would be.
    "Here. Here's something you'll like." She reached up to
a low shelf above her drafting desk and drew down a small
metal pendant. It was fashioned to resemble a lizard-man
dressed in heavy robes. "This is from my homeland, Shiv.
It's metal-not just metal, but Viashino metal. That's some
of the hardest stuff in the world." Unthinking, she tossed
the trinket to the golem.
    One massive hand snatched the item from the air-the
first movement the golem had made since settling into
stillness. He stared down at it. "It is hard," he agreed in
a voice like the distant rumble of a waterfall. "It
scratched me."
    Jhoira's brow furrowed. She crossed the floor to look.
Two small scratches marked the silver man's palm. "Oh, no.
I'm sorry. Let me get something for-" She broke into
laughter, backed up, and slumped onto the bed.
    The silver man leaned forward. "What is it? Did I say
something stupid?"
    "No, no," Jhoira assured. "I did. It's me. If one of my
other friends had gotten scratched, I'd have pressed a rag
on it to stop the bleeding, but you can't bleed. Still, I
was going to get a rag." "One of your other friends-?" the
golem echoed. "Oh, I'm just nervous. I don't know why." She
sat up soberly on the bed. "I don't really have a lot of
friends. I don't usually let anybody else in here, and I
know you're just a machine, but you seem so real, so much
like a person." "So much like a person-"
    She shook her head and fetched a rag from among her
drafting supplies. "Still, you could use one of these. I've
been going on and on, and there you stand, vinegar dripping
from your head." Flipping the rag in one hand, she walked to
the golem and began wiping away the liquid. "You know, in my
tribe back home in Shiv, they put oil on somebody's head to
honor him. It's called anointing. Ghitu do it when you are
born, and when you set out on a vision quest, and when you
need healing, and when you've just been saved from death."
She patiently daubed away the streams of liquid and polished
the creature's shiny pate.
    "Maybe that's what happened to me," said the silver man.
"Maybe I've just been anointed."
    "You're lucky it was just oil and vinegar. Knowing
Teferi, it could have been something much worse."
    "It wasn't Teferi who anointed me," the silver man
rumbled. "It wasn't Teferi who saw that I needed healing."
    Jhoira smiled sadly, wiping the last of the oil away.
She gestured at the pendant. "You can keep it. They're
supposed to be lucky. They're good to have with you on a
vision quest." She wiped her hands on another cloth and
tossed both into the basket in the corner. "Anyway, I'm
doing a treatise on you, and I have some questions-if you
don't mind?"
    The silver man said solemnly, "You are the first person
to ask whether I minded anything."
    Jhoira nodded distractedly. She drew a large folio of
sketches from beneath her drafting table and selected a
number of rattling sheets from it. She spread them out on
the workspace.
    "These are drawings of me," observed the golem.
    "Yes. This is the final set of plans for you before the
powerstone was implanted-front, back, left, right, top, and
bottom views. There's a detail of your torso. You've got
lots of room in there. And here's your head," she said as
she pointed to each matrix of gray lines and gear-work.
    "This legend names me only 'PROBE 1,' " the golem
indicated.
    "Yes," responded Jhoira. "Master Malzra is not very
imaginative when it comes to names. Still, it's a better
name than Arty Shovel-head."
    One of the golem's massive fingers traced out a bracket
that indicated the whole frame of the construct. Beside it
was a call out that said simply, "KARN."
    "I like this name better. What does it mean?"
    Jhoira looked up from the sketch. Her eyes narrowed
intently as she studied the golem's gleaming features.
"That's Old Thran. I don't know much of the language-even
Master Malzra doesn't know much of it-but I know that word.
It means 'mighty.' "
    "Karn," the golem repeated thoughtfully.
    Jhoira smiled again. "Yes. That's a good name. That's
your name. Karn." She turned back to the table. "Now these
sketches on this side show the powerstone and its
integration into the superstructure. The point of my
treatise is to explain how an automaton becomes a thinking,
feeling creature, simply through the addition of a crystal.
I haven't been able to figure it out by looking at these
diagrams, even by watching the operation. I can't imagine
how a powerstone-especially one that looked dead, like the
one inside you-could give a creature thought and life and
soul." "Perhaps it isn't a powerstone," offered Karn
quietly. "Not a powerstone?" Jhoira wondered. "Then what
would it be?" "I don't know, but without it, I am nothing,"
Karn observed. "I've seen myself without it. I'm just a pile
of metal."
    "Seen yourself?" Jhoira asked. She turned toward the
silver man and took his hand conspiratorially. "Karn, just
what is it they have you do in there? I know Master Malzra
has been running secret experiments with you at the center
of them. He's been building some kind of big machine-I've
worked on parts of it-but none of us can guess what it does.
And there's been something strange about the school since
you arrived, something about the air. It feels like waves
moving through a tidal pool or something. Do these
experiments have anything to do with that?" An insistent
knock came at the door.
    Jhoira's face hardened. "It's Teferi, the little rat."
Then, to the door, "Just a moment."
    The knock came again. "It's Mage Barrin. I've come for
the probe. And I have a request to make of you, Jhoira."
    Jhoira hurried to the door, opened it, and bowed
slightly. "We were just in the middle of an interview, but
we can talk later. Would you mind, Karn?"
    "Not at all," replied the silver man, "I would like
that." He turned sideways to slide out the arched doorway.
Barrin backed up to make room. "Karn?" "Yes," responded
Jhoira. "That's his name. What was your request?"
    Night drew down around Tolaria. The dying sun burnished
rooftops of blue tile, giving them a bronze patina. The
Glimmer Moon peered palely over the treetops. Hot, dense
breaks of jungle chittered with the final choruses of day
birds, and night birds raised their first ululating songs.
White waves along the shore glowed golden over burgundy
seas. Throughout the afternoon, a hot, still column of air
had stood upon the isle, but now, before evening breezes, it
shifted and uncoiled until trees and students and all
shivered in relief.
    Jhoira was among them. She crouched in the shadowy lee
of the academy's eastern wall, breathing slowly. The culvert
where she lurked had been designed as runoff for garderobes,
but the building it served became a lab instead of a dorm. A
series of grates fastened into the passage and a main sluice
gate were meant to secure the passage against invaders.
Jhoira first noticed the unused duct in plans of the
buildings; she had quite an eye for details on a page. The
prospect of having her own entrance and exit to the academy
had been enticing. It would allow her to skirt strict
curfews. She didn't actually remove the bolts until she had
devised replacements that would hold the passage secure to
all but her. She was not selfish enough to jeopardize the
security of the whole school for the sake of her own private
amusements.
    Private amusements. She smiled. Kerrick would have been
flattered by the title. Their liaison had lasted for two
months-surely more than a passing amusement.
    Before she reached him, Jhoira had to slip past the
guards, both human and clockwork. They would be more
vigilant now in the shifting air than they had been in the
hot, still afternoon. She dared not open the grate until she
heard her friend above....
    "There it is again!" one of the men shouted overhead.
"Look out!"
    "Damned bird!" cursed another.
    "Bird, my eye," a third yelled. "They make them in
there. They're wind up toys."
    She heard her shrieking toy bird dive and harry the men
on the wall. It was a simple construction, weighing the
equal of two pieces of paper, but it was fast and shrill.
She'd discovered the plans in some ancient designs by none
other than Tawnos, legendary assistant to legendary Urza. It
didn't matter who actually designed the feathery flying
machines. It mattered only that she could make them easily
and-
    "Arghh! It's in my hair!" "Bash it with a glaive!" "No!
It's in my hair, damn it!" "Hold still!"
    "They banned the things. They circulated a memo! That's
what they said! Let them guard up here and get these damned
things stuck in their-"
    The little mechanical birds were as adept at mischief as
Teferi himself. During the next exclamation, Jhoira swung
the grate outward, rolled from the sluice, closed the metal,
set her special pins, and crawled away into the underbrush.
There, breathless, she paused. There was a hammering noise
above and the sickly flapping of ruined wings. Someone
stomped a final time, and there was silence. Then- "See,
it's not a real bird at all. See where the quills are folded
into this paper loop? And here, this hard part? That's what
smells your sweat. They make these things to dive on us! The
twerps are too young, too pasty-faced and frail, to sweat."
    "If I ever catch the little prodigy that's making these-
" "He's watching us right now, I'll wager."
    "There! There! That's what I do to your invention, you
little twerp!"
    Jhoira tried not to giggle as she made her way through
the dense forest. She knew the path perfectly. It was narrow
and shaded, exposed only after the hillsides below the
western bank. She moved without breaking twigs or tearing
leaves. They were her allies in this deception. As long as
no one found the forest path, no one would find the rocky
niche she kept above the shifting sea. As long as no one
discovered the rocky niche, no one would know about Kerrick.
    In an hour's time, she topped the final shoulder of
parched earth above the niche. Already the sun had quit the
sky. A russet blanket of clouds covered the world. The
hooded lantern she had brought to the spot glinted faintly
through a crevice. Peering through the crack, she saw the
bookshelf Kerrick had improvised from stones and flat slabs
of driftwood. The shelf burgeoned with volumes on loan from
the academy: Kerrick was an avid reader. He had little else
to do during his days and said he hoped to gain enough
knowledge of artifice that he could apply for admittance. He
was a good reader, a better trapper, and a superior cook.
Even now, Jhoira could smell the savory aroma of salt-marsh
hare sizzling on a skillet. Kerrick had dressed the creature
with wild spearmint and scallions. Jhoira's knees melted.
    What the academy served could not even be considered
food next to fare like that.
    Drawn by those aromas, Jhoira tiptoed around the corner.
Beside the sizzling skillet were a pair of slim, bronzed
feet crossed over each other. As she approached, she saw the
long, muscular legs attached to those feet, the man's ragged
trousers, his tattered shift, his strong hands, clutching
yet another book. Then there was his handsome face, his
beautiful golden curls. Jhoira's knees melted again.
    What the academy had to offer could not even be
considered manhood next to fare like this.
    He looked up, saw her, and smiled.
    Jhoira leapt into his lap and wrapped him in eager arms
and kisses. "I've been waiting all day to see you."
    Laughter danced in his eyes. "Rotten day?"
    "You have no idea," she said between kisses. "There's a
little tyrant prig who thinks his job is making everyone
miserable-"
    "Yes, Teferi," Kerrick replied.
    "I've mentioned him before?"
    "Often," Kerrick said. "You've said he has a crush on
you, but you're the one always talking about him."
    "He's a child!" she replied indignantly. "I talk about
him like I would talk about a goblin infestation."
    Kerrick shrugged. He shifted toward the fire to turn the
hare meat, and Jhoira caught a whiff of his musky scent. It
was not the reek of worry but the strong animal smell of a
man who works beneath the sun.
    Over his shoulder, the man said idly, "Teferi seems one
of your only friends."
    "Oh?" Jhoira replied archly. "I spend too much time out
here to have any other friends. And I don't hear you
complaining."
    "No, you don't."
    "Besides, I have made a new friend. He's stronger than
you, taller than you, younger than you, more polite ...
definitely more polite."
    A delicious flash of jealousy showed in Kerrick's eyes.
"Then why are you here ?"
    "He's a machine!" Jhoira said, rolling the man into
another embrace. "He's a thinking, feeling machine, and I
think he also has a crush on me."
    "Really?" Kerrick replied. "Is the feeling mutual?"
    "It is," Jhoira teased brightly, "and a little jealousy
will do you some good. You've gotten quite comfortable
living here in my secret place."
    "Stronger than me, taller than me, younger than me? If
you want me to be really jealous, bring out the plans so I
can obsess over them."
    "You'll have them tomorrow-if you return your overdue
books," said Jhoira. "Now, come back over here. Those steaks
need another few moments, and so do I." She dragged him with
her onto the pallet and drew the scent of him and sizzling
steaks into her chest.
    Ah, she could put up with a hundred Teferis as long as
she had her escape route, her paper birds, and her wild,
secret love.
                          Monologue
    What does Urza see in Teferi? The little monster is
nothing like Urza at any age. For one thing, Teferi has a
sense of humor. That is perhaps his only redeeming trait-
aside from his undeniable brilliance. Still, Teferi uses his
brilliance only to tear things apart, not to build them up.
Urza has always been a builder and a serious one.
    On the other hand, Urza's creations-his clockwork men,
his war towers, his powder bombs and power armor-have always
been used to destroy. The sum of Urza's constant creation is
always destruction. Ironic, isn't it?
    Do I dare to hope that, in the end, Teferi's constant
destruction will bring about a new creation?

                              - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 4

    Karn stood in the whirling red beam. Overhead, Malzra's
machine turned back the tide of time. It was Karn's third
trial in as many months. Each test reached only hours
farther back in time. Each produced greater temporal stress
across his frame. The current envelope was a regression of
eighteen hours, beyond which lay almost certain meltdown.
    Karn told himself he should be getting used to the
vertiginous moment when the gear-work of the universe ground
to a halt and then began slowly to turn backward. There was
an instant of spinning wheels and whines of protest before
time's conveyor reversed. Then came a sudden acceleration:
Barrin and Malzra were freed from their immobility. An alien
physics took hold. Effect became cause, memories became
prophecies, and silver men were disassembled to gulping
laughter.
    Now as the spool of time rewound, space shifted as well.
Within his red cone of light, Karn slid slowly sideways. He
jittered through steel engines and furnace casings, his
physical form out of phase with the atomic synchronicity
around him. In moments, he slipped past the laboratory wall
and out into the corridor. He saw himself strolling backward
down the hall beside Jhoira. She had accompanied him to the
lab, talking of her volcanic home island and how she missed
her tribe.
    Jhoira and Karn had become fast friends in the last
months. She was a mental giant, and he a metal one. Whenever
Karn was not in the lab and Jhoira was not studying or
sleeping, the two were together. She had taught him to skip
stones, which he could do with rocks the size of bread
loaves. He had let her ride on his back as he climbed the
eastern pinnacles. From the top of the jutting stones, they
had seen ships so distant that only their topsails showed
above the horizon. Jhoira had shared with Karn her many
impressive clockwork inventions-toy birds and frogs and
leafhoppers-and fixed a finger servo that had burned out
after one of his secret tests. He had borrowed her drafting
tools one evening when she fell asleep mid-conversation and
had drawn a crudely elegant portrait of her. Best of all,
they had made a home for each other, a refuge from the
grueling rigors of their posts at the academy-and from the
depredations of a certain fourteen-year-old menace.
    Karn and his pool of red light drifted out the other
side of the corridor. He moved through a set of tutorial
rooms. Some were dark and vacant. Others were crowded with
tutors, students, and artifact constructs. Many of these
structures were basic forms meant to teach the principles of
artifice to young scholars. More advanced devices could make
beds, tie boot laces, or scuttle like cockroaches. The most
mobile of these creations were used by some of the senior
students in elaborate off-hours stakes races. Some elite
machines were designed to slither into the cells of
opposite-sex students to spy for their makers. For every
such offensive device, there were three defensive ones that
could detect, disable, or outright destroy the offender. The
highest-level creations, though-the sort Jhoira spent her
days designing and building- were complex components for
Master Malzra's time-travel device. He had dozens of his
oldest and most promising students working on the project,
though none of them knew the ultimate end of the devices
they designed.
    Onward went the time traveler in his vessel of light. He
saw into lecture halls, slid through a sleeping student
lying sick and alone in her cell, tore past a pyrotechnic
display on the properties of coal dust, and drifted through
Malzra's private study. Books and models lined the walls,
diagrams and studies hung on stands. In their midst, across
a table piled with ancient manuscripts, Barrin and Malzra
argued heatedly.
    Karn drifted beyond those walls as well. He emerged into
early morning in the academy's gardens and passed the
twelve-foot-thick outer wall, then he moved through forests.
Leaves twirled in odd backward spirals to sucking winds. The
sun retreated to disappear below the horizon. Through a vast
and settling darkness, Karn glided out toward the distant
western shore. It was a place he and Jhoira never explored
on their rambles, keeping themselves to the pinnacles and
the east. Karn slid through tree trunks and boulders, even
long low shoulders of earth at the edge of the island.
Afterward, the ground fell away. A series of rough steppes
rambled down to the sea.
    In what seemed mere moments, the foamy verge of ocean
passed some fifty feet beneath Karn's dangling feet. The
water seemed to boil, ever receding from the toothy shore.
He floated outward. Morning deepened into night. The Glimmer
Moon quit the sky. Black midnight shimmered with twilight.
    He was hot. He was nearing the edge of the envelope,
eighteen hours back and five miles in space. The plan had
been for Malzra and Barrin to monitor the temporal stresses
on the portal device and recall Karn before he reached
meltdown. That wasn't happening. Already his silver chest
plates ground against each other in feverish expansion.
    Still he drifted outward-
    The red pool of light suddenly shimmered out of
existence around him. Flailing to stay upright, Karn
plunged, as massive and hot as a meteor. Overhead, the sky
was starry but moonless. The ocean below was black with
night and deep. It roared up to meet him. Flecked waves
seized his legs, sent jets of steam from the golem's
sizzling hide, and dragged him under. For several long
moments Karn was enveloped in a fine cloud of steam bubbles,
and then he slipped down out of the foamy stuff and sank
through cold, viscous dark. Sandy silt sifted up around him,
and then his feet struck the benthos at the bottom.
    For a few moments he simply stood there feeling salt
water wriggling past all his plates and into the interior
spaces of his being. Surely they would recall him now. He
needed only wait. Still, with each creeping moment, he felt
his temporal displacement draining away. He would soon be in
phase with the particles of this time continuum, solid and
seeable to anyone who might look. Best not to give anyone a
chance. He would remain where he was until recalled.
    An hour passed. The last pockets of air in him had
seeped out and escaped to the surface some fifty feet above.
He'd been bumped three times by an inquisitive serpent and
had given up hope of being automatically recalled. Perhaps
he was out of range. He would have to find his own way out.
    Luckily, among his capacities were an internal clock,
compass, and sextant-not that he could see any stars. Even
so, with the various improvements Malzra had made to all
these systems, Karn had an almost foolproof direction sense.
He set out, slogging toward the island.
    It took longer than he had anticipated. There were
numerous submerged sandbars to climb and other pits to
descend into. There was also a coral reef that was too
fragile to climb over and too extensive to circumnavigate.
He ended up having to smash through, the sharp animal
accretions scarring his silvery knuckles.
    It was midnight when his head finally cleared the water.
Constellations spangled the sky over the black island. In
the extreme distance, the academy glowed, a collection of
ivory jewel boxes. Within those walls, his other self, his
historic self, would be spending the night in voluntary
deactivation. Within those walls, Jhoira and Teferi slept,
and Malzra and Barrin no doubt pondered the upcoming
spacial-temporal trial. The wrapping walls of that school
held everything in the world to Karn, and the rest of the
island was dark-
    Save for that one dim glint near the brow of the sea
cliff. The light was so small he had first taken it to be a
distant star. Marking its position, Karn emerged from the
water and strode up the sloping shore. Water disgorged
itself by the gallon from his sloshing innards. He stood and
let the purge continue.
    What about that light? No one was allowed beyond the
walls after dark. Who could be in that niche?
    Karn climbed. The rocky cliff side before him was all
too easy to ascend after the dragging depths of the sea. In
sliding, scraping moments, he had reached the peak. Ahead,
in a deep, narrow cleft of stone, the light shone tepidly
forth. Karn strode toward it.
    It suddenly went out.
    He paused, allowing his eyes to adjust to the starry
darkness. Something moved in that space-something warm. Karn
made out a peering, squinting face and the glint of stars
from a small, steel blade. The figure withdrew again into
the cave. Karn started forward, his massive feet grinding
quietly over the gravel-covered ground.
    The person in the cave reappeared, hoisting a curved
stick. There came a thrumming sound. Something-a crude
arrow- darted swiftly out to strike Karn's hide. Metal rang
with the sound of stone cracking. A shattered shaft tumbled
away to one side.
    A hostile act. A caveman living on the edge of Tolaria.
An intruder.
    Karn set his jaw and marched toward the cave. Two more
arrows struck the golem and cracked off into the rocks. He
came on, furious. The man abandoned his bow for a large,
stone-tipped club. He bounced it in his hand, growled out a
wordless warning, and squinted into the night.
    Karn strode to the figure and swiped out to capture him,
but the man was too fast, spinning from his grasp. The club
descended. Its stone tip shattered and sprayed outward. The
hardwood handle jangled in the man's grasp. Karn whirled. He
caught the man with the back of one hand and flung him to
the ground. The body sprawled against an outcrop of rock and
lay still.
    Light flared to Karn's side. He spun. Flames roared over
him. Fire sizzled away the water in his joints. He lunged
past the flame at the second attacker. Arms limned in flame,
Karn surged into the cave.
    "Karn!" came a shout of surprise and relief. "What are
you doing here?"
    "Jhoira?" Karn asked. His eyes quickly adjusted to the
darkness.
    Jhoira trembled in her nightclothes, a smoldering torch
butt held in her hand. She must have used the brand to
ignite airborne coal-dust, as the students were taught at
the academy.
    Karn blurted, "What are you doing here?"
    Jhoira's face grew resentful and desperate. "You
followed me. I can't believe you followed me."
    "I didn't follow you," Karn protested.
    "Why did you leave the school grounds at night then?
What about the curfew?" Jhoira challenged.
    "I could ask the same of you," countered Karn.
    "Where is Kerrick? What have you done?" she demanded
suddenly, and stumbled past Karn to the mouth of the cave.
She felt around blindly in the dark until her hand settled
on the leg of the man. She shook him. "Are you all right?
Can you hear me?" The man did not move.
    Karn approached. "I'll carry him inside-"
    "No," insisted Jhoira, shoving past him and clambering
into the cave. "His neck might be broken. Moving him might
kill him." She lit the lantern, gathered gauze and supplies
from a shelf, and hurried back out. Kneeling beside the
fallen man, she let out a moan of worry. One hand reached to
stroke his curly golden hair. "No blood, and he's
breathing." She gritted her teeth as her fingers encountered
a large lump on his forehead. "You banged him up pretty
good."
    "Who is he?" Karn asked suspiciously. "What's he doing
here?"
    "He is Kerrick," said Jhoira with a sigh. She probed his
neck to check for injury or swelling. "He was trying to
protect me."
    "He's not a student," Karn observed.
    "No. He's a castaway, and he's my friend." She slipped
her arms under the man, lifted him, and carried him inside.
"Get the lantern, will you, Karn?"
    The golem complied, following like a dejected dog. "You
never told me about him."
    Jhoira settled the man onto the pallet in one corner of
the niche. "I never told anyone. Master Malzra would have
him killed."
    "But we are friends. We have no secrets from each
other," Karn said. He set the lantern on the makeshift
table.
    "We have secrets. You won't tell me what experiments you
are involved with."
    "Master Malzra forbade me."
    Jhoira smiled grimly, dipping a cloth in a pitcher of
water and applying it to the lump on Kerrick's head. "Master
Malzra forbade me-or anyone-from harboring castaways, too,
so it all comes down to Master Malzra. I keep secrets from
you because of him, and you keep secrets from me because of
him. That's just the way he wants it. He doesn't want any of
us to have friends, to have lives."
    Karn felt a wave of sick dread move through him. He
remembered what his existence had been like before meeting
Jhoira, caught between the quiet apathy of Malzra and the
loud antipathy of Teferi. This moment could ruin things
between him and Jhoira. This moment could cost Karn the only
friend he had and turn him back into Arty Shovelhead.
     "Time travel," Karn blurted, his voice anguished.
"That's what Master Malzra is testing. That is why I am
here. He is testing a device that will send me back
centuries or millennia, that will transport me anywhere
across the planet."
     Jhoira stopped her ministrations and stared in amazed
wonder at the golem. "That's why he called you a probe...."
     "It is the whole reason I have been created," Karn said
soberly. "He instructed me to tell no one about this on pain
of being dismantled."
     "If he can do this, he can change history-"
     "He doesn't want me to change history." Karn suddenly
realized he might be changing history even at that moment.
     "There's much more to Master Malzra than meets the eye,"
Jhoira noted, amazed.
     "Well," said Karn, kneeling before Jhoira in the wan
light of the lantern. "That is the only secret I have kept
from you. You know everything else about me. You have
studied all my plans. You have watched Malzra assemble me.
You even gave me my name, my life. Can you forgive me? Can
we still be friends?"
     A smile that was one part joy and one part pity broke
across her face. "Of course, Karn. You know my greatest
secret now, too. I've always trusted you, and I still trust
you. Karn, you're my only real friend in the world."
     "What is he?" Karn asked, indicating the unconscious
man.
     "He is my love."
     She had no sooner spoken these words than the shimmering
tug of temporal displacement laid hold of Karn. He
shuddered, shifted out of phase, turned incorporeal, and
felt the sudden swift sliding of the red light.
     Just before he spun away through the stone wall of the
niche, he glimpsed, behind the wondering face of Jhoira, one
of Kerrick's fingers draw inward and his eye slit open.
     "It's worth the effort," Urza insisted where he sat in
his high study. "The Thran became the Phyrexians. If we can
divert them from that course, keep them on the path of
artifice rather than mutation, we can save the whole world."
     Barrin held his hand out and paused, seeming to sniff
the air. "What was that? Did you feel that?"
     "A temporal anomaly," Urza said. "They have been
occurring since we first sent the probe through the time-
travel portal. That one was stronger than most."
     "A temporal anomaly," Barrin repeated, stunned. "This is
what I am talking about. We get anomalies like this when
sending someone back eighteen hours. What will happen beyond
that?"
     "We must stop the Thran from becoming the Phyrexians."
     "But millennia? If we could reach that far back in time,
you could take a few side trips and rectify all your own
past mistakes-leading the Phyrexians to Serra's plane,
attacking Phyrexia, blowing up
     Argoth, killing your brother ... why, you could even
decide to undiscover the powerstone at Koilos and keep the
Phyrexians from reentering Dominaria at all."
     Urza's look was sober. "That is what my life's
accomplishment amounts to in your eyes? One grand failure
after another?"
    "Of course not," assured Barrin. "You have done much
good, and I do not begrudge you your mistakes. Mages also
learn through trial and error. What I begrudge you is the
fact that you never take responsibility for your errors. You
don't learn from your mistakes. You never clean up after
yourself."
    "That's what I am trying to do now. I brought the
Phyrexians back into the world. Now I am doing all I can to
find out how to drive them from it forever," Urza said. "I
have learned, but I have much more to learn before I can
right this greatest wrong."
    "Yes," agreed Barrin, "you have much more to learn."
    Missing the intent of this comment, Urza said, "I have
seen one piece of the puzzle, but I don't know where it fits
yet. Have you noticed the pendant Karn wears?"
    Barrin gave a wave of his hand. "A little lizard on a
chain."
    "Have you noticed how hard the metal is? I tested its
hardness. It scratched steel and adamantine and diamond.
What's more, it doesn't heat up at all from temporal
stress."
    Barrin blinked, considering. "What are you saying? That
we should build another probe made of this metal?"
    "Perhaps. Perhaps," Urza's eyes glinted with
possibilities. "I'll have to ask Karn where he got it. If we
could forge a probe of it-"
    "Should we work out a treaty with the makers of the
metal," Barrin asked sarcastically, "or just take over their
homeland and drive them out?"
    "Start with a treaty, of course. There's always time for
conquest later."
    Barrin was grim. Under his breath, he said, "Yes, you
have much to learn."

                        *****

     In a few months, the spatial displacement capacities of
the time machine had been perfected. On one journey, Karn
arrived in the Adarkar Wastes, thousands of miles from
Tolaria. The place was little more than a brittle blue sky
above a brittle white land. Snow and ice covered most of the
ground. Bare spots revealed sand that had fused together
into great, thin slabs of glass, left from a long-ago battle
of fire. Where Karn arrived-this time without the
disconcerting fall from the sky-the land was a cracked sheet
of glass, sand fused in furnacelike heat. At Malzra's
request, Karn gathered shards and brought them back with
him.
     Malzra tested the samples. He declared them indeed to be
from the Adarkar Wastes, He was very pleased with this
result and planned to go even farther with the next trial.
     Meanwhile, the rills of temporal distortion grew worse.
At first these disturbances were subtle and few, slight
time-lags passing through the air like mild tremors. The
frequency of the episodes gradually increased, from once a
week to once a day. The severity went from mere hiccoughs to
lapses that spanned four or five heartbeats. Words lagged
behind lips. Music lurched up and out of tune. Carillon
crews became hopelessly jangled. Goblets were overfilled or
dropped. Unbound folios turned traitor in the fingers of
tutors and fanned out on the floor. Flames devoured hunks of
meat on the grill while neighboring steaks remained raw.
    These were minor annoyances only, especially to a
creature like Karn without heartbeat or breath to get
tangled up. Some of the more infirm tutors, though, had to
ride out these time storms by folding to their knees and
gasping for breath. As the bands of distortion deepened and
grew more common, the school infirmary filled up.
    It disturbed Karn. The next time he was called for a
time trial, two months later, he brought up his concerns.
    "I am not like you," Karn noted. "That's why you made
me, because creatures like you cannot safely move through
time distortions. Each time I regress through the machine,
more time leaks occur, and bigger ones."
    Master Malzra studied the golem keenly. The founder of
the academy always had a strange intensity in his face and a
scintillating focus in his eyes, as though he could see
centuries of time crystallized into mere moments.
    "Are these ... time leaks harming you?"
    Barrin glanced up from the console he prepared. He
nodded approvingly at Karn, nudging him to continue.
    "Not me," Karn replied, "but everyone else. They're not
safe. You have a lot of aging scholars here and a lot of
young children. You are responsible-"
    "Have there been any serious injuries?" interrupted the
master, his eyes flashing like twin gemstones.
    "Not yet, but if we continue these experiments, there
will be injuries, and perhaps deaths, across the whole
island."
    Another nod came from the mage.
    Malzra blinked, astonished. "If we don't continue these
experiments, there will be injuries and deaths across the
whole world. You don't understand, Karn. You have lived mere
moments. You have seen only a hundred square miles of land.
I have lived millennia. I have seen worlds and worlds of
worlds. There are evils at the door, Karn, evils beyond
anything you can imagine. I alone know they are there and
are knocking. I alone am devising a way to keep them forever
out or destroy them when they get in. I alone stand between
this world and utter destruction, and you Come to me like a
nursemaid for these children and old dotards and demand they
get goat's milk and nap times?"
    Mage Barrin dropped his gaze, head wagging softly.
    Karn stood for some moments without responding. He
believed, at long last, what Teferi had said about Malzra's
paranoia. An impulse urged Karn to confront the man with his
own tortured insanity, but the past months had taught him
much about dealing with these strange, irrational creatures
of flesh. "Yes. It is a lonely, dangerous struggle."
    Barrin looked up, impressed. "One that might, one day,
kill us all," he said in quiet reproof.
    Malzra took the comments as accord. "Good. I'm glad you
both agree. Now, Karn, before you get into the machine, I
want you to leave that pendant with me. It may be
interfering with the regression."
    Suspicious, Karn slowly lifted the pendant from his neck
and surrendered it.
    Malzra looked it over keenly. "Where did you get it?"
There was a greedy gleam in his eye.
    Karn opened his mouth to speak, but the words caught
short. Malzra's mad ravings still rang in his head. If the
master started poking around in Jhoira's room, he might find
out her secret. She might be expelled-or worse.
    "I found it. It was snagged on a piece of driftwood that
washed ashore."
    "Driftwood," Malzra said dubiously.
    "Driftwood," Karn repeated.
    Shaking his head in irritation, Malzra said, "Into the
machine then, Karn."
    This time the regression took him to a scene of great
carnage. The place was evil beyond Karn's imagining. Men, or
what had once been men, lay in broken death across the
grassy ground. Some were nearly complete, marked only by
telltale roses of blood on their hearts or bellies. Others
were missing limbs, likely dragged away by the wild dogs
that loped shamelessly among the dead. Even less remained of
some warriors. They had been torn in half by unimaginably
sharp blades or blasted into fragments by fireballs.
Smoldering war machines hulked on the horizon. The smell of
waste, smoke, offal, maggots, and disease filled the air.
    Surely this devastation has been caused by the horrors
and evils Malzra spoke of, the silver man thought.
    Karn had never felt sick before, but now his silver bulk
quivered as with a tarnish that reached to the very core of
him. He had been asked to gather some sign of his journey,
but he could not bring himself to pry a sword from the hand
of a fallen man or pull loose the helm that had failed to
save a life. Instead Karn found a single shield, lying alone
and bloodless on a windblown tuft of grass. This he lifted
and held against him, waiting miserably for the master to
recall him.
    When Karn returned, he sorrowfully presented the shield
to Malzra. The master identified it-a bracer from New
Argive. To the silver man's description of the battle,
Malzra merely nodded grimly-a battle had occurred in that
spot only two days before. Karn had regressed only a day and
a half. The master was frustrated and angry. He brusquely
handed the pendant back.
    "If these are the atrocities you spoke of, Master
Malzra," Karn said solemnly as he donned the amulet, "I
understand now why you fight so hard."
    Malzra's smile-an unusual sight-was sardonic. "These
atrocities are nothing, the result of human hatreds. What I
fight is the hatred of demons."
                          Monologue
    Sometimes I forget all Urza has seen, all he has done.
    The silver man returned from New Argive. We debriefed
him and shut down the laboratory. That night, during the
reading session in Urza's study, he let the volume he was
reading slide down to lie open on his lap. He stared
straight ahead for some time. I lowered my book as well and
waited. Urza's eyes had that faraway look, and I glimpsed
the halves of the Mightstone and Weakstone showing through.
Beyond the high windows, sea winds argued among the palms.
    "I was fighting a whole world, not just Gix, but a whole
world," he murmured.
    Cautiously, I ventured, "Fighting a whole world?"
    "In Phyrexia. I had gone to fight Gix, but there was a
whole world of Gixes. Demons, witch engines, dragon engines,
the living dead and the dead living. And at the heart of it
all, a god. A dark, mad god."
    I wryly imagined the same description coming from an
invader of Tolaria.
    "I fought to destroy a whole world, but Xantcha-she
fought only to regain her heart."
    I drew a deep breath of sea wind. "Yes. That one stone
was a whole world to her. It is a whole world to Karn."
    A gleam of sudden realization shone in Urza's dark,
ancient eyes. "That's why they act the way they do."
    "Who?"
    "The students, the tutors-even you and Karn. Every one
of you is defending your own heart, your own world."
    He is not mad, not wholly. He is ancient and inhuman,
transformed by the millennia, but he is not wholly mad.
    "Yes," I agreed. "Don't you remember how it feels? It is
a lonely, dangerous struggle, one that will, one day, kill
us all."

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 5

    Teferi sat on a wind-blasted crest of rock above the
restless night-time sea.
    It had been quite a feat, reaching this point. Jhoira
was lithe and athletic. She had moved quickly and
soundlessly from her room after lantern-call that evening.
Despite Teferi's invisibility enchantment, she sensed she
was being followed. Twice, as she made her way through the
empty corridors of the school, she looked back. The first
time, Teferi fetched up against a recessed doorway to the
forge room. The handle of the door rattled. She peered a
long time back in the feverish night, and Teferi dared not
breathe. When at last he looked again, she was already gone.
He caught up to her in the Hall of Artifact Creatures-a
museum where Malzra placed important but obsolete
inventions. The place was unnerving enough by day. It was
filled with statuesque creatures of metal plate and guy
wire, each posed with limbs extended as if beseeching the
viewer to reactivate them. At night the museum was downright
frightening. Wiry, dog-headed Yotian warriors menaced in
their crouches. Backward-kneed su-chi lifters seemed
behemoths from some far-off world. At the far side of the
mechanical menagerie, Jhoira was no more than a fleeting
triangle of cloth. The door she exited led to the western
laboratory-a half-used structure that was beastly hot in the
height of summer and dank in the drear of winter.
    Once again, he almost lost her. There was no sign of her
in the lab. He cast a spell, seeing the fading heat of her
footprints on the floor. They disappeared as he followed.
She'd gotten away. Teferi stepped on a slightly skewed
grating. It rang with possibilities. He knelt and stared
down into the darkness below the grate. Jhoira's tampering
had been evident even in the dark-at least to a mage's eye-
and the trick of her specially engineered bolts took only
minutes to divine. After that, it was easy enough to reach
the wall. He saw her slip from the channel as the guards
overhead cursed some nocturnal bird. Teferi conjured a real
bird to do the task for him, a skycaptain that nearly
spooked the men into jumping. With the bird and his
invisibility, the young prodigy followed with ease.
    Jhoira was not so cautious thereafter. Perhaps, once
away from the school, she thought no one would be around to
detect her. Perhaps, once near her hideaway, she was too
eager to be careful. Even in the patchy light of the Glimmer
Moon, Teferi made good time through the steaming woods and
to this spot, just above the sea, just beside the mouth of
the dimly flickering cave. He dispelled his invisibility,
drew a deep breath, and with a smug smile, started into the
niche. He stopped just in time.
    Teferi saw what lay within, who lay within.
    In a fit of disgust, he withdrew, unable to bear any
more. He'd expected to find something to use against Jhoira,
something with which he could extort a kiss from her,
perhaps-but not this, another man. Even if Teferi mentioned
that he knew her secret, he could not win her heart with it.
She would only hate him all the more. He sat there while the
sea toiled ceaselessly below and the wind dug its claws into
the clouds overhead. He rose and headed back toward the
academy, his mind abuzz with questions.
    As he pushed past the pawing undergrowth of the western
isle, a new thought occurred to him: it was possible there
were certain things in life that could not be attained
through manipulation and trickery. Nothing he had done had
won Jhoira to him. No amount of misdirection, cajoling,
humiliation, artifice, boasting, or innuendo had convinced
her he was great. Teferi was honestly confused.
    He had never met a person so resistant to the obvious
truth of his supremacy. She couldn't see any of his
overwhelming virtues, determined to focus on the difference
in their ages. "Grow up," was all she could ever think to
say to him. He was growing up. How could he grow up faster?
He didn't have a time machine....
    That's when he felt the hand seize his shoulder and
thrust his face to the ground.
    "Teferi knows about Kerrick," Karn said to Jhoira. The
silver man hunched just outside the doorway in the nervous
light of morning.
    Drowsy, Jhoira blinked at her friend. She had gotten
back only an hour before, during the sunrise change of the
guard.
    "What are you talking about?"
    "They caught him outside the academy this morning. He
was coming back from the western shore."
    Her stomach sinking, Jhoira motioned Karn into the room
and closed the door behind him. She ran her hand through her
tousled hair.
    "Now, what's all this about?"
    "Teferi's been watching you," Karn said with quiet
intensity. "He probably followed you. They caught him on his
way back from the shore. He must have seen-"
    "Who caught him?" Jhoira interrupted.
    "The guards from the western wall. One had seen
something rustling in the jungle when he left. The guard
followed until she lost the trail but waited on the path for
him to return. They interrogated him for hours-they're angry
about your mechanical birds and think Teferi conjured them.
They got nothing out of him, though, not even the route you
used out of the school, and half an hour ago they turned him
over to Master Malzra himself."
    Shaking her head in irritation, Jhoira swung wide the
bone-inlaid doors of her wardrobe and rifled among her
clothes. She chose her most formal white cloak, trimmed in
gold piping, and slipped it on. Shedding her nightclothes
beneath the robe, she selected a belt of gold rope and
cinched it angrily around her waist.
    "What are you going to do?" Karn asked, stunned.
    "I'm going to go defend myself."
    "Teferi hasn't said anything yet," Karn pointed out.
    "Teferi?" Jhoira asked, angry. "He's holding out for the
right price. He'll sell me out as soon as he has Master
Malzra twisted around his finger." She shook her head again.
"I want to beat him to the punch. I want to confess what
I've done, so at least I have honesty on my side." With a
final snort of surrender, she turned and bent over her cot,
her hands drawing up the covers over a lump Karn had not
noticed before. "Let's go."
    As the two turned to leave, Karn glanced back at the
cot, where he saw the curly golden hair of Kerrick.

                       *****

    Master Malzra was in a state. His face, always alight
with a golden inner glow, was bright as a candle. His eyes
seemed to cast twin red beams of hellfire. He paced, his
blue robes crinkling all about him. In the dim light of the
small study he was enormous and powerful, as though he wore
one of the suits of power armor he had on display in the
Hall of Artifact Creatures.
    Before him, fourteen-year-old Teferi looked as small as
a sparrow.
    "Who are you, then? What are you? A spy? You're too
young to be a Phyrexian sleeper. You don't smell like
glistening oil. But you are smart and ambitious and
incorrigible, just the sort of person the Phyrexians choose.
What were you doing beyond the wall? Who were you meeting?
Phyrexian negators?"
    Teferi kept his eyes averted on the blackwood tabletop
where he sat. "I don't even know what you mean by a Fire Ex-
Fry Egg-Friar Ecclesian-"
    "Don't mock me!" demanded Malzra, pounding the tabletop
with his fist.
    Tapping an inner reserve of strength, Teferi raised his
eyes to meet the glowing orbs of the master, which looked
like the multi-faceted eyes of an insect. Teferi drew a deep
breath and roared right back at the man, "You're mad,
Master. Everyone knows it. You're also a genius, of course.
None of us would come here to study if we didn't know that.
You know more about artifice and magic than any man for
millennia, but you are mad. Fire-Eaters and Fanatics, Demons
and Dog-Faced Men, Invaders and Conspirators and Spies-the
only invaders that ever come to this island are fish stupid
enough to get stranded by the tide or seagulls who have lost
their sense of direction and flown away from everything and
into nothing. No one wants to get in here, Master Malzra,
but I can think of about two hundred students and forty
scholars who want out, and that's what I was doing beyond
the wall, believe it or not."
    In the sudden, stunned silence, a knock came at the
door. Mage Barrin shifted from the shadows and went to the
door.
     While the latch sounded and hushed voices spoke, Teferi
and Malzra stared into each other's eyes. There was
recognition between them. Despite the vast difference in
their ages, the two knew in that moment that they were more
alike than different-brilliant, driven, selfish,
unstoppable, obsessive, irrepressible, and as deeply flawed
as they were gifted. But there was something more to it, an
undeniable spark of greatness-unmistakable among those
blessed, or cursed, by it.
     Malzra's eyes intensified. Teferi felt a presence in his
mind. Sinuous as a snake, Malzra slithered through his
thoughts. The master sniffed among skittering memories,
snapped and swallowed them. Fear like a mouse went first
into that maw, then jealousy and timid insecurity. The
master's mind snapped down images of the forest and the
Glimmer Moon. The truth lay beyond. It smelled sour and
strong. Malzra wound forward. In moments, he would know. He
would know.
     Teferi's eyes intensified, too. A cat came prowling
among his thoughts-righteous indignation and pride-and it
leapt on the snaking mind of Malzra. Fangs and claws,
spitting and hissing, fur and scale, they fought in the
young man's mind. The battle was ferocious, though only
their beaming eyes gave outward sign of it.
     Barrin discreetly cleared his throat to break the
tension. "Jhoira and Karn are here."
     "Another time," Malzra growled.
     "She says she's come to confess," Barrin said, gesturing
the young woman and the silver man into the small study.
     Malzra ended the staring match. His eyes flashed as he
marked the Ghitu woman. She was dressed in her formal
academy robe, the one she wore when inducted into the ranks
of his senior students.
     "Confess to what?"
     "I am to blame for all this," Jhoira said evenly. "I am
the reason Teferi was outside the walls last night."
     The young man goggled for a moment at her and then
jumped in. "She dared me." All eyes in the room turned
quizzically on him. "I'm always trying to impress her, but
she thinks I'm too young for her. Finally, she said she
didn't want to talk to me again until I did something brave
and grown-up."
     "That's not what-" Jhoira began,
     "You thought sneaking out of the academy would be grown-
up?" Malzra demanded.
     "I thought if I could get out into the woods at night, I
could maybe catch a night loon. They have a beautiful song.
They sing to the Glimmer Moon. I made those mechanical birds
to impress her-she's not interested in my magic, and I
wanted to show her I was an artificer too-but she said only,
'they're fake, just like you.' So I thought, if I caught a
real bird, a rare nighttime songbird, and did it without
magic, did it by going myself-"
     "To catch a loon?" Barrin asked, astonished.
     "I had a little chain with a metal collar. I was going
to clip it around the bird's leg and put a hood on his head,
but they got knocked out of my pocket when the guard tackled
me."
     "A night loon?" Barrin repeated, incredulous. He turned
to Malzra. "I don't believe him. Malzra, I think in this
case we could suspend the school's moratorium against mind
probes. I could cast a truth spell on him-"
    "No-" Something had changed in Malzra's eyes, not a
softening, but a hardening, a keen calculation. "No, this
was no crime great enough to warrant such drastic measures."
A guilty look passed between him and Teferi. "He found a
night loon all right, himself, but I daresay this stunt
wasn't enough to impress Jhoira. It was not brave or grown-
up. It was foolhardy and stupid."
    Teferi swallowed and bowed his head. "Yes, sir."
    Stunned, Jhoira realized her mouth was moving, but
nothing was coming out.
    "What do you have to say, Jhoira?" Malzra asked. "Are
you impressed by such exploits?"
    She took a deep breath and said, "Well, in a way, yes."

                       *****

    After the students and the silver man had left, Barrin
lurked among the book shadows of Urza's library. For his
part, the planes-walker sat, silent and brooding, at the
blackwood desk.
    How to say this, wondered Barrin, how to say any of
this? "There's more to this, Urza. You know that."
    "I know," came the calm response.
    "You shouldn't allow the truth of Teferi's words-all
that business about genius and madness and paranoia-to
distract you from the fact that he was outside the school
for more than night loons."
    "Yes," agreed Urza wearily. He drew a long, conscious
breath, not something he needed to do to live, being a
creature of pure energy. Simple acts such as breathing
brought him an invaluable connection to the world around
him. "There is a Phyrexian in the school. I smell it. It is
warded, shielded, wary. Its smell is faint and diffuse, but
it is here. A Phyrexian in Tolaria."

                       *****

    The ruby light of the time-travel portal pulsed around
Karn. He saw none of it. His mind's eye was turned inward,
to the confrontation among Malzra, Teferi, Barrin, and
Jhoira. The outcome of that episode a week ago still boggled
him. Kerrick should have been exposed, Jhoira and Teferi
reprimanded and expelled, and the animosity between them
become an unbreachable wall. Instead, the castaway had
gained access to the academy by way of the secret passage,
Jhoira and Teferi had only risen in Malzra's estimation, and
the young prodigy had won respect in the eyes of the woman
he always sought to impress. How any of this had transpired,
Karn still didn't understand. He had the distinct sense that
much of what had taken place in that strange meeting lay in
words unspoken and deeds undone.
    Time slowed and stopped. Malzra and Barrin stood statue-
still at their consoles. The whine of the machine reached a
peak. Beyond was dead calm. Then the turbines of time
reversed and began rolling backward. It was a dreadful
instant, and in it Karn always felt utterly alone. With slow
deliberation, Malzra and Barrin moved again, their hands
withdrawing along the consoles, undoing all they had done
and powering down the machine. The light deepened around
Karn. This time, the pool did not shift. Malzra had achieved
proficiency in spatial displacement-he seemed to have an
especial grasp of that arcane endeavor-and so had set it
aside to try to push the temporal envelope. With this trial,
all the power of the machine was shunted to the temporal
vector.
    It began, the dizzy spooling of time. Karn had gotten
used to seeing himself withdraw from the pool of light and
slump along backward, listen attentively to the two men, and
retreat through the door. In the time prior to that, Malzra
and Barrin were often busy, breaking down portions of the
time machine, removing shiny new components and replacing
them with burnt-out hunks of metal and glass. One day, their
alterations would reshape this machine so that it could
carry Karn back centuries or millennia....
    He let his mind drift. On that journey, he would see his
own creation and the dead pile of plates and cogs he had
been before. He would pass through the time when Barrin was
young, was a baby, was in the body of his mother, was
nothing at all. It would be a longer journey back to
Malzra's beginnings, of course. How much longer, Karn could
not have guessed. En route, he would see the man being
disassembled piece by piece, just like the time machine
before him. He would see each component removed from Malzra-
his mania, his paranoia, his obsession, his brilliance, his
constant abiding regret and misery. Some of it was part of
his original design, perhaps. Much of it, though, the worst
of it, must have come from suffering, centuries of it.
    The laboratory grew dark. Barrin retreated around it. He
drew from each light orb the enchantment that made it shine.
He backed out the door, closed it, and locked it. Then came
a period of deepening darkness. Karn could almost feel the
sun diving silently below the world, a leviathan swimming
backward beneath the sea.
    It was twenty-two hours now, the extent of their
previous success.
    In the dead of that recoiling night, someone entered the
laboratory. It was not Barrin or Malzra. Whoever it was
neither cast light spells nor lit the mundane oil tapers
around the walls. There were workers assigned to cleaning
the labs, but who would clean in the dark? The intruder
moved along the wall of plans, studying them as though he
could see without light. He sorted briefly among the piles
of parts and drew from his pockets glimmering stones to lay
among the others.
    A thief.
    Karn almost stepped from the circle of light but
remembered Malzra's instructions-to travel back in time
until his frame neared the melting point. He was nowhere
near that now, and in moments, the figure was gone. He
thought he glimpsed, in the gray wedge of hallway light,
golden curls.
    Evening came, in the form of an unnatural dawn. The
regression accelerated. Karn waited through the spooling
hours as students and tutors jittered through the space,
bees in a hive. Morning came. Shadows lengthened and puddled
into vast pools of darkness. It was night again.
    Karn's hide heated until it steamed.
    The thief returned.
    It was forty-six hours into the past. Long enough. Karn
stepped from the ruby light. His frame fairly sizzled as the
silver plates met the air of the former time. The man who
had been opening the door closed it. The silver golem made a
rapid and quiet passage to the door and eased it open. He
peered out, seeing Kerrick withdraw beyond a corner of the
corridor.
    Kerrick. Jhoira had allowed him into the school, and he
was stealing from Master Malzra. There would be more
powerstones or plans or parts in his pockets. What use did a
castaway have for artifact technology? He must have been
delivering these items to someone else. To whom?
    There are evils at the door, Karn, evils beyond anything
you can imagine.
    Karn pursued. He would be out of phase and invisible
only so long, and his metallic footsteps would soon give him
away. If he didn't catch the thief soon, he never would.
    Kerrick fled down a series of curving corridors. At the
end of the snaking route lay the Hall of Artifact Creatures.
Perhaps he planned on stealing one of the devices in it or
copying its design. He slipped the latch and entered the
chamber.
    Karn hurried to catch the door before it swung closed.
He eased inward. His quarry darted away among a cluster of
dog-headed Yotian warriors. The silver man followed. His
frame was already slipping into phase-he was fading into
being. He made his way forward under cover of the mechanical
menagerie.
    He crouched beside a delver. Its sloping backbone was a
vast conveyor designed to bear ores up from mines. Beyond it
stood a weathercock topped with a collection of whirring
instrumentation-anemometer, thermometer, barometer,
cyclonometer. The next beast was wiry and configured like a
hunting dog, with long thin legs, a sleek head, and a
whiplike tail. Adjacent to it, su-chi lifters crouched in
their backward-kneed massiveness. It was unsettling to stalk
among these metallic brothers, deactivated and nearly
discarded, made to stand like statues in this mausoleum.
Karn wondered if he would one day be among them, when
Malzra's mania had turned to some pursuit other than time
travel, or when he had made a better probe to do it.
    He was only halfway across the chamber when Kerrick
slipped away through the far door, toward Jhoira's secret
passage. Karn could not have followed through the tight duct
work, but perhaps he could intercept the thief beyond the
wall.
    Turning, Karn headed for a different door, one that led
to the courtyard. He slid the bolt, eased it open, and
scanned the yard. Beyond lay a hot and windy night. The
Glimmer Moon was a cataracted eye burning behind sultry
clouds. Karn was hotter still, his frame smoldering with
heat stress. He emerged and stole across the courtyard.
Malzra might recall him at any moment. Karn reached the
western wall and climbed the inner buttresses. He rose to
the battlements.
    Beside the turrets, guards stood in lazy clumps. A pair
of clockwork watchers perched on adjacent towers, their
optics turning in slow fans along the outer wall.
    Deep darkness swathed the wall's footing. The grate at
the end of Jhoira's passage lay halfway between the
mechanical guards, obscured by tall grasses. Metal shifted
slightly in the murk. A glint of hair like gold coins showed
beneath.
    Above, the guards still lounged, conversing, in their
quiet knot.
    Kerrick slipped from the grate. He scrambled up the
weedy embankment and entered the thick wall of jungle
beyond. He had not been seen.
    Silver skin sizzling with heat, Karn rose to crouch on
the battlements and hurled himself into the wheeling night
air. He dropped and landed with a thud that brought the
heads of the guards around. Karn crouched, half-visible in
the silvery moonlight. In time, the guards' attention turned
elsewhere. Masked by a rising wind, Karn ambled quietly up
into the woods, after Kerrick.
    More noises came, necessarily, ahead-the thrash of
leaves, the crackle of sticks, the hiss of dew on red-hot
silver. Karn feared to alert Kerrick, but speed was the
thing. The thief had moved quickly and soundlessly over
Jhoira's path, taking with him whatever plans or powerstones
or artifacts he had stolen.
    Karn followed. His energy stores were taxed by the rapid
movements. Heat stress made his joints grind, but anger lent
him strength. He topped a rise just as light from the
Glimmer Moon lanced through a patch of cloud. Kerrick and
two strangers stood beyond. Karn paused, attuning his ears
to the whispered conversation.
    The golden-haired young man held out a large roll of
paper and pointed, saying, "The passage is here. Bring the
full company of negators. I will be sure the way is open. I
will be sure the guards on the wall are dead-"
    That was all Karn heard or saw.
    Malzra's machine reached back through time and laid hold
of him-every smoldering mote of his being-and dragged him
forward. In angry whips of red energy, the jagging light
whirred into a solid cone of radiation. The hillside
vanished and with it Kerrick and his conspirators. Only the
lurid light remained. Roaring in frustration, Karn waited to
reemerge in the time stream. Eventually the fabric of the
future formed itself around Karn. The cone whirred once
more, winked, and was gone.
    Smoldering and red-hot, Karn stood in the midst of
Malzra's time laboratory. The master looked up from his
console. He and Barrin both wore expressions of awe, their
eyes tracing the tendrils of smoke that snaked up from the
massive metal man and tangled themselves hotly around the
time machine. Its own fuselage streamed gray soot and
crackled fragilely as it cooled.
    Karn stepped out of the transport circle. It was a
breach of protocol: he was supposed to wait until Master
Malzra summoned him. He further offended by speaking before
being spoken to.
    "There is an invasion coming."
    Barrin approached and gestured the silver man back.
"There is a danger of contamination if you step out of the
ring-"
    "What sort of invasion?" Malzra asked from the console.
    "I do not know. I did not see who he spoke to, but he
talked of negators-"
    "Phyrexians," Malzra replied in grim confirmation.
    The mage asked, "Who spoke of negators?" "Kerrick," Karn
said. In that moment, he realized he must betray Jhoira's
secret, for the safety of the whole academy and her safety
as well. Still, the necessity of the crime made it no easier
to commit. "He is a castaway, washed up on shore nearly a
year ago. Jhoira found him and saved his life. He has
discovered a way into the academy and now has taken floor
plans of the academy to whoever is in charge of these
negators."
    Malzra began pacing again, the old fury resurfacing.
"They must have a portal to a nearby island or perhaps
merely a Sargasso or boat. They knew I would have defenses
against portals directly into Tolaria. They are massing
somewhere for this attack." "How do you know all this?"
Barrin asked Karn. "I followed him out of the academy, out
of this very room. He took the plans from here," Karn
reported. "Beyond the wall, he met with two figures. They
talked of the negators."
    Malzra was reeling, his face livid. "Damn. Then they
know of my time tampering. They could not have chosen a more
crucial time to attack."
    "When did this Kerrick hand off the plans? How far back
did you go?"
    "Forty-six hours."
    "They could be arriving any moment," Barrin said. "I
will alert the guard." He rushed for the door and down the
hall.
    "It's too late," Malzra said quietly, breathing for the
first time in perhaps hours. He caught a whiff of the air
that wafted from the open door. "They are already here."
    Still sizzling, Karn charged for the door and bolted
into the corridor. It was empty and silent, but a smell of
oil and metal and death tinged the air. He thought but one
thought-Jhoira-and hurled himself down the clattering hall.
Malzra called out, but Karn paid no heed. Down a set of
stairs, around a long slow bend, and up a rise, he reached
the small, round-topped door to Jhoira's room.
    He tried the handle, but it was locked. He pounded. The
wood jumped in its frame. He bellowed a call, but no answer
came from within. Lifting a massive foot, Karn kicked the
splintering mass inward and, turning sideways, won through.
    There was blood everywhere.
    Jhoira had struggled, that much was clear. Now the
struggle was done forever. She lay facedown in the center of
the floor, and a red pool extended from her matted hair out
to the edges of the room. Her sodden robe rested over a body
that was half the size it should have been.
    There were footprints in the blood, iron shod and spike
toed. One led into the wardrobe where Jhoira's robes hung.
The door was slightly ajar, and from the darkness within
peered a feverishly glowing eye.
                          Monologue
    He is not mad. I should never have doubted him. The
madness is what he knows is coming, is what is already here.
It surrounds me. Its fangs sink into me. Its claws rend my
guts. I can somehow feel the warmth of them splatter my feet
in the moment before I die.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria
                       Chapter 6

    The creature in the wardrobe flung back the bone-inlaid
doors, ripping them from their hinges, and emerged.
    It was a huge thing, in general configuration human,
though with its armor implants, protruding bone spikes, and
barb-edged legs, it seemed almost an insect. A pair of steel
struts extended its lower jaw, which was tipped with
glimmering metal tusks that dripped Jhoira's blood. Its nose
had been replaced with another spike, the task of breathing
being accomplished through a series of holes bored through
the creature's sternum and directly into its bronchia. Its
eyes seemed to glow, bedded deep in mirrored sockets, and
its horn-studded brow ridge rose into a sagittal crest that
also ran with blood. Sharpened tips of bone protruded from
shoulders, elbows, fingertips, knees, and toes.
    The creature rasped, "Disarm and deactivate yourself,
and you will be taken intact. Otherwise, you will be
destroyed."
    Karn answered by hurling himself at the thing. It was
fast, sliding from beneath his descending bulk with all the
speed of a snake. Karn clutched one shoulder, but the
creature melted away.
    It was suddenly on his back. Its scissor-fingers jabbed
beneath Karn's headpiece. He remembered how easily Malzra
had flung back his skull and removed the powerstone within-
    Karn pivoted and toppled, hoping to smash the bug
between the hammer of his frame and the anvil of the floor.
The monster shifted again, elusive as water, and landed atop
him. A red spray went up from the puddle of blood where Karn
landed. Gore sizzled on his hot skin. He brought his fists
together, pounding the invader's sides.
    With a growl and a heave, the beast worked the mechanism
at Karn's throat and flung back his skull. Karn could see
nothing more, could move little, his limbs jangling around
him, but he could feel the spike-tipped fingers slide in
around the silver case where his powerstone lay. One yank
and the whole assembly would spill forth, and Karn's life
would be gone-a fragile crystal clutched in the claw of a
Phyrexian killer.
    It paused, its fingers catching first upon a small
trinket hanging about the golem's neck, the Viashino
medallion.
    The beast lifted it, looked it over, and softly purred a
single word: "Thran."
    Karn spoke a different word: "Jhoira."
    Gathering together his shattered will, Karn caught up
the Thran-metal trinket, broke the silver chain that bound
it, and impelled the bauble into the Phyrexian's skull. A
gush of hot oil-blood streamed over him.
    Screaming, the creature fell back. Karn managed to knock
closed his skull-piece and felt his power, his will,
reassembling from fragments on the floor. In the next
instant, he rose above the crouching killer, the Viashino
trinket half-sunk in its frontal lobe. He flung the beast to
the ground, and with one stomp of his massive foot, reduced
the thing's head into an oily mass of slumped skin, brain
ooze, and bone meal. The body trembled for a few moments
afterward, but Karn kicked the sloppy corpse aside and knelt
beside his fallen friend.
    Dead. Jhoira was dead. The rage Karn had felt at his
discovery melted now into anguish and sorrow. The silver man
crumpled before her. This ached worse than a red-hot frame
or a skull-plate peeled back like the rind of a melon.
    "They are everywhere," came a stern voice from the
doorway. "They are killing everyone. Barrin is dead already.
Teferi too."
    Karn looked up to see Master Malzra arrayed in battle
armor that made him look not unlike the machine-implanted
Phyrexian.
    "It is too late to stop them. We mustn't thrash at the
branches of evil, but chop the root. I will send you back.
This whole attack can be averted. Return in time. Return
forty-eight hours. Intercept Kerrick and kill him before he
can relay the plans. I will guard the machine and fight all
comers. I must have Mage Master Barrin back. Let the portal
destroy itself, if it must. Let your own frame melt into
nothing, but stop Kerrick and his negators."

                       *****

     If I kill him, thought Karn as the smoky beam of the
portal danced around him, if I even delay him, detain him,
Jhoira will live again.
     Beyond the fitful circling of that red ray, Master
Malzra worked feverishly at both consoles, his associate
lying dead somewhere in the ravaged school.
     If I kill Kerrick, thought Karn, it all will be as it
was.
     Even then, a brace of negators burst through the door.
Huge and trussed with steel armor, much like the Phyrexian
Karn had already slain, each of these creatures was unique.
One had a lupine head and limbs, though its shoulders and
torso were human-or once were before they had been pierced
in a thousand places by seeking tubes and conduits. Another
was a lurching ogre with massive, infolded features, deep,
malevolent eyes, and arms as huge as other men's legs. A
third was lithe and quick and spidery. These three emerged
among spinning shards of the shattered door and plunged
toward Malzra.
     Karn staggered, almost lurching from the light to drive
back the creatures.
     Without even looking up from the machinery around him,
Malzra lifted a hand and sent out a shocking blast. Three
bolts separated from the main surge and caught the monsters
mid-chest. Lightning blasted holes where the hearts would
have been in humans and raced in crackling fury across the
steel frames. Eyes lit from within. Fangs danced with
sparks. Muscles glowed eerily where neurons ran, but still
the Phyrexians converged.
     For the next sorcery, Malzra did not even raise his
hand. The spell blossomed full-formed from his mind even as
his fingers danced across the consoles. Each of the three
creatures abruptly froze, midstride, and fell to the floor,
shattering like black ice.
     Karn saw no more. In the next moment, all the rest of
the world froze. It stood for a shuddering instant, as if on
the verge of cracking, and then time began scrolling
backward. Broken bits of Phyrexian slid together on the
floor and rose up, assembling themselves in midair and
retreating toward the door. A gathering spell formed flesh
from ribbons of smoke and thrust it into the holes in the
creatures' breasts. They obligingly fled outward, rebuilding
the door from wood fragments before they departed.
    And then time scrolled faster still. The dancing beam
shrieked in its frenetic spinning. The world jittered and
shook. Master Malzra had harnessed the full power of the
device, of its four vectors and its sea-cave turbines, to
power this regression. Karn would likely not survive this
journey, and even if he did, the machine might not remain to
bring him back. But Jhoira would survive, and that would be
enough. Jhoira and Teferi, Barrin and the school. If saving
them meant losing himself, Karn did not mind. Better to end
that way than as a statue in the Hall of Artifact Creatures.
    Morning brought darkness to the world; Kerrick entered
the laboratory on his last visit and was gone; and evening
brought light. Karn waited anxiously through another day and
into the morning-twilight beyond. He was already quite hot,
his bulk steaming and his plates grinding against each other
in expansion. Night deepened. The regression slowed. The
light faltered. Karn clenched his hands at his sides and
felt the strange, very human impulse to pray-to what god he
did not know, perhaps to the time machine itself.
    With a light more beautiful than any true dawn, the
laboratory door cracked slowly open, and the gray corridor
glimmered beyond.
    Karn heaved himself from the dissipating pool of light,
his own silver bulk glowing a dull red to match that color
of the beam. Without pause, he raced toward the now-closing
door, grappled the handle, and flung it wide. He barged into
the hall just behind the golden headed Phyrexian sleeper.
    Kerrick whirled when he heard the door bang raggedly
against the corridor wall. Though Karn was still out of
phase, his superheated shell sent wisps of smoke into the
air in an aura around his body, and Kerrick saw the shape of
the void within.
    He turned and bolted. Karn followed. He had not been
built for speed, and running taxed his frame. Kerrick darted
ahead down the corridor, quickly pulling away.
    Perhaps another regression, Karn thought desperately.
Perhaps I should be withdrawn for another regression-except
the machine may destroy itself to accomplish this one.
    Karn was not as fast as the Phyrexian, but he knew the
academy and knew where Kerrick headed. Launching himself
down a side passage, Karn reached the Hall of Artifact
Creatures. He entered quickly, closing and bolting the door
behind him.
    Karn stalked past deactivated creatures two and three
times his size-mechanical mammoths, rovers with the form of
steel crickets, spidery devices with hands at the end of
each leg. The killer was there, too. Kerrick had entered the
chamber from the far end, and he stalked cautiously forward.
He was on his way to the west laboratories and would need to
pass through the door behind Karn. The silver man eased
himself onto a nearby platform and crouched beside the metal
skeleton of a clay warrior. There, camouflaged among dead
metal creatures, he waited.
    Kerrick came. Cautious and quick, he came. A sneer
jagged across his lip as he set his hand on the doorknob and
pulled, certain he had evaded his pursuer.
    Karn fell upon him.
    There is an unmistakable sound when bones-whether human
or Phyrexian-snap. Kerrick's lower right leg folded below
the knee. Shrieking in agony, the man crumpled to the floor.
    It was a piteous noise, and Karn, fists balled and ready
to finish the man, hesitated. Perhaps breaking Kerrick's leg
was enough to stop him, to keep him from escaping the wall
and meeting with the Phyrexians. He would be found here by
the guard and recognized as a spy. He would be dealt with
harshly by Malzra and Barrin, and perhaps they would learn
from him who he was, and how many Phyrexians massed, and
where. To kill this man insured the Phyrexians would come
again, another day, but leaving him alive to interrogate-
    Still only half-visible in his phase shift, Karn hoisted
the angry man to his shoulders and marched past rank upon
rank of artifact creatures. Kerrick arched away from the
silver man's burning skin and gave little cries of agony.
Prisoner and captor reached the far doorway, passed through
it, and started down the corridor beyond.
    "I have a spy, a Phyrexian spy!" Karn called out.
"Guards! Mage Barrin! Master Malzra!"
    Before an answer came, every particle of Karn's being
was seized by Malzra's future hand. The machine was drawing
him back. There was something different about this summons-
its tearing insistence. The silver man jolted under the
assault and almost fell. He clutched his captive all the
tighter. His frame became griddle-hot. Kerrick thrashed and
wriggled. The long dark hallway whirled.
    With a shriek of fury, the Phyrexian rammed his fingers
beneath Karn's jaw, fumbling for the release mechanism. In
reflex, Karn seized the man's hand and flung it violently
away. The wrenching movement hurled Kerrick free. He landed,
a leg-broken mass, on the stony floor of the hall. Karn
staggered back.
    The red beam came, a chaotic, stabbing light. The
hallway began to dissolve. Karn swung a massive hand toward
the Phyrexian, but his fingers closed on wheeling chaos and
nothing. Shards of reality slid past in mirror moments. Karn
plunged through raveling time.
    Something was wrong with the machine, terribly wrong.
    The lashing pulses of temporal energy formed a vortex
around him, drawing him downward, forward, toward the dark
future and its disintegrating mechanism.
    The laboratory took fitful shape outside the cone. It
winked into and out of existence. A tumbling chaos of red
forms blossomed around Karn. For a second time that day, he
felt the impulse to pray. The laboratory returned. Malzra's
consoles flickered through a shroud of rolling smoke. The
master and Barrin labored mightily at the sparking controls.
Over Karn's head the time machine swayed ominously, its side
panels bleeding soot into the air.
    It was disintegrating.
    The light orb at the base of the device cracked, sending
jabbing rays out in all directions. Where red beams struck,
walls turned to dust, machines to slag. Each ray carved a
jagged rent in whatever it hit, tearing through the
laboratory and the corridors beyond, through the dormitories
and the wall itself, reaching out to rend all of Tolaria.
    Karn stood in the center of it, shielded beneath the
coruscating cone of light.
     Then came the explosion.
     Red was suddenly gone, red and all other color and all
darkness. There was only light in that moment, light like
the center of the sun. It came with a fragile shattering
sound, as though a crystal had been sundered. A bell-tone
keen followed and what might have been thunder if a
lightning bolt could be large enough to encompass a whole
world.
     The air was solid for a moment, an amalgam of gas and
energy, then rushed outward. Walls were gone, just as color
was before. The rushing inferno rolled out in an
incandescent ring from where Karn stood, pulverizing stone
and steel and glass. Farther out, the ring devolved into
lines of blast as raw energy gathered in radiating avenues.
The holocaust obliterated whole sections of the academy and
scoured the earth down to bedrock. Other areas remained
untouched. Buildings were torn in cross section.
     The shock wave pelted outward. It bore a storm of
shattered stone and rent metal that consumed with a million
gnashing teeth anything it struck. Millennial trees toppled.
Stony pinnacles were eaten right through. Green leaves burst
into flame. Clouds of dust and ash boiled up from the
shuddering forests.
     The blaze reached even the sea, and in mile-long arms it
boiled water to a depth of five fathoms. It reached to the
clouds overhead, flinging some aside and bringing fiery hail
from others. It shook the oceans, awakening tidal waves that
destroyed coastal villages two hundred miles distant. It was
a blast like none felt on Tolaria since the dark days of
Argoth.
     It was a blast awoken by the same follies of the same
man.

                        *****

    Urza stood beyond it all. He had been beside the time
portal in the white-hot instant that it exploded. It had
taken every ounce of his metaphysical might to gather the
particles of his being against the massive waves of power.
As mote by mote of matter was blown away from him, he slowly
became a being of pure energy. He resolved himself again and
again in the first heartbeat of that hailing storm.
    In the second heartbeat, he risked it all by reaching
out beyond the rolling envelope of destruction and snatching
them up, one by one-perhaps not his best and brightest, but
those nearest, those who could be saved. Mage Master Barrin
was first (yes, the silver man, Karn, had done what he was
sent to do, had averted the Phyrexian invasion, though even
the facts of that other time loop were as difficult to hold
to and reassemble as Urza's own body was), then five other
scholars, and eight students. He whisked them up with him in
a sudden, spontaneous planeswalk. They would not survive the
journey in human form, he knew, and took a moment to
transform them all into stone. It could be undone later,
when there was time, when there was strength....
    Ravening beams streamed past Urza and his company of
statues. The death throes of his latest dynamo flung out
shrapnel of every conceivable thing. Metal and stone and
bone and brain and even mind tore repeatedly through them.
Urza held fast against the storm. He rose. He took the
others with him.
    Now they were ... where?
    The hillside was sunny and green. A gentle, heather-
smelling wind strolled easily past the fourteen statues.
Urza had saved himself and fourteen others-which meant that
more than two hundred were left to die. He had saved himself
and Barrin and thirteen others. The negators might have done
less damage, but they would have killed Barrin and captured
all of Urza devices and the time machine itself. It had been
a reasonable trade. Urza had saved fifteen, and kept his
work from Phyrexian claws. Yes, it had been a very good
trade.
    The Tolarian survivors stood frozen and silent in that
caressing wind. There was a single, broad-crowned tree at
the top of the grassy hill, and it alone moved, breathing
the balmy air.
    Urza cast the last enchantment he held. It was his final
saving act on that afternoon, for he was spent. He would not
be able to maintain his physical coherence much longer. It
was a feat of will to cast that last spell, to transform
Barrin back into flesh. Stone became bone and muscle and
blood. Barrin awoke. Brows knotted darkly above his intense
brown eyes, the man staggered through tall grass to reach
Urza. "Where are we?"
    Urza achingly shook his head. "I do not know." Nodding,
Barrin took a calming breath and looked out over the rolling
hills, chartreuse beneath the cloud-cluttered sky. "Why are
we here?"
    A shadow passed over Urza's features. "Tolaria is gone.
The time machine exploded. We are the survivors."
    The younger man's mouth dropped open, and he gazed with
angry appraisal at the other thirteen, arrayed like
tombstones in a forgotten graveyard. "Just us? Just
fourteen?"
    "Fifteen," Urza corrected solemnly. "You and I, five
scholars, and eight students."
    Barrin crouched suddenly, clutching his knees. "And the
rest?" Urza blinked. He did not need to blink, but it was an
old habit that came with disturbing thoughts. "Most are
dead. Some may live, sheltered by rubble, but most likely
not."
    His assistant remained on his haunches. He panted like a
dog afraid of thunder. "We have to go back. We have to get
them."
    "Teleport, if you have such a spell ready. I can do
nothing more for a time," Urza replied grimly. "I am spent.
As it is, I cannot anchor myself here much longer."
    "I have no teleport spells. I had no thought I would
need one," Barrin spat. "Then a boat or something. We have
to go save whoever may remain."
    Already Urza's form faded, his features shifting. The
gemstones that had become his eyes flickered. The fire in
them guttered near death. "We will find them in time, any
who escape the island tonight. Any who do not will be dead
by morning."

                       *****

   Karn heaved on the slanting slab of limestone. It
creaked. Its far end ground massively against the edges of
the rubble field. The voices beneath cried out in hope and
terror as light appeared above-not sunlight, but firelight
from the raging flames of the explosion. Karn levered the
edge of the stone a foot off the ground, and two young
students scrambled out. The silver man hauled the block
higher. An aged scholar with a bloody head clawed his way
free.
    "That's all of us," gasped the man raggedly.
    "Head for the jungle," Karn ordered as he let the stone
grind back downward. "Go through the ruins, not the clear
paths. Move through the deep jungle. Get to the sea. Stay
away from the clear paths. They are time gashes, and if you
enter them, they will kill you."
    The aged scholar was still on his knees, cradling a
broken arm. His two young students huddled shivering beside
him. The man looked about at the devastation. Here and there
ragged remains of buildings towered precariously. Between
crumbling stacks of stone, the ground had been scoured to
bedrock. Bodies littered the smashed edifices, but in the
clear paths nothing at all remained but fire-scarred rock.
The old man scratched his silver hair just beneath a
bubbling gash. He blinked, and blood droplets leapt from his
eyelashes to spatter his cheeks.
    "Once we reach the sea, what then?" the man rasped.
    "Find others," Karn advised as he moved toward the next
sounds of screaming. "Find something that floats. Malzra
kept boats on the east shore."
    It was all he had time to say. He'd rescued seventeen so
far, though most of those would die of their wounds or
wander into wild time storms that would tear their bodies
apart. Karn had already encountered a few such destructive
regions, and even his silver bulk, engineered to survive
temporal fluxes, had been nearly destroyed. Any creature of
flesh needed only to catch his head in a different time
stream from his heart, and his veins would burst. Karn had
seen it happen many times already today, too many times.
    The screaming came from ahead. Karn found a guard pinned
under a boulder. The man's upper body had been burned to
resemble the purple-black flesh of a date. His lower body
was smashed beneath the giant stone.
    "Get it off me! I can't feel my legs. Lift it off me."
    Grim-eyed, Karn knelt by the boulder, set his shoulder
against its bulk, and heaved. The moment the stone eased up
from the man's crushed pelvis and legs, a great tide of
blood fled out of his belly, and he sank immediately into
death.
    Karn let the boulder back down. He stood. He could not
imagine a worse fate for these folk-half of them only
children and the other half fragile old men and women. He
could not imagine how an invasion of Phyrexians could have
been worse than this. It was a second Argoth, this
destruction, and Malzra was a second Urza, more willing to
destroy the whole world than let another creature rule it.
    If only Jhoira still lived ... that might make all this
carnage less bitter. If only, but her shattered cell was
buried beneath tons of rubble, and no pleading had come from
it. Perhaps she had escaped. Perhaps she was still out
there, somewhere, in the ruined, burning place.
    Another shout came from just ahead, where a tower had
fallen atop a corner of the north dormitory. Karn marked the
swirling temporal storm that roiled in the space between him
and the spot, and he strode out to circumnavigate it.
    Perhaps she is still out there.

                       *****

    It was near to midnight when the ship slid slowly from
its dock and out into the black, rolling sea. Its masts had
burned away along with its sails. About three feet above
waterline, its bow bore a gaping, man-sized hole where a
red-hot chunk of iron had struck it. The boat was slowly
taking on water, but Karn and a few of the other survivors
were healthy enough to man the bilge pumps.
    The rest-only thirty-three in total-huddled together on
the singed deck and watched fearfully as the burning island
slid silently away behind them. Fires blazed across the
island, and weird lights danced in veils that reached
through the clouds overhead. Waves surged in fits against
the rocky shores, and a hellish moan of tortured winds made
the place seem haunted by the ghosts of the fallen. The
Glimmer Moon, near to sinking into the hungry waves, watched
the whole display with bald accusation.
    Thirty-three survivors, mused Karn grimly as he pumped.
The light of the burning isle faded behind them, and only
turgid cold blackness lay ahead, the sky and sea
indistinguishable and menacing. Thirty-three survivors, and
Jhoira nowhere among them. How could a Phyrexian invasion
have been worse than this?
    "It was a terrible trade," Karn said to himself,
"terrible and unforgivable."
                           Monologue
    Urza says he did it to save me. He says he let the time
machine explode in order to save me and a handful of others
... and keep his precious designs from Phyrexian claws. In
another time continuum, he claims, I was slain by Phyrexian
negators, and the school was overrun. Urza diverted that
time stream so we could end up here, or so he says.
    He is not truly mad. I know that now. He may be lying-a
terrifying possibility, for what dark motive would make Urza
lie to me? He may be telling the truth-all the more
terrifying. But he is not truly mad.
    Tolaria is gone, just like Argoth. And why? To save me?
Of course not. I was saved from Tolaria just as Tawnos was
saved from Argoth, as a side thought.
    Tolaria is gone because if Urza could not have it, no
one would. Urza is still Urza. I doubt he will ever return
to the island he has destroyed, return to rebuild, to
declare himself father to the scholars he has orphaned. I
doubt it.
    Mad or sane, he does not learn from his mistakes.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                        Part II
                    TIMES RETURNING

                       Chapter 7

   Karn stood at the prow of a very different ship-large
and golden and fully regaled-when he next saw Tolaria. The
isle was only a dark shoulder above the heaving sea. Sky and
water scintillated with life and daylight, but that jag of
land on the horizon was as dead and dull as a dried
bloodstain. Karn shuddered. He remembered that horrible
night among the raging fires and toppled walls and time
fissures.
     The scratches he had suffered that night had all been
polished away. Other improvements had been made in the ten
years since the destruction of Tolaria. Master Malzra had
completely replaced the finger mechanism that Jhoira had
repaired. He had also redesigned the latch and coupling
device that held Karn's skull-piece in place, lest other
foes learn the trick of it as easily as had Kerrick or the
negator in Jhoira's room. In his tinkering way, Malzra had
worked a piecemeal overhaul of the power conduits throughout
the golem's frame, making his reflexes somewhat quicker.
Outwardly Karn seemed a new creature.
     Inwardly he felt very old. His intellectual and
affective cortex- the dark power matrix-remained, and with
it sad memories of his first friends. He thought often of
Teferi, the young and brilliant mage. He thought even more
often of Jhoira, Malzra's best and brightest artificer and
Karn's only true friend. Every day that dawned after that
hopeless night, Karn remembered his friend and mourned for
her.
     "What are you thinking?" came a kindly voice at the
silver man's shoulder. It was Barrin. He squinted against
the bright sea and sky, and strands of silver glimmered in
his hair. His eyes reflected the dark wedge of distant
Tolaria. "You have been standing here all morning."
     Karn turned back to face the approaching isle. "I am
thinking of lost friends."
     Barrin's voice softened. "It is a difficult return for
all of us. But one long overdue."
     "It is a place of ghosts," Karn observed. He could feel
Barrin's intense eyes focused on the side of his face but
did not look at him.
     "You never cease to amaze me, Karn," the mage master
said incredulously, "a machine that sees ghosts all around."
     "Don't you remember the lost students, the lost
friends?" Karn asked.
     Barrin took a long breath. "Oh, yes, I remember them,
and I will be sad to be back where they perished. But I have
mourned. It has been ten years. There are new flowers rising
among your ghosts."
     "I still ache over my friends," Karn replied. "It is as
raw as on that first day."
     "Perhaps it is something to do with flesh. Mourning is
healing. You cannot heal. You cannot truly mourn. You can
only ache forever," Barrin thought aloud. He sounded
pensive. "We'll have to devise some means to keep you from
aching forever."
     At last Karn turned toward the man. Beyond Barrin he saw
the golden ship, manned by a whole new contingent of
students and scholars. Gold-painted rails glimmered in the
sea-shine, and white sails reached eagerly toward the isle.
At the helm stood Malzra himself, at once ancient and young.
The ship's name even told the tale-New Tolaria-and for the
last eight years, it had been laboratory and tutorial hall
and dormitory to all of them, vessel for all of Malzra's
pursuits.
    It was the genius of humans to discard the old and
embrace the new, but flesh was malleable. Silver was not.
    "How can I forget this ache and still be me?"

                       *****

    Jhoira stood at the edge of her world. Behind her lay
Tolaria, desolated by the blast of Master Malzra's time
machine. Before her lay the illimitable sea. She was caught
between. Her secret trysting spot had become her home. It
was a small place, but dry and clean, appointed with
furniture, books, and implements scavenged from the academy.
    Most of the old school lay in ruins. The walls that
remained were leaning hazards. The walls that had fallen
were cairns for the dead. Many of the living had been buried
in them too.
    Jhoira herself had had to dig for three days to escape
the secret passage where she had been when the inferno
began. She spent the next three days digging up the final
few others who were trapped alive. She and eight others-all
young students, resilient, canny, and agile-withdrew from
the death-smelling place to Jhoira's secret niche. They, of
course, made forays back into the ruins, to bury the dead
and salvage equipment and food stores. These trips were far
from safe. On the first such excursion, the group lost four
of its members who wandered into extreme time rifts and were
torn apart. Jhoira and the remaining four learned to avoid
such rankling crevasses of time.
    Some zones were dark and dry, their flora withered away.
These were fast-time areas, where a week might pass in a
day. Such places received perhaps a day's worth of sunlight
and rainwater in a week and so became chill deserts. The
darker and drier the zone, the faster the time in it and the
more extreme the rent between it and the temporal flow of
the rest of the island. Other zones were bright and wet-
steamy swamps. These were slow-time areas, where a day took
perhaps a week to pass. In such areas, the sun was intensely
bright, moving visibly across the sky, and rain came in
constant, short, drenching downpours. Most slow-time areas
had not had time to adjust to their new climactic
conditions, flooded to their edges and filled with drowned
trees. In others, time moved so slowly, the fires of the
original blast still stood in orange curtains.
    Extraordinary time shifts proved impassable to Jhoira
and her companions. Crossing such verges boiled blood and
shredded skin, caused some limbs to die of deprivation and
turn gangrenous and others to burst as interstitial tissues
swelled. Such were the fates of the first four who died. The
survivors were careful to map and avoid the violent time
rifts. They ventured with trepidation into more moderate
time fissures and found them difficult to enter and leave.
Changes in inertia caused walking into a slow-time area to
feel like wading forward into hardening cement. Emerging
from slow time to fast time often resulted in extreme
dizziness and sometimes loss of consciousness.
    Even so, the final survivor of the school came from an
extreme fast-time peak, which fused inexplicably with a
slow-time slough beside it. From the normalized zone stepped
an old man named Darrob. He had been only a child of twelve
at the time of the blast but, five years later, he emerged a
gray-haired madman.
    There was only one true benefit Jhoira and her
companions discovered from these time shifts-slow-water.
Water resisted temporal change, retaining the speed of its
former milieu awhile before gradually absorbing a new pace.
Water that flowed from a certain extremely slow-time zone
had preserving qualities, slowing and even stopping the
aging of anyone who drank the thick stuff. Jhoira had no
real idea how it worked, but she knew it did, at least for
the short term. It was by drinking slow-time water that she
had stayed young-seeming only twenty-two.
    Despite this rejuvenating drink, death stalked the
survivors of Tolaria. In the sixth year, their numbers were
dwindled from six to five. Out hunting snakes, a fifteen-
year-old boy fell down the sea cliff, broke his neck, and
was dragged out to sea, even as the others swam helplessly
after him. Two years later, a pair of eighteen-year-old
lovers carried out a suicide pact, leaving only Jhoira, old
Darrob, and another young woman. This last withered soon
after, wasted by some interior disease. Her ashes nourished
the rose bushes she had so patiently planted and pruned and
nurtured. In the two years since her death, the roses had
gone wild, spreading across the nearby boulders in a savage,
fragrant blanket.
    Old Darrob was dead now, too. Three months back, he had
succumbed to the rattle in his chest. Jhoira had buried him
beside the slab of sandstone where Darrob had loved to lie,
a great silver lizard soaking up sunlight. His years in the
dim depths of fast-time had taught him to love the sun. He
had been Jhoira's last companion and, though mad himself,
her final hold on reality. Since the day of his death,
Jhoira had felt her own soul going wild, like the thorny
rose.
    She was alone now, yes, but she always had been. The
nine who had lived with her had been companions, not
friends, not confidantes. The only true friend she had ever
had was Karn, and he was not even human. Jhoira often
wondered what was wrong with her. Perhaps she had been taken
from her people too young. Among Ghitu, a girl was not a
woman until she had gone on a vision quest. Jhoira had never
gone. She was twenty-eight chronologically and twenty-two by
all appearance, but her soul was still the foolish and
frightened soul of a child. That child had made one
desperate lunge toward adulthood, had opened her secret
heart to one man, believing love could not be fooled. It
could be. It always would be. The man had proven a monster.
Now, forevermore, Jhoira would be alone. It was a miserable
way to live, but it was at least that-a way.
    The island had become hers. At some point in the forty
mad seasons since the blast, her fierce desire to escape the
forsaken land had become a fierce desire to protect it from
invaders. At first she referred to this new mania as
Malzra's Malaise-a fear of invaders, destroyers. Now she was
beyond such light and self-conscious wordplay. She was the
island's protector, its guardian spirit. She was the ghost
woman on the western shore, forever watching for nearby
ships, forever fashioning arrows as Kerrick had taught her,
forever designing and building whatever mechanisms she could
for the defense of the land.
    And now, with unmistakable intent, a white-bellied
sailing ship sliced through the spitting billows, making
straight for the eastern ports of the island. Jhoira had not
forgotten her dream of glimpsing her soul mate on a ship
such as that one, but such were the fantasies of a child.
Love could and would and forever must be fooled.
    Jhoira watched the ship a moment more before withdrawing
into the niche, fetching up her bow and quiver of arrows and
heading out to intercept the landing party. With the whole
of the island between her and the docks, and over a hundred
time rifts slicing through the center, Jhoira would not beat
them to the shore. It didn't matter. The island's natural
defenses were formidable enough.

                       *****

    Barrin inhaled the salty scent of the eastern bay,
remembering the smell of saw grass and palm. He sensed
nothing of death or decay in the air and was glad. Perhaps
time did heal all wounds. Perhaps Tolaria had forgiven-or at
least forgotten-its despoiler.
    Barrin glanced back toward Urza, who helmed the golden
galley New Tolaria. It had become his floating workshop,
mobile and elusive, beyond the reach of any petty
government. From the moment the refitted and renamed ship
had slid out of dry dock, Urza had been its unquestioned
master. Captain Malzra, the students called him, and he
proved a deft helmsman. Somewhere in his three and a half
millennia, the man had learned to sail. Better still, Urza's
knack for teaching seamanship equaled his talent for
teaching artifice. He did not so much instruct but
demonstrate and inspire. The young scholars needed only
watch the master hoist the main or scale the ratlines before
they all wanted to do it as well and as quickly as he.
    Of course, being a functional immortal with a body of
pure energy can make even the oldest planeswalker a marvel
in feats of strength, agility, and speed.
    As New Tolaria rounded the stone jetty at the mouth of
the bay, Urza manned the helm, and his young crew worked
their posts with a quiet ease that allowed them long looks
at the land ahead. Barrin, too, studied his erstwhile home.
    The eastern docks remained largely intact, though the
pilings were desiccated from neglect, and thorny weeds had
volunteered in the rotting planks. Two ships of the former
Tolarian complement lay half submerged dockside, their upper
portions scored with burn marks, and their lower portions so
covered in barnacles they seemed made of stone instead of
waterlogged wood. As each wave rolled, long and even, across
them, they rocked indolently in the basins they had hollowed
for themselves.
    On the opposite edge of the bay, a sinister slough of
dark water lay, its surface churning as though it boiled, A
time rift, Barrin realized. Urza had described such
phenomena after returning from one of his planeswalking
scouting excursions. He had spoken in depth about the
physics of the rents but could answer none of the important
questions, such as-what happens to mortal flesh that
ventures into or out of one? Urza's only response to such
queries was, "We'll have to find out when mortal flesh
encounters one." Barrin had made sure the students were
taught how to recognize temporal anomalies and warned what
dangers might surround them. He had even devised illusory
models and magical simulations to prepare the explorers, but
all he could offer was supposition. The experiments with
mortal flesh were yet to come.
    Urza steered clear of the time rift and the other
hazards in the bay and brought New Tolaria smoothly into the
deep-water inlet. He shouted orders, and one by one the last
few sails were taken in. Released by the wind, the ship
lounged aft and piled up glassy mounds of water before it.
It slowed to a near stop, Urza leaned on the rudder, and
students eagerly crowded the starboard rail, each wanting to
be the first to leap to the dock and tie off the ship. Two
young women were the first with the strength and daring to
jump, and three young men followed shortly after. Their
laughing comrades hurled to them thick coils of line, which
they swiftly hitched onto the pilings. The great vessel
lulled once to the fore with the last of its lazy motion and
then settled in on its moorings.
    More students leapt to the dock and received the
gangplank hoisted down to them. It no sooner boomed into
place than the five ensigns and their five exploratory
parties were trooping in orderly fashion onto the dock. The
ensigns were the oldest students-in their mid-twenties-left
from the school at Tolaria, and their parties were picked
from late-teens who had volunteered knowing the dangers they
would face. These groups debarked with the easy strides of
conquerors. The white robes of the former academy had been
replaced by rugged canvas cloaks and capes, with leather
leggings, knee-high putties, and iron-edged shoes. In
moments, the explorers filed off the dock and gathered in
clusters, receiving orders. Then, to north, south, west, and
the angles in between, they set out.
    Barrin watch it all, apprehension knotting the muscles
in his neck. If it was Urza's island and he felt so safe on
it, why were mere children being sent out to explore it? The
touch of Urza's hand on his back made the knots redouble.
    "We are home again, Barrin," Urza said, deep
satisfaction in his voice.
    "We are at the door, knocking," Barrin replied. "We
aren't inside yet."
    Urza studied his longtime associate and friend. "After
all your lectures about owning up to my mistakes, returning
to right the wrongs I have done, how can you criticize me
today?"
    "They're only children, Urza-" Barrin began.
    "They are grownups. They have been thoroughly trained.
They know what to expect. They know what they risk," Urza
replied evenly.
    "They're only children. Not grownups, not probes, not
machines," Barrin finished.
    "If anything should go awry, I am linked to them and can
reach them at a moment's notice." Urza paused, seeming to
hear a voice speak to him out of the wheeling blue sky. "In
fact, the first party of explorers is summoning us. They
have discovered a time rift." He reached out and grabbed
Barrin's hand, saying simply, "We go."
    Barrin felt the world fold in around him and Urza. They
were planeswalking.
    After complications had arisen with Urza's trick of
turning planeswalking mortals to stone (four of them had
been cracked en route and hemorrhaged massively when
returned to flesh), he had devised better spells for keeping
mortal flesh alive through a planeswalk. The enchantment
currently in effect reduced Barrin from a three-dimensional
construct to a two-dimensional one. In this compacted form,
he was protected against the trials of sudden vacuum,
volcanic heat, and absolute cold encountered in a
planeswalk. Barrin's lungs could not explode because they
were no more than flat sheaves of paper. Urza hung there
beside him, attached and pulling him through to where the
world opened up again.
    When it opened, the two scholars stood suddenly on a
bald brow of sand. Before them, the land dipped away into a
grassy swale. There three students stood, staring in
astonishment toward a sharp-edged ravine. The air in the
ravine looked dusky and turgid, tiny flecks of dust catching
and scattering the rays of the sun. Beyond the deep furrow
stood an old-growth forest, but within it, the ground held
only short, scrubby plants with tender purple blossoms.
Small white rocks lined the base of the valley. At the lip
of the ravine crouched the team ensign, a powerfully built
blonde woman. Beside her hovered a young man with long black
hair. They spoke to each other in hushed tones and gestured
into the yawning rift, which emitted a sound like a
breathing giant.
    "Let's see what they have found," Urza suggested.
    He released Barrin's hand and started down the hillside.
With each step, puffs of dust rose from his feet, making him
seem to walk inches above the ground.
    That's the way he would prefer it, Barrin mused to
himself as he followed. The two scholars passed the group of
whispering students, who startled back, lost the thread of
their conversation, and receded into watchful silence. Urza
and Barrin continued until they stood behind the crouching
ensign and her comrade.
    "You summoned me?" Urza said by way of introduction.
    The ensign stood and snapped to attention, "Yes,
Captain."
    "What have you found, Ensign Dreva?"
    "A time rift, Captain, just as Master Barrin had
indicated in his reports." Dreva's eyes were a bit wider
than normal, and she stared into space. "A fast-time rift, I
would suggest, judging from the apparent darkness and the
lack of water. We have conducted a few experiments. I can
repeat them. Rehad?"
    She reached out to the young man next to her, gesturing
for something, and received a long, leafy branch he had
gathered in a nearby forest. Despite her formal demeanor,
the affection between ensign and student was obvious in the
lingering way the branch was passed, hand to hand.
    Ensign Dreva turned her attention back to the captain.
"Watch the foliage on the end of this bough."
    She raised the branch and swung it slowly into the air
above the ravine. Something invisible seemed to take hold of
the dangling end, making it jitter and sway, and the ensign
dug her feet in and tightened her grip on the bow to keep it
from being yanked out of her hand. The leaves quickly grew
brown and curled into dry crescents. Next moment, they
rushed downward from the branch to the floor of the ravine,
where they lulled before turning to dust. Meanwhile, the
leafless twigs twisted, their bark peeled away, their wood
cracked and grayed, and the entire branch came to resembled
the hoary claw of a forest hag. The ensign withdrew the
stick and laid it beside two others, similarly transformed.
     Urza's smile, small and unaccustomed, showed his delight
at these findings. "Excellent work. Using a living branch to
probe the rift was an insightful innovation."
     The ensign flushed. "Thank you, Captain Malzra."
     "There are some who doubted whether you would be equal
to the task-" Urza turned his mysterious smile toward Barrin
"-but I was confident."
     "Thank you again, Captain," Dreva replied. "I suggest we
continue probing the edges of this time rift and set warning
markers. Though most likely the blast that created the
geographic ravine also created the temporal anomaly, we
shouldn't assume the boundary of the one will be the exact
boundary of the other."
     "Well reasoned, Ensign," Urza said. "Continue. Report in
if you discover anything else of note." He turned,
shouldering Barrin toward the privacy of a nearby hilltop as
the ensign sent Rehad and the other students to the forest
eaves to gather more branches. "It seems to me they are
doing quite well, these children you speak of."
     Barrin stared down at the tangled grass at his feet.
"The dangers here are your doing and my doing, not theirs."
     "If they will live here with us, build here and study
here, they must inherit all the evils of the past," Urza
replied. "It is the responsibility of every new generation
to understand what has come before, if only to decide what
to keep and what to discard."
     The philosophical debate was interrupted by a warning
shout from the verge of the forest. Barrin and Urza turned.
Ensign Dreva stood at the edge of the wood, grasping
something in one arm and urgently summoning her comrades
with the other. The students flung down the branches they
had chopped loose and ran. Urza and Barrin ran too.
     Dreva pulled savagely on a tree limb. Other students,
two young men and a woman, reached her and added their
muscle to the task. Moments of shouted orders and position-
jockeying gave way to groans as the students hauled hard on
the limb.
     Barrin pelted toward them, wondering what could be so
urgent about pulling the branch from a tree, and then he
saw.
     It was no tree they pulled on, but Rehad, standing just
within the forest edge. One hand rested on a fat green bole,
just beside a branch he had been intending to cut off. He
was trapped in a slow-time rift, one arm extending beyond,
and his companions were doing all they could to pull him
out.
     "Wait!" Barrin ordered. He struggled to form a spell but
was too late.
     Rehad's arm, bloodless from being trapped beyond the
time continuity of his heart, was no match for the pulling
might of the ensign and the three others. It dislocated. The
tissues caught in the lacerating edge of the time stream
tore and gave way. The arm came off in their grasp. Gore
dribbled slowly from the ruined shoulder. Ensign Dreva and
the students landed in a sloppy heap on the grass, the
severed arm among them.
    Barrin and Urza came to a stop just before the temporal
rift.
    Rehad's face was slowly twisting in pain as the initial
shock of the injury gave way to rending agony. Urza lifted a
hand and pressed it into the wall of slow time. His fingers
trembled as they sank into the hot, thick air. Had he blood
in him, that limb might well have become stuck, like Rehad,
but the master inhabited a body of focused energy. Even so,
the time difference tugged at him, sending crazings of
energy in twisting spirals along the surface of the
distortion. With an effort of will, he maintained the
forward motion of his hand and slowly gripped the man's
bleeding shoulder.
    All the while, Rehad was turning, eyes wide and mouth
dropping open in a scream. He shied instinctively back from
Urza's grasping hand, but the master anticipated the move.
He caught the grisly joint and clamped down hard, stanching
the killing blood flow, then, with grim deliberation, slowly
drawing the young man toward him.
    Behind Urza, Ensign Dreva and the students had risen.
The severed arm lay on the ground at their feet. Rehad's
blood painted their leather leggings and canvas cloaks. Two
of the students were crying, and the third gaped in
terrified disbelief. Dreva herself was close-mouthed and
dry-eyed, though her face was bone-white. She shook her head
in raw regret.
    Barrin moved to comfort her.
    She ducked away, grabbed the fallen arm, and pushed up
beside Urza.
    "Put it back, Captain. You have to put it back," she
implored, jabbing the limb toward him.
    Gritting his teeth, Urza gently pushed her aside. He was
pivoting Rehad around so the man would emerge with brain and
heart aligned, so that he could escape the time trap as
gradually as possible.
    Dreva staggered back. She blinked at the sanguine thing
in her grip and tenderly kissed the back of the hand. Her
lips parted in quiet words: "Oh, Rehad, forgive me." She lay
the limb at her feet and, in a sudden rush like a panicked
deer, darted away.
    "Ensign Dreva!" Barrin shouted, seeing where she headed.
"Come back!"
    She was deaf to it, already hurling herself past the
toothy edge of the fast-time ravine. There came a splash of
energy as she plunged into the time shift. Rings of temporal
flux whirled on the air around her. Waves sank into the
ground and rose into the arcing sky. Within their dancing
midst, Dreva's airborne form withered. Flesh wrinkled and
dried. It cleaved to atrophying muscle and showed bone
beneath. Once she had completely entered the envelope, she
fell to earth in a sudden rush and was lost to sight beyond
the rim of the ravine.
    Barrin bolted after her, down the grassy swale and to
the verge of the fast-time rift. There he staggered to a
halt and gaped.
    She was dead already, her dry, deflated skin teaming
with vermin.
    Barrin turned away, sickened. When he at last mastered
his gut, there was nothing left of Ensign Dreva but scraps
of canvas and leather and a bleached skeleton.

                       *****

    They sat aboard New Tolaria that night. Urza had planned
a banquet to celebrate the island's reclamation. Trenchers
of salt-pork stew steamed beside vast loaves of marbled
bread and mounds of fresh oranges.
    The mood was anything but festive. The day had been a
chastening failure.
    Rehad was below-decks, bandaged extensively and lying in
a drugged sleep. Rejoining his arm was beyond the skill of
the crew's best healers and beyond the power of even Urza
Planeswalker. It lay now in a wooden case within a pocket of
extreme slow time, in the vain hope it might be rejoined in
the future. Meanwhile, Rehad's leader, his love, lay in a
pocket of extreme fast time, her skeleton perhaps even now
scattered by the tiny scavengers of the ravine.
    These two were not the only casualties. Each exploratory
party lost at least one member, and one party was wiped out
entirely. Urza performed two other rescues like the one he
did for Rehad, and Karn assisted in shepherding a young
woman from the recursion loop she found herself in. The only
non-organic members of the crew, Urza and Karn had the best
resistance to time distortions, though their systems were
greatly stressed by these operations.
    The crew ate their victory dinner not in Old Tolaria, as
Urza had hoped, but on New Tolaria, They ate in near-
silence. The waters of the bay lapped, black and thirsty, at
the gunwales of the great ship, and beyond the beam of the
lanterns, the island and sky were black with night.
    From the darkness came a woman. She was tan, keen-eyed,
and mysterious. A savage skein drew her dark hair back
sharply over her head. Garbed in ragged but regal clothes,
she seemed an avatar of the isle itself-alien, angry, and
forbidding. She strode up the gangplank and onto the deck,
pushing past the stunned guards.
    Urza stood.
    Barrin rose, his mouth dropping open in recognition.
    It was Karn, the silver man, who first spoke her name,
in a voice like a rain-swollen waterfall. "Jhoira!"
    "Master Barrin. Master Malzra," the woman said in a
greeting that combined awe and animosity, "I never thought
you would return. I wish you hadn't. After today, you
probably wish you hadn't, either."
                          Monologue
    I was overjoyed to see Jhoira. Her death had weighed
heavily on me and on Karn as well. She was much changed, of
course, hard-muscled and hard-eyed. The impulses of wonder
and forgiveness had been winnowed out of her. She had ceased
to be a student of the academy, becoming a native of the
island.
    As the island's native advocate, Jhoira spoke strongly
in its defense. There, before Urza's new passel of students,
she laid out all his past sins, planted like thistles across
the island and grown up now into great killing forests.
Quite openly, she berated him for his time machine. The
tampering that had brought about the blast had riven the
tapestry of days on the island and left it a jumbled mess.
    She talked of the other survivors who had, one by one,
perished, leaving her alone.
    Even more powerfully, she spoke of how life here had
continued. Fast-time forests had died and fallen away,
giving place to new plants and animals, to an arid tundra
ecology with its own balance of predator and prey. Slow-time
forests had turned into swampy jungles, hot and steamy-
refuges for thousands of creatures that could not have
survived on the island before. Within all these details, I
sensed how the years had changed her too.
    "We are, Master Malzra-" she had said at the end of it
all "-we are your children of fury, orphans who have grown
up in your absence, no longer yours, no longer beholden to
you. Many of us hate you, Master Malzra."
    He listened through it all. I'll give him that much. And
then, into the unhappy silence that settled, Urza spoke, and
what he said filled me with even more admiration.
    "I understand. But I am committed to return, and I don't
want to fight you, my children of fury. I want to be
reconciled. It will be a thorny way, I know, charged with
the thistles I myself planted. But I am committed to
return."
    "You'll need an advisor," I said, "a guide. Jhoira, I
can think of no one better than you to help Master Malzra
understand the mistakes of the past and avert them in the
future."
    There was one final, anxious moment, and then something
in her broke. The mad sheen of defiance cracked, and I saw
beneath it a lonely woman fearing but needing to be among
others.
    "Only because if I refused, every last one of you would
die."
    I tried to look grimly chastened, but I was elated. Urza
was pleased too. The fearful students and scholars were both
jangled and relieved. Someone-even this frightening wild
woman-had to guide them through the terrors of Old Tolaria.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 8

    When most of the crew awoke the next morning, Jhoira was
already on deck. She had drawn aside to trade stories with
Karn. Though fierce and formidable around other humans,
Jhoira laughed and spoke easily with the golem. They were an
impressive pair-the wild woman and the silver man. Her flesh
was as smooth and brown as the sandstone shoulders around
the bay, and his as mirror-bright as the sea they had
crossed.
    Karn told her of all the students and scholars he had
rescued, and how he had searched late into the night for
her, allowing the refugee ship to leave only as the Glimmer
Moon sank in the sea. Jhoira told her own stories of rescue
and loss. All of this passed without the long, awkward
silences of the night before, as though not a moment had
gone by between these long-separated friends. They walked
along the shore and reminisced, skipping stones in the
choppy waves, until the deck was teeming with crew, and the
smell of freshly brewed tea drew them back aboard.
    Jhoira drank eagerly, burning her lip with the piping
stuff. She smiled at Karn and said, "There are certain
drawbacks to being a 'wild woman' and among them are
forgoing real tea from a porcelain cup."
     The crew broke their fast with a second feast, those
going ashore knowing the meal would have to last them until
they made camp at the center of the isle. Jhoira predicted,
with a caravan of fifty, it would take the whole day to
thread their way past the worst time rifts and through the
mildest ones.
     Jhoira's tone of gloom returned as she described to the
crew the temporal distortions of the island. They resembled
the physical topography after the blast. At the detonation
point was a wide temporal basin like a blast crater, where
the explosion uniformly ripped away the natural flow of
time. Near the edges of this slow-time crater were a series
of concentric rills of time, tightly packed fast-zones. The
center would be unreachable except for avenues offeree that
radiated spokelike from it and joined the outer island with
the inner. Many of these avenues were deep slow-time rents,
though others allowed a gradual descent into the crater.
Others still had admixed with the fast-time shells nearby to
make bridges of normal time. Beyond these concentric fast-
time rings were large, irregular regions of extreme time
shift, many contiguous square miles of territory unreachable
to those outside-sheer time plateaus and deep time canyons.
In these areas, whole new ecologies had evolved and cultures
with them.
     Bearing only the clothes on her back and a long walking
staff, Jhoira led a pack-laden parade of scholars and
students up the winding forest paths between temporal
canyons and plateaus.
     Urza followed just behind her. He carried a large wooden
case with ornate inlays of brass and ivory. It looked
terrifically heavy, but his strides were weightless, and his
questions came easily despite the panting of others. Perhaps
he had cast an enchantment that let his feet glide among the
gorse, or perhaps microscopic machines did the walking for
him.
     Barrin came next, carrying the stowed tent that would
hold him and Urza, as well as clanking pots and an
assortment of swaying parcels.
     Behind him, Karn carried the burden of ten men.
Throughout the line, other, smaller automata ambled beneath
heavy packs. The rest of the company consisted of aging
scholars and young students, at once eager and fearful about
what lay ahead.
     "Karn, come up here. I want you to see this," Jhoira
said.
     She gestured toward a wide, glaring, and desolate swamp
filled with the ghost-gray corpses of drowned and burned-out
trees. The water in it was black and seemed infinitely deep.
Insects hung in static suspension above the mirror waters.
Some were poised just before death, the goggle eyes and
gaping mouths of fish stretching the surface tension below.
     "I call this Slate Waters. Here the fires from the
original explosion went out only seven years ago, after
drenching rains. Before then, a pillar of smoke rose above
the spot. By my calculations, in Slate Waters the equivalent
of ten days have passed since the blast. Step in there, and
you'd need a time machine to get back out."
    Karn stared at the spot. It reflected darkly in his
hide. "My time-traveling days are done. Master Malzra is
intent on other pursuits. I'm not much needed these days."
The words sounded at once relieved and disappointed.
    Jhoira studied her old friend. Provisions hulked up from
his massive shoulders.
    "Don't worry, old friend. I need you." She patted his
side and pivoted. "Now look over on this side of the path.
That's a temporal plateau. I call it the Hives because of
the domed mud huts that its residents build across it." She
pointed to a region that was forever in twilight, the land
sunk in a vast pall.
    Scattered forests of short, scrubby trees clung to the
hillsides, a gray and torn fabric of woodlands that looked
all the more spectral because of the blur of their wind-
rattled leaves and rapidly growing boughs. Here and there,
in clear patches among these stern woodland copses, rounded
hovels took rapid shape, proliferating like chambers in a
mud-daubers' nest until whole dim villages could be
discerned in spots, and slender footpaths marked the ground
between them. The villagers themselves moved with unseeable
speed. As quickly as a particular settlement would mound
into being, it would dissolve away again, ephemeral as
bubbles atop boiling water.
    "Five of their generations are born and die during one
of our years," Jhoira said levelly to Urza, who had taken
the occasion to stop and stare.
    Barrin, coming up behind, asked breathlessly, "Five
generations of whom? There were no natives on this island."
    Jhoira's eyes were keenly fastened on Urza's face. "I
can only assume these were students of the academy, caught
in extreme fast time, as unable to escape their rift as we
are to enter it. They are fifty generations removed from
your school. They have lived a thousand years of tribal
history since then."
    Barrin was stunned silent for a moment. Then he said,
"They see us right now, don't they? The hour it will take us
to march past their land will be four days of their time. We
are statues to them."
    "Yes. Unreachable, inexplicable, nearly immobile
statues," Jhoira affirmed. "They can hear us, too, but our
speech is deep and long and meaningless, like whale-song.
Haunting and otherworldly. They've become a different race
from us. Soon they'll be a different species." She began
walking again, and the line of students and scholars
stretched out behind her. "There's an even more fearsome
sight in another time plateau ahead. But first, paradise."
    All down the lines, scholars and students traded
intrigued looks and hunkered down beneath their burgeoning
packs. Jhoira led them up a meandering hillside, past stands
of cypress and creeping vines on the left and a gray place
of tumbled downs on the right. For some time, the hives of
mud and stick were still visible, boiling and receding among
the trees.
    Eventually, the party reached a new place, a highland
with rolling green embankments and thick forest growth. The
native flora of Tolaria thrived here on the bright
hillsides. Fat-boled trees were green from root-clusters to
crowns. Vines like vein work coiled along every stem. Broad
leaves lay in a series of dense canopies above.
    "This is a mild slow-time area, where sunlight and
rainwater are gently enhanced, where creatures and plants
live in abundance, where the heat of the canopy is matched
by the cool of the forest floor. The hills allow enough
runoff to keep the land from becoming deluged, and the
hollows where water collects are deep and clear and cool. It
is paradise. I call it Angelwood, after the fireflies that
light it at night. Whenever I have grown exhausted from my
cliff-side vigil, I have come here to swim and climb and
breathe again. That is perhaps the best part, breathing
again."
    Eyes all around the group turned hungrily toward the
garden of delights. Sweat-dotted brows eased.
    Among the vast tree trunks, large bright birds flew
dreamily through curtains of light and shadow. Beneath them,
water bounded down a sloping face of stone and emptied into
a clear brown channel. After coiling among the forest's
seeking roots, the waterway slid into a nearby vale, forming
a deep, cool pool before spilling into another stream at the
far side. Beneath the surface of the water, the silvery
gleam of fish shone.
    "Why didn't you make this your home?" one student asked,
pushing brown hair back from her eyes. "The game is
plentiful, the nights are warm, the water is pure, and you
would live longer there than anywhere else."
    Jhoira was grim. "You can't live in paradise." She set
out again. The company behind her lingered, a few sipping on
canteens, but most just standing and staring. One student
made a point of scrawling a crude map on a piece of paper,
apparently intent on returning to this spot when time
allowed.
    Jhoira led the group up toward a wide level place where
an outcrop of ancient granite had been worn down like a
filed tooth. Aside from the eastern pinnacles, this summit
was the highest point on the island. Its gray crown was
scoured clean by the blast, dead trees lying in parallel
lines all about the peak. Young trees sheltered by the
fallen logs rose in the midst of the devastation, a future
forest. From the top of the rock, the views were clear from
the pinnacles in the east to Jhoira's niche in the west.
    There, atop that worn-down stone, the company of fifty
paused to catch breath and shake out weary legs. The
intimate vistas of Angelwood were replaced by the panorama
of what Jhoira called the Giant's Pate. In the east, the sea
was a quicksilver curtain streaming down from the white-
rising sun. New Tolaria was a dark and tiny silhouette
against it, crew resting about the deck in the quiet of
morning. The shore was a beige ribbon, silky and coiling.
    Inland, forest and briar, marsh and meadow made shifting
patterns of green and gray, shade and daylight. It was a
verdant land.
    Not so the westward isle. Its distant shore was a bright
orange pile of rankled rocks, among which Jhoira's niche
nestled. Closer to the Giant's Pate, the ruins of Old
Tolaria lay. They were gray and blighted. The onetime logic
of walls and paths was still obvious in the maze-work of
foundations, but most of the buildings had been razed by the
blast. Here and there part of a structure remained,
sometimes in gutted, unnatural towers with open sides and
decrepit backbones of stone. Though not an actual crater,
the slow-time field of Old Tolaria was noticeable in the
bright shimmer of the air over those ruins and the water
that lagged in cellars and leaning doorways.
    Nearby the glaring section that was Old Tolaria was
another district, a place of deep darkness in a literal
canyon. It lay in the morning shadow of the Giant's Pate,
but its gloom was intensified by the high, leaning walls of
the canyon and the vast time shift within it. The floor of
the space was indistinguishable, and some of the students
whispered it was a crack right through to the underworld.
    "It looks like a good place for ghosts," one said.
    "If I were dead, I'd choose a home like that," another
answered lightly.
    "It looks like a scar in the world," ventured a third
with awe, "a bad scar, one that tried to close and heal but
only festered and grew deeper."
    "You are more right than you imagine," Jhoira said.
"That is a very deep chasm and a sheer fast-time precipice.
But there is a bottom to it, and there are creatures trapped
in it."
    "Like the tribes in the Hives?"
    "No," Jhoira said flatly. "Look there. You may not be
able to see it while the Giant's Pate casts its shadows-
sometimes it can't be seen even at the height of midday, but
there is a fortress down there."
    Urza's brow furrowed in concern. "A fortress?"
    "Perhaps it is only a kind of commune, but what I have
seen of it looks savage and braced against attack."
    "What have you seen?" Barrin asked.
    "Spiked battlements, for one, a causeway of suspension
bridges between high guard towers, flying buttresses that
look like they are fashioned of dragon bone, windows as
black and smooth as onyx, fiendish adornments, and thick-
cast tiles of clay. I have the notion they would prefer to
make everything of steel, if they could make it, but iron is
the best they have and not much of it. It has taken many
hours of distant observation to piece that much together. I
would not suggest close scrutiny: I've seen harpoons fly
from that space, spear deer, and drag them in."
    Barrin blinked in confusion. "This barbarous culture
arose from refugees from the academy? Students of ours?"
    "Again, no," Jhoira said. "You remember that man,
Kerrick, whom you found with the broken leg, whom you
interrogated as a Phyrexian sleeper? The man I had let into
the academy? Remember that he escaped an hour before the
blast? He must have been trapped in that fast-time gash-he
and whatever Phyrexian negators he had summoned to Tolaria."

                       *****

    Through a two-story-tall window of polished obsidian,
K'rrik watched the new arrivals. They stood atop the
gleaming peak at the height of the island, a summit always
visible to K'rrik and his retainers here in the depths of
the abyss.
    Jhoira was among them. She seemed, in fact, to be
leading them. She had been a canny foe during the century of
his imprisonment in this time-gash. She never entered range
of the harpoon crews- and more's the pity. He had much to
repay her for. Betrayal to Urza Planeswalker was chief among
the offenses. Putting a harpoon through her gut and hauling
her across the jagged lip of the chasm to burst like a fist-
clutched skull-that would have been glad repayment of her
debts.
    She probably still called him Kerrick. She probably
still thought of him as a golden-haired boy, but a hundred
years had turned
    Kerrick to K'rrik, had made the smooth-skinned Phyrexian
sleeper into a hoary warrior.
    If there were some way to bring Jhoira over alive, not
masticated like the goat and deer carcasses they feasted on,
K'rrik would at last consummate their "love." That was her
other great offense, her persistent virtue in the face of
his advances. It was galling that flimsy chastity should
stand against the might of Phyrexia.
    Of course, if he could drag her across whole, he himself
could have escaped this abyss. It had taken the death of
half his negator minions-twelve of the twenty-four-to
finally convince K'rrik to suspend his escape attempts. Even
so, with each new generation decanted, he sent one in ten
out to seek escape-a tithe to his eventual return to
Tolaria, to Dominaria.
    This ten percent attrition was no great loss. He still
commanded a mighty nation of two hundred Phyrexians. They
filled every corner of the chasm. Generations of them worked
in the deep dank of the waters at the base of the canyon.
They hatched, netted, and gutted the various species of
blind scavenger fish that were their major diet. Other
Phyrexians, for generations, drilled deep into the chasm
walls in search of buried veins of obsidian and the basalt
stones the palace was built of. Scant resources had been the
only real limit to K'rrik's inventive genius. If he could
make steel or powerstones, his artifact creatures would have
overrun the isle eighty years ago. As it was, what little
iron the miners found was more precious than gold. It was
constantly oiled with Phyrexian blood to prevent rust. An
iron sword like K'rrik's was a kingmaker. It made him
unopposable in the arena and maintained his power. Thus the
miners who found scant veins of iron were essential to his
power base, the figurative foot soldiers of his regime. By
carefully distributing these slivers of iron among real foot
soldiers, K'rrik controlled a private army engineered to be
loyal only to him. These killers used draconian measures to
ensure the compliance of all the others. K'rrik presided
over the army and the nation because he had created both and
was the smartest, strongest, and most vicious of them all.
    To these native talents, the Phyrexian sleeper had added
enhancements to himself of bone and steel and, eventually,
even spawned tissue implants. He was indomitable in the
arena. His once-smooth shoulders were now adorned with tusks
hollowed out to inject scorpion-fish poison in anyone he
fought. Similar spikes jutted from his elbows and knees. The
spikes were back-barbed like arrows so that once they sunk
into flesh, they ripped it out in great chunks. His torso
was braced by a black-steel frame that prevented his spine
from being broken and allowed him to break the spines of
others. He himself had wielded the cleaver that removed his
outer two fingers of each hand, making room for more venom
spikes. The century of imprisonment in the abyss had done
much to perfect his form.
    Now, gazing through the thick, dark glass of his upper
throne room, K'rrik saw the means by which he would at last
escape his prison-the power of his old foe, Urza
Planeswalker.

                       *****

    It was a bitter pill for Master Malzra, Jhoira could
tell. The man stood there, gazing into that black jag in the
ground. His eyes saw more than most eyes did-they gleamed
with an acute, penetrating judgment. Surely they saw past
the shrouding murk to the Phyrexian colony that lay within
it. Surely Malzra peered into that black pile of basalt and
obsidian to the wretched creature at the heart of it-
malicious and brooding, growing a year in strength for every
month outside.
    Kerrick was the man. Even without preternatural sight,
Jhoira knew that. Of course, he was no man, but a monster
wearing the skin of a man. She knew he was at the nexus of
that vast infection and that he would be powerful now,
perhaps the equal of Malzra himself, perhaps his superior.
    Karn's eyes, too, saw more than most. He drew Malzra,
Barrin, and Jhoira aside from the others.
    "It is no secret to any of you what I was made for-to
travel down the throat of time. Perhaps I have found my new
purpose here, to enter that place and destroy them." The
suggestion was made with a mild, matter-of-fact tone, but in
a voice like the myriad whisper of trees before a summer
storm.
    A knowing glance passed between Malzra and Barrin. The
mage said through a grim smile, "I seem to remember just
such a journey, from my study of arcane lore. There was once
upon a time a planeswalker who went into Phyrexia to destroy
it. He was armored much as you are, Karn, but was nearly
destroyed in the attempt."
    Malzra nodded. "It is a good analogy. What we have here
is a pocket Phyrexia. And in Tolaria." His all-seeing eyes
were suddenly hooded beneath angry brows. "Jhoira, you spoke
last night of the children of fury I have left in my wake-
the orphaned mistakes that have, in my absence, grown up to
defy me, to hate me, to harry me and slay me if they can. I
see now just how true your words are." He blinked and drew a
deep breath, two actions that signaled a powerful shift in
the mind of the man. "Better not to create such foes than to
be forever fighting them."
    Barrin looked with admiration at him.
    The sun glinted from Malzra's lifted eyes as he marked
its march across the sky. "Already the sun begins its
descent. Come, take us to Old Tolaria, to a place where we
can safely make camp. Somewhere outside the slow-time slough
in the center of the blast. Preferably on high ground
nearby, where time follows its normal courses." A solemn
look crossed Jhoira's face. "I know just the place." She
turned, heading for a path down from the Giant's Pate toward
the decimated academy below. Squinting in tired amazement,
the students and scholars on the hilltop watched her go.
Many of them were worn out from staring into the
impenetrable blackness of the Phyrexian rift and exhausted
from the nettling worry that the cleft awoke in them. They
had unpacked meals of press-bread and jerky. When Jhoira
marched on, they glanced a question at Master Malzra and
Barrin. The two men took their last survey of the spot and
started after her. Flashing on the brow of the hill, Karn
also set his feet to the path. With angry sighs, the
students jammed their half-eaten lunches back into their
packs, hauled the parcels to their shoulders, and stomped
onward down the trail.
    Jhoira took a path that had been carved out by her own
feet during her rambles. It passed a number of other time
rifts, these small and severe, some as narrow as an arm's
breadth but a mile in length. Jhoira called these the
Curtains of Eternity because anyone who ventured into them
would be instantly torn to pieces. There was no need to
instruct the party to stay strictly to the path.
    Beyond loomed the labyrinth of riven buildings that had
once been the Tolarian Academy. The march line stilled to
silence as they approached the necropolis. The older members
of the company had lived in these gutted hulks, had had
friends who died in the cross-sectioned towers and lay even
now, skeletal, beneath the piles of cut stone. To the
natural dread that came upon them all in descending into
that dead place, there was added the drag of slow time on
their hearts and lungs. To step onto those ravaged and
rubble-strewn streets was to sink into a nightmare made real
in stone and bone and ash. Eerily, the sun shone bright and
merciless in that flagging place. Those who glanced up
toward it saw the fiery ball fleeing visibly toward the
horizon.
    During their tour of the old town, Jhoira led the group
to a particularly disturbing sight. It was the statue of a
young man running. Both feet hovered impossibly above the
ground. His mouth was wide in despair. His eyes were
clenched tight. His hands groped out madly. His white robes
were lit with a diffuse orange glow that enwrapped him and
rose into an onion-shaped dome over his head. The young man
was ensconced in a pillar that shone with fiery light. Just
ahead of him, floating still in air, was a heavy cloak,
caught in the moment before descending to enfold him.
    Jhoira watched the faces of Malzra, Barrin, Karn, and
the older students and scholars, looking for recognition.
They stared bleakly for some time, their minds unraveling
the mystery before them.
    At last, Karn breathed the name: "Teferi."
    "Yes. He was caught in flames when the blast occurred.
Only a moment of time has passed for him in these ten years.
When I discovered him here seven years ago, I fetched a
heavy cloak, soaked it in water, and flung it into the air
to engulf him. In another few years-a split second of his
time-he will be wrapped in it, his burning robes
extinguished. Perhaps a few years later, he will tumble to
the ground. Perhaps in ten years, he will see the New
Tolaria and strive to reach it. Then, of course, he will be
torn to pieces." Her face hardened. She gnawed at one lip.
"That damned cloak is all I can do for him. I've studied the
time fissure, performed experiments, tried everything I
could imagine, but he's caught and cannot be saved."
    Stunned silence followed this revelation. Fifty sets of
eyes traced out the doomed figure, frozen in fire,
unreachable, but only an arm's length away.
    At last, Malzra spoke words that comforted them all.
"The first area of study for our new academy will be
techniques to rescue this young man."
    Jhoira wore a grim expression as she turned away. She
led onward at a stern pace. The young students, some only
children of twelve or thirteen, followed close behind. Older
marchers paused at Teferi's Shrine, as some were already
calling it. Master Malzra, Barrin, and Karn themselves
brought up the rear of the procession.
    The marchers felt their sunken spirits and slowed hearts
rise again as they climbed the headlands on the southern
verge of the ruins. Beyond lay a wide, level place covered
with tall, dry grass. The parched blades made a familiar and
soothing noise in the warm afternoon winds.
    Despite Jhoira's steady pace, evening deepened across
the hilltop by the time Malzra, Barrin, and Karn reached the
summit. There the master looked about with his piercing
eyes. He marked the closeness of Old Tolaria, of the
Curtains of Eternity, and beyond it the Phyrexian canyon
where his foes, even then, multiplied.
    "You were right, Jhoira," he said simply. "This is just
the place." He walked to the pack of one of his young, tired
hikers, drew a tent spike from the gear stowed there, and,
with the sheer force of his hand, drove it deep in the dry
ground. "Just here, we will build our new academy."
                          Monologue
    I was bone-weary and soul-weary that first night when,
by lantern light, we erected our tent city. We cleared fire
circles, set stones to hem them in, gathered firewood and
water for the evening, and sat down to dried meat, press-
bread, and a little hot broth. I had been the one all along
telling Urza he must return to Tolaria, must rectify his
past mistakes and embrace the children of fury. But in
glimpsing those children for the first time-whether the
tribal folk of the Hive, the unseeable Phyrexian hordes in
the gorge, or the ghosts of the dead that almost palpably
haunt the ruins of the academy-I fear I was perhaps wrong.
    Forgetting the past, fleeing the death it holds,
shrugging off die wounds-this is the way mortals live.
Yesterdays are supposed to remain dead. It is the gift of
time. Each new generation is supposed to be born ignorant of
the horrors that came before. How else can any of us live?
    And, yet, perhaps I was right after all. Urza is not
mortal. He cannot afford to forget, any more than time can
afford to forget. The world is not large enough to let him
go from mistake to mistake, leaving destruction in his path.
He has to clean up after himself. In a way, his mania to
return in time was a desire to remember, to own up to the
past. He likely would have come to this conclusion with or
without me. Of course, now that Urza has decided, we might
as well assist his every endeavor, for he won't change his
mind for another millennium or so.
    I only hope, after all this temporal fiddling, I have
the blessing of dying after a normal human span-not before
and certainly not after.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 9

   The heavy wooden case Malzra had borne on his back
turned out to be an elaborate desk. He unfolded it next
morning to the surprise and delight of the breakfasting
students. The surface of the thing was smooth ebony composed
of various panels. Each black wood panel slid out of the
main compartments on hidden joints and fused seamlessly with
its counterparts. The end result was an extensive, smooth
tabletop, as wide as Malzra's arm span and twice as long.
The work surface rested on cabinets with many small drawers
and compartments. By some ingenious trick, the whole thing-
cabinets and drawers and all-had collapsed easily into a
compact box. More marvelous than even these capacities: no
sooner than the desk was fully set up, Malzra drew open
drawer after drawer, producing styluses, spanners, rule
rods, compasses, protractors, a set of angle edges, and roll
after roll of plans. He smoothed the last down atop the
workspace, struggling to get them to lie flat until Barrin
set a stone on each corner of the sheets.
    Barrin and Malzra stepped back, allowing the gathering
crowd of students to look on grand vistas in lead and ink.
There was a soaring central hall, with room to seat four
hundred students and scholars, a series of balconies
overlooking the grand space, and an empyrean vault open on
one side to show the dense forest canopy. There were
fanciful towers, rounded and lean like exotic gourds, some
topped with guard stations, others with fire towers, and
others still with observatories that bristled with optical
paraphernalia. The outer wall was an enormous bulwark of
earth and stone, with a notable absence of sewage grates and
duct work. Long, curved corridors, great banks of jeweled-
glass windows, an aviary, aerial docks, a gymnasium, a
large, rock-lined pond, gardens and groves. The dormitories
provided private rooms that were bright and open-no longer
the cells of the previous prison. Every aspect of the design
was marked with imaginative ornamentation-octopodal figures,
fantastical sea prawns, Tolarian drake-head appointments,
four-winds motifs, devices drawn from the naval architecture
of New Tolaria, gulls and kingfishers, anvil-headed storm
clouds, tridents and coral and nautilus shells.
    This was not the stern infirmary of the previous
Tolaria. This was not a prison. Asceticism had given way to
aestheticism, strict artifice to fanciful art.
    "Of course," Malzra said to no one and everyone at once,
"we will have to move the eastern gate from there-" he
pointed to a place on the plans, and the corresponding
location on the topography before them, "-to there, allowing
easier access to the safe path and Angelwood beyond."
    Barrin assessed his friend. "I'm glad to see you've not
turned the school into a fortification after seeing the
Phyrexian rift."
    Malzra smiled tightly, drawing a new plan to the fore.
"They are the ones to be imprisoned, not us. Look, here.
This is the first building. It will be everything to us to
start with-great hall and sleeping quarters and tutorial
space. In time it will be my private lab." He indicated a
large lodge with walls of stone rubble and a peaked roof
held up by tree boles felled and lashed together. According
to the schematics, the initial roof would be thatch, but in
time it could be converted to shake and eventually to slate.
"It will stand there, on that rocky ridge at the edge of the
tent city. We start building it today."
    Breakfasts were forgotten in the ink-and-parchment
visions of a bold, bright future. The whole encampment
gathered around to hear their assignments.
    One ensign and his contingent were given guard of the
camp, charged with setting up posts, building palisades,
organizing a day-and-night patrol schedule, and assembling
an arsenal. The guard group's duties would include the
investigation and marking of temporal danger zones, as well
as exploration into techniques for rescuing Teferi from his
pillar of frozen time.
    Another ensign and her team were sent out to thoroughly
survey the ruins of the old academy, cataloguing whatever
could be salvaged-block and brick, wood and steel,
furnishings and artifacts. She was also charged with making
recommendations for a site and structure that would be a
memorial to the students and scholars who had died in the
blast. Barrin volunteered to join this group, as he was
keenly interested in the proper disposition of any remains
the group might encounter.
    A third group-called the food commission-was sent out
with Jhoira. They sought glades where they could set rabbit
snares, pools in which to string lines for fish, and verdant
fields for planting. Malzra urged Jhoira to make the best
use of mild fast-time areas, where hares and fish and crops
could mature in weeks instead of months.
    Another team took up picks, shovels, levels, stakes, and
twine. They began clearing the location of the new lodge and
excavating a foundation per Malzra's plans and elevations.
Karn accompanied this group, intent on lending his strength
to the earth-moving tasks.
    The last group accompanied Malzra himself on a return
trip to the Giant's Pate. There they initiated further study
of the Phyrexian gorge and suggested strategies and devices
for the extermination of their century-old foes. Malzra
spoke of an ancient and minute device, a tiny crystal
attuned to the Glimmer Moon and suspended like a lodestone
in a drop of water. When the moon rose, the crystals were
drawn upright and emitted a high-pitched tone that
dismantled Phyrexian blood, breaking glistening oil to its
component parts. By mass-producing these "spiders," as he
called them, and introducing them into the gorge though one
of the rivers that flowed into it, they could hope to slay
the whole army of Phyrexians before any of them knew what
had happened.
    With the quiet and determined efficiency of refugee ants
digging a new hill, Malzra's company marched out across the
strange and hostile hillsides of Old Tolaria. The tents that
had sheltered them the night before fluttered, empty and
clean, in the hot, shifting air of summer. The columns of
fire that had held up the black vault of night now smoldered
in gray slumber. There was a sense of expectant hope in the
air. Around axe-wielding arms and bent shoulders and shovel-
prodding feet, there arose the airy vision of a new academy
taking shape all around them.

                       *****

    As the last sharpened logs were set in place about the
tent camp and the foundations of the new lodge, a cool
breeze moved through the surrounding forest. The summer's
labors were done. Autumn had arrived. Workers paused. They
breathed deeply, straightened their tired backs, and lifted
grimy, streaming faces toward the sun. Life at sea had been
no idle existence for the crew of New Tolaria, but at least
it had not held the daily back breaking task of wrestling
the earth-piercing it, digging it, lifting it, hauling it,
dumping it, compacting it. The grit at sea had been largely
salt, which washed easily enough away and provided the skin
certain natural protections against insects. This grit was
good, black earth. It coated everything evenly, never
completely washed away, and smudged the books and scrolls
that the scholars and students studied in their off-hours.
They were a brawny, tanned, industrious lot after their long
months of labor, starting to look like Jhoira, like natives
of the island.
    The cool breeze riffled tents where students rested or
studied. It fanned flames where a midday meal of fresh-water
fish sizzled. It kicked up dust from wheeled litters that
dragged dressed tree boles into place for the lodge's nearly
complete vault. It rattled the roll of animal skins that
would, when complete, become a great dirigible to lift
Malzra's Phyrexian war machine. The breezes seemed all too
eager to bear the dismantled machine into the air. Most of
all, the refreshing wind buoyed heat-weary workers,
promising of cooler days and more rain.
    Barrin drank in the air as he marched up the hill that
led into the palisades. Autumn would mean tall, dry grasses,
ready to be scythed and sheaved and draped into a roof for
the lodge. The place would be warmer and drier than the
tents and more resistant to mosquitoes and snakes. The
prospects of real beds and real pallets was enticing, too.
    Even so, Barrin's uplifted mood came not from hopes of
future comfort but from the completion of long labors. The
ruins were fully scavenged. Every bit of useable stone had
been hauled to the site of the new academy, many of the
rougher pieces already incorporated in the mortared lower
walls of the lodge. Barrin's team had also discovered the
wreck of the Hall of Artifact Creatures and rescued from
that shattered place many operable pieces of machinery.
These Urza had used to construct five su-chi lifters, units
designed to perform the heavy tasks of the construction
projects.
    The most important result of these scavenging efforts
culminated today, though, and Barrin had climbed into the
encampment to gather Urza, Karn, Jhoira, and any others not
immediately employed to come see the result.
    "It's finished," Barrin said simply, brushing dust from
his hands as he stood before Urza.
    The planeswalker glanced up distractedly from the plans
for his war machine, nodded, and gestured to a pair of
students to remove the face plate they had just attached to
the metal framework. One of the young men gave him a look of
consternation, to which Urza replied sternly, "We have to
deepen the belly of that piece or the incendiary devices
won't slide smoothly from the payload chamber. They might
get jammed, they might explode within the superstructure.
Now do it!"
    As the students set to work, Barrin repeated, "It's
finished. I'd like you to come see it."
    Urza turned back toward his plans, which showed a
fuselage of thinly tapped metal. The device, shaped like a
horseshoe crab, hung beneath a great sack of heated gasses.
    "I'm in the middle of something. Can't it wait? Schedule
a formal ceremony. I'll attend."
    Barrin's eyes hardened slightly. "Two hundred students
and scholars died in that blast, Urza. Another twenty have
worked long and hard among the ghosts of those two hundred,
trying to find a way to honor them and remember them. If you
won't come for my sake, come for theirs."
    "While you are mucking about in the past," Urza snapped,
flinging a hand out toward the half-built war machine, "I
have been devising a means to save the future. Just this
morning we learned why the spiders didn't work-not enough
moonlight in the cleft to activate them. This is our only
hope. I have to complete this machine, or your monument
might stand for all of us. I'm thinking about our future."
    In a gesture he rarely made, Barrin took hold of the
master's arm. He felt the hot surge of power beneath the
man's skin. "Come see the memorial. It is why we are working
for the future."
    Urza took one more exasperated look at the fuselage,
where the students swore quietly over their turning
wrenches. He waved them off.
    "Come along, you two. Set those tools aside, and come
along. We are going to look into the past."
    They stared at him for one uncertain instant before his
stormy brows convinced them to drop their wrenches in the
dirt and rise to follow.
    Urza issued a similar command to all the students and
scholars he and Barrin passed on their way out of the
encampment. Scores of tasks were abandoned half finished,
and the folk of Tolaria flocked up behind their two masters.
They had specialized in those long, hot months of summer,
the guards different in dress and demeanor from the
gardeners and hunters, who were different in turn from the
artificers working on Urza's war machine, and so forth. In
that spontaneous parade down into the time-slough of Old
    Tolaria, all the scholars and students were one again,
as on the day they had marched into the island. Jokes and
laughter flowed out in the stern-faced master's wake, the
sound of it not deadened or dragged down by the steady
decrescendo of time.
    Barrin wondered about this happy spirit. He and his
scavengers had always adopted a solemn demeanor among the
ruins, not that much ruin remained. Despite the short days
in that slow-time spot-Barrin and his crew had only ten
hours of sunlight during the sixteen-hour summer days-they
had been diligent. The foundations of most of the buildings
were still there, rectilinear crazings of stone moving
through the hard-packed earth. Rainwater had gathered in the
exposed basements of a number of buildings. Grasses had
volunteered in many of the cleared areas. A few short walls
remained intact, but most of the structures that had
survived had been reverently pulled down. The cut stones
were carefully sorted and stacked for use in the new
buildings. Even the field-stone rubble lay in piles in the
new camp. As a result, the old school now seemed almost a
park land, with quiet meadows, wandering paths of stone, and
placid pools. The ruins were ruins no longer. Barrin's mood,
too, lifted as he felt the final leveling of the temporal
descent, and the parade wound its way into the heart of the
place.
    A plaza had been laid, dressed stones set into an even
mosaic between the two stunning sights there. On one side
was Teferi, mouth still gaping and eyes still screwed tight,
the eternal flames of his robes enveloping him, and the wet
cloak descended only a finger's-breadth. The leaning corner
of a building remained behind Teferi, helping to shield him
from the intense sunlight.
    As Urza and Barrin paused beside this living shrine,
Jhoira emerged from the throng. She stepped up beside them
and stared bleakly at her imprisoned friend.
    "He is trapped, like me. Alone. Abandoned. Neither dead
nor alive."
    "We'll save him, Jhoira," Barrin assured. "We'll find a
way. "He can't reach us. We can't reach him." Her voice held
desperate anger. "If he tries to emerge, he will die."
    "Yes. We must save him before then," Barrin replied.
    "Every night, I wrack my brain. I can't sleep, thinking
about him. There must be a way," she insisted. A trembling
hand traced across her jaw.
    Barrin took her hand and led her away from the spot.
"Come. I have something else to show you."
    On the opposite side of the courtyard stood the memorial
to the others slain in the blast. The base of the monument
was the old foundation stone of the former academy. Urza had
wanted the stone brought to the new school, but Barrin was
adamant. He said it should mark the beginning and the end of
what came before. The side of the giant block of stone bore
both its original inscription- Academy Tolaria, Established
3285 AR-and a new inscription- Destroyed 3307 AR. The front
of the block bore the names of the dead. On the other side
was an inscription in the ancient tongue of Yotia, which
meant in translation:

   The souls of a man who dies
   Standing in the teeth of fate
   Are the souls of all men,
   Gone on ahead that we may remain.

    The hollow interior of the stone held all the bones
unearthed by Barrin and his team, interred as they lived and
died-together.
    The stone was surmounted by a sculpture from the
sketchbook of old Darrob-Jhoira's final companion in the
months before Urza's return. Though his mind had been too
fragmented to allow him to communicate well in words, Darrob
was an accomplished artist. Perhaps the most common image in
his drawings was a seeking figure, gaunt and wind-torn,
holding out a lantern and peering toward the future with
eyes like twin, hopeless pits in his skull. Barrin had taken
the metal remnants of ruined artifact creatures and welded
them, one to another, into a statue of that bleak, searching
soul, leaning ever against a ceaseless and silent gale.
    Jhoira stared sadly. Barrin stood beside her still
holding her hand. Urza took in the whole sight at once. The
long caravan behind spread out in a semicircle to either
side. All of them-student and scholar, artificer and guard-
grew silent as they studied the memorial. Soon, only the
wind spoke.
    Barrin stood in that awed hush and felt an emotion swell
through him, something that was as much joy as it was
despair, something that darkened his eyes and made his lips
clamp in a tight line.
    "On behalf of all of us left here after the blast,
Master Malzra," Jhoira said at last, "I want to thank you
for this. It is right that this is the first finished
building of the new school."
    "Yes," replied Urza with a decisive nod, "yes, it is
right."

                       *****

    The new lodge was completed just before the wet drear of
winter, and the embers in its two great fireplaces did not
go out until spring was warm on the hillsides. Though better
than the tents, the accommodations were still tight. The
finished fuselage of Urza's flying war engine took up one
corner, sitting atop the rolled animal-skin balloon that was
to haul it into the sky. The nighttime floor beyond it was
filled to its edges with sleeping mats and the daytime floor
with tables of food being prepared and eaten. Books and
plans were crammed into cobbled nooks in one corner, and
artifact experiments crowded another. So cramped were these
accommodations that Jhoira and her food-gatherers chose to
sleep and eat on New Tolaria, where hammocks and bolt-head
meals seemed almost luxuriant. Aboard the ship, she also had
more room to pace the nights away, designing and discarding
means of saving Teferi. It was a long, wet winter, and the
only saving grace of it was the drive of Urza and Barrin to
push forward all of the projects begun.
    By the first breezes of spring, a second building was
half completed-a round-walled dormitory with each room
opening outward to the forest splendors of Tolaria and
inward to a central courtyard. Even without doors on the
rooms and shutters on the windows, many of the scholars and
students opted to move into the structure and brave the
first days of spring. By the middle of that season, most
artifact study had migrated to the central courtyard of the
dormitory, and there was room for all in the lodge.
    Today the winds were right. Mild and even, they flowed
from the east, past the harbored New Tolaria up the very
path they had taken back into Tolaria. Breezes coursed over
the Giant's Pate and straight out above the Phyrexian gorge.
    "Ten years have passed in that gorge since our enemies
first saw us, our return," said Urza, sniffing the sea
breeze as it breathed through the new academy. "Surely they
have not been idle in that time. They are tenfold stronger
than they were on that first day and perhaps twice as
numerous. Every day we wait gives them another week to
prepare. It is time."
    He spoke these words to Barrin, but everyone who took
breakfast in the lodge that morning heard him, and they all
knew what he meant.
    "Today, we attack," Urza said.
    Most of those breakfasts went unfinished. Students
rushed to their posts, excited and terrified by what the day
might bring.
    Moments after this announcement, crews hoisted the
balloon of animal skin and the metal fuselage from the comer
and bore them up toward the crest of the Giant's Pate.
Behind them went more workers with massive bellows hooked to
specially designed forges meant to heat air. Ropes borrowed
from the docked New Tolaria followed in their turn, and
crates of dark orbs carried gingerly by pairs of workers.
    "It is crude, I know," Urza said with chagrin as he sat
across from Barrin, who was rapidly filling his mouth with
too-hot forkfuls of fried loon eggs, "but until we have full
laboratory capacity, I am not willing to cobble together an
ornithopter. Besides, this floating behemoth can hold one
hundred times the number of powder bombs as an ornithopter."
    "Even four thousand bombs may not be enough to destroy
them. And if any Phyrexians remain in the gorge, we will be
in grave danger," Barrin pointed out, hissing between
scalding sips of tea. "They are working on something,
Barrin, a way to escape," Urza replied. "They've been
searching for an escape for a hundred ten years of their
time. They mustn't have the metals or powerstones for
anything but a few crude artifact creatures, or they would
be sending them out after us. They must be developing some
new mutation, some new strain of Phyrexian that can escape
their time rift. If one of the four thousand bombs
penetrates to their bio-labs and destroys generations of
research, we will have bought ourselves another few years."
    "Yes," Barrin agreed. He brushed off his hands and rose.
"Yes, today is a good day for this. I'll go brief the flight
team."
    Urza caught the man's shoulder and shook his head. "No,
let me do it. I'll be the one on board with them."

                       *****

    By midmorning, the great war machine of skin and metal
was fully inflated atop the Giant's Pate. Its air-bag shone
in the sunlight gold and brown, crossed in a thousand places
with sewn seams. Beneath, the metal fuselage gleamed, its
base spotted with dew from its early morning trek. Strong
winds up from the bay tugged and teased the dirigible, and
its anchor lines moaned. The ground team worked busily among
these ropes as well as the three long tethers that would
guide the machine out over the rift. Barrin led the team
through checks of the capstans bolted into the stone. Karn
was there as well, prepared to lend his titanic strength to
haul on the lines.
    Meanwhile, the flight team of five was receiving its
final instructions from Master Malzra. One team member was
assigned to each vector of the balloon's movement-an officer
of altitude, another of radius, and a third of tangent.
Through a system of signals, these officers would instruct
the ground team to accomplish the desired movement through a
combination of rope trim and wind utilization. As Malzra's
most accomplished artificer, Jhoira was made officer of
altitude, in charge of the elaborate onboard forge bellows
that provided the machine its lift. The final two fliers, a
scholar and her protege, were the school's best
cartographers. They would lie prone in belly-holds on
opposite ends of the device and would each make maps of what
they saw. Their work would prove invaluable in determining
what sites to bomb, what resources the Phyrexians likely
had, and what strategy to use in future strikes against the
stronghold. Malzra, the final member of the team, was
captain. Receiving information from the mappers, he would
send instructions to the flight officers to position the
machine and, at the precise moment, release salvos of
incendiary devices.
    "The sixth bay is full, Master Malzra," reported a dark-
haired, young woman, breaking in to Master Malzra's
briefing. "Five hundred powder bombs. Two more bays, and the
full complement of four thousand will be loaded."
    "Good," Malzra responded. His eyes seemed especially
dark this morning in the gleaming sunlight. With a nod, he
dismissed the woman and turned back to his anxious team.
"Jhoira, remember, at all times we must remain at least a
thousand feet above the top of the gorge-at the same height
as the Giant's Pate. Even there some Phyrexian projectiles
might be able to reach us. Fifteen hundred feet will be
safer. The bomb bays and mapper bays are shielded, but
projectile penetration is possible and could cause a chain
of explosions that would destroy the machine."
    The crew had known all these facts before, but their
repetition in the shadow of the leaning, leaping device
widened eyes and brought uncomfortable gulps.
    "If a projectile pierces the air sac, we will release
all bombs and ballast and signal to be brought back. Escape
will be impossible until we reach the Giant's Pate. Any who
fall atop the time rift will die immediately. The scarp
below the Giant's Pate is too sheer and littered with fallen
trees to allow any safe landing," Malzra said. He studied
the grave young faces arrayed around him. "I hope you have
said your good-byes, should we not return. If not, I have
brought a messenger." He indicated a fleet-footed girl, who
obligingly tapped a shoulder satchel with quills and
parchment. "Avail yourselves in the next moments. We must be
aboard once the final bomb bays are full."
    Four of the five crew members turned quickly to the
girl, selecting quills and nibs and beginning to scrawl what
might be their last words.
    Only Jhoira stood, resolute and ready. "Karn is here,
and we have already spoken," she said by way of explanation
to Malzra. "The only other person I would send a note to is
Teferi. Of course, any note to him would burn up before he
could read it."
    Malzra's eyes narrowed in assessment of the young woman.
"You must concentrate on the task at hand, Jhoira."
    "Teferi never leaves my mind," she replied. "If I could
trade places With him, I would. We needn't both be forever
alone. He saved me once, you know."
    "I did not. But if you cannot maintain focus, I shall
have to find a different officer of altitude-"
    She dropped her gaze. "I'll fight all the harder,
thinking of him."
    "Good," he replied. "Let's take our positions."
    Malzra laid a hand lightly on her shoulder, directing
her with him toward the waiting craft. His touch felt almost
searing.
    Jhoira walked beside him.
    Shiny and glowing in the morning, the craft loomed up
before them. It bucked slightly under the restless winds.
    Reaching the machine, Malzra drew back a rope slung
across the doorway. He gestured inward and gave a gentle
bow.
    Jhoira preceded him into the vessel. She crouched as she
scuttled down the tight passage. Her feet made small pings
on the plate armor below. The bomb bays crowded either side
of the passage. Ahead, the tangent-officer's crawlways cut
across the main corridor. The radius-officer would remain in
a seat on one side of the craft, monitoring the lengths of
rope anchoring them to the Giant's Pate. Jhoira's post was
in the exact center of the vessel at the juncture between
the fuselage and the balloon. She had sight lines in every
direction and had memorized the height of the various
landmarks. She also had an open shaft downward for a visual
check of the ground position. A harness of hemp held her
suspended in this empty column of air. The rig was designed
to pivot in a complete circle but otherwise provide a stable
base. To one side of it was the forge bellows that Jhoira
would stoke and tend to keep the machine aloft. To the other
side were a set of instruments-anemometers, barometers,
compasses, spyglasses ... Jhoira climbed into the seat and
strapped herself in.
    Malzra, in a similar rig in the belly of the craft,
ordered through the speaking tube, "Stoke the forge for
liftoff."
    "Aye." Jhoira complied, feeling small shudders in the
fuselage as the other team members clambered into their
positions.
    She faintly heard instructions spoken into tubes that
went elsewhere. Beyond the superstructure, anchor lines were
one by one drawn loose, and the ground crew took up the
three lines that snaked around the capstans.
    "Cast off," came the order in all the speaking tubes.
    The craft lurched up from the rock. The nervous chitter
of metal against stone was gone and the rattling resistance
with it. Jhoira pumped the bellows before her, fueling the
fire in the black box. A hiss of red air roared up from the
forge. The vessel rose farther, heeling away from the stone.
Beyond snapping lines and stretched skins, the bright brow
of the hill retreated. The folk clustered thickly atop it,
toiling at the capstans, were diminished. Soon their faces
were only knots of exertion. Then there were no features at
all, only bent backs and sinewy arms like extensions of the
stout ropes themselves. A shadow-painted face of stone slid
by below, descending suddenly into vast distance. An immense
bowl of land opened up. The Giant's Pate became only a
ground-down prominence on one edge of the basin. Lines that
had once seemed massive now looked all too thin, stretched
across the plummeting spaces.
    "Take us up three hundred feet to thirteen hundred,"
Malzra's voice came. "Let's come in from above, give us time
to survey the pit and choose our targets.
    "Aye," Jhoira responded.
    She slid back the door to the coal chute, allowing a few
more shards into the firebox. A lever spread the black
stones across the embers. She pumped repeatedly on the
bellows. Hot air jetted into the vast air sac above, and
more tepid air spilled from the lips of the balloon.
Impatient, the machine rose higher, its lines tugging it in
an arc back toward the Giant's Pate.
    Malzra issued course adjustments, signaled to ground
crews by the tangent and radius officers. The tethers
slackened, and the machine swooped out on new winds over the
black wound of the Phyrexian pit.
    "We're getting clear visuals," the map scholar said into
her speaking tube. "A main fortification at the center of
the cleft, perhaps a hundred yards square, with many turrets
and towers, elevated battlements, and scores of heavy
ballistae, each targeted on the rim of the gorge."
    "Thirty-three ballistae, by my count," the student broke
in.
    Jhoira peered down the shaft. She could make out the
black form of the main structure and the bristling array of
spear throwers atop the towers and rooftops. Even as she
watched, the long shafts foreshortened.
    "They are redirecting them at us," she noted urgently.
    "Maintain altitude," Malzra ordered. "Remember, they
have ten seconds to our every one. They can respond,
regroup, and regear quickly."
    "The main fortress seems to be perched on a rock
prominence in the center of a deep lake. I cannot make out
the contours of the bottom," the chief cartographer
reported. "I'm surprised by all that water. Fast-time rifts
tend to have little water. It looks as though numerous
streams empty into the gorge."
    "Any sign of structures that might be laboratories?"
Urza asked. "I'm looking specifically for spawning
facilities."
    "There seem to be fish hatcheries in various places in
the lake," replied the mapper. "I can make out figures
moving among the sluices and nets. As to laboratory
structures, I could not begin to guess."
    The assistant cartographer said, "There are various
caves and what might be mines in the walls of the gorge-"
    He broke off as the tip-tilted ballistae flickered in
sudden, violent motion. Before any of the crew could blink,
a flight of thirty-three massive shafts leapt into being
twelve hundred feet below. They raced up with preternatural
speed, going from being wickedly barbed jags to being large
as lightning. They rose to within a hundred feet of the
ship's belly before slowing and curving off. The ballistae
bolts lingered a moment on the winds and then tumbled. Their
heavy heads drew them quickly back downward, and they sank
toward the temporal envelop where the Phyrexians were
trapped. Striking the verge of the fast-time gorge, the
bolts accelerated to blinding speed.
    The crack of those thirty-three shafts smashing through
rooftops was like manifold thunder. A cheer went up from the
flight and the ground crews.
    "Excellent," Malzra said. "Maintain tangent, radius, and
altitude. Stay directly above them. They'll think twice
before sending another salvo. I am dropping the payload of
bomb bay five."
    There came a great ratcheting sound as the doors of the
bay swung slowly downward. Out tumbled the powder bombs.
Just such devices had been employed with devastating effect
at Korlis three millennia before, though they had been
dropped in tens on marching troops instead of in hundreds on
a stationary fortification. Now the black objects, which
seemed merely tumbling stones, rolled slowly in their swarm,
gathered speed, and pelted down into the fast-time rift.
They struck the envelop en masse, making a distant, ominous
patter. Accelerating to the speed of the rift, they struck.
    Light leapt from the cleft. Orange flares in their
hundreds illuminated the previously veiled depths. Jagged
roof lines and battlements shone in sudden relief. The
cartographers scribbled frantically. Then smoke obscured
everything in a deeper shroud, and blackness settled again.
    The sound of the attack lagged a moment behind this
brief, pure flash, but when it came, the roar was amplified
by the basalt fort, the glassy water beneath it, and the
rocky cliff faces all around. It seemed a great beast had
awakened, furious, from sleep. The noise filled the air for
some moments, and then all was silent. Smoke- gray and white
and black in curdled rills-bled from the gap.
    "That got their attention," Jhoira shouted, giving a
whoop.
    "Cartographers," came Malzra's call, "target
acquisition?"
    "Too much smoke," replied the scholar. "Give it a few
minutes to clear."
    "That will give them a few hours to regroup," Malzra
responded. "Altitude, radius, tangent-has our position
held?"
    "We've gained height," Jhoira said, "after the bombs
went. We're up to about seventeen hundred feet."
    "Bring us down to twelve," Urza commanded, "and
anticipate the next payload drop."
    "Radius is steady."
    "Tangent is steady."
    "Down to about twelve hundred feet."
    "Payload six away."

                       *****

    The first wave of attacks slew over a hundred and fifty
of K'rrik's minions, toppled three towers, blasted away the
roof of the upper throne room and, worst of all, sent
blazing death into the spawning lab. Vials of brain and
placenta burst and oozed, recombination matrices ended in
tatters on the floor, vats of glistening oil ignited in
enormous jets, mutant stock burned to cinders, and the
decanted, half-mature killers that K'rrik had been breeding
to survive the time rift were roasted alive. The destruction
was almost total. Almost.
    Out of chaos came order. The fires from the initial
onslaught were already extinguished, the dead and dying
thrown to the fishes, and the ballistae recalibrated for
greater distance. K'rrik ordered all able-bodied beasts to
salvage whatever specimens, equipment, and plans had
survived from his breeding laboratories. The remains were
taken below the castle, into the caves. Urza's crude bombs
might have blasted holes in roofs and walls, but they would
not crack the basalt extrusion on which the castle sat and
would not completely wipe out a century of research. All
hope of escape and victory rested in that ragged refuse, in
the half full jars of cracked glass with their skittish
placental inhabitants. Some of the creatures would survive,
and K'rrik's clawed and tentacular horrors carried them as
tenderly as human mothers with their babies.
    All of this had happened in the hour after the first
attack. As the smoke cleared enough to make out the dim line
of the airship above, guards spotted more of the bombs
resting in the air below it. They looked like pepper on a
white piece of paper. It was an easy thing to predict where
they would strike and evacuate the areas.
    K'rrik stood, furious and humiliated, among his folk.
Sizzling chunks of fire struck the roof of one guard tower
and the adjacent section of wall. The resultant chorus of
flares and pops shook the rest of the fortress and echoed
through the chasm. Hunks of stone pelted outward and hailed
across the Phyrexian host, who flinched away. The tower came
to pieces, pulverized by the attack. The weakened wall
crumbled away, crushing an armory lower down. Fires flared
up wherever there was wood or cloth or skin to burn, and the
armory ignited. A cloud of flame and soot shot up in a vast
column, its top rolling and boiling.
    K'rrik watched. The filed teeth in his enhanced jaw
ground into their opposite gums, cutting bloody rents in the
flesh.
    "What are you going to do?" barked a creature next to
him. It seemed more a giant flea than a man, its head three
times the size of K'rrik's and its pale, naked body
humpbacked and twisted. "You can't let this go on!"
    "Yes," K'rrik responded grimly. Pus-colored blood was
suddenly jetting from the creature's severed back as K'rrik
withdrew his sword. The monster tumbled from the wall where
they stood, its body bouncing twice along the buttresses
before striking the black foundations of the fortress and
bursting in a white mass. "Yes, I cannot let you question my
authority."
    K'rrik turned to another Phyrexian, this one more
manlike, though he had the infernal head of a haggard goat.
The commander ordered, "Tell two ballistae crews to fire
three rounds every half hour, half-cocked rounds that will
fall short. Have crews ready in the water to retrieve the
shafts. Cover the rest of the ballistae with dead bodies. I
want Urza to think he has destroyed most of our ballistae,
and nearly disabled those that are left. I want to draw him
downward. Once they are in range, fling the dead from the
ballistae and fire all simultaneously. Aim for the flying
machine's bomb bays."
    Nodding his understanding, the goat-faced man headed off
on his mission.
    K'rrik snarled at the minions around him, "As for the
rest of you, put out those fires. And keep watching for more
onslaughts. Anyone injured will be killed. Anyone killed
will be defiled. It is your duty to fight and to live."

                       *****

    The third, fourth, and fifth drops went as well as the
first. Bombs hailed down. Fire and smoke came up. The sound
of tumbling towers and shrieking beasts rose to meet them.
On the second drop, Jhoira had learned the trick of spilling
heat from the air sac at the moment the bombs were released,
thereby preventing the machine from lurching upward. This
technique allowed for quicker follow-up attacks, greater
accuracy, and less time spent reeling.
    Until the sixth drop. The gorge below was a gray scar,
so full of smoke that no fortification was evident within.
Still, the cartographers had picked out landmarks on the
edges of the cliff and could, from memory alone, pinpoint
important sites to strike. They were above just such a site
now-what had looked like a throne room or great hall-and
Malzra issued the now familiar warning.
    "I am opening bay two."
    Jhoira paused a breath and then bled the air from the
forge. She knew immediately that something was wrong. There
came no grating ratchet. There was no sound of tumbling
bombs. There was only the sudden loss of height as hot air
spilled from the sac.
    "The mechanism is jammed," came a shout over the
speaking tube.
    Jhoira ground her teeth as she struggled to shut off the
bleed and pump the bellows. The dirigible sagged on its
lines, dipping below the crest of the Giant's Pate. The
deflated sac rattled in a sudden downdraft. Jhoira heaved at
the bellows, and jets of red air roared into the sac. It
began to reinflate.
    Loud shouts of metal came below, ballistae shots
hammering into the fuselage. The speaking tubes were flooded
with screams. Then came another wave of ballistae shots only
a breath after the first. They penetrated. Spearheads struck
powder bombs. With a dull roar, they ignited. The explosion
spread. Bomb bay two blasted away. The metal fuselage
fragmented. The machine mounted up on a wave of fire. What
remained of the fuselage rammed up beneath the air sac.
    Jhoira was suddenly inside the balloon, the air around
her baking her skin and burning in her lungs. She was aware
of a great emptiness beneath her. Half of the fuselage was
gone. The rest was shoved in a tangle of lines inside the
skin sac. The other crew members were dead-the officers of
tangent and radius, the cartographers, even Master Malzra.
She was about to die too.
    "I'm sorry, Teferi," was all she could think to say.
    The ragged metal fuselage dropped from the air bag and
slued sideways. It tugged the deflated dirigible down behind
it. The whole mass plummeted toward the Phyrexian gorge
below.
    Coals from the tilted forge sprayed out around Jhoira.
Cursing, she clawed her way from the harness and climbed
into the tangle of ropes. She clambered over them, seeing
through their webwork as the vast gray gorge rushed up to
swallow her. One of the ropes was fatter than the others and
tighter. She grabbed it and felt the insistent tug of life
on the other end.
    "Karn is up there," she gasped to herself. Karn and the
rest of the ground crew.
    She fought her way out of the flapping folds of skin and
the taut net of ropes and clambered up that one fat line,
the one that pulsed with life. Hand over hand, she dragged
herself up the rope, toward the Giant's Pate and away from
the Phyrexian fortress.
    There was too much rope, too little air, too much rock.
    The world roared up with crushing weight. She climbed.
    The ruined dirigible was about hundred feet behind her
now. It struck the fast-time envelope. Waves of time-
distortion roiled out around it. The war machine plummeted
in a sudden preternatural rush. The rope snapped taut. It
flung Jhoira free. The capstan ripped from its mooring and
surged through the air. There came a white-hot explosion
within the rent. The sky and ground fused into a single
sheet.
    "I'm sorry, Teferi." Jhoira struck earth, and all went
black.
                          Monologue
    We do not make machines, I now realize. We make only
fire and death.
    The blast surprised all of us, even Urza. He survived
through a great concentration of will, holding his corporeal
form together, but unlike the explosion that tore apart
Tolaria, or that which tore apart Argoth, Urza had not
anticipated this one. He was struggling to keep his body
solid even as his crew members were no more than red
particles on the wind.
    And there is no time machine for bringing them back.
    The blast surprised all of us. I summoned a wall of air,
trying to catch the falling craft, but only slowed its
descent. In the midst of the fumbling hopelessness of it
all, I saw Jhoira ambling spiderlike up the main line toward
safety. That was the greatest surprise of all, though it
shouldn't have been. Jhoira's force of will equals that of
Urza.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 10

    They sat at Jhoira's bedside in the makeshift infirmary.
No pallet, no cot-here she had an actual bed-Barrin's,
volunteered by him for the purpose. The infirmary was soon
to be a kitchen attached to one end of the great hall, but
now, amid newly mortared fireplaces and stacks of iron-
worked spits and grills and pots, she lay in coma. She was
the only one injured in the wreck of the dirigible. All the
others were killed.
    Except Urza. He and Barrin sat on cook stools just next
to the bed, and they spoke in low tones.
    "She's become another Teferi," Barrin said sadly. "Three
months, and still no response. Lying there, an arm's length
away but unreachable."
    Urza watched the still woman, his eyes glimmering
darkly. "Physically, she is well. You saw me lay hands on
her. You saw the wounds close and the breath begin again.
She was whole the moment I laid hands on her. I can't
understand why she does not awaken."
    "Her wounds are deeper than you can reach, my friend,"
Barrin replied.
    He fondly brushed her hair back from her forehead. Her
face was losing its olive patina after all this time beneath
roofs and blankets. Her hair was darkening from the roots
outward. It was as though the years were being one by one
revoked from her, and she was becoming again a mere child.
    "She survived Old Tolaria, through ten years of
abandonment, isolation, and want. Then we came back, and we
all thought she would return to us. But she didn't. Karn was
her only friend. She was withdrawn and haunted. Every time
she saw Teferi-spoke of him, thought of him-the horror of
those ten years came welling back. She felt trapped, like
him. An arm's length away from us but always alone."
    "She could stay in this coma forever," Urza said.
    "No. She is fighting. Either she will win or lose. It
will not be forever, but it may be a long time. Last time,
she fought for a whole decade."
    Urza lifted his eyes, seeming to see straight through
the wall and even through an oblique curve of the world to
some dazzling place that lay beyond it all.
    "Serra's Realm had once restored my health. I would take
her there at once if Serra remained, if the place weren't
shrinking, if I hadn't led Phyrexia to it...." A cloud
passed over his features and they grew iron-hard. "We have
to keep up the fight. Everywhere I have gone, those monsters
have followed. Everyone I have befriended has been wounded
or killed by them. I would destroy myself if I knew it would
stop them, but they will never quit. I must fight them as
long as I live."
    "And what if you die before they are defeated?" Barrin
asked soberly. "Who will fight them then?"
    All light fled Urza's face, and it was as black as a
mask. "Yes, who then?"

                       *****

    Karn heaved the massive keystone into position atop the
archway. The stone grated against its neighbors. Sand sifted
down from its settling bulk. Silver hands lingered in
uncertainty on the huge block.
    "Does it look straight?"
    Behind him, Barrin looked up from Malzra's field table
and squinted along a sight line. The keystone gleamed like a
jewel in the morning sun, its polished edges reflecting the
Tower of Artifice and the Tower of Mana in the background.
    "Yes, Karn. It looks straight."
    The silver golem nodded and then asked, "Will it stay
put?"
    This time, Barrin was too busy with his sketches to look
up. "Of course it will stay put."
    He sighed. The stack of floor plans and elevations
before him were the latest creations of Urza for his new
academy. Already, after five years of intensive, year-round
building, the school was nearly as extensive as it had been
in its previous manifestation: dormitories, lecture halls,
laboratories, great halls, guard towers, curtain walls,
gates, gardens, and now a new infirmary. Not that many of
the academy's hundred and ninety students were ill or
injured. Most were too young to have any serious health
problems aside from homesickness. Whatever injuries or
illnesses occurred were treated with placebo pills, gauze,
and Urza's healing touch. No, this grand new two-story
infirmary was not so much a necessity as it was a monument
to the school's perpetual patient.
    Jhoira had not awakened. She had indeed become another
Teferi. For his part, the young man was now wrapped in the
wet cloak and beginning a tumble that would take him another
handful of years to complete. Jhoira had meanwhile grown
pale, her hair dark brown again. She did not awaken. Barrin
had discovered that water from slow-time rifts helped to
sustain her health, and Urza provided his healing touch
daily. Nothing improved. Urza had devised a machine that
liquefied whatever food was offered in the great halls and
pumped it into her stomach. Karn, meanwhile, had developed
the habit of picking wildflowers for her from the hillsides
of Angelwood and bringing them to her bed. He too often
stood vigil there, choosing to spend his nights in her
company instead of deactivated.
    Her plight weighed heavily on Barrin and Karn as they
worked on the new building. Both moved sadly and slowly, as
though building a mortuary rather than an infirmary. There
was anger in them too, frustration at their inability to
save her.
    Karn trudged up beside the desk and stood, gleaming in
the bright, hot sun.
    Barrin shielded his eyes from the glare and said
irritably, "Can't you let yourself tarnish a little?"
    "Master Malzra forbids it," Karn replied truthfully.
Then, with a tone of sarcasm he had been slowly developing
over the last fifteen years, he said, "It would bother you
less if you wore a sack over your head."
    Barrin cast a reproachful look at the golem. "I think
maybe it's time to design a new helper-one with a thicker
skin, if that is possible."
    "If you're after compatibility, try a helper with a
thicker skull." "Thicker than Arty Shovelhead's?" "Teferi
was a better companion than you-" "An old shoe is a better
companion than you-" A sudden buzz tore through the air
between the two. They shied instinctively back, gaping at
empty space. Something darted, the size and speed of a
falcon, above the treetops. It circled and dived down toward
them again. It glinted metallic.
    Barrin swore, stepped to the desk, and hauled a sword
from it. As the thing swooped by again, he swung the blade.
It cracked against the silvery shoulder of the device, but
the metal bird soared again, ripping leaves from their
boughs as it shot through the forest. The rattle of its
passage faded briefly and then returned with a swift
crescendo. Growling, Barrin hefted his blade again and
watched the mechanism shriek inward.
    Karn stepped into the path of the attacker. He reared
back, balled a fist, and hurled the massive thing at the
flying target. It crashed amid a jangle of slivered struts
and sprung coils. The artifact creature fell back in the
dirt. Its metallic wings glinted, shuddering to either side.
Spikes thrust outward all across it. An assortment of round,
rending blades emerged, whirling violently.
    Astonished, Barrin and Karn gazed at the broken mass as
it whined furiously. They were so amazed by the display that
neither noticed Master Malzra approach from behind. The
artificer watched with amused interest. It was only when the
mechanism had nearly spent itself and shimmied into
stillness that the master spoke.
    "It was only a prototype. The final falcons will stoop
at hundreds of miles an hour on the gorge-arriving even
before the sound they make. They will smell Phyrexian
glistening-oil blood, home in on it, penetrate the beast's
hide, and begin a shredding procedure."
    Panting heavily, Barrin turned toward the man. "How many
of them will you build?"
    As many as I can, given our supply of Thran powerstones.
If I could only design and build my own stones, I could fill
the skies with these creatures, could perhaps protect the
whole world. With the stones we have-and the ones I hope to
uncover at three Thran sites I have found-I can make perhaps
a thousand."
    "Three Thran sights?" Barrin asked, eyebrow canted. "You
are planning on sending students to dig?"
    "Yes," Malzra replied. "They'll be taken aboard New
Tolaria, and the ship will return with a new load of
students, whom I've chosen from the best and brightest the
world has to offer. I have the itinerary right here. And
since I, myself, need to remain for research-"
    "Yes, yes," Barrin replied irritably. "How many years
will I be away this time?"

                       *****

    "Teferi is covered in your robe, now," Karn said gently.
He sat by Jhoira's bedside in the completed infirmary. "He's
not being burned anymore. You've saved him." He didn't add
that the boy would likely rise, now, and make his way toward
the outer world and be killed in the curtain of time.
    Jhoira was too fragile to bear that sort of news. She
looked pale and small in the bed. Her arms and legs were
weak from years of stillness, her eyes were lost beneath
lids forever closed, her mouth was red where the tube of
Malzra's feeding machine descended.
    "The new students are arriving today," Karn said,
changing the subject. "Barrin has been out collecting them
the last three years."
    Karn glanced up at the rafters of the building. The
academy was at last complete. Malzra had ceased his new
building designs. He now poured all his energy in the
arsenal he was creating to eradicate the Phyrexians in the
gorge. He spoke of the battle as a "dress rehearsal for
global conflagration." It was his new mania. The minds of
all the scholars and students were trained on the task. One
team had developed a battery of long-range ballistae, which
were stationed in a ring around the site and were employed
in a day-and-night peppering of the fortress. Another crew
had devised a set of catapults, which delivered powder bombs
as quickly as they could be concocted. Rivers had been
dammed and diverted away from the gorge to empty the
Phyrexian fish hatcheries and starve them. Meanwhile, every
student spent hours every day assembling the delicate and
complex clockwork falcons Malzra had designed. He would do
just about anything to slay Phyrexians.
    On the other hand, in these ten years, what had he done
to save Teferi or Jhoira?
    Reaching in delicately, Karn grasped the tube that ran
from Malzra's feeding contraption into Jhoira's stomach.
Bracing himself, the silver man hauled slowly on it,
withdrawing the hose. It emerged with a jolting, sucking
motion.
    Karn set the tube aside and said gently, "Come with me."
He lifted her limp form in his arms and, with reverent step,
carried her out the door.
    It was a long walk past the towering buildings of the
new academy and through the western gate. No one stopped
him, though everyone stared. Karn was well known among the
students and scholars, the ever-present builder and
guardian. Jhoira was known too, the never-present ghost of
the former island. In all accounts, they were dear friends,
and half of those who glimpsed the pair believed she had
died at last, and he was taking her to be buried.
    The other half assumed Karn was acting at the bidding of
the inscrutable master.
    Karn carried her away for his own purposes, and hers.
Bypassing the killing time pits and pinnacles, the silver
man bore Jhoira through the thick forests of Tolaria, across
tan shoulders of sandstone, and to the secret niche she had
kept on the western edge of the island. Her things were
still there as she had left them ten years ago, as she had
left all of Tolaria ten years ago.
    "It is time for you to come back," Karn said heavily.
    He brought her to the sunny ledge of sandstone where she
had loved to stand and gaze out to sea. He climbed onto the
stone and sat down. Jhoira was small and cold, cradled in
his lap. Salty air rose warmly around them, lifting and
gently tossing Jhoira's hair. The laboring waves below
worried stones to pebbles and pebbles to sand. The sky was
endless in blue. Mountain ranges of cloud slid in slow
panorama through it. On the horizon of the vast ocean, a
tiny white sail shone-the returning New Tolaria.
    "You always said you would be here, on this stone, when
you would first see your soul mate arrive." He glanced down
at her unmoving form, and desperate sadness welled in his
voice. "Wake up, Jhoira. You have slept too long."
    Only her hair moved, lifted by the caressing breeze.
    "You have to come back, Jhoira. Despite his best
intentions, Master Malzra has turned the school into a
fortification, the students into a young army. He's bringing
more students, to do the same with them." Karn gazed
desolately at the pounding waves. "You wouldn't have allowed
that. You were the soul of this place. Remember how I was
before Master Malzra gave me that dark crystal-what he
called an intellectual and affective cortex? Remember what I
was like before I had a soul? That's what the island is like
without you."
    Still, there was only the slow shift of breath in her,
the arms and leg in languid repose.
    "Look out on that huge dark sea. You see that scrap of
white. It is Tolaria's hope, returning. I know you have been
faraway. I know your soul feels tiny, lost amid rolling
breakers and heaving gales, but it is our best hope.
Return."
    There came a fluttering at her eyelids. Karn held still,
not daring to believe. Jhoira's breath deepened, and she
seemed to settle against him. Her eyes again were closed.
    "If you don't wake now, you may miss your soul mate."
    "I've ... dreamed-" a voice came, as thready and elusive
as the wind, "-I've ... quested.... I know how to break
through...."
    "What?" Karn blurted stupidly. He peered at her, but she
was unconscious again, her figure as limp as the wet cloak
she had thrown over Teferi.
    Karn stood up, the woman in his arms. He felt as though
he had a heart in his chest, for all the thrumming ache of
it. Was she awakening, or was it only the wishful thinking
of a silver man given to fantasy? Feeling as though his
burden had doubled, he staggered back toward the distant
academy. Which healer would know how to waken her again?
What if she never woke again? How had he lived these ten
years without her?

                       *****

    K'rrik stood in the midst of his deep mutant lab, sunk
in the lightless bedrock beneath his castle. For twenty
years, the spot had been exposed, no longer shielded by
water-ever since Urza Planes-walker had diverted rivers from
the gorge to kill off the fish they ate. K'rrik had dammed
the far end of the gorge, thereby making a shallow, stagnant
lake, where at least scavenger fish could be bred from the
waste poured into the pool. For forty years, powder bombs
and ballistae bolts had rained down on their heads. Urza
must have been clearing the island's forests as fast as he
had cleared Argoth's. None of it, not brimstone hail,
lightning shafts, flood nor famine, had reached this deep
cavern and its precious contents.
    In great vats of obsidian, melted and cast for this very
purpose, K'rrik's latest generation of negators was
gestating, maturing. Vast, pulpy heads, hideously distorted
bodies, arms as sharp and thin as swords, legs that could
lope at the speed of jackals, clawed feet that could crush a
man's skull as if it were merely a melon. In two years, this
sixth batch of modified negators would be ready to emerge
from their vats, full-formed, ready to scale the walls of
the gorge and struggle through the vast rending curtain of
time that surrounded them. Perhaps they would die, like the
five previous harvests. Perhaps they would win through, too
weak to hunt down the man at the heart of K'rrik's torment.
    The man? The god!
    Whatever happened, K'rrik had already harvested their
flesh, sampled it, improved on it. The seventh batch would
be stronger yet and ready in another decade. In no more than
twenty years of Urza's time, his beautiful garden academy
would be overrun with Phyrexians, bred to walk uninjured
through the worst time storm, and-this was the best part-
bred to be utterly faithful to their master, K'rrik. To
them, he was more than an ancient sleeper, more than an
indomitable and unkillable warlord. To them, he was a god-
    He was Yawgmoth incarnate.

                       *****

    It had been six months since Jhoira had first reawakened
in the silver arms of her old friend. The healers and Malzra
himself had been incapable of reviving her, despite their
intense and sometimes rigorous interventions.
    Karn's touch had worked the magic their hands could not,
bringing her around again a week after the first occasion.
The moment of lucidity had been brief and feverish, but
Jhoira again said she had been on a vision quest and had
seen a way to "break through." To this cryptic revelation,
she added that she knew how to save herself-and Teferi-then
she lapsed back into unconsciousness.
    Since that time, Karn had refused to aid in any more war
efforts. He spent his time sitting at her side, gently
speaking to her through the long hours of night, telling her
anything he could think of, even reading stories of Shiv
from the academy's library. It was just as in the old days,
the two of them making a home for each other, withdrawing
from the ignorant outside world that recognized and welcomed
neither of them. Jhoira responded. Soon she had awakened
every hour or so and remained awake for minutes at a time.
Karn forced broth and bread into her on these occasions,
refusing to allow Malzra's tube to be in her throat anymore.
In another month, she had been able to sit up, and her arms
and legs had grown stronger. At that point, she had called
for paper and writing implements and tools. She sketched out
a complex machine that even Malzra could not quite
visualize-long tubes and pump chambers, with large gears
bearing huge sails of gauze windmilling up from wide
troughs, a massive turbine driven by teams of workers....
When Barrin and other scholars expressed their reservations
about the large, costly design, none of them spoke of dream
delirium, but the thought lingered in their words.
    Karn gathered a passel of young, bright students from
the new batch that had arrived on the island. He brought
them to the infirmary and equipped them with whatever tools
and resources Jhoira directed. They worked tirelessly, these
children, forever guided by Jhoira and her vision.
    Three months later, their creation was wheeled to the
center of the slow-time slough where the Teferi monument
stood. The creator was also wheeled to the spot, on a cart
Jhoira had had modified for the purpose. The whole of the
academy gathered as the woman's young proteges rolled long,
flexible tubes out of the slow-time area, over the hills, to
a nearby rift of extreme fast time. While they worked,
discreet murmurs of dubiety circulated among the crowd.
    Jhoira rolled herself up beside the hulking machine she
had first glimpsed in her coma. She rapped on the side of a
metal reservoir. The thunderous sound drew the attention of
the group.
    As they quieted, she began to speak, "The principle is
simple. Water resists time change. We have witnessed this.
We survivors of the first academy used the properties of
slow-time water to stop aging. So, too, fast-time water is
reluctant to give up its pulse. This machine draws fast-time
water from a nearby rift that contains an underground
spring. The pumps here fill the reservoirs with water. These
sets of cranks then power the wind turbine and the gauze
sails. The windmill blades dip into the reservoir, drawing
water into the gauze. Wind from the turbine blows through
the gauze and produces a thick fog of fast-time water. The
saturated fast-time cloud will create a safe corridor of
passage into the time pit where Teferi is, and safe passage
back out again."
    Silent doubt gave way to silent admiration.
    "Have any organic creatures successfully passed into and
out of this fast-time cloud?" Barrin asked sensibly.
    Jhoira's countenance sagged. "This machine is the result
not of artifice alone but of vision-Ghitu vision. We have
not tested the device on living creatures, no."
    "I will enter it," Karn said, his voice like the quiet
rumble of gravel in a breaking wave. "I was made to
withstand temporal distortions that would kill any living
thing, and I believe in Ghitu vision."
    Barrin, looking chagrined, continued his objections.
"Yes, Karn, but just because you might be able to walk
safely into the pocket that holds Teferi does not mean he
could walk safely out again."
    It was Karn's turn to stare downward in defeat.
    "I will go with him," came another basso voice, and all
attention turned to the bright-eyed and bearded speaker.
    "Master Malzra?" Barrin protested. "It's out of the
question. We need further tests, animal tests, before any of
us steps into the cloud-"
    "I believe in this machine," Malzra responded simply.
"It is a fine design. It is the first glimmering that any of
us have had about crossing severe rifts. I believe in this
machine, and-" he paused to send a mocking wink in Barrin's
direction "-since I am the reason Teferi is caught there
anyway, I owe it to the lad to help get him out." He
gestured toward Jhoira's proteges, clustered in an anxious
knot beside the pump mechanism. "Fill the reservoir."
    Brightening, Jhoira nodded toward the students, who
began plying the pumps with all their might. The tubes
hissed and gurgled for a time before the first brown
splashes of water entered the reservoir. The liquid
spattered the base of the trough and immediately evaporated,
leaving a residue of dry dust.
    Jhoira was distressed to see this, but Malzra crossed to
her and patted her shoulder. "It just shows that the water
retains its fast-time properties. Be patient. The pumps will
do their work. It is a very good design."
    Water flooded up from the pump tubes and rushed out
along the base of the trough. It shimmered and splashed with
preternatural speed, rectangular waves coursing over its
rising surface. The students continued their work at the
cranks. The water level rose. It seemed to be teaming with
fish, so energetic was its surface. It reached the halfway
point along the wall of the reservoir and crept upward. The
crowd around the tank watched in anticipation.
    Malzra stood beside Karn as the gauze-covered blades
began to windmill through the trough. After a complete
revolution of the blades, workers manning the turbine began
cranking. A hot, unnatural wind jetted from one end of the
device, striking wet gauze and sending a thin spray outward.
Wind bore the vapor along, spotting flagstones between the
machine and the alcove where Teferi huddled beneath his
soaked robe. The spray entered the slow-time pit and crept
slowly over him. Those gathered near the shrine strained
forward to make out any movement across the crouched figure-
the shift of wet fabric, the quickening of drip lines. As
the crank teams set up a powerful rhythm, the mist thickened
into a white wall of fog, opaque and dazzling in the
sunlight.
    Jhoira nodded to Malzra.
    He studied the roiling wall of fog before him. It
churned in a dizzy dance, the suspended particles of water
as vital as they had been in the trough.
    "Well, Karn, it seems creature and creator will step
together into this time machine."
    The silver man stared at the turgid mist. "I can precede
you and provide report."
    Malzra flung away the suggestion with a simple shake of
his head. "We go, side by side." With that, the two strode
to the rolling edge of the fog and stepped inside.
    The mist enveloped Karn with sudden force. It felt like
the rush of sea water when he had fallen into it from his
time-travel cone. He could sense the wet flagstones beneath
his feet, but the fog tore over him like a gale. Bracing
himself against the rolling blast, Karn reached a hand
outward to make certain Malzra was beside him. Through the
impenetrable white air, as thick as paint, it was impossible
to see the man. The buffeting wind coursed around something
solid. Karn's hand swayed outward and struck another hand,
reaching. Malzra took hold of the silver man's fingers and
clung tightly.
    The winds slackened. The violent forces tearing along
Karn's armor plating diminished to a washing flood, and then
a gentle caress.
    Malzra's voice sounded pinched, as though he were caught
in a great vise. "The time differential... is leveling ...
off."
    Karn responded easily, "You are having trouble
breathing."
    "I don't need ... to breathe," came the reply. Again the
winds softened. "We should walk. We are nearly ... time
adjusted now. Hours will pass on the outside for every few
minutes we spend ... in here."
    Shoulder to shoulder, they pressed forward, in line with
the sifting fog. Though time in the fog was compacted, space
remained constant. In only five steps, white mist turned to
gray, and they could sense the looming corner behind the
Teferi shrine. The boy himself lay in a barely
distinguishable huddle on the ground. Karn was thankful he
hadn't stepped on him. It might not have mattered. Teferi
didn't appear to move beneath that wet cloak.
    Except that he was panting....
    "Teferi," Malzra said, the old roundness returned to his
voice, "rise. We have come to take you out of here."
    A small shiver moved through the cloak, and a young,
breathless voice emerged, "Who are you? Angels?"
    Malzra laughed, but it was Karn who replied, "It's me,
Teferi. It's Arty Shovelhead. I'm here with Master Malzra."
    The boy tugged the cloak back from his head and stared
into the thick darkness. He could not have seen more than a
pair of towering figures wrapped in dense fog.
    "What is happening? There was a big lightning bolt out
of the clear air, and thunder so loud I couldn't hear it,
and then everything was flying and burning, even me. Once I
could get my feet under me, I ran. Everything was blinding
and boiling hot, and then all of a sudden comes this
darkness and you two."
    "We've come to take you out of here," Malzra repeated.
    The gray cloud around them suddenly dimmed and grew
black. Night had fallen in the world outside. Only the
Glimmer Moon, streaking bright beyond the fog, lit the
niche.
    Feeling a new urgency, Karn reached down, drew off the
cloak, and lifted Teferi by his hand. "Come along. Hurry
now. Jhoira is waiting."
    "Jhoira?" the boy said as he staggered to his feet.
"I'll be glad to see her."
    "Come along."
                           Monologue
    After the first hour of cranking, I moved among the
crowd, organizing the students into teams that took shifts
powering the pumps, windmills, and turbines. If the flow of
fast-time fog had ceased for only a moment, Urza, Karn, and
Teferi could have been torn to shreds on the verge of their
time pit. The teams worked all through the night. I
fortified them with a number of white-mana spells I know.
All the while, Jhoira and I remained beside the machine to
monitor it for stresses and possible breakdown. No crises
came-as Urza had said, it was a good design.
    The real crisis was one of hope. It had occurred to me
after the first hour that Urza and Karn might have been torn
to pieces by the time cloud only moments after entering it.
They might be lying dead just within the wall of steam,
unseeable to us. How long would we keep up our labors? Days?
Weeks? Months? I could tell that these same dark musings
were plaguing Jhoira, though neither of us voiced our
concerns. It was the middle of the next morning before I
overheard these questions muttered among the crank teams. It
had been a weary and sleepless night for all of us-the
fatigue of labor overlaid with the fatigue of welling doubt.
    "How long do we keep this up?" I asked Jhoira quietly
during the blazing afternoon.
    "We keep it up until the machine breaks or the master
and Karn emerge."
    I felt heartened by her words. Here was a woman who had
struggled out of a ten-year coma to design a machine worthy
of Urza himself.
    A quick march up over the hill told me our labors would
soon end. The water in the fast-time rift would not last
into the night.
    I was coming down the slope to report this grave news to
Jhoira when I saw a terrifying sight. The windmills ground
to a halt, the turbines ceased their whining, and the thick,
life-giving wall of fog roiled and dissipated on the wind. I
started to run until I saw Urza, Karn, and Teferi standing
there, having just emerged, alive, from the time pit. The
crowd of students let out a spontaneous whoop and surged up
around the three refugees. I hurried down toward them until
I saw another knot of young folk, clustered quietly around
Jhoira's wheeled cart. In the next moments I reached her
side. Her eyes were shut, her hands limp at her sides, but
blessed breath coursed smoothly in her chest.
    "She stayed awake until they emerged," one of the
students said with quiet reverence, "and then, a moment
later-"
    "Rest, dear girl," I said fondly, stroking the sweaty
hair from her forehead. "Sleep awhile more. We'll wake you
again. We'll always wake you again."

                              - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 11

    Teferi had not adapted well in the months after his
rescue. The explosion had been horrible, of course, and the
fire afterward, but he had been utterly devastated by the
fact that the world and all his former friends were nearly
twenty-five years older. Teams of healers had gingerly
counseled the victim about his ordeal, focusing on his slow-
time isolation.
    "What isolation?" he asked. "I was alone for three
seconds! When you're on fire, you don't care if you're
alone. The fourteen years before the explosion were more
traumatic. Talk about isolation! I had no peers. Every equal
of mine was five years older than me. Now they're almost
three times my age! Jhoira's forty. Malzra's probably five
hundred and forty. What about Teferi? Oh, he's still
fourteen!"
    It was another wound Urza couldn't heal.
    Neither, apparently, could Teferi. After weeks of
counseling, Teferi told the healers to leave. When they
wouldn't, he cast an itching enchantment on them. They
struggled to maintain their decorum but soon were scratching
like a pack of mongrels. They fled.
    Teferi stalked out of the infirmary. He marched across
the finished academy.
    "That wall wasn't here before," he growled, and flung a
spell at it. Green coils of energy leapt from his fingers
and lashed into the grass at the base of the wall. Ivy grew
rampantly up from the ground, overwhelming the limestone
wall. In moments, the redoubt was buried deep beneath a
riling green mound. "Look at these lovely towers." His hand
flung out again. Moss sprouted all along the rooftops of
blue slate and hung down in gray beards.
    Teferi's tantrum began to attract a crowd of students.
Heads popped from behind shutters. Faces appeared in
doorways. Students emerged to follow the tempestuous lad.
They all knew him from the Teferi monument and excitedly
crowded up to see the teenage hermit in action.
    Teferi whirled. "Get out of here. I'm tired of being
stared at! You've had nearly fifteen years! Look at
something else!"
    The students shied back from him, but the moment Teferi
stalked onward, they followed.
    Drawing a deep breath, Teferi bellowed. "Then look at
this!"
    The student robes of Old Tolaria opened obligingly down
their back panel, allowing for various necessary functions-
and this unnecessary one.
    A new generation of students glimpsed Teferi's infamous
"Breech of Etiquette." Many of them turned in disgust.
Others laughed, some even checking to see if their work
suits would allow a similar display.
    Teferi was apparently dissatisfied with this response
and added to his visual display an olfactory one. He cast a
spell that sent a stink cloud through the whole academy. The
crowd shut their mouths and squinted their eyes and ran.
Doors and shutters slammed closed. The community that had
stared at Teferi continuously for over a decade at last
closed their eyes to him.
    And he disappeared.
    Eventually, the squelching cloud dissipated enough that
students and scholars ventured back into the streets.
    Barrin and Malzra were livid, a week-long experiment
ruined. Their anger only deepened when the prankster was
nowhere to be found.
    "Look everywhere," Barrin commanded the students in the
streets. He hissed to Malzra. "We've not saved him from fire
and time only to lose him to stupidity."
    The whole school was mobilized. It seemed they were
being invaded. It was too bad Teferi was gone, for he would
have loved the sight.
    Jhoira emerged into the din. Students and scholars
trooped like army ants through the academy, opening every
door, looking beneath every bed, poking at every curtain and
tapestry. Her brow was creased in consternation.
    "Teferi, where are you hiding?"
    A smile came to her face. It was as though she could
read his mind.

                       *****

    "I knew I would find you here," Jhoira said quietly as
she approached her niche on the western edge of the isle.
    Teferi didn't look up. He sat on a sunny slope of
sandstone and stared out at the glimmering sea. He had come
to this spot once before, ages ago, and discovered Kerrick
and Jhoira trysting within. Teferi's heart must have broken,
but he hadn't betrayed her secret, even in the face of
Malzra's questions.
    Jhoira remembered the time. To her it was ages ago, but
for Teferi, it had been only a matter of months. Ages.
Months. What did they mean on Tolaria? Jhoira herself seemed
little older than in those days. Slow-time water had kept
her outward age around twenty-two, and the coma had left her
seeming younger still. Her inward vision quest had restored
her. It had saved Teferi and her as well. She had discovered
a way to break through the temporal wall that isolated him
and the social wall that had isolated her. They were perhaps
not soul mates, she and Teferi, but they were metaphysical
twins.
    Jhoira eased up to the rock and slid into position
beside him. It was as though she were reenacting that low
moment ages ago, though now Kerrick was gone. It felt right
to sit beside Teferi instead.
    "I'm glad you're here. It's a good place to be, when
you're feeling trapped between Tolaria and the world."
    The muscles along Teferi's jaw clenched. He stared out
to sea.
    "If you have to be alone, it's the best place in the
world."
    "You don't understand," Teferi broke in.
    "Yes, I do," she said. "Yes, I do." She reached a hand
out to him.
    He didn't take it. "We're farther apart than ever. When
you were eighteen, you always told me to grow up. Well,
look, now you're forty, and I still haven't taken your
advice."
    "This is Tolaria," Jhoira said philosophically. "Time
doesn't matter. You'll see. In a few years, we'll be the
same age."
    He heaved an angry breath. "A few years-an eternity, a
horrible eternity."
    "Not so horrible," Jhoira said, "when you've got
friends."
    At long last, he took her hand. "Thanks, Jhoira.
Thanks."

                       *****

    Seven years had passed since Teferi was released from
his temporal prison. In that time, he had at last become a
man-a young man, to be sure, but at twenty-one, he and
Jhoira seemed the same age. She had been partaking of slow-
time water for two decades. Most of the scholars and
students over the age of thirty were also allowed to drink
slow-time water once a year-the frequency required to halt
aging. More frequent drinks caused strange illnesses. Since
no one understood the long-term effects of the stuff, its
use was strictly regulated. Those younger than thirty were
forbidden the drink at all. Teferi, at one point, had to be
reprimanded by Barrin for drinking fast-time water in hopes
of growing up sooner.
    In the seven years that he had been free, young Teferi
had distinguished himself among the pupils and shown a new
maturity. His pranksome nature eventually played itself out,
though he still had a sharp wit and, occasionally, a sharp
tongue.
    Among Teferi's most ingenious innovations was organizing
a squad of "temporal spelunkers"-students interested in
studying the effects of movement into and out of steeper
time gradients. They modified Jhoira's machine to create
longer-lasting artificial bridges into drastic time shifts.
Teferi even pioneered using existing rivers to cross
temporal curtains. By submerging oneself completely in water
and holding a large glass jar of air inverted over one's
head, a spelunker could be carried along by the current and,
cushioned by the water, slowly readjust to a different time.
Through such discoveries, the academy was able to establish
laboratories in moderate fast-time areas, where a month of
experimentation could occur in a week.
    The most visible effect of these accelerated
laboratories was the rapid proliferation of Malzra's falcon
attackers. Their intricate mechanisms were manufactured more
quickly than powerstones could be found. The crystals came
in only sporadic numbers aboard New Tolaria as it made its
rounds from Thran site to Thran site.
    Meanwhile, Malzra had been busy designing another set of
guardians. He took the sensor systems from the guards he had
built for the walls of Old Tolaria and merged them with
various locomotor apparatuses-bipedal structures modeled
after long-legged and fleet-footed emus, preferentially
quadrupedal frames based upon the feline physiology of
panther-warriors, and even octopedal devices made for
ambling over any terrain type and up even the sheerest
surfaces. Each of these devices was armed with specially
designed pincers and blades for piercing Phyrexian flesh, an
array of sight-targeted quarrel launchers, and a core packed
with explosive powder, to be activated when all other
systems are spent and an engaged foe has incapacitated the
sensory or locomotor systems.
    The resulting machines were collectively known as the
Guardian class-a fearful assortment of artifacts. The two-
legged variety were Tolarian runners, capable of great
bounding speeds, their mirrorlike torsos bearing eight
quarrel ports up each side. Where wings would be on emus,
scythe blades emerged to snap together before them. These
artifact creatures were meant to fight on open fields. The
four-legged machines were known as pumas, sleek stalkers
that would patrol the forests from the treetops and drop
soundlessly onto any intruders. Their daggerlike claws could
bear them swiftly up even sheer tree trunks and could take
off a man's head with one swipe, slicing his neck into three
equal disks. These claws sharpened themselves each time they
were withdrawn into the machine's pads. The final type-
eight-legged beasts-were called scorpions, with pincers fore
and aft and the dexterity of any spider. As yet only half a
dozen of each of these beasts existed, but their gleaming
hides and dark, gemstone eyes were enough to frighten even
the older students. Given the need-and given Teferi's fast-
time laboratories- armies of these creatures could be
created in a single year.
    With patrols of runners, pumas, and scorpions on the
ground and flights of falcons in the sky, Malzra felt he
could ensure the safety of his isle. In addition to these
forces, Malzra instructed students on the creation of
ornithopters. Five were currently being built.
    The academy had become an armed fortification, despite
the efforts of Barrin and Jhoira. They had ensured, however,
that it was still a human place. They emphasized learning
and experimentation over arms production and scheduled
celebrations and festivals to help break the tedium of work.
Even so, the black blight of the Phyrexian gorge never went
away, and every tender thing that came into being in the
walls of the new academy did so in the shadow of that horrid
threat.
    Then they found it-the dead Phyrexian lying at the top
of the gorge, having clawed its way up the cliff. It had
used the properties of normal-time river water to help
cushion its passage, climbing a thin waterfall. Even so, the
beast was macerated from the crown of its bony head to the
last spike in its scourgelike tail. The fiend's pink skin
was ripped, revealing mounds of gray muscle over a hulking
skeleton. Its once-long claws had been worn to bloody nubs
in its tortured climb to the top of the chasm. It had passed
through the shredding blades of time and somehow survived to
reach the top. After two hundred years of experimentation
and mutation, the Phyrexians had bred a beast resistant
enough to time change to climb five hundred feet through the
curtain of fast time. In two more generations, they would be
strong enough to escape the gorge and fight. In four more
generations, there would be hundreds of them. With their
fast-time advantages, the Phyrexians could produce four
generations of hybrids in eight years of time outside.
    This was why Malzra planned the Day of Falcons. Even as
he geared up for all-out war, he devised a swift, preemptive
air strike. The attack had two objectives. Minimally, it
would slay Phyrexians, perhaps even the new generations, and
buy time for Malzra to complete his arsenal. Maximally it
could exterminate every last beast in the gorge and thereby
end its threat forever. Barrin approved the plan, which
required no risk to students or scholars and employed the
seven hundred fifty falcon mechanisms already created.
    At long last, the Day of Falcons arrived.

                       *****

    Atop the Giant's Pate, Barrin and Karn watched Malzra
climb into the framework of his newly completed ornithopter.
This command-class mechanism carried remote sensors that
were linked to the prototype runners, pumas, and scorpions
deployed in a circle around the gorge. It also bore a
payload of fifty powder bombs, a complement of sixteen
quarrel ports, and wings capable of being swept back
alongside the main struts to allow for swift diving. From
this aerial command seat, Malzra would monitor and direct
the coming attack.
    Barrin squinted into the bald morning sun. He held his
hand visorlike over his eyes and peered from the Giant's
Pate out toward the edges of the island. Thin tendrils of
red smoke appeared on the western rim of the isle and frayed
out on the sea winds.
    "Jhoira and her three squads have reached the shore and
set up their posts. They are the last of the thirty-eight
launch squads. The falcon fleet is ready to be deployed."
    Urza strapped himself into the command seat. His usual
blue robes were replaced by a charcoal-gray suit replete
with pockets, tool belt, and armor at the shoulders. He wore
boots laced to the knee, and his gemstone eyes were shielded
by a dark crescent of polished obsidian.
    "If this works today, perhaps we can send millions of
these beasts into Phyrexia itself, and not a single
Dominarian will have to fight."
    "What about you?" Barrin asked levelly. "You are a
Dominarian."
    "Don't you ever stop worrying?" Malzra asked. "I will
fly over the gorge, drop my payload of bombs, and rise out
of reach of anything they could hurl my way. It'll be just
like flying over the deserts of the Fallaji. Besides, I'm
only a diversion, a smoke screen to hide the assault."
    "The falcons themselves will hide their own assault.
That's why we're taking the trouble of launching them at the
edge of the island. They'll outrun sound itself in their
dive. The Phyrexians will neither hear or see them until
they are torn apart by them. Your bomb salvo only risks you
and your new ornithopter."
    "We both know I might possibly survive a fall through
the temporal bubble around the Phyrexians-"
    "Could you survive the moments afterward, surrounded by
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the beasts? Planeswalking
cannot save you when the distances are temporal."
    With a snort, Malzra activated the great Thran device.
It shivered to life. Its wings accordioned out and began to
beat. The machine rose, slow and animated, into the skies.
    "This is a battle I must fight and win." Malzra soared
away from the Giant's Pate.
    Just before the wings' whirring drowned out all sound,
Barrin shouted, "There is another battle, a much bigger
battle, you must fight and win."
    Karn watched the machine climb into the sky, beyond the
reach of words. The silver man said, "The crews have
prepared your ornithopter, Mage Master, as you requested.
They included a pay-load of fifty bombs."
    After a long, drawn breath, Barrin said, "I hope I will
not need it. Master Malzra might survive a fall into the
time bubble, but I am quite-" he broke off, as though he
thought better of what he was about to say.
    "You are quite human, yes," Karn agreed, his eyes still
focused on the shrinking ship, "and I have been near him
long enough to know Master Malzra is not."
    The not-human in his not-bird spiraled upward above
their heads in a maneuver designed to catch the attention of
every beast in the gorge-and to signal the falcon crews at
the edge of the isle.

                        *****

    "There's the signal," Jhoira said to herself. She peered
into the rising sun, where Malzra rode in bold spirals.
"He'll start his bombing run any moment." Turning, she
called to her three squad captains, "Falcons ready?"
    "Squad Fifteen ready," replied Teferi, who stood beside
an array of twenty falcon creatures.
    Each bird occupied a small metal launch platform,
anchored by a foot-long spike driven into the wet sand. The
small creatures shimmered in the early light, their metal
pinions folded against their legs, and their eyes glinting
with predatory hunger.
    "Squad Sixteen ready," came the report of its captain.
    "Squad Seventeen ready."
    Jhoira paused a moment, surveying the gleaming rows of
bird creatures, fifteen rows of four each. They and their
six hundred and ninety comrades could well save the isle.
"Loose falcons!"
    Sixty pairs of wings flashed out. Sixty artifact
creatures crouched a moment, gathering themselves to leap
into the air. Then the wind was filled with the sharp slap
of metal wings. The falcons rose in a great glittering
cloud, camouflaged against the silvery work of the sea. The
great rush of them upward, of wings and cogs and seeking
probes, was something horrific.
    Jhoira glimpsed another mass of glimmering wings along
the shore in either direction. In moments, though, even her
own three squads had ceased to be individual birds and
become only a writhing swarm, an amorphous swirling monster,
and then it too was gone, through the ceiling of clouds. All
across the island, there was no more sign of the flocks of
killer raptors.
    "Gods speed you," Jhoira said to the cluttered sky.
"Gods speed you."
    Urza reached the peak of his spiral into the sky. He
folded the wings of his ornithopter back beside the struts.
The nose of the craft lost lift and dropped toward the black
rift below. Urza blinked placidly behind the obsidian
crescent that shaded his gemstone eyes. Wind shrieked over
the triangular wings. The isle rushed up to meet him. Easing
the airfoils outward, he caught lift and corkscrewed low
above the black cleft. The craft leveled into a furious
strafing pass.
    Black ballistae bolts soared out in a spiky forest all
around him.
    Urza triggered the hold, pouring powder bombs down onto
the much-scarred fortification below. Each tumbling
incendiary device plunged into the fast-time envelop and
rushed fiercely to impact. Shrapnel and smoke belched out in
a line below Urza. He banked, soaring away from another
barrage, and stared with delight at the boiling cloud of
destruction. They would not see the doom that rose at the
edges of the island, rose to descend and pierce the walls of
their time prison and slay them.
    Nor did he see the bolt that rose with fiendish speed
and smashed through his port wing and dragged him down into
the Phyrexian pit.
                        *****

    Amid rolling clouds of smoke, shrieks of glee arose.
Every throat and air sac and proboscis in the Phyrexian rent
hooted as the ballistae bolt transfixed Urza Planeswalker's
flying machine. It dragged on the wing. The ornithopter
listed with agonizing slowness. Would the man have time and
sense to planeswalk from the falling wreck? The smoke
thickened, obscuring the view of all beasts below.
    K'rrik surged to the rail of his observation tower and
grasped it. Even as he gripped the metal, he saw one wing of
the machine dip into the fast-time envelop and send rings of
distortion ripping out from it. The sudden inertial change
hurled the rest of the ornithopter, rider and all, into the
gorge. That was all he saw, smoke boiling up to obscure
anything else.
    K'rrik spun to shout down into the riot of dying
Phyrexians and burning buildings, "To the south wall!
Capture the planeswalker!"

                        *****

     Stunned, Barrin and Karn saw the ballistae bolt lunge up
from the black gorge like a darting fish, lance the wing of
Urza's ornithopter, and drag the listing thing down into the
lashing currents of fast time. The flying machine whirled
once, hung up on the surface of the envelop, and then,
before Barrin could send out a saving spell, slid down into
the vast murk of the gorge. Smoke and darkness obscured all
else.
     Barrin turned, darting down the slope of the Giant's
Pate.
     Karn called after him, "Where are you going?"
     "You said my ornithopter was prepped," came the shouted
response, flung over Barrin's shoulder as he ran.
     "What should I do?" Karn asked.
     "Do anything you can, but be quick. Minutes are hours."
     The silver man suddenly wished he had the controls that
would summon the runners, pumas, and scorpions.
     That useless thought was swept away by a sudden
shrieking roar, descending from everywhere and nowhere at
once. Karn had hardly lifted his brow when, from every
corner of the heavens, shooting stars fell in a great
converging ring. The whistle of their flight rattled the
silver plates across Karn's body. With a series of booms
that came so close to each other as to sound like a
ceaseless peal of thunder, the lightning-swift creatures
lanced down the sky.
     They punched through the time ceiling and accelerated to
blinding speed. They seemed to ricochet between the rock
walls of the gorge.
     Do anything you can. The words rang in the resounding
air.
     Karn shifted his silver bulk. He lifted the Viashino
luck charm to his mouth for an awkward kiss, and bolted down
the steep slope of fallen trees between the Giant's Pate and
the gorge. In clumsy moments, he reached the black lip of
the space. Without pause or thought, he hurled himself
within.
                       *****

    It happened too quickly, the impossible ballistae bolt
through the wing, the sudden unresponsive stick, the listing
turn, the tug of fast time, yanking Urza and his machine
down into the envelope. Before he could think to planeswalk,
he was immersed in the vast, churning field of the gorge.
Then all of thought and will and power were channeled into
holding himself together against rending, dispersing
distortion.
    His hands turned to protoplasmic mush. His feet
evaporated. The wave of destruction clambered up his limbs,
to knees and elbows, hips and shoulders, until heart and
head both were melting into air. The temporal field tore not
merely particle from particle, but wave from wave. The core
of his being dissolved. Urza had to think his body and mind
and soul, had to plan them and stare at the immutable design
of them to force chaos back into order. Again and again, he
resolved himself, red clouds of pulverized meat accreting
into the figure lashed in the ornithopter's seat. All the
while, the ruined bird-machine and the ruined man wrangled
in a tangle between worlds of light and darkness.
    Suddenly he was free and falling. The last angry
torrents of flesh recombined, and he plummeted. The air was
dark and dank and foul. The scent of glistening oil was
overwhelming. Sulfur smoke roiled from the bombs he himself
had just dropped, and beneath those ropy columns, armies of
monsters converged. They slithered in gray-skinned masses,
slime and bone and horn, clambering over each other like
swarming roaches.
    Urza fell.
    There was not enough strength left to planeswalk. Even
if there were, his powers would not allow him to step
through the gates of time. There were spells, though.
    With a weary thought, Urza cast a flying enchantment on
himself and stopped his descent. Ragged, panting if only as
a reminder of the physical form he cast, Urza hung for a
moment in midair. With another effort of will, he began to
rise toward the surface of the gorge. It was like ascending
through great pressurized depths toward the air and light
above.
    The first ballista bolt was a surprise, ripping through
his liver and tearing out his right lung before pulverizing
his sternum and snagging in his rib cage. Pain was a
sensation like any other, useful for orienting him in his
physical form, but this screaming, hopeless pain shattered
his concentration for a moment. He shut off the claxon of
agony, reshaped his body with a thought, letting flesh
shrink away from the shaft until the bolt tumbled free. He
grew a new liver and lung from the pulverized muck of the
old ones.
    But this was work, and it distracted him a few moments.
He fell again. The air rushing up around him was a flashing
mass of smoke, oil-reek, and black shafts. Two more bolts
pinioned him in his plummet. By the time they, too, were out
and the organs they had skewered were regrown, Urza
Planeswalker came splashing down in five feet of foul water.
    From a nearby causeway of carved basalt, hordes of
gibbering monsters-star-shaped eyes and great shags of
barbed hair and curved claws and teeth indistinguishable
from each other in their scythelike savagery-hurled
themselves into the water. The horrid splashing of their
deformed figures seemed the slap of shark tails in frenzy.
In moments, Phyrexians surrounded Urza and rushed in, biting
great chunks from him.
    He thrashed against them. Lightning roared out from his
hands beneath the water. Phyrexians died in scores, but more
came.
    Whenever he fought free of them and began to rise
through the air, arrows and ballista bolts ran him through,
and he sank again into the churning flood.
    They would not kill him, though they could. They would
only harry him until every sorcery was spent, every last
trick gone to the graveyard, then they would net him like
one of their scavenger fish and haul him up to be flayed
alive by the man standing there on that smoke-wreathed
bridge.
    K'rrik.

                       *****

    K'rrik's vast host gathered in the arena at the center
of the city. It was an elevated circle of black basalt,
carved out like a giant funnel, rings of balconies and seats
converging on the small, central platform. Though used most
often for gladiatorial contests-many of which featured
K'rrik himself-the central space was not bounded by any
rails, walls, or gates that might contain the warriors.
Battles began on this stage but ranged the whole arena.
Competitors were not only expected but encouraged to use the
topography, weaponry, and even citizenry of the arena in
their fight. The outer rim of the stadium was lined with a
variety of barbed and spiked weapons provided by the state-
bone, stone, and horn, but of course no iron. To get a metal
weapon, a gladiator would have to wrest it from the claws of
a spectator. Often obnoxious crowd members lost arms or
tails, taken up as makeshift cudgels and whips, and
sometimes smaller beasts were used whole.
    It was not a gladiatorial battle scheduled today,
though. This crowd had assembled for a state execution. They
still brought their weapons in hopes that they might get a
chance to join in the fun.
    In the center of the arena, Urza Planeswalker hung,
lashed to a much-scarred column of obsidian. The pillar was
traditionally used to execute traitors, who were mauled to
death by gibbering horrors. With Urza, the mauling hordes
were needed to keep him weak and defenseless while K'rrik
flaunted his new prize. The largest of his three
executioners was little more than a massive fist of flesh,
with two tiny eyes positioned under a pair of jagged
pincers. At intervals, the beast lunged in and eviscerated
Urza, dragging his steaming entrails onto the polished
basalt. The other two beasts were jackal-headed spiders,
waiting to leap in should Urza overpower the other killer.
    K'rrik paced before the knot of them, hissing with
laughter. Though given to excited ovations whenever the
planeswalker was assaulted, the gathered throng of beasts
was otherwise silent, straining to hear every word of their
ruler, their god. He spoke to them not in the dulcet tones
he had used to ply Jhoira all those years ago. He spoke to
them in no human language at all, but rather in the
growling, crackling tongue of Phyrexia.
    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.
     Urza had descended once before this way, returning to
the ancient, ruined wasteland where he and Mishra had first
discovered the Thran site of Koilos. That landscape, blasted
by a force that sank continents and brought a millennium of
winter to the world, could not have been more tortured than
this one.
     Backlit mountains jutted in a devilish ring against the
sooty horizon. At their tilted tops, steamy lakes glowed
evilly in haloes of brimstone. Twisted piles of rock slumped
down the sides of these silent sentinels, and rivers of
stone pulsed and glowed like arteries. Among them, black
courses formed networks of cool veins. Black and red alike,
the rivers plunged into a great steaming ocean of bubbling
lava, beside which sat twisted columns of stone like
dejected statues. The magma vented gasses in mile high jets,
rock-spitting coronas, and foamy, belching chunks that
sizzled nastily along the shore.
     Urza descended. He landed atop a knob of stone that
overhung this seething sea of fire. Beneath his feet, the
rock was maroon and warm and rumpled, like a glob of blood
pudding. All around him, the air was hot and thick with
noxious fumes. Urza breathed and reminded himself what a
good thing it was to be immortal.
     He lifted his gaze. There, above him, magnificent in the
dead glare of the place and the roiling gloom of the sky,
was what he had come to see: the mana rig.
     It crouched on a massif of basalt, vulturelike on broad
talons of stone and cast clay. These talons ended in myriad
claws that reached in a webwork down the rock face to the
boiling caldera below. The extrusion looked like a gigantic
heart, and once it functioned that way. In ancient time, the
tubes that crisscrossed it drew lava up from the boiling pit
and pumped it into the immense facility above.
     The rig was a thing to behold. At either end of it, a
pair of bowl-shaped heat shields each held aloft a great
city. One, tucked back from the ocean of fire, was an
ancient monastery, its conic temples and towers stacked in a
decorous hive into the sky. The other, hanging out over the
brimstone sea, was a colossal forge of Thran design. It was
here that the incredibly hard Thran metal had come from.
Urza had arrived in Shiv to explore this site. Between the
two cities extended a long storage and production facility
with high, cathedral-like walls and tapered archways. In
that spot, Urza would begin to assemble the weapon that
would turn back the Phyrexians forever.
    Jagged script crawled along the base of the bowl-shaped
heat shields. Within the structure would be more script,
perhaps undisturbed libraries of it. The rooms and halls,
the mechanisms and walls themselves would be chronicles in
metal and stone of the minds of the builders. He would learn
to forge Thran metal, yes, but more, he would plumb secrets
of the greatest artificers the world had ever known-secrets
that had made them into the very enemies he now faced.
    Urza strode from the warm shoulder of stone, making his
way past ropy lines of cooled magma. His gemstone eyes
scanned the eroded edges of the volcano. He would have to
circle north and east, past a giant steaming fissure and a
pair of twin cliffs washed by tides of superheated rock. It
would be a five-mile walk to reach a structure one mile
away-an uncomfortable walk. He was immune to the destruction
of fire and poison but not inured to the pain they would
cause.
    To his clothing, Urza imagined a silver-gilt wrap that
flung back the red heat assailing him on all sides. The wrap
took form, and he felt his other clothes cool and sigh,
venting heat. A veil of fine-ringed metal mesh assembled
itself before his face. Thus garbed, Urza climbed the
difficult mountain passes.
    Of course, he could simply have wished himself into the
structure, but to walk a land was to know it. Geography
would force him to trace the same paths as generations of
others, perhaps as the Thran themselves. He would approach
the rig as they had, would see it the way they had. It was
much like holding a book upright when learning to read,
though it is perfectly possible to read upside down and
backward.
    Already the alien script of this place was beginning to
resolve into meaningful words. There were trails here-broad,
smooth, patient trails. The stone over which they ran was
etched with claw marks. Paths led to various prominent
points-lookout posts. If they were currently manned, Urza
could see no sign of it. Whoever used these trails moved in
the open and at a measured pace. They were man-sized
creatures. They ruled this place and routinely defended it.
Urza lifted the pendant about his neck and stared at the
robed lizard dangling there.
    Other creatures frequented the hillsides too. They had
made various rank nests beneath tilted stones and within
lava tubes. Though hidden from sight, these spots reeked of
furtive movements, worry, and quick death. Spies. Some of
the sites were burned out from within. The bones of their
inhabitants lay in ruin at their entrances in warning to
others. Other spots, invisible to mortal eyes but plain to
Urza's all-seeing gaze, were yet occupied. Tiny eyes
gleamed, rat-like and blinking, beneath dark brows of stone.
    Goblins. Urza smiled gently. Poor, wretched monsters,
vermin more accursed than rats. Once he had taken hold of
the facility, he could bring a few dozen scorpion engines to
clear out the infestation.
    Until then, he had a long walk. Unless a goblin emerged
to bar his way-and descending from the clouds had probably
done much to convince all watchers to merely watch-Urza
would not engage any of the beasts.
    He entered a vast defile and wandered the length of it.
In black-eyed cave mouths, goblins crouched. They whispered
to each other and blinked in resentful appraisal but did not
emerge. Urza's instinctual mind marked their positions while
his higher mind analyzed the structure that hung overhead.
    A third part of his psyche roamed a different defile,
one glimpsed long years before. In it, two vast armies
engaged in a death match. Urza had believed the vision to
show the Thran driving the Phyrexians from the world. It
took him millennia to realize the Thran had willingly become
the Phyrexians, that Mishra had willingly transformed
himself too. Only in that bitter realization had Urza begun
to regain his sanity, to recognize the enemy in himself.
    Something emerged from the lip of stone at the mouth of
the defile. Many somethings. Their rust-red robes melded so
naturally with the cliff sides that Urza had not seen them
until they were rising from every crevice and steam vent
across the stone. They moved with a silent, sinewy grace.
Some slid out on all fours, clutching the ground with four-
clawed hands and feet. Others strode out on hind legs and
brandished thin, wickedly barbed polearms. They posted
themselves in Urza's path and planted muscular tails behind
them. The nearest ones drew back mottled hoods from their
heads. They were reptiles, lizard men, with short, toothy
snouts, small, bright eyes, and craggy skulls. Their scaly
skin gleamed gray-green and red in the fiery light of the
caldera.
    Jhoira had called them Viashino.
    The largest Viashino in the party of thirty-some
approached Urza. It held its hook-edged polearm out before
it. The creature glared into the planeswalker's eyes.
Slivered pupils stared, unblinking. There was intelligence
in that alien gaze, but also fear and resentment. It hissed
angrily.
    Urza's mind scrolled through all the languages he had
learned in three millennia, many of them only written, never
spoken. This tongue was not among the ones he had heard
before, but for Urza to know a language was only for him to
breathe it in.
    "Ghitu are forbidden this high," the lead creature
hissed.
    To understand an alien language was one thing; to frame
a response in it was something else. Urza wondered if he
should have brought Jhoira with him as a native liaison. He
could planeswalk and snatch her up even now, but the rattle
of polearm butts on volcanic scree convinced him not to
endanger her. He kept his constructions simple.
    "Do I look Ghitu?"
    "Who are you, then?"
    "I am Malzra of Tolaria. I have come to see the rig."
    "It is forbidden."
    "I must see the rig. You cannot stop me."
    "Perhaps I cannot," the warrior said, his eyes glinting
like metal, "but our champion can."
    From the rear ranks of the Viashino, eight lizard men
emerged- not eight, but one the size of eight. It was not a
Viashino, though, but a young Shivan drake. The massive
creature slithered forward on hands and feet, tail lashing
viciously behind it. A predatory grin drew black jowls back
from rows of daggerlike teeth. The thing's eyes were small
and keen beneath horned brows. Scaly spikes rose across its
shoulders. In place of the robes of the others, this brute
wore a leather harness, as though it were often used to haul
heavy machinery.
    No dumb beast, though, the drake reared up and snorted,
"I am Rhammidarigaaz, champion of the Viashino. Feeling so
arrogant now?"
    Urza tilted his head in admission. Were he a mere man,
he would be terrified at the prospects of battle, but Urza
could sidestep the fastest blows of this creature, could
shock him mercilessly until he fell dead, could enervate him
so he could not attack, could summon armies of artifact
creatures to swarm the hillside and dismantle these
creatures. Subtlety in dealing with such creatures was a
lesson hard learned over the last few thousand years. It was
not fear that informed his next actions, but a concern that
he not reveal too much about his powers-just yet.
    "Arrogant? No. Confident? Yes." Urza waved the monster
forward.
    Rhammidarigaaz came on. The shouldering might of the
drake was like a mountain moving. Urza did not flinch away.
Without changing appearance, his robes hardened into armor
that would bend only when he willed it to. The creature
clutched him in one massive claw, nails clamping down. Urza
did not struggle. Rhammidarigaaz hoisted him into the air
and snorted hot breath over him.
    It regarded the unmoving man. "Shall I bear you to the
dungeons or kill you now?"
    "You will let me go," Urza replied placidly, "and take
me to your king."
    "Our bey does not entertain vagrants," Rhammidarigaaz
sneered, "and I cannot let you go. You have seen our
homeland. You will remain our captive or die."
    "I foresee a different future."
    The beast clenched its claw. Urza's robes crumpled in
slowly around him, but he gave no gasp of pain. The Viashino
watched in awe, half-expecting blood to rim the man's eyes
and lips.
    Instead, Urza repeated his request. "Release me, and
take me to your bey."
    Enraged, Rhammidarigaaz opened his jaws in a roar and
lifted Urza into the gap. Teeth dripped hot saliva across
his head. The monster shoved him inward.
    As placid as ever, Urza reached up into the drooling
jowls of the thing. One hand clutched a great, slimy tooth
above him, and the other a tooth below. He flexed his
shoulders.
    The drake's jaw distended. Like a dog with a stick
rammed in its mouth, Rhammidarigaaz gagged and rolled his
head. He hissed a cloud of acidic breath. Lizard-men
scattered, but the man in the maw did not relent.
Rhammidarigaaz tried to clamp his jaws together. A great
clacking sound answered. He howled with pain. Yanking Urza
from his mouth, he hurled the man to the ground. The beast
clutched one jowl with a twitching claw.
    Urza rolled across the volcanic dirt and rose to his
feet. He clutched in his hand a dripping drake tooth.
    "Now you will take me to your bey." Urza's gaze brooked
no discussion.
    Rhammidarigaaz dropped the claw from his mouth. Scaly
hackles bristled across arched shoulders. Hot plumes of
death jetted from his nostrils. Twin flames swept over Urza.
    He stood in their midst. Poison and pulverized rock
sluiced past him. In moments, he was lost in the dense
blaze.
    The Viashino who had fled once did so again, backing
farther from the battle. Rhammidarigaaz vented his fury
until lungs were flat and throat was raw. In the aftermath
of rolling smoke, there was no sign of the invader.
    Lizard men ventured timidly from the rills where they
had sheltered. A purring growl that must have been laughter
circulated among the creatures.
    As if stepping around a corner in space, Urza suddenly
appeared. The gory dragon tooth still hung in his grasp.
    "Enough bravado. Now take me to the bey."
    Rage blossomed blood-red in the drake's eyes. His claws
sank deep into the volcanic earth. Its haunches gathered to
spring. Jaw dropping wide, Rhammidarigaaz lunged through air
to swallow Urza whole.
    The planeswalker grimaced. With an offhand gesture, he
flung an arc of magic across the beast.
    He transformed into stone. Rhammidarigaaz, the champion
of the Viashino, became a statue frozen in terrific motion.
He seemed even more massive and fearsome in that aspect. His
jaws gaped wide. His eyes glared blindly. His whole figure
was caught in the act of a leap he would never finish.
    Urza shrugged. The pulpy tooth waggled in his hand.
"Well, now instead of a champion, you have a gargoyle." His
voice grew steely. "Take me to the bey."
    Though none of the Viashino warriors approached, the
largest called out from the lee of a nearby boulder. "No. If
this is what you do to our champion, what will you do to our
bey?"
    It seemed a reasonable observation, and thus, by
extension, these could be reasonable lizard men.
    Urza approached the drake statue. He took a few visual
measurements. Positioning himself carefully out of the line
of charge, Urza set the drake's tooth back into the spot it
had occupied. It no sooner touched the creature than it
fused to his mouth. Urza took a step back. Next moment, the
dragon's stony semblance fell away.
    Rhammidarigaaz vaulted in his attack. He soared past
Urza and crashed to the ground before a pile of cooled
magma. His toppling bulk shattered the stone bulwark. Chunks
of rock bounded out. Viashino scattered farther. The drake's
tail lashed the ground. He rolled twice and fetched up
against a rocky knob. There he lay, miserable, a twisted
mess of wing and claw and scale.
    Urza gazed bemusedly at the creature. He addressed all
the lizard men. "I could go to the bey without you to guide
me, but there may be more mayhem."
    The drake rose. He probed his jawline and gasped out
wonderingly. "My tooth. It's back!"
    "I can kill, or I can heal," Urza said plainly. "You
decide."
    Viashino and drake exchanged sullen glances. The leader
of the lizard men nodded meaningfully to their champion.
    "I r-regret my actions," Rhammidarigaaz stammered
resentfully. "Violence is not the way."
    "All is forgiven. This is a lesson I took years to learn
as well," Urza said. He gestured up the trail toward the
mana rig. "Shall we proceed?"
    With a wounded bow-not quite courtly but not quite
mocking, the drake led Urza up the path. Viashino warriors
fell in line behind them.

                       *****

    Jhoira stood in the east forest guard post along the
path from the academy to the harbor. It was a small, remote
tower, provisioned for three guards with a single cot to
allow a sleeping shift. Tonight the battlements and the
short length of wall were manned by only two, but Karn did
not need to sleep. He stood below, beside the locked iron
gate, and watched through an arrow loop in a curved section
of wall. Nothing would get past him. Nothing ever did.
    One end of the wall verged on a deep fast-time rift
where a contingent of eighty runners and scorpions were
stationed. Anything living would be slain by the temporal
curtain, and anything unliving would be swarmed by the
academy's machines. The Glimmer Moon shimmered from their
silvery shoulders and watchful optics. On the other end of
the wall was a steep cliff at the edge of Angelwood. The
puma patrols would slay any monsters moving through the
forest and the falcons any moving through the air beyond.
    It had been ten years since Jhoira had lounged away the
day in one of the warm pools of Angelwood. She looked no
older outwardly, but inwardly she felt ancient. The slow-
time water that sustained her and all the older scholars and
students preserved her body, but her spirit was no longer
that of a child. She had been on her vision quest. She had
learned how to "break through"-not merely to save Teferi
from his isolation, but to save herself as well. She had
found not a soul mate but a spiritual twin and had found
that she had discovered her destiny. It was not a life of
bright seas and distant shores, though. It was a life of
Phyrexians, forever bubbling out of K'rrik's dark kingdom.
    Tonight would be no exception.
    "All clear down there, Karn?" Jhoira asked, pacing the
top of the rampart.
    "All clear, Jhoira," came the response in a voice like
distant thunder.
    "We have a full complement of runners tonight?"
    "Yes," he replied quietly.
    Jhoira sighed. Karn was not much of a conversationalist
while he was on watch. Her education complete, the academy
built, and her post among the scholars secure, Jhoira had
had her fill of lectures and demonstrations, experiments and
designs. She could have used a little conversation.
    "How many negators do you think we will see tonight?"
    "The average number at this location is one for every
watch of the day and three for every watch of the night,"
Karn noted.
    "That number might change now that Malzra is gone-gone
to Shiv," Jhoira said sadly. "I don't know if I would even
recognize the place. I was eleven when I left it. That was
over forty years ago."
    She shook her head, picking up a chip of stone from the
top of the battlements and hurling it off into the forest.
The stone ricocheted off a pair of trees, sending a deep and
mournful echo through Angelwood.
    "I'll probably never see the place again."
    "Malzra said that he'd be back to collect you, once he
had prepared the way," Karn noted.
    "By the time he's done that, I certainly won't recognize
the place," muttered Jhoira bitterly. "The Viashino and
goblins will be massacred, the drakes will be enslaved, and
the mountains will be leveled into fields of glass."
    Over the years, Karn had developed a nascent sense of
humor that relied heavily on irony: "You have great faith in
Master Malzra."
    "Master Malzra? Do you know who Master Malzra is? He's
Urza Planeswalker! He's caused every great disaster in the
last three thousand years."
    "Yes, I know," Karn said quietly. "I overheard Barrin
and Urza on numerous occasions when they thought I was
deactivated."
    Jhoira growled, tossing her hands into the air and
staring daggers at the silvery figure below. "You might have
mentioned it."
    "Urza seemed to want it kept secret."
    "Didn't it shock you? Didn't it seem impossible for the
man to be a three-thousand-year-old legend?"
    Karn's silvery head shook slowly. "I am a man made of
silver. My best friend is a Ghitu genius who is fifty years
old but looks twenty. I dwell on an island where a day might
pass in minutes or years. No, Malzra's real identity didn't
shock me."
    "Aren't you outraged? Here's a man solely responsible
for every wicked thing that has happened to our world. He
makes messes and leaves-"
    "He has given Barrin a beacon," Karn said.
    Jhoira's rant was caught for a moment short. "He what?"
    "Barrin has a beacon, a jewel-handled dagger that is
magically linked to a pendant around Urza's neck. Barrin can
summon him at a moment's notice should the war turn
suddenly. He can appear as quickly as the island's native
defenders."
    Jhoira shook her head. "You're defending him. Don't you
see? Urza should have stayed here until the Phyrexians were
no longer a threat. He's the reason the Phyrexians are here
at all-"
    "We are the reason the Phyrexians are here," corrected
Karn. "You and I are the reason K'rrik is here. Urza might
have been the reason they came, but we are the reason K'rrik
got in. It's up to all of us to get rid of them."
    Even as these words sank in, Jhoira glimpsed, in the
deep distance, the movement of something vast and
multilegged, scuttling like a giant flea. Karn struck the
alarm.
    A contingent of five runners darted emulike from the
fast-time rent beside the wall. They loped forward along the
trail. Their legs ratcheted in the darkness.
    The distant monster wheeled about, retreating.
    In moments the runners closed in. They flashed silver in
the light of the Glimmer Moon. The small snap of quarrel
rounds rattled though the forest night.
    The Phyrexian shrieked but turned. It was small and
fiendish between the solemn trees.
    The scything sound of the runners' scimitars ended in
five pairs of meaty thuds. One by one, their internal
charges went off. Hunks of meat and blood and mechanism
leapt up into the air. In moments, there was only smoke and
the tangle of legs, monster and machine.
    "We brought K'rrik here, Jhoira," Karn repeated in the
drifting silence.
    "Yes," she agreed, "and we need to get rid of him."

                       *****

    "Yes, Majesty," Urza said graciously as he bowed before
the lizard lord, "I am a planeswalker. I, and all Dominaria,
need your forge."
    Urza made a broad gesture, taking in the high hall, its
rings of balconies, and its conic vault. He had seen much of
the ancient facility on his way in-the coke chambers and
blast furnaces, the mold rooms and rollers, the ancient
gear-work and chain drives. He had seen enough to know that
the forge was capable of producing far more than trinkets-if
it was given over into the right hands.
    The bey was an elder Viashino. A gray-grizzled wattle
hung at his neck, and a bright red crest topped his head.
Robed in purple, Bey Fire Eye stood at an ornate rail, the
equivalent of a throne for a species with neither the
physiology nor the need to sit. The rail was carved from one
wall of a giant piston chamber. The circular space had
become a pulpit, protected from attack on three sides. Its
symbolism was clear-whoever stood within the ancient piston
chamber embodied the power of the arcane machinery all
around. Fire Eye exuded that power. His eyes were small and
implacable as they moved across the gathered throng in his
audience chamber. He glowered especially at the young drake
who had been sent out to best Urza.
    At last, Fire Eye spoke, "What would you build with this
forge?"
    Urza blinked, taken aback a moment. "Machines. Living
machines, like this one." He reached out into empty space,
and in his hand appeared a large sheet of paper-the plan of
the silver man, Karn-and spread it on the floor before the
bey. "Men like this. I will make them from your metal. I
will make them to defend our world."
    The bey stared for some time at the plans before hissing
out his response. "This machine will work?"
    "I will show you, yes," Urza said emphatically. "I will
bring a prototype made of metal. An old model-too soft. You
will see. He works well."
    Again, the silence. Urza was not accustomed to waiting
for the decisions of others, but he needed these creatures.
They knew more about the rig than any other beings on the
planet. They knew the secrets of making Thran metal.
    At last, the bey spoke again, "You may make your metal
men with our forge-on two conditions."
    "Yes?" prompted Urza.
    "First, there is a certain ancient enemy of ours-"
    "The goblins?" Urza guessed.
    "No. The goblins are a menace, yes, but our patrols are
more than able to dispatch them. The enemy I speak of is the
fire drake Gherridarigaaz, mother of our champion. She has
plagued us since her son joined us," the bey said. "You must
halt her attacks."
    "It will be done," Urza replied, "and the other
condition?"
    "Second, grant us as our property into perpetuity the
prototype creature you speak of."
    Urza stared a long while at the lizard lord, sitting
there enthroned on the massive piston. His gemstone eyes
lifted, searching the darksome balconies above, as though an
answer would lie there. "It is quite a sacrifice you ask."
    The bey nodded placidly. "Among our people, sacrifice
for the tribe is the highest honor."
    There was wisdom in this saying. Urza thought of all the
sacrifices in this war so far. As always, the Phyrexian
threat came screaming back to the fore of his mind.
    "Yes," said Urza Planeswalker, "you may have him."
                          Monologue
    With Urza gone, things are quiet here at the academy. We
have had the usual Phyrexian incursions on the borders. They
are only tests, of course, and by killing off each of these
beasts, we are only helping K'rrik perfect his invasion
force for the day when they will all come across. But, for
now, we are safe, and we build more machines.
    I can only wonder what Urza is doing on the other side
of the world. I can only hope that the lessons he has
learned here at Tolaria have made him more human again.
Human or inhuman, I pray he succeeds. Otherwise, we are all
doomed.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 13

    The line of Tolarian runners darted across the grove,
their long legs flashing like swords. Sunlight slanted
through the forests to either side. The lead machine coursed
along a deer path, mounted a gentle slope, and emerged onto
the crest of a summit where it paused. The others loped up
alongside the it. Hydraulics whined as the machines turned,
surveying the plains below.
    At the far end of the fields, Angelwood bristled with
moving figures-Phyrexians. Fangs and claws and barbed tails
flashed among the tree boles and undergrowth. Skin as pale
as bone gleamed sickly. Leathery folds of hide, knobby
shoulders, jagged scales, barbed manes, and eyes like
slivers of midnight... they were monsters of mutation. Now
some of the scavenged bits of metal from fallen falcons and
runners and pumas were making their way into the beasts'
bodies. Not merely war armor, not merely body weaponry,
these hunks of metal were badges of violent valor. They were
kill trophies, recovered from fallen machines.
    On the fields ahead, metal troops gathered to oppose
these monsters. Runners in their hundreds flooded onto the
belly of the land. Pumas bounded down from treetop glades
and stalked through the tall grasses that verged on the
Angelwood. A large phalanx of scorpions filled out the
center of the army.
    The runners on the summit creaked and moved aside,
making room for a new arrival. A large runner, fitted out
with saddle and control panel, vaulted into the cleared
space. Its rider stood up in the saddle and lifted an olive
hand to her brow, peering out across the battle.
    "Karn, get up here," the rider called over her shoulder.
    A gleaming figure labored up the deer path behind her
and stomped to a standstill.
    "I am not built for speed, Jhoira," the golem said
simply.
    Ignoring the comment, Jhoira said, "The main body is
coming straight through Angelwood, as the falcon watchers
reported. They must have mined their way into the cave
complex on the southern edge of the forest. It's just as
well. Angelwood is a mild time slough. While most of our
forces stop the advance, we'll be able to move through the
forest eaves and reach the cave mouth where they are
emerging. We'll cut off the advance and then hammer them
from the rear."
    "How will six runners, a young woman, and a silver golem
stop an army of Phyrexians?" Karn asked, his metal frame
whining in doubt.
    Jhoira flashed a smile over her shoulder and sent her
runner bounding down the slope ahead. "You'll see."
    The other runners followed. They were fleet-footed,
striding like ostriches. Their three-pronged feet scrambled
across the shifting stones as they half-slid, half-ran from
the hillside into the verges of the forest. They wove their
way among great black boles and crashed through damp
undergrowth. To one side, the dark dome of the Phyrexian
gorge hulked. To the other, Angelwood glowed, infested with
hundreds of slow-moving, shambling monsters. Ahead lay a
mossy mound of stone. It was a volcanic extrusion, a wound
in the earth, riddled with caves. It was through those
thousand catacombs that the demonic troops had emerged into
the forest.
    Jhoira directed her mount up the ancient rill and into
the slow time of Angelwood. She charged up the mounded pile
of stone, knowing even then that fiend hordes moved through
the caverns beneath her. The other five runners bounded up
behind her. Karn toiled in silvery languor at the forest's
edge. Jhoira's runner leapt up a knob of stone and scrambled
across it to the other side. Before them loomed a sheer drop
into the mouth of the main cave. Jhoira halted. The five
other runners bounded into position beside her, their legs
whining in complaint.
    From the mossy cave mouth emerged a steady stream of
Phyrexians, ambling four abreast into the hot undergrowth.
The monstrous column fed the army massing on the plains. The
tide could be stemmed right here.
    Wishing Karn were faster, Jhoira wrangled her mount up
beside a leaning boulder and drove the machine against it.
Servos realigned, and the main thrusters of the modified
runner flexed. The great stone grated heavily in its cradle.
It tilted. Sand sifted from beneath it and rained down over
the cave mouth. With one more shove, the runner sent the
stone over. Jhoira frantically brought her mount back
beneath her. It regained its balance on the verge of the
cliff.
    The boulder rolled out, tumbled for a moment in massive
silence in midair, and smashed down atop a trio of hulking
Phyrexians. The stone split like a peeled orange. Golden
oil-blood, shattered bone, and pulped muscle mixed with
stone shards and sand. The column of monsters behind the
site drew reflexively back into the cave. They bunched up at
the head of the army. It was now or never.
    Jhoira rode her runner over the edge of the cliff. It
came to ground on the oily ruin of the boulder and the
beasts. Beside it, five other runners dropped. They landed
on wheezing legs and pivoted. Crossbow bolts, sixteen from
each runner, pelted into the Phyrexians massed in the cave.
The ninety-six shafts struck and stuck in meat and bone. The
vanguard of the Phyrexian line crumpled, and those behind
withdrew a few paces more. It was enough.
    Jhoira led the charge into the cave with her runner. It
clambered over rock shards and the bodies of Phyrexians. The
five others followed. She drew the slim sword that rode at
her waist and brought it slicing down through the carapaced
head of a negator. It gurgled
    but flung out its massive arms to drag her down. Leaving
the blade in the thing's head, Jhoira vaulted from the
saddle. Her mount charged on, out from under her, and swung
its scythe blades to engage the fiend. To either side of it,
the other runners latched onto their quarry. Ten blades
swept out and caught five beasts.
    Jhoira, meanwhile, ran toward the cave mouth. It would
take only moments before the self-destruct mechanisms
activated....
    The first, biggest blast came from her own mount. It
macerated the beast that it held and sent Jhoira's sword
flinging up into the ceiling of the cave. Bits of gore
spattered the walls. The blast threw Jhoira free. She
crashed among dewy leaves as the other five bombs ignited.
    Fire and smoke, bone and stone, waves of belching sulfur
... with a great, roaring rumble, the top of the cave went
to pieces. It collapsed, slowly and magnificently, across
the army of fiends, mashing them. Rubble sealed the
passageway, mortaring it with glistening oil. The shattered
hillside slumped downward in a vast landslide, and like a
figure out of a dream, the silver man solemnly rode that
slide down to ground.
    He clambered from among the tumbled stones and charged
to Jhoira's side, drawing her up in concern. "Are you all
right?"
    The woman smiled tightly, bloody scrapes across her
face. "Well, we sealed off the advance."
    Karn raised his head and stared warily into the forest.
    Many of the lumbering monsters that had emerged ahead of
the blast had turned at the sound of it. They converged in a
fierce semicircle on the silver man and his friend.
    "Yes, we sealed off the advance. Now we can attack them
from behind like you said."
    Jhoira staggered weakly to her feet and saw the
approaching hordes. She sighed in resignation. "I don't
imagine you could pick me up and outrun them-"
    "I'm not built for speed," Karn answered sensibly.
    A solemn nod was Jhoira's reply. "We didn't get rid of
K'rrik, you know."
    Karn seemed to consider. "We fought. That is all anyone
could expect."
    Jhoira looked up sadly at the golem and saw, reflected
in his silvery hide, the hundred fiends tightening their
circle. Some had teeth as long as swords. Others clawed
their way forward on limbs as gnarled, strong, and numerous
as mangrove roots. Lupine heads and barbed hackles, coiled
stingers and bone-studded jaws, naked haunches and cloven
hooves, pulsing poison sacs and pulsing brain sacs....
    "It has been a pleasure being your friend, Jhoira of the
Ghitu," Karn said with elaborate solemnity.
    She smiled brightly. "If I have to die-and all of us
have to-I am glad I die beside you."
    With a ululating cry, the monsters rushed in upon the
pair. A forest of fangs and claws and stingers converged.
Karn shielded Jhoira with his silver bulk.
    There was only shrieking and blood and limbs flung
outward to thrash the trees. Amid talons and teeth came blue
flares of magic. Some coalesced into dagger swarms that
buzzed like bees through the melee. Others spattered eyes
and woke in them cannibal rage. Still others melted tooth
and bone into chalky pools. Growls and gurgling. Blood and
burning. Death and dismemberment. In moments, the furious
carnage spent itself. The forest grew still again.
    Karn turned, confused. Jhoira emerged from the haven of
his arms. There was someone else beside them suddenly, a
blue-robed man with gray-brown hair. He brushed his hands
together as though he had just closed a rather dusty door
and then withdrew his fingers into sleeves designed for
spell battle.
    "Ah, here you are," Barrin said matter-of-factly. "The
main battle is going well. When I heard the explosion here,
I thought it must have been the work of you two."
    Jhoira breathlessly surveyed the killing grounds. The
forest reeked like an abattoir. "The fiends. You killed
them. You cast a spell."
    "A series of sorceries," Barrin replied. "Some of my
best summonations and enchantments. They were well spent,
though, and I can get them back. That's what libraries are
for. I couldn't have gotten you two back."
    "Gotten us b-back ..." Jhoira repeated absently.
    "Urza needs you in Shiv," Barrin said.
    The master had been gone for a few months, and in the
escalating Phyrexian war, Jhoira and Karn hadn't had much
time to wonder about the success of the mission for Thran
metal.
    "I summoned him to aid with the battle-one of the
reasons it is going well. Anyway, he says he's struck a deal
with the Viashino, He needs you to be a liaison with them.
He needs you and Teferi and a number of other students and
scholars to help run things with the lizard men. I will stay
behind with most of the academy. We will carry on this war
until you return."
    "And me?" Karn asked. "Does he need me?"
    "Yes," Barrin said, his expression darkening. "Yes,
Karn, he needs you perhaps most of all."

                       *****

    "No, the gray lever, not the red one," shouted Jhoira
down the line of steaming pipe-work. Remembering herself,
she repeated the instruction in Viashino.
    Her dialect of the language was, of course, Ghitu and
therefore somewhat difficult for the lizard men to
understand. Even so, after half a year of working daily with
lizard men, Jhoira was the only human who could speak
Viashino at all. Urza couldn't exactly be called human. Just
now, the creatures she spoke to cast quizzical looks up the
foggy line of pipes.
    "Gray, you know-the color of your blood. Red is the
color of mine." Jhoira was almost frustrated enough to bite
her own hand to demonstrate what she meant.
    One of the younger lizards, a Diago Deerv, gestured
emphatically at the appropriate lever. The scaly imbecile to
his left grabbed the red lever anyway. Diago dealt a slap of
his webbed hand-a bit of correction used by many members of
Viashino society-reached over, himself, and drew the right
lever.
    A blast of steam came from the pipe stack behind Jhoira,
venting into the black heights of the cavernous room. The
stench of sulfur and superheated rock permeated the place.
It boiled across the unseen vault, jiggling loose the
condensation clinging there.
    Hot drops pelted across her sweating back. Jhoira drew
up a cloak of drake feathers, standard issue for workers in
the lava pits. The feathers were proof against even the
hottest temperatures, and yet they wicked sweat and heat
away from the skin. Beneath the cloak, she wore only a
loose, light shift of linen and similarly loose pantaloons.
Her feet were shod with drake-feather slippers, and she had
matching gloves in case she needed to handle any of the red-
hot controls.
    The vitreous pipes began to glow as lava came pumping up
them. The heat of the chamber redoubled. In a few minutes,
it would be a veritable oven.
    "Let's get up to the blast furnaces," Jhoira instructed.
    The scales of the lizard men prickled from faces, arms,
and tails, struggling to bleed heat into the air. Wide-eyed
and panting, the Viashino nodded their eagerness. It was one
gesture they had picked up from their human colleagues.
    "Good. Follow me."
    Climbing over a jumble of dark tubes, unused and cracked
from centuries of neglect, Jhoira led her contingent to the
wooden ladder. Its iron rails would be too hot to touch, and
even the wood was bearable only with drake-feather gloves.
Jhoira ascended. Diago Deerv followed. His comrades came in
his wake. Jhoira reached the hatch above, turned the thick
metal wheel that disengaged the locking mechanism, and flung
back the hasp. Hot air roared up around her as she clambered
from the shaft.
    Those in the chamber above-a bright, airy, space filled
with giant, fat-walled furnaces and great slag buckets-
turned to watch the sooty and sweating creatures emerge from
their infernal underworld.
    Among the workers in the furnace room was Teferi. The
young man had traded impish games for a keen forcefulness of
will and a relentless search for knowledge. Tall, lean, and
wiry, Teferi was handsome and clear-eyed. His dark skin was
yet unmarked by the care wrinkles of age, but his brown eyes
held an amazingly intense focus. Though chronologically he
was one-third Jhoira's age, they seemed physical as well as
metaphysical twins now.
    "Jhoira," he said, approaching her. The mage and the
artificer were equal partners in this endeavor, overseeing
the full deployment of the mana rig. "How many conduits do
you have working now?"
    "Twenty-five, if this one holds," Jhoira responded.
    "That should be enough to fire all five furnaces,"
Teferi noted with approval. He flashed her an appreciative
and dazzling smile.
    "It's only a tenth of the major pipe ways," Jhoira
replied. "I still can't get it out of my head there should
be a lot more to this facility than making metal. The power
this place could draw from the volcano would be sufficient
to run fifty furnaces, but there aren't fifty here. They
must have used the power for something else."
    Teferi moved in close to her, and a hint of his old
capriciousness glinted in his eyes. He was still arrogant
enough to use magic to enhance the twinkle in his eyes.
    "I tell you, the answer lies in the taboo halls. I've
been begging you for months to explore the place with me-"
    "And jeopardize the alliance?" Jhoira hissed.
    "As long as the drake Gherridarigaaz lives, the alliance
will not be broken," Teferi said. "Come on. Say you'll come
with me."
    Jhoira sighed in resignation. "Once the metal works are
fully operational. Until then, we have no time for messing
around."
    "That could be years," Teferi pressed.
    "Well, make years into months, and you won't have to
wait so long."

                       *****

    The approach to Gherridarigaaz's aerie was forbidding in
the extreme. The lands in a ten-mile radius were goblin
territory, and in it the voracious creatures were as thick
as maggots on a carcass. In a two-mile radius, the dragon's
nest was surrounded by a boiling sea of lava. The aerie
itself perched atop a jagged pinnacle of stone that stood
like a crooked finger in the center of the caldera. Other
tumbled monoliths lay in the bubbling basin. They were
spaced just far enough apart that no terrestrial creature in
its right mind would try jumping stone to stone to reach the
nest.
    Neither Urza nor Karn were known for being in their
right minds. Neither were they exactly terrestrial. They
stood silently on the rocky verge of the magma pit. They had
been in Shiv for over a year and still felt they walked the
surface of an alien world. The audible shuffling of goblin
feet, furtive and feral, in the wastelands behind them only
added to the impression.
    Urza stared for some time at the distant drake's nest, a
huge encrustation of tree boughs woven together with black
pitch and fired clay. He stooped, picked up a large stone,
and hurled it with incredible force across the surface of
the caldera. The stone skipped twelve times before melting
away into nothing.
    "We are, each of us, capable of leaping stone to stone
to get there," Urza said idly.
    "Yes," Karn replied.
    Urza nodded, his nostrils flaring. Any living creature
would have been poisoned by the gasses venting in twisted
columns past them.
    "I could cast a sorcery allowing us to lava-walk or to
fly."
    "Yes," Karn said.
    Urza stooped to lift another stone, but thought better
of it and squatted for some time, watching ghosts of steam
promenade across the lava.
    "I could conjure my own fire drakes and send them to
slay this one."
    "Yes," Karn said laconically. "You are Urza
Planeswalker. You can do anything. You can wish us into the
nest and wish Gherridarigaaz from existence. You can do
anything you want. You are Urza Planes-walker."
    It was Urza's turn to be laconic. "Yes."
    Karn turned toward the scintillating man. "You can do
anything, so why did you trade me away for an army of Thran-
metal artifacts?"
    The planeswalker's eyes hardened. "You answer your own
question. Why wouldn't I trade one silver golem for an army
of Thran-metal men? There is a great war coming. We must all
make sacrifices."
    "But you sacrifice me."
    He had hardly spoken the words when, with a sudden,
vertiginous whirl of movement, the cliff top melted away.
The scarlet sea and sooty sky disappeared as well.
    Karn stood still. Urza was planeswalking them into the
aerie. A human could survive that trip only by being carried
in a protective embolism, or turned to stone, or made a flat
creature of immutable geometry. Karn merely rode as he was.
Urza had sent him on more troubling journeys.
    They arrived. The sooty sky remained above. The rest of
the world was replaced by a vast, woven bowl of wood and
clay, the lair of the fire drake. One corner was filled with
a midden of bones, bleached and bare in the brimstone
breezes. Beside it lay the half-eaten hulk of a small whale.
It had apparently been plucked from the water like a herring
caught by a kingfisher. The reek of the rotting sea creature
was borne outward on clouds of flies. It mixed with the
stench of sulfur and another smell-savage and salty and
keen-edged like wood smoke-
    Gherridarigaaz. The great drake herself lay in the
opposite corner of the nest. She seemed at the moment only a
huge pile of red skin, scales, feathers, and fur. Her great
muzzle oozed twin streams of smoke. Soot tangled languidly
among her spiky brows and rangy mantle. A pair of massive
claws lay beside her face. Wings of skin folded over her
flanks. The creature's scaly tail coiled on the rock-hard
base of the nest.
    Urza stepped toward the creature and said, without
preamble, "I am Urza Planeswalker. I can kill you with a
thought. I will kill you with a thought if you make any move
to harm us, and I will kill you unless you cease your
attacks upon the Viashino settlement."
    The drake slowly lifted her head. Giant lids drew back
from slit-pupiled eyes, filled with gold and black
striations. The beast spoke. Her voice was vast and purring.
"Not much for parley, are you?"
    "Our message is understood," Urza said with finality.
    "Understood, yes," the drake responded. "Obeyed, no."
    "You have no alternative," Urza said.
    "I do have an alternative," Gherridarigaaz corrected.
"Death is an alternative."
    "What creature would choose death over life?"
    "A mother would," came the immediate response. "You have
clearly not been a father."
    Urza cast a long glance at the silver man at his side.
"I have been a father."
    "Oh, yes," purred the drake in remembrance. "Urza
Planes-walker. I'm well enough aware of human mythology.
Yes, you had a son. Harbin was his name. You blinded him
when you destroyed Argoth. Some say you even sank his boat
and killed him."
    "I tried to keep him away from the war," Urza replied as
if in reflex. "What I did, I did to save all Dominaria."
    "You sacrificed your son to save the world," the drake
said. "That is the difference between us, Planeswalker. I
would sacrifice the world to save my son. I will not give up
the fight to free him."
    "Rhammidarigaaz chose to leave you. He chose to join the
Viashino," Urza pointed out.
    "Your son chose to join the war."
    Urza's features drew into an angry knot. "I could kill
you now."
    "Yes, you could, Planeswalker. History says you would,
but why, then, am I still alive?"
    Urza cast one last, fierce glance at the creature. "You
have been warned." With a thought, he and the silver man
departed the fiery aerie.
    Barrin ran. Fronds slapped him. He thrashed through
underbrush.
    The thing behind him was huge and sinuous. It slithered
in his wake-a giant python, muscular, fleet, silent and
cold-blooded. Its horned head was as large as the mage
master himself. If it unhinged its jaw, it could swallow him
whole. Two man-sized bulges distended its gut already.
    "There have to be sorceries to defeat this thing. I know
hundreds of them. It's just a matter of thinking ...
something about swamp-walking-?"
    The mage master ran. He had been in the heat of combat
when the thing had broken through the line. The beast's
sudden appearance had interrupted a complex casting. Mana
burn had lashed Barrin. He had fallen back. Jangled, he had
wracked his brain for a defense but found none and ran.
    This thing wasn't Phyrexian. It was summoned. The python
had been invoked by a Phyrexian capable of casting spells.
That was new. Apparently K'rrik had been decanting time-
resistant mutants long enough to raise a wizard from their
ranks, a wizard or two-or perhaps a small army of them. The
giant serpent behind him was not only a terrifying man-
eater, it was also a harbinger of greater evils to come.
    Breath sawed Barrin's throat. Vines clawed his arms. The
creature's cold breath billowed out around him. It almost
had him. He redoubled his speed. Think! Think! Treacherous
ground stole his feet. With a curse, Barrin tumbled. He
crashed through a brake of undergrowth and smashed against a
tree.
    The serpent coiled into view. It reared up on a broad,
shimmering belly of scales. Its mouth glimmered with teeth.
Its jaw yawned wide and dislocated.
    Barrin clawed behind the tree trunk. He hissed
instinctually and glared into the thing's eyes.
    "What is that summonation spell Teferi is working on? A
creature that can cross time streams ... Not the imps, but
the other one- Teferi's Duck? No, that's wrong."
    The monster coiled rapidly around the mage. It looped
the tree and lunged.
    "Teferi's Drake!"
    A yellow-skinned dragon phased into being beside Barrin.
It spread its wings in the tight confines of the jungle, and
its head darted about angrily. Though the python was
gigantic, in the shadow of the drake, it seemed only a worm
beside a chicken. The drake's head jabbed downward. Its
beaklike mouth snatched up the python.
    The serpent riled in the monster's mouth. One of the
man-sized lumps in it convulsed too, whether in defiance or
digestion, Barrin couldn't tell. Arching its neck backward,
the yellow drake sucked down the python and swallowed it in
one gulp.
    Barrin slid back down beside the tree, panting in dread.
If he had been killed by that python, there would have been
no one left to summon Urza, no one to lead the students. And
there would be more giant pythons, more minions of evil.
More Phyrexian mages ...
    How many wizards does K'rrik have?
    Into his musings came the acute realization that the
summoned drake stared down at him. Its eyes were at once
empty and accusing, like the eyes of Karn. Then, as suddenly
as it had arrived, it phased out of being.
    That was the flaw in Teferi's spell. To date, the
creatures he summoned could cross time rifts but remained in
existence for only minutes. Barrin had known of this side
effect, but he had been desperate. The drake had been
created only to fight, disposable.
    How like Karn....
    Karn sat on a stone escarpment on the mountain side of
the mana rig. The ceramic arteries beneath the structure
glowed with pulsing lava, pumped up from the caldera below.
Within the plant, massive articulated arms would be cranking
huge shafts. Steam shot in vast columns from the top of the
rig. The whole thing rumbled and roared in a foul-tempered
fury. The rig seemed a great beast, crouching in the red-
black sunset, hissing into the sky, slurping from the lava
pool.
    They had brought it to life. After a year and a half of
labor, Jhoira and Teferi and Urza had brought it to life.
Jhoira had proven herself yet again the critical connection
between Urza and the folk under his command. Teferi had come
into his own as an innovative leader and mage. Together they
had achieved an uneasy alliance between the human students
and the Viashino workers. Urza, meanwhile, strong-armed the
drake Gherridarigaaz out of attacking the facility. Even his
presence was enough to reduce the constant goblin border
battles to only sporadic incidents. The mountaintop was
ruled by an iron fist in a velvet glove. All had progressed
according to plan, and the first new castings of Thran metal
were only moments from being poured.
    They had brought it to life, but Karn felt dead.
    Perhaps it was because Teferi had replaced him as
Jhoira's closest companion. Their work to vivify the
facility had made the close contact necessary. Their species
had made the close contact welcomed. Karn felt no jealousy
about this growing relationship and even was happy for
Jhoira to have a friend made of flesh and bone. But between
her work and Teferi, Jhoira no longer had time for long
strolls or afternoon conversations with the silver man. He
wished again for those bleak days together in the guard
towers of Tolaria, but that was not what dragged at Karn.
    No, the feeling of dread and death came from the
sentence on his life. When all was said and done, he would
belong to the lizard men. Urza had offered to move his
intellectual-affective cortex to a new shell of Thran-metal,
though the man could not promise Karn's mind would move with
it.
    With a sudden roar, the facility erupted into motion.
Though the forbidden sections of the rig remained dark,
windows across the rest of it flared with light. The very
walls of the great machine rumbled and glowed. The patient
roll and plunge of the facility's crankshafts and pistons
accelerated to a deep and trembling drone. Jets of steam
above the facility coalesced into a great, sooty cloud that
blotted out sun and sky both and enwrapped the rig and the
silver man in a choking fog.
    He sat awhile longer, shrouded in gloom. The forges
would be firing, the metals forming, the molds filling.
Within the structure, a new army of metal men was being
born. Outside of it, an old metal man was being killed.
    All around him, small red eyes emerged from nearby
crevices and caves. Unseen by the downhearted golem, goblins
ventured up to the very verges of the rig, stood atop each
others' shoulders to peer into windows, and set hundreds of
tattered claws to whatever loose plate or door gap presented
itself.
    In one place, they found their way inside, hundreds of
them.
                          Monologue
    I do miss Urza, Jhoira, Karn, and-yes, I'll admit it-
even Teferi. Their labors on the island before they left
have given us a solid defense against Phyrexian incursion. I
can only hope their labors in Shiv will do the same for the
world itself.
    K'rrik's machinations advance exponentially. Just
because our artifact machines can repulse his current
generation of negators does not mean they will repulse the
ones that emerge in a few months-let alone any more negator
mages who might make it out. We tracked down and slew the
one who had summoned the python, but there will be others.
    The students, colleagues, and I work hard to improve and
adapt our designs, to suggest new machines and to create new
spells, but even our fastest fast-time laboratories run at
half the speed of K'rrik's.
    It will come down to a final conflict-both here on
Tolaria and out in Dominaria at large. To win our little war
here, we'll need Urza and Jhoira and all the others. To win
the coming conflict, we'll need a new machine, one designed
by Urza himself, one that can adapt to anything, one with
firepower greater than that of the whole island.
    Urza started a design before he left. Perhaps he has
finished it by now.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 14
    "This is our salvation," Urza said.
    He paced before the array of plans. They filled the
semicircular wall of his high study in the mana rig. The
room was an approximation of his library back on Tolaria,
though the books that lined the shelves here were largely
Thran, unreadable to anyone but Urza. Tonight, the shelves
served to hold tacked plans, the latest wild imaginings of
the artificer genius. With a slim pointer cast of the new
batch of Thran metal, Urza indicated the sleek structure of
the device.
    ''It is a flying machine, made entirely of Thran metal.
It is driven by a matrix of powerstones, which take up much
of the hull. With these stones, it is capable of faster-
than-sound travel. Power can be diverted from the drive
systems into various gun batteries-"
    "What is it for?" Jhoira asked.
    Among the group gathered, including Teferi, Karn, and a
handful of other top scholars, the Ghitu woman seemed the
only one willing to question the master.
    Urza pivoted mid-sentence and looked at her, blinking.
"Why, it is for war, war with Phyrexia."
    Jhoira's brow furrowed. Teferi's hand clamped over her
arm, but she spoke all the same.
    "The metal and powerstones needed to construct that ship
could be used to make armies of warriors, which would be
more effective against armies of fiends."
    "Armies are slow," replied Urza. The lamplight of the
darksome study glimmered from his queer eyes. "This machine
will be able to move like lightning for quick strikes
against specific targets-targets such as dragon engines and
landing craft."
    "How many such engines do you suspect the Phyrexians
will have?"
    "Perhaps hundreds," Urza said grimly, "perhaps
thousands."
    "Shouldn't we plan to build hundreds or thousands of
machines like this?" Jhoira asked sensibly.
    Urza looked nettled. "There aren't enough active
powerstones on Dominaria to build two of these devices and
any mechanical defenders."
    Jhoira sighed, crossing her arms. "As fantastical and
appealing as this idea might be, it seems to be impractical
in the extreme. Unless we find some underground trove of
powerstones, we must make the best use of the few we have."
    A fiery light glimmered in Urza's eyes, and he seemed on
the verge of snorting. He placed the tip of his Thran-metal
pointer on the table and pressed upon it. The rod trembled
with the master's anger. Instead of breaking, the metal only
made a jagged line across the obsidian top. Wheeling, Urza
tore the plans down from the wall, crumpled them, and flung
them savagely in the corner.
    "No more delays. I want the prototype Thran-metal man
completed this month."

                       *****

    Teferi finished undoing the final bolt, pulled away the
age-crusted grating, and gestured Jhoira into the dark
crawlway beyond.
    "The plans say that this space leads into the heart of
the forbidden zone." His eyes gleamed with mischief. "The
secrets of the mana rig await."
    Jhoira glanced around again, trying to make sure no
Viashino patrols were coming down the passage. "I think this
is a mistake. If the lizards find out-"
    "Tribal law forbids Viashino from entering the forbidden
zone. It says nothing about humans," Teferi said, and his
smile glinted in the dark space. "Besides, you promised. The
metal works have been running at full capacity for a year
now. I'm well overdue."
    A laugh of resignation came from Jhoira. She shook her
head, staring in amazement at the handsome young man. "Yes,
Teferi, you are well overdue." She paused. The cloud of
bygone days passed over her eyes. "You followed me down
another passage like this, once."
    Teferi only smiled.
    "Some things never change."
    So saying, she drew a dimly glowing powerstone from her
pocket and waved it in the cobwebbed crawlspace before her.
Taking a deep breath, she entered it.
    Teferi followed closely behind. The space was tight, its
height slightly shorter than Jhoira's thigh, its width
slightly thinner than Teferi's shoulders. The effect was
claustrophobic. Instead of an actual crawl, the two
explorers had to move forward with an inch-worm motion. Even
so, the shaft did not seem an air duct. The floor was too
solid, the walls were sided with moldings, and in places
along it, constricting the space further, dull-edged hooks
jutted from the walls.
    Getting caught on one of these for a third time, Jhoira
halted. She half-turned, panting, and let the dim glow of
her powerstone reach out through the passage ahead. The
walls, ceiling, and floor regressed to a gray-black square
of emptiness. A cool, dank breeze came from it.
    "There's got to be a reason it is forbidden," Jhoira
whispered, sending sibilant echoes both ways from them.
    "Yes, because whatever is in there is valuable,
precious-"
    "Perhaps even deadly," Jhoira finished for him. "It
occurs to me that since this was your idea, you should have
been the one leading."
    Teferi didn't respond immediately. The sudden silence
made Jhoira nervous. She craned her neck to make out the
man. His powerstone flickered, and wedges of light danced
wanly about them.
    "Jhoira," he said at last, voice awed, "these hooks in
the wall. You know what they are?"
    "Triggers for deadfalls," she ventured wryly, "or poison
darts?"
    "Lamps," Teferi said, answering his own question. "These
are lamp sconces. Look."
    He lifted his powerstone toward the small curl of metal
jutting near the top of the wall. The stone pulsed brighter
as it rose, showing up a small, shiny parabola, and in front
of it, a clip in a sconce. Teferi positioned the glowing
rock in the clip, and suddenly it flared.
    The explorers fell back, shading their eyes. Bright
ribbons of light coursed out around them. Soon their eyes
adjusted to what had once seemed a blinding glare, and they
saw the hallway clearly.
    That was what it was, a hallway made for creatures much
shorter than the two humans. The floor was composed of
venous marble, the walls of riveted metal, and at even
intervals along the passage, lantern sconces hung.
    "Who was it made for? Viashino?" Jhoira wondered aloud.
"They'd have as much trouble as we are getting down this
passage."
    "Maybe the ancient Thran were little guys," Teferi
speculated.
    Jhoira shook her head. "Don't you remember the stories
of Urza and Mishra finding the first ornithopter? Its seat
and controls were human sized. No, this must have been
someone else."
    "You mean that someone other than the Thran built this
place?"
    "No," Jhoira responded, "I mean that the Thran built
this place for someone else to run."
    "A slave race?"
    "Perhaps." Jhoira pivoted. "I see something ahead, off
to one side. It looks like a doorway."
    "Lead on, but be careful. Some of the Thran slaves might
still be around." Teferi withdrew his powerstone from the
sconce, and immediately the hall was plunged into darkness.
It took awhile for their light-acclimated eyes to adjust to
the murk.
    Taking a deep breath, Jhoira inched forward until she
reached the doorway. It was a short opening and narrow. The
space beyond breathed hot, dry air past her. Cautiously, she
extended her power-stone into the swimming blackness. It
showed up a set of ceramic pipes, conduits crawling over
each other like the viscera of some great leviathan. As her
eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could make out,
low in the tangle of tubes, a number of the greater pipes
glowing faintly with the heat of the lava they carried.
    Teferi crowded up beside her and confirmed her thoughts.
"This is where those other channels empty. They are meant to
power the machinery in the forbidden zone."
    "We've accounted for only thirty percent of the lava
tubes. If the other seventy percent were used for these
other devices-"
    "What would take that kind of power? What if it was
mutagenic research, the kind of thing K'rrik's been doing?"
Teferi volunteered.
    Jhoira was dubious. "I can't imagine using such thermic
power to create clone creatures. K'rrik certainly doesn't
have that kind of power. Mutagenics comes more from
tampering with the power of growing things. Remember the
stories of Ashnod? Vats and chemicals and muscular fusion-"
    Teferi's reply was wondering. "You really listened to
all of Urza's lectures?"
    Pushing onward down the corridor, Jhoira said, "The
cool, dank air comes from ahead. There must be a big room up
here."
    Crawling, they came to a tight bend in the passage-a
kink, as Teferi called it. Beyond, the passage widened and
dipped into a debouchment with a pair of open doors. The
chill in the air was undeniable here. The rustle of clothes
slipped outward into silence before coming echoing back at
them.
    Jhoira extended her arm, powerstone held on her open
palm. The light was too feeble to show up anything. Even
with Teferi's glowing crystal alongside it, the space ate up
the light.
     "Well," Jhoira speculated, "either we venture blindly
forward-"
     "To fall into some open pit or other-"
     "-or we try to find another light sconce or two."
     "Here's one," Teferi said, slipping his powerstone into
the bracket. As light leapt blindingly outward, Jhoira
fitted her power-stone into a niche on the opposite side of
the room.
     The resulting glare filled the vast chamber, driving
shadows back beyond a vault of riveted ribs. Metal struts
and trusses lined the walls and ceiling, shot through by
more tangles of pipe-work. The countless tubes-bristling
here and there with valves and pressure gauges, pumps and
release valves-entered the room through walls and floor,
snaked in writhing piles of pipe across the chamber, and
converged on a great central mass encased in scaffolding
many stories high. To compare the network of tubes to
vessels surrounding a giant heart would be to vastly
underestimate the number of tangled channels. They formed a
veritable thicket, through which the central mechanism was
hardly distinguishable.
     "What is it?" Teferi wondered, staggering to his feet
before the massive machine.
     Jhoira rose also. "Maybe you were right about the
mutagenic experiments."
     "Let's go see."
     Teferi brushed dirt from his coveralls and started
forward. He clambered over a dust-mantled manifold, noting
the small ladders and causeways that gave access to them
all.
     Jhoira followed. Each footfall sent lint rolling up into
the air. "It looks like the forbidden zone has truly been
empty for some time."
     "Unused, but not empty," Teferi ventured, pointing to a
small, three-toed footprint on the far side of a cluster of
pipes.
     An adjacent channel held a three-fingered hand print.
More tracks led away from the spot, into the lurking shadows
behind the main mechanism.
     "It's as though somebody watched us approach and
scrambled away when we lit the place."
     A wary look crossed Jhoira's face. "We've seen enough to
make a meaningful report to Urza."
     Teferi ignored the implication. "There's a porthole on
the side of the main machine. It's only ten paces farther."
     Without waiting for her approval, the young man strode
onward. His footfalls obliterated the skittering tracks he
had discovered. Jhoira fell in step behind him. Shadows
deepened. The glare was reduced to triangular bright spots
cast in kaleidoscope across the metal-plated bulk of the
mechanism. Teferi and Jhoira reached the porthole. Teferi
wiped centuries of dust from the face of the glass.
     A dagger of light stabbed through the porthole glass and
glinted across something within. The explorers crowded
together at the window and gazed in.
     "By the stones of Koilos!" Jhoira gasped.
     That huge gem-the powerstone that had sundered at the
touch of Urza and Mishra, driven the two into their
fratricidal war, and opened the door to Phyrexia-could not
have been a larger, more perfectly formed crystal than the
stone at the center of the dark chamber. Beside it,
glimmering in their hundreds, were many more gems, fist
sized and double that, all lying in a dark jumble. If
charged, any one of them could have powered a dragon engine.
    "That's why this place is forbidden," said Teferi with
awe. "It is a trove of powerstones."
    "Not a trove," Jhoira said. "This is a machine for
making them." In the moment of that staggering realization,
Jhoira made a second. She hissed, "Teferi, we aren't alone."
    The two whirled to face a toothy wall of short spears,
thrust their way. Behind the savage shafts, small red eyes
squinted in wicked little faces. Light from the wall sconces
outlined the creatures' rumpled brows, their pointed ears,
their wiry frames, and the obscene proliferation of bristly
hair from ears and moles and shoulders. "Goblins," Jhoira
said.
    Teferi raised his hands to cast a spell, but a ragged
net fell over them both, interrupting the enchantment.
    The net cinched tight. The wall sconces went dark. The
spears converged.

                       *****

    They came from everywhere. They came from the caves
where they had hidden from the Viashino patrols. They came
from crevasses that sliced down into their underground
warrens. They came even from the forbidden zones of the mana
rig itself.
    Goblins.
    They came from everywhere, and they came in their
thousands. Many of the hip-high invaders were the red-scaled
Destrou clan that inhabited the hillsides around. They bore
polearms surmounted by sharpened ram's horns, which curved
close enough to their heads to leave ragged cuts along the
creatures' shallow pates. Their long ears were pinned back-a
sign of all-out war-and their prominent noses flared with
battle howls.
    Others were gray-skinned Grabbit goblins, somewhat
smaller than the Destrou but nastier in combat due to their
tendency to bite with small, serrated, and invariably filthy
teeth. They also employed body slams, wearing studded-
leather jerkins, breeches, and putties. Hurling themselves
screaming into battle, Grabbits swarmed their victims,
biting and spinning, shredding with teeth, claws, and hunks
of metal, bone, and stone sewn into their clothes. They were
savage, relentless, and formidable foes-but they weren't
normally allies of the Destrou.
    Nor were the third group of invaders, the silver-scaled
Tristou goblins. Tall and thin, Tristou occupied the distant
ridges of the caldera. Not normally a warlike race, Tristou
were bone-rolling oracles and goblin visionaries given to
week-long trances that yielded lengthy and largely
unintelligible predictions of doom. Since the arrival of
Urza, Tristou prophets had foreseen an upcoming war that
would unite the goblin tribes. It would be an all-out battle
against the Viashino.
    The day of that war was at hand.
    The Viashino and their human allies had desecrated the
holy necropolis. Destrou sentries had captured two humans
peering into the gemstone tomb. No goblin had looked upon
that sacred place in a century of centuries for fear he
would be struck dead by the ancestral spirits that dwelt in
the stones within. These two humans not only gazed into the
space but shone a light into it and hadn't even the courtesy
to drop dead.
    The united tribes determined the violators would drop
dead- the violators and their Viashino allies. Word of the
atrocity spread like wildfire from Destrou patrols in the
necropolis, to the Grabbit warrens that riddled the volcanic
hillsides around, through the steam tunnels and the guard
posts stationed at the head of the sulfur vents, and to the
distant oracle caves of the Tristou. The wave of angry
whispers crashed upon these far shores and then returned,
bearing on it a unified army of thousands of goblins. They
bore torches and scourges, claw-headed warhammers, notched
cleavers, dart-tubes, acid bladders, nets, daggers, teeth,
claws, and the will to use them in all-out war with their
neighbors.
    They would fight to the death, and the two human
hostages they held would assure their victory.

                       *****

    Urza had been working over his prototype Thran-metal man
when the alarm went off. He looked up, gemstone eyes
glinting in frustration. Whenever Jhoira and Teferi were
off-duty, the alarms were almost continuous. Closing his
eyes, Urza rubbed his temples. The sites were only mental
projections, of course, but thus were all the more
susceptible to psychosomatic ailments such as muscular
tension and nervous spasms. He opened his eyes again. The
half-assembled metal man stared blankly back at him.
    It wasn't working. Thran metal grew. He had not
recognized that fact before. He had assumed only that
Jhoira's trinket necklaces were fashioned in various sizes.
Now he knew that the large lizard pendants had grown from
small ones.
    The pieces of the Thran-metal man were growing too. His
chest plates were already grating against each other and
binding up the shoulder joints. Worse, the clockwork gears
ground together, breaking off cogs, bending shafts,
shattering flywheels. Even as Urza sat there, considering
the slowly deforming mechanism, a great clang announced the
sudden catastrophic failure of a strut in the creature's
pelvis, and a groin plate slumped ignominiously.
    Urza slouched back in his seat, wondering how long this
alarm would be allowed to blare. The mana rig was like a
giant bucket, amplifying the clamor until it was unbearable.
Around the ringing corners of his mind, Urza chased an
elusive thought... something about aligning growing parts
according to the geometry of life, so that the pieces could
expand in concert rather than in opposition.... A sphere
shape or a three-dimensional oval, with internal mechanisms
organized in nested shells, would allow for the growth of
each level and that of the whole. Even in the shrieking air,
he recognized the irony of designing a machine after the
plan of Phyrexia with its nested planes. His gaze strayed to
the abandoned plans for the Thran-metal ship-it was ovoid.
Perhaps he could use the concentric organizational plan to
structure ... to allow the Thran metal... organization with
the ... make a growing-
    "Enough-!" shouted Urza at the reeling ceiling.
    The alarm was suddenly louder, jarring into the room
with a flung-back door. Urza whirled angrily, seeing the
silver man crouching in the too-small space.
    "What is it?"
    "Goblins. Goblins everywhere. Three tribes. The Viashino
are losing," Karn said in a rush
    "That's it," Urza growled, standing and growing a war
cloak about his shoulders.
    The stylus he had been holding grew into a glimmering
staff, and he strode ahead of the silver golem, out the door
and toward the battle.

                       *****

    The forge room was chaos. Viashino workers in their
leather coveralls fought side by side with disheveled, human
students. Wrenches and spanners flashed among double-bladed
paortings, wrist daggers, and dragon-headed throwing axes.
The lizard men fought in ragged clusters, backed up against
the vast, glowing furnaces they tended. With desperate jabs
and off-balance swings, they held at bay the loud, lapping
tide of goblins.
    They were everywhere. Gray Grabbits swarmed at the
front. They hacked and gnawed at knees. Red-scaled Destrou
crowded up behind their short comrades and swung ram-horn
polearms above their heads. Here and there hooks caught
lizard-man sleeves or wattles and dragged the victims onto
the impaling gray horns. Behind that line, a few silver-
skinned Tristou held the center of the floor and flung fire
and lightning into the defenders' ranks.
    Viashino were falling. Already seventeen workers and
four warriors lay in pools of gray blood among the advancing
goblins. Grab-bits fed violently on these dead forms. Two
more lizard warriors hung smoldering on the sides of
furnaces. They had been backed against the sizzling metal,
and their skin adhered. A few flailing minutes followed, and
then the cooked reptiles turned to coal. Two human students
also had died, one impaled on the end of a stolen paorting,
and the other beneath the toothy tide of Grabbits. The
remaining defenders, outnumbered, ill-armed, and overheated,
languished in the verge between fire and spear.
    Diago Deerv brought a gaping wrench down on the head of
a Grabbit before him. It staved the beast's skull. He kicked
the body among the mass of its comrades, giving them
something besides him to eat.
    "Where is Jhoira?" he gasped out to the workers around
him. "She'd have an idea."
    "An idea?" roared a nearby mechanic. A goblin torch
rammed against his chest. The lizard man reared back on his
tail and kicked the fire-wielding monster back among his
fellows. The torch set another pair of Grabbits aflame. "We
need an army, not an idea."
    Diago blinked at the burning Grabbits. "Sometimes an
idea's worth an army." He whirled, pulled a forge pole from
its rack beside him, and slipped its hooked end into a large
latch on the side of the forge.
    "What are you doing? We're fighting goblins, not
forges."
    "Get back!" Diago shouted forcefully.
    His comrades fell back, and in the next moment he flung
open a slag gate in the side of the forge. Out poured a
river of molten metal, spilling across the goblin hordes.
Even the heedless and senseless Grabbits retreated from the
blistering flood. Many weren't quick enough, swept under the
tide and exploding as every liquid in their bodies turned
instantly to gas. These small blasts sent red-hot spatters
of metal out to burn other goblins.
    Panting behind the flood, Diago gasped out, "Gives us a
moment to breathe."
    The warrior beside him was prickly, his scales jutting
out all across his body. "I'd rather die by spear than by
fire."
    Diago looked up, toward the wide stairway that led down
into the forge room. "Maybe we won't have to die at all."
    Another tide rolled down the stairs-Viashino warriors,
fully armed and armored, their paortings gleaming in a
thicket as they waded into battle. Above the tide of
warriors, another figure came, floating above the floor and
emblazoned with fiery light. Urza Planeswalker drifted down,
a second sun above his army. From his fingertips, bolts of
power lanced outward. Where the red crazings struck, goblin
bodies flipped up into the air. They tumbled like charred
toys before clattering to the ground.
    The straggling defenders let out a cheer.
    Urza hovered into the center of the forge room. He
lifted his hands together overhead. A white light awoke
between his fingers. It shone across metal struts and
trusses that hadn't been illuminated in millennia and then
swept out in stunning waves. Rings of illumination moved
over the gathered monsters, stilling them in the midst of
battle. Upraised cleavers did not fall, frozen in air.
Scourges followed one last course before going limp in the
hands of their wielders. The magical staves of the Tristou
flared and became rods of fire before fizzling away into
sifting ash. In his last labor before the stilling waves of
magic lay hold of him, Diago hauled hard on his hooked
staff, drawing the slag sluice closed and stopping the flood
of metal.
    Next moment, even the war cries died away. All eyes
turned to the floating figure.
    Urza shouted over the throng. His voice was guttural, a
collection of growls and harsh barks. The words, nonsensical
to humans, made sense to the goblins and their ancient
lizard foes.
    "Surrender, all goblinkind. Throw down your weapons or
face immediate destruction."
    He made a sign, and three goblin figures-taller and more
elaborately mantled than their fellows-rose into the air.
The three chieftains kicked in struggle against the
invisible claws that gripped them. They drifted toward the
imperious figure.
    Below them, among the goblin rank and file, nerveless
claws opened, letting cleavers and axes fall to the floor.
Grabbits withdrew, bloody mouthed, from corpses. Destrou
dropped to one knee in sign of surrender. Tristou stood,
spells forgotten on quivering lips. Even as they did, the
pacifying waves of white energy gently cycled among them.
    "I will speak with your chiefs about terms of
surrender," Urza announced to the room.
    He made a final gesture, bringing the floating creatures
to a stop before him. They hung uncomfortably in the air,
their robes of state trailing in bloody tatters.
    Urza examined them. His uncanny eyes rested on each in
turn. The Tristou chief was a wizened old creature, his eyes
large and solemn behind a nose as withered and dark as a
date. His robes were once fine-midnight blue with silver
piping, though a scorch mark showed where his staff had
blazed away. One claw had been burned brutally. Beside him,
the chieftain of the Destrou was a warrior female, clad in
gray leather armor from which taut red arms and legs
protruded. She wore the scowl of bitter undefeat and kept
her eyes lifted defiantly in the presence of her foe. The
third chieftain was a mad imp, its small body wrapped in
bloodied armor studded in teeth and metal shards. It fought
angrily against its captivity.
    "I am the lord of this rig," Urza said in forceful
goblin tongue.
    "You and your folk will withdraw. None of you will be
left within five miles."
    "These are our ancestral homelands," objected the
silvery Tristou.
    "You were permitted to live here until you attacked,"
Urza pointed out. "You have brought about your own exile."
    "Our attack was provoked," the Destrou warrior chief
said. "Two of your lieutenants desecrated our sacred
necropolis."
    "That does not matter," Urza said dismissively. "You
have been utterly defeated. Withdraw from this facility and
the lands around, or I will slay every last one of you who
remains."
    "We hold these lieutenants captive," the Destrou
continued. "We hold them in a death cage. It is linked to
me. At a moment's notice, I can make the cage collapse with
them inside, killing them instantly. If I die, they die."
    Urza studied the warrior woman. "You are lying."
    "Their names are Jhoira and Teferi," the warrior chief
replied.
    Urza began a response, but the words jumbled on his
tongue, and he quieted. He breathed, perhaps for the first
time since entering the forge room.
    "Take me to them. I must see they are alive."
    "No," the Destrou chief replied. A file-toothed smile
spread across her face. The tables had turned, and she
savored the shift. "But you may speak with them." She nodded
to the Tristou oracle, who used his charred claw to draw a
black circle in the air.
    Noises came from the circle-the jabber of goblins, the
crackle of a fire, the shift of midnight winds.
    "Teferi, Jhoira," Urza called, "can you hear me?"
    A shifting sound came, and the clang of metal. "Who is
it?" came a woman's voice."
    "It is Urza. Where are you?"
    "We don't know. A dark cavern. They have us in a strange
cage."
    "Is Teferi with you?"
    The young man's voice answered, "Yes."
    Urza's features darkened. "What is this they tell me
about you desecrating their sacred necropolis?"
    Teferi sighed. "We went into the forbidden zones. That
must be what they mean."
    Urza turned to the silvery oracle. "Your sacred
necropolis is within the rig?"
    "It is sacred to our ancestors. They dwelt in it, long
before the lizard men," responded the Tristou with a twitch
of his prune nose. "They dwelt in it with the old masters."
    Before Urza could respond, Teferi offered, "It looked
like it was designed for them. Everything is goblin sized-
corridors and ladders and consoles. Viashino couldn't have
operated or maintained any of the machines we saw."
    The silvery oracle blinked placidly back at Urza.
    "Are you saying your ancestors served the Thran?" Urza
asked in hushed tones.
    "There's more," Jhoira interrupted. "That sector of the
rig-the largest sector-is devoted to making powerstones."
    The planeswalker, despite himself, turned white.
    The oracle spoke into the following silence: "Now, do we
surrender to you, or do you surrender to us?"
                          Monologue
    Urza arrived today with strange and marvelous news. He
has just brokered a peace accord between five races.
    Yes, Urza Planeswalker-defiler of Argoth, scourge of
Terisiare, bane of Serra's Realm, destroyer of Tolaria, he
whose name has become synonymous with mad and savage war-
Urza has brokered peace. Viashino, Tristou, Destrou,
Grabbit, and human now work hand in claw within the mana
rig. To make matters more incredible, the two human
prisoners of war caught desecrating the sacred necropolis of
the goblins have been set in charge of returning the goblins
to their ancient homelands in the rig and training them once
again to run the machinery there. And, most incredible of
all, what Jhoira, Teferi, and their goblin hordes will be
producing are powerstones- large and perfectly engineered
for whatever task Urza wishes.
    He seemed mad again, relating all these things to me. He
seemed as delighted as if he had just finished designing
some vast, improbable, and powerful machine. In a way,
that's what he has just done.
    I was sad to report less stellar results for my own
efforts. K'rrik's negators are growing more powerful by the
week. Our laboratories can hardly keep up with the old
designs. New versions of our runners are still months away
from their initial trials. The spells we have marshaled have
succeeded in blocking whatever summoned creatures and
artifacts the Phyrexian mages have conjured, but we cannot
keep up with their studies. I sense a final conflict coming.
Even if K'rrik's forces do not overrun us soon, we will
deplete our resources and workforce. Whether they win in a
moment or in a million moments, they will win.
    It was with this assessment that I pleaded for Urza to
return and bring Jhoira and Teferi with him. He shrugged off
the request, saying he had complete trust in me. He reminded
me of the beacon, saying I could call on him at a moment's
notice, and that was the end of it. He couldn't wait to
return to his mana rig and the marvelous machines it would
produce.
    I cannot help feeling abandoned. Urza has learned much,
indeed-he no longer forgets his past obligations, only
ignores them.

                              - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 15

    "This is our salvation," Urza said.
    He addressed the same group of scholars-Jhoira, Teferi,
and Karn at the head of the group-in the same study where he
had first presented the design. The plans hanging behind the
pacing master, however, were completely rethought. Thran
metal was used only in key places. The rest of the structure
was wooden.
    "It will be capable of faster-than-sound travel, will be
able to planeshift, will be fitted out with powerful
offensive weapons, and is designed to bear its crew into the
most hostile Phyrexian environments. It will be the ultimate
strike weapon, arrayed to penetrate the enemy's defenses and
destroy the heart of their attack."
    Urza paused, as if waiting for Jhoira's objections. She
coughed discreetly in her hand but offered no comment.
    "One of the key changes to this design, you will notice,
is its wooden hull. Given the properties of Thran metal-
specifically its tendency to grow-I have determined that it
is best used in conjunction with living materials, in this
case wood-a specific kind of wood." Urza set down the
pointer he had been using. "Given the excellent progress you
have made in the new alliance, I feel the time is right for
me to take a brief absence to secure the wooden components."
    The once-silent crowd was suddenly on its feet, protests
coming from them all.
    "What are you talking about-"
    "-bring us to this inferno and then leave-"
    "-how are we supposed to keep them from killing each
other-"
    Jhoira's voice rose above the others. "-only reason the
accord has worked as well as it has is because you are here,
the everpresent and incalculable foe."
    "Let them think I am still here then," Urza said. "If
you want, I can even arrange a few illusory appearances
during my absence. I'm speaking of only a few days away."
    That assurance quieted much of the objection. Jhoira was
still dubious, "What if it is longer?"
    Urza seemed to consider, his eyes twinkling, and then he
gave a small shrug. "You will manage. You always have. In
the meantime, I have some new specifications for Thran-metal
castings-the fittings for the ship. I want you to get
started on them. Also, I have these specifications for the
size and shape of the powerstone I need for the ship's
engines. Jhoira, I want you and Teferi personally to oversee
its creation."

                       *****

    Urza descended into the heart of a dense jungle, into
the heart of an ancient dream.
    It was called Yavimaya. Its ancient trees reached three
thousand feet into the sky and three thousand feet into the
ground, and three thousand years into the past. Just beneath
Urza's feet-shod in gold-gilt sandals, suitable to his role
as ambassador for all Dominaria-spread the tumbled landscape
of treetops. Multiheaded crowns nodded sagely in the high
winds. Among their shifting forms, giant limbs twisted, as
large and brown as whole hillsides elsewhere.
    In the hollows of some of the massive boughs, clear
waters gleamed in wide and twisting lakes, thirty feet deep
above smooth-skinned bark. Daily rains filled these raised
lakes. Their verges hung with shaggy curtains of moss, and
elven settlements crouched at their edges. Waterfalls
cascaded from the lakes, down bows or empty air into the
darksome forest below.
    Urza did not stop among the elven folk. He sought none
of the forest's inhabitants individually but all of them
collectively. He sought the spirit of the forest itself-
Yavimaya.
    In places, a magnificent tree had succumbed at last to
the colonies of worms and termites that riddled its city-
sized trunk, or to the rot of deep roots in lightless slime,
or to the implacable time clock within it, and had fallen.
Many dead giants leaned against their neighbors, forming
vast decaying ramps down into the murk. On such slopes,
whole new ecologies of undergrowth and grazing beast and
sharp-eyed hunter grew up. Other trees, the titanic ones
that could not be held aloft in their creaking plummet
toward ground, opened vast pits in the forest canopy, giving
view down thousands of feet, past the mounded and rangy bulk
of the world trees to the tangle of roots at their base.
    Urza entered one of these empty shafts now. He watched
in appreciation as the huge sprawl of tree summits rose to
close out the sky. Only a large, ragged hole remained
overhead. All around him, single-tree forests shivered
bright green against the blue sky and its scrolling clouds.
The high brakes of branch and bloom gave way to lower ranks
of coiling vine and draping lichen. They in time surrendered
to dark, cold, plunging depths, reached only by manifold
waterfalls and the ever-dimmer sunlight. The air turned
cold, wet, and biting.
    Urza formed a thick, woolen cloak atop his silken robes
of state. The fabrics fanned out on the cool wind, making
him seem some great black spider descending an invisible
thread.
    In time, his gemstone eyes adjusted to the murk. He saw
whole new worlds around him. The curved boughs were
inhabited. Giant antlike creatures swarmed blackly over a
knot in one of the ancient trees. The rotten center of the
knot formed a great archway that gave into an enormous
interior chamber. As Urza slid downward, he peered past
guard ants poised at the brink of their colony and saw into
the teeming blackness inside. There hunks of fruit and
severed segments of leaf and dead carcasses of tree goats
were borne along in caravans to inner storage places.
Translucent white larvae lay in careful nests tended by
tireless workers. A queen, who was the size of a parade of
elephants, laboriously dragged her moving bulk, leaving a
trail of wet globs in her wake. Just below the colony,
placid herds of long-horned cattle grazed on terraces of
bark. These beasts were tended by the ant creatures as
though they were mere aphids in a garden.
    A sheer drop lay beneath the cattle fields. A few
hundred feet farther down, giant cobwebs clung. They held
rolled white pouches-some vaguely cow-shaped, others ant-
shaped, and still more with human or elven form. Urza was
careful to steer clear of the sticky strands of web in his
course toward the bottom.
    Wherever life could cling, it did. Villages of elves
dwelt on shallow swoops of tree bark. Forest sprites lived
in spangled beauty among the deep dew fields. Dryads peered
out distrustfully at him from folds of bark, and naiads
glared from the silvery cascades that dropped from aerial
lakes. Tree goats bounded up the sheer faces of the tree
boles. Black-and gold-skinned cats stalked among fields of
moss. Beneath it all, on the tangled roots at the base of
the trees, druids appeared once in a while. They stared up
at Urza in fierce resistance before disappearing beneath the
ground.
    He gazed down at the root cluster. As vast as the boughs
above, the roots of the trees climbed over each other in a
muscular jumble. In places, the tightly laced structures
held dark pools of water or small banks of new tree growth.
Where the roots did not connect, though, were triangular
wells of darkness. During millennia of growth, the trees had
depleted all the earth beneath them, drawing it up their
boles. The result was a vast emptiness under the root
cluster, broken only by more waterfalls and fat taproots. At
the distant base of this murk, waters toiled in perpetual
darkness. This was the realm of the forest druids,
crisscrossed by thousands of causeways, stairs, and cave
passages.
    They would put up a fierce resistance to any program
Urza might suggest. They would know of Argoth.
    As Urza settled his gold-gilded feet on the root bulb of
a massive tree, a sudden dread rose through him. This place
was uncannily like Argoth. Its elves descended from those
who had fled the forest he and Mishra had destroyed. There
were ghosts here, the ghosts of Urza's past, but he had not
come to commune with ghosts. He had come to discover the
future.
    Urza lifted his hands in invocation. "I am Urza
Planeswalker. I have come for an audience with Yavimaya. We
must discuss the coming war. I wish to ally myself with you.
We must confer upon the fate of our world."

                       *****

    Multani had known the invader even before he spoke his
name. The forest recognized the monster much as a body
recognizes a contagion it had once suffered.
    Defiler of Argoth, Destroyer of Elves, Terror's Twin,
the End Man, Slayer of the People of the World-Urza
Planeswalker.
    Even as the man descended through the foliage of the
upper forest, Multani surged up the bole of a great
magnigoth tree. He gathered himself in myriad surges of sap
and pulses of green wood. From the roots of that ancient
colossus to its spreading crown thousands of feet above, the
magnigoth came to exquisite life. The soul of the forest
quickened every twig and leaf and tendril. Multani could
have flexed the massive roots like the tentacles of a squid
and marched the enormous tree through Yavimaya. He could
have reached out with any of the magnigoth's hundred
thousand boughs and snatched Urza and crushed him. He could
have slain the man ten thousand times, in clouds of mold
dust or swarms of arboreal spiders or lashing storms of
boughs, but he did not, not yet.
    This man was no mere man. He had become a power since
Argoth. He had drawn the might of the land into him and was
perhaps a match for Multani and Yavimaya. He had become a
planes-walker and could wink into and out of existence with
a thought. It would take a careful trap to capture this one.
It would take all the mesmerizing force of the forest's mind
to drive from the planes-walker any thought of escape. Only
then could he could be contained. Only then would Argoth
have its vengeance.
    Until then, though, Multani would seduce the
planeswalker into a trap. He watched patiently, following
Urza down the trunk of the great tree. He would marshal the
might of Yavimaya and lead Urza into doom, just as surely as
Urza had led Argoth into doom.
    A pang jagged through Multani. The man was calling on
the land. He was summoning its power as he had back in
Argoth. He was daring to compel the forest he said he had
come to consult.
    Multani sifted all the faster downward, hurrying to
reach the spot where the man stood. No matter how many
creatures Urza summoned, this was Multani's forest. He would
take them back, free them from the bidding of the Defiler.
    To treat with Yavimaya, Multani thought bitterly, you
must treat with me.
    Urza had finished his invocation, but the forest had not
answered. He stood for some time, letting the verdant air
sift over and around him. He could wait, of course. The
forest knew he was here, sensed his power as assuredly as he
sensed its, but Urza was never content to wait. He always
felt better if he could tinker.
    He reached into his vast reserves of sorcery and
summoned forth a swarm of sprites.
    A flowing cloud of gold and silver cleaved from the
treetops high overhead and danced down on the breezes toward
him. Urza watched in silent amazement. Though the cloud was
still a thousand feet above, his gemstone eyes made out the
tiny darting creatures within it. Winged and delicate, the
sprites approached, a high song in their tiny throats. The
melody ranged hypnotically through many tonal structures,
sinuous and ineffable. Soon Urza could make out words in the
song.

   Return among us, child of ages.
   Sing the reconciling song
   And burn the pages where long
   The sages condemned thee.
   Sing, forgetful, sing
   Of mild, regretful things
   Before the forest's nodding head.
   Let dead bury dead and then
   Arise to sing again.

    The words plucked strangely at Urza's mind. He
remembered those voices, small and chimelike against the
waterfall roar of wind in the leaves, remembered sprites
fighting among druids and elven archers, their voices raised
then in fury and condemnation. These creatures sang,
instead, of reconciliation. They sang as though they were
miniature Barrins.
    Delighted, Urza moved to cast a second summoning spell.
The sorcery was never completed. Already the forest
responded. New ambassadors arose.
    To the convolute roll of the gnat song came also a slow,
low, gulping sound. It came from among the roots of the
oriatorpic trees-shadowy gnomes within their barrows. Their
tones made a basso counterpoint to the whistle-high melody.

   O nations, rise into the dawning light
   Where, bright, our generations'
   hope has come.
   Speak, O dumb, and dance,
   O lame, the night
   Of blame advances round to sun
   And morning comes again.

    Urza stood in the midst of the swelling chords, daring
to hope that this ancient forest had grown up outside of the
pall cast by Argoth's death. Perhaps short-lived sprites and
gnomes would simply not remember that time. The folk who
would not forget, could never forget, would be the elves.
Urza needed to know their mind.
    As though summoned, they came-elves of the high forest.
They came from behind every tree, from within every fold of
root upon root. Their eyes were bright and wide in the gray
twilight of the place and glowed, luminous and green. They
came, singing too, their voices at last providing the main
body of the chantlike round of the other creatures:

   Hello, Urza, we know of you
   From dark times past that nearly slew
   Us, every mother's son, and tore
   Our bodies limb from limb.
   That war Was hateful, true, but now we live
   In peace and health.
   We wish to give You all you ask, to save
   Our world from such a grave
   As once you dug that terrible day.

    The three groups of singers converged around Urza.
Sprites danced in glowing daisy chains in the air around
him. Shadow gnomes scuttled from their burrows to crouch
like toads upon the moss beds. Elves treaded with
preternaturally light footfalls among the roots. Urza
listened to their singing-his mind could hear each strain
separately and all of them together. His foot lightly tapped
the root ball where he stood.
    He heard another voice, a deep rumble more massive and
hollow and mournful than even Karn's. The sound came from
all around, as though the air itself spoke. The clammy
breath of it, though, came from behind Urza. He pivoted,
seeing only a vast wound in the base of the tree. The gouge
was three times his height. Bark had struggled hard to close
over the gash. Great rolled lips of wood still strained to
come together. Next moment, those same bark lips drew apart,
and smaller rents in the side of the tree opened above.
Knots rolled beneath. The wound spoke:
    "Welcome, Urza Planeswalker. We are Multani, spirit of
Yavimaya." The face in the wood was utterly mournful, the
mask of tragedy with only shadows for eyes. "We remember
you."
    The planeswalker bowed his head and actually dropped to
one knee on the root cluster. "Forgive me. What I did three
millennia ago, I did to save Dominaria from hideous
invaders."
    "To Argoth, you and your brother were the hideous
invaders," replied the voice, haunting as a chorus of the
dead.
    "I had to sacrifice Argoth or sacrifice the whole
world," said Urza, almost pleading. "I did not doubt Titania
of Argoth would have made the same choice were she strong
enough to."
    "Titania had been strong enough before they were
despoiled," the tree spirit replied.
    "As I said before, forgive me-"
    "We are not Titania. We are not Argoth. We are Multani
of Yavimaya. We have welcomed you," the voice said, and the
lagging chorus of sprites, gnomes, and elves resumed.
    The melody coursed, coy and yet somehow cloying, through
Urza, like the dank wind moving through his robes. There was
a wild geometry to the tones as they twisted in and out of
each other. The notes trickled upon Urza. Waves of sound lay
beside waves of energy, nudging them into their pattern. He
closed his eyes a moment, struggling to assemble a response
to Multani. Whenever a pair of words connected in his mind,
though, they were soaked apart by the gentle nudge of the
song.
    "We would speak to you at length of this coming
invasion."
    Urza nodded, his eyes opening. He was slightly startled
to realize he was standing. When had he risen to his feet?
The question melted away on the pulsing song. Such matters
were unimportant. There were allies here. There was music.
For the first time since his ascension, Urza felt true joy.
The sharp-edged box of his intellect softened into a warm,
hazy buzz, like a swarm of bees-or a swarm of sprites.
    "We would first treat you to a festival dinner to
celebrate our newfound association."
    Yes, thought Urza, I am hungry.
    There was something wrong with that thought, something
Urza could not quite identify. He couldn't remember the last
time he had eaten. Of course he was hungry. If the forest's
fare was as sumptuous as its music, he would eat himself
sick. Surely there would be wine, and other delights to the
appetites. Urza would indulge them all.
    There was something wrong with that thought too. The
nagging objections bubbled up, drowned, through the flood of
music:

   Return among us, child of ages.
   Sing the reconciling song
   And burn the pages where long
   The sages condemned thee.
   Sing, forgetful, sing
   Of mild, regretful things
   Before the forest's nodding head.
   Let dead bury themselves in dead
   Sing, forgetful, sing.

    When had he begun to sing? When had he ever not sung?
Urza's voice, deep and resonant in the edifice of sound,
moved among the smiling tones of the sprites and gnomes and
elves. The mouth of the tree opened wide. The company of
fairy folk guided Urza forward. He paced, solemn and happy,
into the yawning space and down the throat of the enormous
tree. There would be a feast in these deeps. There would be
more music and lights and festival.
    Except that all of it was behind him now. Darkness and
wood and the irresistible power of Yavimaya pulsed in the
very heart of the gigantic tree. Then, these things were all
around. The mouth spoke one last time.
    "We would speak to you at length, also, of the last
invasion." With that, the tree's mouth closed. Its throat as
well. Urza, caught in wood and the thick darkness, wondered
dimly where he was, and how he was, and who he was. He would
be able to think, were it not for all the pervading mind of
the forest, curing him like cedar smoke, changing him,
preserving him in place.
    But not preserving him. Urza felt his body dissolving
away into wood. His fingers were the first to go, each
burning with incandescent agony. His every nerve sizzled
beneath the skin. His bones turned to chalk and rubbed away
in the sooty gnawing of the heart-wood around him. His
fingers and toes, harvested slowly by the massive tree,
turned into mere minerals.
    "When Harbin, son of Urza Planeswalker, landed upon
Argoth, he sought a green limb to replace a spar on his
flying machine. In its mercy, the forest showed him a fallen
limb that perfectly suited his needs. In repayment, the man
returned to the heart of Argive to bring back armies of
ravagers to harvest the forest. Men and machines felled
ancient trees, slew druids, hunted creatures into
extinction, pillaged, burned, raped, destroyed, all to the
glory of Urza and his brother Mishra. Slowly, they ate away
at Argoth, killing Titania, her spirit."
    The words were needless. Urza had become Titania. His
body had become a vast forest. He felt in every tissue of
his being the destroying, despoiling work of his own armies.
Minute creatures invaded his body and, mote by mote, turned
him into mere minerals, mere resources.
    Urza would have screamed, but he was no longer Urza. He
would have planeswalked from the spot, but that would mean
leaving his body, the forest, behind. He could only hang
there, encased in wood, and endure.
                           Monologue
    Urza is arriving in Yavimaya even as I write this. I
know the forest's position, as unreachable and forbidding as
Shiv. He hopes to return in two days' time. Knowing Urza's
sense of time-and guessing about the reception Yavimaya will
have for him-I'll give him a week before I become unsettled.
    This could well be the pivotal point for Urza. He has
shown he is capable of building human alliances, and more
than that-building coalitions among many races. Perhaps by
creating an alliance with Yavimaya, he can make amends for
Argoth. Perhaps no amount of penance could ever make amends
for such atrocity.
     We have our own atrocities under way in Tolaria. Just
today I led a charge of scorpions against Phyrexian
entrenchments at the border of Slate Waters. Given the
physiology of my mechanical forces, a pincer movement
naturally suggested itself. We flanked the main body of
Phyrexians left and right and trapped them in their
trenches. They were caught between us and the temporal
curtain. I sent scorpion units flooding into their dens.
Meanwhile, I drove a wall of wind down the middle. Flushed
from cover, the beasts fell back into the time curtain at
the edge of that charred swamp. I ordered a charge. We
hurled them into the rift.
     That passage would have killed any human. It did little
more than further jangle these fiends. Even so, the extreme
slow time of Slate Waters halted the Phyrexians in a thick
wall. I ordered the scorpions to fire. Quarrels stormed out
in a killing gale. The front line of Phyrexians was nearly
sawed in half. They were spewing glistening oil in a cloud
before them by the time a human contingent arrived to
reinforce us.
     One young woman tore a hunk of cloth from beneath her
armor coat and doused it with oil from a fallen scorpion.
She stuck the cloth on a spent quarrel, ignited it, and
hurled the thing into the gap. It entered the spray of
glistening oil. A dull orange glow spread from the spot. The
fiery quarrel hung strangely in the air as slow flame rolled
laterally out along the Phyrexian lines.
     We stopped firing. We stood, staring in a mixture of
exultation and dread. Languid tendrils of flame coiled out
around fiendish arms and legs. We watched as our foes
ignited. The cheer that came from us when hair and carapace
were limned in flame devolved quickly to a groan. Eyeballs
ruptured from the heat. Limbs were blasted away. The deep,
horrid roar of dying monsters struck us.
     "Back!" I yelled.
     Even I was cemented in place when the blaze went
critical. White hot, the flash was blinding. We fell back
then by instinct alone. Clutching our eyes, we clambered
over stalled scorpions and mired dead to escape the coming
blaze. When the blast at last emerged from Slate Waters,
most of us were half a mile into the forest. Even so, it
flung us to our faces and, like the warriors on Argoth of
old, we could only pray the sun-bright blast would someday
end.
     It will be another Argoth, this conflict. The Phyrexians
press us day and night. Their numbers grow greater with each
sally. Their magical might will soon be the equal of mine.
The students are weary of fighting, and though I have
employed my most awe-inspiring battle spells, I am not a
charismatic leader. Jhoira and Teferi were better suited for
that. Urza, despite all his inhumanity, perhaps leads best
of all.

                              - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                        Chapter 16

    Jhoira stood on the lofted control platform at the nexus
of the mana rig. To one side of her stood Teferi and to the
other, Karn.
    Teferi watched over his workers-the goblin hordes that
tended the crystal-manufacturing wing of the factory. It had
been nearly two years since the Viashino-goblin war had
concluded, and the forbidden zones were now fully
functional. Each of the three clans of goblin-the silvery
Tristou, the red Destrou, and even the irrepressible gray
Grabbits-had aided in the cleaning and repair of the
facility. In doing so, they had risen to their individual
levels of ability. Chieftain Glosstongue Crackcrest of the
Tristou had become the nominal leader of the three clans,
but a certain manic Grabbit machinist had won over the
masses with his antics, his nonsensical but volatile
speeches, and his instinctive and incessant glad-handing.
Though all decisions were made by Chief Crackcrest, they had
to be approved by Machinist Terd.
    The gray creature even now climbed to the observation
post. He scrambled up a ladder engineered for goblins
considerably larger than he. His much-spattered coveralls
jangled with small shiny tools that no one had ever seen the
goblin use-bits of metal Terd wore like talismans or awards.
Despite his inability to perform actual work, the creature
was in constant motion. His eyebrows-great knotted tufts of
hair that were even more prominent than his prominent nose-
were raining sweat down on his knobby chin. As he grabbed
the rails of the control platform and pulled himself up
beside Teferi, Terd gave a bright, sharp-toothed smile. It
was one of his proudest features. A goblin with a full set
of teeth was a rarity. One with white teeth was a messenger
from the gods.
    Terd kowtowed obscenely, tipping a little rag of felt
that he considered a hat. "The rock thingies all ready."
Terd's reports were no more explicit than his speeches.
Interpreting them typically took a tedious game of charades.
    Teferi gave a long-suffering sigh. "The ore conveyers?"
    Terd shook his head with such abruptness that an
umbrella of sweat unfolded from him onto all those around.
    "The crystal presses?" Teferi guessed.
    Terd pursed his scabby lips in thought and then whipped
his head as though he were trying to rend the suggestion
with his teeth.
    "The Thran-metal molds?"
    Ecstatic, Terd touched a withered finger to his nose.
"Yes, yes. We make rocks today? Yes?"
    Teferi shook his head. "Not until the ore conveyers and
crystal presses are ready."
    "You make Terd a pretty big rock."
    "Yes," Teferi assured.
    It had been one of the incentives provided the goblin
workers that, once a month, when the rig was in operation,
each would receive a small crystal-in fact only a cast-off
shard from a cut stone. Even if a goblin had happened to get
hold of a larger stone, none of the crystals from the rig
would be imbued with power until it was charged with mana.
Even the smallest of stones would permanently drain the mana
from a large tract of land. To power a stone the size of the
one Urza had designed for his flying ship would require the
mana destruction of a whole world.
    "Terd use his stone to be big magic man. Terd become big
king of goblins."
    "Yes," Teferi humored, "and that will be a bright day
for us all."
    "Tend go tell goblin scum-'Work faster! Work faster!'
Then he be king sooner." "Go do that."
    Even as the irascible little fellow scuttled away down
the ladder and shouted commands to his kinsmen, a very
different liaison officer climbed the opposite ladder. Diago
Deerv had proven himself a capable and level-headed lizard
man in regearing the Thran forges. Now with the ancient
enemy of the Viashino occupying half of the rig, it was only
creatures such as Diago and Bey Fire Eye himself that kept
the creatures from all-out revolt-Diago, the bey, and
Jhoira's continual reminders that Urza would return any day.
    Jhoira was not the official manager of the Thran forges.
That job fell to Karn, the very creature who was promised to
the lizard men in payment for their labors.
    Diago rose to his full height on the platform-he had
grown in the last four years-and looked Karn directly in the
eye. "We've finished the castings Master Malzra requested.
We ask that you come to approve them."
    Karn nodded. "I am waiting for a report from the lava
batteries. Then I can come with you."
    Diago took a deep breath and spoke with a strained
voice. "With the completion of these castings, we have
fulfilled the terms of our agreement. We ask for payment of
the price owed us."
    Before Karn could answer, Jhoira interrupted, "Actually,
we have still not successfully created a Thran-metal man."
She glanced warily between reptile eyes and silver ones.
"Those were the terms of our agreement."
    "You've abandoned that project," Diago objected.
    "Actually, no," Jhoira said quickly. "We have a new
design, one that takes into account the metal's growth
patterns."
    "May I see these plans?" Diago asked.
    "Tomorrow," Jhoira said. "I will provide them to you
tomorrow. We can begin our castings then."
    Diago wore a suspicious expression. "And once these new
machines are cast-"
    "Yes," Jhoira said, "then you will have your price. You
will have the silver man."
    Diago bowed low and backed down the ladder.
    Jhoira, Karn, and Teferi traded sober looks.
    "You don't have any new plans, do you?" Teferi asked.
    Jhoira shrugged. "I have old plans-for Tolarian runners.
I'll modify them tonight, taking into account Urza's
nesting-doll pattern of construction. It'll hold them off
awhile more. It may even prove a useful fighter for the
Phyrexian wars."
    That mention brought all of their thoughts around to
Barrin and besieged Tolaria.
    Jhoira spoke for them all. "I hope Urza returns soon."
    Every axe-blow that struck the trees of Argoth bit into
the man's limbs. Every fire that mantled his magnigoth trees
flared through his veins. Every killing blast and grating
landslide enervated him.
    Urza was on the island. Urza and Mishra. Their names
were plague and famine, fire and flood. From opposite ends
of the land they tore at each other. They converged, and
whatever stood between them was destroyed by their fury.
    The man in the wood watched as ancient trees leaned and
crackled and fell. Their bulk did not even rest on the root
cluster before vast machines yanked and hewed and hacked
them into beams and joists and planks-but mostly scrap. Bark
and thin branches, leaves, and buds became only mounds of
debris over which the killing machines rolled. Black snakes
of smoke coiled into the troubled sky. There they joined
great mountains of darkness, hovering as though in mourning.
    What could drive those killing brothers? What passions?
    And yet, the question seemed false. It was forced into
the man in the wood from the outside. He knew just what
drove them-ambition, curiosity, competition, vitality, and
all of it enwrapped in a thin, tragic blanket of distrust.
What drove them? The highest intentions and hopes. What
directed them? The lowest emotion- fear. They were monsters,
yes, but only because of their power. Were it not for their
machines and their armies, they would not be monsters, but
only little boys.
    That thought brought a surge of anger from around the
man. He railed. As sharp and tenacious as resin, reproof
flowed into him. Urza and Mishra were true monsters. They
despoiled all they touched. Their very flesh was corruption.
Their only motivations were pure hatred.
    The man in the wood resisted the welling flood of
recrimination, holding his breath. He pushed back against
the thoughts. They overtook him anyway and soaked into every
pore and poured into his lungs-for every man must breathe.
    There was something wrong in that thought, but the
distinction drifted away on a fresh wave of agony. In that
screaming space, there was no room for any excuse, any
forgiveness, but only the undeniable sentence of guilt.
    At the man's throat there came another sound of
screaming and more visions. Not trees burning now, but
people-white robed students. Not axe machines and levelers,
but loping artifact creatures, some like headless emus, some
like pouncing pumas, some like giant scorpions. Not armies
of Argivians and Fallaji, but armies of fiends and negators,
of killing monsters. They swept over another island, far
away, not Argoth but... but, . . the name would not form in
his mind.
    In the face of this new, horrific assault, the armies of
Urza and Mishra seemed civilized and noble. Felling trees
seemed nothing in the face of burning children. An idea
lurked there, something about the better war to fight, the
war that could prevent the apocalypse.
    That thought, too, was squeezed out of being in the
furious fist of wood around the man. If only he could think.
If only he could hold a thought in his head-a thought of his
own ... but then there was only pain.

                       *****

    Barrin watched from the gorge tower. It was the highest
spot in the academy. Poised beyond reach of Phyrexian
weapons, it curved out over the wall to peer into the dark
swath. This spot was manned day and night, and of late,
mainly by Barrin. From here he could gauge the movement of
K'rrik's forces to any of the four bridges from the time
pit. From here, Barrin stemmed the fiendish tide with long-
range sorceries and enchantments. Intelligence gathered here
allowed him to deploy his machine and human forces to
intercept the attackers. And here, perhaps most importantly
of all, lay the triggering mechanism for the beacon pendant
Urza wore.
     Barrin had just activated the beacon.
     It had been nearly three years since Urza had gone to
Yavimaya, and no one had heard from him. He could be dead,
Barrin knew. Though planeswalkers were extremely long-lived,
they could be killed, especially if their life-force became
unfocused or dissipated. Still, it was a very difficult
thing to kill a planeswalker, but not so to trap one. A
planeswalker could be trapped in deception. If Urza did not
think he needed to escape, he couldn't. If he forgot he
could planeswalk, he could be trapped indefinitely. With
Urza's fragile sanity and top-heavy psyche, such tricks
could be easily accomplished. If he lived at all, he was
trapped.
     Perhaps, though, the beacon blaring into Urza's mind
would startle him out of whatever malaise had laid hold of
him.
     Of course, there was a third possibility. Perhaps Urza
had moved on. Perhaps he had gotten what he had wanted out
of Tolaria and Shiv and Yavimaya and had gone some fourth
place to assemble it all.
     Whatever the cause of Urza's absence, the beacon
summoned him. He must return to Tolaria in the next year, or
there would be no Tolaria to return to.
     The Phyrexians had just discovered a new bridge out of
their pit: a deep spring that fed the academy's wells. One
moonless night, they had poured up through every well head
and cistern in the academy. The forces of Tolaria rallied
and thrust back the monstrous intruders, fighting in their
own home as they had fought beyond its walls. The beasts
were slain wholesale, grates were affixed over any access to
ground water, and new guard posts were created. The
Phyrexians had yet to exact their worst death toll. Their
dead bodies poisoned the water. Any who drank from the
school water supplies in the next days developed a flesh-
eating disease that turned their muscles to bloody mush and
made bone as brittle as crackers. Twenty-three students and
scholars died before the source of the contagion was
discovered.
     All water for drinking or washing had to be brought from
distant wells beyond the school walls. Now, Phyrexians could
rise right in the midst of the academy.
     The Tolarian fortress had disappeared out from under
Barrin. The siege had suddenly turned into a jungle battle-
dark, desperate, chaotic, and finally, hopeless.
     Barrin's hand squeezed the jeweled dagger that triggered
the beacon. The enchanted item would convey to Urza whatever
Barrin saw, whatever he thought-scenes of flesh-eaten
friends and overrunning foes. Barrin said a silent prayer
that Urza lived, and that Urza heard.

                        *****

    Jhoira paced uneasily before the line of Thran-metal
defenders. Just behind her, Diago Deerv marched. His scaly
hide bristled with nervousness as she looked over the
machines. They were flawless. The original plan of the
Tolarian runner had undergone numerous changes, including a
more ovoid body, a deeper bend to the legs, and more
capacity for armaments. Jhoira had overcome the difficulties
of growing metal in this design, and these twelve fighters,
if they ever reached Tolaria, could well prove indispensable
in its defense.
    If they ever reached Tolaria ... she had stalled the
lizard men for two more years, waiting for Urza to return
and broker Karn's freedom. The man had not returned. Jhoira
had decided he was dead. Once the Viashino and goblin tribes
decided the same, the tenuous peace of the rig would be at
an end.
    Worse yet, news of Urza's long absence had at last
reached the ears of the Shivan Drake Gherridarigaaz. She had
resumed her strafing attacks on Viashino patrol posts, had
cut off trade routes to the Ghitu tribes of the sea shores,
and had dropped numerous boulders into the vent shafts above
the city. Her son, who had willingly defected to the
Viashino cause, decided he wanted to return to her.
Apparently he was a typical child runaway, more intent on
making a point than on gaining true independence. The
Viashino had adamantly held him to his alliance agreement.
The young creature went from being their champion to a caged
and chained traitor.
    What would they do about Urza's agreement? With the
return of the fire drake, half of the bargain Urza offered
had fallen through. This morning the other half was in
danger.
    What would it matter? Jhoira asked herself. If Urza is
dead, Tolaria is destroyed, there will be no flying ship,
and there will be no hope for Dominaria's delivery from
Phyrexia. If Urza is dead, Shiv might well be the nicest
place for Karn and the rest of them to live out what
remained of their lives.
    The words she spoke were somewhat different. "Excellent
work, as always, Diago. You and your workers are
extraordinary craftsmen."
    "Judging from your tone, you have no more reason to
delay the payment of our price," Diago said as the two of
them reached the end of the line, where Karn stood.
    Jhoira's jaw clenched. Muscles in her temples hardened.
"No, Diago. I will delay no longer, but I offer you a
different bargain. Instead of taking this one silver golem-
nearly half a century old and battered and filled with all
kinds of emotional entanglements- I offer you these twelve
Thran-metal warriors."
    A harsh edge entered Diago's eyes. "The agreement was
for the silver man."
    "Yes," Jhoira agreed, "and now I am offering you a
different agreement."
    A metallic hiss came from the lizard man's teeth. "No.
We know how to build these creatures. They are not
intelligent. We wish to have the silver man, to learn how to
build an intelligent creature."
    "But, he's not just a silver man, Diago," Jhoira said.
"He's Karn. He has worked beside you all these years. Don't
you care what he wants? Doesn't it bother you to make him
your property, your slave?"
    "We all are slaves to the tribe. To serve selflessly is
the highest honor," Diago said. "Yes, he is Karn, a comrade.
When he is given to us, he will be part of our tribe. He
will be our greatest defender. He will teach us how to make
armies of intelligent machines."
    "Karn can't teach you that," Jhoira said. "I know more
about his construction than he does. Master Malzra's the
only one who really understands his emotional and
intellectual abilities. Would you imprison me? Would you
imprison Malzra?"
    "We do not imprison creatures."
    "What about Rhammidarigaaz?"
    "He agreed to join us. And, as for Karn, Malzra agreed
to grant him to us," Diago said. "And Karn can teach us how
to build an intelligent machine. The secrets are inside of
him. We will gain them...."
    "Enough," Karn said to Jhoira, cutting off her response.
"I will go with them. I will teach them what I can. It is
the highest honor to serve."
    Open-mouthed, Jhoira watched as the lizard man and the
silver man turned and walked away into the depths of the
humming mana rig.
                          Monologue
    They are everywhere. We cannot stand. We will not last
the day. All will be dead. I still clutch the beacon, yet
Urza does not come. We all will be dead.
                              - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 17

    Barrin stood, white-knuckled and wide eyed, in the gorge
tower. He clutched the beacon dagger in his hand and gaped
as the world disintegrated around him.
    A great roaring tide of Phyrexians swept toward the
walls.
    As a whole army, they were terror personified. As
individual creatures, they were worse still. Many of the
beasts were gigantic- white and meaty, seeming to have taken
their forms from the blind shrimp larvae that infested the
gorge lake. They scuttled on sharp, darting legs, their
scaled backs hunched in heinous intent over minuscule eye
nubs. Barbed antennae tasted the air. The warm brine of
human blood drew them on. Others had wolflike figures, all
warped and elephantine, with a mane of mange over leathery
skin speckled in black and pink. Only their heads diverged
from the lupine plan, small, yellow, puffy, and indrawn,
like the heads of jaundiced babies. A vast number of the
company were human or semihuman, though their bodies had
been torqued and tortured into forms unrecognizable-leering
death masks of flayed muscle, spidery arms with sinews
realigned so that radius and ulna became opposing pincers,
rib cages inset with spikes of stone or metal, bellies
implanted with poison bladders that splashed foes in acid,
hips that were no more than winnowed bone and tarry
ligament, and legs that ended in sharpened spikes of bone.
Most of the beasts bore weapons stripped from ruined runners
or falcons. In a few places, machines of K'rrik's own design
shambled among the monstrous hordes.
    "We ourselves have armed them," Barrin whispered.
    Against this onslaught of horror came the defenders of
Tolaria. Barrin activated an array of powerstones, linked to
mechanisms across the island. What falcons remained streaked
down in furious flight. The white vapor trails behind them
traced a converging fan across the sky. Impacting along the
surging front, the falcons seemed to be allied lightning
strikes. They brought with them a vast, rolling thunder.
Fiends were hurled back into the chopping jaws of their
fellows. The falcons' incandescent arrival was followed by
the ratchet and whine of their shredding mechanisms. Blood-
glistening oil and some substance that was bug-black, slime-
green, and a shade of lavender that might have been pretty
if it weren't steamy and acidic-fountained amid bounding
chunks of meat and bone.
    Barrin's delight at this grisly assault was short-lived.
The hordes behind only splashed through the remains of their
comrades and pressed the charge. Barrin squeezed the dagger
handle and simultaneously signaled the second wave of
defenders.
    Hundreds of Tolarian runners lunged up from their
trenches at the base of the wall. The machines loped into
combat, their scythe wings poised to strike. They darted
out, long-legged and fearless. The twang and whoosh of
quarrels sounded from the ports that lined their bellies.
Shafts soaked in anti-oil-a biologic poison designed to
separate Phyrexian blood-thudded home in the pelting lines
of monsters.
    Phyrexians released a corporate shriek that rattled
stones and sheared leaves from their branches. Another line
of dead and dying went down, these not in a slick slough but
a quaking mound of muscle and bone. The monstrous charge
followed on, clambering over the fallen.
    Tolarian runners met them, striking with twin blades.
Some of the beasts were cut in half. Others were torn open
at the belly and ran on a few paces before light fled their
eyes and they rolled wetly in the dirt. A few were
unstoppable. Though runners hung from scythes buried in
their bellies, the beasts advanced, dauntless. They and a
healthy horde of fiends surged into the waiting phalanx of
scorpion engines.
    Urza's scorpions were not designed for speed. With six
legs, massive pincers, and darting tails, they were made to
stand and fight. They held their position as the beast army
fell on them. The first monsters literally fell, legs cut
away. Their bleeding bulks dropped atop the stooped
shoulders of the scorpions, who merely shrugged them off to
snag the next comers. More Phyrexians lost their legs. A
third wave leapt onto the backs of the beasts only to be
undone by darting tail stingers.
    The dead mounded up. In time, the machines' pincers
became pinned beneath tons of oozing flesh. All the while,
fiends fought onward into a hail of shafts from human guards
on the walls.
    Then, the first Phyrexian won through. It was a giant
creature with a body as bulbous and pitted as an old gourd.
It lulled past furiously stinging tails, rolled over the
wall of dead, and crashed mightily against the stone rampart
around the school. White arrows stood in a thicket across
the beast's figure, but they did not stay it. The thing
lunged again, smashing into the wall. A jagging crack opened
from the battlements to the footings. More monsters
clambered past the buried scorpions and reached the wall.
They added their bulk to the giant's assaults or scampered
up the cut edges of stone or flung tentacular digits to haul
themselves over.
    In moments, the walls would be breached, Barrin
realized. They were already breached. The wells and cisterns
poured monsters into the midst of the school. The
battlefront had broken into a thousand pieces, and every
scholar and ever student would fight the legions of hell
alone.
    Not entirely alone-Barrin's fingers danced across the
glittering gemstones. He called all remaining pumas from
their forest posts into the school. He awakened every
mechanism in the Hall of Artifact Creatures-from Yotian
warriors to Tawnos's clay men to su-chi loaders and
conveyers and logging machines. Every last one would fight
today-on this last day of Tolaria.
    His summonations done, Barrin turned and descended into
the dark spiral that led to the yard below. He would fight,
too, with spells and staves and this dagger that had proven
no other defense-and even his nails and teeth and bones, if
it came to it. When it came to it.
    Urza was dead, and soon all of Tolaria would be.

                       *****

    In the midst of all the shrieking wail of forest fires
and trapped animals and tortured elves, the man in the wood
heard a greater conflict: Phyrexian cries, mascerating
machines, whistling arrows, men screaming, children dying,
and in the throat of them all echoed one name.
    Urza! Urza! Urza!
    He knew the name of the Defiler. He knew the Bane of
Argoth, but this Urza was a different one-a benevolent
creature of great power, a mentor, an advocate, a protector.
These voices did not cry out in hatred and rage, but in need
and hope, in supplication. They cried out to a very
different Urza.
    They cried out to him.
    In the deafening clamor of their voices, Urza remembered
who he was.
    The mind of the forest pressed in upon him with sudden
violence, straining to quell the thought. After five years
of torture and penance, Yavimaya's fury was spent. The
forest had come to know the man it had so hated. It had
subsumed him into its web of life. No, Yavimaya's fury was
spent, and its rage was nothing beside the fury of the
battle that summoned Urza.
    He forced back the mind of the wood. He recomposed his
being from the drifting shreds of it within the vast tree.
He brought his mind into sudden, keen focus.
    Yavimaya made one final grab at him. Multani, the soul
of Yavimaya, impelled himself into the form of the awakening
planes-walker. He fused with the forming figure, struggling
to root him in place, but it was too late.
    Urza vanished from the heart of the tree. He was
suspended for only a sliver of time in the fold between
worlds, but during that moment he could feel a presence
imprisoned within him: Multani. In a single instant, his
captor had become his captive.
    There was no time to think of Multani. Urza stepped from
the wheel of eternities into a precise moment, a precise
space. Walls of ancient, gray metal took shape around him.
Large windows of dark glass, levers and gears, fire belching
from glowing forges. It all came into being. None of these
things mattered; only the sharp-eyed and dark-skinned Ghitu
woman in their midst mattered. She had been crouched over a
set of plans, arguing some point with a gesticulating
goblin, when Urza arrived. Jhoira whirled about, slack-
jawed.
    "Gather your best fighters. Tolaria is overrun. I will
return and take you there."
    He was already fading from being before his orders were
complete. The shocked stare of Jhoira followed Urza into the
spinning spaces. He sensed a similar amazement from Multani.
That amazement redoubled the next moment as Urza stepped
into the chaos of Tolaria.
    The walls were breached. The guards along them were
merely boneless heaps or red streaks on white stone.
Phyrexians poured like roaches through the gaps. They
flooded up from shattered grates hurriedly fastened over
well heads. They swarmed through burst doorways and down
stone corridors. They fought those who could resist and
fastened teeth on those who couldn't. Throughout Urza's
field of sight, monsters tossed students and scholars like
white rags. Urza rose from the dirt where his feet had
alighted for a moment. He floated straight into the air and
unleashed red bolts down the ring of wells in the main
courtyard. The blasts of energy sailed down the throats of
the channels. They flashed past the shadowy forms that
scuttled upward. At the waterline, a sudden inferno erupted.
    Red water and black-charred bodies geysered from the
wells. The ground around each well head mounded up in
swollen distress. In the next moment, rock and mortar and
dirt cascaded down into fire-fused plugs. The wells were
closed. The Phyrexians below would drown.
    Urza spun about and cast another sorcery. Red beams
darted out to each jagged breach in the walls. Limestone
grew molten. It folded over the creatures struggling through
the gap. It solidified. The wall was once again whole.
    Urza kept rising. He hurled more fire outward, rings of
the stuff. Force hissed from his hands in arcs of steam and
coalesced over the walls to sweep away the raging throng.
The vanguard of the attack turned to black statues and then
sifting ash. Flames broke out in a great bail. Dancing
orange fire shimmered across the black surge and headed
toward the verges of the forest.
    Still the killer, aren't you? said a mind within Urza.
You would slay every bird and beast to kill the creatures
that oppose you.
    The wall of fire whirled in one last red roar before
dissipating, not singeing so much as a leaf tip. The accuser
within fell conspicuously silent. Urza allowed himself a
small smile-until the next wave of monsters emerged from the
eaves of the woods and stomped forward among twisted bodies
and piles of dust.
    "This is the horror I sought to stop in Argoth all those
years ago," Urza explained to the presence within him. "This
is the horror I still fight, but there will not be another
Argoth."
    Again only silence answered.
    Urza's eyes glittered in their gemstone aspect.
Extending a hand outward, he made a certain sign. One wing
of the Phyrexian host swung in upon the other. Fiends leapt
on fiends, bit through brains, sliced off heads. With
another sweep of his hand, Urza dragged fallen beasts from
the dead pile by the wall, digging free his ranks of
scorpions. The machines hauled themselves from the slimy
darkness where they had been buried and clambered toward the
new line of advance.
    "That should hold them for a moment," the planeswalker
told himself. He drifted back down within the walls.
    Below him, scores of machines, students, and scholars
fought against the ubiquitous foe. Among them, one gray-
haired man battled with an especial fury. He carried only a
dagger but made it work like a sword-slashing, striking,
parrying, piercing. Already around him on the dusty ground,
monsters lay in piles. The dagger he wielded called to the
pendant around Urza's throat. Even more, though, the man
drew him. He sank a fatal blow in the dinner-plate eye of
the creature he fought, and it spilled sloppily out of his
way. Urza alighted where the beast had been and for his
efforts got a dagger in the gut.
    He smiled tightly, "Barrin, good to see you as well."
    Turning white, Barrin drew his blade from the master's
belly. It emerged, bloodless, and the man's belly and shirt
formed themselves behind the retreating knife.
    "Urza, I th-thought you were dead," he yammered
stupidly.
    "Not quite. I have mended the wall and staved off the
main attack," Urza said urgently. "But this must end today.
I must go kill K'rrik."
    "We cannot last," Barrin gasped, almost pleading,
"outnumbered, outmaneuvered ... out of breath."
    "I will bring reinforcements." So saying, Urza winked
suddenly from existence. Like a man stepping across a hall
from one room to another, Urza strode across the corridor of
worlds and stepped into the forge-room of Shiv.
    A sizable assembly awaited him. Jhoira was at the front
of the group, with a rank of twelve modified Tolarian
runners behind her-creatures of Thran metal. The platoon of
humans numbered thirty-five, and included Teferi and all the
other scholars and students brought to the land nearly a
decade before. They were serious now, grown-up, and fire-
hardened, like the metal they so expertly made. Beside them
was a contingent of forty lizard men, including Diago Deerv
and the picked warriors of the bey's personal bodyguard. The
young fire drake Rhammidarigaaz accompanied them, along with
Karn, the silver man. Next to these clean and orderly
troops, a ragtag collection of jumpsuited goblins clustered.
Many bore the crude tribal weapons they had brought to the
rig five years ago. Others carried only the largest,
heaviest, sharpest, or most wicked-looking items from their
toolboxes.
    Jhoira stepped forward with a military snap, accompanied
by Diago Deerv and a scrappy little goblin with eyebrows
that reached beyond his nose. This warrior gave what it
considered to be a rigid salute. Jhoira addressed Urza.
    "Your troops are assembled. Your allies have provided
more than token forces."
    "I see that," said Urza, his eyes flashing on
Rhammidarigaaz and Karn. He indicated them and turned to
Diago. "You realize, of course, that these two prizes of
yours may be sacrificed in the coming battle."
    "Sacrifice for the tribe is our highest honor," Diago
responded with stern sincerity.
    Urza's eyes passed one more time over the forces.
Despite their numbers and their resolve, they would not be
enough. He breathed deeply and said simply, "Come with me."
    The planeswalking wave that swept out from him
encompassed them all in an eye blink. It bore with it Urza's
latest enchantment- a mass effect spell that turned the
troops two dimensional while in the space between worlds.
Thran-metal walls melted away to whirling chaos. Ancient
enemies-Viashino, goblin, fire drake, human, and machine,
hung flatly together in the emptiness, and then the company
resolved out of air into the boiling battle of the Tolarian
courtyard.
    There was no time for orders. There were no columns
marching into battle. There was only space for a breath and
pivoting on one heel and striking whatever horrific figure
loomed blackly up out of battle. The jangle of Thran-metal
paortings joined the clang of goblin axes on carapace. The
silver man fought with bare hands and gargantuan strength.
The fire drake, the only beast that was a match in size for
the gibbering monsters, slew with tail and claws and teeth
and breath-all.
    Tolaria's defenders gave a ragged cheer as the monsters
faltered.
    But it would still not be enough.
    Urza planeswalked again. He left Tolaria for the lofted
aerie of the ancient dragon, Gherridarigaaz. In moments, he
appeared in the woven nest as he had before-sudden and
stunning, businesslike.
    "It is I, Urza Planeswalker," he announced.
    The drake was huge and red against the great weave of
tree bough and tar. She raised a grizzled head and regarded
Urza angrily. "I thought you were dead."
    "I can regain you your son, Great Gherridarigaaz."
    Her head came erect. "Say on."
    "You must fight for me. You must fight for me and the
Viashino and the goblins. Your son fights for us, even now.
I will take you to the place where Rhammidarigaaz is, and
you must fight side by side with him, ally yourself with us,
and save us in battle, and your son will be returned to
you."
    A suspicious glare entered the beast's narrowing eye.
"Fight whom?"
    Urza's eye was a sharp mirror of the drake's. "You must
fight the enemy of us all, the creatures that would kill
every last one of us, the monsters at the door."
    "Ah, yes," said the drake slyly. "Urza and his
Phyrexians."
    "I have no time for games," Urza said sternly. "Come
with me now and fight to regain your son, or do not come at
all."
    The drake lifted herself to her full, impressive height.
She drew her wings tightly about scaly shoulders and darted
her massive head in beside the planeswalker. "I go."
    Urza took hold of the beast's shaggy mane and climbed
onto her long neck. "Unfurl your wings," he ordered, "and
prepare a gout of flame."
     The drake complied. Her leathery wings stretched to
their full extent.
     "We go," Urza said.
     With a thought the deed was done. Urza and the dragon
folded into immutable geometry. Planar creatures, they
careened through the pitching corridor of space. In moments,
the veil of that middle place dropped away, replaced with
rushing treetops and a bright, cloud-cluttered sky. Urza and
his drake regained their third and fourth dimensions. Wings
unfolded into rushing air.
     Ahead, the Tolarian academy huddled on the hillside.
Ropy black pillars of smoke rose from it. Gherridarigaaz
gave one magnificent sweep of her wings. Pitching treetops
rolled away. The drake broke out over the battleground.
Below, monstrous creatures ran in their loping hundreds
toward a thinly defended wall.
     Drawing a deep breath, she hurled fire down on the
Phyrexians. They burned away to greasy black smudges on the
littered earth.
     A cheer rose up from behind the academy wall. The great
dragon soared and banked out over the Phyrexian gorge.
Ballistae bolts leapt up from the rent and cracked past her
wings. With a single surge, she climbed beyond their reach.
     "Yes," Urza shouted to the creature through the wheeling
winds. "Fight beside us, and you will have your son." Then
he was gone.
     He stepped from the back of the wheeling beast. The next
moment he appeared elsewhere, in a peaceful corner of
Tolaria.
     His feet came to rest on a dam of rubble and mortar. The
mighty barrier diverted water from the Phyrexian gorge. To
one side of the broad pile of stone lurked the dark dome of
K'rrik's fast-time loop. To the other side lay a vast, blue
reservoir, water saved from the dank depths of the gorge.
The lake was placid and mirror-still, far from the mad
battle. Fishes darted through its depths. Trees around its
edges cast their souls in its surface. "Forgive me," Urza
said simply.
     Force blasted from his lowered fingertips. It pulverized
the dam and hurled Urza into the air. Rocks separated. Water
burst forward. The flood turned suddenly white, bearing in
its brunt scouring teeth of rock and lime. It roared over
the precipice and punched into the gorge. The belly of the
lake slumped downward and followed. Urza plummeted into the
blue wall of water. It bore him along. It would disguise
him.
     It would protect him.
     He would not be torn by crosscurrents of time.
     He would not be impaled by ballista after ballista.
     He would not even be seen in the jetting flood.
     And once within the time rent, he would destroy the
spawning grounds where these Phyrexian monstrosities were
made, would hunt down K'rrik and kill him, and would cleanse
Tolaria forever of the Phyrexian menace.

                        *****

    Jhoira brought her Thran-metal sword crashing down onto
the head of a gigantic fiend. She split the creature's
sagittal crest and sent it sprawling back against the broken
wall of the infirmary. The beast's divided head came to rest
against the sill of a second-story window. Within that
window, more monsters preyed on the bed-bound patients.
Giving a roar, Jhoira climbed the sloping corpse of her foe
as though it were a staircase. Her sword crashed against the
glazing and sent a spray of glass within. Roars and screams
burst outward. Another swipe of her blade bashed flat the
toothy shards of glass at the base of the window. She
clambered over the sill.
    Many of the patients were already dead. The rest had put
up the best resistance they could with crutches and canes
for weapons. One of the more alchemically minded students
had made impressive use of the various anesthetic compounds
in the chamber. He had also concocted blast powder in small
vials and kept three Phyrexians at bay by casting exploding
philters at the feet of the attackers.
    Coming up behind them, Jhoira swung her sword at the
thick, reptilian neck of one of the monsters. The Thran-
metal blade sliced through flesh and bone like a knife
through water. The head lolled free and toppled toward
Jhoira, its eyes rolling and rows of triangular teeth
snapping. By instinct alone, she caught the snarling thing
by one pointed ear and thrust it away from her.
    One of the beast's comrades-a giant with a wattle of
bristly flesh-spun about to engage her. Its jaws roared open
for a bite that could cut her in half. Again in reflex,
Jhoira rammed the snapping head in the path of the teeth.
The head clamped its dead bite on the living beast's tongue.
Jhoira hardly had withdrawn her hand before the larger
Phyrexian chomped down on the severed head. Bone and tooth
crunched and burst outward in a tangle of flesh that lodged
itself chokingly in the giant's wattle. It gasped and
staggered aside, retching. Jhoira ended its agony with a jab
up one nostril and into the creature's frontal lobe. It fell
with a sick roar, wrenching Jhoira's blade from her hand and
pinning it under its body.
    A sharp pain exploded in her side. Jhoira flew limply
across the room to crash into the wall. Something stalked
toward her, a huge something with gray-scaled skin, small
insectile eyes, and ears that flared into venomous spikes.
It cast aside cots with the same ease it had cast her aside.
Jhoira struggled backward but got caught in a tangle of
canvas and broken wood. The beast lunged. Its claws spread
wide.
    Abruptly, against its gray bulk, there was a small
figure in white. In one uplifted hand, the figure held a
metal case filled with vials of the yellow-gray powder. Next
moment, vials and case both were gone, rammed among the
teeth. The monster's head blasted away, pelting the room
with its pieces. The vacated corpse slumped heavily atop
Jhoira.
    "Are you all right?" Jhoira shouted into the sudden
calm.
    Her rescuer had spoken the exact same words. He rolled
the dead bulk of the beast off of her, ducking away, and
pried her sword from the other body.
    "I'm all right," they assured each other, again in
unison.
    Jhoira gladly received the blade. She thanked the slight
young man who handed it to her.
    "Do you think you can make a stand here? Do you think
you can hold the door and keep more of these things out?"
    "Yes," the young man said bravely. "Yes, if nobody
climbs in the way you came."
    Jhoira struggled up and staggered to the window. The
yard between the infirmary and the academy wall was nearly
deserted now, occupied only by hundreds of dead Phyrexians,
humans, Viashino, and goblins. Even Rhammidarigaaz had left
the courtyard, taking wing with his mother. Together beyond
the wall, they roared down from the skies, sending lines of
fire and sulfur into the host there.
    "There should be no more attacks from that quarter,
unless they breach the wall again," Jhoira guessed. She
strode toward the infirmary door. "The battle has moved
inside. It'll be room to room now. Can you hold this one?"
    "Yes," the man repeated.
    "Good," Jhoira said and strode out into the hallway.
    A great ruckus poured from the Hall of Artifact
Creatures ahead. Sighing wearily, Jhoira ran toward the
sound.
    A room-to-room battle, with her friends in the rooms-
Karn in the observatory, Teferi in the great hall, Diago in
the master's study, Terd in the cellars, Barrin in the
rectory, and Jhoira herself in the Hall of Artifact
Creatures. A small smile played about her lips. What
Phyrexian host could be a match for a group like that? She
would have to remind Urza, as he constructed his flying
warship, to make sure to man it with the best of crews.
    Her face darkened. She would remind Urza if they both
lived through the day.
    Urza rose from the vile sludge at the base of the
canyon. With an exertion of will, he sloughed the muck of
dead fish and tenacious seaweed from his robes. The shallow
lake churned with the flood that poured into the gorge
behind him. Up in the Phyrexian city, though, all was still.
Barrin had been right. K'rrik had thrown every able creature
into the assault, wanting at long last to eradicate the
school. The only Phyrexians who remained were ballistae
crews, sentinels, and those incapable of passing the
temporal barrier. Chief of those was, of course, K'rrik.
    There would also be another crop of vat-grown monsters,
Urza would not leave until they all were dead. From decades
of observation, Urza knew where the mutagenic labs lay-deep
within the basaltic extrusion on which the city was built.
With a thought, he was in a dark, deep cavern.
    An aisle of vats extended ahead of and behind him.
Stonework stanchions stood between panels of smoky obsidian.
Behind these panels were bays of glistening oil-Phyrexian
blood and placental fluid. K'rrik had likely filled these
cells by draining thousands of his citizens. The emptied
husks would then have been diced and jerked to make food for
the creatures developing in the tanks. Phyrexians had
switched from natural to artificial means of reproduction
when placentas began, in utero, to consume their mothers
from the inside out.
    The grotesque figures within these tanks seemed utterly
capable of matricide. Though immature, most were the size of
a full-grown human, with nictitating membranes over large
and rheumy eyes, knobby shoulders, soft claws, oil-breathing
lungs, and rows of legs, some thickening into actual limbs
and others withering and dropping away, leaving only hip-
nubs. In a number of the dark vats, vestigial leg bones hung
from the half-formed teeth of the blind beasts, a snack
between scheduled feedings.
    Urza was sickened. He rose toward the cavern ceiling,
out of the aisle of vats. It dropped away beneath him,
revealing row upon row of vats beyond. One hundred, five
hundred, twenty-five hundred ... A network of bone catwalks
ran above each row. Across the ivory causeway, machines
scuttled, dipping probes into the glistening oil, dumping
chips of dried meat onto the heads of hungry creatures, and
skimming waste from the top. Urza recognized pieces from his
falcon engines in the design of these nursemaid machines. No
wonder K'rrik has sent the whole city on this attack. In
months of his own time, mere weeks outside, K'rrik would
have a whole new city, a whole new army.
    Not any longer-as Urza drifted up into the dark vault of
the cavern, he lowered his hands, spread his fingers, and
sent great blue flashes of lightning down into the vats.
Where the bolts struck glistening oil, massive plumes of
fire rose. The figures within the oil writhed. Blue-white
sparks traced out their curved fangs and the venom sacks
beneath their throats. Arcs leapt finger to finger, knee to
toe. The creatures convulsed, churning the oil, feeding the
fires. In moments, flames wreathed their exposed heads, and
then mantled their shoulders, and then girded their hips.
Thick skin burned and cracked and split and curled back,
looking like bark. Muscle cooked. Bones burst. One by one,
the waiting army of K'rrik stewed where they stood. At the
last, as all the glistening oil flared into the air, the
sudden intense heat change shattered the obsidian shells.
Shards of glass and bits of burnt Phyrexian scattered down
the aisles.
    More lightning flared; more vats erupted. Half of them
were gone. Urza panted, feeling the drain of power on him.
He would recover quickly, of course, and needed only one
spell to slay K'rrik. Until these all were destroyed,
Tolaria would not be safe. Blue energy leapt from his
fingers. Orange columns of fire blazed in the cavern night.
Black clouds of soot and smoke belched up to roll at the
height of the chamber. Dizzy with exertion, Urza blasted the
last of the vats and watched as their inhabitants burned in
putrid pyres.
    This ought to flush out K'rrik.
    Urza stopped breathing. The air in the space could be
nothing but sheer poison. He lifted his eyes wearily toward
the vault. There black smoke rolled in the deeper blackness
of the cave. Something else moved there, too, something
silvery and fleet and ...
    The shriek of the stooping falcon engine sliced through
smoke and fire and oil. Urza raised his gaze just in time to
see the creature's fierce eyes glinting above its knife-
edged beak.
    Impact.
    Urza fell, struck from the sky like a sparrow. He
crashed among oil-dripping glass shards. They were the least
of his worries. His belly was filled with a mass of rending
steel, macerated liver, and bone chips. The cometary
creature had sliced into him and flung itself open. The
whining whir of its shredding mechanism was unmistakable.
The thing tore through muscle and viscera. It snapped ribs
and rattled against backbone.
    With a supreme effort of will, Urza stanched the flow of
blood, reassembled tissues and organs, reconstructed himself
out of the remembrance of being whole, but the machine was
too quick. It destroyed any tissues that reformed.
    Urza was being slain by his own invention, reprogrammed
no longer to seek glistening oil but the smell of Urza's own
blood.
    It was his turn to writhe. He jittered across the shards
of glass. Every moment, his mind threatened to blank out.
There was not enough left of his physical form to sustain
belief, to power the thought that would allow him to
planeswalk and escape this horror. Perhaps if he had not
spent such power on destroying the Phyrexian army, he could
have mustered the strength. Now, though, he was pinned like
a fly to a card. His gemstone eyes speckled with his own
tossed blood. He struggled to reassemble himself, to draw
each of those spots of blood back into the streams and
vessels whence they came. The task was nearly impossible. He
could not escape the machine, nor could he let himself
merely die. He could only feel forever the ravening teeth of
the device.
    At least he had destroyed the army, if he hadn't
destroyed K'rrik. As though summoned by the thought, the man
appeared. The term man could little apply to him now,
though. K'rrik was little more than an animate skeleton. His
time-vulnerable flesh had been mortified from his body over
the centuries of his imprisonment. It had been replaced in
patient succession by grafts of flesh from each new
generation of negators. He had been slowly rebuilding
himself, hoping some day to escape the gorge where he was
imprisoned. His body now had a sinewy look to it, as though
he were not a single man but a series of eels sewn together
in the shape of a man. At the extremities of his figure-
fingers, toes, knees, elbows, and brow- spikes had sprouted,
most of them hollow-tipped and venom-dripping. Only the
man's face remained roughly human in shape, and his eyes ...
they were bright and blue and human.
    "After your last visit, Urza, I knew your weakness. Keep
you near to death, and you cannot escape. Ballistae bolts
and sword strokes are too clumsy, though. They leave moments
of lucidity, and one moment is all it takes," K'rrik purred
as he approached. His clawed and iron-heeled tread cracked
chunks of glass as he walked. "This solution is much safer-
and a nice piece of poetry. Thank you for the falcon
engines. I have forty more, stationed around the gorge,
should you succeed in planeswalking."
    Urza, unable even to draw breath to respond, could only
stare in stunned agony at his nemesis. As he focused his
thoughts inward, on perpetual healing, one curl of his mind
marveled that this monster spoke so well the tongues of men.
    "That was your great mistake, Urza, coming here the
first time. It taught us everything we needed to know. That
has always been your great mistake, Urza, stumbling into our
realm, letting us look you over, and then retreating while
we prepared what we needed to kill you. You did it first in
Koilos, and we followed you out. You did it again in
Phyrexia, and we followed you out. You led us to Serra's
Realm, you know. We attacked and invaded. They think they
eventually defeated us, but we're still there. We've never
left. We never leave a place, once you lead us to it. We've
been engineering the transformation of Serra's Realm. The
angels think they rule it still, but it is ours. It is one
of our staging grounds for the full-scale invasion of your
world.
    "We've never left this place, either, and now, today, we
have taken this island from you."
    Urza wished his could spit his defiance. He wished he
could remind K'rrik that his mutant army was dead, both
inside the gorge and outside. He was left with only a
handful of guards, and no matter how many modifications he
underwent, K'rrik would never be able to squeeze his brain
out of the time-cage where he was trapped. Urza wanted to
say all this, but he could do nothing more than hold onto
consciousness as he shivered across the rubble-strewn floor.
    He didn't need to say any of it. K'rrik seemed to know.
"By the way, you haven't destroyed all the vats. This is
only the smallest chamber. I have three others. I have eight
thousand warriors there. I have two thousand that are ready
to emerge."
    That was it then. K'rrik would taunt Urza awhile more,
then draw his sword and lop off his head. Even if Urza could
somehow muster the strength to planeswalk-which as that
moment, he could not-he could not escape the time pit, could
not even step beyond this death chamber. Three other falcons
circled within the rolling black smoke overhead. That was
it. Urza would die; K'rrik would live. Two thousand more
Phyrexians would emerge to sweep away the final resistance.
Six thousand more would emerge to make Tolaria a Phyrexian
stronghold on Dominaria. The invasion Urza was only
beginning to prepare for would be fully under way. That was
it. All was lost.
    "I see by the look in your ... remarkable eyes that you
have at last grasped your defeat, Urza Planeswalker. The
seed of it was contained in those first moments at Koilos.
From the beginning, you had lost everything." K'rrik
advanced, drawing a scimitar with slow relish. "I had been
hoping to watch your torment a bit longer, but it was only
fun before you broke."
    Urza shuddered with the unholy motion of the thing
shredding his innards. He almost let go in that moment, if
only to steal K'rrik's final victory, but an impulse arose
in him to remain a moment more.
    K'rrik towered over him now and lifted his scimitar
high. "Good night, Planeswalker." The blade descended.
    In the moment before it struck, a sudden surge of power
filled Urza-strength from within him, but strength that was
not his. Multani. It was strength enough for a single
planeswalk. With the power came a whispered word, the one
place to which Urza could planeswalk that would mask him
from the falcons and give him the final victory. K'rrik.
    With a thought, Urza stepped out of space. He
disappeared from the floor and the rattling creature. For a
breath, he was in a nowhere place, but he did not linger
there, lest the Phyrexian would understand. With a second
thought, Urza stepped back into reality.
    He emerged at the exact core of K'rrik's body. Urza's
form of scintillating energy swelled into being from the
spot, bursting the Phyrexian's flesh in a rain of meat and
glistening oil. K'rrik exploded, and in his place stood an
oil-drenched planeswalker. Bits of eel-skin spattered out
across the ruined vats.
    Urza held still, not daring to blink or breathe.
    The falcon that had moments before been rending him
rattled to a stop on the glass-strewn floor. It withdrew its
gear-work wings and shredders, folded them against its
sides, and turned its head quizzically. The machine seemed
to sniff the air. It trotted forward a few paces and pecked
experimentally at the glass shards. Then, in a rush of metal
wings, the thing leapt into the air and climbed into the
smoke clouds above, to join its counterparts.
    Move quietly, came the voice of Multani within Urza. We
have three more chambers to cleanse.
    Urza complied. He rose quietly into the air, sought out
a doorway leading from the cavern, and slid through the air
toward it. As he drifted smoothly along, Urza sent a thought
inward, toward the forest spirit that inhabited him. Then we
are allies?
    Multani's response came without pause. You have known
the agony of Argoth. We have known the agony of Phyrexia. If
these are the creatures you fight, we are allies.
    A sigh escaped Urza. He watched nervously to see if any
of the falcons would pick up the scent of his breath. When
none did, Urza sent, I am glad of it. I'll need your
strength to finished cleansing the gorge.
    Multani replied, When we are out of this pit, and back
into the forested isle, I can conclude this battle for you.

                       *****

    Jhoira had linked up with her old comrades as they
purged the academy of Phyrexians. They had pursued the
beasts out of every chamber and corridor in the place, at
last cornering a knot of twelve monsters in the far
courtyard. Here, though, the tide had turned.
    The defenders of Tolaria found themselves fighting for
their lives.
    The situation was the same elsewhere. The Phyrexians had
been forced from the battlefields by the drakes, runners,
scorpions, and human fighters, but once in the woods, they
held their ground, destroying whatever pumas dropped from
the trees onto them. They would have slain thousands of
Phyrexians, but whatever hundred survived would only return
to the fast-time rent to rise again.
    The defenders despaired.
    The forests themselves rose. Tree branches swiped down
to lash Phyrexian faces and tangle them in boughs and
strangle them. Vines fastened around limbs and ripped them
from their sockets. Mosquitoes and gnats and flies swarmed
the monsters and flayed they alive. Leaves, hardened by some
strange will, cut like daggers across fleeing legs.
    Within the courtyard, the very grass beneath the feet of
the twelve Phyrexians shot up in sudden life, piercing feet
and slicing through legs and dragging the monsters down to
their graves.
    The shout that went up in that moment was weary and
scattered, but it was the shout of victory.
                          Monologue
    It is finished. The invasion of Tolaria is finished. I
have never in my life felt so weary, incapable of even the
simplest spell, incapable of even releasing this dagger I
clutch so tightly.
    But I did not save the island. Urza and his six-part
alliance saved it, and if he can rally the folk of Dominaria
like this, perhaps he can save the world after all.
                              - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 18

    "They are in Serra's Realm, Barrin," Urza said
nervously. Barrin was straightening the master's white and
gold ceremonial robes, and all the fidgeting attention
nettled Urza. "They've been engineering the whole decline of
the plane, preparing it as a beachhead for their invasion of
Dominaria. You aren't even listening."
    Barrin released a long hot breath that only seemed to
make the small pavilion tent more uncomfortable. "There will
be time for war counsels later. Today is a day of
alliances." He punctuated this speech with a snap of Urza's
stole.
    The master let out his own snort. Sweat seeped at his
temples in the warm tent. He was so distracted with thoughts
of devils among the Serra angels that he did not think to
adjust his personal core temperature to be comfortable.
    "They've followed me wherever I have gone. When Xantcha
and I traveled the planes, wiping out Phyrexians, we were
sewing them like seeds through the worlds. I tell you, the
battle we have just fought is only the mildest prelude of
the war to come."
    "Yes," Barrin agreed placidly, dragging an errant strand
of the man's hair back from his burnished brow, "and we just
won the prelude. It is time to celebrate our victory with
our allies." He backed up, looked the man over from head to
foot, and nodded. "You look every inch the conquering hero."
    "I feel defeated. There is no time to waste on
ceremonies-" Barrin grew suddenly stern. "To win the Battle
of Tolaria, you had to enlist the aid of students and
scholars, Viashino, goblins, fire drakes, and even the
spirit of an ancient and distant forest. To win the
Dominarian War, you'll have to enlist the aid of the whole
world. The speech you give in the next few moments will
cement the current alliance and lay the foundation stone for
your planetary defenses. For once, Urza, don't run off to
your clockwork contraptions. For once, Urza, be the
statesman, speak to these delegates you have gathered.
Reward them for the battle won and prepare them for the war
ahead. Afterward, we can go sort things out in Serra's
Realm."
    The planeswalker's eyes flashed with something halfway
between resentment and hurt. In that moment, Barrin
remembered why it was that this great man, this near-god, so
routinely retreated to his machines: among other humans, he
was in fact a shy and fragile man.
    "How do I look, Barrin?" Urza asked. Barrin hitched his
head. "You look ready." Taking a deep and conscious breath,
Urza clenched fists within his robe sleeves and strode
toward the narrow, bright flap at the front of the pavilion
tent. He emerged from the dark, stuffy enclosure onto a
field awash in light and air. " The gathered delegates
cheered.
    Urza smiled. He could not help himself. There, arrayed
before him in the bright glade, were the select
representatives of his alliance: Jhoira, Teferi, and a
contingent of Shivan students; Karn, Bey Fire Eye, Diago
Derro, and the bey's personal bodyguard; Glosstongue
Crackcrest, Machinist Terd, and the Destrou chieftain;
Gherridarigaaz and Rhammidarigaaz; Multani and a contingent
of Tolarian wood faeries; and of course Barrin with two
other Tolarian scholars and a group of elite students. Sworn
to secrecy about the location of this glade and what they
would see here, the assemblage were nonetheless brought to
witness for all their people the salvation Urza initiated
for Dominaria. They represented the army of survivors. But
they were more than survivors, they were victors.
    Only a week ago, fires and Phyrexians, the dying and
dead had filled the island. Tolaria's defenders had won the
battle. They then had turned with equal vigor to scouring
stones and rebuilding walls. The honored fallen of Tolaria
now lay in decorous shrines about the old Teferi monument.
The dead of Phyrexia had made a pyre that burned for three
days, high and blue, beside the gorge whence they had come.
Not even bones or carapace had survived that oil-fed flame.
Thousands of spider artifacts, created by Urza and his
associates in fast-time plateaus throughout the island, had
been deployed to ensure that Phyrexians would never again
plague the island, never again survive the rising of the
Glimmer Moon. All that had remained of K'rrik and his
negators was the vacant gorge and a reek that cleared away
once the last ember of the funeral pyre was out.
    There was no scent of death in this glade. Morning air
shifted brightly. The forest was verdant, untouched by
battle. Centennial trees hung green banners of leaf over the
quiet space. Nature wore its finery.
    The people did, too. Clothes of labor and mourning were
gone, replaced by resplendent finery. The students' and
scholars' robes of silk and linen shone in a panoply of
ranks and colors. As they cheered, the fabrics flapped like
flags in salute. The corps of Shivan humans were garbed in
clean jumpsuits of red and wore expressions that were both
grave and joyous. Bey Fire Eye's lizard warriors were clad
in brightly dyed skins and carried the totems of their
houses. Even Terd had submitted to a bath and a session with
Tolarian tailors. At the back of the company, the fire
drakes wore ornate red barding, surreal against the green
jungle. Smoke drifted like dolorous incense up from their
muzzles.
    As the cheering died away, Urza found himself smiling
again. He noticed the sweat was gone from his temples, and
he took a deep breath.
    "Children of Dominaria, welcome to this new dawn. We
dwelt for a time in deep darkness, but now we have light.
And I am thankful for the darkness if only in that it made
us allies.
    "I have hidden this island of mine from the world. I
hide it still, that the forces of evil we have battled not
find it again. But to you, my friends, it is open. The
learning of this land-the clockwork and spell work-are open
to you now, open to Viashino and Ghitu, to Grabbit and
Destrou and Tristou, and to you, Gherridarigaaz and
Rhammidarigaaz. The machines we have built will defend you
as well as us. The knowledge we have gained will be shared
among us all."
    Applause answered this pronouncement, accompanied by
eager hoots from Terd.
    "By coming together-by ceasing our wars and burying our
pasts-we arm ourselves for the future. Gherridarigaaz has
regained her son not by slaying Viashino but by allying with
them."
    The ancient fire drake bowed her head in acknowledgment,
and something akin to a grin spread across her toothy and
fearsome face.
    "The silver golem Karn-once owned by me and then by the
lizard men-has won his freedom, proving himself in battle
and service to us all."
    Karn nodded his thanks to the Viashino bey stationed
nearby. Urza flung wide his hands in a grand gesture. "The
Viashino, through our decade of alliance and with the
guidance of Jhoira and Teferi, have produced this
magnificent gift for the defense of our world."
    He winked from existence for a moment. A murmur of
uncertainty moved among the Viashino and goblins, but Teferi
and Jhoira wore knowing smiles.
    In the space of a long breath, Urza reappeared, hands
still upraised. Before him, hanging in midair, was an
ethereal ship. Glowing motes of blue magic outlined its
long, sleek gunwales, its deep keel, its sideways-jutting
masts and winglike spars and twining lines. Here and there,
though, the ship was solid-metal pieces that gleamed like
graphite but looked harder than steel. A sleek ram fronted
the forecastle, trailing in its wake a series of floating
portholes, joist plates, mast mountings, spar collars,
cowlings, hinges, strike plates, doorknobs, and rivets. A
large anchor and chain rested in the fore, just behind the
ram. A pair of lateral sail mounts extended from the
starboard and port walls. At the heart of the ship hovered a
massive metal core that could only have been an engine.
    There was no applause now, only sighs of wonder and
open-mouthed stares.
    "The workmanship of these fittings is superb. They will
last an eternity. They will forever grow, drawn on by final
causes from these fine beginnings into perfection. They will
reshape themselves and become what is needed to save us all,
to save our world.
    "But this great ship, of course, is incomplete. It is
not by artifice alone that our world will be saved. It is by
life, too, by green mana. Our newest ally, Multani, spirit
of the great and distant forest of Yavimaya, has brought
with him a gift for Dominaria." Urza lifted a piece of wood,
a large seed. "This is the Weatherseed, from the heart of
the oldest magnigoth tree in Yavimaya, a tree that remembers
the world before the Brothers' War, before the Phyrexians.
It bears in it the essence of the ancient forest. It is the
forest's heart."
    A strange light had entered Karn's eyes. He stared at
the Weatherseed as though it were his own affective cortex.
In a way, the heart of Xantcha and the heart of Yavimaya
were much the same. They would give life to Urza's machine.
    The master held the Weatherseed high and strode to a
clear oval of grass. "From this seed, through the aid of
Multani, the ship's hull will grow."
    So saying, Urza drove the wedge down into the soft
earth. His arm disappeared to the elbow. When he drew forth
his hand again, black soil clung, crumbling, all around it.
He looked at the wound in the grass, seeing even then the
forest spirit moving to weave the spot together. Urza
stepped back as a bright cloud of shimmering creatures
approached. Faeries. They strode from the woods, their very
presence setting a hum in the air. They bore with them
leaves folded into little cups. Gathered dewdrops glistened
in each cup. As the faeries walked past the site, they
poured the cool water onto the ground. The creatures bore
their empty cups back into the woods as a continuing stream
of their comrades followed with more water.
    Once the line of cups ceased, other faeries marched out
of the woods. Accoutered with slim battle blades and
carapaced armor, they were stern-eyed and martial. They
surrounded the spot where the Weatherseed had been planted,
faced outward, and planted pikes.
    Dumbfounded, Terd watched the fey creatures parade into
position. The goblin wore a beatific grin on his face. His
hoary claws twitched as though he wished to pluck at the
faeries, but he resisted. The Viashino, meanwhile, were
watching the ground where the seed had disappeared. Already,
silent and slender, a shaft had grown up from the mended
hole. It spiraled up into the light, sending yellow leaves
out to gather sunshine. In moments, the leaves deepened to
green and proliferated. Twigs sprouted, swelling into
branches. The small sapling shivered in a breeze that only
it sensed and rose upward.
    Urza made a gesture. With slow magnificence, the
ethereal ship tilted, its prow rising into the air and its
stern swinging down to hover over the growing tree. Soon,
the great vessel stood on end. The questing boughs of the
tree reached up to it, running along the metal plates and
lines of force like rose branches up a trellis. They would
spread out along the enchanted framework, taking inspiration
from its design, melding without conforming.
    All the while, quiet lingered in the glade. Urza's
footsteps seemed loud as he retreated toward the tent. No
one watched him, their eyes and minds and hearts captured by
the spectacle of the ship taking form before them-the
conjoining of mechanism and blossom, of artifice and nature,
of history and destiny.
    "Even now, the goblin tribes, once at war with Viashino
and Ghitu and drake-"
    "And each other!" shouted Terd. The group responded with
laughter.
    "And each other-these creatures are working on the
matrix of a powerstone that will drive this great, saving
machine."
    Terd released a whooping cheer, which was taken up by
Glosstongue and the Destrou chieftain, then spread to the
rest of the crowd. There was accord in that sound. For a
moment, they had ceased to be Viashino and goblin, human and
machine. For a moment, they had become the voice of
Dominaria. The cheer rolled out through the forests and
startled birds from their placid perches.
    The sound died away, and Urza spoke again. "To complete
this great ship, I will need all of you, my allies, my
friends. The Phyrexians are gone now from Tolaria and gone
forever, but they are not gone from our world. Even now,
they are taking over a world connected to ours, one step
away from ours. I need your help to build this ship, but I
also need your help to save another realm, for if it falls,
so shall we."
                           Monologue
    Well, I suppose I should have expected it. I'm the one
who set this ball into motion. I am the one who insisted
that Urza regain his past.
    He began the road back to sanity when Xantcha provided
him a facsimile for his brother-Ratepe. It was when this
second Mishra died, again in an attempt to rid the world of
Phyrexians, that Urza at last accepted the truth of his
brother's death. He had begun to regain his sanity.
    Then came the explosion of the time-travel machine. That
blast did to Tolaria what the Brothers' War had done to
Teresiare. In the dark hours after the blast, I had thought
Urza was lost for good, but the death of Tolaria at his
hands worked on him just as the death of Ratepe had. At
last, in present-time microcosm, he had a facsimile of his
past-time, macrocosmic mistake. With the destruction of the
first academy on Tolaria, Urza began to understand the
destruction of Argoth caused by the sylex and by the decades
of war that made the sylex necessary. Urza returned to
Tolaria to rebuild, to face the children of fury. He was
nearer to sanity.
    There was more penance to do. In its destruction and
resurrection, Tolaria allowed Urza to make amends with the
human world for the crimes against Argoth. He yet needed to
be reconciled to the natural world.
    Then came Yavimaya. Urza had gone there to seek the
avatar of the forest, an entity that could grow the hull of
his flying ship. What he got instead was a five-year penance
for the agony of Argoth. Yavimaya remembered Argoth. Multani
remembered Titania. He recognized Urza and made him pay for
his past. In purging the guilt of Argoth, Multani returned
Urza's sanity. And with his sanity, Urza could at last
destroy the Phyrexian children of fury in his midst.
    I've tried to tell him he is well, now. I've tried to
tell him there is no more need to venture into the past,
that now is the time to focus on the future. He only shakes
his head and speaks of leading Phyrexians to Serra's Realm.
    That will be Urza's next journey, perhaps his last. If
K'rrik is to be believed, Phyrexians are there among the
angels. I cannot imagine how Urza will survive, trapped
between angels and devils.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                         Part IV
                  BETWEEN ANGELS AND DEVILS

                       Chapter 19

    Once again Urza descended. It was his preferred approach
when arriving in unknown and hostile territory, and Serra's
Realm, as it had devolved in the last few centuries, was
indeed unknown and hostile.
    It was still an empyrean skyscape, an arcing firmament
stacked with rafts and mountains of cloud. Now, though, the
once-blue sky was tinged in yellow and gray. A brimstone
stink of Phyrexian glistening oil filled the air, and the
realm's illusion of limitlessness had fallen away like a
tattered robe. Heaven seemed cramped. The curve at the edge
of it was just perceptible. The angel realm had once been a
place of white cloud mesas, with large garden berms drifting
placidly among them. Now the great berms had disintegrated
into small clods, some only the size of shacks, and the
sublime mountains had tumbled into pessimistic hills. Their
color was muddied too, as though they were loosing their
quintessence and transforming into dirt. All the lines had
been blurred. Every constitution was diluted. Each ideal was
debased.
    Phyrexians were here. They excelled in such
transformations.
    Urza turned a slow spiral as he descended. Gemstone eyes
marked out signs of habitation. At one time, the realm had
needed no dwellings, for there was neither cold nor rain,
night nor predators, and the very air nourished any who
breathed it. Then, the only structures were built for sake
of art or philosophical contemplation-pillared gardens, ivy-
covered amphitheaters, high halls of state, groves of mana
stones, galleries beneath the whirling heavens. Now many of
those edifices clung in broken ruin to disintegrating clods
of ground. Buildings not firmly rooted had fallen away in
the tumbling chaos. Their foundations jutted like shattered
teeth from rolling chunks of ground. Among these foundations
new structures had been fashioned that seemed more the beige
hives of mud-daubers than the homes of angels. They were
hard-packed outside, and inside delved into spinning
darkness-entrenchments against inclement weather and sudden
night and marauding predators. Phyrexians were here.
    The smoke that rose from some of these deep hovels told
of fires within to heat and dry the dark, cold spaces. The
scent of flesh on that smoke told of creatures being hunted
and slaughtered and eaten. No longer was breathing
sufficient to sustain life. Now life had to be stolen from
others who had it. Angels lived upon mortal flesh. The
plane, once a living creature in its own right, had died.
Every tissue and corpuscle of its being struggled to
survive-preying on neighboring cells, drawing nourishment
from the decaying body all around.
    Phyrexians were here. They had killed the plane and
taught the dying to eat the dead.
    Only one fine structure remained, Serra's Palace. Urza
glimpsed the palace, floating distant and dark within the
gray sea of sky. It looked like an inverted question mark, a
fact that had seemed fitting when Serra resided in the
crystal aviary at its pinnacle. She had devoted herself and
her realm to the constant debate of perfect society, perfect
virtue, and perfect beauty. Questioning and discussion were
an inescapable part of her realm. Now, though, the inverted
question mark of the palace symbolized a place adrift,
constant questioning become eternal doubt. It no longer
meant debate, but confusion.
    Toward that sign of confusion, Urza floated. As he
neared the spot, he saw that it glinted more with rusted
steel than silver. Its great banks of golden glass were
shrouded in an orange grille, spiked and forbidding. Its
ivory pilasters were chipped and yellow. The windows of its
fanciful turrets had been knocked out to make space for
batteries of ballistae and barracks of angel warriors.
    These latter flooded out upon the acrid air, approaching
the invader.
    They were led by three archangels. Gigantic eagles'
wings bore these creatures hurtling forward. In their hands
glinted magna swords. Single-edged and curved at the tip,
the blades were halfway between scimitars and axes. A
carapace of massive silver plate armor covered each of them,
and a skirt of metal mesh trailed behind. Silver masks hid
their faces. In the wake of these three fierce defenders
came a contingent of thirty-some warrior angels. Smaller and
more lightly armored than the archangels, these creatures
nevertheless bore wicked-tipped lances, round bracers, and
expressions of fanatical loyalty.
    Urza watched as they came. He readied the supernatural
defenses of his planeswalking form. He would not fight these
creatures, but they might fight him. Even if he could
survive such a conflict, there would be more forces in the
palace-archangels, angels, the Sisterhood of Serra, human
warriors, and the citizens of the realm. He would have to
win past them all and do it without fireballs and killing,
to reach the embattled creature at the center of this
collapsing plane. He had come not to conquer but to ally.
    They swarmed up around him. Wings beat the yellow air.
The three archangels formed a triangle that hemmed him in,
and angel warriors orbited in a large sphere all around.
Droning wings almost drowned out the stentorian command of
the lead archangel.
    "Approach no farther," the archangel said from behind
the mask. Cold, ruthless, and almost metallic, the voice was
neither male nor female. "You are uninvited."
    "I am Urza Planeswalker," the man responded, his white
robes of state stark against the brown clouds and fetid
winds.
    "We know," the archangel replied. "We remember the smell
of you." The comment was spoken matter-of-factly, without
humor or malice.
    Urza's lips tightened. "Yes, but I do not recognize the
smell of this place."
    "Much has happened since you came. Much has happened
because you came." With or without inflection, the
implication of this statement was clear.
    "That is why I have returned," Urza replied. "I have
come to help restore the realm to its former splendor."
    "It is not your concern, Planeswalker," the archangel
said. "It is not your war."
    "It is if I become your ally."
    "Lady Radiant needs no allies."
    "Radiant? Yes, I remember her. So, Radiant is in command
now?"
    "Yes."
    "And she needs no allies?"
    "Yes."
    Urza cast an ironic glance around at the devolving
realm. "It would seem to me she could use whatever help she
could get."
    "That is not for you to decide."
    "Nor for you. Take me to her," Urza said in sudden
command.
    "You are uninvited."
    "I could merely 'walk there." Urza lifted his hands
threateningly to either side, and the sphere of angels
widened just perceptibly. "I am Urza Planeswalker."
    The angry buzz of wings deepened. Angels nervously
fingered their lance hafts. The lead archangel drifted
toward Urza. From behind its mask, air emerged, hot and
steely.
    "Come with us." The creature backed away from the
planes-walker, its unseen eyes remaining ever on him.
    Without further word, Urza followed through the droning
air. All about him, angels hovered in static threat. Their
shadows, pale and diffuse in the sickly glow of the sky,
passed languidly over Urza as they went.
    Ahead, the dark, overturned question mark grew. With
each moment, its transformation was more apparent. Ogee
arches above landing platforms bore boxy portcullises like
iron false teeth. Fine traceries had been removed to make
room for bulky grills. Crystal mana collectors had been
replaced here and there by smoking chimneys. Lines of soot
traced across buttresses, and blast points showed where the
palace had sustained attack.
    "Your palace has become a fortress," Urza noted, and he
remembered a similar transformation of his academy.
    "Only a temporary measure," the lead archangel said,
maintaining his backward flight, "but, as you can see, the
defenses are warranted."
    Urza could see. He imagined Phyrexians swarming the
palace, riding on their wicked skyships or flying on wings
of steel. He could imagine salvos of bolts arcing from the
engines and smashing against the floating city, could
imagine angels much like these pouring from the shattered
windows and staved walls. There was war in heaven, and he
had brought it.
    "Yes. Warranted. That's why I want to speak to Lady
Radiant. Her foes are my foes. I know of the monsters
lurking here, and I have armies of my own to help destroy
them."
    Behind its quicksilver mask, the archangel did not
respond. It merely drifted backward, without apparent
effort, toward a large landing platform at the base of the
inverted question mark.
    The platform jutted like an angry jaw from beneath a
dark archway. Its edge was ringed with curved horns, the
teeth of a great carnivore. A few flying machines hung in
dock around it. Clusters of figures stood in their midst.
Three were archangels and another handful angel warriors.
Most of those on the air dock, though, were moiling crowds-
angels and humans. They clustered together like fearful
sheep. Guards strode around their group and jabbed with the
butt of their spears. Some of the humans, packs on their
backs, staggered up a wobbly gangplank and onto a waiting
air boat. Meanwhile, in sad knots, angels broke from the
rest, laboring out into empty air.
    "Who are they?" asked Urza on the final approach to the
landing.
    The archangel before him sank lightly to stand on the
crowded platform. Other angels around alighted as well.
"Refugees, mostly, fleeing the rebels of the far reaches.
They have come to the city for protection, but we have no
room for them. Others are dissidents, heading for exile."
    Urza nodded, setting feet to ground. The marble floor
felt gritty, scored with stone chips broken off in some
recent assault. "To what plane will they be exiled?"
    "They will remain on this plane. No one leaves the
realm, not even dissidents."
    "And what of planeswalking visitors?" Urza prodded.
    "Radiant awaits above," the archangel declared.
    Walking backward in the midst of the landed flock, the
angel guided Urza into the once-great city. The divine
figure moved with a smooth ease, as though its feet still
did not touch ground. It floated beneath yawning embouchment
where refugees and dissidents huddled and brimstone breezes
blew.
    The spaces within were vast, dwarfing even the mob of
angels around Urza. Tall, slender columns held aloft vaults
of stone. When last Urza walked these halls, those vaults
rang with lyric music and the sounds of lively debate. Now
they roared with the shouts of sparring soldiers. Along the
walls, rank upon rank of stone golems stood in mute
insolence, ready to slay any army that might land upon the
platform. The windows behind them were covered in black
iron, giving the place a cave-gloom.
    In the center of the main plaza, a great fountain stood,
five stories high and ornately carved with angelic figures.
If Urza remembered from his last visit, the statuary
depicted the great virtues of Serra's Realm-Art, Discourse,
Freedom, and Peace. No water flowed over that fountain
anymore, though, and the figures representing these virtues
stared out from beneath great rags of dust. At their feet,
martial mounts-griffons and pegasi-drank from a half-full,
stagnant pool.
    Beyond the fountain, a great amphitheater sank into the
floor. Urza remembered the glorious wall of golden glass
that had stood beyond it. A rubble-and-mortar bulwark now
sealed off the rear of the theater, protecting its users
from aerial attack. A platoon of human holy warriors used
the site. Before them paced an archangel, its sexless voice
instructing them in techniques for cleansing and sealing off
Phyrexian catacomb complexes.
    "-want to be certain none of them survive. Do not assume
that any number of spell blasts will cleanse a warren.
Enter, but do so with caution and in teams. Once within,
there will be burned bodies. Make certain they are dead.
Behead them. Do not let a single neck remain intact. Black
mana spells can bring them back, even so. They heal with
preternatural ease. Do not assume a warren is cleansed
simply because all visible foes are dead and quiet. Search
every space. They hide like rats. Look for secret chambers.
Look especially for their offspring. These will be hidden
best of all. Kill them. Behead them. Let not a single one
remain, or it will become twenty and return to slay you. Use
your soul torches to make certain the job is
accomplished...."
    Urza reflected grimly on this advice, the same he would
have given to anyone going with him into K'rrik's fast-time
gorge-if anyone had been able to accompany him.
    The archangel leading him glanced upward. The party had
just reached a broad shaft that rankled upward past hundreds
of floors and balconies and promenades. Even in its decayed
state, the space was awe-inspiring, disappearing into blue
distance a mile overhead.
    "She awaits, above."
    The angels, like a startled flock of doves, leaped
suddenly into the air.
    Urza accompanied them. As they rose, he saw the city in
cross-section. The streets were deserted, the public squares
taken over by encamped warriors, the windows darkened by
plates or locked away in cages of steel. Hollow groans moved
through the haunted structure. Smoke seeped from forges.
Boot steps echoed from armories. A jewel box no longer,
Serra's Palace had become a weapon. It was a city under
siege.
    Urza thought of his distant Tolaria. It had once seemed
as lost as this place. Now it was the nexus of a new
alliance that spread across Dominaria. It had been a long
battle to save the island. It would be
    a longer battle to save Serra's Realm, but it was a
battle he would willingly fight.
    They arrived. Urza drifted from the shaft into an
enormous space, a circle of marble thousands of feet across.
A vast hole in the center of the space opened onto a deep,
verdant forest, a literal hanging garden, in which exotic
birds flitted and sang. Above the marble circle rose mile-
high windows of stained glass. All along the outer walls of
the aviary tower, platforms and perches hung, where Lady
Radiant's court conversed or planned or discussed. Banners
of state, some with the sun-and-wing heraldry of Serra, and
others with Radiant's own lantern-in-darkness design,
floated on wires across the center of the tower.
    Most impressive of all, the glistening-oil stink that
tainted the air everywhere else was gone. Urza sensed the
filtering work of great magic in the air.
    He exhaled in awe. The aviary was the only pristine
place in the realm-quite an exorbitance, given the aerial
army it would take to protect the place. An angel nudged him
with her staff and gestured toward the pinnacle of the
aviary.
    The archangel at the head of the party rose into the
air. "Up."
    As the contingent ascended up the tapered tower, the
spaces around them closed in. Heat grew. In moments,
palatial promenades gave way to large balconies. Golden
windows narrowed. They changed too. As the party rose,
simple triangles of glass gave way to powerful lenses.
Light-bending enchantments lay thick on the panes. Some gave
fragmentary views of other rooms in the palace. Others
showed ruined gardens near the edge of the plane. Still more
followed over the shoulder of one angel or another. Every
floating continent, every tumbling clod, every shattered
wall of the place had its own window. Figures-angelic and
mortal-moved kaleidoscopically through the panes of glass.
    All about Urza, angel warriors averted their eyes from
the jarring mosaic of images. For them, the sight must have
been dazzling and absurd. But Urza's multifaceted gaze could
make sense of it. In this spot, he could see every corner of
the realm. If he stayed here long enough, he could peer into
every mind and heart in heaven. This all-seeing chamber had
been the single most powerful tool at Serra's disposal. In
it, she, or any other planeswalker, would be omniscient. In
the midst of the glaring windows hung her throne. The seat
was grand, a pendulum dangling from the apex of the aviary.
Its back was fashioned of pearl-inlaid gold. It was draped
in red samite that curtained down into the hot space. It
could pivot completely around and thus provide easy view of
every pane of glass. The throne was politically well
positioned too, requiring all supplicants to hover in air
and crane their necks toward the one seated there.
    The planeswalker Serra no longer occupied the throne.
Now the seat held a mere angel-Radiant.
    The woman sat the throne as though it were her eternal
punishment. Myriad images shone from the windows and swam
sickly over her. She endured their ceaseless caress, but her
eyes showed no sign of deciphering the images. For her, the
throne was no all-seeing seat but a torture chair dangling
in the midst of an off-balance carousel. Her eyes were
glassy from long exposure, and her hands clutched the throne
like a pair of talons. She sat with the aspect of one
terrified of heights and did not deign to look upon the
company that hovered up beneath her. Golden hair and white
wings draped in regal majesty about her, but her face showed
nothing like royal grace-only desperate resolve. She had
never been suited to rule the realm, not even at the height
of her power. She had fallen far since then. The realm had
decayed around her, and war had begun. She seemed grimly
determined to see it through to the bitter end.
    Though she did not look down, Lady Radiant recognized
the prisoner. "Ah, Urza Planeswalker, returned at last to
the scene of the crime?"
    "Greetings, Lady Radiant," Urza said formally. He bowed
in midair. "In a way, I have. I have returned for an
alliance. I have returned to save you from your foes."
    "Foes you brought to this place," Radiant pointed out.
"Foes such as your consort, Xantcha."
    "Xantcha was a friend, not a consort," Urza corrected
placidly, "and she did not bring the Phyrexians here. I did.
They followed me."
    "They followed you and ruined us," Radiant said. "We
drove them out once, but never has their taint left us."
    Urza nodded in understanding. "Yes. The stench of
Phyrexia is in the air. I sensed it the moment I arrived,
faint but omnipresent. It is in the air, in the wind, off
angel pinions, even in the lower palace. Only here, in this
aviary, is the stench gone."
    Lady Radiant's voice was strained. "It takes great feats
of magic to make this air pure."
    "But you cannot cleanse the whole realm. For that
matter, you can never restore it to its old grandeur. With
or without Phyrexians, all artificial planes collapse in
time. This one is no exception. But I offer you salvation. I
will bear you and all your people from this place and give
you a new home on Dominaria. It will be as beautiful and
grand as this place. And it will be yours. In return, you
need only pledge your alliance to fight at my side against
Phyrexia. Do not despair for this realm or for Serra's
vision. Once the plane is empty, it can become part of our
greatest weapon. It can charge the powerstone at the center
of an airship that will defend our world."
    "Our world," asked Radiant. Her eyes flashed with
malice. "No. Dominaria is not our world. It is your world.
This plane is our world. It is collapsing because of the
fiends you brought here. I am fighting a war against those
fiends. How dare you suggest we abandon our world? Would you
abandon yours? Your old arrogance remains."
    "Forgive me, Lady," Urza said, bowing. "Much of my old
arrogance does remain. I did not realize how committed you
were to this battle. I should have. I have just concluded my
own private war against Phyrexia. They can hide in plain
sight. They take human form, perhaps even the form of
angels. There is no more insidious foe. In apology for my
presumption, I would like to share with you the technologies
I devised and the spells my mage master devised, to destroy
them. If you will not ally with me on Dominaria, at least
let me ally with you here. I offer myself, my machines, and
my enchantments to aid in this private war of yours."
    "It is exactly that," said a new voice, a man's voice,
coming from a platform behind Urza. He pivoted in air to see
a tall, thin man with a black goatee and eyes as slim and
yellow as wedges of lemon. "It is a private war."
    "Allow me to introduce my minister of war, Gorig,"
Radiant said regally.
    The goateed man gave a shallow bow, though he never
lowered his baleful eyes from the planeswalker. He gestured
to his own features. "As you can see, I am a wielder of mana
magic. I am also an able general. Our war is in hand, and it
is private."
    Urza demurred with a small smile. "I have learned no war
is truly in hand."
    Though she said nothing, Radiant suddenly drew all eyes
to herself. Her face wore a strange, beaming intensity.
"When first we knew you had returned, Urza, we expected you
had come for war. You must excuse us for being so surprised
by your offers of peace."
    "It is a new man who stands-who floats before you," Urza
explained.
    "Yes," Radiant agreed, somewhat dismissive. "Before you
commit yourself and your armies to this conflict, perhaps
you would wish to accompany us on our next raid. We would
like to view your combat strategies as well. Our next
offensive will be launched in a few weeks. Stay with us and
feast until then. Once we have battled shield to shield, as
the saying goes, we will know if this alliance will benefit
us both."
    Urza nodded. "This counsel is well considered." He bowed
low. "I gratefully accept your invitation."
    At a motion from Radiant, the swarm of archangels and
angels melted away beneath them, leaving only the
planeswalker, the angel ruler of Serra's Realm, and the
dark-bearded man, Gorig.
    In one noisy wing of the Shivan mana rig, Jhoira and
Karn peered through a glass port in the side of the crystal
matrix chamber. Below the floor, magma engines channeled
their searing heat into a concentrated beam of ruby light.
It rose up a series of tubes, reflecting from panels of
silvered glass positioned in exact alignment, and lanced
into the matrix chamber. There the beam was split by a large
lens, and split again, the four resulting bands of light
rebounding through the space to sketch out in air the exact
dimensions and cut lines of the airship's powerstone.
    "An ethereal stone for an ethereal ship," Jhoira
remarked acidly.
    Karn glanced briefly toward her, wondering at her mood.
"At the rate Multani is growing the hull, the ship is more
than ether now. It's been over a month."
    "I know," Jhoira snapped. She rose from the riveted
superstructure, dusted off her hands, and whistled toward
the scampering teams of goblins, signaling the magma pumps
to accelerate. "Almost two. Urza is off on another of his
endless journeys."
    A quizzical gleam entered the silver man's eyes. "He has
saved Tolaria. He has made alliances with Yavimaya. He has
devised a great ship to save the world. Now he seeks to
drive Phyrexians from another place. You can't fault him for
that."
    "I don't," Jhoira said impatiently. She stooped beside a
pair of arguing goblins, entered the disagreement in their
own dialect, pointed to a schema one of them held, delivered
a pair of thumps to their heads, and sent them on their way.
"It's just that Teferi is gone."
    "He's what?" Karn asked.
    "He'd said when we were leaving that he'd be heading for
his homeland, Zhalfir. They were having a war of their own,
and they could use a mage of his caliber. He wanted to say
good-byes three weeks ago, but I put him off, said we'd have
time when I'd returned from Shiv. I'd thought we would be
here only two weeks."
    "Perhaps he is still at Tolaria," Karn said. "Perhaps he
is waiting for us to come back. What difference will a few
weeks make?"
    "Much difference, in time of war," Jhoira said. She
angrily threw a great lever, sending lava into chutes around
the matrix chamber. These channels of rock would solidify
around the ionized center of the jewel matrix, providing a
compression mold. "No, he's gone. He wouldn't wait for me.
He couldn't wait for Urza. Last time Urza stepped out for a
week, he was gone five years."
    "He's changed, Jhoira," Karn replied. "Before that trip,
he traded me away to the Viashino. Afterward, he negotiated
to get me back."
    Jhoira at last stopped working, letting labor slough
from her shoulders. "This isn't about Urza; this is about
Teferi."
    Stomping up beside her, the silver man stood, awkward.
He had long ago learned not to drape one of his massive arms
over Jhoira in consolation, lest he crush her.
    "We were best friends before Teferi. We can be best
friends again."
    She turned toward him, a trembling smile on her lips and
tears welling in her eyes. "You're right, Karn. We've always
been best friends. I was silly to think I needed more." A
tremor of uncertainty underlay her words.
    Hesitantly, Karn reached out to take her hand. "Urza has
taken me back, and now you have as well."
    "Yes," Jhoira said. She melted sadly against him.
    Karn stood there, even more lonely than before. He was
the only thinking, feeling machine among Urza's artifact
creatures, and because of it, Urza had no idea what to do
with him. Karn was not a colleague; nor was he a mere
creation. He had been designed to journey through a time
machine that no longer even existed. He was kept busy with a
thousand duties, but he had no real purpose. Had he been any
other artifact creature, Urza would already have junked him,
melted down his parts, and made new machines.
    Now, though Jhoira called him "best friend," her voice
told of disappointment and resignation.
    Standing there, Karn wondered if joining the junk pile
would be a mercy.
                          Monologue
    Teferi left just this morning. He took the refitted New
Tolaria, and a small army of runners, pumas, and scorpions.
I kept half the force-some five hundred units-but probably
did not need to. The island has been cleansed of Phyrexians.
Spider crystals fill the land. Zhalfir needs the machine
warriors more than we do, but Teferi's ship would not hold
more. As it was, I had to argue quite a while to -get the
proud young mage to accept the mechanical aid. I do not
blame him. Though my association with Urza makes artifice a
necessary study, I much prefer spell battles to mechanized
ones. Of course, if one wants to win, one employs both.
    I am seeing such necessary connections everywhere these
days. The hull of the skyship is taking shape, day by day.
Wood fuses with metal, and both grow together. I have spent
many evenings with Multani. Weary in the suspiring night, he
relates to me all he has learned from our fast- and slow-
time forests. He speaks of young worlds and old, of the
cycle of growth and decay. He tells how the blast that tore
through Tolaria brought death in its first moments, and new
and diverse life thereafter. He says that had it not been
for the destruction of Argoth and the sinking of Teresiare,
Yavimaya would never have risen. Life and death oppose each
other, yes, but it is only in their opposition that either
can exist at all. There is no death without life, and no
life without death.
    Magic and machine, metal and wood, life and death,
Shivan fire drakes and Tolarian sea drakes, somehow, Urza
has brought them all into alliance. Somehow, in the words of
Multani himself, Urza has come to embody each of them. I
have never had such hope for our world as I do now.
    Urza has been gone too long in Serra's Realm. He seemed
to think he would be able to quickly tell angels from
devils. I have to wonder. If fire and water can become
allies, perhaps good and evil can,too.

                             - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 20

    Urza flew among echelons of Radiant's purification army.
He wore a battle suit, much like the one he had devised for
his assault on Phyrexia. The mechanized assault armor bore
special protections against fire-he remembered well the
conflagration of glistening oil in the gorge-and airborne
poison. It was also proof against ballistae bolts. He bore a
great black battle lance tipped with numerous blades,
including a narrow axe and curved spearheads. From earlobes
to toes, he was covered in black metal, scale mail, and
power conduits. He realized with a certain irony that should
he slay Phyrexian sleepers this day, he would seem more the
monster and they more the humans.
    Ahead of Urza to his left flew the commander of this
echelon, an archangel as faceless and sexless as the others,
its name unknown to Urza but its command unquestioned. It
bore a magna sword that could cleave the head from a bull
with one swipe. Behind the archangel, in a great cone, flew
a contingent of fifty angel warriors, some armed with whips
and nets, others with enchanted torches that flared blue-
white and were said to turn the skin of Phyrexian newts
yellow. The remainder carried swords for summary executions
and head bags that would allow the dead to be counted and
the skulls to be immolated, preventing grave magics from
reviving them. At the rear of the party sailed an airship
loaded gunwale to gunwale with white-suited holy warriors.
These humans stood statue-still as the ship surged along.
Their eyes stared golden and dead from their heads.
Righteousness had been part of these warriors' demeanors
when they first arrived in Serra's Realm, and ruthlessness
had been learned along the way.
    The flight of angels and avengers sighted their target
ahead-a tumbled cluster of pulverized earth. What once had
been an archipelago of aerial islands had been shattered
into fragments of rock and grass. The remaining planetoids
turned listlessly in midair. Some of them spewed uneven
spirals of soot from the hovels dug in their sides.
    "The Jumbles contain the single largest infestation of
Phyrexians in the realm," Radiant had explained some days
ago over a course of tea. The porcelain settings rattled
with each stomp of boots drilling in the palace below. "They
masquerade as angel folk and human outcasts-and to be sure,
there are settlements of each among them- but there are
wolves hiding among the dogs. You'll know them by their
yellow-green cast in the light of the soul torches."
    Urza lofted one such torch now. Others did the same. As
yet, the light from the arcane brands was too distant and
dim to pick out any creatures on the rolling boulders and
hunks of ground. They would see soon enough. Angels swooped
down with lightning speed.
    The archangel commander made a series of crisp hand
signals. The outer wings of the attack column broke away
into sweeping lateral dives. Urza stayed with the leader,
its core flight of twenty fighters, and the air barge. The
other two units-fifteen angels each-soared outward to
converge on their target like a pair of hammers. The main
flight rose, following the archangel.
    The field of rolling rubble dropped away beneath,
revealing for the first time in its midst a series of larger
aerial islands. The central force would land on the largest
of these, purify it, and post a contingent there to secure
it while proceeding to the second largest. Already refugee
hives of mud and stick were visible below. The colony
crouched in a hollow of stone beside a dead forest of gray
stumps. The refugees must have been scavenging the ruined
forest for firewood.
    Another hand signal from the archangel indicated a flat
rock bed just below the warren. They would land there. Like
screaming falcon engines, the angels stooped from the sky.
Their enchanted torches blazed all the brighter in the
rushing air. The sight must have been horrifying from below-
two-score sun-bright lights blazing down like comets,
bringing with them a host of warrior angels and a boatload
of angry humans. The sight must have seemed an apocalypse.
    The angels came to ground at a run. They dashed up slope
toward the gaping entry to the warrens.
    Within, faces shone, yellow-green and wide-eyed. They
flashed away into shadow.
    The angel warriors homed in on those fleeting faces.
Their strides lengthened. Their blades rose. There came no
shout of fury or terror, as comes from mortal armies on the
charge. Only the sizzling torches and the relentless boots
announced their coming. Blue-white light bleached the gently
rolling landscape. Glaring circles spilled into the shabby
warren entrance.
    As the charge closed, a mighty crunch and thud sounded
behind. The ground leapt. The barge of holy warriors had
beached itself. A clank and boom announced the fall of the
troop door. Then came the human roar of fury and fear.
    Meanwhile, Urza and his archangel commander had reached
the warren's entrance. They charged within and rounded a
corner. A pair of desperate blades swung weakly out toward
them. The first caught on the archangel's massive shoulder
plate. The second scraped dully against Urza's armored flank
before clattering loose to the floor. The wielders-two young
human-looking males-staggered back from the assault and
flung up hands to ward off the archangel's torch-cudgel. In
the blue-white glare of the torch, the young men glowed a
ghastly shade of green.
    A spell arced from the angel's gloved hand, pinioning
the limbs of both men on spits of lightning. They paused
only a moment before bursting outward in a rain of charred
flesh. White flashes of life-force flared from the falling
bodies and were drawn violently into the torches. Without
pause, the archangel strode over the smoldering forms and
into the narrow passage beyond. It was a spiraling descent
that led into the heart of the aerial island. Urza followed.
    Behind them, the main body of angel and human warriors
entered. Two warriors took post at the cave mouth.
    "They live in cold, squalid darkness down there, afraid
of the light, of the truth," Radiant had said as she nibbled
on a corner of toast. She had followed the comment with a
wistful sigh. "It is as though the air that had once
nourished all of us is poison to them."
    The archangel led Urza and the rest of the cleansing
contingent down the spiraling passage. It let out into a
large central chamber. It was deserted. Five small fires
leaked smoke into holes in the ceiling. A few middens of
bone and trash lay near disheveled sleeping mats. From this
central chamber, many dark side passages opened.
    The archangel drifted regally into the middle of the
cavern. He signaled the troops after him to scour the
passageways. Two by two, the warriors pressed into the
darkness. Torches flared. Voices cried out in terror.
Lightnings crackled. Teams emerged.
    Efficient, rapid, and ruthless.
    Except that something was very wrong. As they had
descended into the cavern, the Phyrexian stench of the air
lessened until it was gone.
    Urza swept quickly ahead of the brute squads, into a
dark passage. His gemstone eyes dismantled the darkness, and
he saw:
    A very human family huddled in that tiny alcove-mother
and father and child. Phyrexians did not make sleepers to
resemble children. These folk clung to each other, cowering
against unyielding stone. They stared through the blackness
at the hulking figure of Urza. They muttered prayers to
their angels.
    Then the killers arrived. They swept past Urza. Their
torches sent mirror-shards of blue and white scattering
across the wall. Urza saw his own shadow cast, huge and
malevolent, over the family.
    Then torchlight broke out over them, and their skin
glared yellow-green.
    An axe rent the father's head, and a spear impaled
mother and child both. Red blood came from them all in the
moment before the incinerating blast. White fire gave way to
black smoke and red welts in the eyes. In the midst of it,
spinning ghosts poured from the cloven forms and were sucked
away into the beaming torches.
    An angel cast another sorcery. Glowing motes of sand
followed the inner contours of the wall, seeking secret
doors. When none were found, the killing team gave the all-
clear whistle, shouldered their weapons, and marched out
past the holy warrior posted at the entrance.
    Urza followed them out. He soared to the archangel who
hovered in the cavern midst. Arriving beside the commander,
Urza spoke rapidly.
    "Those torches don't work. They show human skin to be
yellow-green also."
    The archangel's response was unimpassioned. "We have no
better way to proceed."
    "You are killing your own folk. You are killing humans
and angels, not Phyrexians!" Urza insisted.
    "This is a private war," the archangel replied flatly.
    "I can smell their blood."
    "We cannot send you like a scent hound into every
burrow-"
    "You cannot keep killing innocent people-"
    "You have done so-"
    "I have done so to battle Phyrexia!"
    "Phyrexia is here. You said it yourself!"
    "The reek isn't here. It is in the palace-"
    And then he knew he had said too much.
    Even as the lightning bolt jagged out from the
archangel's fingers, Urza stepped into the space between
worlds and walked the halls of chaos.
    Urza emerged in the height of the aviary. He was alone,
for the moment. Radiant's throne stood empty. The nearest
angels or guards lingered on platforms hundreds of feet
below. He was alone, save for hundreds of spell triggers,
silently tripping, one after another. He felt their
sorcerous hooks drawing over him and retracting into the
walls. He waited-for Radiant, for her personal guard, for
whomever would answer the alarms. In the all-seeing panes of
glass around, Urza glimpsed images of slaughter and death.
The cleansing squads had not ceased their labors.
    A globe of light leapt into being around him. Its
surface roiled with fire. A score of angels rose in a fierce
circle from the floor and, in moments, hemmed him in with
spears.
    She arrived. Whatever other enchantments lay upon the
space, Radiant apparently maintained a summoning alarm. She
appeared, seated in her punitive throne, wings and hair
drooping over her sides. As her robes of state spread across
the high throne, a darker being took form just behind Urza.
Minister of War Gorig drew his tall, lean figure together
from empty air and strode to the edge of the platform. His
lemon-wedge eyes glared balefully at the planeswalker.
    "To what do we owe this intrusion?" Lady Radiant asked
from her lofted throne.
    "Forgive my effrontery," Urza said, sketching an
elaborate bow, "but the situation is urgent."
    "You were to accompany our cleansing army at the
Jumbles," she said. "You were fully provisioned and briefed.
That battle is even now in progress. Why are you here?"
    "Your cleansing army is killing humans and angels as
well as Phyrexians," Urza said urgently. He flung a hand
toward the images in the windows. "Look! See for yourself!"
    Radiant involuntarily peered toward the scenes, and then
reeled, her eyes swimming with violent images.
    Gorig blinked in irritation. "There will always be
civilian casualties in such operations. There are weeds
among the grain. To root out the weeds, a few heads of grain
will be lost. But to leave the weeds, they will all be
lost."
    "I sensed no Phyrexians in the main cavern we entered,
and yet every living creature within was being slaughtered.
They were humans. They were angels. They were not
Phyrexians, and yet they died all the same."
    Gorig's response sounded like a growl in his throat.
"They were dissidents. They were traitors to the state. They
were in league with Phyrexia, were in all respects but
physiology Phyrexian. You do not know their crimes against
the state and so cannot judge their fates. This war is a
private matter."
    "If you wish to be rid of these refugees-"
    "These dissidents," corrected Radiant serenely.
    "-these dissidents, I will prepare a place for them on
Dominaria."
    Radiant's fair features were tainted with distaste. "You
would bear them to your world, even knowing Phyrexian
sleepers hid among them?"
    "Yes," Urza said without pause. The response seemed to
surprise even him. "I would do my best to root out whatever
Phyrexians lurked in their midst, but better the multitude
of mortals survive to shield a handful of monsters than that
they die to eliminate them."
    Radiant glanced a question at her war minister.
    Anger jagged across Gorig's features. "How can you
possibly make this offer? If even one of the beasts
survives, your whole world could be destroyed."
    "I know that very well," Urza replied sternly, "and yet
I make the offer. Lady Radiant, do you give me leave to rid
you of your refugee problem?"
    The woman's face had regained its placid composure. "I
suppose it would save us casualties and weaponry merely to
ship out the dissenters-"
    "No," interrupted Gorig. "No one leaves. The doors of
the realm are closed and will stay closed. No one leaves."
    A protest formed itself on Urza's lips but never
emerged. In a sudden flash, Urza understood. "No one leaves
except me."
    Even as he stepped across the dimensional threshold into
that shifting space between worlds, the roar of Gorig
followed him out, "Return and you will be slain. You are an
enemy of the state, Planes-walker. You are Phyrexian!"

                       *****

    "Phyrexian sleepers are indeed in Serra's Realm," Urza
said as he paced in his private study, "and they are
transforming it, using it to prepare their invasion of
Dominaria, but not as we had thought."
    Mage Master Barrin sat grimly at the black-wood table.
The shadows of the high study gathered about his shoulders.
Beyond the window, in a distant glade, the nearly completed
hull of the airship creaked in its slow, final expansions.
    "The sleepers have fomented rebellion in the realm. They
have sparked a civil war. They've done it not by stirring up
dissidents among the citizens but by filling the palace with
fear. Their leader is War Minister Gorig, who has shut down
the discourse and debate that once filled the terraces and
gardens of the realm and replaced them with tribunal and
terror. Every day he declares more citizens traitors to the
state and evicts them from the palace. They cannot leave the
realm, though, and flee to refugee camps on broken islands
at the edge of the plane. There they are hunted down as
though for sport. All the while, the realm shrinks."
    Barrin was nettled. He ran a hand through his ragged
hair. "How does any of this advance the Phyrexian invasion?"
    "White mana," Urza said. "Phyrexia has discovered a way
to decant it, draw it off, and convert it into black mana.
By slaying the refugees, they are harvesting white mana,
drawing it into sorcerous torches that store the power until
it can be taken to Phyrexia. Between raids Gorig must empty
the torches into a soul battery. All the while, Serra's
Realm is shrinking, and Phyrexia's reach is growing. Gorig
will allow no one to leave because he is harvesting their
souls."
    A specter crossed Barrin's eyes. "Harvesting them ..."
He shook his head, dumbfounded. "How much has the realm
shrunk?"
    Urza rubbed his jaw in consideration. "It has already
fallen below its critical mass. Its collapse is inevitable."
    "If all of that white mana is harvested by Gorig and
reaches Phyrexia-"
    "We are doomed," Urza finished.
    Barrin could sit no longer. He bolted to his feet, chair
toppling behind him. He paced feverishly.
    "If we could find Gorig's stores of white mana and
divert them into the powerstone for your flying ship ..."
    An astonished look crossed Urza's face. "I can't believe
what you are suggesting. It is Argoth all over-using the
souls of others to power my own private war."
    "No," said Barrin. "No, this is different. This is no
longer a private war, Urza. And you would not be harvesting
souls. You would be resurrecting them. They are gone
already. You would be bringing them back, saving them from
Phyrexia, and giving them new life in the heart of your
ship. You would be giving them a chance to avenge their own
deaths."
    "Perhaps," Urza allowed. His eyes glowed with remembered
atrocities. "Perhaps."
    "This is not Argoth at all, Urza," Barrin assured.
"We're too late to save Serra's Realm. The Phyrexians have
already destroyed it, but you can still save her people."
    Urza's voice was fervid as he picked up the thought.
"I'll find where Gorig is storing the souls-they must be in
Serra's Realm, perhaps in the palace. But he'll know I've
come back. He'll know what I'm looking for. He'll tighten
his defenses. I'll have only a few chances. Perhaps I can
bring back some refugees each time. I could take a hundred
at once if they would gather together-but there are
thousands." He looked up. His eyes sparkled intensely. "We
need the ship, Barrin. Once I find the battery of souls,
we'll need the ship to go get the rest of them. How soon can
it be ready?"
    "The hull is almost complete. The engine and metal
pieces are already in place. The sail crews finished months
ago. By now Jhoira and Karn will have completed the
powerstone core. We've got to train a crew, of course. Find
the soul battery, and I'd say we could fly in a month. Three
weeks, if we work day and night."
    "I'll find the battery ... and save those I can ... and
muster the rest."
    Barrin smiled broadly, rubbing his hands together in
astonishment. "I had thought our victory over the monsters
in the gorge had been your crowning moment, my friend. But
you have made wars before, and it takes no great man to
kill. It takes a great man to save, Urza. It takes a great
man."

                       *****

    The cranes were in place around the upended airship,
block and tackle threaded through great straddling braces of
metal. Terd kicked the base of one of the stanchions,
scratched his head in vexation, and shouted instructions to
his gray-skinned comrades. They scurried up about him and
stared in puzzlement at the bottom of the metal beam. It sat
almost but not quite atop the stone it was supposed to rest
on. As his workers looked downward at the spot, Terd took
the occasion to fling his arm out, winging them all in the
back of the head. More shouts followed, and the workers
turned to a set of ropes stabilizing the great piece of
machinery.
    Meanwhile, Diago Deerv and Barrin consulted diagrams
spread across the field table. They discussed torque and
stress loads. Diago assured the master mage that the metal
cross members could support two flying ships. If any aspect
of the arrangement were insufficient, he insisted, it was
the network of ropes. With a quirked lip, Barrin likewise
assured the Viashino engineer that Tolarian hemp was
extraordinarily strong in all of its applications.
    Nearby stood another table. It was stout and stone. Four
runners surrounded it, a watchful scorpion was stationed
beneath it, and falcons circled high above it. Atop the
table lay a black cloth, beneath which huddled a mass the
general size and shape of a man. To one side of the table
stood Karn. Though he was utterly still, the focus of his
eyes shifted nervously across the crowd of students, lizard
men, and goblins clustered beyond the ropes.
    Jhoira sensed the tension in her friend. "Relax, Karn.
There are no Phyrexians among us today."
    "The stone is priceless," Karn said. "It wouldn't take a
Phyrexian to try to steal it."
    "It would take a mammoth," Jhoira pointed out.
    "I'll just feel better when the stone is in the engine,"
he said.
    Jhoira shook her head wonderingly and teased, "You're
constantly complaining about having a purpose in the grand
scheme of things, and once you have a purpose, all you can
do is worry."
    "Perhaps my affective matrix is flawed," Karn said in
impressive deadpan.
    A shout came down the line of goblin laborers. Ropes
that had been slack went suddenly taut. The great hull of
the ship creaked as lines tugged it in cross-directions.
Long and slender, the ship quivered within its drydock
framework. Its bowsprit wavered, three hundred feet up in
the blue sky, and with a tremendous groan the prow tilted
down toward the horizon. More shouts came from the goblins,
and lines shuddered with the strain. The curved metal
stanchions overhead bowed just slightly beneath the tipping
burden.
    Mage Master Barrin sent streamers of blue magic out to
wrap themselves around points of stress. Scintillating power
sank into metal or hemp, adding magical strength.
    The tapered stern of the airship, once lying against the
ground, tilted upward, showing a row of windows and an
insignia shaped like a giant seed.
    "The Weatherseed," Jhoira said, pointing to the spot.
    "Yes," Karn agreed.
    "Multani says the ship is complete but unfinished,"
Jhoira said. "It's still alive, still growing. It is as much
a creature as it is a machine."
    Karn was silent.
    Jhoira pressed. "You are no longer alone, Karn. Urza has
designed and built his second living machine."
    "No, Jhoira, you are wrong," Karn said. "I'm a thinking,
feeling machine, but I am not alive. This ship is Urza's
only living machine. It is always growing, integrating new
parts into its structure. I am not growing. I am
disintegrating."
    Jhoira sighed heavily. "Disintegrating-aren't we all."
Masts and spars that had for long months jutted sideways
from the upended ship stepped into the sky. With a final
shudder and thud, the vessel settled atop the landing
spines. Ropes that had eased it downward grew slack. The
teams hauling on those lines leaned forward and let them
drop to the ground. There was a sigh from workers and
artificers and even the ship herself. Upright for the first
time, the sleek-raked craft looked large and muscular
against the whispering forests of Tolaria. Crews reverently
approached it, staring in awe at its glimmering portholes
and its elegant webwork of lines.
    Then the commands started again. Workers set ladders to
the side of the vessel and climbed aboard. Ramps were hauled
into position to ease loading. Weapon crews swarmed the
various beam weapons embedded in the prow and along the
length of the gunwales. Master Mage Barrin levitated himself
into the air and floated along the curving rail of the
craft, surveying it on all levels. "Well, Karn, let's get
this stone inside," Jhoira said. She pulled back the black
cloth, revealing a massive and beautifully shaped stone,
configured in a long lozenge like the Weatherseed itself. It
caught the sunlight, amplified it, and sent it stabbing
outward in a blinding corona. Karn leaned down, gathered the
heavy gem against his gleaming chest plates, and hoisted it
into the air. The combination of silver and crystal was
dazzling. Karn was transfigured, a man made of lightning. He
walked reverently toward the ramp that led into the ship,
and a cadre of four runners surrounded him.
    Jhoira fell back, astonished by the bright spectacle. It
suddenly occurred to her that Karn and the airship were of a
piece. They were not two different generations of invention
but one continuum. Perhaps Karn didn't realize it-perhaps
Urza did not even realize it- but the silver man and the
skyship would go down together through time, parts of a
single legacy.

                       *****

    Urza crouched in a dark chamber in Serra's Palace.
Gorig's forces had located him and were closing in. Their
boot steps rang in the hallway. He still had not found the
soul battery. He had not even discovered where Gorig kept
charged soul torches. Time grew short.
    With sudden violence, soldiers' boots pounded against
the barred door.
    Urza stepped away. He crossed the echoing crawlspace
between worlds and emerged in the empyrean reaches of
Serra's Realm. Here the palace was only a distant black
speck drifting on the horizon. Ahead of him, the Jumbles
formed a chaotic sea of tumbling stones.
    A golden regatta of troop landers and angel wings
glinted above one of the larger masses. They descended
toward a refugee hive. Their white-blue soul torches trailed
smoky crazings in the air. There, just beneath a green ridge
where grasses clung to a ruined temple, was the entrance.
    With a mere thought, Urza disappeared from the spot
where he hovered. He stepped in a flashing moment into the
mouth of the hive.
    A handful of young guards started at his appearance and
pivoted to hurl their crude spears. One man fell in a tangle
of grimy clothes. Four others managed to send their spears
Urza's way.
    The planeswalker swept his hand in an arc before him,
and the spears cracked from a sudden, invisible barrier.
They rattled to the cave floor.
    "Save them for the cleansing army," Urza advised. "Like
it or not, I am your ally against them. I am going within to
take with me any who wish to escape to a new place." He
retreated quickly down the passage while the sentinels
stared, stunned, after him.
    One of them, a young angel warrior, rose on her wings
and followed. Urza sped away from her. She shouted in his
wake.
    "Who are you?"
    "I am Urza, the planeswalker." The broadening cave walls
picked up the announcement, bearing it inward to the people
clustered about fires there. Without pause, Urza continued
his oration, "The armies of Radiant are coming. They will
kill anyone they can find in this place. Any who wish to
escape, gather here beside me."
    His summons was met with only dull stares.
    "There is no time. If you would live, gather here."
    Though most of the folk beside the fires-grimy men and
women and dispirited angels-stayed where they were, a few
young folk rose tentatively and made their way toward Urza.
Behind him, several metallic thuds sounded, and then came
the distant roar of warriors charging. More of the cavern's
inhabitants gathered to the stranger's side, a group of
nearly twenty. Flashes and shrieks sounded from the mouth of
the cave. Now no one remained by the fires, either fleeing
to Urza or fleeing away to the dens carved into the rock off
the main hall.
    "Those who will not come," Urza shouted out as he
focused his mind on the coming planeswalk, "if you survive,
get yourself to the colony farthest from the palace-the
Arizon colony on the aerial island called Jobboc. I will
return there in two weeks' time to save you and anyone else
you can bring with you."
    Gesturing the fearful, starving mob into a tight
cluster, Urza extended his consciousness to surround them.
Just as the air began to flare and spark with lightning,
Urza folded them into two dimensions and 'walked with them
from the world.
    Radiant sat on her throne at the height of the aviary.
In the last few weeks, it had become a much more soothing
place.
    When Urza had joined the rebel cause, Gorig at last
convinced Radiant to fortify the aviary. She let him
surround the glass tower in a web of steel grills. That
measure did not satisfy Gorig though. He pointed out that
any flying creature with a crossbow could slay her on her
throne by sending a bolt through the glass. Radiant
relented. She allowed Gorig to fasten thick plates of steel
atop the grillwork. Of course the aviary grew dark. The
plants died. The birds fell into an unnatural slumber from
which they never awakened. The place became cold and dank,
but at least it was safe-except for those cursed windows and
their violent images. Last of all, Gorig had convinced
Radiant to let him dispel the far-seeing enchantments and
convert all the panes in the aviary into mirrors.
    Now Radiant sat in a dark and safe aviary. The only
light came from her glowing presence. The mirrors all around
her shimmered with her image. For the first time in
centuries, she felt at home on the throne of Serra. Here she
sat, searching the eyes of a multitude, the eyes of Radiant.
    "Lady Radiant," came a voice from below. It was Gorig.
He had emerged on his audience platform. The whine of servos
told that he yet wore his battle armor. There was another
sound, too, the untidy whisper of a large and heavy bag
being drawn along marble. "I have something to show you.
Something that will please you very much."
    "Not now, Gorig," the angel said distractedly. "I am
seeing the future. I am gazing into my own eyes."
    His voice was impatient but as sly as a serpent. "Look
down for a moment and you will see the future."
    "No. The future is here. It is in my eyes. That's where
Urza Planeswalker will find his fate. He will look into my
eyes. This war will come down to us. I will fight him
myself. He will look into my eyes and see the beauty there
and remember what this place was when Serra sat this throne,
what this place was before he brought death here-"
    "We had a successful harvest today-"
    "I will look into his eyes and understand at last what
madness makes a man bring devils to heaven and then return
to aid them."
    Gorig's voice was suddenly hesitant. "I would advise you
not to look directly into the eyes of Urza Planeswalker, my
lady. They are unnatural things-like the eyes of a bug. They
will only hypnotize you."
    "No, Gorig," Radiant said with a bitter smile. "I will
look into his eyes, and he into mine, and we'll know which
of us is right and which of us is mad."
    "Please, dear lady," begged Gorig, "forget about Urza
for a moment. Look down and see what I have brought you."
His entreaty was followed by a clattering sound, as though
the bag he dragged disgorged hundreds of large wooden balls.
    Her curiosity piqued, Radiant at last glanced down. Her
eyes lit with delight. "Oh, heads! There must be two hundred
heads! Oh, how beautiful, Gorig. How beautiful!"
                          Monologue
    In the last three weeks, Urza has gotten four hundred
and twenty-three refugees out of Serra's Realm. He estimates
that at least that number has been slaughtered by Radiant's
cleansing army. He also believes each of his intrusions into
the embattled plane only accelerates Radiant's genocidal
war. All of the large concentrations of refugees have been
harvested-aside from the Arizon colony on Jabboc. It holds
thousands.
    For them, there is only one hope-the airship. Once it is
fully operational, it should be able to hold most of the
remaining Serran "rebels." The trouble is, the vessel will
be fully operational only when we find the soul battery.
    Urza still hasn't located it. He has searched Gorig's
private chambers. He has penetrated the deepest vaults in
the palace. He has fought his way into and out of the best-
defended sections of the realm. Still, nothing.
    On one of his journeys, Urza was forced into a showdown
with an angel contingent. After the smoke had cleared and
the bodies had fallen to dust, he recovered twelve mana-
charged soul torches. A week's study, night and day,
revealed the trick of them. They held enough white mana to
provisionally charge the ship's powerstone. We estimate the
vessel will be able to fly, planeshift once, fire a few
bolts from the deck-mounted energy ports, and maneuver to
the refugee encampment.
    The twelve emptied torches are now mounted along the
lines of the hull, power conduits running from them to the
core of the ship.
    Urza hopes they will draw enough white mana from the air
of Serra's Realm to recharge the stone for another
planeshift-with the refugees aboard. The power will not
last, of course. We need the soul battery to permanently
charge the stone. But Urza is less concerned about
completing his airship than he is about rescuing refugees.
    He acts as though these folk are modern-day ambassadors
representing the bygone thousands killed in his wars.
Perhaps they are. Perhaps in saving them, he is saving
himself.

                                - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 21

    The day of launch had arrived. A great crowd filled the
Tolarian glade-student and scholar, elf and artifact engine,
Viashino and goblin, angel and human. Half of them were
refugees from Serra's Realm. They pinned all their hopes on
the rescue force at the center of the glade. The other half
of the crowd had worked for years to assemble that force.
Now the work was done. Ail that remained was to wait and
watch. The crowd pressed inward, just out of reach of the
war-barded drakes but as close as they could get to the
great sky-ship.
    Aboard the vessel, Master of Engines Karn made his
rounds in preparation for launch. He peered down into the
open hatch.
    Artifact creatures clustered in the hold, shoulder to
shoulder- two hundred runners, twelve pumas, two hundred
scorpions, and a hundred modified Yotian warriors. These
creatures formed the planetary defenses meant to guard the
refugees as they boarded the ship. The mechanical men
shifted in the close quarters, some of them packed so
tightly they could not stand. There would be no room for
them on the return trip, Karn knew. They would be left
behind to be blasted into nothing, or captured and dissected
and melted down. Barrin seemed impressed by Urza's
willingness to sacrifice the artifact creatures, speaking of
Urza's newfound humanity. Karn felt only saddened by it.
    Disintegration.
    He drew the hatch closed over the main hold and turned
away, striding across the narrow deck to the roosts where
three hundred falcon engines awaited release. They would
perform a new task, providing aerial cover for the fleeing
refugees. In addition to this function, they would home in
on Phyrexian blood, impaling themselves in any target, and
shredding the creature from the inside out. They would also
fight any foes that threatened the refugees. Just in case
the falcons did not purge the plane, Urza had filled
bombards with modified spider capsules, which would resonate
in the presence of strong white-mana sources.
    He spoke of saving the refugees and cleansing the plane.
    Of course, Karn thought darkly, neither the falcons nor
the spiders would be returning either.
    He moved along the gunwale toward the first bank of fog-
cutting lanterns along the bow. They were fitted with
focusing lenses and parabolas that rendered their light into
powerful beams. In tests, these ray weapons could ignite
clothing from two thousand feet away, could make deadfalls
burst into flame, and could etch stone. The lantern crews
were goblins, selected due to their familiarity with the
Thran ray technology used in the crystal forge. Terd and a
pair of gray, stumpy Grabbits manned the lantern Karn
checked over.
    "Everything in order here, Master," Terd declared with a
salute snapped so rapidly that his fingertips left welts on
his forehead.
    Karn only nodded, continuing his inspection of the
device. "The sighting mechanism is dirty."
    Eyes widened into saucers on Terd's face. In a gibbering
tongue, he upbraided his companions. He stomped on one's
foot and twisted the other's ear before returning his
attention to Karn. A toothy grin crossed his lips.
    "It so clean, you see your face in it-" the thought
shimmering in his eyes grew a bit cloudy. He blinked
uncomfortably "-or not. We not shine ray at your face. You
shiny enough, it bounce off anyway! 'Course, it then kill
everybody else. We not shine at your face. Malzra say angels
got shiny faces, too. We shoot for whites of eyes. Wait, we
not see whites of eyes-"
    Karn left the creature in midsentence, following the
rail to the glasspitter-an invention of Jhoira's. She had
been inspired one day by the deadly sprays of molten metal
that occurred when water dropped into a blast furnace. The
bombards hurled spheres of glass-covered energy among
enemies. Where the balls burst, melted shrapnel was flung
outward. Her design was finished and presented to Urza
before she had fully thought through the lethal
consequences. Before she would allow the devices to be
built, she made Urza promise they would be used only against
dire and deserving foes. She got her wish-and command of the
flying ship.
    Even now, Jhoira crouched in the prow beside the ship's
final ranged weapon-an acid atomizer. The device used an
unstable energy field to dispersed a caustic spray among
foes. Karn approached her.
    "Is the atomizer in working order, Captain?" Karn asked.
    Jhoira startled. She stared at Karn, blinking stupidly
for a moment before shaking the visions from her eyes.
"Sorry, I was just mentally preparing for the coming battle.
What were you saying?"
    "The acid atomizer, Captain," Karn repeated, "is it
ready?"
    Jhoira nodded, crossing arms over her chest. "Yeah, but
don't call me captain. Call me Jhoira. Just because I've
been given command of this vessel and crew doesn't make me a
captain. As for the atomizer-the fog from this thing will be
as destructive as a blast of the fire drakes' breath."
    They both reflexively cast glances toward Gherridarigaaz
and Rhammidarigaaz, positioned on either side of the long,
sleek ship. The fire drakes would provide an aerial defense
of the ship and the refugees. The beasts would be
planeswalked into Serra's Realm by Urza himself.
    Just now, Urza was to starboard tightening saddle straps
on the ancient drake dam. To port, Barrin packed wands and
tomes into the saddle bags of the young dragon. Though
Jhoira was in charge of the ship, Urza and Barrin would
direct the entire operation, employing an arsenal of white-
mana spells from the backs of the fire drakes.
    Urza even then stood in the drake saddle and made a
gesture to silence the buzzing crowds. "They will call us
invaders," Urza said, his voice amplified by a quick spell
from the mage master. "They will call us invaders, just as
they have called their own citizens traitors. They have even
called us Phyrexians, so powerful is the web of delusion
that traps them. We will not listen to what they call us. We
will listen to what history calls us. We will save them
despite themselves."
    A mild ovation answered these words.
    "We are not invaders. We are defenders. We are the
alliance of Dominaria. We are human and divine, Viashino and
goblin. We are builders and enchanters. We are the power of
the forest and of the sea, of the mountains and of life
itself. We have cleansed our own island of Phyrexian hordes,
and we will cleanse Serra's Realm as well. But, most of all,
we will return, and bring with us the rest of her refugees,
a new army of allies."
    A roar of joy began among the humans and angels gathered
there. It swept through the ranks of lizard men and goblins,
elves and artifact creatures, students and scholars, until
the very forests and oceans echoed the shout.
    As the sound mounted up, Jhoira nodded to Karn.
"Initiate the startup sequence, Master of Engines."
    "Aye, Captain," Karn replied.
    He crossed the narrow deck to reach the bulkhead where
stairs descended into the hull of the ship. In moments, he
had reached the engine room. Diago Deerv and three other
red-scaled Viashino came to awkward attention as Karn
entered.
    "Initiate startup sequence," the silver man ordered.
    The Viashino snapped salutes and scrambled to their
posts. Switches were flipped, levers adjusted, and gyros set
into motion. Groans came from the massive engine. A chatter
of commands and verifications arose among the lizard men.
    Karn meanwhile moved to the center of the curved console
bank, beneath an ornate speaking tube that led directly to
the bridge. Before him, a pair of deep ports delved into the
inner reaches of the engine. Karn inserted his hands into
the holes, feeling for the twin bars at their bases. He
found them and clasped his hands. When turned, the rods
would trigger the engine's start up.
    "Open the superfluid manifold," Karn ordered.
    He pivoted both handles inward, and felt the mechanisms
engage and lock. A great warmth was abruptly born within the
engine. In moments, it had drowned out the ovation outside.
    Before Karn could withdraw his arms, bracers emerged
from deep within the machine and fastened over his wrists.
Small wire probes slid smoothly into the joints in his
knuckles. Magnificent surges of energy prickled along his
hands. Jolts moved up arm and shoulder conduits, converged
in the silver man's chest, and fountained into the
powerstone at the center of his head.
    Suddenly Karn could sense the green superfluids coursing
through the great engine block before him. He could feel the
warm bath sluice around the glimmering powerstone at the
heart of the machine. He could see out the fog-lanterns of
the ship, fore and aft, starboard and port. He could
kinesthetically sense the weight and alignment of the ship's
hull, its sails, its lines, even its young, strong captain
as she stood at the ship's wheel. The airship had become a
second body for him. Its engines and controls and defenses
were suddenly his own.
    Integration.
    To welling cheers, Karn lifted the great skyship into
the air. It rose amid the red-flapping wings of the fire
drakes. It ascended into the bright skies over Tolaria, the
bright skies of Dominaria.
                       *****

    Jhoira felt small and overawed as she stood on the
bridge of the airship. As yet, there was no need to steer.
The vessel was merely rising into the blue Tolarian sky. Not
until it made headway would the warping of sails and the
bending of airfoils make any difference at all to the
craft's movement. But clutching the wheel now made a
definite difference to Jhoira's position: it allowed her to
stay standing.
    Beneath her feet, enormous, hot engines labored. They
dragged into clear air a payload of five hundred war engines
and a crew of thirty. She tried to forget that the fully
loaded ship weighed four thousand tons. She tried to forget
that this was the vessel's first time aloft-its shakedown
cruise. She tried to forget that she would be sailing this
vessel into a war with angels.
    Something huge and red arced with sudden violence above
the ship's, rail and then disappeared again. It returned, a
leathery mountain, translucent-the bones of a great drake
visible through it. The wing dipped a second time. When it
reappeared, it brought the red-mantled head of
Gherridarigaaz above the rail. A gray snort escaped one
craggy nostril as the she-drake pulled herself higher into
the sky. Urza, standing in his saddle, lurched into view. He
held something in his hand, something that looked like a
club but sparkled like a wand. His face was clenched with
effort, and he drove the drake toward the prow of the ship.
    Something is wrong, Jhoira thought, clinging to the
wheel. Something has come loose-or something that was
supposed to come loose hasn't.
    Gherridarigaaz surged toward the bow of the ship. Urza
leaned so far in the saddle he appeared in danger of
falling. He swung the shimmering club at something clinging
to the prow. A dull thud sounded, and then a wet shattering
sound.
    "I name thee, Weatherlight" Urza declared, holding aloft
the fragmented neck of the bottle. His mount soared away
over windswept treetops.
    Jhoira laughed. There was no monster, nothing amiss. The
planeswalker was merely blessing and naming the boat on its
maiden voyage. Jhoira felt the weight of dread and
impossible futures sag away from her and drop among the
rattling leaves below. She laughed.
    "Full ahead! Follow that drake," the first captain of
Weatherlight commanded.
    Gherridarigaaz darted out over the forests of Tolaria.
Rhammidarigaaz slid into her wake. Weatherlight followed
them both. Wind coursed over the prow and back to reach
Jhoira. She drew the fresh air into her lungs and remembered
another place she used to stand-at the edge of her world.
She remembered an earlier time, when young courage filled
her heart and she dreamed of a soul mate. The man had never
arrived, but she had lived a full life without him, and now,
young courage poured again into her heart.
    Gherridarigaaz was merely a crimson jag on the horizon.
Rhammidarigaaz was just behind her. Weatherlight gained on
them both. The helm had grown active in Jhoira's grip,
tugging at her the way an eager horse pulls at the rein. She
returned its forceful play, holding the ship against cross
winds.
    "Trim the sails," Jhoira commanded the human crew. They
scampered to cleats and drew on lines. "Reconfigure the port
and starboard fans into airfoils." More workers clambered
onto the lateral rigs to rework the canvas.
    With each tug on slack lines and each shift of sail, the
ship gained speed. It coursed above the green sea of trees
with greater velocity than any water-bound craft. A turgid
wake of tossing tree-tops spread out aft. The wind washing
over the deck threatened to blow the lighter crew members
overboard. Terd and his diminutive comrades hunkered down
beside the rail. Lines throughout the rig hummed in the
bluster. The ship's hull creaked as it eased itself into the
stresses of its new orientation.
    Jhoira smiled. She had almost caught up to Urza and
Barrin. At the shoreline of Tolaria, the drake riders nudged
their steeds to match the ship's speed. Gherridarigaaz and
Rhammidarigaaz flew wing and wing. Churning storms of air
spread in twin cones behind them. Jhoira steered the ship
past the shore and into the twin gales. Wind lashed brutally
across the deck.
    "Hang on!" Jhoira shouted to her crew. "We will slow
once we enter Serra's Realm."
    Until that time, they had to fly in close formation.
Urza's planeshift would barely encompass both drakes, and it
could be tracked by Weatherlight's apparatus only if the
field effects overlapped. Whitecaps thundered below, and
gray cumulous clouds thundered above. The very air seemed to
turn solid, tearing at sailcloth and hemp, wooden hull and
metal fittings. It clawed also at the captain at her wheel,
but now she felt only exhilaration.
    A bubble of magical might swelled out from Urza. In a
heartbeat, it stretched to encompass both drakes. Already
they shimmered, punching into the portal.
    "Planeshift!" shouted Jhoira.
    Another bubble welled up from the heart of the ship
itself. The curtain of magic cracked out, whiplike, and
dimmed sea and sky. Blue Dominaria glimmered for one tiny
moment more, and then it was gone. The roar went with it.
Black chaos swept in to displace all. Beyond the ship's
rails lay only a churning world of emptiness, and the
laboring wings of two great drakes.
    And then blue and black both were gone. In their place
came a vast skyscape of tinged light, sulfuric cloud, and
troubled, tumbled chunks of land.
    "Serra's Realm," Jhoira said into the sudden roar of
wind, the edge of Serra's Realm. She reached down to a slot
in the deck and drew forth a glass-encased map of the
Jumbles, The cartography was unmistakably Urza's-detailed,
turbulent, overworked. It showed three landmark isles. One
was pear-shaped, and it tumbled in rapid succession. Another
was long and flat like a great stone knife. The third, lying
just beneath the descending brow of sky at the utter edge of
Serra's Realm, was the rock called Jobboc.
    There, on that distant and broken world, in a colony
called Arizon, waited a thousand souls.
    "Start a rapid swing round to starboard on heading
ninety-five, three twenty-eight, eight. We're heading for
Jobboc." Steersmen trimmed in the airfoils and Karn, below,
channeled what remained of the ship's power into the banking
descent. "Release spider bombards from alternate sides every
thirty seconds beginning on my mark." The bombard crews
scrambled to load their first salvos.
    Meanwhile, Terd clambered up the ladder to the main deck
and grabbed at Jhoira's sleeve. "They are here already,
Lady. Lightning bugs!"
    Jhoira peered out along the line of the goblin's gnarled
finger. To port, she glimpsed a beautiful and terrible
sight. Glimmering in air like gold dust, were the cleansing
armies of Radiant.
    "Mark!"
    "They've released the first spider bombard," shouted
Barrin. He brought Rhammidarigaaz through a sweeping turn to
the flank of Urza.
    "Good," Urza called back from atop Gherridarigaaz.
"We'll know who we're fighting." He looked to his left,
where the cleansing army of Radiant swarmed. Their wings
making a distant drone in the air.
    "How many do you think there are?"
    "Hundreds," Urza called back, "perhaps thousands. We
will need every advantage."
    Urza flung out his hands, drawing to himself the white
mana of the many places he had traveled in the realm. He
fueled a pair of powerful spells. White lightning crackled
out from his fingers and spread across the two drakes,
feathering around them in a thousand leaping lines. Power
surged through them. The enchantment made scales seem
gossamer feathers, made red mantles seem rainbowed coronas.
There was a sudden glorious aspect laid on the beasts. They
were transformed into divine figures, terrifying in their
beauty and power. With another gathering of white-mana
magic, Urza cast a scintillating aura around each rider, a
whirling circle of what appeared to be snow.
    "That will protect us from white-mana spells or
creatures," Urza explained.
    Barrin, unfamiliar with the realm, drew on blue magic
instead of white. He summoned a pair of Tolarian drakes.
Giant kin of fire drakes, these two dragons had skin as
smooth and translucent as reef water. Their wings flashed
blue against the yellowing clouds. Their spiky manes, as
barbed as tridents, oscillated in the roaring wind. Barrin
reached into the core of his memory, tapping memories of the
forests of Tolaria. He thought of Jhoira's Angelwood and the
Western Reaches and the many fast-time subarctic scrub
forests, and cast an enchantment on the two creatures. Green
scales sprouted across the backs and bellies of the summoned
drakes, providing them additional protection against
attacks, magical or mundane.
    "Impressive," shouted Urza over the growing buzz of
angel wings approaching.
    "I have a leviathan up my sleeve, if things get really
desperate, though summoning it would tax my every reserve."
    There was no time for more discussion. The approaching
army's drone had become a roar. They grew from golden motes
into arrows of flame.
    The angel army of Radiant arrived.
    They soared in with the speed of falcons. Two score
archangels led the vanguard, each bearing a magna sword,
broad as an axe but long as a lance. The archangels came in
a vertical circle and held their blades inward like a ring
of fangs. Behind them, forming a lethal gullet, were
hundreds of angel warriors bearing lances. A great leviathan
in its own right, the cleansing army of Radiant opened its
toothy maw to swallow the drakes and their riders.
    "I'll meet you on the other side!" Urza yelled as he
plunged into the hailstorm of white fangs and silver masks
and flashing steel.
    The other side of what? Barrin wondered.
    The angel thicket closed around him.
    Magna swords struck the tip of the fire drake's pale
muzzle and sparked along its scaly neck. The enchantments
held, repelling steel. Even so, the blades converged,
tracing their way toward the rider.
    Barrin yanked hard on the drake's rein. Rhammidarigaaz
curved broadside to the speeding angels. His leeward flank
arched away from attack, and his windward flank became an
impenetrable wall against which archangels and angels
smashed in bloody wreck.
    Barrin urged Rhammidarigaaz back into his charge. The
beast surged his wings, flinging loose a pair of angels who
had swarmed up behind him, and vaulted deeper into the
throat of the attack. He breathed a great gout of fiery
breath into the onslaught, and angels fell from the sky like
burning pigeons. Rhammidarigaaz plowed into the vacated
space.
    The dragon's side was dotted with blood, most of it
angelic, though there were a few long wounds where swords
had broken through the enchantments. Instantly, Barrin cast
a healing spell on the drake, and the gory gashes along his
sides knitted together with threads of white energy.
    Another blast of fire emerged from the beast. More
angels tumbled in black smoke and melted quill. Silver masks
cleaved to screaming faces. Magna swords fused with
skeletons.
    Distant in the fight, the flames of Gherridarigaaz
carved an equally hellish swath through the swarm of angels.
    The blue drakes fared less well. Their steam breath
killed many, but the press of bodies and the hack of swords
ripped the creatures to rags. A bolt of healing radiance
leapt from Urza toward the beleaguered Tolarian drakes, but
another sorcery, cast by an archangel warrior, deflected the
spell en route.
    Barrin was beginning his own healing enchantment when an
angel choir shrieked down upon him and laid to with swords.
A familiar sorcery leapt from his fingertips. The kindled
fire arced across the pitching air into the face of an angel
warrior, waking flames in her mouth and eyes. He unleashed a
second spell of the same kind, drawing additional power from
the first. A third conflagration blazed out to strike an
archangel, blasting a hole through its armor and out the
other side. Three bodies tumbled away, but twenty more clung
to the drake's back and attacked with swords and barbed
whips.
    Massive blades descended. They struck Barrin in head,
neck, belly, and back. Magna swords rebounded from his
enchanted flesh as though they had struck stone.
    Barrin sent Rhammidarigaaz into a sudden dive, flinging
free the attackers and bringing the beast's fire breath
against new clouds of the foe. Exhilaration moved through
the Mage Master of Tolaria- until he saw the bleeding hulks
of the Tolarian drakes.
    They were below and behind, their carapace enchantments
dispelled, and their blue hides marked with gashes as
numerous and ominous as hieroglyphics. The killer angels
still clung to the beasts, maggots on dead corpses, until
their wings at last gave out. In quick succession, the
summoned beasts dropped from the sky. Angels peeled
themselves from the falling forms.
    Chastened, Barrin brought Rhammidarigaaz soaring back
into the fray, fiery breath and steel-hard wings slaying
angels in their hundreds. The master mage cast sorceries,
death blossoming all around him. He would kill as many as he
could as quickly as he could, hoping to keep them from the
refugees.
    Suddenly, black and grotesque in the midst of that angel
throng, there came a beast that could win right past
Barrin's white mana protections. Bewinged, befanged, and
Phyrexian, the monster dropped like night from the sky onto
Rhammidarigaaz's neck. It reared up, and Barrin recognized
the lemon-wedge eyes Urza had described.
    The man otherwise was utterly transformed-his figure
hulking and muscular, fitted with countless implants and
weapons-halberd arms and dagger-tipped feet and scythes at
the elbows. The greatest weapon of all, though, was built
right into the beast's torso-a black manifold that blazed in
twelve places with the white-blue fires of soul-stealers. He
drew white mana into his very being, storing it, harnessing
part of it to transform himself. He grew more powerful with
every creature he killed.
    Gorig was the mana battery.
    Barrin had time to see no more. Gorig lunged atop him.

                       *****

    Karn felt Weatherlight's fading power as a torpor in his
own frame. The soul torches weren't gathering enough white
mana from the surrounding air to recharge the stone. It only
glimmered weakly within its superfluid bath. The ship had
enough energy to fly, perhaps enough for a few brief bursts
from its ray weapons, but the vessel would not planeshift
again.
    "We'll need more torches, Jhoira," he called into the
speaking tube over his head. The sound of his voice was
empty and weary, made doubly so by the metal pipe work.
"Just to carry the refugees away, we'll need power from more
torches."
    "Aye," came the clipped reply from above. "Prepare for
landing."
    Below the ship-Karn still saw all the world through the
ray weapons at bow and stern-the aerial island called Jabboc
floated black and forbidding against the descending dome of
Serra's Realm. It was a dark place. The eternal light of
Serra was failing in these reaches. The life-giving air was
thin and tainted. The very edge of the plane hovered only a
scant mile beyond the black rock. In ever-changing array,
its frayed fabric showed the gray chaos that lay between
worlds.
    "Reduce speed," Jhoira's order came.
    Gratefully, Karn scaled back the power flow from the
tepid crystal.
    "Decrease altitude."
    Sails shifted, the prow rose just slightly, and the
ship's keel eased downward. The massive aerial island
swelled to fill Karn's field of vision. He saw there a
twilight roil of hills and rocks. Dead fields lay gray
within the perpetual murk. Tangled trees stood in dead woods
across the isle. It seemed Hades or Sheol, a place of
shadows, sunless land of the dead.
    "Lanterns ahoy! Bring the ship to ground beside those
lights."
    Through the eyes of the ship, Karn saw the flickering
glow of lanterns, oil and wick pushing back the darkness.
The tepid light traced out arches against the dark-the entry
to the Arizon colony. Light reflected in tiny gleams from
something clustered within. They seemed almost wasp eggs,
piled inside the mud-daubers' nest, but with a certain
wonder and dread, Karn realized what they were-
    Faces, thousands of faces-waiting and hoping for
salvation.
    Karn drew upon the strength of his own power matrix to
bear the ship across the cold reaches before the cave. A
black vale below led past a field of rubble and a forest
deadfall. The Weatherlight nosed through the tangle of trees
and to the flat plain, just below the cave. Landing spines
emerged from the lower sweep of the hull. Easing the ship
slowly down, Karn felt in his own being the vast shudder of
the hull settling.
    "Open hatches! Release falcons! Deploy runners and pumas
and scorpions! Ready cargo holds! Ready ray weapons!" There
was a new urgency in Jhoira's voice.
    When Karn peered through the stern lanterns, he saw why.
    Angel armies descended on them in a golden cyclone.

                       *****

    Urza stood in Gherridarigaaz's saddle. The Tolarian
drakes had plunged out of the battle there, where the swarm
was thinnest. They had tumbled away into the gray-blue
depths and, some mile below, flashed out of existence
entirely.
    Only a mile below ...
    The plane had shrunk considerably before their arrival,
but it was dissipating even more quickly now. Urza drew hard
on the reins, sending Gherridarigaaz into a blistering
attack. Angels tumbled from the dragon's blazing onslaught,
white and inconsequential like popped maize from a steaming
kettle. They, too, dropped away and disappeared in the ever-
nearer edge of the world.
    With every angel death, the plane was collapsing. The
more fiercely the drakes battled the main army, the less
time any of them had. Soon the mana depletion would reach a
critical threshold, and then the collapse would take only
moments. Any living thing left in the plane would be
destroyed.
    "Hold fire!" Urza commanded the drake. He reined her in
a huge circle. "To Rhammidarigaaz, to Barrin!"
    The dragon entered a shallow dive that would speed her
toward her son and his rider. Angels flung themselves in
dense clouds about her, but she held back her killing
breath. Magna swords shrieked across her armored hide. Some
bit through the enchantments and sliced open long rents.
Urza's magic healed them even as they formed, letting not a
whisper of air spill from the drake's wings.
    Even so, agony won through. Gherridarigaaz roared, smoke
trailing from her jowls. She barely contained the fires that
ached to spew forth. She focused her fury instead on the
battle ahead and on Rhammidarigaaz caught in it. Another
three surges of wing brought her to soar just beneath him.
    Urza shouted toward Barrin, saddled above, "Break off!
To the Weatherlight."
    In a flash, they were past. The drake sliced through air
and angel both as they made their way along. Air made small
booms at the trailing edge of the drake's wings. The
thickest swarm of warriors fell away. Gherridarigaaz punched
through the final wall of them and shot into the gray spaces
beyond. Ahead lay the Jumbles. At its distant end hung a
large floating isle, and on it glinted the lights of
Weatherlight. Those lights were dim beneath the gold and
white shimmer of angel warriors and soul torches.
    Another army.
    Urza urged his mount to greater speed. Even as they
closed on Jabboc Isle, he could see the advancing curtain of
chaos at the edge of the plane.
    There was less time than he had thought.
    Jhoira helped a staggering old man into the hold of
Weatherlight. He was garbed in tatters, his face drawn into
a scowl of concentration, his eyes turned down from the loud
battle that raged only a thousand yards aft. How anyone
survived in the Jumbles was a mystery to Jhoira, let alone
how an old, infirm man had. How old had he been when he was
cast into that world of flotsam? Perhaps he had lived in the
isles for years, perhaps all his life.
    "Quickly, please, Grandfather," she urged gently, "and
move as far aft as possible."
    "Is there sunlight where we are going?" the man asked,
tottering a moment on the steps.
    "Yes, sunlight, water, forests-everything," Jhoira
assured as the man moved forward. She stared across the bow
at the snaking column of refugees.
    There were too many of them. They were too slow, too
weak. Beyond their desperate cave-colony, the crackling wall
of chaos verged nearer and nearer. Soon it would not matter
that there were too many of them. Soon the edge of the plane
would begin its disintegrating march across the isle.
    Matters aft were just as grim. The falcon engines fought
fiercely, dropping angels from air atop the front line of
ground combat. The ranks of runners thinned, their crossbow
quarrels already spent, their scythe blades snapping out to
trap their foes. Orange explosions crackled out along the
line. Clutched together, angels and machines both blazed
into nothing.
    Soul torches fell to ground at the front and crackled
and spat, absorbing the hundreds of souls that perished
there. The infernal devices blazed, white hot.
    The mathematics were against Jhoira. Even if each
machine destroyed one warrior with its blast, Radiant could
overrun them with hundreds more.
    "Karn, can you muster enough power to use the ray
weapons?" Jhoira called.
    The answer sounded dower and hollow. "I have barely
enough power to lift off."
    Jhoira stared at the infernal line of battle and
considered. She had been told, as commander of the ship, she
was not to leave it, but if she didn't, there might well not
be a ship to leave. They needed to charge the stone, and
only a thousand feet away, power lay sparking and crackling.
    "I'm going to get some torches," Jhoira told Karn, her
voice hushed. "I'll bring back as many as I can carry."
    Karn's response was slow-too slow-but Jhoira did not
need to hear it to know what it was. He as much as forbade
his captain.
    It is mutiny, pure and simple, thought Jhoira ironically
as she dropped amid the lines of scorpion engines, marching
into oblivion.
    A scraggly figure leapt from the rail to land at her
side. "You need fighters, I think," Terd said, matching her
stride for stride.
    "You're right," said Jhoira kindly.
    "The more torches, the better," added another familiar
voice. Diago Deerv blinked placidly at their looks of
surprise. "After all, my folk built half this ship."
    Side by side, the woman, the goblin, and the lizard man
waded forward through the press of metal, heading toward the
burning front.
    The Phyrexian smashed atop Barrin, breaking ribs and
flinging the man from his drake saddle. The Mage Master of
Tolaria tumbled across the dragon's spread wings and fetched
up, broken, in the crook of one reptilian elbow. His mind
whirled, unable to fasten on anything. Wind roared over him.
He clung to the drake's wing, shaking his head to clear it.
    Gorig crouched on the saddle, jowls drawn back in a
dagger-toothed leer. Long, barbed legs drew up beneath the
insectoid creature. The twelve soul-stealing ports along its
manifold torso flared in hungry anticipation. Its wings
spread outward, and again it lunged.
    The first blast of air over Barrin brought with it
thought of a spell. He summoned his memories of distant
Tolaria and hurled before him a wall of air. The creature
smashed heavily against the sudden gale. Gorig roared. It
tumbled helplessly backward, away from the mage master and
his mount.
    Rhammidarigaaz rolled beneath the turbulent barrier.
Barrin could only cling raggedly to the drake's wing.
Rhammidarigaaz pivoted and soared out from the angel swarm.
His fiery breath carved an avenue of soot and burning flesh
before them. Barrin could not care. He could only hold on,
inching slowly back toward the saddle.
    "Urza ordered the retreat," Rhammidarigaaz gasped out
between breaths. "Weatherlight is under attack."
    Barrin nodded dizzily. He clawed his way back to the
saddle and clung, gulping ragged breaths.
    A ferocious roar came behind them. The bright blaze of
the wall of air shattered. Out of the heart of that
conflagration came the shrieking Phyrexian. Gorig soared,
faster than even the archangels who followed in a shrieking
cone behind. Devil and angels alike, every last staff and
wing and magna sword was intent on destroying Barrin, Mage
Master of Tolaria.
    He could not care. He could only hold on and stare at
the battle that raged around Weatherlight. If he reached
Urza, the ship might be saved.
                          Monologue
    Death is not so horrible a thing when one is broken and
clinging to the burning back of a fire drake and plunging
through a heaven that seems in all ways hell. Death is not
so horrible at all.

                            - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                       Chapter 22

    The front lines were thick with angels and scorpions
engines, so thick that Jhoira had to battle her own forces
to reach it. From behind she grabbed a scorpion's stinger
and let the darting tail fling her up onto its back of metal
carapace. She caught a foothold and sent her sword swinging
into the epaulet of the angel warrior before it.
    The creature was fast. His soul torch clattered up and
hurled her blade to one side. He followed the stroke with a
dagger slash. Jhoira reared back from the strike. She kicked
the creature's dagger hand, spinning him to one side, and
stabbed with her sword. The angel grasped his side and
whirled. The soul torch swung in a blaze toward Jhoira's
face. She staggered, trying to bring her sword to bear, but
she was too slow. With a white-blue sizzle, the torch
impacted. Jhoira instinctively crumpled atop the scorpion's
back and cradled her face, expecting to find only charred
tatters of flesh. Her skin was whole and healthy.
    The torch had impacted the scorpion's intervening
stinger. The metal tail thrust back the magic brand. It slid
from the angel's grasp and toppled. The sizzling tip of it
fell against the wound in the angel's side. In a white-blue
flash, the creature's soul was sucked away. Lifeless, the
angel collapsed. The torch flared.
    Jhoira scrabbled across the scorpion's back and snatched
up the torch. She lifted it, just in time. The brand blocked
a descending magna sword. The broad blade clattered aside
and sliced deep into the scorpion's back plate. Jhoira rose.
An archangel towered over her, struggling to wrench its
magna sword from the collapsing scorpion. She rammed the
white-hot tip of the torch up beneath the archangel's silver
mask, catching it in the fold between throat and jaw.
    The archangel shuddered, caught between a snagged blade
and an incandescent death. Then, in a terrific clamor of
wings and armor, the creature convulsed its life away. The
torch shuddered and trembled as it drew in the powerful
being's life-force. Jhoira gritted her teeth in
determination to hold on to the too-hot handle. A roar
erupted, fury and agony embodied, and death clutched the
archangel. Its own soul torch dropped, and Jhoira let go of
her dagger to catch it. Meanwhile the angel toppled back, a
great tree falling in a forest. Its wings cleared a broad
path beneath it.
    As Jhoira caught her breath, she saw Terd scurry out
upon that fallen giant and snatch up three more torches
lying among the angel dead. They were overflowing with
power, having drawn into themselves the souls of hundreds of
warriors. Terd used the ragged end of his tunic as a hot pad
to grab the torches. He scuttled back just as another angel
descended to strike him down. One wave of the three
sputtering brands pushed the creature back among its
cohorts.
    Jhoira grabbed Terd's collar and hauled him away from
the front.
    In his turn, Diago caught Jhoira's collar and hauled her
back. Moments later, a fireball struck the spot where she
and Terd had been, driving the destroyed scorpion into a
blackened crater.
    "I have two torches," Diago gasped out as he drew back
his comrades in retreat. The lizard-man's scales stood on
end in the heat of battle. "You have two torches, and the
goblin has three. That should be enough. We have to get back
to the ship."
    "Yes," Jhoira agreed, breathless from fighting and from
holding onto the cometary torches. "Back to the ship....
This will be enough to get us flying ... shoot some deadly
shots.... Maybe even to planeshift."
    Jhoira looked toward the ship. It was a carnival-lit
hulk on the hillside, beside the glowering caverns of Arizon
and the black masses of refugees, crowding into the ship.
Behind that tableaux, the curtain of chaos gnawed at the
edge of Jabboc isle.
    "Maybe even to planeshift...."
    "Cease this battle!" Urza cried imperiously. His figure
blazed with light aback Gherridarigaaz. Dragon and rider
descended in a column of mana energy before the storm of
angels and falcons. "Cease this battle or be destroyed! I am
Urza Planeswalker!"
    "Tremble before him!" came a voice in mocking answer
from among the angel horde.
    Radiant emerged. Her figure was lit with an incandescent
heat equal to Urza's. A group of archangels accompanied her,
four before, four behind, and four more around the ruler of
the realm. Her appearance brought a sudden hush to the
battle lines. She was strange-eyed, beautiful, and
terrifying.
    "Tremble before this petulant god-child, this despoiler
of worlds, destroyer of planes. Urza has come, my children,
and when Urza comes, death always follows."
    "I have come to take you out of death. I have come only
to carry away those I call refugees, those you call refuse,"
Urza shouted from the hovering drake. "Let us leave in
peace, and we shall kill no more."
    "It is too late for bargains. Your war is collapsing our
plane around us." She gestured with her war staff toward the
advancing curtain of chaos. "You come first bringing
Phyrexia, and you come last bringing destruction."
    Urza lifted his own battle staff. "Forgive, fair lady. I
brought Phyrexia here, true, but you have given it a home in
your war minister, Gorig, and throughout your court. The
very spells you created to drive the stink of Phyrexia from
your palace are the spells that allowed Phyrexia to dwell
there and surround you and turn you against your own people.
Your plane shrinks not because of me, but because of these
soul torches of yours, harvesting the life of your people,
your plane, for Phyrexia. That is why chaos threatens. That
is why your plane is dying."
    In the echoing stillness of the battle, whining servos
and pulsing wing beats gave the air a dead drone. Beyond
that sound hovered the approaching rumble of matter giving
itself over to chaos.
    "Come with us, all of you. Come with us to another
world. Come where all who are good can live and where
Phyrexians, beneath the Glimmer Moon, will die. Come with
us, Radiant. Cease this senseless war, and come with us."
    She seemed to consider, her face for a moment lovely
amid swirling hair and wings of light. Then she spoke, and
death followed her words. "Kill them all. To a man, kill
every one!"
    Radiant herself made good the command. She hurled a wall
of force from outstretched fingers. The vast wave of energy
ate the very air. It arced toward Urza, too fast to stop,
too huge to escape. It would not kill him, but it would stun
him long enough that angelic death could fall on him from
the sky.
    Gherridarigaaz rose. The ancient fire drake spread her
wings in a giant shield before Urza. He had to cling to her
back not to be thrown from the vertical saddle.
    The blast struck Gherridarigaaz full in the belly and
chest. Scale and skin and muscle disintegrated. She
dissolved away as though in acid. Ribs hung for a moment,
vacant of flesh, and then dripped into white smears.
Gherridarigaaz released one last, long wail before lungs and
throat and head all were gone. Wings, too, vanished. By the
time the wave spent itself, all that remained was spine and
shoulder blades and half a pelvis.
    She had sacrificed herself. It was the highest honor
among lizard folk.
    Urza escaped the tangled traces of the saddle just
before Gherridarigaaz's remains plunged away. He roared too.
He roared as though she were his own mother. The time of
negotiation was done.
    The time of moderation and sanity was finished.
    The time of killing had come.
    Gathering magical might, he hurled himself at the tyrant
of heaven.
    Radiant was ready. She hung in the skies, savoring this
moment. Her eyes gleamed madly in the fray. Lithe hands
swept out to her sides and forward, as though in a curtsey.
Her fingertips trailed long lines of archangels in their
wake. They converged on Urza.
    Heedless, he shot toward her. With a thought, his flesh
turned adamantine. Magna swords fell in a flurry upon him.
Their broad blades rang and clattered. His head smashed them
back like a soaring cannonball. What archangels managed to
hold onto their blades shuddered in nerveless jangle. Others
lost their swords. A few even lost their arms. Urza blasted
past them all and ran headlong into Radiant.
    A lesser being would have been torn in half by the
attack, but Radiant had been waiting for this moment. She
dodged back in the instant of impact, grabbed hold of the
rocketing planeswalker, and with a surge of her wings,
hurled herself along with him. She clawed at his face,
seeming surprised at its impenetrable warding. Then, hands
soft as silk clutched his sides, and lightning arced from
her fingertips. It traced out nerve and muscle and bone, a
storm within the planeswalker.
    He trembled, enervated. Electricity possessed his every
tissue. Aside from spasms, he could not move.
    Smiling bitterly, Radiant carried him above the boiling
cloud of angels and falcons and into the wheeling heights.
"You are not welcome here, Urza, not now not ever."
    Those soft hands turned iron hard. She flung the
paralyzed man upward, into the descending ceiling of chaos
above the realm. As he went, the last jags of lightning
danced across his frame. A white tempest cycloned from her
upraised hands. The storm bore him fist-like into the
shredding curtain. Urza smashed into the verge. He dissolved
away. Chaos grated muscle from bone. He was gone as quickly
as Gherridarigaaz had been. The wind dissipated, and Urza
    Planeswalker was not even a stain on the dark chaos.
Radiant shook her head and brushed her hands off. Something
suddenly was between those hands. Urza took form against
her. One hand caught her beneath the jaw. The other arm
wrapped her waist. No longer adamantine, those limbs were
still implacable, inescapable. He flipped her over and
dragged her back down into the roaring battle, down toward
the struggling refugees and the battle-torn ship. He forced
her to gaze at the sight.
    "Look, Radiant. Look who you are killing. Look what
you've become."
    "I know what I am," she gasped out. "I know what you are
too." She cast a quick series of spells, prepared and laid
aside for this very moment. All defenses were stripped from
Urza's head. Her fingers grew as long and sharp and curved
as daggers. She drove them into his skull. They punched
through bone and into his frontal lobe. Urza roared,
reconstituting shattered bone and ruptured brain. She was
not done, though. Her fingers curled into claws. She raked
through gray matter and shattered sinuses and optic
cavities. She scooped up the gemstones that were his eyes.
With a brutal yank, she hauled them forth.
    Blind and gaping, his head staved, Urza struggled
against tumbling walls of pain.
    He clutched to her. She was all that kept him aloft. He
had to heal. He had to rebuild his being.
    He could not. Part of that being-the only part that was
not a mere projection of his mind-had been ripped away.
Those gems defined him. They were at the heart of the
Brothers' War: Might-stone and Weakstone. They had been his
eyes since the blast at Argoth. They had been his eyes since
he had become a planes-walker. They were at the heart of his
madness, his power.
    Even in his dying agony-for, yes, he was dying: his
power was also his weakness-Urza realized how like Karn he
was. They were both defined by stones set in their heads.
Both lived with them and died without them. Mightstone and
Weakstone-they were Urza's affective and cognitive cortex.
Without them, he was destroyed.
    Radiant knew it. With relish, she hoisted the gory
things overhead, beyond Urza's feeble reach, and she
actually laughed. "Gorig had told me about these. He had
told me you were like Xantcha. She had had a Phyrexian
heart, and you have Phyrexian eyes. I told Gorig I needed
only look into these eyes to know that you were mad, that I
was right. Yes. This is my moment of triumph. I've found the
Phyrexian in my realm, Urza. I've found the Phyrexian, and
it is you."
    She smiled, a faint and wicked thing that Urza could no
longer see.
    "I've won, madman," Radiant said, staring into the
glimmering crystals. In their bloody facets, the battle
below played itself out. "My work is done. Gorig will finish
off your forces and our rebels. He will cleanse the realm.
That is his job. He will even capture your ship-what a
curiosity! And with these powerstones-the Eyes of Urza-I
will restore my heaven." A thought occurred to her. "Funny
that you tried to destroy my world to charge a power-stone,
but in the end it is your powerstone that will save it." She
glanced down at the convulsing body of Urza, clinging to her
in its death throes. "I rather like whispering these things
into your dying ears. Perhaps I will take you with me. Yes,
no better way to assure you are dead."
    So saying, she cast a final spell and disappeared from
the decaying heights of her plane. She took with her the
Mightstone and Weakstone and the dying body of the
planeswalker.

                       *****

    Before Weatherlight's bow roared a wall of absolute
destruction. Entropy ground rock and grass and tree to
nothing, nothing at all. Behind the ship's stern roared
another wall-angels turned demonic, rending the machines
thrown hopelessly against them. Both walls advanced, closing
in on the ship and her overflowing hold.
    "There's no more room!" shouted Terd from the hatch. His
webbed foot stomped on the shoulder of one refugee as if he
could pack them more tightly.
    "Then let them stand on deck," Jhoira replied testily.
    She lifted the third soul torch over the exposed
conduit. They'd had to tear up planks beside the wheel to
find where the lines of power descended to the crystal. The
ship had shuddered with each stripped board, as though it
felt the wound in its very being. Beneath the planking ran a
channel of metal sinews, like an exposed nerve bundle. It
led down to the powerstone in the core of the engine. Taking
a deep breath, Jhoira lowered the sizzling torch so that its
butt contacted the conduit. With a lightning jolt, the torch
emptied its charge, and the tip of it went black.
    "How's that?" Jhoira called down the speaking tube to
Karn.
    "Better," came the metallic reply. "Almost enough to
lift off. We'll be top heavy. We'll need more power to keep
the ship upright. How many more?"
    "Two more torches," Jhoira said, casting the emptied one
aside and lifting another.
    "No, how many more refugees?"
    As energy surged into the conduit, Jhoira looked at the
almost-full deck and the crowd struggling to reach the ship.
"Too many. Too many."
    "They've broken through!" shouted Terd. He clung to the
rails of the ship and pointed at the sky. Angels flooded
down in a great storm. "Permission to fire? Permission to
fire!"
    Jhoira fitted the last torch into the slot. "Fire!
Fire!"
    Between goblin fingers, fog-lanterns rattled violently.
Their parabolic plates slid into position. Twin red beams
stabbed out from them and tore into the Cascade of angels.
Fire erupted among them. The down-rushing wave faltered a
moment. Roars of rage turned to howls of despair.
    Jhoira glanced over her shoulder. The final hundred
passengers were rushing up the gangplank and packing
themselves in on deck. In moments, the ship was fully
loaded. "Castoff the gangplank.
    Castoff the grapples. Draw the anchor. Prepare for
liftoff!"
    Power surged blue-white through the exposed conduits.
Jhoira backed away. She caught hold of the ship's wheel and
shouted, "Take us up, Karn! Bring us around in a quick turn
to port, heading one sixty-five, thirty-one, sixteen.
Lantern-rays, clear us a path through the battle. Hold on!"
    A tremor of anticipation moved through the crowd and
through the great hull itself. The tremor turned into a
rumbling groan. The engines below decks growled to life. A
grinding noise rose between landing spines and ground. Knees
buckled under the first jolting advance of the vessel.
Ponderous and clumsy, Weatherlight nosed up and away from
the rocky niche where it had sat. Energy coursed in dazzling
rivulets along the exposed conduits. The prow curved
dangerously near the advancing curtain of chaos. "Hard to
port!" Jhoira shouted.
    The ship listed away from ravening oblivion. The
refugees crouched on the deck clung tightly to the rails and
each other. With a magnificent roar, the ship nosed up and
away from the planar envelop. A ragged cheer moved wavelike
across the deck until the new danger came to the fore.
Flights of angels and archangels converged on them, magna
swords swung toward the refugees like scythes to heads of
wheat.
    "Down, everyone!" Jhoira ordered, her voice raw. "Fire
at will." Beams of killing light erupted from shuddering
lanterns and cut jagged lines across the vanguard. The acid
atomizer dissolved away any creatures that lingered. Angels
tumbled from the skies, their spirits whirling ghostlike
from their riven forms and into the soul torches along the
ship's hull. With each new life, Weatherlight gained speed.
    Still, the beams did not catch them all, and angels
poured over the rails. Refugees shrieked. Magna swords
sliced into them. Red fountains erupted.
    "Glasspitters fire! Beams fire! Fight, all of you!
Fight!" Swords and belaying pins and chains-the crew led the
charge. Viashino and goblin and human, they fought. Great
blasts of molten glass belched out from the bombards,
catching and slaying angels in their hundreds. Rays of
crimson light burned through feather to muscle to bone.
Still they came. Out of the throat of heaven came the killer
angels. Spirit after spirit poured from sundered bodies into
the torches, into Weatherlight's powerstone. Out of it
flowed red beams that slew all the more. Every death fed the
killing machine.
    "Faster, Karn!" Jhoira shouted. "Punch through them.
Planeshift speed!"
    There came no answer from the speaking tube, only the
roar of engines and the hot smell of heat-stressed metal.

                       *****

   Radiant reappeared in her throne room, her sanctuary.
Ever since Gorig had cast mirror spells on the windows, this
room had become her refuge. Now into her refuge, she had
brought the dying form of her foe and the gems that were his
life.
    It was a simple enough thing to decide what to do with
Urza. She stripped him from her waist and tossed his
crumpled figure to a nearby platform. She wasn't much
interested in Urza anymore. He had been merely the package
that had carried these stones. Now, broken open, he lay
discarded on the floor.
    These stones, though ... Radiant lifted them in a gory
hand. She had not spent the energy it would take to
transform her fingers from the dagger-claws they had become.
She rather enjoyed them in their fierce aspect. They looked
so powerful like this-reflecting the gentle glow of the
stones and mantled in the planeswalker's blood.
    Radiant glanced up. The mirrors were full of her
glimmering victory. From every angle, the darkness gave back
fragmentary visions of her beauty. A forest of eyes gazed at
her-no longer merely her eyes, but the Eyes of Urza too.
    "You were like Serra, weren't you?" Radiant said. Her
quiet voice echoed ceaselessly off the dark mirrors. "You
could see in this room-even when the windows were lenses.
You could make sense
    of the visions of this throne. Of course you could. Your
eyes had a facet for every window, and now your eyes are
mine."
    Urza did not move. His sundered head leaked blood and
brain onto the floor.
    "Gorig will be sad he was not here to collect your
soul," Radiant said wistfully. "Ah, but I have your eyes.
Such beautiful eyes."
    The crystals rolled languidly apart on her hand. She saw
only then the ragged point of fracture between the two
stones. She had known the Mightstone and Weakstone were
halves of a whole, but seeing how they might be joined
intrigued her. Taking one crystal in each hand, she studied
them.
    "It looks as though they fit together just like-this-"
    Breath failing, strength failing, Barrin had crawled to
the saddle of Rhammidarigaaz and strapped himself in. The
young fire drake struggled toward one army of angels and
away from another. Before him, a refugee ship fought through
the battle, mantled in spectral lights. Behind him a furious
demon labored at the head of a hellish legion.
    It was a unique vantage there, suspended in the relative
calm between two deaths, between pain and despair. Barrin
knew he was done for. He could not fight. He could not
escape, but he did have one final spell and the power to
bring it into being. The question remaining was one of
timing and focus. What would be the best use of the spell?
Perhaps he could compel Radiant to kill Gorig, or Gorig to
kill Radiant, or an archangel to make a suicide stand to
cover the ship's retreat.
    Gorig was more than a Phyrexian monster. He was the soul
battery.
    Suddenly Barrin knew what he would do. He rolled onto
his back. Gorig labored down toward him out of the darkening
heavens. The beast's torso blazed blue-white in
anticipation. There was a simple ratio-something about the
velocity of A minus the velocity of B divided by the
distance between them over against the velocity of B plus
the velocity of C divided by the distance between them-
something Urza could have calculated with a mere thought.
Barrin was more mage than mathematician, and he had trouble
breathing, let alone calculating. Instead, he simply waited
until the demon-eyes ablaze and dagger-teeth drooling over
the mage master's legs-hovered just out of reach. Summoning
the last bit of his strength, Barrin cast a ray of command.
    The fury in the beast's eyes shifted from Barrin down to
the approaching Weatherlight, down to the main deck, where
the captain stood. With new, ardent speed, the Phyrexian
monster dropped into a dive and screamed his way toward the
beleaguered ship.

                       *****

    Mightstone in her right hand and Weakstone in her left,
Radiant slowly brought the two together. As the rough facets
of the split edges approached each other, the light in the
crystals redoubled. They suddenly glowed brightly in her
hands. They cast her shadow, giant and menacing, through the
aviary. In a million mirrors, Radiant glimpsed herself
transfigured by the light.
    A glinting smile crossed her teeth. "Such power. Such
power."
    She brought the stones closer together. Light flared
brighter still and brought with it heat. Intense beams leapt
out of each facet of the stones. They struck silvered glass
and ricocheted through the aviary. The vast structure seemed
the interior of a giant gemstone, glimmering brilliantly
around Radiant. Light bathed every dark corner. It shone
across the ruined gardens below. It danced on bodies of dead
birds. It gilded the still form of Urza Planeswalker.
Refulgent, nimbic, luciferous, radiant light.
    "If they were lenses instead of mirrors," Radiant mused
idly, "all this light would spill outward and be lost. But,
clever me, it remains here. It is mine."
    She turned the Weakstone slowly, matching its fracture
marks exactly with that of its brother. With a final slow
ecstasy, she eased them together....
    The stones never touched. Lightning awoke between them.
The glare was blinding. The heat was incinerating. The
crystals, glimmering faintly when apart, were holocaustal
together. Their effulgence filled every mirror. The light
had nowhere to go. Each moment grew exponentially brighter.
Each instant grew exponentially hotter.
    Radiant tried to pull her hands apart, but the stones
called to each other. They burned out her eyes.
    "I'm the mad one!" she gasped.
    Next moment, it did not matter. Angel flesh seared away.
Angel bone exploded. Blood flash boiled. Innards puffed into
black smoke that itself was bleached white and then
dispersed altogether.
    Radiant was gone. The lantern in darkness had burned
herself out from within.
    Someone else was there in her place. Someone hovered
there, the embodiment of the stones, the creature created
and sustained by them. It was the conflict between those
stones-the world-shattering conflict of irreconcilable
opposites that were even so halves of a whole-that granted
Urza life. It immolated his old flesh, and in the same
flash, fitted him with a new body, a glorified body. It
formed around the locus of his being. It formed around the
stones that were his eyes.
    And next moment, the core of heat and light could no
longer be contained. Every mirror in the mile-high atrium
shattered. Hunks of silvered glass flung outward and crashed
into the grids and plates Gorig had said would save Radiant.
They buckled out and flew away, insubstantial as paper. The
blaze followed them. It arced through air. It filled the
yellow and shrinking skies.
    Urza gazed out through the blinding brilliance. He saw
the explosion peel back the skin of Serra's Palace. He saw
it pulverize walls within. He watched as blast lines punched
holes deep into the floating citadel. Shattered and crushed,
the palace listed slowly. Streamers of force tore through
its web of levitation spells. The place released an horrific
moan and rolled over. The massive hand of gravity tightened
its fingers around the thing and dragged it downward. It
receded. A coiling sea of smoke trailed behind it. The
broken hull soon seemed only the falling, spinning seed of a
maple tree.
    Then it struck the rising floor of the plane. Chaos
swallowed it whole.
    All around Urza, the edges of the blast were
disappearing against the closing. Before the tide of
destruction could sweep him under, Urza stepped from the
dying realm.
    * ****
    Only moments after the deafening explosion that
destroyed the palace, Jhoira heard an even more ominous
sound. Through the groan of overheated engines and the
shriek of dying refugees and the howls of rabid angels, she
heard a high, keening wail. Something was falling out of the
sky, too fast to avoid. She looked up. The meteor hurtled
through the angel throng, ripping wings from bodies and
rending anything it stuck. It grew larger, its maniac teeth
glinting in the moment that it hung above deck. Its eyes
were yellow as lemon wedges.
    With a sudden, horrific boom, the demon creature struck
the white-hot powerstone conduits. Its head was pulverized
by the impact. Its wings peeled away, but the thing's
massive metal torso remained. The soul-portals on either
side of it flared, emptying their charges into the engines.
    Weatherlight lunged forward. The beam weapons stabbed
out with twice their previous intensity. Whole flights of
angels disintegrated. Souls en masse flooded into the
flashing torso. The ship gained speed. Angels flung
themselves away from the juggernaut and hovered in stunned
terror in space for a moment before realizing the curtain of
chaos had closed on them.
    The plane was disintegrating. The point of critical
collapse had been reached. Nothing would stop it now.
    The white mana that rained from the folding skies poured
into the powerstone of Weatherlight. Every creature caught
by the advancing curtain turned into a spiral of life-force,
which was drawn into the sparking torso of the beast, into
the engine.
    Jhoira could do nothing but stand and stare in grotesque
fascination and awe.
    The angel armies fell back as the refugee craft sped
into the clear space beyond.
    To starboard appeared Rhammidarigaaz, with Barrin lashed
to him. There was no sign of Urza. Unless the dragon flew
just above the ship at the moment of planeshift, it and
Barrin would be left behind.
    "Planeshift before final collapse!" Barrin shouted. "Any
mortal left in the plane will die!"
    "I know! I know!" Jhoira returned. "You hear that, Karn!
We need full speed! We need it now."
    "Too many passengers," Karn roared from below. His voice
was strained, as though he propelled the ship by main
strength. "Too much weight!"
    Before the bow, another army of angels hung. They were
disintegrating before another collapsing edge of the plane.
And suddenly they were gone.
    Only the Weatherlight and Rhammidarigaaz remained in the
collapsing plane. Curtains of chaos closed ahead and behind
them.
    "Now or never, Karn!" Jhoira shouted.
    They reached the wall. The prow of the ship sank into
chaos and dissolved. In the breath afterward, the ship and
all those aboard were gone.

                       *****

    The invasion force had been gone eight hours, and the
sun had at last quit the skies over Tolaria. The crowd that
had had gathered for Weatherlight's launch had remained, but
their high spirits had dissolved. The festive morning had
given way to a speculative noon, which in turn surrendered
to a fearful and prayerful evening. Night now lay full and
cold over the academy walls. Someone had fetched candles
from the great hall, but a mocking wind put out the hopeful
little lights moments after they were coaxed to life. A few
lanterns had replaced them, glaring baldly across the
mulling multitudes. The quiet prayers were becoming whispers
of doubt.
    A restless breeze moved among the trees. The crowd
turned its attention to the distant deeps of the sky.
Something moved there among the lazy clouds of night.
Something large. The shape grew rapidly and silently on the
wind.
    The crowd that had lingered throughout the long, hot day
began to draw back in dread. Those lurking in doorways
withdrew inside, and those out in the open pressed back
toward doorways. A reddish streamer of flame outlined
devilish jowls and a great, rapacious eye.
    "It's a demon!"
    "Yes, but one of ours."
    The dragon's figure was clear now, above the treetops.
In moments it soared over the walls and flapped ferociously
above the courtyard. Rhammidarigaaz! In his wake, black
against the blue-black of night, there came a giant hull.
From its sides jutted smiling faces and waving hands.
    The Weatherlight.
    It was some months later when Jhoira stood again at the
prow of the ship, feeling the sea winds in her hair. She
breathed deeply and remembered a time long ago when she
stood in her secret spot, on the prow of Tolaria, and
dreamed of far-off places and soul mates. Her girlhood
dreams had not come to pass and had in fact brought her much
pain over the years. Life had been good nonetheless. She was
among the greatest artificers in the world, a trusted
companion of Urza Planeswalker and, for the time being, the
ad hoc captain of the grand ship Weatherlight. She had
explored earthly paradises, had run forges in hell, had
fought wars in heaven, and had traveled the planes with a
silver man and a skyship.
    "How are things looking down there, Karn?" she asked
through the speaking tube that emerged at the prow.
    "The crystal's supply of energy is limitless," Karn
replied. His energy had also increased of late. The orphaned
child of Urza had at last found his home, at the heart of
the ship he feared would be the end of him. The planeswalker
had returned from Serra's Realm chastened by his victory.
Unexplainably to anyone, he had begun to show a fatherly
affection toward Karn, saying the silver man was formed in
his own image. Whether by plan or happenstance, Urza's first
thinking, feeling artifact creature had become the heart of
his Legacy for the world.
    Karn had even learned a little bit about humor. "Is
there anything you'd like me to shoot?"
    "No, thanks, Karn," Jhoira said. "Steady as she goes."
"Aye, aye."
    Yes, it had been quite a life so far. No soul mates, but
quite a life-or were there soul mates?
    The tip of Zhalfir jutted just ahead, a rocky prominence
behind which stretched a broad and bountiful land. The civil
wars were concluded, thanks to the wisdom and power of a
certain Tolarian wizard, and the country had pledged a tract
of land for human refugees from Serra's Realm. That was the
purpose of this trip. Jhoira, Karn, and the crew of
Weatherlight were conducting three hundred and sixty-three
human refugees to their new home in Zhalfir. Jhoira's mind,
just now, was not on any of those three hundred and sixty-
three, but rather on the figure that stood, red-swathed and
magnificent on that prominence of stone.
    Heart catching in her throat, Jhoira shouted the order
that would bring the ship slowly up to hover just above the
prominence. Smiling broadly despite herself, Jhoira called
out to the man standing there. "Teferi! Excuse me, Lord Mage
Teferi of Zhalfir! Good to see you again."
    "And you!" came the genuine reply. With a simple flip of
his arm, the man levitated up to the ship board. He spread
his cloak in wide majesty as unseen arms of magic lowered
him to stand before Jhoira. He bowed low, returned her
smile, and set hands on his hips. "I hear you have some new
citizens for my nation."
    "Yes," Jhoira said. "Three hundred and sixty-three."
    "Fine. Fine. I do hope you are planning to help them
settle in."
    Jhoira tipped her head regretfully. "I can stay the day.
Urza wants his ship back for other ... errands."
    Teferi nodded, his eyes darkening in disappointment.
"Some other time then, perhaps."
    "Why don't you come back with me to Tolaria?" she
suggested. "You have lots of friends there. Arty Shovelhead
is aboard. He would be happy to see you."
    "I'm lucky to be alive, after all I did to him." Teferi
wore a chagrined smile. "It's hard to believe a hundred-
pound kid would pick on a twelve-hundred pound golem. Still,
I'll have to see him again later. Anyone can fight a war.
It's maintaining peace that takes all the real work." He
looked her up and down. "Well, Jhoira of the Ghitu, let's
take these people to their new home."
    "Yes, my friend," she replied. "Yes."
                          Monologue
    I'd really hoped Jhoira and Teferi would get together.
After all, a master artificer and a master mage would make
natural partners Oh, well, perhaps it will come in time. And
on Tolaria, time is one thing we will never run out of.

                           - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

                          Epilogue

    At last, Urza is sane.
    He remembers battling his brother Mishra, three thousand
years ago, and regrets the destruction they caused. He
remembers the death of his surrogate brother, Ratepe, and
his best friend Xantcha, and is grateful for their lives
together. He is capable at last of true regret and
gratitude, and that goes a long way. He is at last capable
of having true friends.
    Urza not only remembers his past, he has taken
responsibility for it. He resurrected time-ravaged Tolaria,
did penance for Argoth, destroyed a small corner of
Phyrexia, and even saved the refugees of Serra's Realm.
    As I write this, I sit with Urza in his high study. The
evening winds of Tolaria are hot and pregnant with life. The
sound of night-birds has begun, haunting and beautiful. The
Phyrexian gorge lies quiet, empty now for nearly a decade.
The only other sound comes from the great hall. There is a
dance tonight, and a whole new generation of Tolarian
students are having fun. I tap my foot absently to the
distant sound of rebecs and drums.
    The master raises his face from the book he is reading.
It is his wife's account of the Brothers' War. He has been
reading it very gravely during the last month, his
thoughtful expression broken at moments into wistful
remembrance. The smile that appears on his face now is
something different, though.
    "How late does the dance run tonight?"
    I shrug. "I said they could dance till the Glimmer Moon
went down-well after midnight. If the sound is bothering
you-"
    "No," Urza says with an off-putting hand. "It's just
that I've been rereading this wedding sequence. I remember
the dances from that day, long ago. I don't imagine modern
music would quite accommodate the same steps...."
    I rise. "Oh, if not, we can teach the players a few of
the old tunes."
    Yes, Urza is sane. Now, I suppose I'll see if he can
dance.

                        - Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria