Evangel
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
The Phyrexians of New Phyrexia aren't perfect. They're imperfect.
Synthesis wasn't always its own arm separate from evolution. Perhaps eons in the future, after the plane of Phyrexia was no more, they would be incompatible ideas on a new Phyrexia – an open sore promoting competition – but that had not always been the case.
Jin-Gitaxias could despise Vorinclex and his slobberings of "evolution." He could claim only he knew the meaning of true progress, and that perfection is not a goal, but a process. Yet long ago in Dominaria's past – long ago in Phyrexia's past – there was but the Great Evolution, of which "synthesis" was a synonym.
Where ingenuity meets inhumanity. When dreams of steel and oil forged the future in metal and oil!
Uniformity was coerced and it was bred. It was achieved through corruption and under duress, oppression, and bereavement. All true, as in the present.
But the Phyrexians of the past were not a hierarchy fivefold spread compared to their modern-day descendants. They followed Yawgmoth, whereas leadership on New Phyrexia was hotly contested; at least, before Elesh Norn stepped it up stamping out her challengers.
That was the imperfection shining through. For all diabolic intents, Yawgmoth's Phyrexia was a well-oiled machine, so black in its construction and constitution, there was a loyal understanding even among the "mistakes" that the world ended with him (in a very literal way).
Machines feel no fear, no sorrow, no hunger – only glorious purpose, true and pure. This was not true of New Phyrexia. No matter how powerful Norn's branch became, her hold on her puppets was parasitic. It wasn't pure. It wasn't true rulership.
These machines were capable of feeling fear. Not fear of a ruler, but useless bog-standard nerves born out of run-of-the-mill maladies in any species such as doubt, grief, and love.
Their leader was susceptible to nightmares. Delicious miseries sown.
Jin-Gitaxias' solution to imperfection was to surgically remove the undesirable pulp.
Vorinclex's was to let nature run its course, the strong culling the weak.
The core ethos of being Phyrexian had fragmented due to exposure to Mirrodin's suns. A painful quandary, and a fragile spot Urabrask would capitalize on.
Gix failed, but his failure wasn't tied to his Phyrexian-ness.
Ablution in glistening oil did not wash away the stink of Mirrodin or Dominiaria or any of the other worlds they'd infiltrated.
The caress of those worlds was too deep.
Too poisonous to New Phyrexia.
