Necrosynthesis
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
People should know better than to make reckless wishes, especially on Innistrad.
What has ten arms, crawls on four hacksaws for legs, has a tail that walks on a hundred, and gives off the electric buzz of a skaberen's lab?
If you answered a part-octopus, part-horse, part-vorapede zombie fused to a storm-harnessing contraption, you're probably dead trembling from the sight through the gutter grate of Olag and their tentacled chin brushing their fright-white hair.
Ludevic did this, the maniac!
Olag…Ludevic?
But if you investigated deeper instead of coasting first appearances, it was really those with preconceived opinions of Ludevic that started him on this freakish project.
An undead opus and other prized creations weren't enough. Ludevic of Ulm, the persecuted necro-alchemist and necrogenius from Havengul, was unafraid and unbothered to continue stretching the boundaries of magic and science.
On the literal cutting edge of the science of death! Perhaps nearing death himself, in fact!
He flipped the switches on his galvanic reservoir, chanting silent words under his stinking breath. Vital fluid travelled down the slurry-dispensing pneumatic tubes to the cylindrical chambers containing his animal experiments, while arcs of blue lightning between the machine's bulbed coils and capacitors rendered him momentarily blind.
"It lives...IT LIVES!"
Was it Ludevic's hubris that sparked Olag's vulgar birth?
Partially. Insofar as Olag was a horrifying, violent amalgam of incongruent parts and bloodless materials intermixed in the image of Ludevic himself. The husk of his lab equipment the patin ligitus bridging Olag's grossly textured, semi-equine body and the bare vestigial resemblances to Ludevic's "humanity."
The cold truth, though? It was the unruly mob's hubris. The hysterical villagers – the Magic community – stitching together the stitcher they envisaged. Panning Ludevic. Debating his colour identity, his profession, his brains, and morbid works. Naturally, trying to force their notion of him into a framework not designed to handle shards: Innistrad, the one place in the Multiverse where wishes were most likely to go awry, following the trope of a monkey's paw.
Connect the blue wire? The red wire? The black?
So convinced this wouldn't be the Werewolf Commander fiasco 2.0 redux, when it took two returns just to right that ship. A Veil-Cursed and an Uncontested Alpha to produce a Midnight Scourge.
Like Frankenstein and Frankenstein's Monster who inspired Ludevic, his colleagues, and their creatures, who was the monster? Who was the man? Ludevic was the mad doctor. Was Ludevic also the makeshift monster the doctor crafted? Ludevic and the monster with blade-feet, one and the same?
No, the wizard's got them fooled.
Hubris was Ludevic's monster.
And all bore responsibility for creating the monster. The gentle, tragic thing in the cellar, a deformed self-portrait only in physicality. Aping human behaviour as Ludevic toiled upstairs, the mad doctor recommencing his unsavoury trade and filthy merchantry.