Corrupted Observer
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Pairings: Referenced (canon) Ertai x Belbe, unrequited (canon) Yawgmoth x Rebbec.
Summary:
Belbe gives thought to rebelling against her Phyrexian masters, and thoughts evolve into action.
Love can poison. Offset purpose.
"Those who wish to become evincar must first cast off the shackles of compassion."
Pain is the foundation of power. Abcal-dro, the high priest who decided her designation, implanted this law very painfully into the newborn amid gurgled, liquid laughter.
Was it slavery if her body was not hers? A simulacrum, partially made up of meat preserved from a forced donor's corpse?
Could it be classified indoctrination, when she only existed to fulfill the role she was created for?
In spite of its hellish environment and the acts of unfeeling desecration committed inside the factories and workshops, Phyrexia was a well-oiled machine. Unskinning, deboning, blood replacement…Every torture that could be inflicted, Phyrexia actuated with ruthless efficiency. Mathematical and surgical precision. Clinical optimization the Supreme Master – the great arch-physician – instilled upon the Nine Spheres.
A doctor knew what deficiencies to excise. Where to drag the scalpel.
Belbe was a more perfect creature than the flesh being whose parts produced her. Did that not confirm Phyrexia a symbol of perfection? Perfection that the fittest should strive toward? That the fittest should evolve toward?
Once, she believed Phyrexia was the cure. But the further she drifted from "home," the longer she spent in the Citadel on Rath, witnessed Crovax's growing hunger for slaughter, and experienced intimacy with Ertai, Belbe realized Phyrexia was instead the disease. It was a plague that would wash over other worlds. An illness carrying nothing but unnecessary suffering and eventual death.
Weren't her orders incongruent? The overlords conditioned her to be an observer and choose an evincar worthy of seizing the position abandoned by Volrath, the truant. Yet, Abcal-dro also gave a specific directive she could participate in the contest for governorship herself should she so rule.
She certainly had the means. Between Her Excellency's dignitary presence and black diamond armour, fashioned from the most resilient substance available on Phyrexia. Between her enhanced senses and self-regenerating anatomy. Everything down to the glistening oil and her skeleton of duralumin and steel.
Belbe had a destiny. A function incompatible with her budding individualism.
That was the definition of a paradox.
Redness eclipsed her blue freckles. She desired to strike pain upon the madman who made himself her nemesis. Pound his skull against the Stronghold, like she'd shattered the catchers in Volrath's Dream Hall…The tyrant's curious mental vineyard. Preferably, against the flowstone both Crovax and Ertai had become so adept with.
Were her actions being corrupted by emotion?
Would the overlords melt her down and reprocess the resulting scrap as punishment?
Violence seemed programmed into her species. She'd watched Phyrexian science alter Ertai, the addictive intervals on Volrath's rejuvenation infuser blackening her paramour's magic, intensifying his personality, and greying his skin until it echoed a nominally less severe version of Commander Greven il-Vec's.
Tolerable losses, according to Ertai.
As removed as she was from the Dark Lord of Phyrexia, they began flawed tissue. Though the Phyrexian agent recognized nothing of Avila, her antecedent.
The priests could cloud their god in religion. He could drape himself beneath recombinant flesh and finery. The truth was this: When the Eye of Yawgmoth was inserted inside her sternum, she felt a craving void, eons-old, connecting her to the nethermost layer of their metal world.
Below artificial jungle.
Below smokestacks.
Below pipes and flues.
Below the vats.
Below the Boiling Sea.
Below the Inner Circle.
Below the furnace.
Below raw energy. To a purity that'd permit no other.
The Ineffable.
Jilted by the woman who turned aside his vile offering. Cut off from Dominaria, his plane of birth.
Rebbec!
Belbe entertained no illusions about abjuring the deeper echelons or the Father of Machines without it costing her life.
No, Phyrexia created her. She was grateful. Abcal-dro gave her a name. A reason to exist.
Glory to the Lord of the Wastes.
It was Crovax's twisted displays at toppling all opposition to his ascendancy through widespread misery that were wasteful and inefficient. By massacring thousands of hostages taken throughout the City of Traitors on flowstone pikes, he flirted open war with their own people in the volcano crater on their doorstep – the Dal and the Vec – even as rebel forces led by the elf Eladamri secured victories out of Skyshroud.
Still, the emissary harboured unclean aspirations. "Contemplating options" is how the arrogant sorcerer phrased it. Except, Belbe's analysis of the future was derived from lengthy (lengthy for a Phyrexian) calculation. Hard percentages and logic, instead of Ertai's notion reading nonsensical movements in the human bowel had any effect on the unquestionably bleak outcome.
One doesn't survive Yawgmoth's will.
But if Rath and Dominaria's conjunction met a snag? If total flowstone production didn't exceed the target plane's mass at the time the overlay occurred?
Technology broke down. Belbe would too, a hundred percent if Crovax got to her first. The faulty machinery would be replaced unless she and Ertai (and perhaps Greven, provided some politicking) separated Rath, Phyrexia, and Dominaria definitively.
After the Phyrexians lost their bridge, after the invasion failed, and after the three of them settled their respective scores with Crovax, Ertai could rule Rath and occupy that stupid hunk of furniture Crovax put so much stock in. They'd ground Predator, and via percher, declare freedom to the Rathi races.
A seismic opportunity compared to Yawgmoth's agenda. If it had a mote of success, that is.
Sooner rather than later, she'd have to make a choice. Crovax's coup only added to this urgency.
She was the Hidden One's eyepiece.
Belbe, after the dead Thran word for "lens."
One eye closes. Another opens.
She helped the rebels find safe passage to Dominaria.
Eladamri slew his daughter's impostor, then followed Takara and Sivi into Belbe's portal.
Dear Avila.
An eye for an eye.
A father's temporary reprieve.
The fight will continue on a new battlefield.