Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter. It would never end.
It was the moment before blade met flesh, when multicolored light rippled through the air, slipping across the oil pouring down his face. For one last moment: the man made in the image of a hero, shining with the incandescent light of faith, before he was smashed against the ground like so much brittle glass.
And she, a daughter, a boot, delivering the last crunch underfoot. A blade's breath: light of hope, prophet of despair.
"Danitha. Do your duty."
What was it?
Act I.
The thunder of footsteps. The flash of flames. The falsetto of screams. Danitha couldn't breathe.
It was an impossible decision. The city was in sight, but it would take another half-hour, at least, to get there on foot. She needed, felt a roar in the bottom of her spirit that surged through her arms and legs and lungs, to charge in, to be there. And yet here were her people, the people who would be easy targets for any Phyrexian outriders ready to turn living souls into grist for their war machine. She had promised to stay. But yet, but yet. She was needed. Were the fighters in Ruzon less her people than the villagers? Perhaps she could serve them both, perhaps, perhaps—
Do your duty.
She couldn't. She had to. No time. Make a decision. Pray to Serra, or to whatever might listen, that it's right.
She barked at Marten to organize the villagers, to get low to the ground in the grain field, and to flee east if Ruzon fell. She assembled her paltry troops, offering the reservists ten minutes to decide: accompany her to the city or stay there, with their families and friends. And last of all, she stood before Aveya Joryev, with her smoldering purple eyes and her phantom's face and her dark soul, and begged.
"Please," Danitha said. "Protect them. Please."
Aveya pressed her lips together, said nothing for a moment. Her eyes burned into Danitha, weighing every inch of her spirit, judging for time immemorial whether this was a leader or a girl wearing her father's armor, bargaining with adults. "As I have said, Lady Danitha, my duty is to Benalia."
Joryev silence; implications left hanging in the air. What did that mean? Her father would know. Aron's mind was steel and silk, a light that pulsed into the heart of every person, find them, their hearts, made them his. Bloody, oily, choking on viscera and bile. Danitha turned over the puzzle, slipping across its surface, jabbing with a child's fingers, working her way to whatever it was that she could use to convince Aveya. But there was nothing. She could only leap.
"For Benalia, for yourself, I don't care. I don't have time to debate with you. But Lady Aveya—I know what you've seen." Her voice wavered. "Your sons. Disappearing into metal. Screaming your name. Leaving you behind. Everyone out here—they have someone like that, or they are someone like that. Please. Don't let it happen to anyone else."
Blaze of purple fury. Boundless rage, without depth, drilling into Danitha, dripping hate, at Danitha, yes, but only because her voice had given spectral form to the memory, a poor boy's hand reaching out from a roaring cloud of oil, falling apart, leaving the world broken at your feet (Aveya's? Danitha's?). And then, like the pulse of a firefly: gone. Aveya, staring at her, silent.
"So long as you live, Lady Danitha, you are our leader. If only for that reason, I shall keep watch."
A sigh, release, everything flowing forth. "Thank you."
But as Danitha swept around and prepared to assemble her entourage, Aveya spoke again. "You must know this already, Lady Danitha, but you will add nothing by being there. If the city is lost, your being there will change nothing, and these people will be left her, without you."
Danitha clenched her hands. She attempted to scry an answer in the depths of her memories, digging into the flesh of her palms, as if they would tell her something. But any wisdom from her training, any advice from her father, any fruit of experience, dissolved into mist; she had only the quiet thrum in her heart, beating to a tune that, now, even she could not hear.
"I'll have to try." And she was gone.
As she returned to their staging point, she clenched her jaw, thinking that the reservists had, as usual, been dawdling, away from their work, not heeding her instructions, shooting the breeze instead of following her invitations.
But as she approached, the kaleidoscope of steel locked into place: there, a crowd, the entire detachment, had gathered. They stared forward at her, faces as mottled as their very lives, but stoic, their hands being their backs. Not green reservists, not cowards, not even people who balked at their duty. They were there. Light shone through them like they were pigmented glass, and through their broken forms and paltry garments and baggy bony skins, there, like a mirage that slipped here and there in the wind, and yet with the solidity of life, half-there and half-not, there shone images of real knights. Like on the glasswork, rippling with grace. And alive.
And there she was, standing before them.
"I want to give you one more chance," Danitha said, something in her voice tearing in both directions, begging them to come and pleading them not to. "You can stay. I can't promise you'll return. The city might be overrun—we're doing this in the hope that there are survivors, not for ourselves, not for glory—there will be precious little of that."
But they stood, stolid, still. Arms folded behind their backs. In the front, lips pressed together, was a man, wrinkles set deep into his face, plated in armor that hung loosely about his emaciated torso, an image of some dead knight. "As you say, Lady Danitha. For hope's sake."
Armor gleaming with prismatic radiance in the mottled light of the Invasion, like images of Gerrard himself. Today, perhaps, he would be with them.
And so she divided them, allowing five to accompany her and commanding the other ten to stay behind, protect the refugees—and they did, these green, inexperienced, broken people, they did it not because they had veterans' but because they cared, they wanted to be there.
She and her new squad prepared for the charge into Ruzon, tightening the straps on their armor to account for the weight they'd lost, sharpening their blades against anything they could find, stretching their worn legs, hurriedly filling their bellies with steaming bowls of grain. As Danitha slipped her breastplate over her head, she heard a shout behind her. A huge soft hand clasped her shoulder, and as she turned, she found one last soldier ready to march. Nathyn, wearing one of the squires' helmets and brandishing a long shield beaming with a stained-glass blazon, a castle with seven windows. The sigil of House Capashen.
"No, I'm sorry," she said. "I won't allow it."
"I'm sorry, Lady Danitha—Danitha," they interrupted. "No choice in the matter. You won't leave me, you said. And, well, I won't leave you."
"You can't," she said, voice icing over even as her spirit wept. "Your daughter is here. I won't allow it."
"I'll be the person my daughter will be proud of, or I'll be nobody at all."
She looked at them, and felt the words ricochet within her, echoes, sickening, beautiful. A father, defiled, twisted into something unrecognizable. A father, beloved, a person his daughter was proud of.
It was his face, half smashed into a pulp of wires and oil and half radiant with life, that she saw as they bid farewell to the caravan. She prayed that, whatever her duty was, she was doing as Aron Capashen would have done.
Flame and ash. Metal threshing flesh. Explosive light against the horizon. The battle was not over.
They had arrived in a city that was crumbling, a city that was bleeding, a city that was fighting back. The Coalition forces had coalesced a hardy resistance. Even as draconic monstrosities made of chrome and ivory surged overhead and obliterators with claws dripping black ichor skulked through the city streets, the defenders did not break ranks. Llanowar elves, moving in blurs of green against the gleaming white Benalish architecture, sent arrows and surging vines overhead to yank down airborne Phyrexians; Ghitu pyormancers erected roaring walls of crimson flame, incinerating the massive beasts that attempted to break through; and there, on the front lines, her people, Benalish knights, held a perimeter with gleaming shields and stalwart swords.
But their discipline couldn't match the Phyrexians' numbers. As Danitha and her motley crew arrived at Ruzon's southern gate, stained with crimson blood and scraps of armor and mounds of Phyrexian flesh but, sickeningly telling, no corpses—the monsters wanted to make sure everything went to use—they found a Phyrexian fighting force that seemed endless. They were pressed against the wall of a gatehouse, watching as Benalish soldiers shining in silver pushed the Phyrexians further, further—then, were pushed back themselves, as spidery Phyrexians with a dozen legs and obliterators made of fused flesh pounded back against them. Overhead, the steel arms of the invasion tree had burrowed into the walls of the city and its tallest towers; whatever buildings weren't rubble were drenched in glistening oil, which licked down their sides like the towers were weeping.
Danitha turned. The members of their little squad looked back at her with wide eyes, their humanity flickering through the hazy aura of heroism. She met Nathyn's eyes; their mouth was pressed shut, as if trying to keep in a scream, and their hands squeezed so hard around their donated halberd that their fingers were white.
"What," they breathed. "What do we—what do we do?"
She looked back. Her heart churned again; was Aveya right? Should they simply turn back?
Flashes of metal. Stained-glass blades. Benalish shouting over the din of destruction.
"No," Danitha said. "We do our duty."
She rounded the corner and pointed her blade, glittering in the golden sun, at the invaders. A shout, a roar, a command, and she was running, the squad was behind her, and time crunched into a flat surge of motion. The Phyrexians were a raging wave flinging themselves against the shore, but Danitha was a typhoon. Flashes of porcelain, etched ebony claws, copper-plated fangs: cut, parry, dodge, jab, slash, repeat. Images blurred before her face. A white-clad invader, head spurting oil as it was shorn away from its body—a grey-skinned elf, dressed in Keldon battle cloth but grafted with coppery blades, swinging wildly; Nathyn, the baker, the parent, holding stalwart their shield as the reservists hacked off the Keldon's arms and drove blades into its throat; Danitha, taking an obliterator by surprise, hacking, chopping, slicing, bringing the creature to its knees, driving her blade through its chitinous skull in a splash of oil. She could see the Benalish sentinels on the other side, they were getting closer, closer, the Phyrexian wave was parting, and—
A thunderbolt force slammed against her. She flew through the air, whipping in the wind, and slammed into the side of a blazing little structure (perhaps it had once been a customhouse; now it was a funeral pyre). Only a moment to realign: charging through the crowd of disoriented Phyrexians was a beast. Something like a frog or a fungus or both, like one of those drawings Aryel had shown her of Urborg, her home. Oil poured in a fountain deluge from its maw, and its arms, long, gnarled like the stalks of mushrooms, were dotted with sickly polyps, glistening red and black as they belched a sickly green vapor into the air.
She screamed a warning, begging, as one of her men charged towards it, but it was too late—in slow motion, he sagged and froze as the vapor circled around him, and he began hacking, bloody spittle flying from his mouth as he grasped his throat—and then he was off the ground and his legs were kicking desperately out of the creature's mouth and then they too were gone.
It opened its mouth and hacked, belched, and in its exhalation Danitha heard the man's scream. Then, silence.
It stomped toward her, extending its claws. She turned for her men, but they were scatted; two had cleared the crowd and had joined the Coalition's frontline, now dotted with Argivian phalanxers and Ghitu pyromancers in addition to the Benalish knights, all being corralled by a strange woman dressed in the beaming scarlet of Shiv and the cerulean of Tolaria; the other two were attempting to hold off the Phyrexians crashing down from behind them, pushing back bloody talons with shimmering blades and attempting to hold off massive gushes of oil. Nathyn, his shield, huge but no match for the onslaught, was beating back the Phyrexian footsoldiers closing in on Danitha. He wouldn't leave her.
No space. No time. What do to—
There. Look. Assess your enemy.
Danitha saw it: as the fungus-creature stomped past the flames gushing around the square, a lingering puff of acrid smoke drifted into the inferno. A flash of white and blue popped, for half a moment, in and out of existence, and it wasn't until the beast extended its long legs and began rumbling toward her that she realized it was a tongue of flame. The flame—the gas—the beast—the Phyrexians.
She roared a command, really just a few words strung together, to the soldiers behind her, and they broke away from the rushing crowd of Phyrexians, waving their arms frantically at the Ghitu flamemages. The woman in crimson and blue saw, furrowed her brow, flicked her eyes to Danitha. She prayed that the men, sloppy as they were, could time things right.
She waved her sword above her head, flinging stained-glass light in the monster's face—which may have bothered it if it had eyes instead of a blank face coated with scummy mud—but no matter. It was charging, and she stood her ground, until—
She flung herself out of the way as the creature slammed into the customhouse, years of Benalish labor disintegrating under its weight. In the moments it spent on the ground, flinging aside rubble and burning wood, Danitha swept in close, dragging her blade across the polyps with a sickening squish. She clamped her lungs tight, praying not to catch any of the gas in an errant gasp, and, with a final stroke, drove her sword into a bubbling pocket in its chin. The creature screeched guttural vengeance, and in a flash, it had regained its feet—and as it did, she saw behind it, more popping flames flickered in and out, beaming will-o-the-wisps. Good.
It dug is arms into the earth and, in a spring of movement and a hateful wail, bounded at her. She took a final, massive breath, and wheeled around—back towards the crowd of Phyrexians closing in behind her. Had to time it perfectly, pray that the Ghitu would understand her men, that they would would agree with her plan. They closed in on her from both sides, and there, right behind her, she heard the sonorous ring of the Ghitu tongue and the scream of flames meeting open air. She turned, facing the fungus. Perfect, just enough space for her to—
No. No time to dodge. She had miscalculated.
Flames streaked through the air, pouring from the fingertips of the Ghitu pyromancers and towards the fungus creature's open wounds—its open wounds gasping explosive gas. Danitha had gotten the beast close enough to the Phyrexian footsoldiers, but she hadn't made enough time for herself to slip away. One more unanswered prayer.
She wanted to close her eyes, hide away, let their claws take her. But no. This was her duty. She stood, back straight, blade at the ready, like a knight, as the spout of flame collided with the fungus and its scream blurred into a roar that consumed its body, the buildings, the square, in white-blue light, multicolored flame pulsing toward her. Phyrexia, at least, would not claim her body.
Except.
A blur of darkness. Another roar, a woman's voice crunched together with an animal's yowl, filled her ears, and she felt something clench the nape of her neck, like she was a kitten carried away by a parent, and the world pressed together into a blur of colors, and she was rolling, clanging along the ground, skidding, coming to a stop.
And above her, amidst incinerated Phyrexian bodies, was a massive ebon cloud inset with shining amber orbs, and atop the cloud, moving, thrumming with life, was an avenging angel, a crusade made flesh, the screaming spirit of justice come to visit destruction upon the wicked—
The clouds came alive and dove to the earth! Hooves flashed among the dark army, who fled before the spectacle of fury. Canto 211.
—But no, not a cloud, not orbs, not a revenant, and yet still a spirit of righteous justice: it was a cat, enormous, a panther, gazing at her with eyes of liquid gold, and atop it, sliding back her faceplate to reveal stony features and an impossible smile, was Aryel, Knight of Windgrace.
Alive. Her friend was alive.
Act II.
A hard voice, hard as slate, but beneath, pulsing.
"I thought you were dead."
"So did I."
Aryel, astride her panther, the light of a black star condensed into one living form, both of them, led Danitha and the squad through the labyrinthine passages of Ruzon. She moved with poise and practice, precisely that which had earned her such esteem in Benalia's army—precisely that which Danitha thought she had lost.
"I thought they had taken you," the Knight-Commander continued, her face changing with the light: one moment, Danitha had the impression of explosive joy, the other, an anger, a fury, a black rage that consumed Aryel's body. She repeated: "I thought they had taken you."
"A Capashen dying to a Phyrexian?" Danitha said, smiling, broken, teary. "Seems a little cliché, doesn't it?"
She saw, at the periphery of her vision, her reservists give a start. For what little they knew of her, this had not been the Danitha they had seen; stony, brittle, tender. Joking? But Nathyn, there, watching her, smiled a small smile.
A smirk, a sob, in Aryel's face. "Glad to see you're in good spirits. Your guard, Janya— she's here with us"—Danitha exhaled, let another hard knot release in her shoulders—"She told us you were going to be in the chapel, back in Croden. But by the time my knights and I smashed out of the inn, you were gone."
"How many made it out?"
Aryel pressed her lips together. "Only half of the retinue that we brought. A little less, actually. But we made it out." Her face, gargoylic and beautiful, betrayed none of the brittle splintering that Danitha felt in herself, imagining those soldiers who had woken up in the middle of the night to die, missing their families, those knights who, yes, though they knew that death loomed, had done before bed that night everything as normal, said a prayer, washed their faces, adjusted their pillows, made a joke, stubbed their toes, and then died like dogs.
But she knew casualties didn't provoke in Aryel what they provoked in her—not because Aryel was unfeeling, no, certainly not; nor because she, like Aveya, saw in front of her not the soldiers but the mirage of the ideal; no, none of those. It was because Aryel, refugee of Urborg, had already lost everything, family, friends, master, duty; hers was flesh already hardened, a spirt already not of this world. And yet Aryel was not oblivious. On the contrary, Danitha remembered and saw once again before her eyes, Aryel was perceptive, precisely because she saw through these earthly forms, though whatever was beneath Danitha could not imagine—Aryel could see into Danitha precisely that which the shifting light of stained-glass seemed to obscure. And so, in a short clip, she said, pausing, pondering, thinking: "For whatever it's worth, your people know how to die on their feet, not lying down." It was exactly what she needed to hear.
Before Danitha could conjure or response or let flow the churning flame in her stomach, her spirit, Aryel moved ahead and formed them into a line. They passed through a tight alley, along storefronts and restaurants, inside which meek candles still sputtered and dishes lay about, moldering in the dim light, the traces of people who had flung everything down and fled, leaving their silhouetted lives there, absent only the people who animated them. And then they were at the end of the alley, and Danitha squeezed through the tight passageway at the end, and the space opened out, and they were on Ruzon's riverfront.
Clinging to both riverbanks were a smattering of tents, large and tiny, dotted with the blazons of Benalia, Llanowar, Shiv, Keld, and a hundred lesser territories. Armor of silver and glass mingled with thin monastic cloth and exotic geometric patterning; flesh and scales and feathers passed before her eyes; the smell of a hundred cuisines coursed through the air despite the austerity of the war. Just beneath the bridges spanning the river, she saw, in the cerulean water burbling in the harsh daylight, bobbed dozens of watercraft, civilian and military boats buzzing with activity. The waterfront was unchanged, humming with life, even as everything had changed, polluted by death.
"This is our holdout," Aryel said. "We've found, as you have, that the Phyrexians' strength is in their numbers. Agility is our ally."
"And so," Danitha said, recognizing her handiwork. "You deploy strike teams through the canals. Perfect, so long as you hold the riverfront."
"With the Vodalian merfolk protecting the waterways, to make sure no Phyrexian lobsters break through our defenses." Aryel said, smiling. "Your invasion plans didn't go to waste, Danitha." She had dropped the honorific Lady to speak to her, technically a breach of decorum in front of ordinary soldiers; Danitha didn't care.
Danitha paused, glanced overhead; shapes rippled across the sky, flashes of white and then bursts of multicolored light, like the cosmos had for a moment burst open and then collapsed back into place. "Angels?"
"We have two aiding us—Ranai and Argenta. They've seemed especially adept at repelling the Phyrexians—and they're angry as hell, naturally—but even they're getting tired."
"And spread thin, naturally," Danitha said. As she expected, Lyra would have dispatched Serra Angels everywhere—which meant that only a few could be present at any one place, flickering lights amidst the onslaught of dark.
"I've only been in contact with Lyra once. She and the other Serrans are coordinating all of Dominaria's defenses—all while trying to hold back the Phyrexians at Sursi." Danitha's shoulders tightened.
"And Benalia City?"
Aryel's face was steel and stone. "Unclear. It's all come through Lyra, so I don't know. Their forces are holding, and the defense plan seems to be working well enough. But I don't know. Our Tolarians have tried scrying images of the city, but something—some kind of Phyrexian interference—has stopped us from getting a clear image. We know there's damage. Lots of it."
Danitha was going to be sick. She tried to muster a verse, a snippet, for her heart to keep time to—
From dust and light She coaxed forth an uncorrupted world. By Her grace we dwell here, free from suffering. Canto 11. Try it, say it, make it work.
A world returning to dust. Corruption seeping in. Grace, departed. Suffering, everything. Angels impaled on Phyrexian lances, Benalish children with eyes pouring bloody oil, fingernails extended like claws as they turned holy icons in rubble, Serra's essence, holy or simply magical, sputtering, gasping, dimming, hissing away, and at the end of it, Phyrexian laughter.
"We have to go, then," Danitha said sharply. "Relieve them." She looked out to the horizon and asked, prayed, with what meager little faith she could muster, to fly away, to be in Benalia City; better yet, to split herself in half so she could find homes for the people of Croden and be with Aryel here at the same time—had to be with them both. Had to protect them.
Aryel blinked, frowned, glanced at Danitha's squad. "There's something else. Come with me."
Danitha glanced to the reservists, whose faces shone with excitement and terror and nerves. They pressed together, but began to blend into the crowd of troops. At first, it had seemed, the façade of heroism had dimpled, and their imprecision and awkwardness shone through, but something about the crowd surrounded them, infused them, and they joined the collective—still themselves, and yet, something more unfolded out of them. Even Nathyn, with their large shield and ill-fitting armor, seemed to slip into the picture, their particularity resonating in the symphony.
Aryel and Danitha stepped toward the largest cluster of tents, over which a flag beat in the wind: the insignias of Benalia and Urborg stood side by side, over which hung the larger, composite image of the Coalition. They slipped between bearded Tolarians looming over scrolls and Keldon warpriests intoning quiet prayers, past Aryel's Benalish guards, and in a moment they were in Aryel's command tent, the metallic sun turning into burnt twilight.
Without speaking, Danitha pressed close to Aryel, steeling against steel, skin against skin. Her hair smelled of sweat and ash, morning light rolling over a marsh. This, thought Danitha, is what it was: amidst despair, joy bursting through a prism, breaking from the water and slipping into the air and then—dissolving. What was it, this joy? Errant sparks in the darkness?
"Don't die again," Danitha murmured.
"You too," Aryel murmured.
They were there, together, for time that Danitha could not track, and then they slipped apart, Aryel stepping toward a wooden table in the center of the room, on which was pinned a map of Ruzon. Small colored stones, spread across the map like some earthbound rainbow, marked the movements of Coalition troops; shiny blocks of black and grey denoted the Phyrexians. There were, Danitha realized, so many more of them than she thought.
There came a rap at the tent door and Danitha's hand was at her scabbard—but Aryel raised a figer. The flap opened, and between the streaming dead twilight there emerged a crimson-clad Tolarian mage—the same one from the line, the one who had destroyed the toad-fungus. Here, up close, Danitha couldn't help but savor the banded electric life that hummed, just beneath the surface, through her entire form: in her clothes there ran streams of color and history, belted leather striping into billowing crimson, Tolarian vambraces alongside a billowing white cloak dappled with geometric patterns and bleached by the sun, looping threads of cerulean and scarlet around her turban—culminating in her eyes, one warm brown, one watery blue.
"Lady Danitha," Aryel said, her voice shifting into the stiff register of military discourse, "This is Adeliz. The finest mind Tolaria has to offer."
"And Shiv," Adeliz said swiftly, smirking at Aryel "Best of both, you know." She looked Danitha in the eyes, red and blue gleaming in twilight, and gave a shallow bow, not with disrespect but with the indecorum of someone with too much to do. "Lady Danitha. I've heard a lot. Glad to hear it wasn't all eulogy."
"You saved my life, earlier," Danitha said. "I'm in your debt."
Adeliz waved a hand, scoffed. "That? Psh. I was glad. I wanted to know what'd happen when we lit that gassy freak up."
Danitha smiled—then frowned, a misplaced detail floating before her vision like the squiggles in the corner of the eye. "Apologies, Adeliz. But I know everyone on the Benalish deployment lists. Every name, every person who's supposed to be here during the Invasion. You aren't on it."
Adeliz's smile dropped, her blue-and-red irises seeming to dim, as though illuminated by her spirit. "Yes. Well. I evacuated from Tolaria, but, as you've already found, the Phyrexians have a way of interfering with plans." A fizzle behind her eyes, pain wailing out, and for a moment, ever so dimly, Danitha saw the life behind it, the friends and the lovers and the entire world stripped down, turned inside-out, made to reflect nightmares—or perhaps Danitha was only seeing a reflection.
And as always, Aryel saw it, too. "Adeliz came from Tolaria West. The Phyrexians hit it hard— we didn't expect them to target it, but—"
"But you didn't count on Rona," Adeliz spat. She stood there a moment, seething. Her very body seemed to radiate heat, and Danitha couldn't help but watch—indeed, she seemed a vortex drawing in everything; the air seemed sterile, stagnant, everything slowing—and it was only belatedly that Danitha saw that Adeliz's eyes were gleaming blue and red. She exhaled, and things seemed to slip back into place.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm—at Tolaria, see, I research emotive chronomancy—using red mana, different the blue, the usual, you know, to bend the experience of time.
Danitha frowned, stared, kept placid. Always best to show that you have your wits about you, even when you have no idea what you're hearing.
"Ah. Right. Swords, not spells," Areliz continued, eyes flicking about the air, as though she might synthesize the answer from all around them. "Erm, essentially, Tolarians, of course, we have a bad history with temporal magic. Trying to control the flows of time, it, well, takes a specialist, Teferi-level mage, to pull of that kind of thing. But I thought, hey, let's do something different. I use red mana—passion, emotion—for spellcasting. Not precision. Discipline, yes, certainly, that's the Ghitu way—but that's not important. What's important is, I can alter the experience of time."
Blink, swallow blink. Adeliz's mind whirred like a storm; Danitha's pulsed like a star. Imagine the possibilities if—
"Even the Phyrexians?"
"Even the Phyrexians."
"Adeliz is the other instrument in our strategy. She helps slow their reaction time when we hit our targets—that way they don't know which way we came from." Aryel said. "But it's slow to make any gains. Really, we're just holding down the harbor. The path we took you from was only just secured. And who knows, those metal bastards might take it right back." She paused, black lightning passing across her face and then settling back into placidity.
"The situation seems unsustainable," Danitha said. "If Benalia City is in danger, and we can't be sure of anything here, why not evacuate?"
Aryel furrowed her brow, anger flashing again across her face, and she pointed at a wall of black pebbles forming a semicircle around the north of the city. "We haven't been sitting here, you know. We've tried to evacuate Ruzon—on foot, by boat, even by air. But there's—these."—a breath, Adeliz's eyes between them—"Sorry. If it were just the Phyrexians, that would be one thing. We could punch through, with casualties, yes, but we could do it. But it's not just the standard Phyrexians."
"There are two commanders," Adeliz volunteered, her voice picking up tempo and sweeping through Aryel's fuming breath. "One of them, she's some kind of necromancer. She's been a real pain in our sides, right from the beginning. She can raise spirits from the land, long dead ones, and they just keep replenishing the Phyrexians' forces. No matter how many we take apart, she dredges up more. She knows where we're going. There's this—well, I don't want to call it a wall, because, well, I suppose someone could pass through it—but sure, it's a wall. Made of fog. Impassible, unless you want to come out a Phyrexian piece of meat on the other side." Her crimson-and-blue eyes, which had been flitting about the room, lighted on Danitha, and she sucked in a breath. "Erm. Oh. I heard, uh—sorry."
Lips pressed together. "Old wound. You're not the first."
Now Aryel jumped back in. "There's another one, a newer arrival. He's the one posing us real problems. He knows our strategy. We don't know how. He can predict the movements of our troops, and he can hit us from the air. His magic, I've never seen anything like it. We only know anything about him—he's an aven, some kind of mage—we only know because he always leaves behind a survivor. By the time they get to us, they're babbling, can't think straight."
She slipped a sheaf of scribbled paper toward Danitha. It looked, at first, like esoteric blueprints or an atlas in some strange tongue—but, she realized with a chill, that was simply because the writer's language had refused to obey the bounds of the page. There were crude drawings: circles speared with jagged lines, talons ripping across the page, razor feathers impaling human forms—and words, over and over. Inscriptions: Dark wings. Wonderful voice, horrible voice. Laughing.
Danitha swallowed hard, her throat scraping, screaming. His face, smiling warmly, swallowed by Phyrexians, calling for her help, begging, screaming, cackling, face hidden behind a mask that seemed burnt onto his face, just enough space from him that you could see his eyes, bulging, bloodshot, begging, even as his awful voice squawked out its horrible gospel.
"I know him."
Aryel looked at her severely. Behind those steely eyes, recognition.
"I know her, too," she said, gulping. "Or about her. She's from home—from Urborg, I mean." Something in her eyes, glistening, shining. "And that's why we need you here. We think we've found them, in the center of the city. If we can find them there—eliminate them—we'll be able to muster our forces to aid Benalia City."
"Well, good," Danitha said. "So, execute it, then. Get it done. I need to get back to the villagers—I left them. I swore to them. I need to."
Aryel frowned. Black lightning, storms. "We need you here. The troops, they need a leader—a Capashen."
Danitha grimaced, acid in her mouth, sickening gasp at an armored body limp on the ground, so fragile after so many years so strong. "No, they don't."
She stared at Aryel, hard, willing her to stop, willing her to know, begging that she could not simply wash it away, scrape the memories apart. They clung to her, sand pressed against her skin, blood in her hair, stink filling her nose. That name meant nothing. Capashen.
Adeliz was watching, back and forth between them, and bowed abruptly. "I'll excuse myself. Find me when you're ready, Aryel."
Danitha thanked Serra—what a strange thing to do, she mused, thank Serra in a time like this, where had that idea come from?—that they were alone, and with the same breath she cursed that they had to have this conversation.
"What are you talking about?" Aryel said, blunt, demanding, not so much an open question as a statement recognizing absurdity.
"You're the Knight-Commander—you can lead them. They need you, not me. What are the Capashens to them?"
Aryel stared at her with an unremitting glare, seeing deeply, parsing, sizing up, weighing her constituent pieces, trying to see how they might be reassembled. "They swear their loyalty to Benalia, they bend the knee to House Capashen, and they pray to Gerrard. Don't tell me that doesn't matter. Don't even try it."
Danitha shook her head. Fire inside, boiling, hardening, tightening. "Words on a page, a seal on a letter, an image in a church. A dead man and the daughter who killed him. That is what House Capashen is to them."
Aryel kept staring, as though her boring gaze would crack Danitha, but there was nothing left to crack, she knew, for this was the foundation of it all, but still, Aryel went on trying—only, that wasn't what happened. Aryel's eyes softened. She slumped into a chair and stared up at Danitha, casting a look, a grasping hand, a call, across the wide dark seas, a light across the horizon signaling out.
"And. And I need you here. If it isn't for House Capashen, or for Benalia, or for your damned father, I don't care. I need you, just you, and so do they, all these people—they need you. And—and I do."
A mosaic tile slipping into place, a ray of light glowing across the horizon. Words, like those she had spoken this morning: I don't care, but I need you. Danitha churned.
Again, the impossible. Duty, there, in her heart, not holding together life's fabric but ripping her in half: duty to what? To the vulnerable, to justice, to everybody? Why? It was impossible. How? She couldn't. She wasn't ready. The words she had spoken that morning, the words of solace to the people of Croden, tasted of cinders, papery confessions embering away in the dark sun, desolation.
Aryel grasped her hand. There, close. She couldn't do it. But she had to.
It was twilight, a new kind of twilight, as their boat skimmed along the Ruzon River's canals, set low into the ground and bounded by high limestone walls. The sun had begun to dip to the horizon, but instead of splashing acrylic orange and yellow across the world, its light had died away, and the Phyrexian portals, beating like the acid hearts, or better, hateful eyes of some gods the world had forgotten, veneered the city in watery red.
She and Aryel were crouched low to the deck. Below them, the sound of water, the water that the Benalish people had drank and ridden and lived on for millennia, made a mellow swish against the hull. Two skiffs glided across the water behind them, sails whipping gently in the wind. On either side, the distant sounds of fighting: metal clanking across pavement, Dominarian screams mingling with Phyrexian cacophonies—clang, clang, squelch, scream, yell, cheer, scream, fading away as the boats pressed on. Behind them, whispering incantations, the electric buzz of Tolarian spellcasting, which muted their movements to the Phyrexians and concealed them from sight. And above, the sound of thunder—but not thunder, for thunder was of nature, and this was not nature. This was the sound of the horrid colliding with the holy. Ranai and Argenta, doing battle high in the sky.
The angels zipped overhead, swirling around flying Phyrexians made of titanium and chrome, ebony and porcelain. Rainbow sparks exploded off the metal and red light washed over wings of feather and leather. One of the angels, hard to tell which, drove towards a nightmare that looked like a whale had taken skyward, and a constellation of pure mana played off its face as the angel exploded through its side. Aboom rattled through the air like the percussion of a distant parade.
"Has it been like this the whole time?" Danitha murmured.
"It has," Aryel said. "They're exhausted, I'm sure. Just fending them off, days and days."
"If it weren't so awful," Danitha said, as the iridian maelstrom's soft glow lapped across her face, "It would be beautiful."
Aryel smiled, ever so briefly.
A thump on the wood paneling of the boat. Danitha tensed, but Aryel reached out and grasped her wrist, holding her still (as though, Danitha thought, they really stood here, together at the fulcrum of creation). She gestured behind them: the thumps were only the navigator signaling that they were getting close. Two more thumps from beneath the boat: the Vodalian merfolk, keeping vigil in the whispering waves, confirmed that there were no threats to their escape route. Danitha exhaled, attempting to soothe nerves that had been singed beyond healing, the troubled mind that wondered after Marten and Merah and Aveya and the Croden villagers, the memories that circled round and round, a crackling vortex, inhaling, devouring, splintering, dashing themselves against the earth.
The boat rounded a bend and Danitha caught sight of their destination slipping across the skyline.
To the east, beneath the dappled light of the embattle sky, limestone cornices carved into intricate seashells radiated soft peach—Ruzon's city hall. To the west, darker, older buildings, relics of the older wreckage on which Ruzon had been built, squatted together, whispering secrets, housing the embassies of the Coalition nations (or they had, anyway). And nestled between them, overlooking the water, the bridge between past and present: a massive Serran cathedral, gigantic stained-glass windows gushing light over the darkening water. Danitha had only visited Ruzon in passing during some tour of the south, years ago, when her father had guided her along the cobblestone streets of a thousand different little worlds, pointing here and there to the jutting ribs of dark old buildings and the luminous limestone of bright new ones—the former the sterile remains of Old Benalia, and the latter the shining edifices built up from the wreckage. Symbols of Serra's lasting grace, he had said. Though now, as they peered over the skyline like lotus blooms over the water, whose pink flesh so quickly molts, serpentine, falls away to nothing in the sweep of the ocean—now they seemed like the last cracked cornerstones of a world about to crash down.
They passed beneath a massive window cut into the shape of a flower, radiance pouring through the forms of Serra, Urza, and Gerrard, stalwart, beaming, cut in sharp relief against the dusk. Pause, realize, process, that the glow came not just from the sun but from inside. There, beneath the trinitarian iridescence, there flamed wisps of light. Candles, lit, illuming the interior of the cathedral—here, where no Benalish, no Serrans, no Coalition members, no elves or humans or orcs or anybody living, could be. The light, she saw, was obscured, bouncing off oil that dripped from between the stones.
Aryel had guessed correctly. The Phyrexians had taken up residence.
Shuffling sails, creaking wood, water slipping from a burble to a gentle, quiet drip. Look at Aryel's eyes, dark, fiery; Danitha's eyes oaky, gleaming. Ready.
They stepped to the gunwale and slipped coils of thick rope, gnarled like the skin of some primordial beast, with hooked heads and launched the coils skyward. For a moment, the hooks, suspended in midair, like the eternal life of a bird in motion, shone in the shifting light. Then, a clunk, a zip of hemp, and the chirp that signalled metal catching against the limestone railings on the canal.
A symphony of motion: across three boats, bodies, Ghitu and Keldon, Tolarian and Argivian, and at the front, Benalish with Urborgian, gripped the ropes, swung across the chasm between their boats and the canal walls, and yanked themselves up, walking horizontally as though the world had rearranged itself for their sakes. It was precision, it was beauty; even Nathyn, body resonating like a brass bell with the Benalish soldiers, moved like rain slipping in reverse, their callused baker's hands handling the rope with the delicacy of a veteran warrior.
The pitter-patter of leather and steel against limestone echoed across the water, bouncing up and down the canal, and then in a clamor it concluded, the symphony moving, the aria singing out: whistling rope recoiling, silver swords singing out of sheaths.
They weren't alone. Mute alabaster, shivering chrome, vestigial muscular red, all across the plaza, Phyrexians of all forms, humanoids and beasts, fowl, fiend, draconic, demonic, all around them. Instinct told Danitha to unsheathe her sword, scream out commands—but no. Adeliz, just to her right, her face beading with sweat and her tongue pressed against her lips as shimmering sapphire glyphs hung before her like mist.
They pressed close to each other in the misty blue of Adeliz's spell, creeping along the edge of the canals and slipping between squadrons of pristine porcelain soldiers and massive molten beasts stomping this way and that. Duck low, give breadth, slip between legs, keep up. They were invisible, but only within the aura of magical power radiating from Adeliz; slip out of it, fall a few steps behind, drop anything, leave any trace, they would be discovered.
Look back: Adeliz, Danitha saw, was already growing tired. She shuffled along in the center of the swirling mist, clutching her chained spellbook so hard that Danitha wondered if the leather would crack, wondered how long she could keep standing. Closer, closer—thirty yards from the cathedral door, twenty-five, twenty. But for now, they were silent, invisible.
And so instead, Danitha observed. The Phyrexian footsoldiers moved like rushing water, or like zipping hornets, or like music—but not. Smooth, synchronized, but not: smoothness, she knew not how to describe it, but she knew it, smoothness was a quality of silken robes and a father's armor, the crystal surface of water in a sacramental font, and synchronicity was the quality of holy song and lovers' breath; in other words natural, the inner essence radiating out some imperfect but incandescent essence, as though beneath its papery outer form shone like a star and spoke in primordial words, borrowed from some higher graced tongue that was nonetheless as native to the thing as its own being: I am me, made just so. And the Phyrexians' movements were not, not natural, not imperfect, not being as they were. The Phyrexians were in the world, were of it, but they had none of that inner essence; their bodies were strung along ghostly strings, yanked along as by the sweeping hand of another power that cared not for them and willed them to be else than they were. Danitha wondered, now, in this expanse, what it had felt like for her father at the end: slipping away, the starlight within him sputtering, suffocating, crushed underweight, and then he was just a paper doll being tossed this way and that, conscious enough only to watch, with mute agony, what he himself was doing.
No matter. No time. Eyes in front of you: reflection is for recollection.
A grunt, a groan, from the middle of the entourage. Adeliz stumbled, regained footing, stumbled again, and pitched forward toward the ground, the burning glyphs around her sputtered—and the haze of mist around the party began to uncoil. Danitha's breath caught in her throat, the world groaning, slipping, cracking like a glacial mountain rock, a fragment about to break off and tumble to the earth, so close, here, too late, watching it all crumble—
Hands dusted in white, flash of movement, and Adeliz was yanked back to her feet, held up straight. Nathyn was there. The mist coalesced around them again and the phosphorescent runes regained their substance. Danitha caught Nathyn's eye: no words, not even concepts, just a look, shared across the din.
They sped across the last stretch of the cobblestone expanse, Nathyn and one of the Croden reservists holding Adeliz by her shoulders, grasping her close, refusing to leave her behind. It was risky, Danitha knew; they should pull back now, return, gather reinforcements, come back. But no, this could be it; it could be done. If Teshar was here, she could—the thought opened up before her like a chasm in the earth. Plunge a blade into his neck, watch the gentle beautiful light seep away as the Phyrexian chorus turned to a whimper, let a good man die.
She couldn't. But it was too late.
They reached the edge of the gigantic prismatic halo encircling the cathedral, but instead of tromping up the massive limestone stairs to the carved door—in which, she saw, bas-relief images of Serra and Gerrard had been defiled: Gerrard's head had been smashed in, splintered wood and stone scattered at his feet, and Serra had been drenched in a spew of glistening oil, the bright white glow of her eyes swallowed in the ichorous flood—no, they did not go up there. Instead, they slipped to the side of the cathedral, where, set against a wall overlooking the canal, stood a tiny wooden door.
"How did you know?" Aryel whispered.
Danitha smiled, feeling over a beating crimson scar in her spirit. "I know every inch of every style of Serran cathedral from every major period. Father wouldn't have it any other way."
A squeeze of Areyl's hand, a pulse of warmth. Danitha looked back at. Adeliz, who, drenched with sweat, bleeding from her nose, was already weaving another spell from the beaming glyphs.
"There," she said, breathing heavily. "This spell will create a temporal dilation—time will seem to pass differently—inside the cathedral—from outside. I'm slowing the Phyrexians' sense of time. Every minute for them out here will be twenty for you in there—so once they know to send in reinforcements. Hnh. It'll already be over."
She had not, Danitha noted, said you'll already have succeeded. Instead, the grim inevitability: something will have ended.
Still, she nodded. "Thank you, scholar. All Benalia will be in your debt."
Adeliz pressed her lips together. "I. Hnh. My whole life was there. Tolaria. At the beginning. And now it's gone, into the sea. So—this isn't a favor to you. Believe me."
Agony and anguish behind those beaming crimson and blue eyes. But Danitha could say nothing; she could only do.
And so it was time. A signal, a pulse of white light in the air. For a moment, the awful nothing of stillness. And then, the sun itself descended.
No, not the sun: Ranai and Argenta, twinning angelic forms, their wings trailing a vapor of multicolored aether behind them that wrapped around them like the halo of an angel and the tail of a comet and the light of justice, coming down, down, directly into the middle of the assembled Phyrexian forces. A crash of thunder, a bolt of lightning, a ripping of worlds, and the angels were there, on the ground, spears and swords drawn. Waves of Phyrexians descended upon them, but they batted the monsters aisde, lances screaming out rainbow light that shredded in half Phyrexian trolls and engulfed footsoldiers in waves of sidereal flame. Lifetimes ago, the Phyrexians had nearly made the Serrans extinct, taken their very realm from them. And now, the weight of history, the power of light, the force of the holy, was being revisited upon the invaders.
But powerful as they were, Ranai and Argenta would not last forever—if they led the charge, they would be overwhelmed. And so here they were, the distraction, to call the Phyrexian onslaught away from the cathedral as the strike team went to work.
So they must, and so they did.
As they entered, Danitha noted that, despite the damage to the front edifice, the Phyrexians had seemed to ignore this entrance entirely. Presumably, they had wanted a grander entrance. But within, as she led the soldiers two-by-two into the sacristy, where Serran clergy prepared before mass, she saw that even if the Phyrexians didn't care for the door, they hadn't ignored an inch of the cathedral's interior. Little puddles of oil coagulated against floors, desks, walls, and the marbled pillars were scarred deep with scratches, burn marks, broken tile. Throughout the room, spectral traces of lives still lingered: tattered vestments, caked in cracking dried blood, lay at the foot of a pillar, no body to be found; trinkets and jewelry were shattered at the foot of a wall, itself cracked with the imprint of a body; at the foot of an icon of Serra whose rosy glass was splintered in a spiderweb, there lay a lone shoe, waiting patiently for its wearer to return. Danitha felt them, these peoples, these lives, which had come to their end here, in this holy place, this place where they should have been safe, and she wanted to cry, and die, and be sick, but instead of those things she—she could not imagine it—she prayed.
Give them peace.
They pressed on further, and Adeliz let out a hungry gasp as she pressed against a pillar.
"Not—to be—a downer—" she wheezed. "But—need—rest." She swallowed, the gulp of saliva across her dry throat seeming to fill the room.
Danitha furrowed her brow, massaged a temple. Let Adeliz stay? True, she couldn't fight in this state, might be a danger, worse, an impediment—but here, alone? She threw a look to Aryel: nothing, for Aryel, Danitha knew, would want Adeliz to press on. Then, to Nathyn and her reservists, meeting their glances, the looks of shivering children coated in steel.
"Can you protect her?"
Nathyn frowned. "Our duty is to you, Lady Danitha."
"So it is. And I tell you—protect her. Keep back. Give her as much water as your canteens can spare. Keep her on her feet, if you can."
A look between them, then back at her, a flash across her vision: neediness, difficulty, as the feeling of being stretched further than your arm can manage, but a need to hold on—the power of loyalty and the impossibility of keeping to it. But then: a nod. Confirmation. The reservists circled around the mage.
Aryel was watching Danitha as they passed through the winding chambers of the sacristy, coming closer and closer to the central chamber, the altar, where they might begin their search for the Phyrexian commanders. It didn't take long. A glimpse here, a peek there, more and more traces of death before them, but they found, at last, a long hallway, at the end of which was the looming oaken door to the altar. To Teshar.
They slipped through the door, and there burst out an icy spectral exhalation, an onrush of air that clawed with death—choked with the stink of carcasses, the frigid miasma of metal, and something else, something which Danitha couldn't name—frosted bodies and decaying leaves, dark sulfuric water caked with scum.
"Home," Aryel whispered. "Urborg."
The band of troops filed into the cathedral's massive nave, where the strange fetid smell swirled all about them. The space, which should, Danitha knew, have been effulgent with stained-glass light, was dim and deathly—for the glass streamed with oil and new images seemed to seep through the ichor, visions of knights lain low and heroes shattered against the ground, Phyrexians pinning Benalish to stone altars and pouring darkness into their throats. The oaken pews, which ringed the central altar like rays of the sun, were, too, pouring over with oil, which reflected red and gold in the glittering candlelight that suffused the room.
And there, at the head of the altar, there loomed a high dark figure, around whose plated porcelain armor all the light seemed to gather and into whose dark papery wings it all sunk and died.
They approached, the clang of metal seeming to bounce and boom around the echoing catacomb of the cathedral, swords drawn, tiny beacons in the darkness. And then, a voice, layered, grandfatherly and twisted, screaming with the agony of a thousand others, spoke.
"Do you like my work, Danitha?" Teshar said, remaining still, his back to them. She gulped, looked at Aryel, the others, then back to Teshar. She knew that there should be no use in speaking with him—that he wasn't in there, that they had taken him—and yet, and yet, there he was, the same man, the same light of hope, the same beacon of whatever love Serra might have had, and so—
"Teshar," she said, flinching as her voice rebounded all around her, crackling, bending, becoming something other than hers. To her left, Ghitu pyromancers crouched low and took up positions on either side of the aisle. "Please. Stop this. I know what you believe—who you are—that you care, that you love."
Steel raking across stone, talons scraping over stone that begged for mercy.
"Do not presume. You know nothing," he said, his voice glittering with an eerie timbre, beauty enfolded with a thousand agonies.
He swept around, bearing to her and them all the ghastly porcelain skeleton that seemed to have been burned into his snowy flesh. The room was still, taking in the sight of his gruesome form: his wings, so illustrious, so snowy and beautiful, folded back and flaking like they were made of rotting paper, and his limbs seemed twisted in the wrong directions, sprouting blades from his elbows and fingers, visions of Phyrexian nightmares traced onto the body of a good man."
"What you see here," he said, whispering, screaming, echoing, "Is the beginning of a new theophany. Where Serra gasped the emptiness of lies, we shall sing the fullness of truth. Where flesh once croaked with agony, moaned for escape, we shall speak the divine language of unity. We shall exorcise the spirit and raise the body in the high liturgy of perfection."
"You don't believe that," Danitha whispered, more to herself than to him, willing it to be true, begging it, even as there before her there stood, breathing and belching malice, a splintered being reassembled as obscenity. To her right, the Llanowar elves took up positions in the pews and nocked their arrows. "You've felt the Ancestor's touch. You heard the stories. They were real. You knew they were real."
Before her there hung Teshar's tenebrous form, but behind it, like he was the screen through which he spoke—or perhaps it was the reverse, he the screen to which she spoke to this shadow, casting forth a void that pulled her toward itself—another: hateful eyes, pained eyes, life blasted to bits, a man she wanted to be there but was not.
"Please," she whispered, in the voice of a child emerging from the infernal glow of nightmares, so quiet and so loud. "I need you to be here. Don't leave."
A crunch, limestone splintering under a vise grip. Aryel and her knights circled the altar, swords drawn, glittering silver and pink in the cavernous light. Danitha ascended the steps, sword at her side, glittering like a bladed jewel in the firelight, unsure that she could really use it. He looked at her, from behind the leather and oily sinew grafted over his face and neck, and the chorus of voices burned into his throat began to laugh, giggle, cackle, chuckle, booming off each other with awful resonance.
"Moira, dear?" Teshar boomed. "Show our guests in, won't you?"
And suddenly, they weren't alone.
The ground of the cathedral rumbled, split apart, gave a croaking gasp as sickly green fog poured forth from every opening. And then, surging from the mist, there came a body. Their vanguard, something that might once have been a woman, skin that seemed like ink had coagulated into shape, poked through with skeletal bones, banded spikes, bulging through what little you might have called skin, and at its fore, a face made inhuman precisely by its echo of humanity: inert, motionless, green glowing eyes and a graying face that sprouted black horns streaming oil.
"Windgrace," Aryel whispered, choked, voice dying away even as every sound seemed magnified around them. "Give me strength."
This woman, this Moira, wasn't alone: behind her came alien bodies, silver and porcelain metal that caught the flaming glow as the emerald mist carried them upward; compleated bodies, etched black metal fused to the greying flesh of desiccated corpses, fingers extending into claws and legs into pincers and mouths contorted into screams, final agonies persevered for eternity; and, among them, Danitha saw, her stomach lurching, her spirit screaming out—and, too, her throat—there were mortal bodies, Dominarian bodies.
For there, bounded by their arms and legs by a legion of twisted Phyrexian jailers, forming together a shapeless mass of metal and flesh that seemed to be pulsing, breathing, in some horrid simulacrum of life, were the people of Croden. Brother Merah, wings pulled backward by gruesome metallic instruments, stretching and bending as though they were about to be shorn off; Aveya Joryev, pinned by the pointed talons of a Phyrexian obliterator's claws and tails, lancing her arms and legs and shoulders, grasping her in place; and Marten, lashed with a band of black oil that spidered down across his throat, his eyes beaming out at her, dark, oaky, deadened, afraid. And there were all of them, all around, all of Croden's men, women, and children, here, at the Phyrexians' mercy.
Danitha's eyes met Marten's, seeing his lips moving. Spelling out her name. Begging, breathlessly, wordlessly, launching a prayer forth into the nothingness—Help. Please.
But she couldn't. She had left them alone. She had let them be taken. She had searched for her duty, had agonized over it. And, once more, she had failed.
She felt to her knees.
"Fear not," Teshar sang out, in his screeching, beautiful, awful lilt. "For you are the first of our new apostles. The darkness shall fall away, and truth shall free you."
"Let them go!" Danitha roared, knowing that it was foolish to say such a thing, knowing that Teshar relished the boil of her blood and the agony in her soul, what little of it was left tattering in this maelstrom, as he kept cackling; he wanted her to suffer. And so he did.
"Danitha," he said, his voices collapsing and reshaping into a new voice, and old voice, a horrible voice, his voice, her father's voice, moments from his demise, kept forever in the infinite library of Phyrexian torment.
"Do your duty. Do your duty. Do your duty. But you can't, can you? You are made of flesh. Your duty is words. It is vapor. All that is solid is here, in Phyrexia."
"Help," Danitha said, low as she could, throwing a glance to Aryel. "Please." But there was on response; Aryel said nothing, could not even bring herself to look, for before her, in the green and purple mists pouring forth from Moira, the ebon prophet of Phyrexian desolation, there were shapes, sculpted from the fog and shot through with phantom light that imparted to the images a kind of half-living being. Mangrove swamps and tightly packed homes, strange skeletal creatures walking hand-in-hand with humans and panthers standing on hind legs. Aryel stared, captivated.
"All that you have lost may return to you," Teshar continued, gazing out not just as Danitha but at the Croden villagers, the Benalish, Aryel. "Your idols have led you astray, to a place of silence and mute absurdity. You must know: all this means nothing. But should you wish for more, for the perfection you so lack in these feeble forms—Phyrexia provides."
She couldn't move. Step forward—swing her sword—even raise a hand—and Marten, Merah, Nathyn's daughter—all of them would be dead, absorbed into the Phyrexian monstrosity. Eyes and tears and screams called out for mercy. Danitha had no way to give it, and Phyrexia had none to offer.
Danitha. Do your duty.
She saw before her lowering the sword; letting her father live; letting him take her; letting all of it fall into the cold darkness, where there resided nothing, nothing she loved or that loved her, no promises of heroism or glory, no words of love, and no, nothing to hurt, nothing to ache, for that seemed so captivating: for an end. Someone was crying, and she realized, with only the dimmest of awareness, that it was her. Time slowed, thrummed, moved through the infinite depths between heartbeats.
But for once, Danitha realized with a start, like the rip-roar of lightning, it wasn't just her.
A crack, a rustle. She flicked her eyes to the door, and there was Adeliz, held under Nathyn's arm, swirling with glyphs of sapphire and crimson, eyes glowing in a kaleidoscopic mesh of color even as her nose bled and sweat beaded down her forehead. The glyphs had filled the air, tinging it with purple, and all moved in slow motion, swirling like a rainstorm around the Phyrexian armature that held the Croden mercenaries. Adeliz's spell, magnified, focalized: here, on their side, it was buying them time.
And there was Nathyn, looking at her, mouthing words, whispering across the void a truth that she heard from their spirit: I won't leave you.
Danitha's eyes met Aryel's, yanking her away from the searing phantasmal Urborg. Eyes, pressed into one another, seeing each other, strategizing without words, unfurling a world without even a breath.
"I'll take her," Aryel said. "You get him?"
"Done."
"Don't die again."
"You too."
Danitha surged forward; behind her, Aryel roared out, rallying the Coalition forces to her side. From within vortex of walled-off time, Danitha saw, Marten watched, eyes flicking back and forth in slow motion.
She dove at Teshar, raising her blade high and bringing it down with thunderbolt weight, but Teshar was faster. His wings pounded the air, buffeting Danitha with a gust of putrid wind. He was in the air, coming down on her, claws extended, no time to dodge—and then Benalish shield, one of the reservists towering over Danitha, he was there, deflecting the blow. From behind, a bolt of Ghitu flame caught Teshar in the side and sent him sprawling.
He was back on his feet in a moment, wailing abominably, as though pulling forth the agonies of all creation to himself—and so they did, coalescing around him in Phyrexian form, tiny spidery mites made of porcelain, footsoldiers made of multiply grafted human bodies, etched-steel obliterators loping to his side and turning their eyes on the assembled forces.
Time crunched together, fragments of life pulsing alongside each other like streams in a river, and Danitha, with some kind of consciousness held just askew, just behind herself, seeing before her the clamor and carnage, observed. Here: Teshar loomed in the air, casting gusts of wind and searing bolts and slivers of shining obsidian metal at them; to her side, a Ghitu firemage was a second too late, stumbled, and garbled out a bloody prayer as his skin and face and eyes were perforated with Phyrexian metal. She ducked, swept her leg out, slashed through leathery skin, stabbed between metal plates; Phyrexian bodies feel before her piecemeal, arms and heads spurting oil as they spun the ground. There: A flock of compleated raptors, plated with metal, beady eyes bulging out of their skulls and chrome tendrils whipping about their bodies like braids of hair, swept down from the cathedral's vaults, descended on a Benalish soldier, pecked at his face and squelched into his eyes as he screamed—then the condors crumpled to the side as Llanowar arrows burrowed into their sides—and then the elves themselves disappeared into crackling green light that streamed from Moira, who was suspended in a cloud of vapor.
Had to get to Teshar. Danitha slipped between the legs of a Phyrexian obliterator, its visage plated half in the burned porcelain of Teshar's armor and half in the etched ebon metal of Moira's—and as the beast whipped around to catch her, Benalish swordsmen descended upon it, honed by months of practice drills. Shimmering blades found purchase in its sinews, and the beast stumbled, buying time for Keldon warriors to lash the monster with ropes and yank it to the ground, then deliver hacking strikes to its face. Wait, look: over there, Aryel, unbidden by caution, was yelling incomprehensibly, cutting down Phyrexian footsoldiers, splitting molten goblins in half, eviscerating copper-plated beasts, as she marched towards Moira—and then was hurled to the ground by a blast of rancid wind from Teshar's staff.
Danitha's stomach turned. No.
A swing of his staff, the crackle of unholy lightning—dodge, drop to your knees, roll against the ground, prepare to advance—but then there came the screams. Behind her, a crowd of Benalish, Keldons, Argivians—her people, all of them—had taken the brunt of the of the blast; it hadn't been a pure bolt of force or even searing flame, no, the Phyrexians were hardly so merciful. As the lightning crackled into them, acrid smoke poured from the soldiers' flesh, began to stink—rot, sizzle, ripen, burst into a puff of icy blue miasma, skin peeling away from skulls and eyes bulging in agony, and Danitha wanted to cry, scream.
Had to end it now, had to get to him.
She stormed up the steps toward him, her stained-glass blade gleaming in the sickly emerald light. He swept his staff down at her, weight of a mountain surging—she skipped to the left, knocked the staff aside with her blade. A flick of her wrist, a whistle of streaking steel, and the staff went to the ground; a trickle of blood, crimson mixed with deep black, poured from the rent veins in his wrist. He swept his other hand down, talons outstretched, extended beyond his fingers by the power of whirring machinery, and caught her in the face, throwing her back.
Blood seeping into her eyes—wipe it away with her cloak, streak the snowy white with crimson. Give it back to him. Another swipe as his mouth poured out hate, words smashing together like clattering metal; she raised her arm and deflected the blow against her vambraces, the enchanted glass singing out with pain as Teshar ground against it.
What to do—there. Streak of red on the snow. She swept her cloak up, flung it in Teshar's face, blocking his fuming hate and leaving him clawing in the empty air. There, with him distracted, she could drive her blade into his heart, end it—
But there, as he ripped the cloak from his face and stared at her, muscles stretching, croaking, as his body struggled under the weight of his Phyrexian prosthesis—there he was. Grafted into him, something hateful, but there, the man, the man who had cared and loved, the man who had been there—was he not the man she should protect? And yet, and yet—
He didn't care. Black lightning poured from his hand, crackling into Danitha's chest and hurling her backwards. Her face ached, burned, like the sun had grown angry and smote her where she stood. She rolled against the ground, fragments of wood and stone and glass crunching beneath her as she slid along. There, over her shoulder, she saw the rest: Phyrexian forces circling around the Coalition, Nathyn and the reservists and desperately pushing metal husks away from Adeliz, who lay slumped against the pew, streaming with sweat and tears and blood. Aryel smashing her sword against Moira's ebon visage, emerald fog swirling all around them, clogging the knight's eyes and nose and mouth. Moira holding her by the throat, squeezing. And there, there was Marten, and Merah, and Aveya, and Nathyn's daughter, all of them, watching there, in frozen motion, looking back; in Marten's eyes, there burned light like flames, gazing out at her. Her duty, broken, crumbling, slipping away.
And there was Teshar, sweeping down upon her. She caught garbled words: "Glory," "Unity," "One." It was melodious. It was horrible. His holy words, turned to poison, breathing down, pouring out unholy darkness upon her, face burning, skin sizzling, and there was his laugh, his scream, awful, echoing all around them with the resonance of an unholy sacrament.
"You will not kill me," Teshar barked. "Your duty. Nothing. A weakness. To be wiped away."
In those moments, as his claws closed around her throat and she closed her eyes, tears streaming down, praying, asking for Serra, her father, anything, to grant her mercy in these final moments, to let them all die quickly.
"Danitha. Do your duty."
Her duty.
She opened her eyes. And saw something new.
There rippled, before her, something that came from without, but that also rose from somewhere deep within, something pulsing, something alive, but not just alive: it was something boundlessly alive, shimmering like an ocean of starlight which you could stare at and see in its depth, awestruck, the open secret of all things. These people being here, just as themselves, miraculous, themselves: the shape of Marten there, there, just there, him, nothing more, but more profoundly, nothing less. As though the swirling cosmic spheres had aligned and opened and she could see not just the things before her but the endless sidereal world beneath them, a stellar breath which whispered: It is you, here and now, who I love, and this love is life boundless.
She recalled the oath she had made a lifetime ago, that she had consecrated again that morning. I will protect the less fortunate. I will love bravely. I will face despair and fight on. She had known that the oath bound her to something beyond, and that was there, yes; but she had forgotten why she had composed it herself, why it must have come from her: oaths bind you to what is beyond yourself but must also come from the most primordial place within, the place in which your being is riveted to the ground of all creation. Her duty reached within and without.
With all the force in her body, she kicked, feeling cracks beneath her boot—once, twice, thrice—and Teshar was away.
It was, she thought dimly, stepping to her feet, as Teshar himself had said, on the other side of time. It was testament to the truth that this world, and that prismatic reality that thrummed within it, was holy. It was to be fought for, loved, not for honor's sake, but because it was worth it. Worth loving. Her duty.
And then she was back, and this nightmare Teshar was his staff down upon her, a foul-smelling wind swirling around its crest as the ruby light of Phyrexian death glinted off the blades.
And there was her sword, pulsing in the stained-glass radiance in Serra's name, dashing Teshar's staff off course. She rolled to the side, scrambling to her feet, and took a defensive position—a sword stance her father had taught her, as his mother had taught him, on and on through generations, streaming love, Benalish or Sheoltun or nationless, and for that matter Shiv and Yavimayan and Argivian and Keldon, coursing through, binding them—not because it was violent, no, nor because it was honorable, those were just incidental—no, because it was of this world and this world was filled with slivered astral light and was, at the end, worthwhile.
Another swing from Teshar, another deflection, and then she twirled like sunlight on the sea and she felt her sword slip through air as an extension of her body—and Teshar's staff lay split in half on the ground.
It didn't deter him. The monster that was the missionary charged at her, clicking, squawking, gibberish dripping with poison. She ducked, then surged up, feeling the crack of porcelain under her shoulder as she flung Teshar to the ground. That would be the opening to go in, drive her sword into his chest, but—no. Back to the defensive stance. Teshar's legs bent at impossible angles and sang out with a sickening crunch as his limbs spin into place. His claws extended again—then caught her bracer.
The world's heart beat. She ached. She saw in him that light that pulsed in all Creation. But he would, like this, snuff out as much as the Phyrexians demanded—all of it. And so as Teshar charged her once more, Danitha screamed and drove her blade into his chest.
Ichor the color of black opal seeped onto her blade. Teshar slumped forward into her, at first thrashing, clawing, and then coming to a rest.
"Please, Brother," she breathed. "Know peace."
A moment, a breath. All creation shifted. And then, something happened. Something that Danitha did not explain and could not explain and would not explain all her life save for the quiet whisperings in the depth of her heart.
There shone through the stained-glass light of the cathedral, in the faces of Serra and Gerrard, a beaming prismatic ray, searing away the coagulated oil, and in that exploding auroral light, the Phyrexians slowed, became sluggish, slumped, screamed, sprung back—and the Coalition members became stronger, faster, sweeping aside the invaders. And there, pressed close to Danitha, in Teshar, there pulsed warmth, life, being, and then it poured forth from him once more, not as his stinking fetid lightning but in bolts of red and blue, purple and green and gold, spearing the Phyrexians through, blasting Moira aside, giving Aryel space to maneuver, driving the ebon necromancer back to the corners of the cathedral and out again, emerald smoke following in her wake.
Then in a rapid flash like a receding rain it was gone, and Teshar was slumped against her, whispering in a dulcet melody which she could not be sure she heard but which she knew she did.
Later, she would be told later that it was the angels, Argenta and Ranai, releasing a burst of angelic energy to which the Phyrexians were vulnerable. On further inspection, it was speculated that someone, perhaps her, had tapped into a reserve of mana, letting unformed magic flow forth, in some kind of miracle that defied her lack of magical prowess. And yet.
She remembered hitting the ground, half-closing her eyes, as though before her was some sweet sleep that had been calling to her. She remembered arms around her: Aryel's and Nathyn's and Marten's alike, carrying her along, whispering, in all of them, I will not let you go, for in that fragility there was something alive and it was love.
It was not until they had burst forth from the cathedral and sprinted along the waterway, now alight with activity, and dove down into the water, into the waiting arms of their merfolk vanguards and been propelled up onto the deck of a boat, that Danitha could rest. Aryel was there, by her side, gazing up, as through a fog, at the dappled starlight, streaked with splashes of multicolored aurorae that trailed behind the angels. Peace.
To say the war then ended is untrue, for it did not. To say there were no casualties, no broken hearts, no shorn lives—this, too, would be untrue. Dominaria was a massive world, full of lives broken by the Invasion. But it was also full of lives who refused to slip into the darkness.
Such Danitha knew in that moment, as Marten hurried about her, scribbling notes in his makeshift ledger to calculate squadron sizes, troop movements, rations. All around them, the survivors of Croden whirled, an organism alive and divided into a hundred hundred parts, beneath the banner of the Coalition. Some were slipping on suits of armor and training for the first time in years or the first time in their lives, with blades, battleaxes, maces, shields.
Over them all, looming, like a raven—no, indeed, like some albatross, lingering, dark and purpled and yet hopeful—as Aveya Joryev. She would remain in Ruzon, heading the city's defenses with Adeliz. The Benalish would not be short of leaders, not while she was around. Such was Danitha's burden: she could not stay with them all, could not protect them all—but she would ensure they would not be alone.
But there were others there who were prepared to journey again. Some—there was Nathyn and their daughter, smiling together, looking at Danitha, not alone, never alone—had bent the knee to the House Capashen, pledging their arms, their work, their hands (dusty with flour), whatever they might provide. And they needed much. Danitha herself was recovering and Aryel was co-leading the contingent—but Danitha saw etched in Aryel's face some call of pain, the ache of that spectral Urborg, the tears calling them to return home.
Soon, she had promised. First, they would reach Benalia City—which, they had finally received word, now that Teshar's interference had dissipated, was repulsing the invasion. The Serra Angels, it seemed, were not prepared to lose anything else to Phyrexia. Danitha wasn't either.
Another look around: at Marten's oaky eyes, Aveya's gleaming purple, Adeliz's sapphire and crimson, Nathyn's beaming brightness, Aryel's deep obsidian black, the mottled manifold of agony and faith and hope amidst Benalia's people.
She breathed in, breathed out. Let her heart beat time to that song whose rhythms played in the depths of her spirit.
The light of love shines brightly through even the smallest of cracks. All shall be illuminated. Canto 903. Her favorite.
She saw, there, before her eyes, gazing up at the streaming light, something else, shimmering there, like a vision half-real, watery like a dream, and yet undoubtedly there. It was herself, not bent low or crying out, but there, back straight, blade by her side, in the chapel of Capashen Manor, swimming in a sea of emerald and gold and red and purple light that poured through stained-glass windows—beaming, she saw, with clear vision despite the tears which filled her eyes, through an image, solid, real, of a man in stained-glass armor with oaky eyes and a smile that bodied forth a lifetime of love. And as she gazed into his face, preserved here not as as a monster but as a hero, as the man he was, she felt rays of light seep into her and felt something beyond herself, an embrace, a love profound, pouring into her, filling in the cracks, raising her up on a pillar, encircling her and suffusing her, and touching her spirit, as words rose forth in her mind: I love you.
Tomorrow they would set out for Benalia City. Tomorrow, back on the road, they would struggle, and suffer, and find themselves rising, again, before the tide of Phyrexian death. But she would rise. She would protect. She would love bravely. She would face despair. And she would fight on.
It was her duty: she could do no less.
The end. For now.