Magic the Gathering: Time Streams (Artifacts Cycle) by J. Robert King

Author:J. Robert King [King, J. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 2008-06-05T22:00:00+00:00

The words were needless. Urza had become Titania. His body had become a vast forest. He felt in every tissue of his being the destroying, despoiling work of his own armies. Minute creatures invaded his body and, mote by mote, turned him into mere minerals, mere resources.

Urza would have screamed, but he was no longer Urza. He would have planeswalked from the spot, but that would mean leaving his body, the forest, behind. He could only hang there, encased in wood, and endure.

Monologue

Urza is arriving in Yavimaya even as I write this. I know the forest's position, as unreachable and forbidding as

Shiv. He hopes to return in two days' time. Knowing Urza's sense of time-and guessing about the reception Yavimaya will have for him-I'll give him a week before I become unsettled.

This could well be the pivotal point for Urza. He has shown he is capable of building human alliances, and more than that-building coalitions among many races. Perhaps by creating an alliance with Yavimaya, he can make amends for Argoth. Perhaps no amount of penance could ever make amends for such atrocity.

We have our own atrocities under way in Tolaria. Just today I led a charge of scorpions against Phyrexian entrenchments at the border of Slate Waters. Given the physiology of my mechanical forces, a pincer movement naturally suggested itself. We flanked the main body of Phyrexians left and right and trapped them in their trenches. They were caught between us and the temporal curtain. I sent scorpion units flooding into their dens. Meanwhile, I drove a wall of wind down the middle. Flushed from cover, the beasts fell back into the time curtain at the edge of that charred swamp. I ordered a charge. We hurled them into the rift.

That passage would have killed any human. It did little more than further jangle these fiends. Even so, the extreme slow time of Slate Waters halted the Phyrexians in a thick wall. I ordered the scorpions to fire. Quarrels stormed out in a killing gale. The front line of Phyrexians was nearly sawed in half. They were spewing glistening oil in a cloud before them by the time a human contingent arrived to reinforce us.

One young woman tore a hunk of cloth from beneath her armor coat and doused it with oil from a fallen scorpion. She stuck the cloth on a spent quarrel, ignited it, and hurled the thing into the gap. It entered the spray of glistening oil. A dull orange glow spread from the spot. The fiery quarrel hung strangely in the air as slow flame rolled laterally out along the Phyrexian lines.

We stopped firing. We stood, staring in a mixture of exultation and dread. Languid tendrils of flame coiled out around fiendish arms and legs. We watched as our foes ignited. The cheer that came from us when hair and carapace were limned in flame devolved quickly to a groan. Eyeballs ruptured from the heat. Limbs were blasted away. The deep, horrid roar of dying monsters struck us.

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