Time Streams: Artifacts Cycle Bk. 3 by J. Robert King

Author:J. Robert King [King, J. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2018-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Urza descended. It felt nice not to have to walk. It felt nice to indulge himself in the luxuries of being a planeswalker, to forget about the worrisome business of feigning breath and blinking, of being asked to join in dinners. For him, eating was only a nuisance. Despite his many almost limitless powers—stepping plane to plane with little more than a thought, casting all colors of magic at high levels, living beyond the terrors of ravaging time, seeing to the essence of things, smelling Phyrexian blood at a hundred paces—portraying a convincing human was a task that was at once vexing in its minutiae and exhausting in its limitations. It was a small and tedious job, but a necessary one.

Except in times like these.

Urza descended past great rafts of sulfuric cloud and banks of rusty steam. His ceremonial robes shrank inward about him, becoming a suit marked with drake-feather pads to deflect the volcanic heat of the landscape. His sandals transformed into thick leather boots that laced to the knee. Hair braided itself tightly to his head, proof against stray fingers of flame. He needn’t enter a landscape this way, dropping from such a height, but he wanted to survey this land before alighting upon it. And, frankly, he enjoyed the ride.

Urza had descended once before this way, returning to the ancient, ruined wasteland where he and Mishra had first discovered the Thran site of Koilos. That landscape, blasted by a force that sank continents and brought a millennium of winter to the world, could not have been more tortured than this one.

Backlit mountains jutted in a devilish ring against the sooty horizon. At their tilted tops, steamy lakes glowed evilly in haloes of brimstone. Twisted piles of rock slumped down the sides of these silent sentinels, and rivers of stone pulsed and glowed like arteries. Among them, black courses formed networks of cool veins. Black and red alike, the rivers plunged into a great steaming ocean of bubbling lava, beside which sat twisted columns of stone like dejected statues. The magma vented gasses in mile high jets, rock-spitting coronas, and foamy, belching chunks that sizzled nastily along the shore.

Urza descended. He landed atop a knob of stone that overhung this seething sea of fire. Beneath his feet, the rock was maroon and warm and rumpled, like a glob of blood pudding. All around him, the air was hot and thick with noxious fumes. Urza breathed and reminded himself what a good thing it was to be immortal.

He lifted his gaze. There, above him, magnificent in the dead glare of the place and the roiling gloom of the sky, was what he had come to see: the mana rig.

It crouched on a massif of basalt, vulturelike on broad talons of stone and cast clay. These talons ended in myriad claws that reached in a webwork down the rock face to the boiling caldera below. The extrusion looked like a gigantic heart, and once it had functioned that way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.