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  The axe sliced deeply through the shield. Metal bloomed from either side of the blade. The blade cleft Gerrard’s left hand. Nerveless, he dropped his shield. It tumbled, riven, to the ground.

  Gerrard fell back a second step. He certainly had not planned on that. He brought his sword up in sudden hopelessness.

  The second axe blade struck. It caught Gerrard’s great sword just above the crosspiece and clove through. A six-foot blade was shorn to six inches. In its follow-through, the axe came about again. The head that had cleft Gerrard’s shield struck the pommel and hurled it away from his grasp. He took a third step back, bleeding hands flung out to his sides.

  The fourth and final stroke came violently. The axe hit Gerrard’s chest. Razor steel chopped through the leather tunic he wore, through the cloth beneath it and the skin beneath that. It cleft the sternum as if it were the wishbone of a game hen. The blade continued on, bisecting the left lung and the heart ensconced there. At last, the edge lodged itself in the young man’s spine.

  Apocalypse

  ©2001 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering, their respective logos, and all character names and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  Cover art: Brom

  Internal art: Brian “Chippy” Dugan, Dana Knutson, Todd Lockwood, Anson Maddocks, r.k. Post, Mark

  Tedin, and Anthony Waters

  First Printing: June 2001

  eBook Publication: March 2018

  Original ISBN 9780786918805

  Ebook ISBN 9780786966455

  640-C5608000-001

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  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: The Gladiators

  Chapter 2: Revelations from the Thran Tome

  Chapter 3: Defenders of Dominaria

  Chapter 4: A Steely Cloud

  Chapter 5: A Lonely and Glorious Thing

  Chapter 6: Four Gods in Nine Spheres

  Chapter 7: Rock Druids

  Chapter 8: Into the Labyrinth

  Chapter 9: Out of the Frying Pan

  Chapter 10: The Music of the Spheres

  Chapter 11: How Lazy the Ages

  Chapter 12: Elsewhere, in Phyrexia

  Chapter 13: Weatherlight Reborn

  Chapter 14: Rock Folk

  Chapter 15: Of Axemen and Heads

  Chapter 16: The World Killers

  Chapter 17: In the Monsters’ Lair

  Chapter 18: Battles Without and Within

  Chapter 19: Lava Rising

  Chapter 20: To Set the Captive Free

  Chapter 21: The Duelists

  Chapter 22: The Gutting of Phyrexia

  Chapter 23: The Eyes of Urza

  Chapter 24: Yawgmoth

  Chapter 25: Weatherlight Gains a New Crew

  Chapter 26: Struggle for the Very World

  Chapter 27: When Gods Do Battle

  Chapter 28: Disparate Salvations

  Chapter 29: The Doom of Dominaria

  Chapter 30: Chiaroscuro

  Chapter 31: The Choice of Heroes

  Chapter 32: Death Meets Death

  Chapter 33: In the Garden of Heroes

  Dedication

  To Jaya, Dragontrainer, and all the fans—

  This one’s for you.

  (Actually, they’re all for you, but this one especially.)

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, Jess. What a great run we had!

  Thanks, Mary and Peter, for everything.

  Thanks, Scott, Daneen, Tyler, and Bill for such a terrific setting.

  Thanks, Urza, Gerrard, Sisay, Hanna, Orim, Tahngarth, Squee, Multani, Karn, Eladamri, Liin Sivi, Grizzlegom, and a host of others, but especially Yawgmoth, you little devil, you.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Gladiators

  It all came down to this: two men kneeling side by side before Yawgmoth.

  These were no mere men, of course. One was a virtual god. His long, ash-blond hair spread across the stone, and his powerstone eyes were cast in deep shadow. Urza Planeswalker had first opened the gate to Phyrexia, had fought the first Dominarian war against demon hordes, had planned and executed the current world war down to its minutest detail. He had lived for millennia and had spent all the while preparing to face Yawgmoth—though he had never expected to do so in a full, abject, and willful bow.

  Beside him knelt a man who wasn’t even a hundredth his age. No gray showed in his jet-black hair, and no worry lines in his high forehead, though he had inherited worry enough for a whole world. As Urza had unwittingly begun this great horror, Gerrard had unwillingly received the onus of ending it. Centuries of eugenics had distilled courage, resourcefulness, wit, tenacity, and ferocity in a single vessel—Gerrard Capashen. With these qualities, he should have defeated the invaders. Instead, he bowed to them.

  Side by side, the two best hopes for Dominaria pledged themselves to Yawgmoth.

  The Ineffable was there and not there. Yawgmoth’s mind formed the black dais where Gerrard and Urza bowed. Colder, sharper, more merciless than granite, the dais stole each breath as it panted from the two men. It felt their homage in splayed and sweating hands. Beyond their fingertips lay more pieces of Yawgmoth’s mind—cudgels, axes, swords, maces, whips, flails, branding irons, and every other death conceivable by the Lord of Death. These fantastical weapons, ored and smithed and sharpened by the One Mind, glowed avidly. Yawgmoth was in the dais and the weapons, in the black sands that filled the wide arena and in the black stands that circled them and the black sky that overarced it all. The arena and its weapons were no more or less than the dream of a god.

  In all this irreality, only one thing was real.

  Gerrard lifted his head and gazed toward the stands.

  A solitary figure stood there. Hanna. Hair of gold, eyes of blue, skin of silk, lips of rose—only she was solid and true. Hanna had become all the world to Gerrard. He no longer cared to save Dominaria or even himself. He cared only to save her. To do so he had damned his own soul. That was why Gerrard bowed here.

  But what bent the knee of the Planeswalker? Surely he did not bow for true love. Who, out of all eternity, had ever deserved Urza’s love? Who but Yawgmoth himself?

  Suddenly, Hanna was not alone in the stands. From dark corridors, creatures emerged.

  The first were tall and gaunt, with skeletal faces and bodies draped in black robes. They moved like puppets on strings, weightless and jittery. Behind them loped hulking creatures. Enormous eyes rolled fitfully in their rumpled faces. Clawed hands knuckle-walked down stairs. Then came spidery monsters that ambled on clicking legs. Beasts arrived in multitude—goat-headed warriors and cicada men, clockwork horrors and gibbering imps, creatures with mucous-skin and brains on
arthropodal legs, monsters covered in jag-edged knives, bald albinos with serpent tongues, onyx-eyed angels, blood-lipped devils, vampire hounds, skeletal vipers. Phyrexians all.

  Doubtless, this was Yawgmoth’s Inner Circle. Who else would he admit to this unholy place? These were the most vicious, murderous, and hateful of his minions. They slithered and floated, clomped and skittered to seats all around the amphitheater. The ground shook. Quite soon, the arena was filled. Hisses, shrieks, bellows, and moans rioted in the air. The stench of rot and filth, blood and oil, rolled downward.

  For all their savagery, though, not a beast touched Hanna. Among them she walked, inviolate and determined, toward a balcony on one end of the arena.

  It held a great black dragon, larger than the planeswalker Szat, larger than the Primeval Crosis. The beast’s mantle bristled with horns. Its manifold wattle expanded with vile breath. Claws as wide around as a man clutched the rail of the balcony and seemed to sink into the stone. Voluminous wings draped robelike down its hackled back.

  Urza lifted his head and stared. On wondering lips, he spoke the name, “Yawgmoth.”

  Hanna ascended to the balcony and seated herself within the ebon shadow of the enthroned dragon. She set her hand on his foretalon.

  In amazed dread, Gerrard said, “She’s taken his hand. She’s taken Yawgmoth’s hand.”

  “That dragon alone is not Yawgmoth,” Urza replied, gesturing toward the wicked throng. “They all are Yawgmoth.”

  Gerrard understood. These gathered spectators were not servants of the god. These were avatars. He had filled the whole arena with fleshly simulacra of himself. He saw through their eyes and heard through their ears and felt through their bodies. Though thousands upon thousands of creatures assembled, this was, in truth, a private audience.

  The crowd quieted. Mouth plates and mandibles shuddered to silence. Every eye trained upon the two figures in their midst. The weight of that stare pressed Gerrard’s and Urza’s heads down to the stone. Where once they had bowed their faces, now their entire bodies went prostrate. That stare could have crushed them, but it did not. Yawgmoth did not want their corpses. He wanted their worship.

  Through thousands of teeth and from thousands of tongues, a single voice formed itself: the voice of Yawgmoth. “At last, it has come to this.”

  “Yes, Lord Yawgmoth,” breathed Urza reverently, “at last.”

  “It was inevitable,” continued the voice of the multitude, the voice of the One. “All living things will bow before us. All things that do not bow will die. Even you, our greatest foes, lie now upon your faces in worship—and you live.”

  “Praise be to thee, Lord Yawgmoth,” responded Urza.

  Gerrard lay silent before the awful god.

  “But you will not both live. Only one is needed to hand us Dominaria. Only one will ascend. The other will die.”

  The men lifted their heads and stared toward the high balcony.

  Gerrard’s eyes reflected the slim blue glow of Hanna.

  Urza’s eyes—queerly faceted things—reflected only the utter blackness of the dragon.

  The men did not speak to their new master, but their faces asked a unison question: Is it I, Lord? Is it I who will sit in the hollow of your breast? Is it I who will die?

  “We do not choose who will live and who will die. Through conflict, we rise. Through killing, we live. Through phyresis, we are transformed. We have slaughtered nations and worlds, have piled bodies to the heavens that we might ascend them. And we have ascended.

  “If you will ascend, you must do so in battle. Already, you have risen this far. You have buried friends—nations of friends—and climbed up their backs. How else would you win your way here, to bow before us? But to rise beside us, you must fight one battle more, must bury one friend more.

  “You, Urza Planeswalker, and you, Gerrard Capashen, shall battle one another to the death. We are the Lord of Death. We shall make the victor our servant. We shall make the slain soul our plaything.”

  Urza stared solemnly toward the balcony, his eyes glinting in thought. “Great Lord, forgive my presumption, but it would be a waste to destroy this masterpiece beside me. Gerrard Capashen took eight hundred years to engineer. Rather than destroy him, allow me to grant him to you, a gift, as was my titan engine—”

  Gerrard interrupted, “I was about to say what a shame it would be to smash this old fossil. So many would pay to see his bones.”

  Urza snorted. “You are a mere man. You cannot hope to defeat me. I am a planeswalker.”

  Before Gerrard could respond, the crowd spoke the words of Yawgmoth. “Not here, Urza. You are not a planeswalker here. We have stripped you of every weapon, every spell, every immunity. Here, you and Gerrard both are mortal. One of you will prove it all too soon. Gerrard, let youth empower you. Urza, let age empower you. They and your wits are your natural weapons. The only other weapons you may wield are those before you.”

  The gladiators—for that was what they had become—turned their gazes to the swords, axes, and clubs ranked before them. Motes of energy raced around razor-sharp blades and brutal spikes.

  “Each is deadly in its own right. Each is also magically enhanced to strike not simply flesh but also spirit. Perfectly conceived, perfectly designed, perfectly balanced, these weapons are the finest you will ever wield. Learn from them. Experiment. Practice on each other, and when you can strike a clean and killing blow, do so. We judge the living and the dead. Only a pure and worthy victory will be rewarded.”

  Gerrard raised himself to one knee. Clear eyed, he peered toward Yawgmoth and Hanna. “I’ll gladly fight Urza. He created me in misery and doomed me to kneel here. I would fight him and slay him for no reward, and ascending beside you, Lord Yawgmoth, is great reward. Still, the contest would be more interesting if you’d give one extra boon to the winner and one extra curse to the loser.”

  The horrid menagerie heard. Through fangs and proboscises, they spoke. “We will do it. The victor shall receive that which he most desires. The soul of the vanquished, gathered unto us, will receive that which he most dreads. But your foe shall declare first. Name your desire, Urza called Planeswalker.”

  Though Gerrard had lifted himself to one knee, Urza yet lay facedown. His mouth sent ghosts of steam across the stone. He spoke in a whisper, but the dais was Yawgmoth. It gathered the sound and sent it out through the arena.

  “I wish but one boon, Great Lord—to learn from you, to understand all you have done and how you have done it, to explore the brilliance I behold in this place, in this world. I want to know how you have brought metal to life and how you have made life into metal. I want to understand not only artifice but phyresis. I want to worship, and in worshiping, to know.”

  Silence answered that request, and then the voices: “So it shall be granted to you, Urza called Planeswalker, should you prevail.” The eyes of the crowd turned upon Gerrard. “And what of you, Capashen? What boon would you beg?”

  He rose to stand. The movement seemed so strange, there beside the prostrate planeswalker. But something in Gerrard’s eyes prevented Yawgmoth from lashing out.

  “I want only Hanna. Return her to life. I don’t want her on a string, as you keep Selenia. I want her free, alive, and able to walk through that portal back to Dominaria. I want you to place a mark of protection on her, that no Phyrexian dare harm her. For Hanna I fight.”

  A thrill moved through the assembled host. In the black balcony, Hanna sat beside the huge lizard. Her hand did not lift from its great talon.

  “For one woman, you give up a whole world?”

  Gerrard took a deep breath. “She is my whole world.”

  Heads shook and tongues clucked. “A great weakness, Gerrard, to have so big and soft a heart—a great weakness in a world filled with blades. We will grant this boon to you, as you ask, should you prevail.” The air whined with an eager tension. A sudden gleam traced the weapons at the edge of the dais. “Now, Urza Planeswalker and Gerrard Capashen—ris
e and take up blades and do battle.”

  The Benalish master-of-arms cared nothing for halberds or poniards, tridents or mattocks. Gerrard wanted a sword—no unwieldy bastard sword or fainting rapier but a solid cutlass, the blade of a skyfarer. He strode toward the nearest one. Stooping, he clutched its hilt. It tingled, alive in his grip. Barbs of energy prickled across his knuckles and moved through his veins. The sword and its arcane powers reached through the sinews of his body and tied knots in his heart. This blade had much to teach. Gerrard spun, leveling the sword. It hummed, thirsty for the blood of the planeswalker.

  Urza stood there, unarmed. His strange gaze moved patiently from one weapon to the next. Here was the artificer, analyzing each hammer and rod against Gerrard as though he were an engine to be disabled. Through his mind tumbled weight ratios, tensile strengths, moments of arc, and calculated torque. He would not slay Gerrard but dismantle him, an artificer destroying a rogue machine.

  The thought enraged Gerrard. The knots in his heart tightened, wringing hatred from twisted muscle. Let Urza ponder his weapon choice, spending time he did not have. Gerrard would teach him his error. He strode across the dais.

  Eyes gleaming, Urza stooped and drew up a simple pike of polished steel. It was a defensive weapon, meant to keep attackers at bay, but useless once they had closed. Still, the black energies that crawled down the shaft told that this weapon had its own secrets. Power jagged into the hands of the planeswalker and crawled beneath his flesh, teaching him its ways.