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  “I have been a fool,” Crovax admitted, standing well beyond the reach of that sanguine blade, “hurling my best warriors at you. They may be worth nothing to you dead, but to me, their careers had only begun. I have lost a platoon here.”

  “That’s not all you will lose,” Gerrard replied, panting as he hefted his axe. “You’re out of warriors. Now you will lose your life.”

  “If you are truly to replace me, you had best know what you are in for. Let me show you what you lack.” Crovax motioned toward Gerrard with a crooked claw. “This is what you must be capable of to rule in my stead.” He turned his back on the stalking man, lifted his claws, and brought them down on the finger-bone keys of his agonophone.

  The wall came alive—not the wall, but the creatures racked on the wall, the living pipes of Crovax’s murderous organ. With each key his fingers depressed, a living creature shrieked out. Despair became music.

  Gerrard growled, hurling himself at the evincar. He fought against the current of screams. He would save those poor souls by putting his halberd in the man who tormented them. With all his might, he swung the blade toward Crovax. It sliced air before slicing spine.

  Except that Crovax stepped to one side. He had understood Gerrard’s compassion. He had known what the young man would do. The halberd did not strike the evincar of Rath. Instead, it crashed into the white-boned keys of the agonophone and pinned them down. Above, victims jittered in absolute agony, screaming their lungs raw. When one exhalation ran its course, they only sucked air to scream again. They were dying, slain by the savior of Dominaria.

  And now the savior needed a savior.

  Crovax knocked Gerrard’s jangled hands from the axe and the halberd. He caught Gerrard’s throat in his claws and squeezed. Flesh bulged in red bands beneath his constricting fingers. Crovax stared into his captive’s face.

  The evincar spoke. Rot-smelling breath billowed out. “It takes more than strength and speed and wit to rule here, Gerrard. It takes bloodlust. It takes the genuine fascination—no, genuine obsession with causing pain. Yes, you are strong. Yes, you are powerful. But until you are cruel, you will never rule in my stead.”

  With that, Crovax tightened his grip. Gerrard’s eyes spun for a crazy and delicious moment. Then, they went dark. In those lightless orbs, Crovax saw his own bright, distorted smile.

  CHAPTER 19

  Lava Rising

  Sister Dormet and her fellow rock druids strode with stolid patience down the basalt throat of the volcano. They hummed an ancient dwarven hymn. The treacherous slope led them to the floor of the cavern—what had once been a flood of lava. There, they would end this battle. They marched out beneath the massive shadow of the Stronghold.

  The impossible fortification was under impossible siege. At the main gate, Eladamri, Grizzlegom, and Liin Sivi battled their way inward. At the opposite end, more invaders fought—folk who had arrived in an otherworldly ship. All across the Stronghold, explosions mixed with shouts. Moggs, il-Vec, and worse things fell from balustrades. They shrieked all the way down and made sunbursts on the rock floor.

  Sister Dormet stepped around one such spot and pressed on, heedless. She and her folk had not come to fight these creatures. They had come to purge the mountain of its stain.

  Even when beasts pursued them, the rock druids did not fight. They merely paused midstride. Feet fused with the floor. Heads crouched down in hunched shoulders. The once-animate creatures transformed themselves into stout stalagmites. By the time the monsters arrived, whether slavering hounds or gibbering goblins or skittering machines, none could harm the dwarfs.

  This was their element. They made themselves harder than diamond, weightier lead. Not claws nor hammers nor drills could disrupt their rocky repose. The dwarfs merely waited.

  Most attackers abandoned them for livelier prey. Some few continued their assaults. For them, the dwarfs flashed red hot. Any creature touching them would be affixed and fry to death. Any within a few feet would spontaneously combust. Four or five times, the brave band of dwarf priests had left smoldering piles of bone as they moved onward.

  They reached the base of the cavern. Sister Dormet pivoted her massive hammer down to kiss the smooth stone. When steel touched basalt, there was a kind of kindred call between them. It heartened Sister Dormet. Fire had forged both hammer and lava, and it remained in both. Cleansing heat called, steel to stone. Soon, Sister Dormet and her company would marshal that heat.

  They marched, twenty-some dwarfs intent on destroying millions of Phyrexians. The soft ping of Sister Dormet’s hammer told her they would.

  * * *

  —

  Portcullis was its name—an enormous gateway into the Stronghold. The gargantuan bars of that gate bore plates of flowstone fashioned to resemble the face of onetime Evincar Volrath. The new ruler of the Stronghold, Crovax, had modified the image only by adding rows of crudely rendered shark’s teeth.

  Eladamri had known both oppressors—the wicked Volrath and the wickeder Crovax. His people, the Skyshroud Elves, had lived an eternity beneath the baleful glare of the Evincars of Rath. Now it was Eladamri himself who faced down that visage.

  “Portcullis must fall,” he hissed to his comrades, and pointed with the sword he held.

  Liin Sivi strode up beside him, her lithe figure painted in the green blood of moggs. “You mean, we must get past it.”

  “I mean it must fall,” reiterated Eladamri as he stared at that hated composite face.

  Grizzlegom arrived next. The blood-rimmed smile on his face told how much he enjoyed this battle. “What do you suggest?” He flung his hand toward the rail and the black cavern beyond. “Our demolitions experts are out of reach.”

  Nodding grimly, Eladamri said, “It’s just a matter of knowing what will explode and how to set it off.”

  “Glistening oil ignites with a simple flame,” Liin Sivi offered as the triumvirate advanced, at the head of a small but ferocious band of troops. “And it burns quite hot. Enough to set fire to, say, hydraulics fluids.”

  The elf commander’s eyes traced across the massive hydraulics cylinders that opened and closed the gates of Portcullis—mechanisms guarded by contingents of Phyrexian elite. Eladamri nodded wonderingly.

  “So,” Grizzlegom said, “we need to kill, stack, and burn the defenders of the gate, thereby detonating the hydraulics?”

  Liin Sivi and Eladamri nodded in unison.

  “As long as we’re talking dead Phyrexians, I’m in,” Grizzlegom said.

  He waved behind him, drawing forward an eager platoon of minotaurs. A quick hand signal told them to prepare weapons for battle and bunch tightly around their commander. The troops did so with remarkable efficiency. Halberds, hammers, and swords joined the axe of Grizzlegom, ready to slay. The weapons seemed almost gleaming teeth in a huge creature that charged forward.

  Eladamri released his own battle cry. Skyshroud and Steel Leaf elves crowded up to one side. All bore swords like his own, though the ones farther back kept their blades sheathed and their bows nocked. On Eladamri’s other side charged a handful of Keldons, each one worth ten men and armed with a great sword. With Eladamri, they would make the passageway run with glistening oil.

  Now, they needed someone to ignite the spark. Liin Sivi was the one. She had become ad hoc commander of the Metathran troops. The tall blue warriors had found something to appreciate in the scrappy and powerful Vec at their head. She was as fearless and fierce as a Metathran. She snatched up a torch ensconced along the flowstone bridge, lifted the fire high, and shouted, “Charge!” The Metathran did.

  In the vanguard, long-legged Grizzlegom and his minotaurs roared toward the gate. Metal flashed above their heads, and hooves cracked stone beneath. Il-Vec and il-Dal warriors braced for the charge. Though hypertrophied and machine-enhanced, the Rathi could not match the minotaurs’ fury.

  Grizzlegom’s axe rang upon an il-Dal’s war hammer and split the head of the thing. With a yank of his arm, he hauled axe and
hammer both away and smashed the warrior’s bearded jaw with his fist. The il-Dal folded up, only to reveal another warrior behind. Grizzlegom did not even pause to clear his fouled weapon, instead swinging axe and hammer both. The haft of the war hammer slammed into the guardian’s eye. Even as he was going down, the minotaur commander stole his war hammer. Axe in one hand and hammer in the other, Grizzlegom advanced over his foes.

  Eladamri meanwhile battled moggs. It was the ultimate war of high-brow against low. Eladamri and his elves seemed sculpted angels, and the moggs seemed melted devils. Razor swords battled bone-crushing cudgels; razor wits fought thumb-sucking meatheads. Eladamri dismantled his first opponent like a butcher dressing a hog. His sword cleft muscle from sinew and sinew from bone. The Keldons fought with equal ferocity, unmaking these corrupted images of the fey.

  Liin Sivi and her Metathran unit battled with the greatest power. They went toe-to-toe against not half-breed Rathi but real Phyrexians. While elves fought the ultimate perversion of elf flesh, Metathran fought creatures so like them in genetic manipulation that they might have been brothers. Blue hands grasped gray skulls and ripped them apart. Metathran heads bashed Phyrexian hearts. Liin Sivi’s own weapon flashed on its ringing chain and brought Phyrexian oil-blood gushing like ale from spigots. It took only a touch of her torch to engulf the rest of the beasts in flame.

  Fire rose, orange and red and blue, from the fallen Phyrexians. It ignited the standing ones. The blaze swept from them to beasts piled beneath massive hydraulics cylinders and mantled them in flames. While minotaurs fought il-Dal and elves fought moggs, true Phyrexians burned. Liin Sivi slew more and hurled their bodies onto the pyre. Soon, flames licked across every stippled edge of the opening mechanism.

  The first crack came, loud and glad, like the shout of a victor. Hydraulic fluids sprayed from the seam. They fanned out and caught fire. The blaze swept inward, fought past airless jags of steel, and reached the mechanisms within. Gears ground, cogs broke free, pistons popped, and the whole horrid dynamo disintegrated.

  One mechanism exploded, sending shrapnel across the battlefield. Jagged hunks of metal slew elves, minotaurs, and Metathran—but many more of the Stronghold’s defenders. The explosions unhinged the grinning gates of Portcullis. With a terrific shriek and moan, the bars slipped from their mountings. Coalition forces broke free from their battles to retreat at a run. When those gates came down, they crashed atop the few beasts left to defend the way within.

  “Onward!” shouted Eladamri. His command was echoed in the vengeful shout of his troops. “Onward, to Crovax’s lair!”

  “Onward!” they all replied, and the coalition forces charged over the wreckage of Portcullis.

  * * *

  —

  Sister Dormet and her comrades walked through a hellish space. The ground beneath their boots had hardened in tortuous forms. Cracks vented white clouds of sulfur steam, which rose and coiled like tentacles. All else was blackness and baking heat. Lesser races would have buckled and died, but dwarfs were made of rock and brimstone and blackness.

  No longer did they pause in their march. No longer did Rathi warriors and Phyrexian horrors sluice among them. The dwarfs plodded toward a great radiance—not of light, but heat. Across their whole bodies, they felt the volcanism. Heat was their god—all-creating, all-shattering heat.

  Sister Dormet tightened her grip on her hammer. She had not used the weapon against Phyrexian and Rathi foes, for it was a sacred device. This hammer was a physical manifestation of the one great tool that forged all the world, that pounded heat into matter and made the shape of things. It created; it did not destroy. The hammer would awaken heat in these very stones.

  The dwarfs marched from the forest of stalagmites and emerged on a long, shallow basin of stone. The cracks that crazed out before them hissed with sulfur. Like the converging lines of a web, those fissures reached toward a center—a deep, wide pit from which that incandescence came.

  Hammers held at the ready, the others wordlessly advanced down the treacherous slope. None slipped. None pitched into the dark crevices. They made their way with the surefooted ease of mountain goats. When another step would have pitched them down a shaft, they merely bounded over it.

  Wreathed in steam they went, and wreathed in song. With voices like grating stone, they sang a lay in the tongue of their kind:

  In ancient Dalrodrooma grew

  The rockbound blossom called milay,

  A flower sweeter grown in stone

  Than those in peat and blackest loam,

  And speckled with the morning dew.

  They sang of a flower nurtured in rock and darkness. They sang of themselves. With each line of the song, they struck the rock upon which they traveled. Their hammers awoke sudden heat. Instead of rock shards flying, the blows flung spatters of redhot stone. Impervious to the stuff, the rock druids marched on.

  The essence of the glad milay

  Distilled itself from rock-broke roots.

  In battle it was born forlorn

  And battling turned the chill murk warm,

  And wrested rainbows from the gray.

  They had reached the end of their journey—a deep, wide pit that gushed a fat column of steam. At the cliff’s edge, the dwarfs ceased their march and stood. Swinging their hammers against the cliff, they concluded their song.

  A flower by the steamy flue

  Cannot avoid the burning touch

  Of lava. Boiling stone is thrown

  Upon milay and sears its bloom—

  Until it cools and grows anew.

  With each blow of the hammers, more molten rock splashed from the edges of the pit. Long red channels of lava ran down the cliff, fingers reaching. Rhythmic impacts melted more stone, until each dwarf stood above a regular cascade of red. They sang on, and the probing lava at last reached low enough that it touched kindred stuff—magma. The quickening pulse of dwarf hammers sent life into the melting stone and into the molten lake below. In the midst of the deep well, a red eye blinked awake. It widened and grew nearer. The chant worked. The hammers worked. The rock druids awakened the stony depths.

  Yet they sang. Yet they pounded as the deadly flood welled up beneath them. A quarter mile below, five hundred feet, one hundred feet, ten feet…The incinerating red tide swept up.

  Still singing, Sister Dormet lifted her boot and set it onto the deluge of stone. She brought the other boot up beside the first. There she stood, hammer gripped at her side and voice singing. All the others did likewise. They rose on the cleansing tide, on the flood that would soon scour the Stronghold from Dominaria.

  * * *

  —

  How like old times, thought Eladamri. His sword made quick work of an il-Vec warrior. The thing had once been a man but was so contorted by grafts and gears as to have become a monster. With a slash across the middle, Eladamri made it into nothing at all. He did not pity the thing. Its own cowardice had made it what it was. The petty cowardice of individuals had enslaved whole nations to the Phyrexian overlords. If the only way to revoke that tyranny lay in slaying each coward who empowered them, Eladamri would do it. How like old times.

  He bashed past the fallen halves of the monster and took two more running steps down the corridor. Liin Sivi and Grizzlegom fought beside him. They descended a gnarled passageway like the throat of a great beast. Their footfalls and shouts reverberated from the glistening walls. Behind them crowded the warriors of the strike force. They had taken the flowstone bridge, destroyed Portcullis, and eradicated every beast along the main corridor of the Stronghold. More such beasts rose ahead of them.

  Eladamri’s sword decapitated a mogg as it lunged in the charge. Headless, the beast’s shoulders still rammed his stomach and shoved him back.

  Liin Sivi bounded on, wielding her toten-vec without letting fly. She buried the curved blade in an il-Dal’s belly and, cutting a quick circle, emptied the creature on the floor.

  Grizzlegom gored a pair of Rathi warriors.
He carried the two monsters for two steps more as he swung his axe into another’s torso. Then, like a dog flinging water from its pelt, he shook violently and flung the remnants of his three foes free upon the corridor floor.

  They flooded on, Liin Sivi now leading, Grizzlegom behind her, and a slightly winded Eladamri at the last. The way opened onto a wide balcony that overhung the inky blackness around the Stronghold. The balcony was crowded with monsters.

  Grizzlegom and Liin Sivi paved the way, each slaying two creatures and charging after more.

  Eager for the kill, the elf lord hurled himself at the first Rathi he could reach. His sword sang as it struck the thing’s slender shoulder and carved down through what should have been its heart. He drove the blade downward toward the viscera, a definite kill. There, the sword stopped. It caught on something hard, something glasslike embedded in the center of the thing. Growling his impatience, Eladamri rammed his blade through the beast and shoved it to ground.

  Only then did he see its face—her face. She was a young elf woman—once a Skyshroud Elf, though her flesh had the gray pallor of a Phyrexian construct, and her eyes were glass balls. She writhed on his sword, pinned like a bug. He could have killed her with a simple twist, but he stopped short. It was not what she was now—an ocular servitor, the likes of which he had seen before—but what she had been. She was no coward, but an elfchild abducted and turned into an instrument of evil. She was a creature much like his own daughter, Avila.

  As he looked down at the poor creature pinned on his sword, sweat and blood poured into Eladamri’s eyes, and brought tears too. They were not all cowards slain this day. Some were victims.

  A quick twist ended the struggles of his victim. Yet blinded, Eladamri stood above the fallen creature. He reeled, struggling to calm his thundering heart.