Jess Lebow - The Darksteel Eye

It was as if his eyes had been covered over with grease. His vision cleared, and he could see the world for how it really was. Suddenly, everything was right in Mirrodin. It did not matter that he hadn’t caught the elf. He had time, and now he had an increased mental and physical capacity.

“She’s mine,” he said.

Standing up, Malil wiped the last of the serum from his lips with the back of his hand. But when he pulled it away, he didn’t see the pure shimmering color of blinkmoth serum. His hand was covered in a thin red liquid-like elf blood. He touched his lip again, and more of the substance came away. The flask as well had traces of the stuff on its broken edge.

Now that he thought about it, the strange sensation he had felt while searching the floor was still bothering him. Turning over his hand, he examined his palm.

It too was covered in this red liquid. A piece of glass protruded from just under his index finger, and the liquid seemed to be pumping from a scratch in his hide.

Malil dropped the beaker and grabbed hold of the shard of glass. Pulling it out, he touched his palm. A small patch of it had become soft. Where the glass had been, there was an incision, and it wept fluid.

The metal man touched his lip. It too felt soft, and a small wound just like the one on his hand was leaking.

He was bleeding.

Memnarch stirred.

“Master.” Malil shook the prone frame. “Master, are you all right?”

Memnarch stared at him with unseeing eyes. “Serum. We must have serum. We must … know .”

“Yes, Master,” replied Malil. “Where do I find it?”

Memnarch pointed to the ruined infusion device.

Malil nodded. “It’s broken.”

Memnarch shook his head, pointing emphatically to something beside him. There, lying on the ground, was a large hose. On one end was a sharp-tipped needle.

* * * * *

Glissa stepped out around an unusually wide monolith, and suddenly she was outside of the mycosynth forest. Directly before her, a short hill dropped softly down into a valley, and beyond that, a wide, rolling expanse opened up underneath the humming mana core. In the far distance, just below the point where the ground curved up, disappearing from view, she could just make out the base of Panopticon.

“It’s still a long way,” said Bruenna, stepping up behind her.

Glissa nodded. “Perhaps we should rest here. Something tells me the opportunities will grow fewer the closer we get to the tower.”

Bruenna nodded. “A wise decision,” she said. “What about the golem? The longer we linger, the more he turns to flesh.”

Glissa looked up at Bosh. He still appeared much the same as he had when she first met him. Now, though, he was far more expressive. His stoic, unmoving jaw smiled or frowned, depending on his mood-and his mood, Glissa found, changed quickly.

Right now, he was happy. The edges of his lips curled up, and his eyes seemed more open. Maybe all the things she had been telling him about being flesh were true. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all to become like her, live a life that was more frail but more enjoyable because of that vulnerability.

“You’re right,” replied Glissa finally. “We should keep moving.”

The elf headed down the hill, moving slowly closer to the far distant Panopticon. The others followed close behind. When they reached the bottom of the valley and headed back up, Glissa heard a strange noise.

“What’s that?”

Bruenna turned her head to listen. “I do not know.”

Slobad recognized the sound. “Threshers.”

As if the goblin’s words summoned a pack of hungry beasts, a line of buzzing threshers rolled over the hill and descended on them. Similar in design to levelers, threshers were smaller, faster, hunched-backed killing devices. In place of the scissoring scythe blades, these creatures had a rotating cylinder of interlocking, curved cutting devices.

Glissa had seen them before on the plains, roaming around when the razor grass fields had grown too long to see over. They dug deep, mazelike pathways into the growing blades.

What purpose their ritual served, Glissa was uncertain. She’d seen the leonin use the cut grass to built weapons, but they were not responsible for these killing devices. Memnarch was.

The threshers rolled down the hill, their spinning blades chewing up the mossy ground covering. Glissa drew her sword. The wizards had already drawn mana, and their spells flew. The long blue tracers of their arcane magics lit up the sky. Glissa flashed back to the many fights she’d faced with these human spellcasters. They were fast. Their spells always struck first, taking a heavy toll on whatever was coming at them.

The wizards’ spells splashed against the advancing line of threshers, and for a moment a few of their number were lost in a cloud of mystical energy. Bruenna let out a whoop, but she fell silent when those same devices rolled out of the cloud, unharmed.

“What happened?” asked Glissa.

Bruenna shook her head. “They are either immune to magic or-” she turned to look Glissa in the eye-“they are no longer made of metal.”

That was all the conversation they had time for, as the rolling devices crashed into them.

Bosh was the first to encounter the foe. Kicking out, he smashed the first in line in the side, expertly avoiding the spinning blades, aiming for a spot right beside the creature’s eye. A well-placed blow here could incapacitate it, shaking loose the constructs that made it run, leaving it an empty shell that could be ignored on the battlefield.

The golem’s foot landed squarely where he aimed, but instead of the pounding boom of hollow metal, Bosh’s foot sank deep into soft, pliable skin. The creature let out a squeal and skittered back, as if it had felt pain. It shuddered and jolted from side to side. Bosh’s blow hadn’t incapacitated it, but it seemed to have confused the creature. He didn’t have time to worry about it, as the next thresher fell on him, its blades spinning.

Glissa too was engaged in a fierce fight. She cut down, sending her blade into the spinning teeth of her opponent. She had yet to really test her new weapon. The Sword of Kaldra would have cut through anything, bone, metal, flesh, it didn’t matter. She had grown accustomed to its power, and she fought now as if she still wielded it.

The steel blade slashed across the leveler’s mowing cylinder, and it cut deep, but it wasn’t metal it bit into; it was flesh. Blood spurt from a tremendous gash, washing over Glissa and covering her in the sticky red fluid. The wounded thresher shied back, and two more took its place.

Glissa fought off the two devices. Though they had become flesh, their blades were still sharp. They left long gashes in the metallic floor of the interior, and the elf knew enough to keep herself away.

Fighting these part-flesh, part-metal artifacts was like fighting a forest beast in the Tangle. That thought reminded her of something her father had told her as a young elf going out on her first hunting party. “Some bits are metal, other bits flesh, but you always want to stay away from the teeth.”

Glissa pulled her blade back, coming across with both hands and swiping at a thresher in a flat slice. The tip of her sword cut into the creature’s eyes, and she took a step back. Her swift attack bought her enough time to spare a glance over her shoulder. What she saw didn’t make her happy.

The Kaldra Champion floated over a pack of threshers. The smaller creations were fast and more agile than their leveler counterparts. The Champion smashed his fist to the ground, but the devices darted away unscathed. Against bigger, slower targets, he was a superb fighter. Against these little creatures, the Kaldra Champion was nearly useless.