Jess Lebow: The Darksteel Eye

A wave of warm, embracing rage flooded up her spine, erasing the pain in her ribs and filling her with a new strength. She wanted to torture the Kaldra Champion, make it feel the same betrayal that she had felt, make it suffer as she had, make it pay for the deaths of Bosh and Slobad.

The Radix lit up with green fire. The inscribed runes and symbols glowed with a preternatural light, and jags of power leaped from the ground to the trees and up against the Kaldra Champion.

In that moment, Glissa felt the mana of the Tangle flow to her without her willing it. The power of the forest, the entire forest, was at her command, and she funneled it into her rage, shaping it with her anguish, focusing it with her pain into the Kaldra Champion.

Suddenly, the Radix exploded. A ball of green mana, as large as the moons of Mirrodin, burst through the ground. In a blink the plate was evaporated, and the trees for miles in each direction fell to the ground, laid low by the force of the blast.

The green lacuna had come. The new green moon shot from the ground and smashed into the Kaldra Champion. The shield, sword, and helm were all consumed in a flash of green energy. His magical fists and head dropped away, and with them Glissa too dropped to the ground into the tangled burning wreckage.

Glissa awoke jammed between two downed, partially melted trees. Her head hurt. Her ribs hurt. Even her teeth hurt.

How long she’d been out, she did not know.

She sat up and looked around. Where the Radix had been, there was now a huge hole, much like the other lacunae. All around, the Tangle had been melted or bent. The trees lay in straight rows like neatly combed hair, and everything was burnished or molten.

Nothing moved.

Glissa laid her head back and closed her eyes. She thought of Slobad. She tried to imagine what the last few moments of his life had been like, falling through the trees … She had to stop herself. It was too painful.

Something poked her in the head. “Crazy elf going to lie there all day, huh?”

Glissa’s eye’s popped open. “Slobad?”

The goblin’s face was covered in soot. He smiled, his dingy yellow teeth showing brightly through his blackened visage.

She grabbed him by the elbow, unable to get up for an embrace. “I thought you were dead.”

Slobad shook his head. “Naw.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Slobad just bounced, huh?”

* * * * *

Memnarch stood on top of the ruined wall of his laboratory. His skin was scorched, the wound on his leg was cauterized and sterile, and two of his eyes had been ruptured. He limped as he walked, barely able to keep himself up.

Panopticon had toppled to the ground, blown to bits by the green lacuna. Its insides were burnt and ruined. The windows in the observation level had all been blown out, their glass vaporized by the tremendous blast.

He looked up at the new hole in the floor of the interior. The green lacuna had finally come to pass. The world would be out of balance for some time to come.

In the wreckage of his tower fortress, Memnarch found Malil, lying on his side, still inside the darksteel Eye. The impervious metal frame of the scrying device had saved them both from being vaporized in the blast.

The Guardian of Mirrodin bent down and touched the metal man’s chest.

Malil’s eyes shot open.

Memnarch smiled. “Come, Malil,” he said. “We have much work to do, much work to do indeed.”