J. King - Onslaught

"You are my best work team. Quickest. Most efficient. Most skilled. You are my best. You must be the First's best." She strode on, stopping to stand on the back of the first dwarf.

Cotton burned away. Skin peeled back, muscle sloughed to rot, and bone went to chalk. Vital power rose ghostlike from the corpse and twined around Phage. She drew her hands to one side. Webs of life force rolled from her fingertips to stretch across the darkness and wrap the First. He seemed to breathe in the power. Soon his figure glowed, and Phage stood in the burned-out midst of the body.

With a shriek, the goblin lying beside the dwarf tried to scuttle up and away.

Phage stepped again, pinning the creature to the ground.

While the goblin died, the other workers tried to rise, but Gorgoth dutifully lashed them. Black coils of magic struck and stung, enervating them.

Phage's words lashed them as well. "I am faithful to the First unto death. Now so are you."

Despite the barbed thongs that opened wounds just ahead of her, she advanced. The scourge brought agony. Phage brought death. One by one, she slew the workers of her best team.

Every eye on the island watched these summary executions, and every mind understood. Pay homage to the First or die. Phage was not their ultimate leader. She was only a knife in the hand of the First.

Gorgoth watch more closely than any other. Though the demon's scourge roared mercilessly, his eyes held sick pity. He had turned these workers around, and now they all were dying. Still, Gorgoth knew about survival. This was what he must do to survive.

"Man… woman… child… beast…" called Phage. She grappled the rhino's head and rotted it away to a skull. The vacated body gave a groan and crumpled. "AH must serve the First unto death." Almost tenderly, she wrapped her arms around the gigantipithicus. It tried to fight back but dissolved to gray slime wherever she touched. In her embrace, it ceased to be. The gang's most powerful workers lay in heaps. Phage shifted to stand before the taskmaster.

Gorgoth went to its knees. "I-I have whipped them. I-I have been faithful to you to the death."

"Faithful to me" Phage said, shaking her head sadly. She grasped his goat head and kissed it-the kiss of death. Her hand slid to his neck and squeezed. The skull came off in her grip. While wings shivered, the body fell over. Phage carried the fragile bones to the First. She laid them at his feet, and laid herself there as well.

The First stared down at her, then at the skull, then at the whole island, covered with prostrate figures. Even the crone knelt deeply, her mule beside her. "You have done well, my servants." He spoke quietly, but magic carried his words to all those who knelt. "The Cabal is here."

From thousands of throats, the answer came. "The Cabal is everywhere."

"I am especially pleased with my daughter Phage. She wisely builds my coliseum. She wisely speaks through the old crone there. She will speak also through another." The First's smile glimmered in the darkness. "Phage, I have brought the one who gave birth to you, who once ruled you. Now you will rule her. As this crone is your voice to the workers, this one will be your voice to the world." He gestured behind him.

The curtains on the barge parted. From them emerged Braids, a smile stitching across her face. "Hello, big sister!"

"I am honored," Phage said, still in her deep bow.

"Stand, Phage, Zagorka, and Braids. Approach."

While Phage rose, Braids skipped down the gangplank and came up alongside her. Zagorka left her mule, hobbling up with the others.

The First's smile deepened, and he lifted his hands to the starry heavens. "You three will make this coliseum into the center of Otaria, the center of Dominaria."

In that killing embrace, Jeska lived. In trembling agony, she became Phage.

In the midst of endless sands lay a tiny spot of green. Were any gods looking down, they might not have noticed that solitary acre of brush amid millions of millions of acres of nothing. No gods looked down, though.

It was left to Ixidor to look up.

He knelt on a little sandbar in the midst of the stream. Sand caked his arms and legs. Mud hung in dry scales from his face. Blood painted his three-fingered hand. He was creating. Feverishly. Already, his oasis teemed with life.

While fingers scooped and shaped clay, fish schooled to either side of the sandbar. With unblinking eyes, they watched Ixidor work. He paused and stared back, and the fish flitted away to wavering depths. Something else flitted, and Ixidor's focus shifted to the gleaming surface. It reflected his birds, flocking through an eggshell sky. Bright plumes and brighter calls filled the oasis.

Ixidor had set them there-birds in the heavens and fish in the stream-before he had thought of feeding them. At first he had made fish-eating birds-cranes, kingfishers, gulls-and bird-eating fish-creatures that had never been before. Some fish flew. Some birds swam. It was impractical, though, an endless solipsism. At last, Ixidor had relented, created harmless but prolific bugs-water striders, bottle flies, mayflies, gnats. Even now, they swarmed, plaguing their creator.

Growling, he turned his mind back toward the thing in his hands. Water had eaten at it. He rose, working the resistant material. This glob of nothing was soon to be a monkey. He had already created mice, moles, bats, hares, foxes, goats, and pigs. He only half understood what any of them ate and suspected some would eat each other. Such practical matters would work themselves out. After all, he was only their creator-an artist, not a husbandman. As long as he kept creating, there would always be abundance, and in their abundance, the creatures would work it all out. How more responsible could a creator be?

Ixidor paused again. Animals eating animals… people eating people… creators abdicating all… Behind this creative fury lay a different fury, the mania of loss. Every body he formed was an apology in flesh to the one body he would never touch again. Every mind he made was a vain search for the one mind that was irretrievable. He could hardly breathe. He had to focus, to think about something other than her, anything other than her.

The mud hung heavily in his hands. Cradling what would become the creature's head, Ixidor ran his thumb in to form an eye socket. Beside it, he formed a second. With his pinky, he created nostrils and began to carve out a mouth. The head lulled free of the shoulders. Ixidor scowled. He pinched clay together, trying to get the thin neck to reform. The head was too heavy. Grabbing a stick, Ixidor rammed it into the narrow body and up through the neck. The stick cracked the torso of the beast, though, and it crumbled into two clods. Ixidor tried to shove them together, but the mud would not bond. Angry, he hurled away the half-formed creature. It spattered against the river bank.

He stood there in the midst of the stream, clumps of clay falling from his hands. Fish snapped stupidly at the little clots.

Bugs swarmed him, their mad buzz in his ears. The trees thrashed with warring birds, and the undergrowth with tiny predations.

"Not enough room," Ixidor said to himself. "Not enough room."

Maybe he should make smaller creatures. Maybe he should make creatures that didn't eat, that didn't reproduce. Aside from those things, though, why live? What was the point of life except to eat and reproduce?

Ixidor stood, abstracted. There had to be more to life than that. If there wasn't, Ixidor would make more-he would create not just life but also meaning.

Before he could create either, though, he had to create room.

Ixidor slogged out of the stream and strode toward a desert agave. It was a light green plant with broad, sawtoothed leaves that jutted up all around it. Ixidor studied the configuration. He chose the widest frond at the base of the agave. Setting one foot beneath the foliage and the other on the flat of the blade, he bent it down and cracked it. He yanked back and forth until the fat leaf came off in his hand.