Paul Thompson - Nemesis

"Your Highness, it is done. Will you do the honors?"

Crovax folded his arms across his chest and inhaled deeply. "The task is yours. Carry out the sentence."

Ertai bowed. He stood by Vuel's side and formed the command in his mind. The former evincar trembled. His head snapped around, and he stared at Ertai in abject horror.

Vuel tore against his manacles as convulsions wracked his body. One by one his toenails and fingernails sloughed off. The skin of his extremities split, and red blood-no longer glistening oil-ran out on the gray ground. His joints disintegrated, and as he watched, his fingers fell off, joint by joint.

Liquid flowstone coursed through his veins, obeying Ertai's last command: disassemble. The nano-machines attacked Vuel from the inside, dismantling his body at a cellular level. His knees dissolved and his lower legs dropped away, leaving the former master of Rath dangling by his manacled wrists. Then his wrists came off, and he fell to the ground.

Vuel landed face upward. As his ears and nose slid from his face, as his teeth bubbled out of his mouth on the last breath from his lungs, he saw the ever-gray sky of Rath change to perfect, cloudless blue. It was the sky of Dominaria, and Vuel, son of Kondo, had returned home at last.

The fire burned out. Nothing but ashes remained of the flesh of Belbe.

The plain was empty. Vuel was gone. Not even bones were left as the implacable flowstone disassembled him down to the last gory mote. Ertai alone remained. He waited under a sky he knew for the fire to die. When the last small flames went out, he waded into the pile of cinders that had been Belbe's bier, heedless of hot embers. Her metal skeleton was intact, though warped by the pyre's intense heat. He found her small skull, smudged and blackened but with bright alloy gleaming around the eye sockets. He tucked the warm skull under his arm.

His foot dislodged an unfamiliar object-a black sphere about four inches in diameter. He picked it up. It was cold to the touch, not hot, and not a speck of ash clung to it. The shiny surface was seamless, unmarred. Phyrexian, no doubt. Belbe's "lens."

Even with a control rod in his spine, Ertai was terrified. He dropped the black orb and kicked it back into the ashes. All he wanted was the skull. He ran back to the Stronghold under the stars of Dominaria, praying the lens no longer worked.