J. King - PLANESHIFT

The cannon blazed. Crimson destruction belched from its muzzle. Rays ignited the foundering Predator. Sections of the vessel exploded. Crew disappeared in the blasts or tumbled in flames toward the volcano's crater. A second barrage ripped the lower forecastle clean away from Predator. With it went the grapple mounts. Weatherlight ground free of the disintegrating ship.

Gerrard smiled viciously, leaning toward Orim. "See? We were doing it the hard way. Don't snap the grapples. Destroy the ship."

Sisay retreated to the helm, and Karn to the engine room. The last of the il-Vec had been dispatched. They covered the stem castle. Crew members busily dumped bodies over the rail.

Tahngarth loomed up suddenly beside Gerrard. He held overhead a massive corpse-the horn-studded figure of Greven il-Vec. With a look of triumph, he hurled the body overboard. It arced from Weatherlight's stern to the gunwales of Predator.

"Fitting," Gerrard shouted, "that the captain go down with his ship."

"That's a calling card," Tahngarth said, his voice deeply brooding. He watched the fiery vessel plunge away. It spiraled in air, trailing a cyclone of smoke above it. Predator plummeted toward the deep pit at the volcano's center. "A calling card for Crovax."

Gerrard nodded solemnly, watching the ship fall. It seemed a blazing comet as it entered the pit. A ring of fire descended around it and lit the walls. Weatherlight would follow down that dark passage soon enough.

Breathing deeply, Gerrard released the fire controls of Squee's cannon and peered at the fallen gunner.

"How's he doing?"

Orim's eyes were weary as she looked up. She stroked coin-coifed hair from her face. "That wound would have killed me or you, but somehow, he's survived."

A muffled voice volunteered, "You need Squee to fight Crovax."

Gerrard laughed. "You used to think everybody wanted you dead, Squee. Now it seems everybody wants you alive."

"Everybody's got smart all of a sudden," Squee groaned. He stood up, stretching his back. "Whatcha do, Orim, give Squee a Greven spine? You probly want Squee as servant! Everybody want Squee as servant!"

Orim smiled. "He'll be just fine." She spotted two more crew members in need of healing. "Tahngarth, give me a hand getting those two down to sickbay."

Nodding, the minotaur followed her.

Gerrard watched his two friends carry the wounded away. His reverie was broken by the sound of goblin feet tapping the planks. He looked down to see Squee, arms crossed, staring at him accusingly. Gerrard spread his hands in question.

The goblin scowled. "Maybe commander think he keep gun. Maybe he think he not give Squee back Squee's gun."

"No, no, no," Gerrard replied, backing away from the cannon. "I was just standing here."

Squee advanced a step. "Maybe he think Squee not well enough to shoot. Maybe he afraid more bad guys sneak up his butt."

"Look! Look! They're all gone. There's nobody here. I was just standing near the gun. It's yours. Fine. Take it back. I don't need it."

"Yes, you do," came a voice out of nowhere. "Greven left one soldier behind."

Invisible arms clamped tightly around Gerrard, and then turned visible-Phyrexian arms. Their grip was implacable.

They pinned his weapon in place. Gerrard thrashed his head to see who had grabbed him, but he could not even turn.

Squee lunged toward them. "Ertai!"

With a thought, the wizard who had once served on Weatherlight disappeared from the stern castle, taking Gerrard and Squee with him.

Never before had the armies of Keld retreated. When overmatched, Keldon warlords descended bravely into death, grinding away at their foes all the while. Any adversary who would dominate the Keldons would pay for victory in blood, oceans of it. Superior forces often surrendered to Keld for this very reason. The wisest enemies avoided war altogether, knowing they would face an all-out and endless battle. This adversary was no rival nation. Who can battle a glacier? Who can war with a volcano? Who can stand against the coming of Twilight, the night of wrath?

The Keldons had stood as long as they could. Here was the culmination of history. Millennia of battles since the descent from Parma had led to this moment, this blasphemous moment. Twilight had come. The honored dead of Keld had returned to life. They had emerged from the Necropolis only to join armies of Phyrexians. Dead Keldons had slaughtered live ones. Keldon history had bowed in service to a foreign god. Still, living Keldons had battled bravely on.

Then the very world turned on them.

Beneath the army's feet, ice turned to water. Around their shoulders, water turned to steam. The Keldons in their hundreds of thousands descended through ice and fire into the heart of the world.

Only a single scant legion escaped. They had been farthest out from the fighting-young camp runners and old warriors cursed to survive their battle careers. All of them fled. There was no honor in this retreat, but there was less honor in letting the flood claim them. Keld needed warriors, even if they be only whelps and curs.

Across disintegrating ice, the army retreated. Their colos leaped over widening crevasses. Infantry splashed through new warm streams. Warriors struggled to navigate the calving ice cliffs. They rushed toward the black basalt mountain on one side of the terminal glacier. Even when they reached that rock-solid ground, it too shuddered under them. It was as if the fire gods below pounded the over world with massive hammers.

Now the survivors of the Battle of Twilight camped on a chill ridge of black stone. It was a defensible spot-no Keldon would camp anywhere else-though no Phyrexian foe remained. Alt had died in the world conflagration. The only foe was the flood itself.

At first, the towering terminus had sprouted countless jets across its surface. Water that had fought through twisted passages shot in straight lines from the glacier. Pressurized streams widened and joined. Centuries of centuries of water burst out into a gray river. Enormous hunks of ice bounded free. They bobbed through deeper stretches and rolled among rapids. The serpent of Twilight muscled its way toward the sea.

The flesh of that serpent was filled with bodies. Keldon, Phyrexian, elf, colos all tumbled in a confused mass. The wurm had swallowed them. A Phyrexian's spikes impaled a Keldon's back, and the two bodies formed a new creature. An elf was tangled in the reins of his colos, and with six legs and two arms and two heads, they floated together.

Dead fingers clung to shattered rams and hunks of mast. In places, the bodies had gathered in a ghastly Sargasso.

The Keldon survivors looked down with solemn despair. These dead were the finest warriors in the land, slain not by swords but by fire and ice. Every camp runner and warlord felt instinctually that he should have tumbled in that flood with them.

They did their best to make amends. Warriors stood at the edge of the flood and reached in with polearms to snag whatever soldiers they could. They lifted Keldons and elves out and laid them in orderly rows below the camp. They dragged Phyrexians free and tossed them into bonfires. Even so, most of the corpses were out of reach, even out of sight, schooling along beneath the waves. For every body they hauled from the river, fifty others bobbed past. Even so, the dead below the camp outnumbered the living in it.

"There will have to be a new Necropolis," said camp runner Stokken to himself.

Doyen Lairsen stood nearby, watching the awful tide. His plaited hair and beard were pitted with soot where smoke sticks had burned to their nubs. ' "Why? What is the point?"