J. King - PLANESHIFT

He was dying. He was alone, and he was dying.

They tricked me, he thought. His consciousness poured out like a wineskin. They tricked me into sacrificing myself. I am no god. I'm no longer anything at all.

He tried to drive toward the surface. It was useless, but life always fights, even when the battle is lost. Darigaaz fought.

There was no more time. Rhammidarigaaz was dead. He was suddenly, surprisingly dead.

At first, the notes were scattered and uncertain, as if the players were warming up. A tone here, a trill there, but nothing that amounted to music. Soon, there came a quickening, the pulse of a drum, insistent and irresistible. A drone joined it, the long strident breath of a bagpipe. The basal rhythm invited melody. Strings added their voices, then winds, reeds, and brass. They converged. They crescendoed. They sang.

In all its loud cacophony, life reentered Darigaaz.

He fought again toward the surface. The tar grew watery- slack and tepid. It could not grip him. His flesh was new and slick. He surged upward. Wings hurled back the muck as if it were air.

Rhammidarigaaz's head broke the surface. Tar peeled from his jowls and eyes and horns. It sloughed from shoulders and arms, wings and waist, legs and tail. With a mighty stroke, he shot from the blackness. It closed beneath him.

Darigaaz's roar was a volcano. It spewed straight up into the eye of the dragon cyclone. He followed the fire skyward. Life had returned and brought rage with it. He was done being subordinate. He was done being tricked, done suffering fools.

Darigaaz's body was new-scaled in rubies, youthful and lithe, quick and powerful. His mind was new too, bursting with the sorceries that are a god's inheritance. Even his soul was new, not the suffering spirit of a mortal creature but the unrepentant heart of a god. Darigaaz's time had come to rule-he and his sibling gods.

Rith burst from the black well of death. Her flesh was solid emerald. Voracious clouds of spores fountained from her roaring jowls as she took to the sky. Angelic Treva followed, a creature of white light. Radiance poured up past her teeth. Then came Dromar, who breathed a shaft of distortion that shook matter apart. And, last of all-Crosis.

The black dragon god had bat wings and a cobra's body. His legs were powerful, his talons were tipped in razor claws, and the whole of his being gleamed like onyx. From his mouth came a black column that slew anything in its path.

This was Crosis, the one the other four had died to raise. He had nullified death and raised them all again as gods.

The five Primevals vaulted up through the vortex of dragons, rising faster than mortal wings could have borne them. They owned the heavens.

Except that there, beyond the coiling serpents, a ship dared to fly. She had a massive prow ram and a sleek hull and shimmering wings of metal.

"The skies are ours!" shrieked Crosis.

"Who dares contest them?" hissed Dromar.

"It is Weatherlight," said Treva.

"We must drive them to ground," Rith determined.

Rhammidarigaaz was last to speak, but he spoke with the same fury as the rest. "We must destroy them."

Firstborn of the Primevals, Rhammidarigaaz led the dragon gods and their nations across the sky to destroy Weatherlight.

"Dragons, dead ahead!" called Tahngarth into the speaking tube. “They're flying an intercept course." At Weatherlight's helm, Sisay lifted her captain's glass. "One of them is Rhammidarigaaz! They're allies!" A cheer went up across the deck. The crew had needed some good news. They had fought in a shaken delirium since Gerrard and Squee had disappeared. No one knew where they had gone. It was good to see allies in the sky. Five beasts led up the dragon nations. Red, green, white, blue, and black, the serpents vaulted into the heavens. They climbed with an impossible speed. Their eyes blazed angrily. "They don't look like a welcoming party," Tahngarth said. Sisay stayed the course, one hand clutching the helm and the other the captain's glass. Through it, she could see the glint of fangs and claws, the spark of fury in draconic eyes.

"I think you're right."

Tahngarth pivoted his gun forward, drawing a bead on the black dragon. His hands sweat on the fire controls.

"You're the captain, Sisay. You've always been the captain. You have to decide. What do we do?"

Fire roared in a red-hot column from the mouth of Rhammidarigaaz.

"Hang on!" Sisay shouted.

She swung the wheel hard to port and yanked back on it. Weatherlight stood on end.

"Full power!" she called.

Weatherlight's engines hurled their own fire. On pillars of flame, the ship rocketed away. The Gaea figurehead tore through clouds. Her metal wings spawned cyclones in her wake.

Through swirls of mist, the five dragons ascended. They gained on the shrieking engine. As red as ruby, green as emerald, white as lightning, blue as sky, and black as death-the beasts spat killing blasts. They arced up toward Weatherlight.

Tahngarth yanked his gun about but couldn't draw a bead past the gleaming wings.

Next moment, those wings were mantled in fire. They would have melted except that the Thran metal was fortified by Karn. Even as flames fell back, voracious spores engulfed the stern. They rooted themselves and grew rampantly. Any other ship would have splintered beneath the parasitic plants, but Weatherlight's magnigoth wood was strengthened by Multani. A white shaft of light blazed out above Weatherlight’s . It dropped to cleave the ship in two. There would be no defense against it-except an expert helmsman.

Sisay rammed the helm forward. The ship plunged. Her wings tucked. She slipped from beneath the killing beam. Engines drove her down toward Urborg.

The hurtling dragons overshot her. They turned in the sky above and folded their wings. Snarling and snapping, they dived.

"Tahngarth, get to stern," Sisay called. "We won't need forward guns while we're running."

Tahngarth nodded his approval and unlaced his gunnery traces. "Let's just hope I can fill Squee's shoes."

How glorious it was to cross Dominaria in the Golden Argosy. No hunger, no thirst, no weariness, no wounds- but these were only the beginning of the marvel. The ship sailed with impossible speed. She cut through water as though it were air, and through air as though it were nothing at all.

From the moment that Warlord Astor had debarked, the ship's sails had filled with an otherworldly gale. She had coursed like a comet across the world. Her path was straight and incorruptible. Where islands loomed up before her, she only breasted through them. Her prow clove into sandy beaches, soil, and solid rock. She cut through mountains as though they were but shadows and sailed out the other side.

Never did her company fear. Eladamri and Liin Sivi, the Steel Leaf and Skyshroud elves, and ten thousand Keldon warriors- none of them feared the ship would wreck. They were well aware of the world beyond her rails but knew their role in that world lay far ahead, at Urborg.