J. King - INVASION

Spheres and worlds away, Tsabo Tavoc smiled.

Her vat priests lifted their heads.

It was simply enough done. She needed only place the image of Thaddeus in their minds. She felt the saliva run along their withered jaws. They would obey her summons. The vat priests would send their most sanguine minds to Koilos to have a look at Thaddeus.

Satisfied, Tsabo Tavoc's consciousness sifted back upward. Her mind withdrew into the Caves of Koilos. When the Ineffable had walked the world as a Thran, these had been called the Caves of the Damned. As she returned to the delicious battle, Tsabo Tavoc thought how right that name had been.

Certainly for Thaddeus, they would once again be the Caves of the Damned.

My sword unmakes another. I see the tip chop through the thing's belly. It splits wide like a shirt ripping. Out spill strange, dark, wet shapes. The monster comes to pieces. It seems not even to have the will to live.

They cannot kill me. It is almost brutal to slay this way. They are no match for me and mine. It is like cutting grain to kill these Phyrexians. It is like chopping wildflowers, except that these flowers shriek and gush.

Another goes down. It seems to be almost bowing to me. I split its back. My sword cuts through, separating meat from bone as if filleting a fish. I charge through the muck of it. My foot crushes a panting lung.

I am too well made. Urza has done too much to make me. He has winnowed away humanity, knowing his foes will destroy all that is human. Urza perfected my inhumanity so that I could fight Phyrexians and not be destroyed. I am a greater monster than these things I slay. I am a vat-grown monster whose leash is held by Urza instead of Yawgmoth.

The sword hacks through a scuta's shield and the knob of bone beneath. It splashes brain on my feet and chops through to the monster's spine. The creature slumps atop scuttling legs. Dust rolls up around the settling beast. I vault over it and cut through a Phyrexian trooper. It is so surprised by my assault that it stands, gaping, though its shoulder is cut through down to the sternum.

I am too well made.

Thaddeus and his hundred had broken through. They drove like demons through the Phyrexian hordes.

Agnate was still mired in the slaughterhouse of the western front. He fought amid encroaching corpses. Dead Metathran lay in lurid intimacy with dead Phyrexians. Legs and arthropods jutted in heaps, part redoubt, part hazard. Killing another beast, Agnate peered beyond the thing's bulk.

Thaddeus fought in the sere distance. Oh, to battle at a run, so fast and free! It must have been glorious.

Agnate reached out his mind to his counterpart. Above the mad din, he sought. In all that killing lunacy, Thaddeus was lost. Agnate could not touch his comrade. A greater presence filled the battlefield-a greater mind in jealous possession.

It mattered little. Thaddeus would prevail. They knew each other's minds even when they could not touch. Thaddeus was too busy in the running battle.

It must have been glorious.

This place was not fit for the elves of Llanowar. They were accustomed to colonnades of quo-sumic trees, to hanging vines in vast highways, to leaves among the clouds and days beneath the sun. This place had no trees but columns of tortured stone. It had no vines but giant blind serpents that crawled the cave floors. In place of heavens, there were groins of rock. Instead of sunlight, there was blackness. It was worse than that. Crowded here in these haunted caves, the elves knew that even now trees and vines and skies were decimated. This place might not be fit for elves, but neither was their home, anymore.

Eladamri walked among the refugee rabble. They sat shoulder to shoulder in a large, dark cavern. Liin Sivi strode in silent watchfulness behind Eladamri. She kept at bay the refugees, who teemed about him in their terror. They had feared to come here. It was a place that lived in their common mind-the Dreaming Caves, the underworld home of the dead.

True enough, since they had arrived, strange, moaning spirits seemed to flit all around them.

Eladamri was no prophet. He was a warrior. For him this was not an underworld but a bunker, not a place of the dead but of the living.

Were these the only survivors in Llanowar? Could they even be considered survivors? Perhaps a hundred had died in the palace. Perhaps a hundred more had died in the flight downward. How would these thousand die? Starvation? No, they would not last so long. They would die in a trampling stampede.

One old elf, clutching a squalling child, had summed up all their fears-"The Dreaming Caves… bring nightmares… to life!"

The refugees had brought a wealth of nightmares with them. Visions of hurtling plague bombs shone in their wide eyes. Shrieks of dying countrymen echoed through their ears. Shame at leaving their dead nobles… royal rings unclaimed on stilled fingers…

Perhaps the Dreaming Caves did have that power. Here, beneath miles of root, the air was charged with green mana. Merely breathing it induced a waking sleep. The very rock hummed in sympathy with the hearts of the people. Perhaps these caves did pluck thoughts from their mind and send them spinning through air.

One man's private terrors paraded before whole families. The very real deaths of hundreds above were recombined into the surreal deaths of hundreds of thousands below.

Refugees staggered about the caverns, wringing their hands and wailing. Others fought their comrades, thinking them ghosts. Still more fled shrieking into deeper places. They fell into nests of white serpents, which awoke to find warm meat. They dropped into wells that plunged to the boiling core of the world. They fled into the manifold stomachs of Dominaria, where she devoured her own children.

Terrors came true.

Eladamri had to stop all this. He had not saved these people yet. He had brought them out of one death and into another.

Not for long. If they could dream of horrors, they could dream of beauties.

Lifting high the lantern he had brought from above, Eladamri strode with sure and measured step among his folk. He headed for a prominence of rock on the far side of the cavern. To reach it, he would pass through the main mass of refugees. The staging was perfect, as if he had dreamed it into being. As Eladamri went, he sang an ancient ballad of the Skyshroud elves, his people on Rath:

I walk the groves of Damherung.

Below a dappled sun go I

And sing of Volrath's coming doom

Beneath a brilliant sky.

O forest, hold thy wand’ring son

Though fears assail the door.

O foliage, cloak thy ravaged one

In vestments cut for war.

The refugees did not know this hymn, but they would think they knew it. The caves carried his voice among them like a breeze that promised rain. Music swallowed remembered shrieks. Echoes became memories. They knew this hymn, and as he walked among them, they put aside jangling terrors to sing.

For what are leaves but countless blades

To fight a countless foe on high,

And what are twigs but spears arrayed

To slay the monstrous sky?

O forest, hold thy wand’ring son

Though fears assail the door.

O foliage, cloak thy ravaged one

In vestments cut for war.

The murmur of the song rose, drowning the last of the moans and shrieks. Even Liin Sivi, walking behind him, sang. Voices joined, strengthened, grew, until it seemed the throat of the world sang with them.

Though death has guile and kilting power,

Though bloodlust rules the steaming tides,