Smoke billowed in explosion across the walls of the city. Rock vaulted outward, leaving large breaches. Urza ran toward the gaps. Above the city, falcon engines dropped like silver meteors. They sought oil-blood and the organs that pumped it. With ramrod heads and razor beaks, they punched into the abdominal cavities of countless beasts. Whirling blades sliced the organs to ribbons.
The rockets and the falcons and lightning only softened the outer defenses. At full stride, Urza reached the city. His titanic foot crashed down atop a gatehouse and smashed it flat. A second stride, and a phalanx of Phyrexian troopers died. The buildings seemed as fragile as a wasps' nest. The beasts within burned as easily, buzzed as angrily, stung as impotently.
Bo Levar surged up alongside Urza. A blue wave of energy fanned out from him, macerating Phyrexians.
Szat poured magical fire across the swarming monsters. Their heads flared like jackstraws.
Commodore Guff knelt and clawed within a shattered building as though he sought his monocle.
Freyalise planted rampant growth with each footfall. Vines jagged out to strangle the city.
Even Daria and Taysir and Windgrace cast spells with sanguine glee.
Only Urza killed with numb hands and a numb heart.
Chapter 9
For five days, Agnate and his Metathran legions had driven inward across fens and bogs. Beneath the blazing sun, they ground forward. Beneath the Glimmer Moon, they camped on whatever terrain they had gained and defended it against an endless assault of nocturnal beasts.
No human would have survived the campaign. Humans were born for other things-for laughing and falling in love and bearing young. They had to give up such things to fight a war. Metathran were different, bioengineered and therefore asexual. There was no falling in love and no bearing young, and the only laughing they did came with victory.
Metathran ate while they fought. Their teeth clenched rock-solid biscuits that contained all the nutrients they needed. They drank while they fought. Enzymes in their throats purified even rank swamp water. Like oxen in the traces, they bulled forward over new ground. They could battle in their sleep. For Metathran, fighting was as breathing, as dreaming.
It had been a glorious five days for Agnate. This was not trench warfare like Koilos, with suicide charges across empty ground. This was guerrilla warfare. Secrecy and cunning and courage were key. Tactics and wilderness skills meant life. Here Phyrexians in their mindless hordes could not combat Metathran in their mindful legions. It was a vindication of the creature that Agnate was. It was also revenge for Thaddeus.
Agnate could still see his counterpart dissected alive- every tissue flayed away, his body dismantled bone by bone to his ribcage, even a stone laid against his diaphragm to help him breathe. Phyrexians had torn him apart to learn how Metathran fought.
This is how we fight, Agnate thought as his battle-axe cracked the skull of a Phyrexian trooper. It clove through the neck and into the beast's sternum. This is how we fight.
"Advance!" shouted Agnate to his troops.
Agnate lifted his axe. The cleft monster came up with it. He brought the Phyrexian down on one of its compatriots. The horn-studded trooper made a weighty mace. Spikes drove through the second monster's torso. Internal organs showed in their slimy complexity as the two beasts fell.
Careful not to slip in the mess, Agnate set his powerstone pike to receive the next charge. A monster obliged. Its face was little more than gray skin stretched over a human skull. Its torso was a bundle of tormented muscle over twisted bone. It fell on the pike, which tore its way inward. Still the creature fought.
Holding his pike with one hand, Agnate dislodge the axe with the other. He swung it. The blade sliced through one of the beast's arms, clove the ribs laterally, and emerged from the torso. The top half of the creature toppled from its legs. Agnate shoved the rest of the polearm through the monster. He picked up the weapon and strode onward.
Shoulder to shoulder with him ran a tight pack of Metathran. They were bloodied from that last charge but unbowed. The shouts of warriors and screams of beasts resounded on the flanks of the advance. Agnate and his corps had punched through the center.
They charged up a slimy bank, past arms of forest, and out onto a wide, sandy plain. Beyond the sand flats stood a scattered army of Phyrexians. They drew back, uncertain, as Agnate and his forces appeared.
Agnate halted. All around him, Metathran formed up on their commander. More of the blue-skinned fighters arrived every moment. One hundred troops. Two hundred troops. Five hundred troops.
The Phyrexians beyond the sand flats began an all-out retreat.
"Charge!" Agnate shouted, his axe lifted high.
His voice was joined by five hundred others. Battle cries shook the air. A thousand boots shook the ground. In ten steps, the Metathran reached the speed of hunting hounds, in twenty, that of hunting cats. It felt good to be running full-out after battling for inches.
The ground suddenly stole his feet. Agnate plunged waist deep into quicksand. All around him, his folk did the same. There was no stopping the charge. They bore forward and were swallowed by the deceptive world.
He had led his forces into a trap. The Phyrexians had gotten him just as they had gotten Thaddeus-lured into a fatal charge. There was no time for shame, not on a battlefield, and this shifting, sinking stuff was the current battlefield.
Metathran were too brawny to float. It wouldn't work to lie flat upon the sand and hope to be buoyed up. Even with lungs full of air, Metathran sank like stones. Already the wet sand lapped at Agnate's ribs. It was preternaturally cold and slick like rot. A current dragged him downward and to the right.
Others warriors sank more quickly than he. A line of them were already submerged to their shoulders. Their necks craned above the sand. They must have been situated over a crevice in the basin.
Whatever underground river fed the quicksand, the water drained there. The current dragged them down. Those warriors were doomed. Sand made little wells in their ears. They would never escape. The current would drag them down and through the crevice and tumble their dead bodies in underworld rivers. Soon the whole army would bump through the arteries of Dominaria.
There was only one hope-to sink to the bottom and walk themselves out.
"Submerge," Agnate commanded, "and stride for shore!"
For some, it was too late. Their heads were covered.
Agnate drew his last breath, closed his eyes, and drove himself into the sucking ground. Hands sculled against the thick grains. His feet plunged deeper. Cold and slick, the sands closed over him. Black ground gripped him and pulled him down.
Any moment now there would be solid rock, or mud thick enough to shove against, or something other than this cold, entombing stuff.
Any moment.
Agnate sank in silence and chill. He wondered if this was what it felt like to die. Most mortals believed their souls rose to some airy otherworld, but Metathran had no souls. Their bodies were their all, and their bodies sank. Perhaps this was what Thaddeus had felt in the moment of death. Perhaps Agnate even now was dying.
The air in his chest was hot. It swelled in his lungs as though they would burst.
Agnate's foot caught on something hard. It seemed a stick, or club-long and slippery. Kicking, Agnate felt more of them- not sticks but bones.
This quicksand had eaten armies before, countless times. Agnate and his troops were only the latest additions to a warrior's graveyard.
Agnate caught a foothold and pushed. The bones shifted. He slipped. His other boot drove against a skull. It was no good. The sand was too thick, the current too strong.
Agnate felt shame for having led his people here to die. Shame meant he had given up.