Casting a wicked glance over his shoulder, Gerrard said, "Excellent idea, Tahngarth!" He leaned to the speaking tube. "Sisay, prepare to planeshift."
Her voice answered from the tube. "Where to?"
"Tahngarth's homeland."
Tahngarth sagged in the traces. Ever since he had been tortured in the Stronghold, he had dreaded returning to his people. To minotaurs, appearances mattered. A handsome beast was a virtuous warrior. A twisted creature was a monster. Under the torments of Greven il-Vec, Tahngarth had become a monster. He was certain his folk would reject him. His hands went numb on the fire controls. Urborg scrolled, watery and black, beneath him.
"I've got the coordinates laid in," Sisay replied.
"Take us there," Gerrard said. "The rest of the fleet and the Serrans can hold the skies while we're gone. Do it."
Sisay sent Weatherlight, in a long, steady climb up the skies. Her engines roared. Her airfoils tucked. The Gaea figurehead drove up through racks of cloud. In moments, the island shrank to stern. The prow carved a hole in the heavens.
With a clap like thunder, Dominaria vanished. Blue sky dissolved into gray chaos. It buzzed in deadly disarray just beyond Weatherlight's power envelope.
Tahngarth stared bleakly out at the Blind Eternities. This nowhere place somehow soothed him.
The planeshift was done all too soon. The envelope around Weatherlight turned to sky and water. Suddenly, all the world was blue and white. Above the hurtling ship arced a cerulean dome. Below it stretched an endless sea. The two were halves of each other, brilliance and darkness. Weatherlight slid between them, her prow pointing toward the arrow-straight horizon.
"Where is it?" rumbled Tahngarth.
"I don't know," replied Sisay. "The coordinates are correct." Her words faded away to the roar of the engines.
"What do you mean?" Tahngarth asked. "How can a whole continent disappear?"
Gerrard snapped his fingers. "Teferi!"
"What?" the minotaur barked.
"Urza said something about his phasing out Zhalfir- magically taking it. He said only the sea remained. He must have taken the Talruum mountains too."
Tahngarth stood and peered at the choppy sea. He couldn't believe it. "He took the whole continent?"
Gerrard shrugged. "That's what Urza said."
It was a brutal irony. A moment ago, he feared rejection from his people. Now, they didn't even exist.
Faltering, Gerrard added, "Urza said something about refugees. He said a contingent of Talruum minotaurs went to Hurloon."
"Next stop, Hurloon?" Sisay asked.
Eyes blazing with fire, Tahngarth growled at Gerrard, "Why are you doing this?"
Gerrard cast a glance behind him. "You said we needed another army."
Eyes darkening, Tahngarth crossed his arms. "How are you going to enlist their aid?"
Gerrard shrugged. "I don't know. Honor? The promise of a brutal fight? What do you suggest?"
"Don't expect me to be your liaison, Gerrard. They will hate me."
Gerrard shot back, "They just don't know you like I do," Turning to the speaking tube, he said, "Captain Sisay, take us to Hurloon."
"Aye, Commander."
Tahngarth closed his eyes as the engines took hold of his stomach. He felt the beaming sun go out of existence. His shoulders grew cold. The tearing winds of the deck died to nothing. The whine of Weatherlight's power core was dampened, sound slipping away into the Blind Eternities. Tahngarth did not watch. He could not bear to see the world dissolve again.
Sound changed. The engine's clamor rebounded from ground. Sudden wind tore at Tahngarth's hide. The cold of evening wrapped him, the wet of alluvial plains. Wood smoke hung in the air. This would be Hurloon. He opened his eyes.
Immediately he wished he hadn't. Below, in the last glow of the day, stretched an enormous wasteland. It had once been the city of Kaldroom, a garrison ground for centuries of minotaur warriors. Now, the city was in ruins. Every roof, every fence, every wooden thing had burned away. Only stone foundations and rubble walls remained. They twisted away to the horizon. Within them lay bodies, minotaur bodies-bulls and cows and calves. They had died where they had stood, slaughtered by the same fire that had destroyed their city. The streets of the city were lined with craters. Smoldering fires lit the darkness. They sent gray smoke skyward. Weatherlight shot among them, stirring the smoke in twin vortices.
Tahngarth pulled himself from the gunner traces and stood at the rail. He stared with bald horror at the scene below. These had not been warriors. These had been merchants and teachers and families. The fire that had slain them had not fallen from the sky. It had burned on Rath as the world overlaid. With utter precision, the Phyrexians had turned a whole city into an oven.
Lifting his head to the skies, Tahngarth released a roar. It mixed with the thrum of the engines and the shout of the air. Long and furious, the sound pealed out across the plains.
The minotaurs of Talruum were gone, and those of Kaldroom were slaughtered wholesale. Better to have disappeared into the ocean than to have died like this. And what of the other cities? Was Tahngarth the last of his people to live? Twisted into the semblance of Phyrexian monstrosity, was he all that remained of the once-proud race?
Weatherlight shrieked out across the city to the garrison grounds. Half the population of Kaldroom had dwelt within the barracks of that place. They remained. Minotaur warriors were laid foot-to-head, row on row across the ground. Their bodies were pristine, untouched by the fire that had destroyed the populace. Even their armor was polished, even their uniforms. Not one showed the wound that had killed him. Their eyes had all been propped open as hunters do to the creatures they stuff. What were these corpses? Trophies? Why would Phyrexians bother to chain corpses together?
"They're alive…" Tahngarth whispered breathlessly. The realization prickled his hide with a memory.
He is trapped. A red beam stabs down at him from a panel above. It strikes his flesh. It twists his horns and swells his muscles and transforms him into a monster.
Shaken by the flashback, Tahngarth suddenly knew why the Phyrexians had kept these warriors alive.
Without bothering with his gunner's harness, Tahngarth swung his cannon to the fore and was squeezing off his first shot before he had even glimpsed what must lie beyond. Red rays ripped the air, plunging toward a huge black building, as amorphous as a mountain. It was a flowstone laboratory, grown on Rath and overlaid on Kaldroom. Tahngarth's shot struck the side of the structure. It lit up a portico and bathed the scabrous priests that stood there. They burned like paper. The portico collapsed. A hole opened in the wall. Through it, Tahngarth glimpsed what lay within: torture chambers, vivisection tables, vats of glistening-oil. It was only a moment's glimpse before Weatherlight hurtled above the black rooftop, but it was enough to convince Tahngarth.
"We must destroy that building!"
"What is it?" Gerrard shouted as Weatherlight entered a long, sweeping turn to port.
"A Phyrexian incubation ground. They've killed the citizens and have somehow drugged the garrison. They're going to turn them into monsters. They're going to make them all like me. We have to destroy that factory."
A beam stabbed up from the structure and sliced across the sky. It howled so close overhead that the hairs on Tahngarth's head curled. Two more shots roared from other guns.