Many a day had Memnarch stood and pondered this conundrum.
His creator, his god Karn, had the power to forge whole worlds from nothing more than a thought. Unless he stayed on his world, though, maintaining it through his own force of will, it would collapse, imploding like an overripe star.
Karn had not been back to Mirrodin in a very long time.
The stuff of perfection was unstable. Could something that did not last truly be considered perfect? Was there such a thing as temporary perfection? Memnarch hoped so. But what really boggled his much-enhanced mind was the thought of natural worlds. If Karn could not create a stable world, then who could?
There were worlds beyond this one. Many, many worlds in fact. Memnarch had seen some of them. He had visited a few when the Creator had seen fit to take him along. These worlds did not collapse. They did not need a planeswalker to maintain their existence.
That meant Memnarch’s creator had a creator. In fact, Karn had spoken of another planeswalker, a man named Urza, who had created him. But if Memnarch’s Creator had a creator, then perhaps that Creator had a creator as well. And that Creator likely had a creator and he a creator too.… Could it really go on and on forever? There must be a starting point-one true Creator who created all other creators. If that were true, then how did that Creator come to be … created?
Memnarch’s head hurt. He’d been down this line of reasoning so many times, and each time he reached this very same point, the point at which he no longer cared to think about it any longer.
That wasn’t why his head hurt. It had been a long time since his last serum infusion. His mind ached for the lift, the joy, the mental strength that an infusion gave him.
He turned his enhanced gaze back out over the interior of the plane, trying to put that thought out of his mind. A giant blue-green spark arced through the air, hissing as it orbited the glowing orb. Then, with a popping sound, the energy dived back into the surface of the mana core.
The super-charged interior sun of Mirrodin had erupted exactly four times since its creation. Each time it created one of the four moons. There was one for each color: white, blue, black, red-but not green.
Green would be the next.
When the time came, another lacuna would be created. The mana core would shoot out a glowing ball of plasma with such force and with such heat that it would burn straight through the mile-thick, solid metal crust of the plane. The new moon would breach the surface and rocket off into the sky, joining the other four moons and falling into its natural orbit around the plane.
Once the moon punched through the crust and shot off into the atmosphere, it would find its place among the other moons. Each of them would push or pull on it, as if they were magnets. The moon would wobble back and forth, finally settling into its place among the others. Until that happened, the forces of nature would be terribly out of balance.
First, the blinkmoths would disappear. There was nothing about the plane of Mirrodin the Memnarch did not understand-except where the blinkmoths went during that first moon cycle. He couldn’t explain it. After witnessing it the first two times, and being without serum for an entire moon cycle, he’d scoured the entire plane, inside and out. There was just no logical place for them to go. They simply left Mirrodin.
Memnarch was fully aware of the power of magic. He considered himself an accomplished spellcaster. But there were no spells to his knowledge that could move a creature from one plane to another. Only planeswalkers could do that.
He doubted very much that the blinkmoths were planeswalkers.
Wherever they went, it was a mystery to Memnarch.
The next noticeable change after the new lacuna would be the irregular moon orbits. As the green moon worked its way into it natural rotation, the others would be pushed and pulled in and out of their own orbits. Days and nights would blend together. At first there would be two short periods of light followed by two equally short periods of darkness. It would be a relief to the surface dwellers after having endured the long, hot days and the pitch-black nights of the Convergence. Still, the constant rising and setting of the moons would make sleep hard to come by, and it would put all of the wild animals in a frenzy. Their mating, hibernating, and hunting habits would be confused.
That all would pass.
Eventually, though, things would settle back into their normal rhythms. It always amused Memnarch to see how regular and predictable the organic creatures were. They loved their patterns and their rituals. Everything needed to be just the way it always had been for the past generations. Of course, it never really was exactly the same. Things changed, slowly-imperceptibly to the mortal folks. That was the beauty of evolution. Things improved, much like Memnarch had improved himself.
There was devolution as well.
Whatever had caused the mycosynth growths had also caused what Memnarch referred to as the “Spore.” The Spore was a virus. It attacked metal, got into places it shouldn’t be, and it broke things down. The Spore tarnished what little perfection Memnarch had to hold onto. It caused flesh to evolve into metal.
It caused metal to devolve into flesh.
Memnarch suspected that the Spore existed for a very long time, but he couldn’t be sure. He assumed that it appeared after Master Karn had left Mirrodin. A planeswalker would have noticed such a virus in his own plane and eradicated it. He also knew that the Spore either originated in the mana core or was fed by the waves of energy it gave off. The mycosynth only grew on the interior of the plane, and each of the towering chrome spires reached toward the glowing blue-white orb, grabbing for it like greedy fingers.
As time passed, Memnarch had ever so slowly become more fleshy. He could only hope that when he ascended, found the spark and became a planeswalker, that he would be able to overcome the effects of the Spore and destroy them before they destroyed the plane.
That was where the elf girl came in.
She had the spark-that vital piece of a person’s soul, the one in a million difference that made her capable of becoming a planeswalker. Given the right circumstances, she could ascend herself.
Master Karn had once spoken of ascending. He had told Memnarch of how it had happened during a terrible fight on another world. Before the Creator had become a god, he had been a metal golem-a creation just like Memnarch.
In the story, Master Karn spoke of an invasion of his home world by a sickness. He called it the Phyrexian Plague. Memnarch knew nothing more about it, but he imagined it was much like the mycosynth and resulting Spore here on Mirrodin.
This plague had taken hold of the world to such an extent that Karn and his master had been forced to build a last-ditch weapon-one that required them to sacrifice themselves in order to use it. Both creator and creation willing sacrificed themselves for the good of those left on the plane.
While the blast of the weapon vaporized the planeswalker creator, it did something different to the metal golem Karn. Maybe it was the trauma of being seared by a beam of holy light so powerful it could cleanse an entire planet of a virulent plague in one blast, or maybe it was the heroic action the metal golem had chosen. Whatever the cause, Master Karn ascended. His metal golem body was destroyed in the blast, but a new body was formed-one of quicksilver, one that with just a thought could walk among the stars.
Memnarch smiled at the thought. That was what he was planning to do, vaporize his own body and become a planeswalker. He did not have a super weapon, but he had something just as good-the mana core.
When the green moon was birthed from the surface of the interior sun, it would strike the shell of the plane and burn its way out. Using the information he’d collected from the other moons, Memnarch had pinpointed the exact location of where the eruption would occur.