The deeper they got into the swamps the more the mountains started to cut free from one another and slide slowly into the dark murk of the Mephidross. Koth shook his head and said that the ore had destabilized … every day the swamp and its green, necrogen fog bit deeper into the Oxidda Chain. Venser stopped to investigate how that could happen. He looked closely at the way the oil of the swamp suffused the metal of the mountains, until the great hulks of the Oxidda took on a crumbly consistency.
At one point they witnessed a mountain sliding into the swamp. The ground shook and in its immenseness a slab from a mountain creaked and suddenly fell with a great crash. Liquid from the swamp rose up in a wall many times taller than a man, and the green haze enveloped the slab.
The land began to smooth. By the second day they gained the big sky and all that lurks in that high place. Koth’s eyes were always on the sky. Once he saw a dark dot moving across its open sweep. They stopped to watch, but the dot moved away.
Their boots sank deeper in the black ichor of the swamp. Caught in the lowest places, the sticky material reached to their ankles. They slept on whatever high ground they could find, and only when they were so exhausted that they could not lift their scum-covered feet. They slept where they fell, in fireless camps. In that way, they escaped detection for a time.
At the end of the second day they found a corpse of a sort laid out in a twisted pose that left it half in and half out of the murky water.
Venser turned to Koth. “Phyrexian?” Venser said.
“Nim,” Koth said solemnly.
The nim looked a bit different from the others they had fought near Koth’s village. It was more skeletal, for one. There was little or no meat left on its body, and the meat left was rotting off the shiny bones. Its forearm had simply rotted off, and only a stub at the elbow remained, with rags of flesh where the limb had once been. Its skull had fused onto its body and the teeth of the maw had fused and grown together into a tangled mass that looked like sharp antennae. Its limbs were longer than those of the other nims, as well.
“It walks partially on its hands,” Venser said, looking up from his investigation of the creature. The artificer’s eyes were shot through with red and he appeared aggravated, Koth thought. He watched his hand shake slightly. He’d seen him like that before over the last days, and the trembling always disappeared eventually. He decided to keep an eye on him.
“There is oil on it,” Koth pointed out.
“Yes,” Venser said absently. He stood and almost tripped.
“Are you wounded?” Koth said.
Venser smiled absently. “No, I haven’t been.” He looked first one way and then another. “I only need to sit down.”
He found a small boulder that was out of the swampy murk, and seated himself on it. From his left sleeve he drew a small bottle filled with turquoise-colored fluid. He uncorked the bottle and took a small sip. He carefully replaced the stopper and slipped the bottle back into his sleeve.
“What is that?” Koth said.
Venser swallowed the fluid in his mouth before turning to the vulshok with a small smile.
“Nothing,” he said.
Koth did not seem convinced. “Well, whatever it is there is not much of it left.”
“That is true,” Venser said, straightening the fabric of his sleeve over the pocket holding the small vial. “I did not have much time to pack for my journey to sunny Mirrodin.”
“What if you don’t get it?”
Venser stood.
“This is our way, I believe,” he said, and started walking.
“So, we’re done talking about whatever is in your sleeve?” Koth said.
Venser said nothing.
They moved through the wet of the Mephidross only in the daylight, and slept as little as possible. By the third day each of them was stumbling in their tracks and had to sleep. They did so under the other’s close guard. They encountered in their wanderings other nim lurching and sniffing, and mostly avoided them. Once Koth found a small enclave of the wretches and tore their parts loose from their bones, which he then wished aflame and left smoldering on a high place for the entire known world to see.
Soon they made out the ghostly shapes of distant hills in the green haze. As they neared, the hills became more pronounced and especially a hill in the middle of all the others. Its torturous aspect was clearly the focus of this derelict land, yet they made for it.
“The Vault of Whispers,” Koth said. They were stopped in a stinking dell very near the tower, and all around them the calls of creatures unknown clinked in the failing light. The tower itself loomed overhead.
“Has it always looked like this?” Venser said.
“Yes. Always,” Koth said. “That middle section has always been rotted out.”
“But what keeps it from toppling when the middle has a hole as it does?”
“That network of strings. They are lead. There is much lead in this place. The lead holds the halves together. That and the power of the Black Lacunae.”
“What is that?” Venser said.
“The Black Lacunae?” Koth said. “It is where the dark power under the surface of Mirrodin shoots upward as a geyser of water might. There was no stopping or slowing the flow at this place, and those that have given themselves to dark foolishness come to this place for power. We vulshok have a saying, ‘Steel is hard, but a fool’s head is harder.’ ”
Venser chuckled at that. He looked back at the lead and iron mountain that held the Vault, and the smile fell from his face. It really was an amazing thing to see. It seemed to be constructed of dull gray veins wrapped around struts of melted lead. The green gas that floated ominously out of the chimneys of the other mountains did not float as much out of the top of that mountain. Rather, a powerful dimness rose as heat waves might and moved up into the air before mushrooming out over all of the land. The top was corroded away to such a degree that only fingers of lead remained. The very air seemed to be breaking down the mountains, and despite himself Venser had to wonder what his own lungs looked like after breathing the air.
“What does this air do to us?” he said.
Koth was squatting out of the hot winds, sitting back on his haunches and poking absently at the ground with a long sliver of iron. “It turns us into nim.” He said. “If we stay long enough.”
Suddenly Venser cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”
A roaring echoed off the mountain.
Aware that the vulshok was watching him, Venser hardened his face into an expression he hoped conveyed a sense of command. Truth be told, he had not felt in command at all lately. With the vulshok constantly undermining him, and the uncertainty of the mission they had kidnapped him to accomplish, Venser was not altogether sure any of them would make it off of this fascinating plane. He had already resigned himself to die before he could planeswalk away, spreading the spawn of phyresis to other places. As he looked out over the vista, he wondered if the others had the same commitment.
The green necrogen gas suddenly swirled around in a dense shroud. Through the mist, coming over the rise, the outline of a monstrosity materialized. A huge, vicious-looking Phyrexian lumbered into view. Roughly snake shaped but with bare ribs and articulated metal cabling, the smell of rotting flesh preceded it, and long appendages ending in sharp spikes swung as it loped forward. Its eyeless head turned toward them.
“We are close now,” Koth said. “Let us destroy this beast and be done with it.”
As the creature had not detected them yet, Venser and Koth lay sheltered in a raw divot next to a slough and awaited its arrival. When the beast had moved between them the Planeswalkers attacked. But it was stunningly fast, and snapped around in an instant, extending an appendage Venser had not seen from its belly. The segmented limb shot at Venser’s head, knocking him out of the aura of blue he had wound around his head.