Urza formed a thick, woolen cloak atop his silken robes of state. The fabrics fanned out on the cool wind, making him seem some great black spider descending an invisible thread.

  In time, his gemstone eyes adjusted to the murk. He saw whole new worlds around him. The curved boughs were inhabited. Giant antlike creatures swarmed blackly over a knot in one of the ancient trees. The rotten center of the knot formed a great archway that gave into an enormous interior chamber. As Urza slid downward, he peered past guard ants poised at the brink of their colony and saw into the teeming blackness inside. There hunks of fruit and severed segments of leaf and dead carcasses of tree goats were borne along in caravans to inner storage places. Translucent white larvae lay in careful nests tended by tireless workers. A queen, who was the size of a parade of elephants, laboriously dragged her moving bulk, leaving a trail of wet globs in her wake. Just below the colony, placid herds of long-horned cattle grazed on terraces of bark. These beasts were tended by the ant creatures as though they were mere aphids in a garden.

  A sheer drop lay beneath the cattle fields. A few hundred feet farther down, giant cobwebs clung. They held rolled white pouches-some vaguely cow-shaped, others ant-shaped, and still more with human or elven form. Urza was careful to steer clear of the sticky strands of web in his course toward the bottom.

  Wherever life could cling, it did. Villages of elves dwelt on shallow swoops of tree bark. Forest sprites lived in spangled beauty among the deep dew fields. Dryads peered out distrustfully at him from folds of bark, and naiads glared from the silvery cascades that dropped from aerial lakes. Tree goats bounded up the sheer faces of the tree boles. Black-and gold-skinned cats stalked among fields of moss. Beneath it all, on the tangled roots at the base of the trees, druids appeared once in a while. They stared up at Urza in fierce resistance before disappearing beneath the ground.

  He gazed down at the root cluster. As vast as the boughs above, the roots of the trees climbed over each other in a muscular jumble. In places, the tightly laced structures held dark pools of water or small banks of new tree growth. Where the roots did not connect, though, were triangular wells of darkness. During millennia of growth, the trees had depleted all the earth beneath them, drawing it up their boles. The result was a vast emptiness under the root cluster, broken only by more waterfalls and fat taproots. At the distant base of this murk, waters toiled in perpetual darkness. This was the realm of the forest druids, crisscrossed by thousands of causeways, stairs, and cave passages.

  They would put up a fierce resistance to any program Urza might suggest. They would know of Argoth.

  As Urza settled his gold-gilded feet on the root bulb of a massive tree, a sudden dread rose through him. This place was uncannily like Argoth. Its elves descended from those who had fled the forest he and Mishra had destroyed. There were ghosts here, the ghosts of Urza’s past, but he had not come to commune with ghosts. He had come to discover the future.

  Urza lifted his hands in invocation. “I am Urza Planeswalker. I have come for an audience with Yavimaya. We must discuss the coming war. I wish to ally myself with you. We must confer upon the fate of our world.”

  *

  Multani had known the invader even before he spoke his name. The forest recognized the monster much as a body recognizes a contagion it had once suffered.

  Defiler of Argoth, Destroyer of Elves, Terror’s Twin, the End Man, Slayer of the People of the World-Urza Planeswalker.

  Even as the man descended through the foliage of the upper forest, Multani surged up the bole of a great magnigoth tree. He gathered himself in myriad surges of sap and pulses of green wood. From the roots of that ancient colossus to its spreading crown thousands of feet above, the magnigoth came to exquisite life. The soul of the forest quickened every twig and leaf and tendril. Multani could have flexed the massive roots like the tentacles of a squid and marched the enormous tree through Yavimaya. He could have reached out with any of the magnigoth’s hundred thousand boughs and snatched Urza and crushed him. He could have slain the man ten thousand times, in clouds of mold dust or swarms of arboreal spiders or lashing storms of boughs, but he did not, not yet.

  This man was no mere man. He had become a power since Argoth. He had drawn the might of the land into him and was perhaps a match for Multani and Yavimaya. He had become a planeswalker and could wink into and out of existence with a thought. It would take a careful trap to capture this one. It would take all the mesmerizing force of the forest’s mind to drive from the planeswalker any thought of escape. Only then could he could be contained. Only then would Argoth have its vengeance.

  Until then, though, Multani would seduce the planeswalker into a trap. He watched patiently, following Urza down the trunk of the great tree. He would marshal the might of Yavimaya and lead Urza into doom, just as surely as Urza had led Argoth into doom.

  A pang jagged through Multani. The man was calling on the land. He was summoning its power as he had back in Argoth. He was daring to compel the forest he said he had come to consult.

  Multani sifted all the faster downward, hurrying to reach the spot where the man stood. No matter how many creatures Urza summoned, this was Multani’s forest. He would take them back, free them from the bidding of the Defiler.

  To treat with Yavimaya, Multani thought bitterly, you must treat with me.

  Urza had finished his invocation, but the forest had not answered. He stood for some time, letting the verdant air sift over and around him. He could wait, of course. The forest knew he was here, sensed his power as assuredly as he sensed its, but Urza was never content to wait. He always felt better if he could tinker.

  He reached into his vast reserves of sorcery and summoned forth a swarm of sprites.

  A flowing cloud of gold and silver cleaved from the treetops high overhead and danced down on the breezes toward him. Urza watched in silent amazement. Though the cloud was still a thousand feet above, his gemstone eyes made out the tiny darting creatures within it. Winged and delicate, the sprites approached, a high song in their tiny throats. The melody ranged hypnotically through many tonal structures, sinuous and ineffable. Soon Urza could make out words in the song.

  Return among us, child of ages.

  Sing the reconciling song

  And burn the pages where long

  The sages condemned thee.

  Sing, forgetful, sing

  Of mild, regretful things

  Before the forest’s nodding head.

  Let dead bury dead and then

  Arise to sing again.

  The words plucked strangely at Urza’s mind. He remembered those voices, small and chimelike against the waterfall roar of wind in the leaves, remembered sprites fighting among druids and elven archers, their voices raised then in fury and condemnation. These creatures sang, instead, of reconciliation. They sang as though they were miniature Barrins.

  Delighted, Urza moved to cast a second summoning spell. The sorcery was never completed. Already the forest responded. New ambassadors arose.

  To the convolute roll of the gnat song came also a slow, low, gulping sound. It came from among the roots of the oriatorpic trees-shadowy gnomes within their barrows. Their tones made a basso counterpoint to the whistle-high melody.

  O nations, rise into the dawning light

  Where, bright, our generations’

  hope has come.

  Speak, O dumb, and dance,

  O lame, the night

  Of blame advances round to sun

  And morning comes again.

  Urza stood in the midst of the swelling chords, daring to hope that this ancient forest had grown up outside of the pall cast by Argoth’s death. Perhaps short-lived sprites and gnomes would simply not remember that time. The folk who would not forget, could never forget, would be the elves. Urza needed to know their mind.

  As though summoned, they came-elves of the high forest. They came from behind every tree, from within every fold of root upon root. Their eyes were bright and wide in the gray twilight of the place and glowed, luminous and green. They came, singing too, their voices at last providing the main body of the chantlike round of the other creatures:

  Hello, Urza, we know of you

  From dark times past that nearly slew

  Us, every mother’s son, and tore

  Our bodies limb from limb.

  That war Was hateful, true, but now we live

  In peace and health.

  We wish to give You all you ask, to save

  Our world from such a grave

  As once you dug that terrible day.

  The three groups of singers converged around Urza. Sprites danced in glowing daisy chains in the air around him. Shadow gnomes scuttled from their burrows to crouch like toads upon the moss beds. Elves treaded with preternaturally light footfalls among the roots. Urza listened to their singing-his mind could hear each strain separately and all of them together. His foot lightly tapped the root ball where he stood.

  He heard another voice, a deep rumble more massive and hollow and mournful than even Karn’s. The sound came from all around, as though the air itself spoke. The clammy breath of it, though, came from behind Urza. He pivoted, seeing only a vast wound in the base of the tree. The gouge was three times his height. Bark had struggled hard to close over the gash. Great rolled lips of wood still strained to come together. Next moment, those same bark lips drew apart, and smaller rents in the side of the tree opened above. Knots rolled beneath. The wound spoke:

  “Welcome, Urza Planeswalker. We are Multani, spirit of Yavimaya.” The face in the wood was utterly mournful, the mask of tragedy with only shadows for eyes. “We remember you.”

  The planeswalker bowed his head and actually dropped to one knee on the root cluster. “Forgive me. What I did three millennia ago, I did to save Dominaria from hideous invaders.”

  “To Argoth, you and your brother were the hideous invaders,” replied the voice, haunting as a chorus of the dead.

  “I had to sacrifice Argoth or sacrifice the whole world,” said Urza, almost pleading. “I did not doubt Titania of Argoth would have made the same choice were she strong enough to.”

  “Titania had been strong enough before they were despoiled,” the tree spirit replied.

  “As I said before, forgive me-”

  “We are not Titania. We are not Argoth. We are Multani of Yavimaya. We have welcomed you,” the voice said, and the lagging chorus of sprites, gnomes, and elves resumed.

  The melody coursed, coy and yet somehow cloying, through Urza, like the dank wind moving through his robes. There was a wild geometry to the tones as they twisted in and out of each other. The notes trickled upon Urza. Waves of sound lay beside waves of energy, nudging them into their pattern. He closed his eyes a moment, struggling to assemble a response to Multani. Whenever a pair of words connected in his mind, though, they were soaked apart by the gentle nudge of the song.

  “We would speak to you at length of this coming invasion.”

  Urza nodded, his eyes opening. He was slightly startled to realize he was standing. When had he risen to his feet? The question melted away on the pulsing song. Such matters were unimportant. There were allies here. There was music. For the first time since his ascension, Urza felt true joy. The sharp-edged box of his intellect softened into a warm, hazy buzz, like a swarm of bees-or a swarm of sprites.

  “We would first treat you to a festival dinner to celebrate our newfound association.”

  Yes, thought Urza, I am hungry.

  There was something wrong with that thought, something Urza could not quite identify. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. Of course he was hungry. If the forest’s fare was as sumptuous as its music, he would eat himself sick. Surely there would be wine, and other delights to the appetites. Urza would indulge them all.

  There was something wrong with that thought too. The nagging objections bubbled up, drowned, through the flood of music:

  Return among us, child of ages.

  Sing the reconciling song

  And burn the pages where long

  The sages condemned thee.

  Sing, forgetful, sing

  Of mild, regretful things

  Before the forest’s nodding head.

  Let dead bury themselves in dead

  Sing, forgetful, sing.

  When had he begun to sing? When had he ever not sung? Urza’s voice, deep and resonant in the edifice of sound, moved among the smiling tones of the sprites and gnomes and elves. The mouth of the tree opened wide. The company of fairy folk guided Urza forward. He paced, solemn and happy, into the yawning space and down the throat of the enormous tree. There would be a feast in these deeps. There would be more music and lights and festival.

  Except that all of it was behind him now. Darkness and wood and the irresistible power of Yavimaya pulsed in the very heart of the gigantic tree. Then, these things were all around. The mouth spoke one last time.

  “We would speak to you at length, also, of the last invasion.” With that, the tree’s mouth closed. Its throat as well. Urza, caught in wood and the thick darkness, wondered dimly where he was, and how he was, and who he was. He would be able to think, were it not for all the pervading mind of the forest, curing him like cedar smoke, changing him, preserving him in place.

  But not preserving him. Urza felt his body dissolving away into wood. His fingers were the first to go, each burning with incandescent agony. His every nerve sizzled beneath the skin. His bones turned to chalk and rubbed away in the sooty gnawing of the heart-wood around him. His fingers and toes, harvested slowly by the massive tree, turned into mere minerals.

  “When Harbin, son of Urza Planeswalker, landed upon Argoth, he sought a green limb to replace a spar on his flying machine. In its mercy, the forest showed him a fallen limb that perfectly suited his needs. In repayment, the man returned to the heart of Argive to bring back armies of ravagers to harvest the forest. Men and machines felled ancient trees, slew druids, hunted creatures into extinction, pillaged, burned, raped, destroyed, all to the glory of Urza and his brother Mishra. Slowly, they ate away at Argoth, killing Titania, her spirit.”

  The words were needless. Urza had become Titania. His body had become a vast forest. He felt in every tissue of his being the destroying, despoiling work of his own armies. Minute creatures invaded his body and, mote by mote, turned him into mere minerals, mere resources.

  Urza would have screamed, but he was no longer Urza. He would have planeswalked from the spot, but that would mean leaving his body, the forest, behind. He could only hang there, encased in wood, and endure.

  Monologue

  Urza is arriving in Yavimaya even as I write this. I know the forest’s position, as unreachable and forbidding as Shiv. He hopes to return in two days’ time. Knowing Urza’s sense of time-and guessing about the reception Yavimaya will have for him-I’ll give him a week before I become unsettled.

  This could well be the pivotal point for Urza. He has shown he is capable of building human alliances, and more than that-building coalitions among many races. Perhaps by creating an alliance with Yavimaya, he can make amends for Argoth. Perhaps no amount of penance could ever make amends for such atrocity.

  We have our own atrocities under way in Tolaria. Just today I led a charge of scorpions against Phyrexian entrenchments at the border of Slate Waters. Given the physiology of my mechanical forces, a pincer movement naturally suggested itself. We flanked the main body of Phyrexians left and right and trapped them in their trenches. They were caught between us and the temporal curtain. I sent scorpion units flooding into their dens. Meanwhile, I drove a wall of wind down the middle. Flushed from cover, the beasts fell back into the time curtain at the edge of that charred swamp. I ordered a charge. We hurled them into the rift.

  That passage would have killed any human. It did little more than further jangle these fiends. Even so, the extreme slow time of Slate Waters halted the Phyrexians in a thick wall. I ordered the scorpions to fire. Quarrels stormed out in a killing gale. The front line of Phyrexians was nearly sawed in half. They were spewing glistening oil in a cloud before them by the time a human contingent arrived to reinforce us.

  One young woman tore a hunk of cloth from beneath her armor coat and doused it with oil from a fallen scorpion. She stuck the cloth on a spent quarrel, ignited it, and hurled the thing into the gap. It entered the spray of glistening oil. A dull orange glow spread from the spot. The fiery quarrel hung strangely in the air as slow flame rolled laterally out along the Phyrexian lines.

  We stopped firing. We stood, staring in a mixture of exultation and dread. Languid tendrils of flame coiled out around fiendish arms and legs. We watched as our foes ignited. The cheer that came from us when hair and carapace were limned in flame devolved quickly to a groan. Eyeballs ruptured from the heat. Limbs were blasted away. The deep, horrid roar of dying monsters struck us.

  “Back!” I yelled.

  Even I was cemented in place when the blaze went critical. White hot, the flash was blinding. We fell back then by instinct alone. Clutching our eyes, we clambered over stalled scorpions and mired dead to escape the coming blaze. When the blast at last emerged from Slate Waters, most of us were half a mile into the forest. Even so, it flung us to our faces and, like the warriors on Argoth of old, we could only pray the sun-bright blast would someday end.

  It will be another Argoth, this conflict. The Phyrexians press us day and night. Their numbers grow greater with each sally. Their magical might will soon be the equal of mine. The students are weary of fighting, and though I have employed my most awe-inspiring battle spells, I am not a charismatic leader. Jhoira and Teferi were better suited for that. Urza, despite all his inhumanity, perhaps leads best of all.

 

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