Chapter Text
Drana of Malakir plunged her serrated sword down through the core of yet another monstrosity of meat and not-meat. It crumpled out of the sky, trailing void-black shards, as she yanked the blade back out of its blue guts. The ground fighters clustering around Sea Gate alternately cheered and yelled up at her as they scrambled out of the way of her latest kill, but she had already turned away. For a moment the vampire bloodchief lurched and dipped on uncertain winds, then steadied herself before arrowing towards another reaching horror. Figures in darkly iridescent plate armor fell in behind and before her. Their weapons flashed, lopping off the creature's tentacles so their lord could punch through the armor beneath and slice apart what she hoped was its head. She plunged one gloved fist into the dying eldrazi as it fell, ripped out a handful of dripping magenta and smeared it across her chestplate over dozens of similar stains. Drana knew the essence she gained this way would amount to but the smallest sip, but the sight of their lord feeding on the enemy never failed to revitalize her warriors in turn.
Beneath her Zendikar roiled with a violence even she had never seen before. The land convulsed in its attempt to finally vomit up the poison it had stomached for six thousand years. Torrents of mana rippled across the ground like heat waves. Drana slid sideways to put herself in the path of one such surge, followed by her vampire warriors, and felt a feverish strength race through her. She drifted a moment to let the power close her most severe wounds. Around her all the races of Zendikar fought to hold the swarms away from Sea Gate. Drana's keen sight picked out grey-skinned kor hooking foes out of the sky, elves of the deep forest commanding elementals of vine and bone, merfolk casting nets to snare beasts more horrible than anything the ocean could conjure. And over it all, the titans. Kozilek's warping nature came in pulses that shattered everything around her, made a mockery of breath and gravity and light. But it was Ulamog that bled into her mind, Ulamog that frightened her, not because of its strangeness but because it wasn't strange. Drana knew that essence. She had descended from it all those thousands of years past, a fragment shed by the titan just like the horrors whose blood crusted and dried on her armor. And no matter how deeply she rejected them, no matter how hard she fought, even now - even now! - some lost scrap of herself yearned to rejoin that terrible hunger that sawed through the sky.
The waves of mana coursing through the ground beneath her suddenly shivered and realigned. Drana bolted upwards in surprise. A brilliant trifold glyph seared across her magical senses, followed by a note of pure, resonant power - and the entirety of existence woke to answer. Beneath her the skin of Zendikar split apart. She darted out of the way as leyline after incandescent leyline ripped free of the earth. The blazing streams of power lashed up towards Kozilek and Ulamog, seizing them in brilliant bonds. The titans writhed, but the lines of flame only twined themselves tighter around impossible geometries - and pulled.
The titans Became.
Earth and sky wheeled around her. Drana dropped out of midair as Zendikar's sky inverted into the present, became the Presence, the world folded and turned inside out. An overwhelming weight buffeted her from every side. Her mind reeled beneath the magnitude of their existence. She caught herself a few meters above the ground, soared back upwards and scanned frantically for anyone else still alive, then swerved just in time to avoid a disgusting hybrid of cyclone and tentacle plummeting past her. The meat-cloud hit the earth and splattered apart. Each droplet resolved itself into the magenta-blue of eldrazi drones skittering outwards into the fray.
Drana raised her sword and channeled a fraction of power, letting it blaze a brilliant red. She couldn't see her vampiric cohort anymore, and in her heart wasn't sure she wanted to - if the grasping tentacles had taken them, if the warping wheeling waves had split them asunder - but when her signal flared above the fight a handful of black shapes swept back up towards her. Relief. She dove down to meet them, giving a wide berth to another meat-cyclone dropping out of the sky.
Then the world stuttered - and the colossal tentacle was just above her and falling fast, and Drana had a glimpse of her lieutenant Kan's face contorted into a rare expression of surprise before the flesh dropped on her like a hammer-blow.
She hacked upwards with her blade, gouging oozing trails into the mass as she tried to climb up while plummeting down. Pulpy tendrils bulged out of the bruise-colored surface, waggling as if tasting the air; then before she could turn to slice them too, they whipped around one ankle and her sword arm. Wind whistled in her ears as she fell. She slashed and stabbed, felt the meaty bonds finally part, and shoved herself out in a direction that she hoped wasn't the--
Drana hit ground hard enough to squeeze a yelp of pain out of her. Armor plates crunched under the impact and bit into her ribs and legs. She staggered to hands and knees, rolling sideways, grasping for her sword. A broken shin guard fouled her movement; she grabbed blindly for the cracked edge and ripped it away. Her desperate struggle had thrown her far off-course and she had landed on the outskirts of Sea Gate, on a slim ridge left miraculously empty for the moment. The tentacle that had swatted her out of the air impacted in the distance; a new swarm of drones boiled outwards from the crater. Living power still streamed into the sky, still held the titans fast. But Drana felt the ground quake beneath her. The images of Kozilek and Ulamog wavered above her, but the land's power withered faster beneath that engulfing horror.
That trifold glyph seared again across her mind, wrote itself across the earth - and the slender loops of power that bound the titans ignited around them. All the fire and fury and pain Zendikar had built up in six thousand years under the eldrazi's yoke erupted into scorching light. Soil disintegrated into dust under her palms as the world threw itself entire into this final stand. Drana dug her fingers into the dying earth and drew in all the living energy at her command, all the vampiric strength of a bloodchief. If Zendikar would die, then it would die shrieking, screaming, fighting to the final moment. Zendikar would die free. She reached further still, back into that ancient essence that had formed her long ago, cast aside from the titans themselves, she reclaimed it all; and then she hurled it forth. A circle of stone around her shattered upwards into new life. Zendikar would die free. Vines erupted out of dust, then crumbled back into ash. The circle she had briefly invigorated began to contract and she pushed harder still, screaming alongside her world, screaming one single blazing cry of defiance: Zendikar will be free!
And somehow - impossible - unthinkable - the titans' presence began to retreat.
The sky rang with that overwhelming cacophony that had threatened to shatter her within the first eldrazi she had drained; now Zendikar burned its own song into the cosmic noise of the titans' being, crashing, searing, disrupting. When Drana dared a look upwards she saw nets of leylines tearing apart limbs that shriveled and disappeared. Kozilek and Ulamog shrank more rapidly in the sky, their leyline bonds slackening, and the noise of them faded away to--
Away.
Drana shoved herself to her feet, new anger flooding through her. Kozilek and Ulamog weren't dying at all. They were running. The titans in the sky were slinking away - to the away she had first sensed within Ulamog's distant understanding. The titans would go to away, where they would rest and gather themselves, and then they would come back. In a thousand years, ten thousand years, it didn't matter to forces that knew time only as an inconvenience. The humans below would celebrate without a thought, because it didn't matter to them either - they would long be dust when Ulamog returned.
Drana, Kalastria bloodchief, liberator of Malakir, sovereign of vampires and of what remained of Guul Draz, would not be.
She would have to watch this devastation happen again. Fight this grinding war of attrition again.
Her enemy
her prey
was running
And Drana of Malakir didn't leave her prey alive.
Drana found the padded box at her waist, cracked one of the three small stone vials within, and swallowed its contents. Magenta flame raced through her veins and lit up her sight. She tossed aside the vial and reached deep into her self, seeking that origin she loathed, that sympathy she had fought to erase but could not deny: she was eldrazi-born. At the core of her being still lurked that treacherous grey seed that had bloomed into Drana, Kalastrian bloodchief. She held it in her mind, still longing to rejoin its masters, and told it, You will serve me.
Her vision shifted and stretched. Through the lens of that connection she saw the eldrazi’s dark, puckered blotches on the world, newly highlighted in magenta. They faded like blood seeping into earth. She drew her sword and locked her freshly-heightened senses on her prey, and followed.
A storm of needles blasted her to her knees. The pressure of reality itself tore into her. But in among the hail of pain she could still see those dark tendrils coiling and retreating, slinking away from Zendikar through a million rips and tears; paths that belonged to the eldrazi, paths that therefore belonged to her. She pushed harder. The needle storm became a solid wall, a barrier of shrieking pain worse than any she'd ever felt, but the magenta trail of her prey hung tantalizingly close and if the eldrazi could go through, then so could she - she was Drana of Malakir, and no one held her back--
a snap like a match striking
screaming noise and chaos wild and raw, roiling boiling in the titans' wake, reaching along that grey cord of connection, but distance no longer had meaning and
but they fled before her born on shifting currents not riding the noise but submerging within it and already the brilliant scars Zendikar had written through their essence had begun to fade
and she fell fast but they fell faster still
and they slipped away
And it was night.