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Chapter Text

Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter.

Rancid oil wafting on the air. Prismatic light glinting off a swinging blade, surging toward its destination, moving of its own accord, rending apart worlds, lives, loves.  

“Danitha. Do your duty.”

Danitha Capashen’s knees shook against the chapel floor, sweat beading against her forehead as her legs screamed beneath her. Specks swam in front of her eyes, washed in the iridian hues of the stained glass above and around her, and she tasted vomit in her mouth. Her chest, concealed in silver and golden armor, heaved.

Under her breath, she hummed a tune. The words echoed in her mind.

Into the smothering dark, Serra spoke a single word: “Hope.”

Song of All, Canto 2. A trick she had learned from an old knight. She had heard the Song since she was a girl, sung the Serran hymn at mass and over ceremonies with him—who was it? No, no need to remember—she sang it until her voice cracked. When she lost focus even now, the Song was there, a rhythm to which her heart always beat time. Every warrior needed it, a tune or verse or drumbeat to keep in the heat of battle, that was what he had always said—

Ah, of course. He was the old knight. It was his trick.

She felt ill.

A thump behind her. A voice. “Lady Danitha?”

She whipped her head back, hand reaching for the pommel of her sword—but she released a sigh. Only Marten. The steward’s eyes latched onto her, staring with exacting insight.

“It's time to go, my lady,” Marten said quietly. “The council is convening.”

Danitha sighed, nodded. A single breath and she was composed.

Duty must be obeyed. If the frame of duty is broken, none shall weave life’s fabric. Canto 167.

She lifted herself to her feet, rolling her shoulders to dispel her nerves. They passed through the chapel’s apse, the last glimmering light of the stained glass draining away from her ivory-colored cloak. The godly light failed to warm her. As they exited, a retinue of knights circled around them, led by her personal bodyguards, Janya and Payle.

A breath. “Go ahead, Marten.”

The steward fished a tablet from within the folds of his robe, tapping it with his quill. “In attendance: House D’Avenant: Lady Cerise D’Avenant, along with her daughter, Tori. Firmly support you, though they’re getting impatient about the retinue we promised for their inner islands. House Croger: Markus Croger, representing his mother, Lady Eadith. Grumbling about the Keldons, though not so loudly as usual. House Rosecot: Symon Rosecot, representing his brother, Lord Alvan. Starting to get grouchy about supplying the Coalition with grain levies. House Tarmula: Lord Rache Tarmula and his loremasters. Much friendlier to us since we connected them with the Coalition research unit at Tolaria. House Deniz: Rethana Deniz, representing her father, Lord Jerek. Wishes us to take action against Vodalian piracy, though whether it was truly pirates or the Denizes covering for their own incompetence, I don’t have enough information to say.”

Danitha smiled. Marten stumbled through conversations with about everyone—but he could breathe life into the sepulchral mass of shorthand notes, numbers, and to-do lists that clogged her daily ledger. That was why, even in spite of his youthful inexperience and scandalous ambivalence to  the Church of Serra (some had even said complete rejection of it), her fath—no need to name him, no need to think—her predecessor had ignored Marten’s youth and appointed him to the position of High Steward. It was also why Danitha had kept him on her retinue. It was strange to think that, a scant few months before, he had just been her cousin—a friendly face when she sat in on Council meetings, an excellent companion during diplomatic missions, and a much-needed voice of reason to calm her brashness.

Now, Marten’s insight was more necessary than ever—because in the wake of the Phyrexians’ latest visit, the Seven Houses’ politicking was fiercer than ever. Present, as always, were old ideals, piety, glory, and power, but there was also the responsibility of supporting the Coalition and making good with ages-old rivals. Yet another duty, she mused, her stomach fluttering. They were getting closer to the council chamber, the abstract designs of the chapel architecture blending into more mimetic representations of Benalia’s founding and its first heroes.

Danitha frowned. Marten’s rapid-fire dossier had finally sunk in. One house was missing. “What about the Joryevs?”

“The Joryevs,” Marten said venomously. “Marana Joryev. Representing Lady Aveya.”

“Marana? I haven’t heard of her—is she one of the children?”

“Tch. Hardly. Distant cousin. She was a minor bookkeeper in the Joryev administrative corps until a few months ago. Nobody of note. Either the Joryevs have all come down with a cold or they’re trying to insult us.”

“Because of me?”

“I wouldn’t take it personally. It’s a show. They pulled these same tricks with your—erm—” He began to sputter.

“Lady Danitha!” a voice called out. Just in time.

They neared the lavishly decorated door at the end of the hall. Her retinue of knights parted slightly, revealing an elegant figure clad in white and black lobstered armor. The stark colors and stygian design—spikes sprang from her pauldrons and sharp lines traced across her chestplate—made a striking contrast with the multicolored stained glass that shone on the Capashen knights’ armor. Her features were sharp, set into a semi-permanent frown, and her dark eyes smoldered like coals. They lightened ever-so-slightly as she approached Danitha.

Aryel, Knight of Windgrace, Knight-Commander of Benalia, gave a perfunctory bow.

“Glad you’re here,” Aryel said, sweeping past the circle of bodyguards. “I don’t know how much longer I could speak with these diplomats before I started taking off heads.”

“So now that’ll be my job,” Danitha said, smirking.

Aryel hailed from the swampy island of Urborg, but after its conquest by the Cabal years prior, she and her knights had fled to Benalia. She had proven a remarkable commander: she was swift, bold, and highly aggressive—even concerningly so, to some peaceminded Benalish. Nonetheless, her tactics had honed her troops for combat with the Phyrexians. When the Invasion began, they had been ready. More ready than some of us, Danitha noted distantly.

Two Capashen knights swung around Danitha and Aryel, each taking one side of the door. There was a brief flurry of movement and clanking armor as the Capashen retinue entered the high meeting chamber, passing into a sea of light. She took stock of the councilmembers and their retinues, all seated apart, each bearing their house’s sigil, each gazing at her. She picked out the newcomer immediately: Marana Joryev was seated at the far end of the table. She was slim and pallid, and her eyes, which gleamed the color of sprawling amaranth fields, would not stay still. She was flanked by several Joryev knights, their armor draped with black cloaks and their sigil, a seven-keyed ring, glowing softly in purple stained glass—but most noteworthy were the lockboxes that each held in their hand, clutching them like they were dangerous. Odd.

Chairs squeaked and papers shuffled in the wind as the representatives of the other Great Houses rose from their seats. Each one bowed to her and to one another, each offering a distinct flourish—the D’Avenant’s dipping their heads low and sweeping their hands high into the air, the Rosecots thumping their chests with one hand, the Joryevs closing their eyes and crossing their arms, and so on. It was one of the many elaborate rituals enshrined in Seven Houses’ day-to-day practice. Of course, Danitha mused, the rituals themselves were just attempts to reconstruct the practices of Old Benalia, the kingdom that had existed before the devastation of the first invasion. It was history long dead, but the Benalish were a people who spent every moment of their lives grasping for it, hoping to find something meaningful. With mixed success,she thought bitterly.

Danitha took her seat at the head of the table, cleared her throat. There were dozens of eyes circling around, and her stomach fluttered as they bore into her. It wasn’t the number of gazes—she had attended these meetings since she was a child and speaking before crowds was hardly unfamiliar—but the look in them. In her visits to the Council through her childhood and adolescence, even the most serious conversations had come with an unspoken proviso: they took her seriously, but only in the subjunctive, the as if. All of them were suspended there in the gossamer veil of knowing that, when push came to shove, they didn’t need to rely on her, because her father was in charge. But here, now, there was nobody else. No longer as if, but reality. And she could hardly be up to the task.

No time. She blinked. Years of training constellated into alignment: she spoke loudly, clearly, unwaveringly.

“Let us come to order,” she said. “First: updates from the Houses…”

Things went to Marten’s prediction. The D’Avenant daughter, Tori, reiterated her house’s loyalty and pledged troops to the new fortification efforts—though she remarked that the D’Avenant archers were spread too thin. Lord Rache Tarmula had nothing but kind words, going on at length about the advancements in Phyrexian linguistics that his researchers and the Tolarian scholars had uncovered. The Crogers, Rosecots, and Denizes each made perfunctory gestures of loyalty, but voiced louder complaints.

“I respect your concern, Lord Croger,” she had said after Markus had sneered at her order to begin organizing Keldon-Benalish patrols on their borders. “But Warlord Radha is our ally. Her warriors will help us, not harm us.”

“Certainly, my lady,” Croger had said venomously. “House Croger simply wishes to note that when the brutes pillage our homes and massacre our elders, we will be content to have warned you.”

“I assure you, Benalish security is my utmost priority—”

A voice needled from another part of the room. “Danitha knows plenty about massacring our elders, after all.” Members of the Croger retinue snickered, and as she whipped her head around, she found a sneer slithering across Symon Rosecot’s face.

“I beg your pardon, Lord Rosecot?”

“Hm?” His eyes shone with emerald light. “I said nothing, Lady Capashen.”

Such disrespect wasn’t uncommon, but it was surprisingly flagrant. She frowned. With only two houses firmly behind them and three practicing such open disloyalty, to say nothing of the opaque Joryevs, the Capashens stood on unsteady ground. If Benalia wasn’t preparing for war, she might be worried.

But, she realized dimly, why shouldn’t she be worried? There was nothing to stop the Council from taking some extraordinary measure—a change in their structure, a new division of power, even a suspension of her leadership. The Capashens currently held power by the rule of the Ranking, which rotated each house into power during the lunar year, but why hold onto that tradition when so many others had been shattered at their feet?

And, of course, there were the Joryevs. The massive question marks. Marana Joryev had not yet spoken, but she had been active all meeting. Her eyes slipped this way and that as each representative spoke, up to their faces and then down to the notepad in her lap and then back up to their faces and then around to the other representatives—clearly trying to match names to faces, notes to lives. Marten hadn’t exaggerated: the Joryevs had sent their dregs to this meeting.

When the conversation turned her way, Marana’s hands clenched shut, crunching her papers together. She licked her lips, cleared her throat, looked out.

“Greetings, erm, Councilmembers,” she mumbled. Danitha heard snickers. “I come, hm, here, on behalf of House Joryev, who are, erm, not, well.”

“Perhaps they’ve come down with a stuttering plague,” murmured Lord Rosecot. Danitha bristled, shooting him a blazing glare.

“I’m here, ah, to report that we’ve…we’ve found something,” Marana continued. The Joryev knights swept towards the table, dropping their parcels on before her and clicking them open. They tilted the boxes towards the councilmembers, gingerly, with stiff caution in their movements.”

“At first,” Marana said, “We thought it was just paranoia, delusion, perhaps mischief. Fearful scouts seeing something that wasn’t there, or teenagers playing pranks.”

Danitha furrowed her brow. From where she sat, the contents of the boxes appeared ordinary. A conch shell, a steel pauldron, an open book. She wondered whether the Joryevs were making some strange joke.

“But then, we looked closer. Our Tolarian scholars use spells to scry origins, enchantments to reveal deceptions—even tried washing them with water. But the…well, it stayed on.”

One of the Joryev knights approached her. She peered into the box, and for half a moment, a blessed moment when all was still normal, she saw nothing. Then, she saw it.

“We don’t know what it means, but we…we need help.”

Etched in the seashell, almost blending into its cream-and-brown exterior, she saw it. On the pauldron, etched into the steel as though with a branding iron, she saw it. And in the book, on page after page, printed over the letters, she saw it.

A circle speared with a sharp line. The insignia of Phyrexia.

“What’s the meaning of this, Joryev?” barked Tori D’Avenant.

“It’s as it appears, Lady D’Avenant.”

On the other side of the table, Rache Tarmula frowned, peering closely at the shell. “This doesn’t appear to have been painted. What is it? Some pigment or brown ink?”

“The symbols aren’t written with ink. They aren’t written at all,” Marana said, waving her hands as though the words floated before her. “They’re just…there. As though they’ve been imprinted on the universe.”

“And what does that mean, precisely?” This time, the question came from Symon Rosecot, whose sarcastic lilt had turned to a tremulous shudder.

“We, erm. We don’t know,” Marana said, looking at Danitha, “That, well, it’s why they sent me. They’ve quarantined themselves. They don’t wish to let anyone in or out, for fear of sleeper agents in their midst. I was considered…a negligible risk.”

Silence, but not a reverent or empty silence. A choked silence, the quiet that arises when the darkest nightmares, the congenital fears of a hundred generations, are breathed in the air like miasma.

And it was Danitha who had to break it. “We see plainly, Councilmembers, that House Joryev has presented us an imminent threat. Obviously, we must endeavor to ensure that this new incursion is isolated and that we quash it. What, Lady Marana, does House Joryev request for this endeavor?”

Marana was silent a moment, then spoke, with an uncharacteristic certainty that could have only come from rehearsing the line over and over. “You, Lady Danitha. You yourself.”

Murmurs and exclamations rippled through the crowd. She caught snippets: “—Terribly unsafe—” “—they know she’s got no mercy, of course—” “—could be a cover, could be a sleeper agent already—”

Danitha balked, stumbled over her words a moment, then recalled. If you have nothing to say, ask a question. Collect yourself as they answer. “Who gave you this request, Lady Marana? And why me?”

Marana frowned, struggling to hold her words together in her mouth. “Lady Aveya, she, well…she recognizes that you have firsthand experience in, erm. Combating sleeper agents.” A hush. A cold laugh. A dozen conjured images of Aron Capashen, slain on the field of battle. “And she wishes that this threat be taken seriously. That Benalia offer its best to eliminate whatever Phyrexian attack the Joryevs might be facing.”

Dozens of eyes on Danitha again. She stared, pondered, possibilities racing. There was a logic to the Joryevs’ request, to be sure. Sending an inexperienced leader, one who had not faced the brunt of the Phyrexian force before and who was not prepared for their tactics, might simply exacerbate the crisis. But still, should the incursion be too great, should she be pulled away or worse, Benalia would be left without a leader. More instability. More death. More broken ideals.

And yet, she thought, staring out at the eyes, suspicious and scared and cautious and sad, would that be any different if she refused? If she was the kind of leader the Council thought she was, one who could not live up her name?

She nodded, then threw a gaze around the room. “House Capashen hears your request for aid, House Joryev. And we will answer it.”

“You’re absolutely deranged, cousin!” Marten said.

“It’s hard to disagree, even with a bureaucrat,” said Aryel.

They stood on the balcony of Danitha’s private chambers, which overlook Benalia City’s glittering stained-glass towers and the amaranth fields surrounding the city. Danitha had always savored the gentle breeze that flowed off the Reitmar River, and even their anger couldn’t spoil it.

Aryel’s slate armor resisted even the beaming glow of the Benalish sun, and though Marten’s tunic, scrawled with gold leaf, shone with brilliant light, his face was dark.

“Danitha,” Marten said, trying to calm himself. “You should be staying here, helping to prepare our armies. Let Tori D’Avenant and her knights handle this.”

She shook her head. “No, Marten. They’ve requested me, and they’ll get my help. We’re Capashens. We can do no less.”

Marten pursed his lips. She could almost see the fury boiling behind his eyes.

“Let me do it, then,” said Aryel. “I’ll lead a contingent of Capashen troops. I’ll go in your name.”

Danitha was tempted to accept. But no. She wanted to tell her why it woulnd’t be the same, why it had to be her, why the Benalish had nothing without their faith, that they needed this. But she refrained.

“No. My decision is final. You’ll both accompany me and my retinue, and we’ll investigate any threat the Joryevs might be facing. Easy as that.”

Aryel scoffed, but Danitha knew, could see in her friend’s countenance, that she understood. Aryel was a knight without a lord and a warrior without a land. She knew, as well as any of them, what it meant to depend on a leader. She gave a perfunctory bow and departed, preparing to marshal her troops.

Marten was left there, staring at Danitha, studying her. She expected he would say something more about the expedition, but he surprised her with something else.

“You should really stop spending so much time in the chapels, cousin. It doesn’t seem to be good for you.”

She furrowed her brow. “Something wrong with spending time in Serra’s presence, Marten?”

“It doesn’t seem to me that she’s vey present to you. Or anyone.”

“What of her angels, of Lyra Dawnbringer? Or her priests?”

“Powerful magics, to be sure,” he said evenly. “The lingering power of a dead planeswalker, certainly. No dispute.”

Danitha was quiet a moment. She knew Marten cared little for the Church, or at least professed to. He had attended every service growing up, same as her, but the last few years, the brutalities and losses of the Phyrexian Invasion had weighed on him, as it had so many others.

“Serra’s grace preserves us, cousin,” she said, almost automatically. “We need to it keep going forward. She reminds us of all we can be.”

He kept staring, studying, like the intellectual he was. “So you say, cousin. I don’t remember much of the Song. Until the song—the faith—starts fighting our battles or ending death, all by itself—or ensuring the safety of this adventure of yours, for that matter—until then, I’ll leave it to you.”

He, too, bowed, then proceeded out. Danitha was left staring over the bounds of the city, spotted with shining images of Gerrard and Serra, hoping and needing.

Once more, Danitha found herself kneeling, trembling, acid in her mouth, before a wall of Serran stained glass.

Chapels were one of the few places that Danitha could spend time unbothered, and in Croden, the small town in which the retinue had stopped to rest for the night on their way to Castle Joryev, that was especially true. Curious eyes were everywhere. Among their retinue, green-faced knights jockeyed for a glimpse at the famous Lady Capashen (Child), Knight of the Coalition (Unready), Hero of the Mana Rig (Failure), Ruler of Benalia (Father-Murderer). The townspeople, too, were curious. Their countenances shone with the awe for the Great Houses that their Benalish upbringing had inspired, but in their eyes, there was something else, a half-second of hesitation carefully ensconced behind a smile. They had paused for a moment to watch the retinue, then pulled away.

“Are they worried that we’re here for a witch hunt?” Marten had said. “That our presence means there are still Phyrexians here?”

Danitha had pressed her lips together. “No. They fear that we’re bringing them with us. This village has held on since the Invasion, which means that there were either no sleeper agents here—unlikely—or that they’ve already disposed of them. The village is safe, for now. But every outsider could be another Phyrexian in waiting.”

Blood and smoke. Oil and blood. Screams mixed with gurgling bubbles of tar.

“Danitha, do your duty.”

She had looked out on the throng of townspeople scurrying about the Capashen knights. In the faces that rippled before her—and each look that was shot their way—Danitha caught glimpses of broken lives. She saw one half of a marriage, emptily chattering now that there was nobody to be silent with; one half a friendship, moving sluggishly because there was no other person to go out and meet in the morning; one half of a childhood, stumbling along because there was no larger hand to take hold of. Everywhere, half-lives, once full of devotion and admiration and now lain low before shattered images and dead heroes.

Much as Danitha herself was now lain low, before a stained-glass image of Serra and Gerrard Capashen that gushed red, gold, and purple light onto her face. Her ancestor gazed out with a self-assured smile, the kind that—if the cantos in The Triumph of Gerrard were to be believed—had been able to inspire legions of heroes.

Shadows lingered at the edges of her vision; just out of sight, she could swear, was her father, gazing back at Gerrard with a devoted smile.

“We’re here because of him,” he said.

  “Right. Because we made sure we didn’t get eaten by the Phyrexians,” she said in the serious tenor she’d adopted even at age ten. He smiled.

“Yes, my love, but more. We’re here because of his example. We sing his song down through the ages to remember that Serra has ordained us to do incredible things. He shows us all that we can be.”

Tender words morphed into sickening mechanical whirrs. A face whose parts were at war, lips cracked into a vile sneer, oaky eyes gushing oil that shimmered behind wisping fumes of burning glass. They were eyes that wept in a plea for release, but even more, and you had to be up close to see this (close enough to smell the sweat and viscera sticking to the body that had embraced you since you were a little girl), those eyes wept in anguish for a dream being mutilated every second it spent on this earth.

Sacrifice, as Gerrard and Serra and a thousand years of Benalish history had demonstrated, was the way of a hero. If death was the end, it could be honorable. But nowhere in that history, or any of the stories it inspired, was the knight turned into a vulgar abomination, his insides hoisted high for all his soldiers—his daughter—to see, made into a gush of oil to be smeared across a holy symbol, begging for release.

Because that was their greatest crime, wasn’t it? They hadn’t just made a valiant knight into a vulgar insult. They made sure he was awake for every moment of it. They made sure that he knew it was happening and made sure that he could see the look in his daughter’s eyes when she beheld him, when she approached him, and when she separated his head from his neck.

Gerrard and Serra were images of all Aron Capashen wanted to be. But Aron Capashen’s final days blasted those images to pieces. When his limp body fell to the ground, it was surrounded by the wreckage of a life’s ideals.

Daintha made it just a foot out the door before vomiting.

When she returned to the chapel, she found she wasn’t alone. An elderly aven, taloned hands folded gently within his flowing white robes, perched in the pews. He was old, she observed, with graying feathers and a face worn with age, but he swayed back and forth as though to an inaudible song. He was priest, she realized, and she dimly hoped that he hadn’t heard her make a mess outside.

“Greetings, child,” he said, his voice quiet despite their being alone in the chapel. “Is it that sort of day?”

Danitha smiled. “Lately it seems that sort of day has been every day, Brother.”

“Teshar,” he said, smiling. He paused, casting his eyes into the pew, then back up at Serra. “I suppose you’re right.”

She found the stock response slipping from her lips, tasting of acid. “We’re here to protect you. We’re performing regular sweeps to ensure that there are no Phyrexians lingering in the village, and our forces have been vetted thoroughly. We’ll help wherever needed, take whatever you offer, and—”

He waved a hand. Danitha, following the fossilized grooves of hereditary piety more than any conscious effort, fell silent. Reverent.

“There is no need for that. The Ancestor—Serra, I should say—embraces you as you are. In here, you do not need to be what you profess to be out there. ‘In the gathering, there is strength for all who founder—’”

“‘—renewal for all who languish, love for all who sing,’” Danitha finished. Canto 642. “My father taught me well.”

“A virtuous man, then. You are lucky.”

“He was. I was.” Her mouth tasted of bile. Teshar’s eyes flashed with recognition, and he remained quiet a moment.

“Forgive me. It has taken me time to unlearn my old habits, to remember the world in which we live. You number among many. Many fathers lost, many daughters left behind. If we had as many graves as we had mourners, the land would be more stone than grass.”

Images flashed before her eyes of Benalia City, lying in ruins, choked by the salty air of a dried river and the bleached bones of her people.

“I suppose it’s Serra’s compassion, then,” Danitha spat, her chest tightening and rage seeping out without her knowing why. She reprimanded herself. “I apologize, Brother.”

Teshar shrugged. “You are hardly the first to take her name in anger, and you will not be the last.”

“I admire your patience. All of this, the liturgy, the music, the Song—they must soothe you greatly.” She envied it.

The aven chortled, to Danitha’s surprise. “Hardly. I love our traditions dearly, don’t mistake me. But when my altarservers disappear and my organist can’t play because they’re weeping over their wife’s grave and my lector refuses to read the scriptures because the words mean nothing to him, tradition doesn’t offer much help.”

Danitha bowed her head, adding three more lives to her catalogue of agonies. Three more Benalish to hold up, even as her back already creaked under the weight. And still, she had nothing to say.

Teshar read the emptiness in her face. “When I was young,” he said, deliberating words, looking mistily into the distance, “I was captivated by stories of my people’s Old Continent. Otaria. It was a shining paradise, given to us by the Ancestor. But there was a war—a conflict unimaginable, wrought by the pollution of Phyrexia. Our verdant expanses burnt to ash, our soaring peaks made into rubble, our crystal waters dyed red with our own blood.”

How familiar. She knew the stories—the aven exile was one of many historical events drilled into her during diplomatic trainings and national history courses. When the False God Karona leveled Otaria, the Benalish and the Church of Serra had taken the aven in. They had brought their own culture and religion with them, and even as they became devotees of Serra, they still spoke reverentially of their older god, the Ancestor. Many proclaimed, in fact, that those were simply two names for one divinity. There were conflicting accounts, dozens of leading interpretations. She hadn’t paid the theology much mind—her greatest concern had been navigating the aven’s political standing, their desire for representation in the Council of Seven.

“I loved those tales,” Teshar continued, “Because in them, I could read a destiny printed in the stars. A marvelous intention that explained the cataclysm. Perhaps we were the blessed few who had abstained from sin. Or perhaps suffering was Serra’s way of teaching us.”

“If that is true, then by now, we must be well-schooled,” Danitha said, thinking of the bloated cemeteries that dotted the Benalish countryside. Tehsar nodded grimly.

“I think differently now. What good is explanation in the face of such suffering? Is Serra so simple that she saves by calculus, or rescues only the virtuous?”

“Certainly not. But the catechisms teach us that she elevates us. Saves us from suffering. Teaches us through it, uses it to make us greater, more heroic.” Or so they said. It was difficult for Danitha to imagine what suffering had taught her father, sobbing for mercy in tears of oil.

“Perhaps. But,” the priest said, staring at her with the kind of look that leaves one feeling stripped bare, “Tell that to one who is suffering.”

She frowned. “Unorthodox theology, Brother Teshar.”

“Perhaps,” he said with a grandfatherly giggle. “Perhaps it is god-talk for a new age. I believe that Serra was not gullible. Nor naïve. How could she have been? She had profound power, and endless love. How can one love what one does not understand—and did she not understand us to her core, if she herself suffered and died? She, who suffered, who joined us in the depths of our existence—it would be impossible for her to ignore our suffering, and it would be absurd for her to make suffering only a teachable moment.”

“Then what?”

“It is my faith that Serra does not desire suffering for us. Nor that she ignores it. She joins us in it, walks with us through it, gives us the resolve to do what is right in spite of it.”

“Then what of Gerrard?” Danitha interrupted, speaking without knowing why. “Wasn’t he ordained to destroy Phyrexia, to sacrifice himself so that we can know all that Serra has destined us to be?”

“Gerrard died, and we revere him, not because destiny commanded it but because he chose to do what was right. He, I believe, found Serra, or whatever is meant by her name. Serra does not grace us only so that we can be heroes. She meets us in the flames of this burning world. She extends her hand so that we may find the strength to rise and keep fighting. Not because duty or glory or dreams of heroism demand it, but because this world is holy. Because it is right.”

Danitha’s throat constricted. She was ten years old, looking up into her father’s shining eyes. She was twenty, gazing into eyes soaked with oil. “And if we fail?”

“Failure is where Serra meets us, sister. Our brokenness does not dishonor her. If we fall, then we fall as Gerrard did, and as Serra did before him: in commitment to what is right. Testament to the truth that, deep down, this world matters.”

Danitha opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a sharp little sound, like a child’s cry. She lowered her head and forced her eyes shut and felt herself a tiny person flung into a world impossibly large, cold surging water pouring her into typhonic depths, not just cold but empty like a crypt, like the hollow eye of a skull that looks back at you. But a hand, Teshar’s leathery talons, rested on her back, sharp nails resting gently on her back so as not to scratch her, and the streaks of watery darkness that closed in on her shone through with a beam, a rippling jewel light that fell on her face and wrapped her like a mantle, like a father’s too-long cloak—only now not stained with grief but lightened with life. Teshar’s talons were so different and so like the other man who had placed a hand on her back, who with Serra’s light had lifted her when she broke. He held her there, for a long while.

That night, at half past midnight, at the very moment Danitha began to slip into the haze of sleep, the screaming began.

Her body moved seconds faster than her mind (dimly remembered lessons in swordplay, approving smiles, reminder that your instincts often move faster than your reasoning). Her feet hit the floor and her hand was on her sword the moment before the sickening, all-important question came to her: who was it? What sleeper agent had they missed, what signs had she ignored? Was it one of her knights, or one of the townspeople, or Marten, or—

It didn’t matter now. Danitha murmured a prayer for their soul—and for her own.

She assumed a defensive stance, dropping low and reaching out toward the door. There was rumbling, murmuring, behind the brittle wood. Her fingers tightened around the hilt of her blade, and time slowed to stillness, and her eyes met her blade for half a moment, rippling with the ghostly luminescence in the moonlight. But it was wrong. Splotches of light, beaming like bloody stars, seeped crimson light into the sky. They etched strange symbols into the heavens, as though a vengeful god was scrawling a message on the world.

Not important. Focus. What is around you? A knight can’t get to the horizon if she doesn’t look around her. Go.

She yanked the door open and found Payle and Janya, on the other side, half a beat behind her. A breathless messenger, blood trickling from a slivering wound in his forehead, leaned against the wall. Moonlight rippled through the stained glass set in the sentries’ halberds, throwing a ghostly luminescence over their faces. In that gossamer veil, their faces seemed half-suspended, alive for one moment and then dead the next.

“Lady Capashen—” “Out of nowhere—” “Came from the sky—”

“Stop,” she said. “Organize your information. Give me identity. Numbers. Geography. Key people. Now.”

The messenger sputtered, took a breath, then—she could see years of discipline, passed down since the day of Torsten, pulse in his movements—spoke.

“Phyrexians. Hundreds. Coming from the columns of metal in the skies. Right on top of us, but they’ve made a ring around the village. The attack fell right on top of Knight-Commander Aryel’s detachment—they had lodged in the inn—and we haven’t been able to make contact with her.”

Danitha frowned and hoped that her eyes wouldn’t betray the sick feeling beneath. Outside, the night shrieked with the sounds of steel meeting steel and men screaming for mercy. “And Lord Marten?”

“Oh! Yes. He’s secure in the chapel. The town’s priest, the aven, corralled as many villagers as he could. The Phyrexians didn’t pay attention at first, but they’ll be coming.”

“Are there that many?” Danitha said, furrowing her brow. “Why aren’t they splitting their forces?”

He looked at her, eyes wide, voice struggling for words. “You don’t understand.”

But when they pushed out the front door the makeshift compound, Danitha did.

The red lights in the sky weren’t half-dreams or nocturnal phantasms. Dotted across the sky like leprotic sores, bleeding images blazed down on the village. Huge columns of metal like roots of some terrible tree stretched across the sky, and from their prongs, nightmare forms flung themselves to the earth. Winged metallic dragons spewed onyx and ruby flame, and forms that had once been alive laughed like hyenas as they tumbled to the ground, skittering on metal legs towards the Benalish. And all around her, the village burned: flames crimson and gold from out-of-control hearths, splashes of green and red light from hastily crafted spells, steely blue lights shining in windows as the screams of the innocent fell silent.

She blinked, then turned to the messenger. “Go to the chapel. Tell Lord Marten I’m on my way. He’ll give you further orders.”

There, in his smoke-stained faced and puffy eyes, she saw what she didn’t want to see: he didn’t know if he could make it. But then, he nodded. He was Benalish. He would do his duty, even if it broke him.

He disappeared through between blazing buildings, and she turned to face the street. She blinked, and then heard a ghastly cacophony: tinkling clicks like a coin dropping in a well, and below that, metallic voices wailing a strange melody. And then, the Phyrexians arrived.

Before her she found a host of monsters made of chrome and porcelain, ever so slightly alive, but moving with marionette jerkiness. Two chrome-plated creatures slithered toward her, their spiderlike bodies sprouting tentacles that gleamed blue light, and three porcelain soldiers, bearing strange swords and axes that looked like bone, marched forth with eerie coordination, guttural hymns echoing from behind their masks.

She barked an order, and with orchestral precision, Payle and Janya fell into formation. The sentries fanned to make points on a triangle, drawing the chrome spiders’ attention and holding them back with their stained-glass halberds. The porcelain soldiers’ attention paused for half a beat, as if awaiting orders on which direction to take—and Danitha found her time to strike.

She sprung forward, and, taking she sword in both hands, she stabbed into the crimson flesh in one of the soldiers’ sides, then twisted. To her surprise, however, the solider barely flinched—if anything, its ghastly song grew louder. The others swept towards her, but Danitha kept her cool, dropping back and parrying their bony blades. Behind her, she noted, the sentries had pulled back together and drawn the spiders with them, chopping away tentacles even as more grew to replace them. They were outmatched.

And she was outnumbered. Need to even the odds. She ducked another swing from the soldier she had stabbed, then used her momentum to swing her sword upward—sliding through his muscly elbow and cleaving it away. It wheeled back, disoriented, and her leftover energy, she whipped the blade back down, burying it in another soldier’s helmet. It dropped to the ground, limp.

“Your brother Raff is so sure that knights know nothing of science,” Aron had laughed. “But a swordswoman should know as much about weight, motion, and geometry as any Tolarian physicist.”

A clang. A crunch against her armor and the cold feeling of earth as the remaining soldier drove his blade at her chest. Thankfully, her armor absorbed the blow—but she doubted her head would. Behind her, she heard her sentries shout as metal slithered into flesh. The Phyrexian stepped over her chest, raising a sawtoothed sword high into the air, aiming at her temples.

Time slowed. Normal strategy would be a kick to the stomach, but considering that it might not have a stomach…could parry, but from this angle, I wouldn’t have the leverage to hold the blade in place…ah. Of course.

She pressed her legs together and drove them into its stomach, but instead of kicking out, she lifted it into the air and vaulted it behind her. She wheeled over in time to see the Phyrexian collide with one of the chrome spiders, both tangling on the ground in a heap.

Limited time. She sprung to her feet, and a whirl of stained glass and steel, she dismembered the remaining chrome spider, freeing the sentry that had been entangled in it. She barked another command and the sentries fell back into position, surging over the fallen Phyrexians like the tides and spearing them with their weapons. The spider hissed at her with eldritch rage, but she cut off its shriek with a blade planted between its eyes.

Her adrenaline dropped and she began to pant, recovering her breath from the Phyrexians’ strike. By now, the other spider and the soldier had gone still, and her sentries trudged back to her, human blood mixing with grisly oil. She noted, dimly, that Payle was bleeding from her side.

“Can you stay up?”

She frowned, winced. “Don’t know, my lady. Thought it was just a flesh wound, but it’s…burning.”

She peeled away the cloth, and her stomach lurched. There, mingled with Payle’s blood, were weeping pools of oil. Payle looked at her with the face of a child, not an adult. She had ripped the Phyrexians apart, but here, Danitha saw, she was afraid. Danitha tried to keep her countenance firm.

“Don’t worry,” she said, trying to believe it. “You’ll be alright. But do your duty, soldier—find somewhere safe. Barricade yourself. No use fighting when you’re about to fall over.”

“Yes, my lady.” Not a word said about the oil; not a word needed. But they both knew it.

“Janya, with me.” They marched into the streets, and despite herself, she turned back, seeing Payle leaning against her halberd, knees shaking. Her eyes flashed at Danitha, and she saw what she had seen before that day: a lifetime of Benalish honor, Benalish duty, Benalish faith, disintegrating, turning into dust that floated above the shining pools of water and blood and oil.

They passed without incident through the street, but when they found the town’s plaza, things were even more grisly than she’d feared. From the doorway of a smoldering bakery, a marshal barked orders at several recruits engaging a porcelain armored warrior. Near the central monument a cavalryman reined in his terrified horse and plunged his spear toward a flying Phyrexian plated in porcelain. At the fringe of the square, a father led his gaggle of children into a smoky alleyway, desperate to escape.

She felt sick. To the north, at the inn where Aryel and her troops had lodged, swarms of onyx and porcelain and chrome Phyrexians surrounded the building like a cloud. Smoke gushed from the windows and inbetween flashes of silver Benalish armor, she saw the dark inhuman forms of Phyrexian monstrosities. And there, to the south, at the little church where she had cried for her father in Teshar’s arms, the facade had been half-reduced to rubble and the doors had been ripped off their hinges.

Aryel was an essential asset. Should she be compleated, the Phyrexians would gain a general capable of dashing Benalia’s greatest warriors to pieces. But Marten, Marten was her right hand. He held more knowledge than anybody, even her, and if they got that, all the Coalition’s defenses would be vulnerable.

“My lady,” Janya breathed. “What do we do?”

Her? Decide? Impossible. She would know what to do later. All overwhelmed, all in need, all her people, but—

The civilians. Those half-lost lives.

“Go to the inn. Find Knight-Commander Aryel, if she still lives. If not, get any survivors to the cathedral. We won’t let them take any more.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Danitha charged toward the church, dodging beneath flying Phyrexians and burning woodwork to reach the door of the church. When she reached the precipice, she considered turning back, thought of Aryel’s armor being gutted by Phyrexians and her corpse being plunged into their oil, her friend, gone, like so many others. But no.

Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the light inside the church; the some stained glass remained in place, shining light down on Benalish faces, but most windows had been shattered, and shivers of light glinted in the half-twilight of the burning town.

A statue of Serra stood at the center of the chapel, nine feet tall, arms at her side, though even she looked strange in this light. Danitha picked out Marten immediately: she stood, inexplicably, waving a longsword entirely too large for him. To his side, a Benalish night lay limp on the ground. Teshar was next to him, both with their backs to the wall, as they shepherded children behind them. But why? The Phyrexians—

It wasn’t a statue at all.

The figure turned to her, and she saw its body, half etched metal and half rippling muscle, she let out a gasp. She recognized it from Tolarian briefings—a Phyrexian obliterator.

The beast, whose wiry tendons pulsed with life even as its metallic jaws belched mechanical death, leveled itself at Danitha, its bloodied tail scraping along the cobblestones. It raised its clawed fingers up, revealing shreds of metal and blood and flesh caught between them, and as it cleaned itself, Danitha swore she saw it smile.

She let her mind trace the grooves from years of swordplay drills, mock battles, and—more recently—insomniac nights spent imaging hypothetical attacks.

“You can’t have them,” she shouted. Then, she charged.

It closed the distance in half a moment, and they met in the center pews. It swung a bladed arm at her, steel plates clanging together a cackle in its throat—but she spun out of the way, her armor catching fragments of cobblestone split apart by the obliterator’s claws. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw its tail bat aside her sentry, slamming him into the ground with a sickening crunch. She darted in and pricked the obliterator’s fleshy wrist, which squelched and oozed black oil. It swung around at her, but she slipped beneath its arm and rolled along the ground, sweeping her glittering blade across the monster’s side. Her sword glanced harmlessly off its metal plating, but as she rose to her feet and yanked the blade back, she felt it slip across rotted flesh. The obliterator wailed.

She smirked at it, dimly wondering if it had eyes to see her with. Of course, she reasoned, it wouldn’t matter if it killed her. She paced back, waiting for the next engagement, and the obliterator did the same, dropping to four legs like an enormous tiger. It wheezed in staccato, alternating between noxious smelling breath and bursts of cold metallic air. She strategized: arms too close to spin out of the way, teeth to sharp to go straight in, no telling what it would do if she tried to get under it—

A quiet whir of machinery. Then it sprung forward, leaping hit into the air and sweeping its claws, stained with blood, toward her. Had to take the risk. She tried to crouch and roll beneath it again, but as she drove her sword into its abdomen, a column of darkness slammed into her stomach and air poured out of her lungs. She felt a pierce, a crush, a crunch, and she whirled through the air to find herself suspended by its tail. Barbed tendrils jabbed over her armor, and she felt a cold metallic sting as they speared her sides. Blood stung her mouth.

And all around them, the windows filled, then burst. Phyrexians in chrome and porcelain and etched onyx poured into the church, descending upon the screaming Benalish. She saw Teshar fire a bolt of white light from his hand, then another, but they closed around him.

She tried to swing her sword, but the tendrils were covering her arm, her wrist, preparing to pour glistening oil onto her, and the bastard was laughing, laughing just like her father had, with that icy sound like plates smashing together.

She bled. She choked. She screamed.

But then, so did the creature. Shining Benalish glazeplate sprouted from its leg and the creature dropped to one knee. It wheeled around and yanked Danitha with it, and she saw Marten, still wielding the knight’s longsword, hacking at the obliterator’s leg. The creature gave a sickening hiss. The tendrils loosened around her arm ever so slightly.

“I am a Capashen! I am Benalish!” Marten roared. “We will not break!”

Danitha wrenched her arm through the tendrils, holding onto her sword with all her strength, but it was like moving through tangled vines.

He swung the blade again, but this time it clanged off the obliterator’s ebon armor. In a blur, the creature whipped its arm toward the squire, and he dove to the ground. Another dodge as he slipped under its tail, then another as he chopped away the tendrils with clumsy swordstrokes, streaking the steel with black blood.

Danitha found herself yanked back and forth as the creature wheeled around Marten. Then, appearing along its side, he jabbed the blade between the scaled plates of its skin—and apparently found purchase, for the Phyrexian gave a sickening roar. Marten yelled, half yelping and half cheering, and Danitha wanted to laugh with him. She almost had her arm out—so close—could help finish the monster off—

A blur of movement. Shimmering blades. Danitha tried to scream, but the obliterator moved faster than sound.

The bladed claws caught Marten in the side as he was yanking the longsword out of the creature’s leg. There was a splintering crack, and Danitha saw the obliterator’s metal jaws illuminated by shards of shattered Benalish stained glass. They hung in the air for a moment like shooting stars, then rained down on Marten, who lay at the oblierator’s feet, blood seeping from his side.

He was crying. Just like he had when they were children. She had never cried then but wanted too now. He was so young. His mother loved him so.

The obliterator pinned him to the ground with another claw, as if eager to extend his suffering. It planted a foot on his chest, its barbed tail whipping around and preparing to strike. Whipping her head around, begging for help, she saw that the swarming Phyrexians were leaving the way they came, entangling warriors and civilians and carrying them along with them.

And there, coiled and choked by porcelain metal, his hand reaching out for help, was Teshar, the priest, the lover of all creation, being pulled away.

From below, she heard Marten’s sobs. But no, not sobs. “The light of love shines brightly through even the smallest of cracks.” Beneath his choked cries and bloody moans, a sound. Garbled lyrics that she thought her cousin had willfully forgotten. “All shall be illuminated.”

The Song of All. Canto 903. A promise from Serra: I will not leave you.

The creature’s tail raised above Marten’s head. Danitha screamed.

She yanked her arm with all her force and screamed and the tendrils ripped and broke. Prismatic light flashed in the dark as she drove the sword into the creature’s meaty neck, and its roar turned into a gurgle. Glistening oil exploded from its mouth and inky viscera gushed onto her arm. The creature dropped to one knee, its tendrils going limp and letting Danitha drop to the ground. It turned to look at her, roaring and inkstained scream of fury and hate. She repaid it by driving her blade into its mouth and through the top of its jaw. The scream died away as the creature went limp, slipping to the ground.

She wanted more than anything to rush to Marten, but the others—only, as she wheeled around, the others were gone. Many of Benalish civilians remained, but any warriors were gone, their weapons dropped where they stood. Where Teshar had stood, now only were fragments of his staff and shreds of his cassock. Now, she found, tears were streaming down her face.

“Danitha,” a voice said, weakly. Marten. She rushed to her cousin’s side, moving without thinking, wrapping his bloody wounds in shreds of her cloak, using his own ripped tunic as a bandage, trying to stave off the blood flow, no time to think about the oil.

“The crypt,” he whispered. “Open. The crypt.”

But the townsfolk were already ahead of her. Yanking open the door to the church crypt, they revealed dozens and dozens of civilians, maybe hundreds, taking shelter among the bodies. The Phyrexians had missed them.

“How?”

“Teshar’s. Idea,” Marten said, wincing. “Path leading away. Through the crypts. We can go. Three abreast. Everyone out. Thirty minutes.”

“Always thinking in numbers, cousin,” she croaked.

“Ha. Ha.”

He coughed, blood mingling with his spittle. Danitha went to one knee to help him, but she winced, clutched her side, stiffened. More blood from her wound. She couldn’t leave him, but she wasn’t strong enough to lift him.

One more try. She went down to one knee, her sides screaming, and wrapped Marten’s arm around her neck, then lifted. To her own surprise, he began to move—and, she realized belatedly, it wasn’t her doing it.

Three villagers had circled around them, lifting Marten up by the shoulders, legs, and arm. She recognized them: one-half of a friendship, one-half of a marriage, one-half of a childhood. Withered faces, dim eyes. But something else. Something that shone out like starlight.

“We’ve got him, my lady,” said one, an old man.

Something moved in her, something small and profound, a gentle beat like a hummingbird’s wing and thundering roar like the movements of the earth. She was filled with something new, a feeling that rippled through the depths of her being and filled her with the desire to embrace them, to hold them, to keep them close to her and to love them for what they had done and to feel an immense agony for all that they had lost, were still losing. Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped them away quickly.

The villagers moved quickly, lifting Marten and cradling his broken form as they moved toward the crypts. Danitha limped behind them, trying vainly to shake off the pain of her wounds. As she reached the crypt, she surveyed the survivors: one-hundred-and-twenty-odd people, adults and children alike. Only a few had arms of any kind, and even fewer had training—just a few reservists on their off-rotation. She began to wonder what had become of their knights, but then recalled the carnage at the inn. Aryel’s face flashed across her mind.

“Lady Danitha.” She turned and found the old man who had carried Marten to the crypt. “I mean not to harass you further, far be it from me, for all you’ve done. But we’re a great many, and many are afraid. Do you know where Brother Teshar is, that he might say a hopeful word?”

She felt sick. She saw the image of Teshar’s terrified eyes, his soft hand reaching out from the cloud of Phyrexian metal. So very much like that other man whose once-loving eyes, weeping incarnations with oil, had looked at her, begging. “He’s…gone. I’m sorry.”

The old man’s eyes dimmed. “I see.” A pause, a gulf, unnamed agonies and hopes run aground. “Then what should we do?”

She glanced over her shoulder. Janya had never returned, and perhaps if they waited, she might arrive with Aryel and her troops. Perhaps. But if they stayed, then more Phyrexians were sure to come. Danitha doubted she could stand for much longer, much less fight. And yet again, and yet again: Aryel, her friend, her confidante, her general, the key to their survival, for how could they expect to survive in the wild without her troops?

Back at the townspeople, faces dark, scared, wishing to be home, wishing to be in a world where lives were not lost and friends were not torn away and hopes were not splintered. Her people.

“We keep moving,” she said. “We’ll find somewhere safe, then regroup. All shall be illuminated, brother.”

Half a smile crept across the old man’s face. He rejoined the crowd, which began to shuffle and rustle as the townsfolk fell into their three-by-three formation. She looked out on them with love and agony.

“If you’re there, Lady Serra,” she whispered, “Help me be like my father.” Then, she slipped towards the front, ready to lead the way into the darkness.

Chapter Text

Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter. It was happening again.

Oaky eyes weeping black oil. Mouth twisted, begging, shameful, praying to be erased, looking in the face of the one whom he had raised in love and honor.

“Danitha. Do your duty.”

And what was her duty? To maintain the honor of the people who had already been lain low like beasts? To be a hero—the kind who slay their fathers and can do nothing for the shattered people before them?

The steel in Danitha’s boots clicked against the floor of the stone passageway. She stretched her arm, wincing only slightly as she felt the healing magic pulse in her sides. She knew she should keep it still, let the cleric’s power do its work, but more powerful in her was the congenital urge to act. Especially in present circumstances.

Behind her: rows and rows of Benalish refugees whose orderly footsteps, trained by years of discipline, couldn’t conceal groans, cries of agony, prayers for salvation—or death. And ahead of her, the tunnel plunged into the distance. By her estimation, they had walked miles since exiting the chapel, and the end of the cavern only twinkled with the dimmest light.

Even further behind them: the village of Croden, reduced to ruins, razed by Phyrexian invaders. Countless Benalish, children and adults, consumed by the monsters. Hundreds of her troops, devoured, reduced to grist for the monstrous machines. Among, them, perhaps, was Knight-Commander Aryel, Benalia’s most important miliary leader besides Danitha herself. She grimaced: Aryel might already be lost, made a Phyrexian abomination, laying waste to Benalia City, crushing underfoot the knights who had trained all their life to be heroes, people who had believed in Benalia and in the Church of Serra and who now would be drowned in oil and crucified as testaments to Phyrexian glory.

And then there was Teshar, the aven priest who had held Danitha, counseled her, whom the villagers were still asking after, whom she refused to say she had seen pulled into a cloud of Phyrexian monsters. She prayed, with the little light still twinkling in her soul, that he would know peace.

The cave was, her cousin Marten had explained, part of a religious rite, a way of commemorating the honorable and dishonorable dead alike. Each year, the people of Croden would celebrate a Serran service in the chapel and carry relics of all who had died in the year—personal effect, trinkets, tempera-painted icons of Serra or Gerrard, even bones—through the tunnel and to the salt-soaked cliffs, then let the sea take them. Remembrance and release. She felt a pang, a bite of venom, something almost like anger at them for being able to consign those burdens to Serra with such ease.

The onyx walls of the cave closed in. She seemed to float apart from herself, from it all, felt sick. All their lives, and hers, had been built on millennia of Serran faith and Benalish heroism, promises of honor and heroism and conquest and immortality, and that faith was shorn apart, mutilated before their eyes and then reduced to smoking rubble, and she was the last to stand in the ash. She was not resuscitating that history; she was its last gasp.

Danitha straightened her shoulders—an easy, rote maneuver, the kind that could bring her body under control, something easy to keep track of when the mind was too stormy, or so he, the man who had been her father, had told her, back when he was a knight instead of a bloated monstrosity weeping shimmering oil. “You have duties out here,”—he pointed to the ground—her father did always love pointing to make a point—“And duties in here.” He pointed to her head. “Both real. But one is a world of shadows. One is a world of life. Know which is which. They change roles. Find yourself in the real one.”

She cringed, trying to hear the real fatherly voice that the clang of alien machinery had replaced in the moments before—it all. World of shadows, world of life.

Danitha tapped one of her knights on the shoulder. “Take the lead. I’ll be back.” He nodded stiffly, and she could see an almost imperceptible expression—suspicion, fear, doubt.

Easing her steady gait—letting herself feel the tight, stinging pain of her wound—Danitha dropped back into the crowd. She allowed the survivors to slip around her, trying to meet as many of their glances as she could manage, half sickened at the cold death in their eyes and half stunned by the awe with which they still, somehow, looked on her. She wanted to receive them with pride and triumph, just as her father would have. Instead, she felt like hiding like a child.

She reached the middle of the caravan, where they had improvised a mobile infirmary. There were two rows of gurneys, their carriers, nothing more than strong-armed townsfolk who had been drafted into the duty, ambling awkwardly down the corridor. They were trying desperately, with little success, not to jostle their charges. In the center-back  gurney lay a limp form, shorter than any Benalish knight, just close young enough to be confused for a squire, excepting, of course, how scrawny as he was. Marten Capashen. Cousin. Steward. Friend.

Roll your shoulders. There was Marten, sprawled out on a gurney, murmuring quietly as they jostled him along.

“How is he?” Danitha looked at the ersatz medic in the back of Marten’s gurney. Their thick muscles were beaded with sweat—the cool corridor was baking with the heat of human breath and bodies—and they huffed quietly as they trotted along. Their hands, she noted, were dusted with a layer of ash.

“Hanging in, my lady,” they said, casting his eyes down. They had likely never met a member of the Great Houses, at least not one higher than the petty noble that the Joryevs had installed in Croden. That man, Iven Joryev, had still been missing when Teshar and Marten had shepherded the villagers to their escape. Perhaps he had died. Perhaps something worse had happened.

“What does the cleric say?” her eyes were fixed on Marten.

“Hrm,” they grunted. “I haven’t talked to Brother Merah in a while. Seems occupied, my lady.”

She glanced up. Merah, the other aven clergyman of Teshar’s parish—part of the same pastoral mission—was the only surviving Serran priest in their company, and so he was their healer by default. He walked alongside the front row of gurneys, whispering clipped prayers to Serra as golden light flickered from his fingers. An experienced healer would struggle to keep up with this many injuries, and this young cleric, who had seemed more interested in theology than life magic, was far from experienced.

Then, she remembered herself dimly. “What’s your name?” she asked the medic, cursing herself for forgetting her manners.

“Nathyn, if it pleases, my lady,” they said quietly.

“Are you here with your family, Nathyn?”

They pressed their lips together. Nodded. “My daughter’s here. That’s all.” They nodded towards a cot nearby, where a little child was nestled into a cot, sleeping, tossing and turning.

“I’m sure Merah will get to her in due time,” Danitha said, knowing she should say something else but losing the words in her throat. Teshar’s words echoed: What good is explanation in the face of such suffering?

Nathyn nodded stiffly, then turned away.

Danitha placed a hand on Marten’s forehead. The sheen of icy sweat was unpleasant, but his fever had broken. He was sleeping unsoundly, periodically murmuring nonsense and thrashing his legs. She wondered if he was still there, still in that chapel with the Phyrexian’s razor claws perpetually piercing his sides, she herself perpetually screaming for him and begging for mercy. When he awoke, would he be relieved to escape that nightmare, or horrified by the one they were still in?

She felt that feeling, the one that lives not so much in the brain but in the spine and the nerves and the heart, of a figure, next to her, gazing upon her, and without knowing why she was filled with the dread of being watched by her father, and she flicked her eyes up at that unknown shape just beyond her—but it was only Nathyn. They looked away as soon as she turned to them, but for the half-moment of mutual recognition, when she saw them watching her, she was filled with dread at the dim eyes of dun faith, yes, but there was also something else, something more there.

Something pulsed in her, something like the feeling she’d felt in the church, something moving, a wanting that reached out, and she was looking at their powder-stained fingers. But then they were looking away and it fled, and she was back here, amidst the dark, the dead, and the dying.

The next time she visited, a few hours later, she thought Marten was sleeping. But as she approached, Marten raised a hand.

“So, cousin,” Marten said meekly, without opening his eyes. “What’s the plan?”

“Hm,” she said, smiling ever so slightly. “After what happened at Croden,”—she looked at Nathyn (burning buildings, broken bodies, Benalish weeing oil)—“The Phyrexians clearly haven’t brought some paltry strike team.” An understatement. The Phyrexians were pouring in from the seeping wounds in the sky, and she doubted that any fortifications could stand up to them for long. “Joryev Manor, perhaps? It’s a full day on foot, perhaps half a day to ride.”

Marten gave a hoarse grunt, gasped out words. “Ah, of course. The Joryevs. Isn’t it convenient, cousin. That they. Called you out here. Middle of nowhere. Right at the moment the invasion started.”

“Sleeper agents, you think,” she said, her stomach knotting. He shrugged.

“I’m. Not at full capacity. But I’m suspicious. And in any case. Could the Manor really be standing?”

He was right. If the Manor wasn’t rubble already, it might be a monument to Phyrexian glory and Benalish suffering. The Joryevs might be nightmares with eyes weeping oil and flesh grafted to steel and claws hands that held their daughters by the throat and squeezed the life out of them and—

“So, hardly desirable,” she said.

“Perhaps Lyra Dawnbringer will come save us. Perhaps the D’Avenants.”

She smirked. “Now, cousin, being wounded doesn’t mean you can slack off. Lyra and the Order of Dawn have sworn to defend Benalia—not us. Benalia City is their greatest priority. Ditto for the D’Avenants. I trust Cerise, but now that the Invasion has started, her priority will be to stabilize the Council.”

“Ah, yes. The practicalities of politics. So very thrilling when you’re at court. So very difficult when you’re on death’s door.”

“Perils of leadership. In the meantime—our daring escape. If we can’t go south, we’ll have to lead the civilians out, then north, along the coast. Eventually, we’ll run into Deniz or D’Avenant settlement—hopefully one that’s still standing. If it isn’t, perhaps our merry band of misfits will grow.”

“Hnh.” Something resembling a laugh slipped out of Marten. “You know, cousin. Inbetween your audacity All my jabbering has meant something.”

“I might be wildly unprepared and walking amidst smoldering wreckage, but I was trained for this.”

Marten furrowed his brow. As the muscle flexed, a tiny blot of blood trickled from his forehead—a wound that Brother Merah hadn’t seen to, evidently. “It’s a risk to bring these civilians along. We’ll move slower. Be in more danger.”

She was tempted to agree. But. “If we leave them here, they’ll be defenseless. The Phyrexians haven’t found them yet, but it’s just a matter of time.”

He groaned and tried to say more, but the words turned to a groan in this throat. She tapped a finger to her lips and wiped beading sweat away from his forehead. “Keep resting, cousin. I’ll  get a lay of the land. See what we can do.”

As she reached the mouth of the cave, Danitha was met not by shimmering beams of the Benalish sunrise but by the steely light of an invasion.

She was crouching near the tunnel’s exit, a squat little maw that opened into the foot of a stony bluff. Jaren, the scout who had brought the first report—he was a squire, really, apprentice to the knight back in the chapel, the one whom the Phyrexian had mutilated (a man raised to be a hero, proud of his people, insides ripped out by a hulking monstrosity, just like)—he had given as comprehensive an account as his trembling voice could manage. But she struggled to believe it until she saw it.

Overhead, the sky was pocked with the branches of the Phyrexians’ terrible tree. Dozens of them. If the attack in Croden was any indication, each branch carried hundreds of Phyrexians—perhaps thousands. And this was only here, in one of Benalia’s most thinly populated regions. She could only imagine the untold thousands swarming in Llanowar, Shiv, Tolaria, Benalia City. The blood and oil and steel and screams. She whispered a prayer, shaky, like ink dribbling on paper, that the Coalition’s preparations would help save as many lives as possible. She couldn’t bring herself to hope for anything more than that.

“Alright,” she said, turning to the squire. “Let’s go.”

Jaren’s eyes flared. “Go? Erm, my lady? Go where?”

“I need to survey the terrain, see the paths. We need to know our options.”

The squire shook his head, and then caught himself a moment later and stilled himself. “Well, my lady. I suppose you might. But I—you should go.”

She frowned. “No, squire. I can’t go alone. I need someone to watch my back. We don’t have enough soldiers to spare—someone need to protect the villagers. Your people, yes?”

Jaren nodded stiffly. She recalled that he was squire to the reservist detachment in Croden, that he was as much a member of the townsfolk as of the army.

“Then this is how we help them. Come with me,” she said, cutting off any further objects. Regret hung on her shoulders; she knew she should give the boy more space, more choice, but they couldn’t afford it. They had to carry on.

“Very well, my lady,” Jaren murmured. “But you’d best be ready for the smell. It’ll set in soon.”

As they exited the cave and stepped out over the limestone rocks, she inhaled the solemn breeze of the ocean, so like the riversoaked air of home. Her cloak streamed around her in the salty wind. Particles of water drenched the air, as if the sea itself wished to crawl up to shore. Next to her, Jaren covered himself with a paltry hood to escape the oceanic gale.

They paced through the rocky terrain abutting the coast, picking across jagged stones that would-be fishermen had used for generations. Each step added more data to her mental calculations—whether the wounded would be able to climb the stones, whether children would hurt themselves while trying to keep their balance, whether the salt spray would put them at risk for hypothermia. Marten could have sized up the situation in a moment, but she had to make do with the fruits of experience.

As they reached the end of the rocky outcropping, Danitha was relieved to find easier, greener terrain. A wall of swaying reeds parted easily before them, and they finished retracing Jaren’s path—right up to the treeline of the coastal forest. The ember light of the Phyrexian portals rippled through the pine-lattice canopy, and Danitha swore that she saw shadows slipping through the darkness. Jaren shuddered.

No time to ponder it. She kept her sword at the ready, letting its mutlicolored stained glass wash her with iridian light. They slipped between the trees, finding the paths that Joryev subjects had worn into the earth over generations. She wondered whether Lady Aveya herself had ever been here; she had never gotten the impression that the quiet, dark-eyed noble took much time to venture out of her estate, but it was Benalish tradition to tour the domains at the conclusion of each seven-year cycle of the Ranking. Danitha wondered what had become of her. She hoped dimly that her end had been swift, painless. But she doubted it.

“My lady,” Jaren whispered. His skin was pallid. “I thought I could go, my lady. But when I went out—I can’t. I was there next to Duwain, back in the cathedral, when the monster came in.”

“What? Who is—” A pause. Of course. Jaren, a squire. Duwain, his knight—

She paused. “I’m,” she said softly. Her voice cracked, failed. Words struggled to knit themselves together in her chest. “He was…”

Jaren continued, as though he couldn’t hear her, as though he were speaking to some glowering presence just behind her back. “He asked me for his sword, and I gave it, and he asked me for his spear, and I gave it, and he asked me stand beside him, and I—tried. He charged. He thought I was behind him. But that thing. I know the stories—I know I was supposed to charge in with him and fight it. But it looked at me—it didn’t have eyes and it looked at me, and it just…”

“Smiled,” Danitha breathed. “And you couldn’t move.”

“And then Duwain was gone. And I’m left.”

Danitha placed a hand on his shoulder. “Jaren. Look at me.” The squire—he was a boy, no older than her brother, she dimly thought—struggled, thrashed his head around, eyes fogged with tears. “Duwain is gone. But we’re here. So now, we have to do this. We must. It’s.” She tasted metal on her tongue. “It’s our duty.”

Duty. The word, infused with generations of utterance, millennia of meaning, echoed through the ages to every Benalish warrior—invested with the spiritual exhalation of Serra herself, as though she was calling each and every person to offer all they had—found their mark. Jaren steeled himself, inhaled, nodded.

She allowed him a moment to gather together his surveying equipment, turning away so that he wouldn’t see her grimace. She despised the words she had spoken, abhorred that she was doing this to him, begged for it to be someone else, begged for peace. He was little more than a child, and more than that, he was a hurt child, a sick child, who needed healing and care, not the platitudes of Benalia’s glory cult. But they had no choice.

The face of Light will shine upon them, and they will know war no more. Song of All. Canto 918. The words flashed in her mind, then faded to smoke, vaporous nothing. If only.

“Duty, squire,” Danitha said, willing herself to believe it.

As they plumbed deeper into the woods, the fragmentary trails and isolated groves assembled themselves in her mind. Images rose before her, possible paths: here a route perfect for a retinue of knights, there a path that would accommodate three abreast. But none would be easy for a hundred wounded, grieving, broken refugees; every snaking vine was a broken leg, every outcropping of rocks an impassable obstacle for the disabled, every tangle of bushes a moment when someone might be left behind.

And, true to the squire’s assessment, a stench hung in the air. At first, Danitha thought it might be the sulfurous odor that wafted along muddy coasts, but that wasn’t it. Nor was it the smell of the animals that made their homes in the wood. Nor was it even the smell of Croden’s distant fuming embers. It had, she thought, pacing through the soft squishy soil of the cliff, the textured depth of leather and the sharpness of rot, the scorching scream of tar and the ferrous cloy of blood. She rested her hand against tall, gnarled pine, breathing deep, trying to ignore the stench even as she felt compelled, without knowing why, to inhale it all the more deeply.

She had never remembered the smell before, only the words, but now, there he was again, before her, stinking of synthetic life: stretched skin no longer nourished by the body, organs ripped free from the chest and left to bake in the heat of whirring metal like rotten meat. Her foot, she dimly noted, was pressed into something sticky, some mud. And there was something else: floral, like games in the summer sun and candlelit laughter. But that wasn’t mud, was it? Ah. There. Mixed in with the stench of destruction, even as he screamed and black oil poured between his teeth, her father smelled of lavender. His favorite.

It was only when she heard Jaren yelp that Danitha looked up and saw that the tree was scarred with the sigil of the Phyrexians and that its bark was split, oozing ebon ichor.

She stumbled back, drawing her sword, but the symbol stared down at her like the cycloptic eye of an undead god. And it wasn’t just there. A crack, a squelch, and the pines began weeping glistening oil that intermingled with sap and dripped to the ground, smelling sweet like rancid sugar. Another sound, pine needles crunching underfoot and branches splitting and steel clanking against wood. By the time she realized what was happening, it was already too late.

The Phyrexians materialized on all sides, rising from the underbrush and stepping from behind tree trunks and skittering along the dirt path. They came in different forms, bedecked in different metallic shapes—A ranking system? Different contingents?—soldiers in beaming porcelain and bloody fleshy leather whose blades were lined with enormous cuspid teeth, goblins with sickly puce skin and armor glowing like firelight, enormous skeletal cats made of chrome, coppery simians that hung from the trees and barked raspy screams.

Jaren whimpered. Danitha gulped. The Phyrexians watched.

She held her sword at the ready, its stained-glass light casting them in a dim multifarious aura, and, she noticed, the Phyrexians cringed when its reflected light fell on them. She allowed herself a moment of relief: Benalish glazeplate was infused with layers of enchantments—wards of protection, auras of power, incantations to ward off dark magic. She was glad that she could depend on those, at least.

The Phyrexians didn’t move; they stared at Danitha and Jaren, eyes of all kinds—glowing and bulging and bloodshot and empty—boring into them. There was a rustle, and from the crowd there emerged two figures, side-by-side, moving in lock-step.

On the right: an ebon-plated thing that might have once been human, its body scoured of flesh and its fingers grasping an axe whose blade was the size of her arm; but most arresting was its face, whose bones seemed to have been flattened, smoothed over, and rescuplted into a blank mask, bisected by a black line. The mask symbol, Danitha remembered, of the old Phyrexian god Yawgmoth.

All this she only had a moment to size up, because as the figure on the right entered the clearing, her blood ran cold. Even despite the leathery flesh that stretched over the body, even despite the porcelain armor plated over the arms and throat and face, even despite the wings that belonged more to a demon than to a priest, Danitha recognized him: speaking to her in quiet whispers, holding her with love and care, speaking the words that seemed from the depths of his soul to hers. Teshar. The Ancestor’s Apostle.

“Hello. Lady Danitha,” Teshar boomed, his voice—beautiful, tenor, a gift to choirs and hymnals—mingling messily with raspy whispering echoes, as though a dozen more voices were packed into his throat. “Long time. No see.”

The last she had seen of Teshar, he had been screaming, begging for help, as oily Phyrexian claws closed around him. Danitha had prayed to Serra, offered up whatever faith she could muster, to let the aven, the loyal priest, the parish vicar, the comforter, the friend, find peace. Serra, it seemed, had not answered.

It was happening again.

Danitha knew she should think that Teshar was gone. There was no use trying to negotiate. Whatever soul might have been there, once shining incandescently, was now only the lifeless engine fire of the Phyrexian war machine. She knew this; but she didn’t believe it.

“Teshar,” Danitha said, barely audible, surely not loud enough for the Phyrexian that had been her friend to hear it—except, Teshar smiled. He gestured to the dark, masked Phyrexian beside him, and a horrible voice, a voice once human and now mingled with crackling static and the hiss of metal, boomed from its face.

“We’re here to protect you,” it said, in Danitha’s voice. Words she’d spoken to Teshar in the chapel. “Do your duty, soldier—find somewhere safe.” Her voice again, this time the words she’d spoken to Payle, her bodyguard, during the attack on Croden, as black ichor had seeped from a wound in Payle’s side—these words, echoing out of the Phyrexian’s mouth. “Do your duty. Do your duty. Do your duty.”

“Danitha, do your duty.” Her father’s voice. Head separating from body; father dead and daughter destroyed.

“Lady Danitha,” Jaren whispered. She was going to be sick. Jaren nudged her. But then, the masked Phyrexian turned to him.

Something that had once been a man’s booming voice: “Squire! To me!”

Jaren stiffened his grip on his sword. He whimpered. “Duwain?”

It repeated itself. Squire! To me! Over and over. And then, the voice died in the Phyrexian’s throat, and the defiant cry turned into a yell, and a gulp, and the sound of squelching flesh, and a scream, a scream that repeated itself over and over. Jaren dropped his sword, tried to cover his ears, but the scream grew louder, louder, kept repeating Duwain’s death over and over and over.

“Jaren!” Danitha screamed. “We have to go!” But he didn’t move.

Danitha could barely think, barely keep herself on her feet. Teshar, on the ground in Croden, crying, screaming, oil seeping into her, losing everything, emotions disintegrating and consciousness not just slipping away but turning hard, metallic, slick, parts disassembled. Teshar, standing here, laughing, the other Phyrexians joining, cackling together in a horrible chorus.

The ache in her seethed. It poured in rushing torrents, in images of bloodied friends sprawled on the ground and holy men screaming as they were torn away and nightmare fathers weeping and stained-glass faith exploding into a million shivered fragments. It beat red like the blood in her temples, like the heart of a flame, and she felt herself moving by the grace of instinct, as though elevated above her own body, and she surged forward.

For that battle Brindri was an angel of light and fury, Song of All, Canto 524

The two copper apes and chrome cat came at her first, pouncing at her legs and bounding from the branches with echoing guttural laughs. She spun sideways, crouched—had to time it perfectly—swept up with her sword, flung the cat into the air—right into the chest of the leaping gorilla. They fell together in a heap, and Danitha swung down, digging her blade in the ape’s back as it struggled to get up. A foot on its back, a push as hard as she could manage, but it was like keeping a horse still. Its groaning mechanical parts were too powerful. The cat thrashed beneath the ape, clawing at Danitha’s leg, and the parts fell into place in her refined tactical mind: she drove her sword through the ape’s chest and into the cat, cringing as feline squeals merged with simian grunts and dissolved into a gush of blood and oil.

Good. Two down. Now—

She felt a crunch as the other copper ape slammed its fists into her back. Foolish, foolish forgetting about it. The monster was on top of her in a moment and she found herself barely able to stand, her armor absorbing the brunt of its blows but still reverberating bruising impacts along her spine. In the corner of her eye, she saw the porcelain soldiers and the pallid goblin surging towards her, brandishing their sick toothy blades, and over there, Jaren had finally picked up his sword and was pacing towards Teshar, all as the ape kept pounding, all as the Phyrexians kept laughing their horrid laugh.

But fury was Danitha’s, too.

She swept out her back leg, dipping her knees as the ape lost its balance. It teetered back and forth for half a moment, and that was where she found her chance. She pushed back up, slamming her back against the Phyrexian and sending it sprawling back, then spun, sweeping the blade out—and separating the ape’s head from its hulking body.

Over her shoulder, Jaren had engaged with Teshar and the executioner, the ebon figure playing the same laughter over and over again. Jaren swung clumsily and Teshar easily deflected with his white bleached staff, forcing Jaren back.

No time to think. In a flurry, the porcelain soldiers were on her, swinging in a whirlwind of blades. She deflected with her bracer, hearing a crunch as the Phyrexian metal broke against her wrist. The Benalish glazeplate absorbed the force of the blow, but her wrists still shuddered from the force of the attack, and she dropped back, watching, studying. They walked forward together, in perfect harmony, and engaged, jab, swing, jab; swing, jab, swing; and then it struck her. The Phyrexians were coordinated, but it was their only strength. Their bodies were new, fresh, made of parts not used to collaborating. Take care of one…

She twisted her sword so that its flat end faced them—and beams of sunlight bounded off the enchanted glass set into the blade, directly into the face of one Phyrexian. It hissed as the prismatic light, infused with spells of warding and weakening, sizzled against his face. Its companion wavered, and Danitha took her chance. Dart in, slice, detach the sword arm—then, blade to the face. As the other regained its bearings, it showed its face—porcelain scorched crisp by enchanted light—just in time for Danitha to drive her blade through its chest and force it to the ground.

Her cloak twirled in a sweep of white as she spun to meet Teshar and the executioner. Hopefully Jaren had held up well enough to—

No. Teshar stood over Jaren, porcelain metallic foot pressed into his neck, the boy choking, thrashing, screaming out, as the executioner loomed over him, continuing to squawk his knight’s words. Squire! To me! Squire! To me!

Danitha became water rolling over the stones, legs roaring, burning and begging for relief as she charged forward, sword raised, and slammed sidelong against the executioner—and felt his body slam back against hers, as though she had pushed a boulder and the boulder had pushed back. The executioner stared at her with that horrible blank face, then marched stiffly,

“Ah,” Teshar said, looking at Danitha with a smile. “Finally. No need to waste any more time.”

The executioner slipped into a fluid stance, as though he had done it a thousand times, cleaving hopeless lives from desperate bodies, and swung his axe high into the air and swept it down on her. She raised her sword to deflect the blow, but the axe collided with the weight of a landslide; it was all Danitha could do to remain standing, sword locked against the axe’s blade, wrists screaming out as the executioner’s primeval hate bore into her.

“We have been ordained anew,” Teshar said, his beautiful voice dripping poison, his foot grinding into Jaren’s throat as the executioner forced down on Danitha. “Into the glory of Phyrexia. As the Etched Host spills your blood, I shall anoint it with new blessings.”

Ignore. Ignore. Ignore. Dodge, turn, roll, avoid the blade, get the leg—deflection—avoid the arm—axeblade in your shoulder—bruise on your neck—too much. The executioner pressed forward, his axe sweeping in a maelstrom. Its voice still boomed. Squire! Danitha. To me! Your duty.

It was not an act of strategy but one of rage that drove her next. She charged, knowing the executioner would not feel surprise, that indeed it felt nothing at all, and even as its axe sheared a hole in the side of her armor and crunched against her ribs and dug into her flesh, she knew it felt nothing—just as she knew it felt nothing as she pulled herself along the axe and drove her sword up through its chin.

Glistening ichor spewed out of its throat and head, and the voices in its throat garbled together into a horrid screech, and the executioner fell.

Teshar’s face was still visible, ever so slightly, behind the porcelain mask. She saw eyes open wide, filled with blackness and blood, as though they had been stretched open by force, as though he were in there, made to watch the holocaust in which his body participated. In those eyes she saw horror. But in his crooked face she saw a horrible knowing smile.

“Well done,” he said. He lifted a foot off Jaren’s neck. “You would, I’m sure, be the perfect addition to our Alabaster Lady’s legions.”

“Teshar,” she breathed, begged, without knowing why, grasping that he was gone but not believing it. “Please. Remember yourself. Serra—”

Metal and flesh and rage clanged together in Teshar’s throat. “Serra. Nothing. Just as your people. Just as your world. Just as you. Are nothing.” He looked at her, his mutilated skin cracking and clanking as his eyeless mask met her gaze. “You will gain strength only when you renounce these nothings. If you believe I am wrong. Then try to kill me. I am fresh from incubation. Simply watching. Studying. I am vulnerable.”

It should be easy. It should be simple. But as Danitha looked at Jaren and him and heard the voices screeching in his throat, voices that belonged to Payle and Aryel and her father and herself, as she looked at the abomination that had given shape to faith and inverted it, annihilation made flesh, her arm felt heavy. He was there, all of it, a world and a history and its hopes and its faith all folded into one thing, mutilated, strung up like a martyr cursing his own cause, defiling it, and—she hesitated.

Something like Teshar’s grandfatherly laugh, but horrible, worse, broken apart, echoed in his throat. “I thought not.”

Jaren looked at her, tears streaming down his face. He opened his mouth to speak and she could see the words, the terror, the agony, and his lips, she saw caught somewhere between her name and “sorry.”

A twist. A crack. A scream. Jaren’s form went limp and Danitha was screaming and Teshar had taken to the skies. She was alone.

She returned to the cave limping and bleeding and with a tear-stained face.

She had commended Jaren’s body to the sea, just as the people of Croden had always done with their dishonored and honored dead. When she entered the cavern, there were only the briefest questions, only a flash of quizzical faces and worried looks, as to why she was alone. But they died away quickly. There was, after the events in Croden, little need to ask.

She commanded Croden’s sparse retinue of reservists to assemble the townspeople near the mouth of the cave. There, in a meek voice that nonetheless echoed down the cavern, she spoke.

“Your home,” Danitha said, in a voice that to her sounded almost a whimper, “Is gone. This was not an isolated attack. We are besieged. The Phyrexians have launched a new invasion on our home. In Benalia City and Shiv, in Llanowar and Keld, in Argive and Tolaria—and in Croden—we are under attack.”

Stony faces, cold pale. If you had told these people a year ago that they would fight the Phyrexians as Gerrard had, as Serra had, they would cheer. Now: silence.

“I would like to tell you that the battle will be easy. That Serra’s light will burn through the invaders. That we will go into myth like Gerrard and Serra. But I will not do that. I do not know what will happen, and I won’t lie to you. I can only tell you our next course. We will go north, following the coast, until we reach a Coalition outpost.”

She heard murmurs. “—be safe there?” “What about the angels?” “—knights are supposed to save us—”—still sleepers among us—” “—Going to leave us behind once we get too slow—”

She answered none of them. “We’ll ride at dawn. Be ready.”

Danitha limped toward her bunk at the heart of the caravan, feeling sick as she saw the innumerable despairing lives that looked on her. She could only look away.

She was seated, later, next to Marten, as he thrashed in his sleep. When she had approached, his response had been pithy. “Best you can do, I suppose.” Then, he had drifted into unconsciousness.

She sat there, cross-legged, like when they were children, next to him, gazing on his features, his sweat-stained brow and premature aged face. She mustered the feeblest of prayers that he might find some peace before the nightmare continued.

Nathyn, Marten’s ersatz medic, the person with the dusty hands, was there, too, large burly form next to her, and for the second time that day Danitha had the feeling in the back of her chest and the root of her skull of being watched, thought about, without being looked at. This time, when she looked at Nathyn and they flicked their gaze away, she was not silent.

“How are you?”

They looked at her suddenly, eyes wide like an owl’s. They frowned. Pondered a moment. “Fine enough. Erm. My lady.”

“Danitha. And please—I don’t think you’re fine enough. Be honest. I’m not doing well myself.”

Nathyn grunted, as if they needed a moment to believe what they were hearing. “Nor I, my lady. Danitha. I’m, erm, scared.”

A silence. She nodded, prepared to speak, but they kept going, as if they didn’t notice her silence.

“I—I had just finished my rolls. Because—I’m a baker, you know, so I have to—I have to make the rolls. Every night. Give them time, let them breathe in the air. Sorry. Erm. That’s not what you meant. When it comes to strategy, I suppose—”

The bakery. She remembered the image: the bakery back in Croden, shattered, burning, crumbling, with Benalish soldiers fending off Phyrexians in its blazing doorway. A cleric without a church; a baker without a bakery; a ruler without her steward. Nathyn’s hands: covered not with ash, but flour. “No. It is. Please, tell me.”

A lump in their throat. Nathyn opened their mouth, then croaked, then closed it, then opened it. “The rolls. My lady, the rolls. They were still there, in the bakery, when I left. They were rising, they’ve got to rise every night, hours and hours. You have to let them sit out to breathe in the air—I tell my daughter, it’s because—Lady Serra’s got to breathe into them, make them light.” They stopped, inhaled, quavered. “She calls them Angel Wings. She’s seen them, the angels—I don’t know, not Lady Dawnbringer, nobody like her, but someone else, they’ve flown over, and my daughter, she likes to make the rolls, just in case the angels ever drop in again. My wife loves them. Loved them.”

Danitha’s impulse was to think strategically: Croden was close enough to Joryev Manor that it should be under the aegis of some Serran angels, but if they had retreated inward, they might have requested the angels do the same—or they might be occupied by the Phyrexians, or might already be torn to shreds. But then Danitha looked at Nathyn. She saw them, all of them. There they were, their life, just across the fissure between them, a breath’s distance, a thousand miles. “Where is she?”

They gestured ahead with their chin. She saw tiny sleeping child curled up on a cot, drifting back and forth. But next to her, in the dim golden light of Merah’s healing magic, she noticed what she hadn’t seen before: bundles of fabric, clothes, stained with soot—women’s clothes, with no woman around to wear them. She turned back and found a flushed face streaked with dry tears and for a moment, this father here and this daughter there, she lost herself, was somewhere else, another daughter with another father.

“The angels weren’t there. You were there, my lady, in the chapel. It was blessing. But I don’t think Serra wasn’t there. I know that’s horrible to say. I know the angels, they need to be everywhere, of course, but I just—it’s. My bakery. My daughter’s rolls. I put extra frosting on hers, make it look like feathers. She asked me, you know, if the angels would help. If they’d help get her mother out of the blaze. I didn’t know what to say, you know, so I just said, I don’t know.” He looked up suddenly. “People say that you’re going to leave us. Trot off with the soldiers and fight some battle. But my daughter, me, we, it won’t. I can’t. Can’t be alone.”

Eyes filled with tears, trying to shake them off as she walked forward. She could do nothing. Except—she reached down and hoisted the other side of the gurney with them, pressing next to them.

“I’m here with you,” she whispered. “I won’t leave you alone.”

Chapter Text

Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter. On and on it went.

A mouth twisted in mute scream. Eyes filled with love, screams, shining with a coded message of a thousand life-lessons never to be taught, joys never to be celebrated, faith never to be reclaimed from the ashes.

“Danitha. Do your duty.”

She couldn’t.

“Our best hope is Ruzon,” Marten had said. “It’s one of the Denizes’ largest ports. Northwest of here. Once we clear the Joryev forests, it’s a day’s ride, across the pastures and plains. Easy for everyone to make, even the wounded. It’s a Coalition staging ground. If we march there, we may find shelter and provision.”

Shelter and provision. High promises. Danitha wondered, without saying anything to Marten, who had seemed increasingly agitated in the previous few days, whether it was the right thing to do. Benalia’s plains were beaming and fecund, and the promise of food—a bed—was entrancing. But it would be days yet before they reached the edge of murky Joryev forests, and even then, it was impossible to know what they would find—whether the same decimation that had met them in Croden would pursue them to Ruzon. But she said nothing, because Marten’s eyes burned with some strange dark fire in them, as though he knew it was a risk and didn’t care, as though he was grasping on to the idea of Ruzon, and if it was death then let it be so, and so she had said nothing.

So they marched, Danitha and the remnants of the town of Croden, across hard earth and through steely sea-cliff grasses. The stench of Phyrexia hung in the air: fuming rubber mingled with the sweet rot of decaying flesh. Death, everywhere.

Danitha mentally recounted those whom death had claimed—it was a good exercise, she knew, she heard a warm oaky voice from the past insist, for a ruler to know their logistics without their steward’s help. (No matter how meager the leader is, she thought bitterly). Croden: a town of twelve hundred. Their initial party: three-hundred and twenty-four. After the first night: three-hundred and twelve. Six who had succumbed to wounds, bleeding in the dark and crying out for their families; two who, shouting over the roar of the ocean crashing against the cliffs, left the group to fend for themselves; one, the squire Jaren, who had died (by her failure).

And, of course, those lost to grimmer fates. Two, the first nights in the cave, whose wounds began in trickles of bloody red and then darkened and by the end seeped black. In the morning, they were gone, their possessions left entirely undisturbed, their cots encrusted with sludge. Left, presumably, to join the hundreds and hundreds of Croden villagers who had been swept in the torrent of Phyrexian death.

Payle—all the soldiers under her command—Aryel, her eyes shining in the flames—Teshar, sonorous voice, grandfatherly love. Weeping, crying, begging for her help, eyes turning deep onyx and words garbled in gasps of slime. Teshar, the peaceful man, the beautiful man, plated in porcelain, weeping oil, eyes screaming for mercy, voice crunched into a cacophony, breaking the Joren’s neck, the boy he must have known, must have cared for, and laughing, laughing, laughing.

She wondered, as she knelt against one of the crackly pines that dotted the cliffside (Eladamri pines, she recalled from her geography lessons, after one of the heroes of the first Invasion), if there were more among them. More Phyrexians in waiting. She, Marten, Brother Merah had agreed to take a headcount each morning and each night to ensure that nobody had left and no new strangers had arrived—but there were too many people to count, too few people she trusted to do the counting, and too little time to double-check their work. Perhaps worse than the doubts that wobbled her mind, however, was what she did find. When she asked whether there were any wounds, any concerning symptoms, many met her with silence, sepulchral unmeaning silence.

Danitha couldn’t blame them. Seeing protectors, leaders, friends, lovers, parents, children, blasted apart and turned to abominations, transmuted into nightmares like the kind that pursue you each night with no reprieve and which leave you crying, asking for your father, knowing he isn’t there—it silenced all language. The only thing worse: thinking that it might happen to you. Silence, silence, and worse.

But Danitha could not accept that.

So here she was, kneeling against the crackled roots of the Eladamri tree, her hands folded in front of her as her eyes, dark like the tree bark, dark like his eyes had been, swept around the prayer circle. Brother Merah had invited the entire camp to a Serran service (a smoke-puff of normalcy? Consolation to those for whom consolation might mean nothing?). Fewer than twenty had shown up. Even those who had arrived, she noticed, seeing their faces, sunken with hunger, clammy from cold, bodies shaking with fatigue and fear, even they seemed to be here out of some sense of obligation, some instinct at the base of their skulls that insisted that they must. She observed, with a breath of relief, familiar faces, the baker Nathyn and their daughter, Elara.

Brother Merah was intoning the mass, his voice tremulous and weary, not like Teshar’s, deep and sonorous (screams, wails, cackles, a thousand voices layered on his, spitting venom at her, begging for death). Around them, eyes, downcast. The spectral gasps of a faith half-empty.

The mass’ words were etched in her being; had heard it recited in the mouths of a thousand different celebrants, standing alongside her father with a straight spine, like his, arms folded behind her, like his, face serene, like his. Here was her favorite part, when the celebrant rang bells of five sizes to symbolize how Serra’s grace resonated through the dappled shapes of the universe. Here was his favorite part, where the priest invoked the names of the Serran heroes: stalwart Brindri, caring Angus, wise Urza, and, of course, as her father loved best, heroic Gerrard Capashen. (She had wondered, at age seven, when the name Aron Capashen would be added to the list. She knew, now, that it would never be).

“And, now,” Brother Merah chirped, tapping his talons together, breathy, puffing out syllables like it would spray Serra into the air, finding nothing but empty breath. “And, now, siblings, we may, erm, bring Serra’s grace, here to each other, by our words, for as it is written: Art, discourse, freedom, peace.” Silence. “Has, erm, has anyone words, words of grace. Hm?”

Silence, silence, silence. Some silence, of course, was normal during the Attestation of the Faithful—sometimes because Serra’s wings did not descend upon the faithful immediately, and often because the great orators among Benalia City’s crowds needed to give the appearance that their carefully rehearsed bromides were from the heart. But this was more, an empty silence, the silence of words deadened. In Danitha’s heart, she felt, without knowing why, an ache, a love, a need.

Merah nodded, moving to conclude the silence. Together, wordless, they prayed.

That night, the argent moon splashed silver light across a meager slip of sky, swallowed by the red rippling fury of the Phyrexian portals. Danitha, lying on her bedroll, legs aching from a day of clambering over uneven rocky earth, shuddered at memories, echoes of agony and prayers for mercy.

“Marten,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

Silence for a moment; or, better, the sound of one feigning silence, wishing for it. Then, his voice, quiet. “Yes.”

Brother Merah’s healing magic had finally gone to work on Marten’s body, knitting together the flesh and bone that the Phyrexian obliterator had shorn apart back in Croden. But he had never been athletic, and no healing magic could change that—and so he had lagged behind Danitha today, sluggish, stumbling, grunting curses at himself.

“Can’t sleep?”

A sigh, shallow, a simmer, quiet, like simultaneously he didn’t want her to hear and needed to make sure she did. “No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Silence. There hung between them a plunging gap, an abyss. It was a silence that spoke: the quiet fuming silence of one who not only does not speak but who resents speaking, who spits on it, who is enraged that anyone might have the gall to speak. There was nothing for her to say, nothing that would fill that void, and yet within her she felt that cry, that need, that she could not pin to reality.

“Please, cousin,” she breathed. “I need you.”

Pause. In that boundless depth, the waiting, all creation groaned.

“Do you still feel the wounds, Danitha?” he said. “When they heal you?”

“Hrm,” she said, paused. A darkness in his voice, a pusling ebony eye inside his question. “Your wound should have healed. Do you need more time with Brother Merah?”

“No. Not like that. I haven’t had it before, you know. Restoration magic. Not really. Just when I had pneumonia when we were young, from sitting out in the rain when mother said not to. I wonder if mother is alive. But no. When they heal you, when they heal wounds, I mean, I didn’t think I’d still feel it. But I do. Not the hurt—it’s not that, I’ve kept an eye out for infections and bleeding. But I feel it, like a buzzing, like that warm tight ache you get when you come in from the snow with the ice sticking to your fingers. I can’t stop feeling it. It doesn’t hurt—but I feel it. I feel the claws in me. I feel it all slipping away.”

A catch in her throat, a burning in her eye. She slipped a hand beneath her tunic and felt for her wounds, but just beneath the skin, aching there, was a pit with no end, filled with inky darkness and love drowned in oil, something that could not, could not be cleared. Her father’s face floated, drowned and bloated, at the top.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I’ve felt it.”

She could feel Marten shuddering from across the abyss. His breath shook, wavered asynchronously like his lungs were breathing separately.

“Will it go away? Will I be myself again?”

Chest heavy; all the words she knew, all the wounds she bore, smashing together in her mind, refusing to meld. Inspiration, that was what he needed; she had trained in it, in rhetoric and diplomatic care, but those memories were nothing but graves belching ghastly exhaust. But he needed it. She opened her mouth and began to tell him that, yes, he would be fine, that he could simply—

Truth must be set free. If the wings of Truth are clipped, the voices will fall silent. Canto 167. Her duty.

“No. It won’t.”

She slipped her hand beneath her tunic again. Suddenly they came on her, one after another, like voltaic surges: the rib the Phyrexian had broken in Croden, the leathery scar that a sleeper agent had left her with during the first Invasion, the reknitted wrist once fractured by a practice sword, held crying, with his arms around her, assuring her that all knights, yes, even him, got hurt; they could be broken, as she was, as Marten was now.

“It won’t go away,” she continued, letting the wind blow through her. “It won’t go away. You’ll carry it. But you will always be yourself, cousin. There is something in you, something true, and it doesn’t get wiped away that easily.”

Marten sniffed. She could see silvery light shine off the damp splotches on his cheeks.

“When I was there, in the chapel,” Marten said, “When it was standing over me and it was the end, it was—there was, it was just, standing over me, everything fell away, and I stared into something terrible, it was something despicable, like it was something that felt like nothing at all. It was like a bad dream, except when you wake up you learn it wasn’t a dream. Like this huge, dark shadow that was looking over me. And it felt like it was everywhere, like this horrible harsh light at the end of everything, and I was falling apart, and I was going to be gone. It was all—Nothing. I don’t know what it is, Danitha. I just know—when it looked down on me, the whole world was just. Nothing.”

They hung there, across the abyss. And then, she reached out her hand. Hung it in the air, a moment.

“I won’t let it take you, cousin,” she breathed. “It can’t. It won’t. Things—this world, it’s—” She cursed within. She felt, not for the first time, indeed this feeling had welled in her with increasing regularity, like she was grasping in the darkness, the outer contours, the edges, of what she was saying, of this thing that he needed. She was pressed against it, it was right there, and if she could only wrap her hands around it and tell him, then maybe—but no. Her words died before they were born.

And they were there for a moment, for a minute, for eternity in silence. She wanted to speak, but the silence swallowed her.

And then. She heard—something. A rustle of pine needles. A crunch. The clang of metal.

Danitha had her sword in hand before she was on her feet. No time to click on her breastplate or vambraces, barely time to slip into her gauntlets and boots, had to gamble that Phyrexians would decide not to go for her chest or forearms or sides. Unlikely. The sword would be her insurance. In a moment, Marten was behind her, looking out, teary eyes shining.

The other members of the night watch were swept up in her wake, swirling into her surging run. They were reservists, less sharp than she was used to—movements sluggish, coordination sloppy, almost slamming into each other, and all dead tired—but as she hissed orders at them, they fell in behind her. She could hear labored breathing, gasping, chattering teeth, gasps of prayer.

Swords glinted silver and prismatic in the moonlight, casting light over the inky trees, seeming to reflect like phantom lights in the distance. There might be dozens out there. If Teshar was back, she doubted this rugged squad would be able to hold him off. Splintered bodies, twisted forms, Phyrexian laughter.

She saw a slip of shadow dart between twisted vines, then two more blurs behind it. She flung a hard up in a blurred gesture, praying that the squad would catch her meaning, and went low to the ground. Step around a broken vine, push aside an unsteady stone, press against trees to avoid detection, listen for whirs of machinery. Nothing; she heard only rustling foliage and clanking metal—the sonorous ping of familiar steel. Benalish steel.

Compleated knights? The lost soldiers at Croden? Aryel, come to visit vengeance upon Danitha for leaving her behind? Eyes that would drip sludge-soaked hate, images of faith and honor turned to obscenity, and her, needing to bury another blade into the body of another love.

A slip, a crunch, a yelp of pain from behind her. She wheeled around—but no, not a Phyrexian; one of her squad had slipped on the mud and plunged facefirst into the earth.

Element of surprise lost. She dug in her feet, took her sword in both hands. The shadows were approaching, gaining on them, seemed to surround them, she could dimly see the soft light of stained glass shot through with moonbeams. Get ready to kill, to die.

A shadowy form swept toward her. It was heavy, armored—and she wasn’t. Best use that against it: she waited, pretended not to see it, then, as it came upon her, she slipped to the side and grabbed it by the collar, yanking down and sending it to the ground in a heap.

A yell, a roar—was that an order to stop? Who said to stop? No time—another form came down on her with a halberd, set with amethyst stained glass, and she deflected easily. She spun her sword in her hand, disorienting it, then slammed the flat end of the blade against its head. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t kill them.

Another shout. Another blade raised, this time a sword. Steel met steel and sparks showered like stars in the darkness, casting light on their faces.

Not Phyrexian. Not corrupted. Human. Benalish. What was more: a dead woman.

“Well,” said Lady Aveya Joryev, head House Joryev, warden of the south. “Funny seeing you here.”

An argent moon in the sky, now shining down upon on another light: a fire whose half-living embers sizzled quietly, kept low so as to avoid attention. Two faces gazing at each other across the gasping fire.

Aveya Joryev had the bearing of a queen, her high, sharp features like bleached marble sculpted into a placid frown. Aveya was older than Danitha—in her forties, if she recalled Marten’s dossier correctly—but age alone didn’t account for the deep shadows set into her skull, or, indeed, the pallor that lingered over her face; Danitha, it seemed, was not the only leader struggling during the Invasion. Within the depths of Aveya’s face, her violet eyes shone like gemstones in some dragon’s hoard, swallowing all the light around them and reflecting it out with purified brilliance like the molten shine of a crucible. And still, Danitha dimly thought, the possibility that behind them was the inky black nothingness of a Phyrexian sleeper.

It was those eyes that pierced into Danitha now, watching, absorbing, cataloguing, as Aveya spoke.

“If my cousin Marana did her job,” Aveya said, measuring her words, speaking in a lullaby rhythm even as amaranthine hate smoldered in her eyes, “you already know how things began. Strange symbols in our books, our armor, the environment around us. It was not paint, not even anything artificial. It was as though the Phyrexians had stamped themselves upon reality.” Danitha remembered last week, last year, last millennium, the tome in whose pages the Phyrexian insignia rippled like an inky serpent. The omen of things to come.

“Thinking that this incursion was just a repetition of the last,” Aveya continued. “We quarantined. It was a foolish assumption, of course, to think that you know what’s coming even as a new reality presents itself to you. But we did. We rounded up all the members of the house, our most essential troops, and dispatched Marana to Benalia City to petition your aid.”

Danitha frowned. “A negligible risk—that’s what Marana said about herself. She didn’t get the invitation to quarantine, I suppose.”

Aveya shrugged, her face placid, as though she were not human but artifice. “I’m sure it seems clear from your side, Lady Danitha. But was I going to risk sending out my generals, or my administrators, or my family, when I knew that the Phyrexians might be upon us?”

Like I did, Danitha thought, her spirit twisting, and then boiling into a sudden torrent of rage. “And so you asked me to come, instead? To risk myself and my people, instead of yours?”

Purple eyes bored into her. “It was the only way I could ensure my house’s security. I had a high estimation of your abilities. Who you chose to accompany you was entirely your decision.” She left the final point hanging in the air, and though she hadn’t outright insulted Danitha, though she spoke with such solidity that she might be reading a report, Danitha still felt a blade slipping into her sides. She remembered, hazily, as beaming through a mist—

“Some,” he said in his soothing, thoughtful voice, the one full of hope for how intelligent a leader she might be, the one that would be turned to mechanistic monstrosity, “Some use their words like warhammers—loud ones, like Alvan Rosecot. Others use them like arrows—precise, deadly, like Cerise D’Avenant. But others know the deadliest trick of all: when to stop talking.”

“Nevermind that. It was our mistake, of course,” Aveya continued, before Danitha could conjure a response. “Quarantining all our essential house members simply made us a far easier target. When the skies opened up and they”—her voice, for less than a moment, foamed venom—“and they rained out of it, we were all clustered in one place. It was easy for them to choke through those halls that my ancestors built, move through, room by room, and slaughter us.”

Benalish bodies piled high in corridors, ichor and blood running in rivulets down stairs and dripping through floors, adults and children begging for their lives, all her friends, all her family, cut down, Joryev bodies piled alongside Capashen, her brother and her knights and the countless dead whose suffering was only just beginning.

“Who escaped?” Danitha dared to ask.

“From what I can tell, only us. This cluster of one hundred. We have ten knights, fifteen men-at-arms, and a few squires—the rest are manor staff and family members.”

“Your children? Your generals?” She didn’t know why she asked, for she knew the answer, but there was some whisper in that darkness, some sickening urge to hear the truth. Purple eyes. Boundless.

“My younger daughters, Ayana and Coryne, are here,” Aveya said, quietly. She stared across at Danitha, the golden-red of the flames seeping into her eyes and reflecting back out with mute fury, despair without depth. “But otherwise, no. General Demrov, dead. High Steward Jakub, dead. My sons—Jonys, Ursav. They’re gone.” She paused. Something in her face shifted, like the slip of a river of mud, and for the first time since they sat down, she looked away from Danitha, down into the flames, and spoke only to herself. “My poor Ursav. He was knighted last month, brave boy. Poor, poor boy. I saw them take him away. He was screaming my name.”

Teshar, screaming, pulled into a cloud of metal. Danitha didn’t want to speak; if Aveya didn’t know what would happen to those the Phyrexians abducted, it would be better to say nothing. And yet, as Danitha looked into that same stubborn flame into which Aveya stared, and caught the depths of life in her eyes, and saw the black blood that streaked across Aveya’s armor and sword, it occurred to her all at once that Aveya knew precisely everything she needed to know, and, what’s more, everything she didn’t.

“We escaped, with what little provisions we could manage. We’ve been moving at night—and now, we’ve found you. We hope to join with you, if you’ll have us.”

Danitha stared into Aveya’s dark countenance, her sidereal eyes. She felt in her a flame, and she hated those eyes, hated them, and hated the soul which they bodied forth into the world—the soul which, in its selfishness and its misjudgment, had left a house member to fend for themselves, had called Danitha on this errand, had led Aryel and so many of her men to her death, had led all them to their deaths, really, for how could they escape this, all because this woman trusted Danitha, and that, that wonderful and true alibi, was what she despised most of all. She wished to spit, curse, leave her and her miserable troop her, or worse, strike her down, dethrone her, put her to death, send her over the cliff and into the water like Joren, poor Joren—

—Usrav, poor Usrav. Beaming purple eyes, not crying if only because there were no tears left.

A moment had elapsed. An eternity. Danitha stared, oaky Capashen eyes meeting Joryev purple.

“It’s our duty. We can do no less.”

They marched, the mottled company, across bloodstained earth. The dry cloying grasses of the southwest morphed, mile by mile, into tall silty foliage whose verdure proclaimed the distant fecundity of Benalish riverbeds. The wounds of the Invasion Tree gushed crimson light into the distant sky, but even their profanity failed to reach the vegetation.

It was, indeed, the perfect place to hide. Danitha and Aveya reasoned that the Phyrexians had no need for sleep, so traveling at night was pointless—instead, they cloaked themselves in the river forests’ greenery and marched beneath the cool canopy. At the first sight of metallic light or the first sound of machinery, they clung to the dirt. At night, they clustered together in beds of moss or behind treetrunks, nurturing the dimmest of fires for warmth.

They attempted, ever so briefly, to forage for food. But, as it turned out, even the forest had been poisoned by Phyrexian hands. They found persimmons imprinted with inky sigils, rabbits whose snowy fur mingled with bleeding machinery, mushrooms whose caps were corpulent with ebon ichor. During mealtimes, Danitha split the provisions as best she could, weighing between the withered civilians and the sparse retinue of soldiers—who, she admitted disdainfully, her head throbbing with two decades’ worth of lessons in supply chains, would need more food to stay upright. But the villagers—pants of exhaustion, bony ribs visible through clothing, vacant stares filled more with persistence than hope—when she closed her eyes, or began to think or even blinked, they were there, looming with spectral emptiness next to Aryel, Teshar, Aron.

“We won’t last another day,” Aveya murmured one night, as she, Danitha, and a wheezing Marten gathered around a paltry flame. Her sharp Joryev features deepened in light of the fire and the stars, and her purple stained-glass armor projected a vapor of ethereal radiance around her. “By tomorrow, the troops will need to break away from the civilians.”

“No,” Danitha said, boring holes into Aveya’s deep eyes. “We won’t leave them behind. They’ve come this far—they’ll be dead out here.”

Marten coughed dryly. “There’s always Ruzon, of course—Lady Aveya. It’s a large port. Should be safe, we think. It was well-supplied by Coalition forces, at least, that is—well, you know—erm, since before. It’s a Coalition staging ground. Everyone should be able to get there. We’ll find safety.”

“Or more death,” said Aveya. She threw Danitha a caustic glare. “If the Phyrexians sent a legion after a town full of civilians just to get you, surely they’d send enough forces to level a Coalition stronghold.”

“What do you propose, then?”

“We ride northeast, across the highlands, into Llanowar. Considering the forest’s strength, Phyrexians should be at loggerheads, and we’ll be able to regroup. You and I take the lead, with our troops in tow.”

“And I repeat: the villagers won’t last another day out here.”

Aveya looked at her, eyes steely. “I’m aware, Lady Danitha. I do not condemn them. But we cannot survive if we remained with them.”

She fumed, fury bursting forth in blazing gushes from her breath and her eyes and her being. “They’re your subjects—our people. If you don’t care about that—”

“I know what you think.” Purple eyes boring back into Danitha’s. “You believe I’m congenitally cruel. I’m not. I’m not cruel, Lady Danitha, nor am I a fresh young idealist. I bleed for my people. I weep for the duty that I have lapsed in. But I know that my higher duty is to Benalia’s honor. If we die, then the future of Benalish civilization dies with us. Perhaps for the final time. I won’t allow that.”

She pressed her lips together. Joryev silence hung in the air. A vacuum, a void, between them. Dueling eyes, battling wills. The voice of a father.

“Rosecots use words like hammers. D’Avenants use words like arrows. What about us?”

A smile. Knowing. “Capashens, my dear, use words like we use our swords. As lights in the darkness.”

“No. There is more to us than that. I won’t let them go.”

The next morning, they rode for Ruzon.

Early morning, the pre-dawn twilight settling over verdant hills dotted with purple grain and honey wildflowers. In a circle, again, Brother Merah was leading a Serran mass. They knew that, whatever they might find in Ruzon, they would not be celebrating another service here in the wild. The crowd had swelled, from the power of novelty or nostalgia or both, but a pall still stood, mistlike and opaque, around them. Spirits wavered dimly like ghostly candles.

Brother Merah had passed around tiny stained-glass icons of Serra and Gerrard at the beginning of the service, and now, as Danitha kneeled on a rocky outcropping, ignoring the groaning pains in her legs, she looked down into Serra’s shining visage, rippling with goldleaf thread and glass of crimson and blue. She was smiling, somehow, despite all the horror around them, the icon was still smiling, and it made Danitha moved and sick and tender.

“Your enemies will pound upon the door of your defenses,” Merah was saying, his voice wavering but grasping tightly onto the words, an anchor in a storm. “But only you shall have the key, and it is the key of life.” Canto 873, Danitha remembered dimly, as she stared into Serra’s luminescent crystal eyes, and begged her for that key.

Merah was ringing, now, the bells, and swinging a censor full of smoking incense, its fumes spreading around them, mingling with that pall of darkness, somehow infusing it, enriching it. Danitha felt, suddenly, without knowing precisely why, drawn into the darkness, by those smells, the ones imprinted in her memory by time and love, and she felt something, at the bottom, there, staring into Serra’s eyes and smelling the strange smell and hearing the sonorous tinkle of the dappled bells, and suddenly the sun crested over the horizon and gold light ripped across the darkness and shone over them in a rainbow, if just for a moment, before fading.

And here was Brother Merah, asking, once more, to the silence. “Now,” he said, clicking his talons against the censor, sighing between breaths—and, Danitha saw, was shocked she had not seen before, looking over his shoulder for help, but nobody was there, because that was where Teshar would have been. “Now, siblings…we may…bring Serra’s grace, here to each other, by our words. As it is written: Art, discourse, freedom, peace.” Again, silence. “Any words of grace?” Quietly: “Please?”

Danitha looked at them, the faces, old and young and brittle and strong (more brittle than strong). She felt something that she could not have described, not even if she dredged all the words of all Benalia’s greatest orators. It wore glittering cloth, shone with gossamer fragility like love of family and stood with the armored weight of duty. She saw all of them, here, and without knowing why she closed her eyes and heard a voice speaking and realized it was hers.

“Sisters, siblings, brothers. There are words which I live by.”

Hundreds of eyes upon her. Merah, Marten, Nathyn, Aveya, so many others who she looked back into, as though all at once.

“When your world is broken and dark, it is difficult to live by anything. When a squire is knighted, they take an oath—one they create for themselves. When you swear these words, you do not always know what they mean, or all that you must do to uphold them, or how you can fail in doing so. You do not know what can be taken from you, or how it can be defiled, or how all those things which are holy can be smashed at your feet.”

She paused. These people, around whose lives was suspended that shimmering veil of she knew not what, they surrounded her, were bound close.

“We take oaths to bind us to something greater than ourselves. These were my words—” She remembered. The solemn tap of blade on her shoulder, the shivered light of stained-glass faith, the look of a father beaming with pride. “I will protect the less fortunate. I will love bravely. I will face despair and fight on.”

“For reasons I can’t explain, not with the words we have now, that duty means something to me. I hold it close, even when the ground I walk on is falling out below me. Because—because something helps me hold on, and helps me reach out. Something real. Something I feel, here with you. I don’t know what it is. Something like grace.”

In her hand, the icon of Serra glittered in the morning sunlight, fiery pink hues washing over the crystalline eyes and splashing Danitha with all the colors of the rainbow.

“And so I will make this oath to you, once more. Even as our world crumbles, I will hold true to them. I will protect. I will love. I will face despair. And I will fight on.”

A breath. Silence again. A look: eyes, gazing back to her, a sliver of grace, fully alive.

As Marten had promised, the march to Ruzon was an easy one. For the villagers, whose faces had grown long and gaunt under their meager food regimen, the abundant grain of the Deniz territory was a blessing. By midday, the caravan had stopped in a tall field where Benalish gain and corn were mingled, and the smell of crackling oats rolled on the gentle breeze. It was hardly a banquet, but they were fed.

Still, Danitha was uneasy. Moving from the steely pines of the Joryev heartlands into the wide expanses of Benalia’s middle region—it brough relief from the austere coastal environment, but it also meant that they were out in the open. No clustered trees would conceal them from roving Phyrexian eyes, no coastal outcroppings would cover their escape, and, somehow, Danitha was most troubled by this, no pine canopy could shield them from seeing the rippling steel arms of the Phyrexian invasion tree. Before, the sky had only been visible in narrow strips and occasional flashes, allowing most of the villagers to ignore the burning sigils, even as they haunted Danitha’s every thought, breath, movement. But now, it was plain for all to see: the Phyrexians hadn’t simply destroyed their home, no, not something so small as that: they had made the world their own.

She marched, now, alongside Marten, who attempted to trudge through his limp and his poorly exercised muscles, and Nathyn, Marten’s erstwhile nurse. Although Brother Merah had declared Marten fit to move himself and transferred his gurney to an old woman in the back of the caravan, Nathyn had remained behind Marten, clinging like a shadow, eyeing him, grasping his hand when he stumbled, ensuring he didn’t skip any meals, no matter how paltry. And still, somehow, whenever they found a moment, Nathyn found time to cast their eye to Elya, their daughter, who was walking alongside the village matron who had taken charge of the children.

“Now, Danitha,” Marten huffed. His face was bleached pink, scorched by the afternoon sun and distended by the exertion on his lungs. “Now, Danitha. Do you know what I’m going to do when I get to Ruzon?”

“What’s that, cousin?”

“I’ll tell you. I’m going to look around. I’m going to find a fountain. I’m going to dip my head in it and drink in some of that water, that good, fresh rainwater, and then I’m going to go to a tavern. You know, the Denizes, they have the very best taverns, all the sailors there, you know, it’s all very well regarded—and yes, cousin, I know what you’ll say, the strategy is that the sailors should be off to Vodalia to execute the maritime defense plan, but surely some will still be there, or at the very least the innkeepers will  be. So, anyway. I’m going to have the biggest meal I can find, I don’t care if it’s meat pie or grain cake or Shivan dragon chops, I’m going to eat.”

Danitha smiled, and she ached. She wondered how many of those mariners were in wooden crypts at the bottom of the sea, how many had been swept into the Invasion tree and were screaming in those horrible pods as black oil was funneled into their mouths and eyes, and how many, how few, were left without the words to tell the tale.

A deep, quiet voice. “Do you think. Um. Lady Danitha,” Nathyn said, in a clip, circling between their language and the invisible codes that radiated around the nobility. “Do you imagine that, well. Do you think that the angels will be there?”

She pursed her lips. “It’s possible. It will all depend on how”—she pointed to the sky—“All of this happened. They may still be there. They may have congregated in Sursi. They may be in Benalia City.”

Nathyn nodded quickly, dropping their head down, dodging her glance. She smiled.

“I’ll tell you this, though,” she said. “Once we get there, I’ll make sure Lyra Dawnbringer and your daughter get some face-to-face time.”

Nathyn’s eyes beamed, and they laughed a deep laugh, a hearty one, the kind that would boom even over the roar of bread ovens. It hung in the air for a moment like the tinkling of a massive bell.

But then another sound cut across the air, and the sound of laughter blurred into a scream up ahead. For as the sun had begun to set, spilling red-gold flame across the horizon, they crossed over a ridge and were afforded a view, unobstructed, of Ruzon, one of Benalia’s jewels.

A city besieged. A city swarmed by Phyrexian metal and massive Invasion branches. A city burning.

Chapter Text

Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter. It would never end.

It was the moment before blade met flesh, when multicolored light rippled through the air, slipping across the oil pouring down his face. For one last moment: the man made in the image of a hero, shining with the incandescent light of faith, before he was smashed against the ground like so much brittle glass.

And she, a daughter, a boot, delivering the last crunch underfoot. A blade’s breath: light of hope, prophet of despair.

“Danitha. Do your duty.”

What was it?

Act I.

The thunder of footsteps. The flash of flames. The falsetto of screams. Danitha couldn’t breathe.

It was an impossible decision. The city was in sight, but it would take another half-hour, at least, to get there on foot. She needed, felt a roar in the bottom of her spirit that surged through her arms and legs and lungs, to charge in, to be there. And yet here were her people, the people who would be easy targets for any Phyrexian outriders ready to turn living souls into grist for their war machine. She had promised to stay. But yet, but yet. She was needed. Were the fighters in Ruzon less her people than the villagers? Perhaps she could serve them both, perhaps, perhaps—

Do your duty.

She couldn’t. She had to. No time. Make a decision. Pray to Serra, or to whatever might listen, that it’s right.

She barked at Marten to organize the villagers, to get low to the ground in the grain field, and to flee east if Ruzon fell. She assembled her paltry troops, offering the reservists ten minutes to decide: accompany her to the city or stay there, with their families and friends. And last of all, she stood before Aveya Joryev, with her smoldering purple eyes and her phantom’s face and her dark soul, and begged.

“Please,” Danitha said. “Protect them. Please.”

Aveya pressed her lips together, said nothing for a moment. Her eyes burned into Danitha, weighing every inch of her spirit, judging for time immemorial whether this was a leader or a girl wearing her father’s armor, bargaining with adults. “As I have said, Lady Danitha, my duty is to Benalia.”

Joryev silence; implications left hanging in the air. What did that mean? Her father would know. Aron’s mind was steel and silk, a light that pulsed into the heart of every person, find them, their hearts, made them his. Bloody, oily, choking on viscera and bile. Danitha turned over the puzzle, slipping across its surface, jabbing with a child’s fingers, working her way to whatever it was that she could use to convince Aveya. But there was nothing. She could only leap.

“For Benalia, for yourself, I don’t care. I don’t have time to debate with you. But Lady Aveya—I know what you’ve seen.” Her voice wavered. “Your sons. Disappearing into metal. Screaming your name. Leaving you behind. Everyone out here—they have someone like that, or they are someone like that. Please. Don’t let it happen to anyone else.”

Blaze of purple fury. Boundless rage, without depth, drilling into Danitha, dripping hate, at Danitha, yes, but only because her voice had given spectral form to the memory, a poor boy’s hand reaching out from a roaring cloud of oil, falling apart, leaving the world broken at your feet (Aveya’s? Danitha’s?). And then, like the pulse of a firefly: gone. Aveya, staring at her, silent.

“So long as you live, Lady Danitha, you are our leader. If only for that reason, I shall keep watch.”

A sigh, release, everything flowing forth. “Thank you.”

But as Danitha swept around and prepared to assemble her entourage, Aveya spoke again. “You must know this already, Lady Danitha, but you will add nothing by being there. If the city is lost, your being there will change nothing, and these people will be left her, without you.”

Danitha clenched her hands. She attempted to scry an answer in the depths of her memories, digging into the flesh of her palms, as if they would tell her something. But any wisdom from her training, any advice from her father, any fruit of experience, dissolved into mist; she had only the quiet thrum in her heart, beating to a tune that, now, even she could not hear.

“I’ll have to try.” And she was gone.

As she returned to their staging point, she clenched her jaw, thinking that the reservists had, as usual, been dawdling, away from their work, not heeding her instructions, shooting the breeze instead of following her invitations.

But as she approached, the kaleidoscope of steel locked into place: there, a crowd, the entire detachment, had gathered. They stared forward at her, faces as mottled as their very lives, but stoic, their hands being their backs. Not green reservists, not cowards, not even people who balked at their duty. They were there. Light shone through them like they were pigmented glass, and through their broken forms and paltry garments and baggy bony skins, there, like a mirage that slipped here and there in the wind, and yet with the solidity of life, half-there and half-not, there shone images of real knights. Like on the glasswork, rippling with grace. And alive.

And there she was, standing before them.

“I want to give you one more chance,” Danitha said, something in her voice tearing in both directions, begging them to come and pleading them not to. “You can stay. I can’t promise you’ll return. The city might be overrun—we’re doing this in the hope that there are survivors, not for ourselves, not for glory—there will be precious little of that.”

But they stood, stolid, still. Arms folded behind their backs. In the front, lips pressed together, was a man, wrinkles set deep into his face, plated in armor that hung loosely about his emaciated torso, an image of some dead knight.  “As you say, Lady Danitha. For hope’s sake.”

Armor gleaming with prismatic radiance in the mottled light of the Invasion, like images of Gerrard himself. Today, perhaps, he would be with them.

And so she divided them, allowing five to accompany her and commanding the other ten to stay behind, protect the refugees—and they did, these green, inexperienced, broken people, they did it not because they had veterans’ but because they cared, they wanted to be there.

She and her new squad prepared for the charge into Ruzon, tightening the straps on their armor to account for the weight they’d lost, sharpening their blades against anything they could find, stretching their worn legs, hurriedly filling their bellies with steaming bowls of grain. As Danitha slipped her breastplate over her head, she heard a shout behind her. A huge soft hand clasped her shoulder, and as she turned, she found one last soldier ready to march. Nathyn, wearing one of the squires’ helmets and brandishing a long shield beaming with a stained-glass blazon, a castle with seven windows. The sigil of House Capashen.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t allow it.”

“I’m sorry, Lady Danitha—Danitha,” they interrupted. “No choice in the matter. You won’t leave me, you said. And, well, I won’t leave you.”

“You can’t,” she said, voice icing over even as her spirit wept. “Your daughter is here. I won’t allow it.”

“I’ll be the person my daughter will be proud of, or I’ll be nobody at all.”

She looked at them, and felt the words ricochet within her, echoes, sickening, beautiful. A father, defiled, twisted into something unrecognizable. A father, beloved, a person his daughter was proud of.

It was his face, half smashed into a pulp of wires and oil and half radiant with life, that she saw as they bid farewell to the caravan. She prayed that, whatever her duty was, she was doing as Aron Capashen would have done.

Flame and ash. Metal threshing flesh. Explosive light against the horizon. The battle was not over.

They had arrived in a city that was crumbling, a city that was bleeding, a city that was fighting back. The Coalition forces had coalesced a hardy resistance. Even as draconic monstrosities made of chrome and ivory surged overhead and obliterators with claws dripping black ichor skulked through the city streets, the defenders did not break ranks. Llanowar elves, moving in blurs of green against the gleaming white Benalish architecture, sent arrows and surging vines overhead to yank down airborne Phyrexians; Ghitu pyormancers erected roaring walls of crimson flame, incinerating the massive beasts that attempted to break through; and there, on the front lines, her people, Benalish knights, held a perimeter with gleaming shields and stalwart swords.

But their discipline couldn’t match the Phyrexians’ numbers. As Danitha and her motley crew arrived at Ruzon’s southern gate, stained with crimson blood and scraps of armor and mounds of Phyrexian flesh but, sickeningly telling, no corpses—the monsters wanted to make sure everything went to use—they found a Phyrexian fighting force that seemed endless. They were pressed against the wall of a gatehouse, watching as Benalish soldiers shining in silver pushed the Phyrexians further, further—then, were pushed back themselves, as spidery Phyrexians with a dozen legs and obliterators made of fused flesh pounded back against them. Overhead, the steel arms of the invasion tree had burrowed into the walls of the city and its tallest towers; whatever buildings weren’t rubble were drenched in glistening oil, which licked down their sides like the towers were weeping.

Danitha turned. The members of their little squad looked back at her with wide eyes, their humanity flickering through the hazy aura of heroism. She met Nathyn’s eyes; their mouth was pressed shut, as if trying to keep in a scream, and their hands squeezed so hard around their donated halberd that their fingers were white.

“What,” they breathed. “What do we—what do we do?”

She looked back. Her heart churned again; was Aveya right? Should they simply turn back?

Flashes of metal. Stained-glass blades. Benalish shouting over the din of destruction.

“No,” Danitha said. “We do our duty.”

She rounded the corner and pointed her blade, glittering in the golden sun, at the invaders. A shout, a roar, a command, and she was running, the squad was behind her, and time crunched into a flat surge of motion. The Phyrexians were a raging wave flinging themselves against the shore, but Danitha was a typhoon. Flashes of porcelain, etched ebony claws, copper-plated fangs: cut, parry, dodge, jab, slash, repeat. Images blurred before her face. A white-clad invader, head spurting oil as it was shorn away from its body—a grey-skinned elf, dressed in Keldon battle cloth but grafted with coppery blades, swinging wildly; Nathyn, the baker, the parent, holding stalwart their shield as the reservists hacked off the Keldon’s arms and drove blades into its throat; Danitha, taking an obliterator by surprise, hacking, chopping, slicing, bringing the creature to its knees, driving her blade through its chitinous skull in a splash of oil. She could see the Benalish sentinels on the other side, they were getting closer, closer, the Phyrexian wave was parting, and—

A thunderbolt force slammed against her. She flew through the air, whipping in the wind, and slammed into the side of a blazing little structure (perhaps it had once been a customhouse; now it was a funeral pyre). Only a moment to realign: charging through the crowd of disoriented Phyrexians was a beast. Something like a frog or a fungus or both, like one of those drawings Aryel had shown her of Urborg, her home. Oil poured in a fountain deluge from its maw, and its arms, long, gnarled like the stalks of mushrooms, were dotted with sickly polyps, glistening red and black as they belched a sickly green vapor into the air.

She screamed a warning, begging, as one of her men charged towards it, but it was too late—in slow motion, he sagged and froze as the vapor circled around him, and he began hacking, bloody spittle flying from his mouth as he grasped his throat—and then he was off the ground and his legs were kicking desperately out of the creature’s mouth and then they too were gone.

It opened its mouth and hacked, belched, and in its exhalation Danitha heard the man’s scream. Then, silence.

It stomped toward her, extending its claws. She turned for her men, but they were scatted; two had cleared the crowd and had joined the Coalition’s frontline, now dotted with Argivian phalanxers and Ghitu pyromancers in addition to the Benalish knights, all being corralled by a strange woman dressed in the beaming scarlet of Shiv and the cerulean of Tolaria; the other two were attempting to hold off the Phyrexians crashing down from behind them, pushing back bloody talons with shimmering blades and attempting to hold off massive gushes of oil. Nathyn, his shield, huge but no match for the onslaught, was beating back the Phyrexian footsoldiers closing in on Danitha. He wouldn’t leave her.

No space. No time. What do to—

There. Look. Assess your enemy.

Danitha saw it: as the fungus-creature stomped past the flames gushing around the square, a lingering puff of acrid smoke drifted into the inferno. A flash of white and blue popped, for half a moment, in and out of existence, and it wasn’t until the beast extended its long legs and began rumbling toward her that she realized it was a tongue of flame. The flame—the gas—the beast—the Phyrexians.

She roared a command, really just a few words strung together, to the soldiers behind her, and they broke away from the rushing crowd of Phyrexians, waving their arms frantically at the Ghitu flamemages. The woman in crimson and blue saw, furrowed her brow, flicked her eyes to Danitha. She prayed that the men, sloppy as they were, could time things right.

She waved her sword above her head, flinging stained-glass light in the monster’s face—which may have bothered it if it had eyes instead of a blank face coated with scummy mud—but no matter. It was charging, and she stood her ground, until—

She flung herself out of the way as the creature slammed into the customhouse, years of Benalish labor disintegrating under its weight. In the moments it spent on the ground, flinging aside rubble and burning wood, Danitha swept in close, dragging her blade across the polyps with a sickening squish. She clamped her lungs tight, praying not to catch any of the gas in an errant gasp, and, with a final stroke, drove her sword into a bubbling pocket in its chin. The creature screeched guttural vengeance, and in a flash, it had regained its feet—and as it did, she saw behind it, more popping flames flickered in and out, beaming will-o-the-wisps. Good.

It dug is arms into the earth and, in a spring of movement and a hateful wail, bounded at her. She took a final, massive breath, and wheeled around—back towards the crowd of Phyrexians closing in behind her.  Had to time it perfectly, pray that the Ghitu would understand her men, that they would would agree with her plan. They closed in on her from both sides, and there, right behind her, she heard the sonorous ring of the Ghitu tongue and the scream of flames meeting open air. She turned, facing the fungus. Perfect, just enough space for her to—

No. No time to dodge. She had miscalculated.

Flames streaked through the air, pouring from the fingertips of the Ghitu pyromancers and towards the fungus creature’s open wounds—its open wounds gasping explosive gas. Danitha had gotten the beast close enough to the Phyrexian footsoldiers, but she hadn’t made enough time for herself to slip away. One more unanswered prayer.

She wanted to close her eyes, hide away, let their claws take her. But no. This was her duty. She stood, back straight, blade at the ready, like a knight, as the spout of flame collided with the fungus and its scream blurred into a roar that consumed its body, the buildings, the square, in white-blue light, multicolored flame pulsing toward her. Phyrexia, at least, would not claim her body.

Except.

A blur of darkness. Another roar, a woman’s voice crunched together with an animal’s yowl, filled her ears, and she felt something clench the nape of her neck, like she was a kitten carried away by a parent, and the world pressed together into a blur of colors, and she was rolling, clanging along the ground, skidding, coming to a stop.

And above her, amidst incinerated Phyrexian bodies, was a massive ebon cloud inset with shining amber orbs, and atop the cloud, moving, thrumming with life, was an avenging angel, a crusade made flesh, the screaming spirit of justice come to visit destruction upon the wicked—

The clouds came alive and dove to the earth! Hooves flashed among the dark army, who fled before the spectacle of fury. Canto 211.

—But no, not a cloud, not orbs, not a revenant, and yet still a spirit of righteous justice: it was a cat, enormous, a panther, gazing at her with eyes of liquid gold, and atop it, sliding back her faceplate to reveal stony features and an impossible smile, was Aryel, Knight of Windgrace.

Alive. Her friend was alive.

Act II.

A hard voice, hard as slate, but beneath, pulsing.

“I thought you were dead.”

“So did I.”

Aryel, astride her panther, the light of a black star condensed into one living form, both of them, led Danitha and the squad through the labyrinthine passages of Ruzon. She moved with poise and practice, precisely that which had earned her such esteem in Benalia’s army—precisely that which Danitha thought she had lost.

“I thought they had taken you,” the Knight-Commander continued, her face changing with the light: one moment, Danitha had the impression of explosive joy, the other, an anger, a fury, a black rage that consumed Aryel’s body. She repeated: “I thought they had taken you.”

“A Capashen dying to a Phyrexian?” Danitha said, smiling, broken, teary. “Seems a little cliché, doesn’t it?”

She saw, at the periphery of her vision, her reservists give a start. For what little they knew of her, this had not been the Danitha they had seen; stony, brittle, tender. Joking? But Nathyn, there, watching her, smiled a small smile.

A smirk, a sob, in Aryel’s face. “Glad to see you’re in good spirits. Your guard, Janya— she’s here with us”—Danitha exhaled, let another hard knot release in her shoulders—“She told us you were going to be in the chapel, back in Croden. But by the time my knights and I smashed out of the inn, you were gone.”

“How many made it out?”

Aryel pressed her lips together. “Only half of the retinue that we brought. A little less, actually. But we made it out.” Her face, gargoylic and beautiful, betrayed none of the brittle splintering that Danitha felt in herself, imagining those soldiers who had woken up in the middle of the night to die, missing their families, those knights who, yes, though they knew that death loomed, had done before bed that night everything as normal, said a prayer, washed their faces, adjusted their pillows, made a joke, stubbed their toes, and then died like dogs.

But she knew casualties didn’t provoke in Aryel what they provoked in her—not because Aryel was unfeeling, no, certainly not; nor because she, like Aveya, saw in front of her not the soldiers but the mirage of the ideal; no, none of those. It was because Aryel, refugee of Urborg, had already lost everything, family, friends, master, duty; hers was flesh already hardened, a spirt already not of this world. And yet Aryel was not oblivious. On the contrary, Danitha remembered and saw once again before her eyes, Aryel was perceptive, precisely because she saw through these earthly forms, though whatever was beneath Danitha could not imagine—Aryel could see into Danitha precisely that which the shifting light of stained-glass seemed to obscure. And so, in a short clip, she said, pausing, pondering, thinking: “For whatever it’s worth, your people know how to die on their feet, not lying down.” It was exactly what she needed to hear.

Before Danitha could conjure or response or let flow the churning flame in her stomach, her spirit, Aryel moved ahead and formed them into a line. They passed through a tight alley, along storefronts and restaurants, inside which meek candles still sputtered and dishes lay about, moldering in the dim light, the traces of people who had flung everything down and fled, leaving their silhouetted lives there, absent only the people who animated them. And then they were at the end of the alley, and Danitha squeezed through the tight passageway at the end, and the space opened out, and they were on Ruzon’s riverfront.

Clinging to both riverbanks were a smattering of tents, large and tiny, dotted with the blazons of Benalia, Llanowar, Shiv, Keld, and a hundred lesser territories. Armor of silver and glass mingled with thin monastic cloth and exotic geometric patterning; flesh and scales and feathers passed before her eyes; the smell of a hundred cuisines coursed through the air despite the austerity of the war. Just beneath the bridges spanning the river, she saw, in the cerulean water burbling in the harsh daylight, bobbed dozens of watercraft, civilian and military boats buzzing with activity. The waterfront was unchanged, humming with life, even as everything had changed, polluted by death.

“This is our holdout,” Aryel said. “We’ve found, as you have, that the Phyrexians’ strength is in their numbers. Agility is our ally.”

“And so,” Danitha said, recognizing her handiwork. “You deploy strike teams through the canals. Perfect, so long as you hold the riverfront.”

“With the Vodalian merfolk protecting the waterways, to make sure no Phyrexian lobsters break through our defenses.” Aryel said, smiling. “Your invasion plans didn’t go to waste, Danitha.” She had dropped the honorific Lady to speak to her, technically a breach of decorum in front of ordinary soldiers; Danitha didn’t care.

Danitha paused, glanced overhead; shapes rippled across the sky, flashes of white and then bursts of multicolored light, like the cosmos had for a moment burst open and then collapsed back into place. “Angels?”

“We have two aiding us—Ranai and Argenta. They’ve seemed especially adept at repelling the Phyrexians—and they’re angry as hell, naturally—but even they’re getting tired.”

“And spread thin, naturally,” Danitha said. As she expected, Lyra would have dispatched Serra Angels everywhere—which meant that only a few could be present at any one place, flickering lights amidst the onslaught of dark.

“I’ve only been in contact with Lyra once. She and the other Serrans are coordinating all of Dominaria’s defenses—all while trying to hold back the Phyrexians at Sursi.” Danitha’s shoulders tightened.

“And Benalia City?”

Aryel’s face was steel and stone. “Unclear. It’s all come through Lyra, so I don’t know. Their forces are holding, and the defense plan seems to be working well enough. But I don’t know. Our Tolarians have tried scrying images of the city, but something—some kind of Phyrexian interference—has stopped us from getting a clear image. We know there’s damage. Lots of it.”

Danitha was going to be sick. She tried to muster a verse, a snippet, for her heart to keep time to—

From dust and light She coaxed forth an uncorrupted world. By Her grace we dwell here, free from suffering. Canto 11. Try it, say it, make it work.

A world returning to dust. Corruption seeping in. Grace, departed. Suffering, everything. Angels impaled on Phyrexian lances, Benalish children with eyes pouring bloody oil, fingernails extended like claws as they turned holy icons in rubble, Serra’s essence, holy or simply magical, sputtering, gasping, dimming, hissing away, and at the end of it, Phyrexian laughter.

“We have to go, then,” Danitha said sharply. “Relieve them.” She looked out to the horizon and asked, prayed, with what meager little faith she could muster, to fly away, to be in Benalia City; better yet, to split herself in half so she could find homes for the people of Croden and be with Aryel here at the same time—had to be with them both. Had to protect them.

Aryel blinked, frowned, glanced at Danitha’s squad. “There’s something else. Come with me.”

Danitha glanced to the reservists, whose faces shone with excitement and terror and nerves. They pressed together, but began to blend into the crowd of troops. At first, it had seemed, the façade of heroism had dimpled, and their imprecision and awkwardness shone through, but something about the crowd surrounded them, infused them, and they joined the collective—still themselves, and yet, something more unfolded out of them. Even Nathyn, with their large shield and ill-fitting armor, seemed to slip into the picture, their particularity resonating in the symphony.

Aryel and Danitha stepped toward the largest cluster of tents, over which a flag beat in the wind: the insignias of Benalia and Urborg stood side by side, over which hung the larger, composite image of the Coalition. They slipped between bearded Tolarians looming over scrolls and Keldon warpriests intoning quiet prayers, past Aryel’s Benalish guards, and in a moment they were in Aryel’s command tent, the metallic sun turning into burnt twilight.

Without speaking, Danitha pressed close to Aryel, steeling against steel, skin against skin. Her hair smelled of sweat and ash, morning light rolling over a marsh. This, thought Danitha, is what it was: amidst despair, joy bursting through a prism, breaking from the water and slipping into the air and then—dissolving. What was it, this joy? Errant sparks in the darkness? 

“Don’t die again,” Danitha murmured.

“You too,” Aryel murmured.

They were there, together, for time that Danitha could not track, and then they slipped apart, Aryel stepping toward a wooden table in the center of the room, on which was pinned a map of Ruzon. Small colored stones, spread across the map like some earthbound rainbow, marked the movements of Coalition troops; shiny blocks of black and grey denoted the Phyrexians. There were, Danitha realized, so many more of them than she thought.

There came a rap at the tent door and Danitha’s hand was at her scabbard—but Aryel raised a figer. The flap opened, and between the streaming dead twilight there emerged a crimson-clad Tolarian mage—the same one from the line, the one who had destroyed the toad-fungus. Here,  up close, Danitha couldn’t help but savor the banded electric life that hummed, just beneath the surface, through her entire form: in her clothes there ran streams of color and history, belted leather striping into billowing crimson, Tolarian vambraces alongside a billowing white cloak dappled with geometric patterns and bleached by the sun, looping threads of cerulean and scarlet around her turban—culminating in her eyes, one warm brown, one watery blue.

“Lady Danitha,” Aryel said, her voice shifting into the stiff register of military discourse, “This is Adeliz. The finest mind Tolaria has to offer.”

“And Shiv,” Adeliz said swiftly, smirking at Aryel “Best of both, you know.” She looked Danitha in the eyes, red and blue gleaming in twilight, and gave a shallow bow, not with disrespect but with the indecorum of someone with too much to do. “Lady Danitha. I’ve heard a lot. Glad to hear it wasn’t all eulogy.”

“You saved my life, earlier,” Danitha said. “I’m in your debt.”

Adeliz waved a hand, scoffed. “That? Psh. I was glad. I wanted to know what’d happen when we lit that gassy freak up.”

Danitha smiled—then frowned, a misplaced detail floating before her vision like the squiggles in the corner of the eye. “Apologies, Adeliz. But I know everyone on the Benalish deployment lists. Every name, every person who’s supposed to be here during the Invasion. You aren’t on it.”

Adeliz’s smile dropped, her blue-and-red irises seeming to dim, as though illuminated by her spirit. “Yes. Well. I evacuated from Tolaria, but, as you’ve already found, the Phyrexians have a way of interfering with plans.” A fizzle behind her eyes, pain wailing out, and for a moment, ever so dimly, Danitha saw the life behind it, the friends and the lovers and the entire world stripped down, turned inside-out, made to reflect nightmares—or perhaps Danitha was only seeing a reflection.

And as always, Aryel saw it, too. “Adeliz came from Tolaria West. The Phyrexians hit it hard— we didn’t expect them to target it, but—”

“But you didn’t count on Rona,” Adeliz spat. She stood there a moment, seething. Her very body seemed to radiate heat, and Danitha couldn’t help but watch—indeed, she seemed a vortex drawing in everything; the air seemed sterile, stagnant, everything slowing—and it was only belatedly that Danitha saw that Adeliz’s eyes were gleaming blue and red. She exhaled, and things seemed to slip back into place.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m—at Tolaria, see, I research emotive chronomancy—using red mana, different the blue, the usual, you know, to bend the experience of time.

Danitha frowned, stared, kept placid. Always best to show that you have your wits about you, even when you have no idea what you’re hearing.

“Ah. Right. Swords, not spells,” Areliz continued, eyes flicking about the air, as though she might synthesize the answer from all around them. “Erm, essentially, Tolarians, of course, we have a bad history with temporal magic. Trying to control the flows of time, it, well, takes a specialist, Teferi-level mage, to pull of that kind of thing. But I thought, hey, let’s do something different. I use red mana—passion, emotion—for spellcasting. Not precision. Discipline, yes, certainly, that’s the Ghitu way—but that’s not important. What’s important is, I can alter the experience of time.”

Blink, swallow blink. Adeliz’s mind whirred like a storm; Danitha’s pulsed like a star. Imagine the possibilities if—

“Even the Phyrexians?”

“Even the Phyrexians.”

“Adeliz is the other instrument in our strategy. She helps slow their reaction time when we hit our targets—that way they don’t know which way we came from.” Aryel said. “But it’s slow to make any gains. Really, we’re just holding down the harbor. The path we took you from was only just secured. And who knows, those metal bastards might take it right back.” She paused, black lightning passing across her face and then settling back into placidity.

“The situation seems unsustainable,” Danitha said. “If Benalia City is in danger, and we can’t be sure of anything here, why not evacuate?”

Aryel furrowed her brow, anger flashing again across her face, and she pointed at a wall of black pebbles forming a semicircle around the north of the city. “We haven’t been sitting here, you know. We’ve tried to evacuate Ruzon—on foot, by boat, even by air. But there’s—these.”—a breath, Adeliz’s eyes between them—“Sorry. If it were just the Phyrexians, that would be one thing. We could punch through, with casualties, yes, but we could do it. But it’s not just the standard Phyrexians.”

“There are two commanders,” Adeliz volunteered, her voice picking up tempo and sweeping through Aryel’s fuming breath. “One of them, she’s some kind of necromancer. She’s been a real pain in our sides, right from the beginning. She can raise spirits from the land, long dead ones, and they just keep replenishing the Phyrexians’ forces. No matter how many we take apart, she dredges up more. She knows where we’re going. There’s this—well, I don’t want to call it a wall, because, well, I suppose someone could pass through it—but sure, it’s a wall. Made of fog. Impassible, unless you want to come out a Phyrexian piece of meat on the other side.” Her crimson-and-blue eyes, which had been flitting about the room, lighted on Danitha, and she sucked in a breath. “Erm. Oh. I heard, uh—sorry.”

Lips pressed together. “Old wound. You’re not the first.”

Now Aryel jumped back in. “There’s another one, a newer arrival. He’s the one posing us real problems. He knows our strategy. We don’t know how. He can predict the movements of our troops, and he can hit us from the air. His magic, I’ve never seen anything like it. We only know anything about him—he’s an aven, some kind of mage—we only know because he always leaves behind a survivor. By the time they get to us, they’re babbling, can’t think straight.”

She slipped a sheaf of scribbled paper toward Danitha. It looked, at first, like esoteric blueprints or an atlas in some strange tongue—but, she realized with a chill, that was simply because the writer’s language had refused to obey the bounds of the page. There were crude drawings: circles speared with jagged lines, talons ripping across the page, razor feathers impaling human forms—and words, over and over. Inscriptions: Dark wings. Wonderful voice, horrible voice. Laughing.

Danitha swallowed hard, her throat scraping, screaming. His face, smiling warmly, swallowed by Phyrexians, calling for her help, begging, screaming, cackling, face hidden behind a mask that seemed burnt onto his face, just enough space from him that you could see his eyes, bulging, bloodshot, begging, even as his awful voice squawked out its horrible gospel.

“I know him.”

Aryel looked at her severely. Behind those steely eyes, recognition.

“I know her, too,” she said, gulping. “Or about her. She’s from home—from Urborg, I mean.” Something in her eyes, glistening, shining. “And that’s why we need you here. We think we’ve found them, in the center of the city. If we can find them there—eliminate them—we’ll be able to muster our forces to aid Benalia City.”

“Well, good,” Danitha said. “So, execute it, then. Get it done. I need to get back to the villagers—I left them. I swore to them. I need to.”

Aryel frowned. Black lightning, storms. “We need you here. The troops, they need a leader—a Capashen.”

Danitha grimaced, acid in her mouth, sickening gasp at an armored body limp on the ground, so fragile after so many years so strong. “No, they don’t.”

She stared at Aryel, hard, willing her to stop, willing her to know, begging that she could not simply wash it away, scrape the memories apart. They clung to her, sand pressed against her skin, blood in her hair, stink filling her nose. That name meant nothing. Capashen.

Adeliz was watching, back and forth between them, and bowed abruptly. “I’ll excuse myself. Find me when you’re ready, Aryel.”

Danitha thanked Serra—what a strange thing to do, she mused, thank Serra in a time like this, where had that idea come from?—that they were alone, and with the same breath she cursed that they had to have this conversation.

“What are you talking about?” Aryel said, blunt, demanding, not so much an open question as a statement recognizing absurdity.

“You’re the Knight-Commander—you can lead them. They need you, not me. What are the Capashens to them?”

Aryel stared at her with an unremitting glare, seeing deeply, parsing, sizing up, weighing her constituent pieces, trying to see how they might be reassembled. “They swear their loyalty to Benalia, they bend the knee to House Capashen, and they pray to Gerrard. Don’t tell me that doesn’t matter. Don’t even try it.”

Danitha shook her head. Fire inside, boiling, hardening, tightening. “Words on a page, a seal on a letter, an image in a church. A dead man and the daughter who killed him. That is what House Capashen is to them.”

Aryel kept staring, as though her boring gaze would crack Danitha, but there was nothing left to crack, she knew, for this was the foundation of it all, but still, Aryel went on trying—only, that wasn’t what happened. Aryel’s eyes softened. She slumped into a chair and stared up at Danitha, casting a look, a grasping hand, a call, across the wide dark seas, a light across the horizon signaling out.

“And. And I need you here. If it isn’t for House Capashen, or for Benalia, or for your damned father, I don’t care. I need you, just you, and so do they, all these people—they need you. And—and I do.”

A mosaic tile slipping into place, a ray of light glowing across the horizon. Words, like those she had spoken this morning: I don’t care, but I need you. Danitha churned.

Again, the impossible. Duty, there, in her heart, not holding together life’s fabric but ripping her in half: duty to what? To the vulnerable, to justice, to everybody? Why? It was impossible. How? She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready. The words she had spoken that morning, the words of solace to the people of Croden, tasted of cinders, papery confessions embering away in the dark sun, desolation.

Aryel grasped her hand. There, close. She couldn’t do it. But she had to.

It was twilight, a new kind of twilight, as their boat skimmed along the Ruzon River’s canals, set low into the ground and bounded by high limestone walls. The sun had begun to dip to the horizon, but instead of splashing acrylic orange and yellow across the world, its light had died away, and the Phyrexian portals, beating like the acid hearts, or better, hateful eyes of some gods the world had forgotten, veneered the city in watery red.

She and Aryel were crouched low to the deck. Below them, the sound of water, the water that the Benalish people had drank and ridden and lived on for millennia, made a mellow swish against the hull. Two skiffs glided across the water behind them, sails whipping gently in the wind. On either side, the distant sounds of fighting: metal clanking across pavement, Dominarian screams mingling with Phyrexian cacophonies—clang, clang, squelch, scream, yell, cheer, scream, fading away as the boats pressed on. Behind them, whispering incantations, the electric buzz of Tolarian spellcasting, which muted their movements to the Phyrexians and concealed them from sight. And above, the sound of thunder—but not thunder, for thunder was of nature, and this was not nature. This was the sound of the horrid colliding with the holy. Ranai and Argenta, doing battle high in the sky.

The angels zipped overhead, swirling around flying Phyrexians made of titanium and chrome, ebony and porcelain. Rainbow sparks exploded off the metal and red light washed over wings of feather and leather. One of the angels, hard to tell which, drove towards a nightmare that looked like a whale had taken skyward, and a constellation of pure mana played off its face as the angel exploded through its side. Aboom rattled through the air like the percussion of a distant parade.

“Has it been like this the whole time?” Danitha murmured.

“It has,” Aryel said. “They’re exhausted, I’m sure. Just fending them off, days and days.”

“If it weren’t so awful,” Danitha said, as the iridian maelstrom’s soft glow lapped across her face, “It would be beautiful.”

Aryel smiled, ever so briefly.

A thump on the wood paneling of the boat. Danitha tensed, but Aryel reached out and grasped her wrist, holding her still (as though, Danitha thought, they really stood here, together at the fulcrum of creation). She gestured behind them: the thumps were only the navigator signaling that they were getting close. Two more thumps from beneath the boat: the Vodalian merfolk, keeping vigil in the whispering waves, confirmed that there were no threats to their escape route. Danitha exhaled, attempting to soothe nerves that had been singed beyond healing, the troubled mind that wondered after Marten and Merah and Aveya and the Croden villagers, the memories that circled round and round, a crackling vortex, inhaling, devouring, splintering, dashing themselves against the earth.

The boat rounded a bend and Danitha caught sight of their destination slipping across the skyline.

To the east, beneath the dappled light of the embattle sky, limestone cornices carved into intricate seashells radiated soft peach—Ruzon’s city hall. To the west, darker, older buildings, relics of the older wreckage on which Ruzon had been built, squatted together, whispering secrets, housing the embassies of the Coalition nations (or they had, anyway). And nestled between them, overlooking the water, the bridge between past and present: a massive Serran cathedral, gigantic stained-glass windows gushing light over the darkening water. Danitha had only visited Ruzon in passing during some tour of the south, years ago, when her father had guided her along the cobblestone streets of a thousand different little worlds, pointing here and there to the jutting ribs of dark old buildings and the luminous limestone of bright new ones—the former the sterile remains of Old Benalia, and the latter the shining edifices built up from the wreckage. Symbols of Serra’s lasting grace, he had said. Though now, as they peered over the skyline like lotus blooms over the water, whose pink flesh so quickly molts, serpentine, falls away to nothing in the sweep of the ocean—now they seemed like the last cracked cornerstones of a world about to crash down.

They passed beneath a massive window cut into the shape of a flower, radiance pouring through the forms of Serra, Urza, and Gerrard, stalwart, beaming, cut in sharp relief against the dusk. Pause, realize, process, that the glow came not just from the sun but from inside. There, beneath the trinitarian iridescence, there flamed wisps of light. Candles, lit, illuming the interior of the cathedral—here, where no Benalish, no Serrans, no Coalition members, no elves or humans or orcs or anybody living, could be. The light, she saw, was obscured, bouncing off oil that dripped from between the stones.

Aryel had guessed correctly. The Phyrexians had taken up residence.

Shuffling sails, creaking wood, water slipping from a burble to a gentle, quiet drip. Look at Aryel’s eyes, dark, fiery; Danitha’s eyes oaky, gleaming. Ready.

They stepped to the gunwale and slipped coils of thick rope, gnarled like the skin of some primordial beast, with hooked heads and launched the coils skyward. For a moment, the hooks, suspended in midair, like the eternal life of a bird in motion, shone in the shifting light. Then, a clunk, a zip of hemp, and the chirp that signalled metal catching against the limestone railings on the canal.

A symphony of motion: across three boats, bodies, Ghitu and Keldon, Tolarian and Argivian, and at the front, Benalish with Urborgian, gripped the ropes, swung across the chasm between their boats and the canal walls, and yanked themselves up, walking horizontally as though the world had rearranged itself for their sakes. It was precision, it was beauty; even Nathyn, body resonating like a brass bell with the Benalish soldiers, moved like rain slipping in reverse, their callused baker’s hands handling the rope with the delicacy of a veteran warrior.

The pitter-patter of leather and steel against limestone echoed across the water, bouncing up and down the canal, and then in a clamor it concluded, the symphony moving, the aria singing out: whistling rope recoiling, silver swords singing out of sheaths.

They weren’t alone. Mute alabaster, shivering chrome, vestigial muscular red, all across the plaza, Phyrexians of all forms, humanoids and beasts, fowl, fiend, draconic, demonic, all around them. Instinct told Danitha to unsheathe her sword, scream out commands—but no. Adeliz, just to her right, her face beading with sweat and her tongue pressed against her lips as shimmering sapphire glyphs hung before her like mist.

They pressed close to each other in the misty blue of Adeliz’s spell, creeping along the edge of the canals and slipping between squadrons of pristine porcelain soldiers and massive molten beasts stomping this way and that. Duck low, give breadth, slip between legs, keep up. They were invisible, but only within the aura of magical power radiating from Adeliz; slip out of it, fall a few steps behind, drop anything, leave any trace, they would be discovered.

Look back: Adeliz, Danitha saw, was already growing tired. She shuffled along in the center of the swirling mist, clutching her chained spellbook so hard that Danitha wondered if the leather would crack, wondered how long she could keep standing. Closer, closer—thirty yards from the cathedral door, twenty-five, twenty. But for now, they were silent, invisible.

And so instead, Danitha observed. The Phyrexian footsoldiers moved like rushing water, or like zipping hornets, or like music—but not. Smooth, synchronized, but not: smoothness, she knew not how to describe it, but she knew it, smoothness was a quality of silken robes and a father’s armor, the crystal surface of water in a sacramental font, and synchronicity was the quality of holy song and lovers’ breath; in other words natural, the inner essence radiating out some imperfect but incandescent essence, as though beneath its papery outer form shone like a star and spoke in primordial words, borrowed from some higher graced tongue that was nonetheless as native to the thing as its own being: I am me, made just so. And the Phyrexians’ movements were not, not natural, not imperfect, not being as they were. The Phyrexians were in the world, were of it, but they had none of that inner essence; their bodies were strung along ghostly strings, yanked along as by the sweeping hand of another power that cared not for them and willed them to be else than they were. Danitha wondered, now, in this expanse, what it had felt like for her father at the end: slipping away, the starlight within him sputtering, suffocating, crushed underweight, and then he was just a paper doll being tossed this way and that, conscious enough only to watch, with mute agony, what he himself was doing.

No matter. No time. Eyes in front of you: reflection is for recollection.

A grunt, a groan, from the middle of the entourage. Adeliz stumbled, regained footing, stumbled again, and pitched forward toward the ground, the burning glyphs around her sputtered—and the haze of mist around the party began to uncoil. Danitha’s breath caught in her throat, the world groaning, slipping, cracking like a glacial mountain rock, a fragment about to break off and tumble to the earth, so close, here, too late, watching it all crumble—

Hands dusted in white, flash of movement, and Adeliz was yanked back to her feet, held up straight. Nathyn was there. The mist coalesced around them again and the phosphorescent runes regained their substance. Danitha caught Nathyn’s eye: no words, not even concepts, just a look, shared across the din.

They sped across the last stretch of the cobblestone expanse, Nathyn and one of the Croden reservists holding Adeliz by her shoulders, grasping her close, refusing to leave her behind. It was risky, Danitha knew; they should pull back now, return, gather reinforcements, come back. But no, this could be it; it could be done. If Teshar was here, she could—the thought opened up before her like a chasm in the earth. Plunge a blade into his neck, watch the gentle beautiful light seep away as the Phyrexian chorus turned to a whimper, let a good man die.

She couldn’t. But it was too late.

They reached the edge of the gigantic prismatic halo encircling the cathedral, but instead of tromping up the massive limestone stairs to the carved door—in which, she saw, bas-relief images of Serra and Gerrard had been defiled: Gerrard’s head had been smashed in, splintered wood and stone scattered at his feet, and Serra had been drenched in a spew of glistening oil, the bright white glow of her eyes swallowed in the ichorous flood—no, they did not go up there. Instead, they slipped to the side of the cathedral, where, set against a wall overlooking the canal, stood a tiny wooden door.

“How did you know?” Aryel whispered.

Danitha smiled, feeling over a beating crimson scar in her spirit. “I know every inch of every style of Serran cathedral from every major period. Father wouldn’t have it any other way.”

A squeeze of Areyl’s hand, a pulse of warmth. Danitha looked back at. Adeliz, who, drenched with sweat, bleeding from her nose, was already weaving another spell from the beaming glyphs.

“There,” she said, breathing heavily. “This spell will create a temporal dilation—time will seem to pass differently—inside the cathedral—from outside. I’m slowing the Phyrexians’ sense of time. Every minute for them out here will be twenty for you in there—so once they know to send in reinforcements. Hnh. It’ll already be over.”

She had not, Danitha noted, said you’ll already have succeeded. Instead, the grim inevitability: something will have ended.

Still, she nodded. “Thank you, scholar. All Benalia will be in your debt.”

Adeliz pressed her lips together. “I. Hnh. My whole life was there. Tolaria. At the beginning. And now it’s gone, into the sea. So—this isn’t a favor to you. Believe me.”

Agony and anguish behind those beaming crimson and blue eyes. But Danitha could say nothing; she could only do.

And so it was time. A signal, a pulse of white light in the air. For a moment, the awful nothing of stillness. And then, the sun itself descended.

No, not the sun: Ranai and Argenta, twinning angelic forms, their wings trailing a vapor of multicolored aether behind them that wrapped around them like the halo of an angel and the tail of a comet and the light of justice, coming down, down, directly into the middle of the assembled Phyrexian forces. A crash of thunder, a bolt of lightning, a ripping of worlds, and the angels were there, on the ground, spears and swords drawn. Waves of Phyrexians descended upon them, but they batted the monsters aisde, lances screaming out rainbow light that shredded in half Phyrexian trolls and engulfed footsoldiers in waves of sidereal flame. Lifetimes ago, the Phyrexians had nearly made the Serrans extinct, taken their very realm from them. And now, the weight of history, the power of light, the force of the holy, was being revisited upon the invaders.

But powerful as they were, Ranai and Argenta would not last forever—if they led the charge, they would be overwhelmed. And so here they were, the distraction, to call the Phyrexian onslaught away from the cathedral as the strike team went to work.

So they must, and so they did.

As they entered, Danitha noted that, despite the damage to the front edifice, the Phyrexians had seemed to ignore this entrance entirely. Presumably, they had wanted a grander entrance. But within, as she led the soldiers two-by-two into the sacristy, where Serran clergy prepared before mass, she saw that even if the Phyrexians didn’t care for the door, they hadn’t ignored an inch of the cathedral’s interior. Little puddles of oil coagulated against floors, desks, walls, and the marbled pillars were scarred deep with scratches, burn marks, broken tile. Throughout the room, spectral traces of lives still lingered: tattered vestments, caked in cracking dried blood, lay at the foot of a pillar, no body to be found; trinkets and jewelry were shattered at the foot of a wall, itself cracked with the imprint of a body; at the foot of an icon of Serra whose rosy glass was splintered in a spiderweb, there lay a lone shoe, waiting patiently for its wearer to return. Danitha felt them, these peoples, these lives, which had come to their end here, in this holy place, this place where they should have been safe, and she wanted to cry, and die, and be sick, but instead of those things she—she could not imagine it—she prayed.

Give them peace.

They pressed on further, and Adeliz let out a hungry gasp as she pressed against a pillar.

“Not—to be—a downer—” she wheezed. “But—need—rest.” She swallowed, the gulp of saliva across her dry throat seeming to fill the room.

Danitha furrowed her brow, massaged a temple. Let Adeliz stay? True, she couldn’t fight in this state, might be a danger, worse, an impediment—but here, alone? She threw a look to Aryel: nothing, for Aryel, Danitha knew, would want Adeliz to press on. Then, to Nathyn and her reservists, meeting their glances, the looks of shivering children coated in steel.

“Can you protect her?”

Nathyn frowned. “Our duty is to you, Lady Danitha.”

“So it is. And I tell you—protect her. Keep back. Give her as much water as your canteens can spare. Keep her on her feet, if you can.”

A look between them, then back at her, a flash across her vision: neediness, difficulty, as the feeling of being stretched further than your arm can manage, but a need to hold on—the power of loyalty and the impossibility of keeping to it. But then: a nod. Confirmation. The reservists circled around the mage.

Aryel was watching Danitha as they passed through the winding chambers of the sacristy, coming closer and closer to the central chamber, the altar, where they might begin their search for the Phyrexian commanders. It didn’t take long. A glimpse here, a peek there, more and more traces of death before them, but they found, at last, a long hallway, at the end of which was the looming oaken door to the altar. To Teshar.

They slipped through the door, and there burst out an icy spectral exhalation, an onrush of air that clawed with death—choked with the stink of carcasses, the frigid miasma of metal, and something else, something which Danitha couldn’t name—frosted bodies and decaying leaves, dark sulfuric water caked with scum.

“Home,” Aryel whispered. “Urborg.”

The band of troops filed into the cathedral’s massive nave, where the strange fetid smell swirled all about them. The space, which should, Danitha knew, have been effulgent with stained-glass light, was dim and deathly—for the glass streamed with oil and new images seemed to seep through the ichor, visions of knights lain low and heroes shattered against the ground, Phyrexians pinning Benalish to stone altars and pouring darkness into their throats. The oaken pews, which ringed the central altar like rays of the sun, were, too, pouring over with oil, which reflected red and gold in the glittering candlelight that suffused the room.

And there, at the head of the altar, there loomed a high dark figure, around whose plated porcelain armor all the light seemed to gather and into whose dark papery wings it all sunk and died.

They approached, the clang of metal seeming to bounce and boom around the echoing catacomb of the cathedral, swords drawn, tiny beacons in the darkness. And then, a voice, layered, grandfatherly and twisted, screaming with the agony of a thousand others, spoke.

“Do you like my work, Danitha?” Teshar said, remaining still, his back to them. She gulped, looked at Aryel, the others, then back to Teshar. She knew that there should be no use in speaking with him—that he wasn’t in there, that they had taken him—and yet, and yet, there he was, the same man, the same light of hope, the same beacon of whatever love Serra might have had, and so—

“Teshar,” she said, flinching as her voice rebounded all around her, crackling, bending, becoming something other than hers. To her left, Ghitu pyromancers crouched low and took up positions on either side of the aisle. “Please. Stop this. I know what you believe—who you are—that you care, that you love.”

Steel raking across stone, talons scraping over stone that begged for mercy.

“Do not presume. You know nothing,” he said, his voice glittering with an eerie timbre, beauty enfolded with a thousand agonies.

He swept around, bearing to her and them all the ghastly porcelain skeleton that seemed to have been burned into his snowy flesh. The room was still, taking in the sight of his gruesome form: his wings, so illustrious, so snowy and beautiful, folded back and flaking like they were made of rotting paper, and his limbs seemed twisted in the wrong directions, sprouting blades from his elbows and fingers, visions of Phyrexian nightmares traced onto the body of a good man.”

“What you see here,” he said, whispering, screaming, echoing, “Is the beginning of a new theophany. Where Serra gasped the emptiness of lies, we shall sing the fullness of truth. Where flesh once croaked with agony, moaned for escape, we shall speak the divine language of unity. We shall exorcise the spirit and raise the body in the high liturgy of perfection.”

“You don’t believe that,” Danitha whispered, more to herself than to him, willing it to be true, begging it, even as there before her there stood, breathing and belching malice, a splintered being reassembled as obscenity. To her right, the Llanowar elves took up positions in the pews and nocked their arrows. “You’ve felt the Ancestor’s touch. You heard the stories. They were real. You knew they were real.”

Before her there hung Teshar’s tenebrous form, but behind it, like he was the screen through which he spoke—or perhaps it was the reverse, he the screen to which she spoke to this shadow, casting forth a void that pulled her toward itself—another: hateful eyes, pained eyes, life blasted to bits, a man she wanted to be there but was not.

“Please,” she whispered, in the voice of a child emerging from the infernal glow of nightmares, so quiet and so loud. “I need you to be here. Don’t leave.”

A crunch, limestone splintering under a vise grip. Aryel and her knights circled the altar, swords drawn, glittering silver and pink in the cavernous light. Danitha ascended the steps, sword at her side, glittering like a bladed jewel in the firelight, unsure that she could really use it. He looked at her, from behind the leather and oily sinew grafted over his face and neck, and the chorus of voices burned into his throat began to laugh, giggle, cackle, chuckle, booming off each other with awful resonance.

“Moira, dear?” Teshar boomed. “Show our guests in, won’t you?”

And suddenly, they weren’t alone.

The ground of the cathedral rumbled, split apart, gave a croaking gasp as sickly green fog poured forth from every opening. And then, surging from the mist, there came a body. Their vanguard, something that might once have been a woman, skin that seemed like ink had coagulated into shape, poked through with skeletal bones, banded spikes, bulging through what little you might have called skin, and at its fore, a face made inhuman precisely by its echo of humanity: inert, motionless, green glowing eyes and a graying face that sprouted black horns streaming oil.

“Windgrace,” Aryel whispered, choked, voice dying away even as every sound seemed magnified around them. “Give me strength.”

This woman, this Moira, wasn’t alone: behind her came alien bodies, silver and porcelain metal that caught the flaming glow as the emerald mist carried them upward; compleated bodies, etched black metal fused to the greying flesh of desiccated corpses, fingers extending into claws and legs into pincers and mouths contorted into screams, final agonies persevered for eternity; and, among them, Danitha saw, her stomach lurching, her spirit screaming out—and, too, her throat—there were mortal bodies, Dominarian bodies.

For there, bounded by their arms and legs by a legion of twisted Phyrexian jailers, forming together a shapeless mass of metal and flesh that seemed to be pulsing, breathing, in some horrid simulacrum of life, were the people of Croden. Brother Merah, wings pulled backward by gruesome metallic instruments, stretching and bending as though they were about to be shorn off; Aveya Joryev, pinned by the pointed talons of a Phyrexian obliterator’s claws and tails, lancing her arms and legs and shoulders, grasping her in place; and Marten, lashed with a band of black oil that spidered down across his throat, his eyes beaming out at her, dark, oaky, deadened, afraid. And there were all of them, all around, all of Croden’s men, women, and children, here, at the Phyrexians’ mercy.

Danitha’s eyes met Marten’s, seeing his lips moving. Spelling out her name. Begging, breathlessly, wordlessly, launching a prayer forth into the nothingness—Help. Please.

But she couldn’t. She had left them alone. She had let them be taken. She had searched for her duty, had agonized over it. And, once more, she had failed.

She felt to her knees.

“Fear not,” Teshar sang out, in his screeching, beautiful, awful lilt. “For you are the first of our new apostles. The darkness shall fall away, and truth shall free you.”

“Let them go!” Danitha roared, knowing that it was foolish to say such a thing, knowing that Teshar relished the boil of her blood and the agony in her soul, what little of it was left tattering in this maelstrom, as he kept cackling; he wanted her to suffer. And so he did.

 “Danitha,” he said, his voices collapsing and reshaping into a new voice, and old voice, a horrible voice, his voice, her father’s voice, moments from his demise, kept forever in the infinite library of Phyrexian torment.

“Do your duty. Do your duty. Do your duty. But you can’t, can you? You are made of flesh. Your duty is words. It is vapor. All that is solid is here, in Phyrexia.”

“Help,” Danitha said, low as she could, throwing a glance to Aryel. “Please.” But there was on response; Aryel said nothing, could not even bring herself to look, for before her, in the green and purple mists pouring forth from Moira, the ebon prophet of Phyrexian desolation, there were shapes, sculpted from the fog and shot through with phantom light that imparted to the images a kind of half-living being. Mangrove swamps and tightly packed homes, strange skeletal creatures walking hand-in-hand with humans and panthers standing on hind legs. Aryel stared, captivated.

“All that you have lost may return to you,” Teshar continued, gazing out not just as Danitha but at the Croden villagers, the Benalish, Aryel. “Your idols have led you astray, to a place of silence and mute absurdity. You must know: all this means nothing. But should you wish for more, for the perfection you so lack in these feeble forms—Phyrexia provides.”

She couldn’t move. Step forward—swing her sword—even raise a hand—and Marten, Merah, Nathyn’s daughter—all of them would be dead, absorbed into the Phyrexian monstrosity. Eyes and tears and screams called out for mercy. Danitha had no way to give it, and Phyrexia had none to offer.

Danitha. Do your duty.

She saw before her lowering the sword; letting her father live; letting him take her; letting all of it fall into the cold darkness, where there resided nothing, nothing she loved or that loved her, no promises of heroism or glory, no words of love, and no, nothing to hurt, nothing to ache, for that seemed so captivating: for an end. Someone was crying, and she realized, with only the dimmest of awareness, that it was her. Time slowed, thrummed, moved through the infinite depths between heartbeats.

But for once, Danitha realized with a start, like the rip-roar of lightning, it wasn’t just her.

A crack, a rustle. She flicked her eyes to the door, and there was Adeliz, held under Nathyn’s arm, swirling with glyphs of sapphire and crimson, eyes glowing in a kaleidoscopic mesh of color even as her nose bled and sweat beaded down her forehead. The glyphs had filled the air, tinging it with purple, and all moved in slow motion, swirling like a rainstorm around the Phyrexian armature that held the Croden mercenaries. Adeliz’s spell, magnified, focalized: here, on their side, it was buying them time.

And there was Nathyn, looking at her, mouthing words, whispering across the void a truth that she heard from their spirit: I won’t leave you.

Danitha’s eyes met Aryel’s, yanking her away from the searing phantasmal Urborg. Eyes, pressed into one another, seeing each other, strategizing without words, unfurling a world without even a breath.

“I’ll take her,” Aryel said. “You get him?”

“Done.”

“Don’t die again.”

“You too.”

Danitha surged forward; behind her, Aryel roared out, rallying the Coalition forces to her side. From within vortex of walled-off time, Danitha saw, Marten watched, eyes flicking back and forth in slow motion.

She dove at Teshar, raising her blade high and bringing it down with thunderbolt weight, but Teshar was faster. His wings pounded the air, buffeting Danitha with a gust of putrid wind. He was in the air, coming down on her, claws extended, no time to dodge—and then Benalish shield, one of the reservists towering over Danitha, he was there, deflecting the blow. From behind, a bolt of Ghitu flame caught Teshar in the side and sent him sprawling.

He was back on his feet in a moment, wailing abominably, as though pulling forth the agonies of all creation to himself—and so they did, coalescing around him in Phyrexian form, tiny spidery mites made of porcelain, footsoldiers made of multiply grafted human bodies, etched-steel obliterators loping to his side and turning their eyes on the assembled forces.

Time crunched together, fragments of life pulsing alongside each other like streams in a river, and Danitha, with some kind of consciousness held just askew, just behind herself, seeing before her the clamor and carnage, observed. Here: Teshar loomed in the air, casting gusts of wind and searing bolts and slivers of shining obsidian metal at them; to her side, a Ghitu firemage was a second too late, stumbled, and garbled out a bloody prayer as his skin and face and eyes were perforated with Phyrexian metal. She ducked, swept her leg out, slashed through leathery skin, stabbed between metal plates; Phyrexian bodies feel before her piecemeal, arms and heads spurting oil as they spun the ground. There: A flock of compleated raptors, plated with metal, beady eyes bulging out of their skulls and chrome tendrils whipping about their bodies like braids of hair, swept down from the cathedral’s vaults, descended on a Benalish soldier, pecked at his face and squelched into his eyes as he screamed—then the condors crumpled to the side as Llanowar arrows burrowed into their sides—and then the elves themselves disappeared into crackling green light that streamed from Moira, who was suspended in a cloud of vapor.

Had to get to Teshar. Danitha slipped between the legs of a Phyrexian obliterator, its visage plated half in the burned porcelain of Teshar’s armor and half in the etched ebon metal of Moira’s—and as the beast whipped around to catch her, Benalish swordsmen descended upon it, honed by months of practice drills. Shimmering blades found purchase in its sinews, and the beast stumbled, buying time for Keldon warriors to lash the monster with ropes and yank it to the ground, then deliver hacking strikes to its face. Wait, look: over there, Aryel, unbidden by caution, was yelling incomprehensibly, cutting down Phyrexian footsoldiers, splitting molten goblins in half, eviscerating copper-plated beasts, as she marched towards Moira—and then was hurled to the ground by a blast of rancid wind from Teshar’s staff.

Danitha’s stomach turned. No.

A swing of his staff, the crackle of unholy lightning—dodge, drop to your knees, roll against the ground, prepare to advance—but then there came the screams. Behind her, a crowd of Benalish, Keldons, Argivians—her people, all of them—had taken the brunt of the of the blast; it hadn’t been a pure bolt of force or even searing flame, no, the Phyrexians were hardly so merciful. As the lightning crackled into them, acrid smoke poured from the soldiers’ flesh, began to stink—rot, sizzle, ripen, burst into a puff of icy blue miasma, skin peeling away from skulls and eyes bulging in agony, and Danitha wanted to cry, scream.

Had to end it now, had to get to him.

She stormed up the steps toward him, her stained-glass blade gleaming in the sickly emerald light. He swept his staff down at her, weight of a mountain surging—she skipped to the left, knocked the staff aside with her blade. A flick of her wrist, a whistle of streaking steel, and the staff went to the ground; a trickle of blood, crimson mixed with deep black, poured from the rent veins in his wrist. He swept his other hand down, talons outstretched, extended beyond his fingers by the power of whirring machinery, and caught her in the face, throwing her back.

Blood seeping into her eyes—wipe it away with her cloak, streak the snowy white with crimson. Give it back to him. Another swipe as his mouth poured out hate, words smashing together like clattering metal; she raised her arm and deflected the blow against her vambraces, the enchanted glass singing out with pain as Teshar ground against it.

What to do—there. Streak of red on the snow. She swept her cloak up, flung it in Teshar’s face, blocking his fuming hate and leaving him clawing in the empty air. There, with him distracted, she could drive her blade into his heart, end it—

But there, as he ripped the cloak from his face and stared at her, muscles stretching, croaking, as his body struggled under the weight of his Phyrexian prosthesis—there he was. Grafted into him, something hateful, but there, the man, the man who had cared and loved, the man who had been there—was he not the man she should protect? And yet, and yet—

He didn’t care. Black lightning poured from his hand, crackling into Danitha’s chest and hurling her backwards. Her face ached, burned, like the sun had grown angry and smote her where she stood. She rolled against the ground, fragments of wood and stone and glass crunching beneath her as she slid along. There, over her shoulder, she saw the rest: Phyrexian forces circling around the Coalition, Nathyn and the reservists and desperately pushing metal husks away from Adeliz, who lay slumped against the pew, streaming with sweat and tears and blood. Aryel smashing her sword against Moira’s ebon visage, emerald fog swirling all around them, clogging the knight’s eyes and nose and mouth. Moira holding her by the throat, squeezing. And there, there was Marten, and Merah, and Aveya, and Nathyn’s daughter, all of them, watching there, in frozen motion, looking back; in Marten’s eyes, there burned light like flames, gazing out at her. Her duty, broken, crumbling, slipping away.

And there was Teshar, sweeping down upon her. She caught garbled words: “Glory,” “Unity,” “One.” It was melodious. It was horrible. His holy words, turned to poison, breathing down, pouring out unholy darkness upon her, face burning, skin sizzling, and there was his laugh, his scream, awful, echoing all around them with the resonance of an unholy sacrament.

“You will not kill me,” Teshar barked. “Your duty. Nothing. A weakness. To be wiped away.”  

In those moments, as his claws closed around her throat and she closed her eyes, tears streaming down, praying, asking for Serra, her father, anything, to grant her mercy in these final moments, to let them all die quickly.

“Danitha. Do your duty.”

Her duty.

She opened her eyes. And saw something new.

There rippled, before her, something that came from without, but that also rose from somewhere deep within, something pulsing, something alive, but not just alive: it was something boundlessly alive, shimmering like an ocean of starlight which you could stare at and see in its depth, awestruck, the open secret of all things. These people being here, just as themselves, miraculous, themselves: the shape of Marten there, there, just there, him, nothing more, but more profoundly, nothing less. As though the swirling cosmic spheres had aligned and opened and she could see not just the things before her but the endless sidereal world beneath them, a stellar breath which whispered: It is you, here and now, who I love, and this love is life boundless.

She recalled the oath she had made a lifetime ago, that she had consecrated again that morning. I will protect the less fortunate. I will love bravely. I will face despair and fight on. She had known that the oath bound her to something beyond, and that was there, yes; but she had forgotten why she had composed it herself, why it must have come from her: oaths bind you to what is beyond yourself but must also come from the most primordial place within, the place in which your being is riveted to the ground of all creation. Her duty reached within and without.

With all the force in her body, she kicked, feeling cracks beneath her boot—once, twice, thrice—and Teshar was away.

It was, she thought dimly, stepping to her feet, as Teshar himself had said, on the other side of time. It was testament to the truth that this world, and that prismatic reality that thrummed within it, was holy. It was to be fought for, loved, not for honor’s sake, but because it was worth it. Worth loving. Her duty.

And then she was back, and this nightmare Teshar was his staff down upon her, a foul-smelling wind swirling around its crest as the ruby light of Phyrexian death glinted off the blades.

And there was her sword, pulsing in the stained-glass radiance in Serra’s name, dashing Teshar’s staff off course. She rolled to the side, scrambling to her feet, and took a defensive position—a sword stance her father had taught her, as his mother had taught him, on and on through generations, streaming love, Benalish or Sheoltun or nationless, and for that matter Shiv and Yavimayan and Argivian and Keldon, coursing through, binding them—not because it was violent, no, nor because it was honorable, those were just incidental—no, because it was of this world and this world was filled with slivered astral light and was, at the end, worthwhile.

Another swing from Teshar, another deflection, and then she twirled like sunlight on the sea and she felt her sword slip through air as an extension of her body—and Teshar’s staff lay split in half on the ground.

It didn’t deter him. The monster that was the missionary charged at her, clicking, squawking, gibberish dripping with poison. She ducked, then surged up, feeling the crack of porcelain under her shoulder as she flung Teshar to the ground. That would be the opening to go in, drive her sword into his chest, but—no. Back to the defensive stance. Teshar’s legs bent at impossible angles and sang out with a sickening crunch as his limbs spin into place. His claws extended again—then caught her bracer.

The world’s heart beat. She ached. She saw in him that light that pulsed in all Creation. But he would, like this, snuff out as much as the Phyrexians demanded—all of it. And so as Teshar charged her once more, Danitha screamed and drove her blade into his chest.

Ichor the color of black opal seeped onto her blade. Teshar slumped forward into her, at first thrashing, clawing, and then coming to a rest.

“Please, Brother,” she breathed. “Know peace.”

A moment, a breath. All creation shifted. And then, something happened. Something that Danitha did not explain and could not explain and would not explain all her life save for the quiet whisperings in the depth of her heart.

There shone through the stained-glass light of the cathedral, in the faces of Serra and Gerrard, a beaming prismatic ray, searing away the coagulated oil, and in that exploding auroral light, the Phyrexians slowed, became sluggish, slumped, screamed, sprung back—and the Coalition members became stronger, faster, sweeping aside the invaders. And there, pressed close to Danitha, in Teshar, there pulsed warmth, life, being, and then it poured forth from him once more, not as his stinking fetid lightning but in bolts of red and blue, purple and green and gold, spearing the Phyrexians through, blasting Moira aside, giving Aryel space to maneuver, driving the ebon necromancer back to the corners of the cathedral and out again, emerald smoke following in her wake.

Then in a rapid flash like a receding rain it was gone, and Teshar was slumped against her, whispering in a dulcet melody which she could not be sure she heard but which she knew she did.

Later, she would be told later that it was the angels, Argenta and Ranai, releasing a burst of angelic energy to which the Phyrexians were vulnerable. On further inspection, it was speculated that someone, perhaps her, had tapped into a reserve of mana, letting unformed magic flow forth, in some kind of miracle that defied her lack of magical prowess. And yet.

She remembered hitting the ground, half-closing her eyes, as though before her was some sweet sleep that had been calling to her. She remembered arms around her: Aryel’s and Nathyn’s and Marten’s alike, carrying her along, whispering, in all of them, I will not let you go, for in that fragility there was something alive and it was love.

It was not until they had burst forth from the cathedral and sprinted along the waterway, now alight with activity, and dove down into the water, into the waiting arms of their merfolk vanguards and been propelled up onto the deck of a boat, that Danitha could rest. Aryel was there, by her side, gazing up, as through a fog, at the dappled starlight, streaked with splashes of multicolored aurorae that trailed behind the angels. Peace.

To say the war then ended is untrue, for it did not. To say there were no casualties, no broken hearts, no shorn lives—this, too, would be untrue. Dominaria was a massive world, full of lives broken by the Invasion. But it was also full of lives who refused to slip into the darkness.

Such Danitha knew in that moment, as Marten hurried about her, scribbling notes in his makeshift ledger to calculate squadron sizes, troop movements, rations. All around them, the survivors of Croden whirled, an organism alive and divided into a hundred hundred parts, beneath the banner of the Coalition. Some were slipping on suits of armor and training for the first time in years or the first time in their lives, with blades, battleaxes, maces, shields.

Over them all, looming, like a raven—no, indeed, like some albatross, lingering, dark and purpled and yet hopeful—as Aveya Joryev. She would remain in Ruzon, heading the city’s defenses with Adeliz. The Benalish would not be short of leaders, not while she was around. Such was Danitha’s burden: she could not stay with them all, could not protect them all—but she would ensure they would not be alone.

But there were others there who were prepared to journey again. Some—there was Nathyn and their daughter, smiling together, looking at Danitha, not alone, never alone—had bent the knee to the House Capashen, pledging their arms, their work, their hands (dusty with flour), whatever they might provide. And they needed much. Danitha herself was recovering and Aryel was co-leading the contingent—but Danitha saw etched in Aryel’s face some call of pain, the ache of that spectral Urborg, the tears calling them to return home.

Soon, she had promised. First, they would reach Benalia City—which, they had finally received word, now that Teshar’s interference had dissipated, was repulsing the invasion. The Serra Angels, it seemed, were not prepared to lose anything else to Phyrexia. Danitha wasn’t either.

Another look around: at Marten’s oaky eyes, Aveya’s gleaming purple, Adeliz’s sapphire and crimson, Nathyn’s beaming brightness, Aryel’s deep obsidian black, the mottled manifold of agony and faith and hope amidst Benalia’s people.

She breathed in, breathed out. Let her heart beat time to that song whose rhythms played in the depths of her spirit.

The light of love shines brightly through even the smallest of cracks. All shall be illuminated. Canto 903. Her favorite.

She saw, there, before her eyes, gazing up at the streaming light, something else, shimmering there, like a vision half-real, watery like a dream, and yet undoubtedly there. It was herself, not bent low or crying out, but there, back straight, blade by her side, in the chapel of Capashen Manor, swimming in a sea of emerald and gold and red and purple light that poured through stained-glass windows—beaming, she saw, with clear vision despite the tears which filled her eyes, through an image, solid, real, of a man in stained-glass armor with oaky eyes and a smile that bodied forth a lifetime of love. And as she gazed into his face, preserved here not as as a monster but as a hero, as the man he was, she felt rays of light seep into her and felt something beyond herself, an embrace, a love profound, pouring into her, filling in the cracks, raising her up on a pillar, encircling her and suffusing her, and touching her spirit, as words rose forth in her mind: I love you.

Tomorrow they would set out for Benalia City. Tomorrow, back on the road, they would struggle, and suffer, and find themselves rising, again, before the tide of Phyrexian death. But she would rise. She would protect. She would love bravely. She would face despair. And she would fight on.

It was her duty: she could do no less.

The end. For now.