"Wonder if this'll stop Yawgmoth," Gerrard muttered.

Urza's head replied, "Don't count on it."

As if she breasted a wave, Weatherlight drove her prow through the disruption field. Light broke over them ahead, a thin, gray light, but light all the same. Weatherlight emerged into the fire-scored throat of the volcano. The few remaining Rathi cannons began unloading on them.

"Don't worry, old man," Gerrard said, not unkindly, to Urza. "Yawgmoth's just a genie in a bottle. All I need is a big enough cork." He nodded toward the top of the shaft, where a plague engine drifted massively within a Phyrexian armada. "And there it is." Leaning toward the speaking tube, he called, "Brace yourselves. Sisay, full aloft."

"Aye, Commander!"

Even as she hauled on the helm, the ship's engines purred. It was a throaty and confident sound. The vessel seemed almost to stretch on her keel as she jagged toward the sky. Ray cannons were too slow. She slipped through their red fingers.

Gerrard pumped the foot treadle of his cannon and swung it fore. "Tahngarth, Karn, take a bead on that thing."

"Aye," Tahngarth replied. The charge mounted in his weapon.

Karn at amidships followed the ship above. "We can shoot it down, but how can we make sure it plugs the hole?"

"That's where Sisay comes in," Gerrard replied, spitting on the gun's manifold and seeing the stuff boil instantly away. "She's gonna drive the thing down there." Gerrard paused, listening for the wail of incredulity.

Sisay surprised him. "Fine. I'm spoiling for a good fight."

Weatherlight vaulted from the mouth of the volcano. She leaped up the sky. Above her, the plague engine blotted out the sun. Huge and black and scabrous, that vessel seemed a looming storm cloud. Weatherlight darted beneath like silver lightning. Then came the thunder.

Four cannons boomed. They turned the air white. Blasts converged with a will. They jabbed beneath bristling horns and rammed into the superfluid cisterns beneath. Metal dissolved. It rained down amid a gush of green fluid.

Engines all along the port side sputtered and failed. Smoke puffed from dead innards. The ship began to list. "Take out the starboard side!" Gerrard commanded. He hurled another wall of white beneath the craft.

His shot was joined by a swarm of bolts from the other cannons. Hot fire raked beneath the craft, a more oblique angle as Weatherlight neared it. En route, the beams incinerated a tangle of enormous pipes, ripped through blast armor, and at last reached the starboard cisterns. Energy poured in, and green fluid poured out. The mountainous ship turned and began to plummet.

"It's all yours," Gerrard shouted to Sisay as Weatherlight drove up abreast of the plague engine.

"Not all!" Sisay replied in warning.

Black-mana bombards hurled webby death out across the air. Tahngarth's gun ripped a hole in the destructive curtain, but not enough of a hole. The other gunners were too slow and the ship too fast. Weatherlight plowed into the killing web.

Gerrard and Tahngarth ducked, bracing against the lash of energy. It never came. Gerrard glanced up to see ropy strands of black mana dragging across the ship's shift envelope. "Great job, Weatherlight!" he whooped. In answer, the ship slipped out of the killing goo, topped a tight arc, and clove down on the plague engine. Gaea led the charge, wearing the fearless face of Hanna. Down through a forest of spikes she drove. Her ram smashed into the solid spine of the ship. Magnigoth wood pounded metal armor. Her engines engaged. For the first time since her transformation, Weatherlight truly roared. Incredible force hurled the ship down against the plague engine and hurled the plague engine down as well.

Gerrard floated up weightless in his harness as the vessels plunged toward the volcano. His face grew peaked. "Can you see the hole, Sisay?"

"I can't," answered the captain, clinging to the helm, "but Weatherlight can. She's running things now."

Gerrard nodded, looking out past huge, curving horns to armor plates that swarmed with Phyrexians. He pivoted his gun around and vaporized a whole platoon. They became smoke that fled upward with awful speed. "You think she'll know when to pull up?"

More cannons brought death to more monsters as Sisay said, "She'll know."

A bank of cloud swept up around them, and suddenly the horizon appeared in a full circle.

"Any moment now, Weatherlight," Gerrard murmured to himself. "Let's not be overdramatic." The rest of the fleet spun so high above, they seemed mere specks. "Any moment-"

Weatherlight broke free. The forest of horns dropped beneath her. She leveled and rose. The plague engine plummeted. Dust glittered between them in rushing air. The Phyrexian ship struck the volcano's peak. The edges of the superstructure peeled up in a circle, shoved by the rim of the pit. The rest of the engine slumped in the hole, a perfect plug.

"Ha!" shouted Gerrard. "So much for Yawgmoth!"

Though Urza's head was turned toward Gerrard, he seemed to see with other eyes. "He needn't emerge to have won."

Gerrard stood up, gaping over the rail. He had been so intent on the plague engine, he had not noticed the world all around.

It was utterly devastated, stripped to bedrock as if a sylex blast had scoured the land. The topsoil was gone.

Swamps had sunk away into the sea. The oceans had advanced. Coalition armies entrenched across the land were inundated. The surf churned their bodies.

"What happened?" Gerrard wondered aloud.

New armies of Phyrexians occupied the land. Massive creatures in dun and black, monsters scrambled over rocky embankments and marched down volcanic ravines. In their wake, they left elf troops slaughtered en masse, or Keldons buried in tall cairns of mud, or minotaurs mired in sudden bogs.

Even as Weatherlight soared by overhead, a division of Metathran battled the lumbering warriors. Though Metathran axes carved ferociously into the front, though limbs fell from the creatures, their numbers never seemed depleted. The monstrous armies only advanced, grasping Metathran in bare hands and ripping them apart.

"Where did they come from? How did they take so much land?" Gerrard growled.

Urza stared baldly at him. "Don't you understand? They are the land, the humus-all things dead. Yawgmoth has raised them here. He has raised them here and throughout Dominaria. He animates the very soil against us."

"Our place is down there," said a deep voice at Gerrard's shoulder. He turned to see Commander Grizzlegom. The minotaur had climbed on deck and strode, as sure-footed as a mountain goat, to Gerrard. Beside him stood Eladamri and Liin Sivi. Decision shone in their eyes. Grizzlegom spoke for all of them. "We're not skyfarers. We're infantry. We can't do any good on this ship, but there's plenty of good that needs doing below. This is our world, Gerrard. You have to let us defend it."

Gerrard stared at each commander in turn. His face was grim, and the courage in their eyes made him clench his jaw. "It'll be suicide. How many troops do you have?"

Grizzlegom shrugged, as if numbers were meaningless. "A handful of minotaurs, the same of Metathran, elves, and Keldons-"

"A handful," Gerrard interrupted.

"Plus two hundred prisoners released from Phyrexian dungeons."

Gerrard shook his head, "Why would they fight?"

Grizzlegom wore a blank expression and repeated the words slowly. "Prisoners ... from ... Phyrexian ... dungeons."

Urza said, "Let them go, Gerrard. This ship and her crew have a no-less dangerous destiny ahead."

Gerrard nodded. "It has been an honor to fight beside you, my friends."

"An honor," Grizzlegom responded, bowing his head.

Eladamri and Liin Sivi nodded their assent.

"Take us down, Sisay," Gerrard called into the speaking tube. "A flat, rocky spot away from these mudmen."

"Thank you, Commander," said Grizzlegom.

Gerrard's voice still rang with command. "Tahngarth, Karn, Squee-let's pave a landing strip."

His gun lit. A white beam stabbed down. It reached across the rumpled rocks and splashed over a regiment of the mud creatures. In kiln heat, their flesh steamed and dried. Hardened shards peeled away and tumbled to the ground. More fell. The beasts on the periphery of the beam merely crumbled. Those in the core exploded, showering the ground with hot mud. Four more guns fired. All around Weatherlight, monsters became ceramic statues, or crumbling piles, or nothing at all.

A basalt extrusion provided a wide and lofty platform. The plateau formed a black silhouette in Gaea's eyes as the ship eased down to it and slowed. With a gentle settling motion, the craft landed upon the stone.

No sooner did Weatherlight sigh on her landing spines than the spare gangplank slid across her gunwales and boomed in place. A moment later, the brave coalition forces of Dominaria marched down to certain battle and certain doom.

It was good to have rock beneath one's hooves again. It was even better to charge across that rock, axe in hand and foes aplenty stretching to the sea.

Grizzlegom had begun this charge on the slanting gangplank of Weatherlight. The extrusion leant its slope as well, but the true speed came from Grizzlegom's angry heart. He sensed it. They all did: They fought the battle of the Apocalypse.

And what strange harbingers were these mudmen, these golems. They seemed like Mishra's mud warriors, raised out of antiquity to terrify posterity. Grizzlegom knew how to fight Phyrexians. He understood their voracity. But who knew how to fight mudmen?

Whirling his battle axe overhead, Grizzlegom bowed his head and bulled into the things. Their flesh was soft but dense, like clay. Grizzlegom's horns rammed a pair of them. Pivoting his weight, he rose and shook his head. This was a lethal tactic that normally slew both foes at once.

This time, as the bodies folded and tore, loose chunks of humus clambered all over Grizzlegom's shoulders and neck and snout. They squeezed themselves into the minotaur's nose and mouth to suffocate him. They combined to form strangling fingers at his throat. They rolled into eyes and wormed down ears. Stomping his fury, Grizzlegom hurled away what remained of the clay corpses. He spat out the chunks in his mouth, shook away the bits in eyes and ears, and snorted magnificently to get rid of the plugs in his nostrils.

All around him, the other minotaurs were similarly plagued. One whose entire head had become encased in the torso of a mudman collapsed under the weight of two more that piled on him. He struggled out of the cluster and gasped a single breath before more beasts fell on him. They buried him alive.

Even as Grizzlegom escaped the suffocating stuff, his axe bit deeply into the pile. The blade struck on horn, and Grizzlegom reached in with his free hand. Two more cuts opened the ground enough that he could haul the bull's head forward-far enough to see that he already was dead.

The living ground wrapped itself around Grizzlegom's hooves. Hacking and stomping, he struggled for a hard crust of soil just ahead. If he and his troops could reach that patch, they could survive.

Across that way, Keldons advanced. Indeed, they sprayed oil and fire before them. The intense heat baked the ground and any mudmen on it. The arts of fire were well known to the Keldons, for in their cold climate, fire was life. In this infernal climate, the same held true.

Mudmen dragged Grizzlegom down to his hocks. He used his axe like a climber's pick and pulled himself free. Another mudman landed on his back. He hurled it away and scrabbled onto the baked ground. As he rose, he pulled two other minotaurs to the solid ground. There, the three fought and slew, waiting for the rest of their platoon to join them.

If these monsters rise everywhere, thought Grizzlegom as he cut the head from another golem, our world is indeed doomed.

While minotaurs and Metathran died in living graves, mudmen swarmed up the stomping magnigoth treefolk. Lashing roots only stirred the golems more deeply. They rose, depleting the soil. Magnigoths sank until their roots languished on bedrock. Worst of all, though, the creatures that climbed those massive boles ripped away foliage as they went. With no soil beneath and no leaves above, the titanic treefolk would soon be dead.

Except that Eladamri and his elven warriors fought just as fiercely.

The Seed of Freyalise stabbed into a golem's back and hauled himself up by the sword. Catching a handhold on the thing's shoulder, he chunked a foothold out of its wounded back. He vaulted up the tree's bole and split the head of the mudman. It fell backward. The riven clay tumbled down a cliff of rugged bark, broke into pieces on the spiky root bulb, and spattered to the ground. Fragments sprayed across the pyres there. Keldons had built the fires to bake monsters into ceramic. They would not rise again.

Chain rattled past Eladamri, paying out as the toten-vec sank its blade into the bark above. Up that chain climbed Liin Sivi. The mud beneath her fingernails and the murder in her eyes told of the golems she had already slain. The dun-coated bark above told of those she would destroy next.

"Who raises these beasts?" she wondered breathlessly. She took a handhold, yanked the toten-vec free, and hurled it up to transect a golem.

Eladamri shrugged. "Some planeswalker or some god."

"Mortals against gods," Liin Sivi snorted. "It would be nice, just once, if the gods were on our side."

Something drew Eladamri's attention upward, past the golem. Crowded tree bole, past the shredding crown of the tree, and to the blue sky beyond.

"They are," he said with sudden certainty. "They are."

Chapter 27.

When Gods Do Battle.

The devastated spheres of Phyrexia disappeared. Reality folded around the planeswalkers. For a blinking moment, all that existed was Freyalise in her downy nimbus, Bo Levar in his captain's cloak, the panther warrior Lord Windgrace, and Commodore Guff, stripped of his rubbers.

Then, in place of a destroyed Phyrexia appeared a destroyed Dominaria.

Each tortured rill bore a thousand claw marks. Each twisted valley held a million bones. Every last speck of soil had been scraped away, every swamp flooded, every tree felled. In their place, endless armies fought. In flesh gray and blue, in fur brown and white, they battled Phyrexian soldiers and things made of mud. Middens of bodies piled up. Between the rows of the dead, the living fought.

Even magnigoth treefolk languished under the tide of monsters. A shattering boom resounded below, and the land jumped as one of the treefolk lords fell beneath its assailants.

"Urborg, but it is all too much like Argoth," Freyalise said quietly. An angry light shone in her gaze.

Commodore Guff lifted a bristling red eyebrow and said, "You were at Argoth?"

"No, but I knew Argoth. It was a profound loss. This too-" She gestured toward the dying magnigoths. "This too ..."

"This will not be a loss," growled Lord Windgrace. "This is my home. I have fought this battle for centuries. I will not lose it in a day."

So saying, he dropped from the sky. He fell not as a stone would, but with preternatural speed. Pivoting to lead with his forelegs, Lord Windgrace reached toward a knot of Metathran and minotaurs, sorely pressed below.

Commodore Guff watched him go and clucked quietly. "Too bad."

Bo Levar turned a questioning gaze on him.

The commodore blinked behind his monocle, coughed into his hand, and said, "What?"

"What's too bad?" asked Bo Levar.

The commodore pointed his finger emphatically, as if realization floated on the air, and he was trying to pop it. "Oh. Yes. Too bad. Too bad that he'll be killed."

Bo Levar's eyes grew wide. "He'll be killed?"

Guff nodded, smiling absently. "Us too. Everybody. Everything."

"What?" chorused Bo Levar and Freyalise.

The commodore seemed taken aback by their vehemence.

He patted the pockets of his tunic. "Well, I'm sure that's the way I approved it." A smile of discovery came to his face. He dipped fingers into a small watch-fob pocket and pulled out an impossibly large book. It had once been a three-volume work, though the commodore had inexpertly joined their spines with shiny gray tape. He flipped open the grand tome and paged through.