At one moment, at one glorious moment, the luciferous glow at last reached the core of Yawgmoth. He recoiled but could not escape. He thrashed horribly, but the ship was merciless. In shimmering seconds, the final particle of his ensconced self was eaten away.

The Lord of Death was dead. Yawgmoth was dead.

The rest of the cloud began to retreat. It unraveled. It shrank like oil from soap. Darkness dissolved in concentric circles from the death of Yawgmoth. Clouds disintegrated. Dawn broke across a tumbling sea.

Sunlight and godlight chased the fleeing shadows to the nearby coasts, and over the seas, and over the mountains. It would chase the last vestiges of Yawgmoth to the ends of the globe.

Sisay laughed through glad tears. It was done. That was the reason for the tears. The reason for the laughter was on the forecastle. She had never seen so ardent and ridiculous a victory dance as the one performed just then by Tahngarth.

It should have been morning, but Dominaria might never see morning again.

Elves lingered in the treetops of the Skyshroud Forest. They sat upon their beds, waiting for doom. All around, on the spreading branches of the trees, waited faithful troops.

Above their heads descended the thick cloud of Yawgmoth's presence. Yes, he would arrive here first, in the treetops. Had the elves been moles, they would have hidden in the ground below.

But they were elves. If they would die, they would die in the trees.

Even Freyalise waited there, powerless against this onslaught. She hovered in the doorway of Eladamri's home, light gleaming around her. She had offered to take these folk to some other forest, some world that was not doomed. They had declined. So she waited with them. Another semblance of herself stood vigil in Llanowar, on deathwatch there too.

"Forgive me, elfchildren," she murmured.

Her words seemed to change the air, to change the world.

Warmth replaced cold. Light replaced shadow. Life replaced death.

Freyalise took a quick breath and smelled fresh air. She stared up past sun-dappled leaves into a sky of aching blue.

In Hurloon, Lord Windgrace and Commander Grizzlegom had found a battle at the end of the world. Beneath a descending cloak of blackness, they fought Phyrexians.

Grizzlegom's axe plunged through a trooper's skull plate. It clove the beast in neat halves, showing every part in cross-section. Beside Grizzlegom, Lord Windgrace punched claws into the shell of a scuta. He ripped it wide open. All around, minotaurs gored and severed and trampled, each bent on clearing one plot of land of these insect invaders.

In the midst of battle, their work was abruptly done. Light broke over them. The impenetrable clouds of blackness seethed away. With them went the will of these monsters. They slackened in the sun, grew lethargic without the clarion call of their lord.

Minotaur hammers didn't slacken. Their axes, their cudgels, their swords made quick work of the last beasts.

Suddenly deprived of foes, Grizzlegom and his people straightened their oily backs under a rising sun. They howled a victory howl.

In Benalia and Argivia and Koilos, it was the same. The death of Yawgmoth brought the stupor of his creatures. Even alewives, even boys with slings and girls with sticks dismantled the horrors of Phyrexia.

Chapter 33.

In the Garden of Heroes.

Sisay was glad Dominaria was safe. She only wished she and her crew were as well.

Weatherlight plummeted. She, the vessel of divine dispensation, was a gutted wreck. Even Karn no longer answered from the engine room. The helm was dead in Sisay's grip. No power, no thrust, no rudder- the best she could hope for was a crash landing in water. Had they been higher, no one would have survived. As it was, the heart of Yawgmoth had left them a mere hundred fathoms above the sea. Sisay rode the ship down, steering what amounted to a winged rock toward its final impact.

"All hands, on deck!" she shouted through the tubes. "All hands! You are advised to jump if you have the courage to! Otherwise, we will strike together."

Crew flooded from the main hatch. Many were folk who had flown through Rath and Mercadia and Phyrexia with this ship. Now, eagerly, they leaped from its plunging sides. Some even had the thought of opening capes and shirts to slow their descent. All the while, Weatherlight dived toward the sea.

First Mate Tahngarth stayed at his gun.

"You heard me, Tahngarth," Sisay shouted. "I know you have the courage to jump!"

His response was a rumble in the tube. "Yes. And I also have the courage to sink with the ship."

A final few crew hurled themselves clear in the moments before impact. Then Weatherlight struck the sea.

Sisay saw no more, flung to the deck like a rag doll.

Squee, between her legs, helped to break her fall, but her weight snapped his knobby neck.

Tahngarth was hurled too, but his gunnery harness protected him from impact.

Others crashed to the planks, not to rise again except as shark bait.

Walls of water surged up on either side of the ship. They closed overhead and crashed down. Then everyone tumbled in the all-powerful flood. The ship was engulfed in water, but the air trapped in her hull shoved the whole of it up to the surface. Waves surged whitely through balusters, taking crew with them. On the forecastle, Tahngarth struggled free of his gunnery harness.

On the bridge, Sisay numbly rolled over. She found Squee, his head bent at an impossible angle. There was no time for sorrow. The impact had split the keel. Even now, the ocean poured into the wide-open hull. Sisay kissed the corpse of her cabin-boy-he had been more than that, slayer of Volrath, of Ertai, savior of a thousand butts.

Snuffing back a tear, Sisay crawled to the main hatch of the bridge and flung it open. Water welled up. Already, the amidships was flooded, and the forecastle sunk too. Explosions below told that saltwater had penetrated the drive core.

Taking a deep breath, Sisay plunged into the flood. It was warm, inviting. It seemed to tell her she would live after all. She swam out of the wreckage and surfaced above amidships. She drew a deep breath. The water bubbled. Air boiled up in violent columns all around. With it came more crew, paddling to stay afloat.

The broken hull of Weatherlight sank furiously. One moment, it was a mere fathom down. The next, it was twenty. Then its outline, the shadow of Sisay's former life, disappeared forever.

There would never be another ship like Weatherlight.

Sisay stroked weakly, breath catching in her throat.

Up from the waters emerged a familiar, horned head- that of First Mate Tahngarth. He seemed almost to grin.

"We've done it, Sisay. We've survived the Apocalypse."

"Not yet," she replied, nodding toward the nearest island, some twenty miles away.

Tahngarth's smile disappeared, but his voice was still lively. "Still, we live."

Sisay blinked in thought. "So many do not. What of Gerrard, Karn, Orim-?"

"You can't get rid of me that easily," said Orim, stroking up beside them. "What good is water magic if it can't save you from drowning?"

Sisay laughed. "I'm glad to see you, my friend. We are the survivors of the command crew."

"What about Squee?" asked Orim.

"He's not command crew," Tahngarth objected.

Sisay shook her head. "He didn't make it."

"What?" came an outraged voice. "Squee always make it!" The goblin shook water from his hairy ears. "Yawgmoth say so."

"Yawgmoth is dead," Tahngarth pointed out.

Squee shrugged, an interesting gesture amid the foam. "So what? Yawgmoth should've fixed Yawgmoth as good as he fixed Squee!" The goblin smiled with yellow teeth.

Sisay returned a white smile. "Well, it's good to have you back. Grab whatever floats, all of you, and stick together. We've got a long swim ahead of us."

One year later and one hundred fifty miles away, the command crew of Weatherlight assembled again one final time.

They gathered among the heroes of Dominaria- Grizzlegom, Lord Windgrace, Sister Dormet, and hosts of Keldons, Metathran, elves, and humans. Even three magnigoth treefolk, who had survived the onslaught of Yawgmoth, towered above that august company. They assembled to honor the world's fallen defenders, whose ghosts lurked at shoulders and on tongues. All who had won the war gathered, living and dead.

Sisay certainly felt it as she strode among the stumps of palm trees. This outer isle of Urborg had seemed the perfect spot for the memorial-farthest from the devastations of black and white mana, and the onetime home of Crovax himself.

He had made his burnt-out plantation home a shrine to his glory. Now, all of it had been leveled into a series of clean, contemplative steppes, each leading toward the Heroes' Obelisk.

Sisay ascended toward it now. First Mate Tahngarth held her right arm, and Cabin Boy Squee held her left. Healer Orim followed in close company. All were gravely silent as, among the war's other heroes, they ascended level after level. The platforms nearer the obelisk were crowded with noble folk. As the heroes advanced among them, heads turned. The names of these heroes-Sisay, Tahngarth, Orim, Squee-came to strangers' lips. One by one, the assembled host nodded or bowed before Weatherlight's command crew.

Sisay smiled tightly to them. Her eyes flitted across the crowd, seeking familiar faces but finding none. Instead she turned her gaze toward the great black obelisk before her.

It was a gargantuan monument, five sided and carved from enormous sections of basalt. Its edges had been polished to a mirror sheen, and in them were etched the names of the brave fallen. One side bore the folk of Keld and Hurloon. The next recorded the dead of Yavimaya and Llanowar. The third side told of losses in Benalia and Argivia, the fourth of Tolaria and Vodalia, and the last, all who had fallen at Urborg. At the peak of the great obelisk, two busts had been carved back to back- the faces of Urza, and Gerrard. In back, their heads fused with the monument, making the two men seem parts of a whole.

Sisay and her crew approached the monument, around which a rope of red velvet stretched. She spotted the seats reserved for her and her company, among the other great leaders of the war. As they settled in, hands tapped shoulders and lips whispered familiar greetings.

The gathering had waited for these final few. The officiator of the ceremony-a familiar woman in green, whose feet never quite rested on the polished ground- began her oration.

"Here, my friends, in this weighty monument-here are the souls lost to save our world. It is a crushing weight, too great to be borne by any one of us. Yet, it was borne by two." She lifted a regal hand skyward, toward the faces engraved above. "Is it any wonder, under such a burden, that they seemed sometimes petulant, sometimes mad? Is it any wonder that we all found ourselves railing against them and later consoling them. Theirs was a burden we each bore but in fraction. They shouldered it, and in the end, it crushed them.

"Their sacrifice sums the sacrifice of everyone listed here, and everyone who died nameless in this conflagration. Because of them, we remain.

"Here is a secret-The weight they bore is nothing next to the weight we bear. They have handed us a new world. Now we must carry it on our backs. It is our job to live, to make certain their sacrifice was not an empty one. They willingly shouldered the burden of death. Let us gladly shoulder the burden of life .. .."

As Freyalise spoke, for it was indeed she, Sisay could think only of her friends, gone forever. Wars were won by the dead for the living, but those who survived, those as wounded as she and her crew were, could not truly live afterward. Wars were fought for grandchildren and great grandchildren, not for sons and daughters.

Sisay wondered how her companions and she would survive in a world without Weatherlight.

"... I wish I could read every name on this obelisk. I wish that each could be inscribed in the highest position, that whatever gods might roam by would know them for who they were. I wish each could be inscribed in the lowest position, that all of us who dwell in the dirt might read and remember. That is our burden-to live and read and remember. To keep pure the world given into our hands."

It was too great a burden. Sisay dropped her gaze from the planeswalker and stared into her lap, hands clenched on the black suit of mourning she wore.

Standing on the docks of Urborg, built especially for the hundreds of ships that converged for this ceremony, Sisay felt much better, and much worse.

She felt better because she was by the sea again, surrounded by great ships, and awash in the contented chatter of seafolk preparing to set sail. She felt worse because here she would say good-bye to her companions of years.

The planks of the pier were rough and sticky with pitch. The smell of creosote filled her nose, along with the tang of salt and fish. Sisay took a deep breath. All these odors were sweet to her. All were the smell of life.

"It was a beautiful ceremony," said Orim. The words broke into Sisay's reverie. She turned to see the healer, her hair a year longer and done up with a treasure trove of Cho-Arrim coins. Orim had forgone the turban today, and sunlight glimmered in her black locks. "Gerrard would have been honored."

"I know," Sisay responded flatly, regretting her tone even as her lips closed on the words. She glanced an apology at her comrades. Tahngarth and Squee averted their gazes. Orim did not.

Her eyes were deep and searching. "You aren't happy."

"No," said Sisay.

The healer's smile was immediate. "But we won. We saved a whole world."

Sisay turned, her eyes welling. "I know. That's why we came together, to save the world. That's what we've done. That should be enough. But somewhere along the line, we became friends. And what is a whole world saved when it costs so many friends?"

A troubled expression swept across Orim's face. "Gerrard was made for that moment. Out of centuries, he was made for that. And we were made to live on." She tried to smile again. "Freyalise was right, Sisay. Our burden is greater. It is a difficult thing to die doing what's right. It is even harder to live doing it."

Sisay nodded bleakly, throwing her hands out toward the ships chafing at dock. "So which of these will take you away?"

A conspiratorial look came to Orim's eyes. "None of these. I have made arrangements with another voyager."

"Whom?" Sisay asked. Her question was answered as if it had been a summoning.

The air beside the two women distorted. Images of water and sky twisted as if reflected in a silvery pool. A mercurial form took shape-tall, lean, quicksilver .. ..

Sisay gaped in astonishment. "Karn! I thought you were dead."

"I am," came the easy response. No longer did his voice sound like shifting gravel, but now like the delicate music of water. "The Karn you knew is dead, at any rate. I bear the name, but I am more. I am the sum of a legion of artifacts and souls."

Clutching the sides of her head, Sisay said, "Where have you been?"

A smile came to that strange face, which had been unable to smile before. "I have been wandering the planes. They are beautiful and horrible. I have been learning. I have much to learn."

"You're late," Sisay said, still stunned. She gestured over her shoulder to the obelisk, only just visible above the pitching tree-tops. "You missed the ceremony."