Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [79]
Bolas had told her that there would be some sign of the next phase of his plans, and that she would know it when it came. She fretted a bit that she had never pressed him for more detail, but when the Eternal Crags trembled, broke, and fell into dust, exposing a shadowy, alien world beyond it, she had to admit that, as signs went, that one was impressively unambiguous.
Days after the Crags fell, she walked among the rubble, looking to discover, finally, what her master might have wrought in the places beyond the boundaries of her world. The going was hard, but she summoned elementals to push through the debris, and carved a satisfactory path into the heart of where the mountains once were. The destruction ran in a rough line, hewn to an invisible boundary as far as the eye could see in either direction. She had reached it—where Jund ended, and some other world began. When she reached the junction point, she gasped. The volcanic sediment of her native Jund gave way to flats of a gray, hard-packed substance like clay, flecked with bits of … dead matter. Decomposing beings lurched and crawled across the landscape—but the stench was the first enemy to cross the border.
It was Grixis, the purported home of her master. Somehow she had expected something a little more … regal. Whenever Bolas visited her, his presence overwhelmed her. The sensation of power positively dripped from him, the aura of a monarch who ruled a vast empire. But that place, his home, was a corpse. What would drive him to lair there? Surely, if Bolas was capable of traveling to Jund and presumably other places, he could retreat to someplace more fitting his personal magnitude.
Still, the tang of black mana that clung to the dragon was also unmistakable in Grixis. As her own elemental magic thrived in the fiery cauldron of Jund, so must his flourish there. The dragon terrified and fascinated her when he came to her world; he must be a god there, she thought.
NAYA
Looking over the panorama of the world of Naya, Sarkhan shook his head dismissively. Naya had never experienced an attack by a dragon. It wasn’t as if massive creatures were foreign to it; the gargantuans native to Naya destroyed their share of its jungles just by walking around, garnering them reverence with almost every culture on the plane. But the footfalls of meandering gargantuans were not adequate preparation for an assault by a dragon.
Jund’s dragons were specially adapted to dealing with difficult game. They survived on fast-moving goblins, human warriors with swords and scale-piercing spears, and the incredibly tough and stubborn viashino. The dragons had perfected a death-plunge maneuver that allowed them to scoop hordes of fleeing humanoids in a single gulp, becoming such experts at the maneuver that they could execute it while strafing any terrain from wide volcanic flats to jagged peaks—which is why most denizens of Jund huddled in the sheltered lowlands, away from their ravaging jaws.
On Naya, the foliage was thick but eminently flammable. There were no jagged chasms between mountain peaks.
As Jund and Naya overlapped one another, serrated peaks from Jund sliced through Naya’s understory and gushed lava into its glades. Meanwhile huge stands of trees and vine-covered step pyramids from Naya lanced up through Jund’s highlands. Any pockets of civilization that had once thrived in the intermingled areas were crushed immediately. The areas of overlap became dead zones, filled with ruins and corpses.
Sarkhan had begun summoning his personal flight of dragons as soon as he mustered the mana for the spell. Maybe the dragons were a gift from a cold, calculating dragon planeswalker, but the fact remained that they were a flight of dragons under his control. If that was somehow a disgrace, Sarkhan had never enjoyed disgrace more.
The first dragon he summoned for his army was the immense male hellkite, Karrthus. He was almost stately in his bearing, a crown of horns encircling his head and a single sharp spike curving downward from his chin. He thrashed