Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [86]
“The dead have begun to walk the earth,” said Kresh flatly, looking ahead. “Get your weapons ready.”
A group of humanoid corpses shambled toward them, their putrid flesh hanging from their bones, their mouths distended, and their eye sockets rolling with expressionless orbs.
Ajani gripped his axe. They looked like awful parodies of human beings, and some other creatures Ajani couldn’t recognize. It must be magic related to the creatures that killed Jazal.
When the undead creatures saw them, they stopped shambling, and charged.
ESPER BANT FRONTIER
The demon Malfegor delighted equally in causing as much misery to his own forces as to those he conquered with his army. He enjoyed pulling on the metaphorical strings of power that branched out below him, reveling in the grim puppetry of the undead. If he weren’t heading where he was heading, he would almost feel happy.
Esper had been something of a joke. Still flush with black mana to fuel his dark heart, its shard was conveniently structured around systems of control—hierarchies of mages and sphinxes—as if the place had been designed for a demon’s whip. He wrested control of Esper’s forces away from its mortal masters with only a modicum of torture and the simplest of promises, with few exceptions. One high-minded sphinx managed to meet his blazing glare and resist his temptations of power and corruption. Although Malfegor successfully slew or tempted away all of the sphinx’s underlings, the creature did the smart thing—it fled with its life, disappearing into Esper’s sculpted skies.
Truly, if he had to march across an entire world to get to Bant, Malfegor thought, then Esper was the world that he would choose to form the bridge. By the time he reached the frontier area where the crystal-sand dunes of Esper began to bleed into the fields of Bant, he had
doubled the size of his army. Etherium-infused drakes and sludge striders made admirable shock troops. And those human and vedalken archmages, properly tempted out of their mortal souls, made excellent lich lieutenants. He liked how their metallic enhancements exposed their minds to him, framed in etherium tracery. It let him observe directly the torment caused by his rule.
But he couldn’t truly enjoy the march, due to its ultimate destination. The lands of Bant were not new to Malfegor, for he was a truly ancient demon. He remembered Alara when it was a single, complete world centuries before, and he had ruled with impunity then. He remembered when Alara split in five, tearing one aspect of Alara away from another, casting him into the depths of that subworld Grixis. And just before the world broke asunder, he remembered facing and destroying a beautiful archangel with a shining sword, in all his demonic life the one being who had come closest to slaying him.
GRIXIS
So this is the plan, Levac? Sit here and have this baby in this hovel, while the world shakes outside?” Levac and his wife Salay had spent countless nights wandering Grixis’s network of tunnels. They had eventually settled in an abandoned hermitage much smaller than the stronghold at Torchlight had been; but the wards were active, and the undead hordes had seemed to pass it over.
“No. I’ll figure something out before the baby’s born, Salay,” said Levac. “But even if we’re forced to have it here, you don’t have to worry. I’ll protect you and the baby.”
“Like you protected Vali?”
That stung. It had been days or weeks since Vali disappeared into a mob of the walking dead. His screams had been the music of Levac’s nightmares every night since. He thought he might actually be handling it worse