Invasion

Chapter 14

In Yavimaya's darkest hour, Multani toured a lightless place. The Heart of Yavimaya was the eldest and largest magnigoth in the forest, a five-thousand-foot-tall tree. Its root bulb bulged above the nearby canopy. Foliage spread in four vast rafts up its manifold trunk. The tree's crown was a huge, lofty forest in its own right. Normally this was a place of eternal and holy light but not now. The Heart of Yavimaya was now a ravaged battlefield.

For two days, Phyrexian troop transports had hovered above the canopy. Down webby lines, monsters slid. They dropped from their cords atop the Heart of Yavimaya.

It was a sacred site, as large as a great city. In ancient times, Multani had excised a piece of the tree's core, gifting it to Urza Planeswalker. From that wedge of wood grew the hull of Urza's great skyship Weatherlight. No thinking creature dared live on the Heart of Yavimaya-not elf nor sprite nor druid.

That bark, too holy for the feet of fey, was desecrated by the claws of Phyrexians. Every branch became a roadway for the demonic army. Phyrexians swarmed it, bending every fiber of the crown with their black weight. They ripped the leaves off. They peeled back the green tendrils. They drove killing spikes down into the living wood. As they had done throughout the forest, the Phyrexians turned life to unlife.

To lose this tree-this most sacred tree-would be to lose everything.

No thinking defenders dwelt on the Heart of Yavimaya, so the tree defended itself. It transformed the spikes driven into it, infusing them with the ancient power of green. The killing shafts gained life. Black and green mixed and blended. The spikes that had cracked down into the tree's vast boughs shot suddenly upward. Each was as sharp as a spear, as stout as a lance. They drove themselves through the Phyrexians standing above. Ebony wood impaled monsters. First to die were those who sat upon or straddled spikes. Next to die were all the rest. Spikes grew rampantly. They jutted even from the healthy flesh of the tree. Once the secrets of death had been learned by the Heart of Yavimaya, they were whispered through every grain.

The Phyrexian city had become a sudden necropolis.

Victory.

Multani walked the battlefield among the writhing beasts. Not a Phyrexian remained free. Every last one had been skewered. They hung overhead. Their oil-blood rolled quiet and golden down the shafts. Barbed legs shivered in agony. Claws clutched air.

Multani walked onward. He approached a humanlooking leg, the pierced foot of a one-time man. Above the creature's hips was the shaggy body of a ram. Instead of fur, though, the thing was covered in spines that oozed poison like sweat. The bestial torso of the monster seemed strange above these strong, human legs.

Multani reached out, setting his fibrous hand on the riven foot. Through feverish flesh, his mind touched its mind.

He saw a vision of another place. The beast gazed in horror across a different killing field. He saw not treetops but a convoluted tumble of red-black ground, like muscle laid open. The sky seemed a reflection of the ground-a crimson mass of coiling energy. Between ground and sky hung impaled tens of thousands. They were not Phyrexians. They were men, and women, and children. The Phyrexians there walked quietly among the dying folk. In their midst sat a madman. He smiled and sipped from a delicate cup and sang songs to himself.

From the Phyrexian's mind, Multani gleaned a name for this horrible world-Rath-and a name for the madman- Crovax.

This was their foe. This was the man-the monster- who had assembled the armies of invasion. Crovax had slain tens of thousands of humans and elves on his own world. For them, the Heart of Yavimaya had exacted revenge.

Multani released the foot of the dying beast. His mind broke contact. The scene of horror in Rath was replaced by the scene of horror in Yavimaya. There was little difference. The Heart of Yavimaya had become as hellish as a hillside in Rath. Life had learned the tricks of death.

"Perhaps this is what must happen," Multani mused grimly to himself. "Perhaps to defeat these foes, we must become like them." What victory was that? Once they had become their foes, the Phyrexians would truly have won.

A great sadness swept through Multani. The Heart of Yavimaya was horribly disfigured. All that was green had been shredded. All that was smooth had turned to spikes. The crown of Yavimaya's most sacred tree had become a cemetery.

Feeling weak, Multani dropped to one knee. His vinelike hand settled onto the tortured bark. His mind fled inward, through the fibers. He sensed the tree's agony. Every spike that had grown rampantly upward had also grown rampantly down. When green life had allied with black death, it had formed a cancer that ate away living flesh. The Heart of Yavimaya was dying, impaled on the same spikes that slew its foes.

Multani reeled.

Defeat.

The Heart of Yavimaya was dying. It was becoming Phyrexian. The forest could not be saved.

Gaea, hear me. In defeating these monsters, we become monsters ourselves. The forest is lost, slain as Argoth of old- turned from living wood into took of death.

Gaea did not speak to him, but he sensed that she also was dying.

That filled Multani with a new passion: anger. Yavimaya and Gaea would be saved by him if they would be saved at all.

Multani marshaled red fury. He had allied with red before^;- with lightning and fire, with Kavu lizards and lava. They had not destroyed the forest. They had been conformed to the power of life.

Ah, there-there was the great difference. The Heart of Yavimaya had conformed itself to the power of death. Instead, it should have transformed its foes with the power of life.

Multani smiled. The aerial roots that formed his teeth were a ghastly jumble. He knew what he must do to save the forest.

Closing thistle-blossom eyes, Multani sank down on the bark. His fingers twined themselves deep into the crevasses there. His mind followed into the agonized wood. He melted. His body of vines sloughed on the outside of the huge bough.

Pain suffused Multani. It might have slain him except that he tapped its power. He used agony to reach down past the cancerous crown and into the tree's immemorial bole.

Multani cascaded down the trunk. He took anger with him. Five thousand feet down, he reached the root bulbs and spread farther. Through the hundreds of trees that surrounded this forest giant, he went- through the thousands that touched upon them, and the millions beyond. To each, he conveyed his fury at the death of the Heart of Yavimaya.

He summoned them, the vast and endless forest. He summoned them.

Let's teach these black monsters the ways of life, he told them. Let death be swallowed in victory!

The forest rose to his call. The spirits within each tree took his fury into themselves. Ancient souls stirred for the first time since Urza Planeswalker had been trapped among them. A huge welling force-the forest itself-roused. Yavimaya had always been sentient, but now it was awakening. Tiny leaves of desire united. Individual surges of power gathered into a single column of green force.

The locus of that mana cyclone was the Heart of Yavimaya itself. Its wood flared phosphorescent. Its bark glowed as energy seeped out the creases. Green power whirled up through the aching tree. Rotten wood woke to new life. Rings lost to time renewed themselves. The surge of power fountained through the tree, blasting into the spike-filled crown.

Green strength rushed through deep-driven spikes. It flooded the stalks and washed away all darkness. Magic pressed into every space, every tissue. No room remained for corruption. The spikes turned healthy and whole.

Multani soared up the Heart of Yavimaya, glad for its salvation. What he sensed in the next moments, though, was beyond his dreams.

The power did not cease in the tips of those spikes. It flowed into the creatures impaled there. Through glistening-oil and acid lymph, it passed. Just as the forest's soul reinvigorated dead wood, it enlivened the monsters pinioned there. They writhed. They growled ghastly growls. The forest was not done with them. It formed cell walls. It thickened glistening-oil to sap. Veins hardened into vines. Bones became heartwood. Muscles became quick. Skin turned to bark. The warriors of Phyrexia slowly transformed to beasts of wood.

The forest was converting its foes.

One by one, the new army of wooden warriors drew themselves up off the spikes that had previously impaled them. They climbed down. Every last one was now made of wood. It was as though Multani had brought into being an army of his own offspring.

The Phyrexian necropolis had become a true city.

The Heart of Yavimaya had been saved.

Out of corruption, a sacred race had been born.

Multani arose. He assembled himself from peeled leaves and stripped boughs. A bundle of ivy filled out his torso. The power he had gathered glowed out of every leaf tip. His aura drew to him great masses of foliage. Multani became gargantuan. He towered above the wooden warriors, who stood there, watchful beside the spikes that had once slain them.

The giant man knelt, laying his hand on one of the warriors. His consciousness leaped into the wooden man. There was Phyrexian fanaticism here still and the will to fight, but that was all that remained. This creature had become a child of the wood, a locus of Yavimaya's spirit and will.

Multani drew back. He surveyed the others-a sacred army. "You were once the damned. You were once Phyrexian. No more. Now you are born of Yavimaya. The forest brought you out of death into life. He who gave you first birth is no longer your father. She who gave you second birth, she is your true mother. For you, Yawgmoth is no more, and Gaea is all."

Thousands of clenched fists-gnarled in tough bark- rose to the sky with the shout. "Gaea!"

"Fight for her now. Fight the evils you once were to save the good you have become. Fight for Gaea!"

"Gaea!"

Phyrexians were thick in the elf kingdom of Civimore. They were thick everywhere. The great Kavu lizards grew fat on fiend flesh. No bloodlust or cunning was necessary for the Kavu. The Phyrexians were so thick a beast couldn't yawn without one falling in.

The king, of course, was dead. Half his elf subjects were dead too. The other half did what they could to hide. Occasionally they charged out to die, shouting oaths to their lovers and mothers- better than dying with craven pleas. That was one thing the forest would not do. It would die, but it would not plead for its life.

There was no end in sight. Either these gray-skulled devils would inherit Yavimaya, or these red-scaled lizards would. As for the forest folk-as for elves and apes, druids and green-men-they were merely shifted to the base of the food chain. Death descended on each one, extinction on them all.

What were these new beasts? They swarmed up the boles and bounded through the crown. More Phyrexians? They seemed it, with their brow ridges and horn-studded shoulders. Why, then, did they fall on their own kind? Why ram those claws beneath carapace and rip it out by its roots?

Phyrexians took exception. They turned on their apparent brethren. Fangs clamped down on heads but couldn't bite through anymore than they could have bitten into the side of a tree. Stingers struck against bellies and spattered their poison impo-tently on the surface. Claws did little more that scratch the beasts' hardened hides. Heedless, the wooden warriors killed their brethren.

So, what were these strange things? They seemed outward Phyrexians but inward children of the forest. They fought like the minions of death, but they fought for the minions of life. Garlands twined their knobby skulls. Sucker branches poked out between their claws. There were even little berries here and there-sweet-tasting berries that burst within Phyrexian mouths when they thought to taste brains instead. Deadly and sweet, tender and tough-these were strange saviors indeed.

And what was that gigantic mound of sticks shambling in their midst? Had it been smaller, it might have seemed Multani-but this thing was colossal! It stomped Phyrexians in their tens. It batted them aside in their hundreds. It destroyed them in their thousands.

Victory?

Could it be that the forest would not die, that it would kill the killers? Who could be thanked for such a victory?

There was no name for any of these mad beasts. Such things had not been seen in the world since the Phyrexians left it six millennia ago. The only word that came close to describing these strange monsters was the name chanted low on all their vined lips.

"Gaea."