Beyond their fingertips lay more pieces of Yawgmoth's mind-cudgels, axes, swords, maces, whips, flails, branding irons, and every other death conceivable by the Lord of Death. It felt their homage in splayed and sweating hands. Colder, sharper, more merciless than granite, the 1Īpocalypse dais stole each breath as it panted from the two men. Yawgmoth's mind formed the black dais where Gerrard and Urza bowed. Side by side, the two best hopes for Dominaria pledged themselves to Yawgmoth. With these qualities, he should have defeated the invaders. Centuries of eugenics had distilled courage, resourcefulness, wit, tenacity, and ferocity in a single vessel-Gerrard Capashen.

As Urza had unwittingly begun this great horror, Gerrard had unwillingly received the onus of ending it. No gray showed in his jet-black hair, and no worry lines in his high forehead, though he had inherited worry enough for a whole world. Beside him knelt a man who wasn't even a hundredth his age. He had lived for millennia and had spent all the while preparing to face Yawgmoth-though he had never expected to do so in a full, abject, and willful bow. Urza Planeswalker had first opened the gate to Phyrexia, had fought the first Dominarian war against demon hordes, had planned and executed the current world war down to its minutest detail. His long, ash-blond hair spread across the stone, and his powerstone eyes were cast in deep shadow. Chapter 1 The Gladiators It all came down to this: two men kneeling side by side before Yawgmoth.

Time Streams by J. Robert King