The claw's tip scraped lightly against her skin as she wriggled out from underneath. They belonged to an entity that did not exist.
With a shudder, she shoved the thoughts away. How pure and untainted their vision of perfection, how glorious Zendikar could be through its salvation. Memories surged through her: How it had felt when the metal had been not just pressing against her heart but wrapped around it, when her soul had been melded to the glory of the machine. She landed hard on her rear, and the claw came to rest with the point digging in just below her sternum, just shy of puncturing her skin.
#Aftermath real story free
The metal resisted-and then jerked so abruptly free that Nahiri stumbled and fell. Once she'd loosened the stone's grip sufficiently on the metal, she braced herself and tugged. The core of her power, her spark, no longer a part of her.Īt first the pain of its absence had been so great she'd thought she would die, but over time, she'd grown used to the hollow ache in her soul. All she knew was that she was alive, and hollow. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that she had been fused into the Skyclave itself. Perhaps the Halo had been what had allowed her-maybe others as well-to survive after New Phyrexia's grip had fallen apart. All she remembered was a blast of Halo searing into her, moments before the Skyclave had fallen, with her still inside.
She couldn't say for sure what had happened. Then again, she was no longer a Planeswalker. Every act of lithomancy cost her now, where before it had taken little more than a thought to shape stone to her will. She tried not to dwell on how much effort it took. Wrapping her hands around a metal claw, she felt for the seam where stone and metal tangled together, coaxing the stone to loosen its grip. She'd have to dismantle it all before she could proceed further. The metal pieces were wickedly sharp she'd cut herself exploring the shape of them. She had work to do.Ĭurrently, she faced a tricky situation: She'd been working through a particular corridor for the last few days, but now her way was blocked by a wall of interlaced metal, all fused into the surrounding rock. As time passed, Nahiri realized that everyone must assume she was dead-or rather, they didn't care if she was alive. The entire time, she'd been on edge, expecting people to come looking for her. Peeling off the metal had taken less than a day, but it had been several more before the wounds finished scabbing over, and weeks before the scabs all fell off.
The process had been painful, and bloody. The first order of business when she'd woken up to find the invasion over and herself somehow still alive had been to rip all remaining traces of metal from her body. She knew the drip of water down stone, the cold hiss of wind through the corridors, the bloody tang of rust. At first the lack of sight had been disorienting, but eventually her other senses had attuned to compensate, and now she knew every inch of her surroundings. She'd lost track of how long she'd been down here in the dark. Fortunately, Nahiri had nothing if not time. Compleation had fused stone and metal together on a molecular level, and disentangling the two took an excruciating amount of patient, intricate work for every handspan of metal. In theory, it was a straightforward process: remove the metal that had been grafted into the surroundings and leave behind nothing but the original stone. Deep within the bowels of what had once been the Emeria Skyclave, Nahiri ripped the taint of Phyrexia from her plane.
0 kommentar(er)
