Hurling the dead creature down, Szat whirled to attack the other millipede at his back.

He breathed fire. He poured out corruption.

But it wasn't the other half of the millipede that he slew. It was already dead, smoldering in blackness beneath the angry figure of Kristina. She had planeswalked away from her titan engine just as it was dismantled. Reappearing aback the second beast, she marshaled her full arsenal of planeswalking spells. The monster lay in dead runnels beneath her, but every last spell was gone from the woman. Battling the caustic air all around her, she had no time to 'walk again.

Szat's firestorm dismantled her. Skin, skull, and brain- brain was the thing, whether with a millipede or a planeswalker. If she couldn't think, she couldn't step away from danger, couldn't reassemble a new body. She was gone. Obliterated. An eternity over in an instant.

Szat stood gaping while another beast attacked. This was no Phyrexian but a more deadly mechanism-Taysir, onetime love of Kristina. He fell like a mountain on his fellow titan, hurling him to the scrap heap and landing on top.

You careless bastard! You damned vicious monster!

Taysir was proving himself little better, furiously battering the titan engine of his foe. It was his mistake. Szat was not helpless like Kristina.

Flipping over, Szat hurled Taysir's titan off him. She killed herself. She got in my way.

Both titans were knocked back by a sudden presence between them-Urza Planeswalker in the largest, most powerful engine of all. Hold, both of you. Have you forgotten our mission?

Taysir's suit flashed in rage. Have you forgotten Kristina?

Szat sneered. Urza always forgets the dead.

You're implicated in this, Urza. You're the one who insisted on bringing this… this… murdering monster. Maybe you needed somebody else who would love this place, Taysir roared.

Urza stared from his pilot bulb with bald incomprehension. What are you talking about?

Oh, don't kid yourself, Urza. You love Phyrexia like a man loves a woman. You love her lines. You love her machines. You love the perfection of design through constant war. You don't want to blow up this place. You want to take it as your own!

Enough! Urza shouted. Enough! This was an accident. It shows how vulnerable we all are without our titan suits. Keep them on. In the meantime, I will prove to you what little love I have for this world. On! On to the stone-chargers.

The three had been so immersed in their argument that they hadn't realized the other five had fought on toward the munitions factory. Bo Levar and Commodore Guff led the charge.

Have you seen this one? Bo Levar asked as new defenders rose in a swarm about him. The mechanisms had the configuration of tadpoles, though instead of tails they had single lashing wings. Their main body consisted of gnashing teeth. Bo Levar easily grabbed the wing of the first creature and swung it in an arc before him. The titan engine's glove glowed with a blue radiance that proliferated out across the body of the defender. It seemed to draw the other defenders magnetically inward. They con-verged around the first beast. The chattering jaws chewed each other to shreds of metal. Twenty in one blow.

I'll be jiggered, said Commodore Guff in genuine amazement. Combining martial sciences with magical ones…

The wave of the future, Bo Levar said. You watch. Once this business is done, this kind of stuff will be huge.

Let me have a go, the commodore replied. He grappled a huge, spidery construct that rose in his path. Various colors of magic flashed from the titan and raced along the rodlike legs of the beast. The first spell managed to produce an odd odor, the second to cover the spider in rampant ivy, and the third to send it floating away toward the smoggy ceiling of the sphere. Ah, perfect, little happy to write about that one.

As Bo Levar and Commodore Guff blazed the trail forward, the other titans loped afterward, Urza last of all.

Taysir had sounded so like Barrin. The mage master had once joked that the only difference between Urza and Yawgmoth was a four-thousand-year head start. Such comments were not helpful, and Barrin had been full of them.

Taysir and Szat had been wrong. Urza didn't forget the dead. Every day since he'd killed his brother Mishra-it was a mercy killing, yes-Urza remembered him. He remembered Xantcha and Ratepe, who had been Mishra for him and had helped him reclaim his mind. He remembered the students and scholars of the first Tolaria and of New Tolaria. Most of all, though, he remembered Barrin. That was a loss Urza would never recover from. Barrin, Xantcha, Mishra-they had all become a single beloved other lost for all time. Urza remembered all too well.

His dark reverie was broken by a bright vision. He and his team had reached the ammunitions factory. Before them, row on glorious, gleaming row, stretched thousands of stone-charger shells.

Beautiful.

His own warriors had thought him insane. They had wondered how Agnate could ally himself with a lich lord and march a division down into the world of the dead. They hadn't seen the virtue in Dralnu's vile breast, hadn't heard the words of life in a mouth that smelled of death.

The doubters were proven wrong. In sunlight and cypress break, they saw the truth. The five hundred troops Agnate had led down among the dead had emerged again, accompanied by a hundredfold allies. Agnate's forces now marched with an undead army of fifty thousand. Dralnu had taken Thaddeus's portion. His ghouls and skeletons and zombies and revenants had replaced Thaddeus's warriors. At last, Agnate had a counterpart toward whom to drive in the deadly Metathran pincer. How right he had been. How perfect this felt, to fight so.

Reaping Phyrexians like grass, Agnate and his vanguard topped a low ridge. Beyond it opened a wide mudflat beside the sea. Phyrexians in their multitude crowded the spot. They had nowhere left to flee. Voda warriors tore apart any who sought escape in the water. It was a fitting trap for the arrogant beasts.

Agnate peered down the ridge. It swept in a long curve around the flat. On the opposite side, a mere mile distant, appeared Lich Lord Dralnu with his contingent. The timing could not have been more precise if it had been Thaddeus who stood there. It was time for the pincers to close. Agnate gave a sharp hand signal. As one his Metathran and the armies of the dead descended the ridge at a charge. They crashed into the mud-caked Phyrexians.

There was pure joy in this. Agnate's battle-axe batted away a bloodstock's raking claw. The Phyrexian centaur reeled back. Following through, Agnate brought the axe downward to sever the beast's forelimbs. The bloodstock fell before him but still clawed. Agnate's axe ended its struggles.

Agnate stared down at the split head of the thing. He had delivered Thaddeus's mercy blow the same way and for the same reason. The work of vat priests was irreversible and unbearable. Agnate's axe was not a destroyer but a liberator.

That was the joy of this battle. It was not war but salvation. He was not slaying souls but freeing them. When he and Dralnu were done this day, even the mud would be clean.

Such are the fleeting fancies of warriors between axe blows.

Agnate's weapon swung toward a Phyrexian crab. On a tripod of bladelike legs, the mechanism had only one vulnerable spot- a trio of fleshy heads grafted to its back. The heads were fused in back, three sets of eyes staring in three separate directions. Agnate's axe fell. It bisected two of the heads, but the third lived. One of the thing's claws flung back the axe. Another grabbed Agnate's free hand. The last gripped his weapon arm, dragging him toward pelvic scythes.