The Fifth Dawn Read online

  A darkness at dawn …

  Intent on fulfilling her destiny and revenging herself upon the Guardian of Mirrodin, the elf Glissa must once again dare to cross the forbidding lands that surround her. Accompanied by her loyal companions Bruenna, the human mage, and Slobad, the goblin tinkerer, she must plunge into the depths of the world.

  There the party will come face to face with Memnarch and his minions, followers who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of Glissa and her power. There they will see the world of Mirrodin itself fulfill its long-delayed destiny.

  Cory Herndon completes the story of magic and madness that embraces a world of metal.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to:

  My collaborators and co-plotters Will McDermott and Jess Lebow, authors of the first two parts of this story—The Moons of Mirrodin and The Darksteel Eye, respectively; Peter Archer, who offered me the chance to run my third elf heroine in a row through the wringer and was patient enough to edit every single final version of the manuscript; Andrea Howe, the mightiest error-hunter in the Tangle, who pointed out someone can’t climb out of the hole and still be at the bottom of the hole; Brady Dommermuth, Magic Creative Director, who kept me honest; Scott McGough, who knows what sounds right in a surprising variety of circumstances; Bayliss, Remo, and Ripley, my advisors on leonin behavior; the guardians of the Magic: the Gathering storyline past and present; the designers and creators; and everyone that makes sure those cards and these books get out the door.

  Extra-special thanks and love to Stephanie Poage Miskowski, who provided support, advice, reality checks, and reminded me to eat when I locked myself in the office for weeks at a time.

  Dedication

  For Richard Herndon, artificer-in-training.

  Wake up.

  The voice slithered through the tangled mess that was his mind.

  Mind. Yes, that was the word. A mind that seconds before has been cold, dark, and dead. A mind that was somewhat shocked to be aware of itself once more.

  Wake up, now.

  The voice became a little more insistent. Urgency played around the soggy depths of his brain. The hissed words coaxed a little more clarity into his mind.

  Yert’s mind.

  He was Yert. What was a “Yert?”

  It was … his name. He was a man. A … Moriok. A Moriok man called Yert. A controller of nim. A controller of a mighty reaper that was, like him, dead. Though Yert’s death apparently hadn’t taken hold.

  Visions flashed behind Yert’s eyes as optic nerves sparked inside his brain. He saw images of a strange world, an organic world of soft earth and flesh creatures, horrible and horribly unprotected from the elements. A white stone city filled with humans—tanned and leathery in gleaming silver armor—appeared, then was gone in a sudden burst of white light. Now open seas of some thin, translucent liquid covered the strange landscape, and verdant stands of trees exploded in clusters amid rolling green and gold fields. A flash. Yert saw a grim-faced man with no hint of metal on his skin, a flesh-and-bone warrior swinging a savage chain in a grimy pit. A third burst of white light, and he stood on the command deck of a massive living vessel, cutting through miles and miles of the translucent liquid he’d seen before. He knew somehow that it was as corrosive as acid, and the experience of touching it, even in his vision, made Yert’s skin tingle.

  This physical sensation was lost in yet another flash. The mental scene shifted to show him another fleshy human, this one a magician with a strange hat, call forth nightmarish things made of skin, hair, muscle and tendons. Monsters pulled from thin air without a scrap of metal to protect their hides, yet as savage as a nim zombie, plated with some kind of grayish white mineral.

  The magician in the odd chapeau disappeared, and Yert’s vision filled with a perfect silver sphere floating in swirling blackness.

  Another flash.

  Now Yert hovered over a gargantuan globe that he knew was Mirrodin, even though it was a Mirrodin he had never seen. Everything on this world was pure, glittering metal, a thousand shapes of silver, gold, and copper. Not a hint of corrosion was apparent. Fractal shapes hovered in the sky, casting mathematically complex shadows across the perfect surface. Soon, those shadows began to stretch and distort, disrupting the beauty of the world and spreading across the surface like living things. These shadow-shapes began to take on colors and strange forms, as all over the plane of Mirrodin an imperfect, organic life took hold. Tiny flashes like a million stars winked into existence on the surface, and suddenly the plane crawled with sentient beings that had not been there seconds before.

  Seconds. Second. That was a unit of time, Yert’s brain managed for him. And time … well, time was time. At the moment, he had plenty of it.

  Yert’s inner eye still soared over a much-changed Mirrodin. He took in the blackened swamps of the Mephidross and the glittering, snarled, verdigris vegetation of the Tangle. He mind leaped into open space, and Yert soared over the glittering red spires of the iron-and-copper Oxidda mountains; the dazzling and fluid surface of the Quicksilver Sea punctured by the blue spires of the Lumengrid; and the blindingly bright razor grass plains of the Glimmervoid. Yert saw it all at once.

  The Mephidross was his home, the swamps. Instead of letting the vision-ride pull him along, Yert focused his inner eye on the Mephidross.

  Why did the thought of home fill Yert with such panic? The swampland of Mirrodin, with its snarl of rusty, tangled, wiry branches, thick black water, and smoldering smoke-spire chimneys that spewed charged green mist into the fog—all of these things were familiar, should have felt comforting, but Yert could not contain the fear they drove into his gut. He instinctively sensed that he belonged in that swamp, but could not imagine going back. Something in there hated him, and the feeling was mutual.

  Had he gone completely mad?

  Yert, the voiced slithered in his awakening consciousness. Yert, wake up. Wake up NOW.

  Yes, Yert thought. Excellent idea.

  TANGLED

  Glissa and Slobad lay on their backs in the melted wreckage of the Tangle, exhausted, battered, and drained. Neither the elf girl nor her goblin companion said a word, relishing the simple pleasure of breathing, the smoldering calm left in the wake of Memnarch’s storm.

  Or maybe it was fear. Talking about it meant it had happened.

  She thought about the friends she’d lost and felt warm tears begin to form in her eyes, and decided silence was golden.

  The new green moon cast an emerald glow over the blasted forest, darkening the copper trunks of shattered trees and dulling the normally glittering verdigris leaves to gray. Glissa rolled her head lazily over to look at Slobad. The diminutive artificer, a resourceful goblin who had been her constant ally ever since the death of her family, had one hand draped over his eyes. His vision was remarkable in the dark and sensitive to the light, but the glow of the green moon was anything but glaring to the elf girl.

  “Slobad?” Glissa asked. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “It’s bright!” the goblin said. “You go blind, you keep staring at that, huh?”

  “It’s not that bright,” Glissa observed with a grin. Good old Slobad. He would grieve when there was time. She wiped her own eyes and let her head loll back to gaze up at Mirrodin’s newest satellite. “In fact, I’m staring right at right now.”

  “Slobad take your word for it,” the goblin replied groggily. “Right now, Slobad just need a little shut-eye, huh?” After a few moments, he added, “Besides, in sleep, Slobad don’t have to think.”

  Glissa tried to do the same, shut her eyes for just a moment and try to relax. She failed utterly. Instead, she stared at the new moon until her eyes started to play tricks on her, making the glowing green globe appear
to pulse like a beating heart.

  This was no good. She painfully called on stiffening muscles to prop herself up on one elbow, and poked Slobad gently with the back of one clawed finger. “Hey, Slobad. Are you asleep yet?”

  “Uh-huh,” the goblin grunted without moving. “Elf eyes not getting any better, huh?”

  “We have to go. We have to check.”

  “Check what?”

  “We have to check out the lacuna,” Glissa said. “That blast might not have been enough—”

  “Memnarch? You crazy?” Slobad replied, apparently forgetting how often he’d answered that question already. “Big ugly has to be dead, huh? That tower was right between moon and the core.” Slobad traced a lazy line in the air with one rusty claw. “You saw what that thing did to Kaldra? You saw that, huh?”

  “Of course,” Glissa said, “I just wanted to make sure. Memnarch is so…ancient. We hardly know anything about him, really. We don’t know what it might take to kill him.”

  “If ol’ crab-legs still kicking, would have sent levelers, huh?” Slobad insisted, obviously settling the issue, at least for himself. Glissa was too tired to argue the point. Even if Memnarch had survived the blast somehow, he couldn’t be in any shape to attack her. And with the new moon in the sky, Mirrodin’s self-proclaimed Guardian had lost his chance, she hoped, to capture Glissa’s “spark.”

  She thought she felt a tiny flare of warmth in her breast, but had to be imagining it. It wasn’t every day you learned you possessed the rare, innate ability to become a planeswalker. But one crisis at a time.

  Glissa flopped back onto the blasted ground and stared up at the green moon. “Okay, compromise. We rest now, check on Memnarch later. But it has to be a sooner later, huh?” Her vision was filled with the green orb. “It’s going to need a name,” she said.

  “What needs name? That hole? All right, we call it green lacuna,” Slobad mumbled. “That tree? Let’s call him Leaf-face.” He made a show of covering his eyes. “Now just let Slobad sleep, huh?”

  “The moon,” she said softly, gazing up again at the radiant emerald light. The green glow invigorated her, she could already feel her sore muscles becoming relaxed and her skin began to warm pleasantly from the inside. “There’s the Doom Bringer, there’s Ingle …”

  “Right,” Slobad replied. “Oh, right!” Squinting and keeping his eyes averted from the green glow and, he sat up and hugged his knees. “We the first to see, huh? No one else around, that for sure! What about—?”

  Glissa saw Slobad’s eyes widen with shock despite the glare, and the goblin let out a small gasp of exclamation. The little artificer’s eyes slowly tracked upward from a point just behind Glissa’s ear.

  The elf girl froze for a heartbeat and raced through her options. Lying propped on one elbow on her side gave her lousy leverage, and she didn’t even know what kind of enemy she might be facing. If it was four-legged Memnarch, a swift kick to the ankles wouldn’t help at all. Even if he fell, he might land on Glissa or Slobad. But she had to do something.

  Okay then, not a kick.

  Glissa shoved off the ground with her elbow and rolled hard in the direction Slobad was staring. With luck, she might be able to slam into her foe’s ankles and knock his feet out from under him, maybe even give Slobad an opening to try a more effective attack. Like a fire tube to the groin.

  She slammed into a pair of muscular, armored legs covered in reddish-green wool with the consistency of tangled wire. It took Glissa a few seconds to comprehend what she was seeing. Vorracs were common throughout the Tangle, and Glissa had dispatched her fair share on the hunt. But she’d never laid eyes on a vorrac with a head as big as her family’s house.

  “What that, hu-hu-huh?” Slobad stammered.

  The vorrac turned its shaggy head to the green moon and let loose a screaming howl. Glissa had heard that sound countless times, but as a high-pitched squeal at the end of an arrow or hunting knife.

  Glissa slowly raised one claw tip to her lips. The enormous vorrac finished its eardrum-piercing cry and shook its neck like a soggy khalybdog, clanking large misshapen plates of armor together and knocking loose scattered chunks of debris and filth that rained down on the prone elf girl. Glissa carefully began to scoot back to Slobad, her eyes locked on the vorrac’s jaws. The creatures were omnivorous, though the only animals they were fast enough to catch were small arboreal rodents or fat insects like copper beetles.

  The vorrac didn’t look like it was hunting to Glissa. The creature was ignoring her, and seemed much more interested in gazing around at its surroundings, drooling, and breathing with heavy chuffs that reminded Glissa of the Great Furnace in the Oxidda Mountains.

  “That doesn’t sound healthy,” Glissa whispered when she reached Slobad. “Something’s wrong with that vorrac.”

  “No kidding,” Slobad hissed, gaping at the massive creature. “Vorracs usually big enough to eat, huh? Not big enough to eat goblins?”

  Glissa jumped as the enormous creature shifted its weight on thick legs, causing the ground to jolt with each step. The vorrac turned around with a heavy shuffling dance that looked as painful for the creature as it was slow. “But I also mean that’s not a healthy animal, big or not. Did you hear that breathing?”

  “Elf magic,” Slobad said, “Make stuff big, that’s elf trick, huh? How that vorrac pull it off?”

  “I don’t know, but whoever it was didn’t pull it off. The job’s only half done. Flare, that poor animal,” Glissa sighed, relaxing her grip on her sword hilt.

  “What? I’d give an ear tip to be that big,” Slobad said. “Then they’d all answer to Slobad.”

  “The spell wasn’t done right. It can’t take in enough air, and its skeleton is giving under the weight. See the way its legs are bowing under the pressure? No one with the skill to perform a growth spell of that magnitude could possibly botch it that badly. It’s…it’s obscene.” Glissa shuddered.

  “Weird,” Slobad said, relaxing enough to lean up against a nearby iron boulder. His eyes remained trained on the slow-moving creature receding into a shattered tree fall. “Some elves crazier than most, huh?”

  “What makes you think it’s an elf?”

  “Couldn’t be a goblin.”

  “No, but—trolls, it could be trolls.”

  “Doubt it,” Slobad said. “Kaldra took care of them, huh?”

  “Oh. Right.” Glissa had tried not to dwell on the toll of their latest costly victory, which saw the destruction of the legendary artifact creature that Slobad and Glissa had reactivated to fight Memnarch. As soon as they’d tried to use Kaldra against Memnarch, their enemy seized control of the enormous construct, which had finally been destroyed by the erupting lacuna in the center of the Tangle. Before that, the trolls had held off Kaldra long enough for Glissa and Slobad to reach the Radix and help trigger the explosion of the new green moon into the sky.

  The mighty trolls had lasted but a few minutes. Glissa and Slobad had to assume their strongest allies were dead. Surely if any had survived, they would have seen one by now. Trolls were hard to miss.

  “We were pretty lucky, huh?” Slobad asked.

  “Lucky,” Glissa said. “And I think we still have the edge over Memnarch when it comes to sanity. He was just begging for a moon in the face, if you ask me.”

  “Hey, Glissa?” Slobad asked.

  “Yes?” Glissa replied, still tracking the monstrous, snuffling vorrac.

  “Just me, or this boulder feel … warm?”

  As he spoke, the heavy rock supporting Slobad moved of its own accord and growled. The goblin jumped directly into the air and landed in a roll, coming up on two feet and facing directly away from Glissa and the giant glimmer rat he just realized he’d been using as a pillow. Glissa drew her sword as the fat, muscular creature’s snout turned to face them. The glimmer rat’s rusted fangs dripped corrosive acid that sizzled in smoky droplets in the underbrush, while the thick, spiky hairs that covered its back flared and brist
led. A tail as thick as woven cable slashed noisily in the underbrush.

  “Glissa, look out!” Slobad shouted. Glissa whirled and came eye-to-compound-eye with a half dozen gold and iron wasps, hovering just off the ground. Like the rat and the vorrac, the magically enlarged insects seemed to be having a little trouble operating as they should. The insects’ wings flapped mightily and blasted Glissa’s face with a dusty breeze, but their venomous stingers only just cleared the ground. Glissa muttered a quick oath promising vengeance on the fool that was torturing the creatures of the Tangle with inadequate magic, and her sword appeared in her hand.

  “Slobad … I think it’s almost …” One step back. The wasps didn’t move. The glimmer rat crept closer, snarling and slavering. “Time for us to …” Another step.

  “RUN!” the goblin cried then whirled and dashed into the dark woods.

  Glissa ducked her head and charged after Slobad, wondering what else in the Tangle might have suddenly grown to an impossible size. “Slobad, wait! You can’t just—ow—run anywhere in the Tangle! We have to find a trail!”

  “There are trails?” Slobad hollered back, but didn’t slow down.

  The elf girl heard a shriek, and felt the heavy footsteps of the giant glimmer rat charging into the thicket behind her. A low drone almost out of the range of even Glissa’s sharp ears told her the wasps were following closely behind. She risked a look back over her shoulder.

  One of the wasps was buzzing and dive-bombing the rat, which swatted at the mammoth insect with its cable-tail. The hulking rodent couldn’t seem to score a hit, but kept the insect at bay without slowing its own charge into the brush. The other wasps were heading straight for Glissa, but the thick undergrowth was slowing them down. Their thin wings, already straining to keep their heavy bodies in the air, were too wide to slip easily through the thick undergrowth.

  Glissa couldn’t risk her own growth spell in the middle of the thicket; she could end up impaled on a tree. But she didn’t need magic. She knew this forest better than anyone. She could make it through. But where would they end up?