Urza - Blows up Tolaria

The red beam came, a chaotic, stabbing light. The hallway began to dissolve. Karn swung a massive hand toward the Phyrexian, but his fingers closed on wheeling chaos and nothing. Shards of reality slid past in mirror moments. Karn plunged through raveling time.

Something was wrong with the machine, terribly wrong.

The lashing pulses of temporal energy formed a vortex around him, drawing him downward, forward, toward the dark future and its disintegrating mechanism.

The laboratory took fitful shape outside the cone. It winked into and out of existence. A tumbling chaos of red forms blossomed around Karn. For a second time that day, he felt the impulse to pray. The laboratory returned. Malzra’s consoles flickered through a shroud of rolling smoke. The master and Barrin labored mightily at the sparking controls. Over Karn’s head the time machine swayed ominously, its side panels bleeding soot into the air.

It was disintegrating.

The light orb at the base of the device cracked, sending jabbing rays out in all directions. Where red beams struck, walls turned to dust, machines to slag. Each ray carved a jagged rent in whatever it hit, tearing through the laboratory and the corridors beyond, through the dormitories and the wall itself, reaching out to rend all of Tolaria.

Karn stood in the center of it, shielded beneath the coruscating cone of light.

Then came the explosion.

Red was suddenly gone, red and all other color and all darkness. There was only light in that moment, light like the center of the sun. It came with a fragile shattering sound, as though a crystal had been sundered. A bell-tone keen followed and what might have been thunder if a lightning bolt could be large enough to encompass a whole world.

The air was solid for a moment, an amalgam of gas and energy, then rushed outward. Walls were gone, just as color was before. The rushing inferno rolled out in an incandescent ring from where Karn stood, pulverizing stone and steel and glass. Farther out, the ring devolved into lines of blast as raw energy gathered in radiating avenues. The holocaust obliterated whole sections of the academy and scoured the earth down to bedrock. Other areas remained untouched. Buildings were torn in cross section.

The shock wave pelted outward. It bore a storm of shattered stone and rent metal that consumed with a million gnashing teeth anything it struck. Millennial trees toppled. Stony pinnacles were eaten right through. Green leaves burst into flame. Clouds of dust and ash boiled up from the shuddering forests.

The blaze reached even the sea, and in mile-long arms it boiled water to a depth of five fathoms. It reached to the clouds overhead, flinging some aside and bringing fiery hail from others. It shook the oceans, awakening tidal waves that destroyed coastal villages two hundred miles distant. It was a blast like none felt on Tolaria since the dark days of Argoth.

It was a blast awoken by the same follies of the same man.

***

The aged scholar was still on his knees, cradling a broken arm. His two young students huddled shivering beside him. The man looked about at the devastation. Here and there ragged remains of buildings towered precariously. Between crumbling stacks of stone, the ground had been scoured to bedrock. Bodies littered the smashed edifices, but in the clear paths nothing at all remained but fire-scarred rock. The old man scratched his silver hair just beneath a bubbling gash. He blinked, and blood droplets leaped from his eyelashes to spatter his cheeks.

***

Time Streams, Chapter 6