Urza - Reprogrammed mechanical bird

The shriek of the stooping falcon engine sliced through smoke and fire and oil. Urza raised his gaze just in time to see the creature’s fierce eyes glinting above its knife-edged beak.

Impact.

Urza fell, struck from the sky like a sparrow. He crashed among oil-dripping glass shards. They were the least of his worries. His belly was filled with a mass of rending steel, macerated liver, and bone chips. The cometary creature had sliced into him and flung itself open. The whining whir of its shredding mechanism was unmistakable. The thing tore through muscle and viscera. It snapped ribs and rattled against backbone.

With a supreme effort of will, Urza stanched the flow of blood, reassembled tissues and organs, reconstructed himself out of the remembrance of being whole, but the machine was too quick. It destroyed any tissues that reformed.

Urza was being slain by his own invention, reprogrammed no longer to seek glistening oil but the smell of Urza’s own blood.

It was his turn to writhe. He jittered across the shards of glass. Every moment, his mind threatened to blank out. There was not enough left of his physical form to sustain belief, to power the thought that would allow him to planeswalk and escape this horror. Perhaps if he had not spent such power on destroying the Phyrexian army, he could have mustered the strength. Now, though, he was pinned like a fly to a card.

***

Time Streams, Chapter 17