TWO HUNTERS (PART 2)

TROUVELOT. SOURCE - New York Public Library

The walls stood for millennia.  Breaches were few and achieved through lifetimes of study and sacrifice.  Crossing between planes would be among the final sights for anyone foolish, brilliant, or despotic enough to craft a path through the blind eternities.

Within each plane, empires rose and fell, heroes and villains clashed and died, power and artifice changed hands, and gradually turned to dust under the pressure of the great millstones of mortality. But there is always a hunt.  A drive that compels each creature to its last breath.

Some avoid the pull.  Some contain it to vocation, lifestyle, family, farm, spellbook.  

For some, it’s a hunt and nothing more.  

For the most powerful creatures of the multiverse, it is an obsession that can sustain them across lifetimes and across planes.

For Garruk Wildspeaker, this was never a difficult concept.  The hunt was not some lofty analogy, some intellectual construct wielded by dishonest men. The hunt was the truest form of the self, and the truest form of life.  Life and death.  Victory and defeat.  The apex demonstration of training, skill, and execution.  The hunt was survival.  The hunt was growth.  The hunt was humility.  And in the dance between predator and prey, the hunt was a true form of respect and love.

He had hunted across planes.  He had hunted with the Gatewatch.  He had hunted beasts, gods, and planeswalkers.  Shapeshifters and legends;  mortals and eternals.  Garruk carried his great axe across the blind eternities as a planeswalker, a lone lord of cosmic fluency. 

With these experiences, the once apex predator found himself shifting from hunting alone, for his own goals, to hunting for others.  He still wasn’t sure if this felt right.  Most recently, he hunted two twins who could also cross planes - Will and Rowan Kenrith.  He sought them not to defeat them, but to help the twins who had saved him - who saved Garruk, apex predator of the multiverse - from an early end to his great hunt.

The senses of a planeswalker are developed in unique and complex ways.  For a pure hunter like Garruk, this means signal detection that spans dimensions; worlds.  Garruck, in his hunt on the plane of Eldraine, had for weeks sensed a disturbance.  A sort of static cry that fizzed in the periphery of his mind in the place where a planeswalker goes when they shift.  A static that cried out in pain and mutilation of nature.  And, importantly, they were cries that included the unique, multimodal voices of planeswalkers. 

Something was deeply wrong.  It wasn’t here on Eldraine, at least not yet.  Garruk wondered if this could be tied to the twins he sought.  His tracker senses were telling him to listen to this static, and to consider leaving the trail of the twins here on Eldraine to go - where? He wasn’t sure.  But a hunter doesn’t seek prey by knowing where they are;  they seek prey by knowing where to go to intercept them.

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“Ants. we crush them all the time.  We crush them without thought and smear them on our bread every meal.  And after a thousand meals, i grow bored.”

The Phyrexian Praetor Vorinclex had come back from New Capenna.  He was supporting the praetor Elesh Norn, mother of machines, and matriarch of the machine orthodoxy, in crushing the remaining resistance of Mirrans and a few straggling Planeswalkers who had not yet joined their cause of fallen to their great power.  Vorinclex knew the work was important, but the baroque stanzas of Norn, the melodramatic fury of the planeswalkers, and the brittle spines of the Mirrans had left him feeling chained.  Claustrophobic.  Hungry. 

Vorinclex spoke little.  He did not micromanage his armies - the vicious swarm - with many orders and directives.  Instead, he simply taught them to hunt, and to hunger.  To hunger for the elimination of frail biomass in favor of hybridization with alloys and porcelain.  The true Phyrexian way. 

Vorinclex had traveled planes, like these planeswalkers.  Kaldheim - such a wonderful place to hunt - was his playground for a time, and he missed it’s simplicity and purity.  They understood in ways that many organics didn’t - that truth lay beneath the trappings of station, faction, and even the organism.  The greatest truth was in the dance between predator and prey; one where neither party knew which they would be, but knowing that they would work together to declare who would eat, and who would be food.  Ah! Such a divine dance.

Vorinclex swiped one of his clawed arms through an approaching group of Mirrans. They scattered like wet twigs.

Wait.  These were not Mirrans.  Their armor bent differently; their weapons found a different reverberation against his carapace.  They bled and fell like organics, but these were not of the old Mirrodin, the plane now crowned New Phyrexia and the inner sanctum of Norn’s Multiversal invasion. These were adorned like the Time Planeswalker, Teferi of Zhalfir.

Vorinclex looked up and saw armies emerge from a vast portal, Warclans crying with a lifetime of pent-up battle rage.  They swung through the Phyrexian ranks, reinvigorating the opposition.  In their midst, Vorinclex saw Teferi bend time and disrupt the very space around him to weaken the machine invasion.  Behind him, a ball of white-hot flame raged, immolating machine bodies.  The planeswalker Chandrah blazed again.

Vorinclex felt a joy and a life in his metallic core that had been missing for so long.  The hunter had real prey at last.  Vorinclex was again hungry.

Vorinclex launches his massive frame into the greatest time mage ever to live, willfully pitting his strength against Terferi’s time spell.  Vorinclex cares little for the battle raging around him.  Honestly, Norn’s quest means little to him compared to the hunt of a lifetime.

to be continued…