Quennus turned back to face Tarrin, revealing he was holding the syringe from before.
“What’s it going to do?”
“It will help. Try to hold still, this might sting a little…”
“No! Wait, wait a moment, I don’t want tha- Arrrrgh!”
The syringe effortlessly pieced Tarrin’s coppery skin, depositing a load of unknown liquid straight into the Auriok’s bloodstream. Almost instantly coolness, like ice, spread through Tarrin’s body, causing him to shiver violently for a few moments, rattling the restraints. Just as he began to seriously worry that the coldness would not stop and he would be frozen from the inside out, the cold dimmed down to a bearable chilly feeling in his head and chest, and Tarrin dimly realised his panic had gone, his fear sliding away without protest. He simply felt relaxed and blissfully at ease, even as Quennus reached for him again, holding another syringe filled with liquid.
“What have you done to me?” He asked in a hollow, level voice that echoed how he was feeling.
“I have injected you with a composite drug of my own invention. It affects the higher functions of the subject’s cortex, specifically the frontal hippocampus. In effect it’s quite useful for subjugating and de-prioritizing…….” Quennus noticed at the mildly confused look on his subject’s face. “In simple terms, it numbs your emotions. I myself am usually on a watered-down version while I go about my duties.” Quennus tossed the spent syringe back on to the tray, and grabbed another. Tarrin idly noticed that it had a different coloured band to the first one.
“And we mustn’t forget this one as well.”
Without further comment he administered the contents of the syringe into Tarrin, this time in the wrist.
“And what does that one do?”
“I will demonstrate in a moment,” Mumbled Quennus in a distracted manner as he snatched up a third syringe from his workbench. This time however Quennus injected himself, putting the syringe up to the back of his head, where it seemed to easily slide into a recess on the machinery there. His eyes closed as he pushed the plunger down, well his organic eye did at any rate, and as he withdrew the syringe he trembled violently, as Tarrin himself had done moments earlier. Without explanation he strode forward to Tarrin, and made a quick movement, whipping his hand out and back as though he was a painter dabbing with a brush.
“Do you feel anything?”
Tarrin blinked. “Should I have?”
Quennus raised a hand up to Tarrin’s point of view. He was holding a scalpel with blood on it. Fresh blood on it.
“I just severed your Primary Tendon muscle. If the drug had not worked you would be been in considerable pain. Do not be concerned.”
And he bent over Tarrin’s chest, bloody scalpel still in hand.
“Please do not move. It will make my work difficult.”
Tarrin felt a strange sensation, as though something blunt was being slowly being dragged down his chest. It didn’t hurt at all; it was just a sensation of something being there. And it was then, unhindered by emotion, with only the logic remaining, that he understood. He spoke, with the tone one might use for discussing the weather.
“I’m not going to make it out of here alive, am I Quennus?”
Quennus’ metal eye swivelled to look up at him, while his original one continued to keep track of the incision he was making. He sighed.
“No. I am afraid not.”
Tarrin’s mind knew he should have been afraid at this revelation, or angry, or perhaps wracked with sobbing, but the drug blanked his feelings, kept them out of reach. But intellectual curiosity remained.
“Can you tell me why? I’d like to know.”
Without looking up from his vivisection, Quennus continued to talk, but Tarrin noticed his voice too was a little bit flatter than it had been prior to the injection.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of the concept of ‘The Greater Good’, Tarrin. For example, taking one life to save ten is better than merely saving one, and so forth. But what…..”
A squirt of blood arched through the air as Quennus sawed through layers of muscle and skin using the scalpel. Tarrin lay his head back, continued to listen idly.
“….if we were talking not about individual lives, but entire worlds? I’ve seen them, been to them. The multiverse is vast Tarrin…..so vast. There are more worlds out there than I can count; certainly I haven’t been to them all in over 20 years of Planeswalking. You have no idea; it would blow your mind to know how just how small everything you know is.”
The scalpel danced in Quennus’ experienced hands.
“I told you Phyrexia has left its mark on me, and I told the truth. A long time ago, Phyrexia attacked my home plane, much how it is now doing the same to Mirrodin.”
“Really? What happened, was Phyrexia stopped?”
“At the end of a long and gruelling campaign, the people of my home plane thought we had eradicated Phyrexia from existence, though it left our world scarred and damaged for long afterwards. But evidently we were wrong, for somehow the infection has survived to take hold here, and Mirrodin has not been as fortunate. I would be fascinated to know how it happened; from what I’ve seen it would take only a small piece of Phyrexia to start the cycle again, perhaps as little as a goblet-full of the oil could….”
There was a crack, and suddenly Tarrin felt humid air where he had never felt it before. The sensation was unusual, but not entirely unpleasant.
“You might be interested to know you are in excellent shape for an Auriok, your heart is strong and I’m seeing a very healthy set of lungs here. You could probably have lived to an above average age if not for…..”
Quennus locked eyes with Tarrin for a moment, but the bird-man looked away from Tarrin’s blank stare almost straight away. He didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence. Tarrin decided to break the awkward silence sooner rather than later, he was on a time limit after all.
“Please, continue your story. I want to hear it all.”
After a moment’s silence Quennus extracted his hand, holding something soft and squishy in it. As he put the harvested specimen in a preserving jar he continued to talk, and all Tarrin could do was continue to remain still and let Quennus’ words wash over him.
“I understand that Mirrodin’s people’s joined forces in the face of the Phyrexian invasion, as the people of my home plane did, but you were too late. I understand the hesitancy; no man, woman or child is ready to accept the reality of what Phyrexia means, even when it has started to spread like a cancer. But I think even at the height of the war that the Mirrans still underestimated what they were up against. Again, understandable, but fatal.”
“Phyrexia? It’s some kind of abhorrent civilisation, is it not?”
Quennus shook his head.
“No, it is more than that. You and the Mirrans see it as an invading army, seeking your lands and people’s for subjugation. But Phyrexia is far more than that Tarrin. Phyrexia is an entire ecosystem all itself, a kind of super-organism that aims only to grow and consume until there is nothing left but Phyrexia. It doesn’t exist to defeat armies or isolated villages, it exists to destroy entire civilisations, wipe out entire ecosystems. Every non-Phyrexian thing in existence is at risk, there is nothing Phyrexia will not do to assimilate everything in its path. And here is where the greater good comes in. What do you do with someone sick with an incurable disease, to prevent them from passing the sickness onto others?”
“Well, I suppose the only thing to do is to kill the person, or failing that put them somewhere separate from others, keep them isolated….”
“Exactly! Quarantine is the only solution! Mirrodin is lost, with the exception of the few remaining Mirrans, there is nothing left to save here. Phyrexia has won. But it must not be allowed to get off this world. If Phyrexia knew that other worlds exist out there they…. would find a way to get to them. They would sweep through the whole multiverse. That cannot happen. The only remaining way to deal with Phyrexia is to make it think there is no-where else to spread to. Make sure that Mirrodin is the prison that keeps Phyrexia contained. Forever.”
“And is that why you have come here? You mentioned a mission.” The words came harder now, as though he was fighting against a heavy wind to say to say them. Tarrin’s breathing rate had picked up, but he still felt no discomfort.
“Yes. I was captured by Phyrexia early into my plane’s war with it, and turned into what you see before you. Phyrexia recognises me as its own, I bear its marks and technologies, but it fails to realise that I have my own thoughts and emotions. So I came here, posed as just another cog in the machine, a drone amongst millions of others. No other could have hoped to infiltrate Phyrexia like this. By doing Phyrexia’s grotesque work well, I have worked my up through the hierarchy of the Progress Engine. Now, I am a respected scientist, my words and scientific theorems carry much influence and I regularly have the ear of none other than the Praetor itself.
Tarrin noticed a slight tone of pride in Quennus’ words, mixed with regret.
“And so I have been hiding, erasing or discrediting all evidence of the existence of other plane’s existence. Sometimes I am able to simply wipe the memory of an Exarch, other times I must dispose of them completely before they can spread word of any dangerous discoveries. It has been hard work, always so close to discovery, always covering my tracks so that The Core Augur suspects nothing is afoot. The things I’ve had to do to play the part, Tarrin, you have no idea. I don’t think I can ever forget my sins. I hate that it has to be this way, I hate that the burden falls to me and me alone to do this abominable work…..”
Tarrin gave a wet cough suddenly, his pinned frame wracked with spasms once, twice, three times. When the cough subsided he could feel blood leaking out of his face and gliding down his chin. The feel of it pooling in his nose produced a vaguely ticklish feeling.
“You don’t have long left Tarrin.”
“I guessed. But I’m not afraid.”
“I know. I am glad to know I am able to stop your suffering. Consider it the only gift I can give you.”
Quennus deftly pulled a scrap of cloth from some recess and dabbed the blood up.
“You must understand, I have been saving as many Mirrans as I can. I stage “escapes” and help the Mirran Resistance to launch rescue raids every now and again, and when I am not occupied by my cover duties I visit the Resistances’ base and Planeswalk groups of Mirrans to other words where they can live new lives, but I can’t save them all. It would be too suspicious if too many prisoners went missing, I must not draw attention to myself and my activities. The Core Augar is smart, I must be above suspicion. I couldn’t save you Tarrin, your vivisection had already been approved when I met you, it would have raised far too many questions to have you escape on my watch. I’m deeply sorry. But I will not let your death be in vain. It’s all part….”
“….Of the greater good,” finished Tarrin. He nodded in understanding. It all made sense, in a calculating sort of way. The stakes were unimaginable; casualties of war had to be expended.
Quennus leaned over Tarrin, looming in close. He spoke rapidly now, hurrying his words.
“But I can save your wife and child. They are assigned to be subjected to Phyrisis later on in the cycle; I can easily assign myself as their surgeon.”
Tarrin had started to hyperventilate now, his chest heaving rapidly as his body struggled to cope with what was happening to it. He was beginning to feel cold all over, even though his forehead was slick with sweat. His limbs felt heavy, not the heaviness after a long day of work, but unnaturally heavy, like they had been replaced with lead. Black spots began to appear in his vision, fading in and out. But Quennus was still there, looking back at him. He didn’t seem so scary now, ugly yes, but not scary, like a scarred old ancestor watching over you with advice. There was even a shadow of concern in the surgeon’s avian face, he was sure of it. With his organic hand Quennus cradled Tarrin’s head, trying to settle the shaking.
“You’re going into cardiac arrest. No no no,” he said quietly as Tarrin opened his mouth to try and speak. “Just listen. I swear to you I will save your family, Tarrin of the Auriok, and I will tell them how much you love them when I do so. I will tell them you were brave to the very last.”
“Th…..tha……Thank……you” he managed to choke out.
Quennus’ metal hand tightly clasped Tarrin’s violently shaking, vein-stricken flesh one, even though he knew the patient he had killed wouldn’t be able to feel the gesture.
“Promise….me…..one m-more thing, Q-Q-Quennus.” Tarrin’s voice had died down to a whisper, a rattle evident in it.
“I will try.”
Tarrin seemed to find some strength from within his cracked-open, partly dissected body, and he spoke clearly, one last time. Each word was an effort.
“They…. may have made you in their image on the outside, you may have to act like them, but don’t….. don’t become like them on the inside…. You have to save as many as you can….”
And he fell still, the bronze light of life that flickered in his eyes faded away with that thousand-mile stare that Quennus had seen countless times on his operating slab. The hand that had gripped Quennus so tightly a moment ago fell still, slackly releasing the chrome fingers. Quennus knew beyond a shadow of a doubt there was no point checking for a pulse, it was his own hands that had effectively taken the man’s life.
Quennus staggered back, spattered with blood and bodily fluids. He leant back against a wall, head in hands. He didn’t weep, didn’t scream in guilt or smash the fine instruments in a fit of rage. The only evidence that the emotion-suppressing drug he was on wasn’t totally working was a single tear that slid from the corner of his hazel eye. Quickly Quennus wiped the tear up, holding it up to the light of the lab. Even without his mechanical eye’s zoom function he could see the single droplet was clouded with black, filled with toxic Phyrexian oil. Phyrexia had even taken everything from him, everything, even something as simple as the purity of grief. Quennus quickly squished the droplet between two fingers as if by doing so he could crush the whole of New Phyrexia, take his revenge with just that one act.
Then, with that little private moment over, Quennus wiped off his instruments, removed his surgical attire, and strode from the room, not once looking back at the body that lay strapped and opened up on the slab.
Joshua Olsen
Email: jarraltandaris@hotmail.com
Tarrin was straining against his bonds when he heard the sound. As soon as he had awoken, strapped to an operating slab deep in some biomechanical hell, he had been feverishly working to free his arms. At first he had tried to tug the clamps free, but they were made from some type of organic cable that gave in against his pulls, and then elastically snapped back. Giving up on that, Tarrin had tried to use the metallic growths sprouting from his left shoulder blade to cut through the cords, but he could hardly reach them to get a good cut, and it was tiring work. He had just cracked the metal outer casing of the bonds on his right hand, revealing weaker sinew beneath and causing bubbling black ichor to slowly leak out when he heard someone, or more likely something approaching. The irregular clanking of the figure was closing in; the isolation of the surgery/slaughterhouse Tarrin found himself meant that the figure could only be coming this way to see him.
Tarrin fought down rising fear: he had no illusions about what was going to happen to him now. Back in the refugee camps, he’d heard the tales from traumatized Neurok spies: how captured Mirrins were taken to Phyrexian laboratories like the one he was in and subjected to tortuous experiments so vile and debased as to be practically indescribable. Dissections conducted while the subject was still alive, forced organ removal and graftings, biological weapons testing: these were just some of the options facing Tarrin, and at the end of it all, Phyresis, turning him into one of them. Tarrin thrashed wildly on the slab, pulled at the damaged clamp with all his strength, but it didn’t work, he needed to damage the clamp more, needed more time. Time he didn’t have.
As the door to the surgery slid open he abruptly laid corpse-still, trying to avoid attracting the attention of whatever Phyrexian had entered. He heard as two figures entered the lab, the insidious scuttle of something multi-legged, presumably an insectoid menial drone of some kind, and the heavy irregular steps of something humanoid, no doubt its master. For all their vat-grown horrors and shock troops, the leaders of Phyrexia were always humanoid, if only in the vaguest, barest sense of the word.
Unable to see what was going on because the slab was facing away from the entrance; Tarrin could only listen as the drone chittered in its obscene indecipherable dialect, while its master rummaged around placing metallic instruments on a tray. A moment later, and the master was moving towards Tarrin. This was it then: he was going to be experimented on. Blind terror rose in Tarrin’s chest, but he forcibly quelled it. He didn’t know if Sadra and Varil had escaped the Phyrexian’s raid, but he had to cling to that hope. He wouldn’t beg, wouldn’t give the Phyrexians the pleasure of breaking him. Wherever they were, he could do that much for them. Breathing deeply to try and master his emotions, Tarrin braced himself for the disturbing sight that would be his captor.
A hand gripped the operating slab, shifting it down from its angled position to an almost horizontal one, and as the slab descended, Tarrin caught an eyeful of the Phyrexian Surgeon. He gasped. “Bladewardens preserve us all…..” He’d been prepared for something disturbing, something out of a child’s nightmare, but not for this. Tarrin’s brain tried to supply further words, to perhaps beg for mercy, or even just scream, but the surgeon’s appearance had shocked him beyond words.
The figure that loomed over him possessed an aesthetic common to all Phyrexians: a form that was partly organic and partly mechanical combined seamlessly in some places and crudely in others. While some Phyrexians were unrecognisable from their original forms, others were simply modified versions of what they had been pre-phyresis, and this creature clearly took after the latter. It was no Leonin or Loxodon though, nor an elf, goblin or ogre, or any species Tarrin had ever seen or heard of, but some kind of bird-hybrid.
The surgeon had the body shape of a man, with the head, hands and feet of a great bird, a hawk perhaps. Two currently folded-in wings sprouted from its back, and feathers coated about half its body, wherever metal didn’t intrude. Steam hissed from various hidden parts of the bird-thing, and Tarrin could pick out the slow sound of pistons moving back and forth somewhere around the chest, as well as crackling electricity. One hand had been completely replaced with an abnormally long-fingered metallic graft, each of the 8 multi-jointed fingers tipped with an assortment of sharp instruments not out of place in a torturer’s rack. Countless plates of polished chrome glinted brightly from where they have been grafted, bolted, and fused onto the Phyrexian’s flesh, and blood mixed with black oozed with treacle-like slowness from around them to slowly spatter the floor. The beak appeared to be the best crafted of these plates, the top half of the beak was a solid and finely fitted piece of what looked to be pure silver. It looked a bit out of place, as though put in by a different artificer to the rest of the Surgeon’s “improvements”. The surgeon turned to look at Tarrin in better detail, revealing that one of the creature’s original eyes had been removed, replaced with an implant. The forbidding neon-red light stared back at him from the cavity. Unblinking. Alien. Merciless.
A moment later it appeared to have seen enough, and it turned away from Tarrin. As it set its tray of surgical instruments down and sorted them, Tarrin saw that the eye wasn’t the only area that had been extensively worked on around the head, the back of the cranium had been encased by machinery, no doubt to allow for greater processing power, or, as Tarrin realised with horror, to allow easy access to the surgeon’s brain. Similarly, though partially concealed beneath liquid-spattered surgical garments, the surgeon’s shoulders and upper back around the spine were a lot bulkier than its natural form would suggest it should be, with steel cables entwined through the natural sinew of the wing’s pinions.
This observation of his captor’s anatomy, though distressing in its own way, was a welcome relief from Tarrin’s dire situation. But when the surgeon turned back to face him, now clutching a huge medical syringe, his temporary stunned calm shattered. Breathing kicked into overdrive, Tarrin felt all the fight-or-flight terror of a cornered animal, but without either of the options. The surgeon barked something harshly to the drone, an order perhaps, and then moved towards Tarrin with the syringe, test squirting a few spurts of some rust-coloured viscous liquid.
Tarrin’s resolve collapsed in a moment. “GET BACK! DON’T YOU COME ANY CLOSER MONSTER!!” he bellowed, half in fear, half in anger.
At the word “monster”, the Surgeon, who had the syringe mere centimetres from Tarrin’s neck, stopped abruptly. It looked Tarrin in the eye, as though looking for meaning there. For a long moment Tarrin looked into his captor’s mismatched eyes, before turning away, unable to bear seeing his own fearful reflection in the Surgeon’s half crimson, half hazel gaze. Out of the corner of his eyes, Tarrin could sense the Surgeon cock its head to one side in an owl-like manner, as though puzzled by what it had heard. A second later it abruptly stepped aside, out of Tarrin’s field of vision altogether. He heard the insectoid drone give a confused chittering as the surgeon approached it. Then there was an almighty flash of blue, like a solar flare off the blue sun. It filled the room for a moment, then faded away without explanation. A few seconds later, the Bird-Surgeon was back, uncomfortably filling Tarrin’s field of vision. Its beak opened, as it grasped the syringe once more. To Tarrin’s astonishment, it spoke in perfectly pronounced Aurian, though it had a mechanical inflection to its words.
“I am no monster. I may have been….. marked by Phyrexia, Auriok, but it is NOT my master.”
Tarrin goggled. “You…… you can talk!?”
The Surgeon snorted, causing a burst of steam to emerge from somewhere on its body, ruffling his surgical attire.
“We have precious little time, let’s not waste what we have with obvious questions. My name is Quennus.”
A thousand questions seemed to clamour for first place in Tarrin’s mind, jostling for prime position.
“I’m Tarrin, of the Glint Hawk tribe. Look, if you’re not with the Phyrexian’s, what are you doing here? And why are you able to stand here and talk to me? You…. you were about to cut me open, like one of them! How could you?”
Quennus leaned in. “As I said, there is little time, so you need to listen closely and be prepared to understand a great deal of information swiftly. I am assisting the Mirran resistance, particularly the Neurok agents Vy Covalt and Kara Vrist.”
Hope flared in Tarrin’s chest, maybe there was a way out of this after all! “You’re with the resistance! That’s great news! Are you here to free me? Have you seen my wife and son? Are they safe? Are they…..” But a moment later Tarrin realised that something was wrong with the situation. He jerked his head over his shoulder repeatedly, trying to convey a message without words. Upon seeing Quennus’ look of confusion he sharply whispered.
“You’re blowing your cover, the drone! The thing that came in with you! It’s heard everything we’ve said! You’ve got to cut me free, we have to get out of here right now, before it raises the alarm!”
Understanding filled Quennus’ organic eye, and then he slowly shook his head, one measured movement, left, and then right.
“Do not worry. My transcriber-drone has unexpectedly suffered a most unfortunate malfunction, and has been totally and utterly focused on looking at a blank space of wall since we started talking. It is not of concern to us.”
“Did…..you did something to it?”
“That is correct.”
Tarrin smiled. Everything was going to be okay now, he knew it. “So, you’re in the resistance? I have so much I wish to know! Are you here to get me free? How did you infiltrate into this place? And, forgive me, but I have to ask, what ARE you? You don’t look Mirran, I mean I know you’ve been…. worked on, but I can’t even figure out what you are.”
Quennus looked at himself for a moment, an expression something like regret writ over his features. Was it regret? Or maybe just concentration. It was hard to identify subtle emotions off him, his face and body had been so disfigured by the Phyrexian “augmentations”. Then the moment was gone, and his face was once more impassive.
“Listen closely Tarrin. I am not ‘with’ the resistance as such; I am simply sympathetic to their cause. My presence, and my work here, is more anti-Phyrexian than pro-Mirran. But yes, I help them out when it is feasible to do so. The reason you do not recognise my species’ genus, is because I am not native to your world. To put it in simple terms, I have come to Mirrodin from another plane of existence.”
What does one say to a statement like that? Where do you even begin… thought Tarrin, his disbelief stretched so far it was about to snap. “If that’s true, then how are you….”
“I am a mage of rare, extraordinary power. I have the skill to be able to travel between worlds. It is known as Planeswalking.
“That’s….. incredible. Amazing.”
“That is the standard reaction.”
Suddenly Tarrin recalled the blue flash he had witnessed earlier. “And you used this magic of yours to hoodwink the drone before?”
Quennus nodded. “Very astute. It will not realise what has happened, and later, I will submit it to my superiors as having malfunctioned, losing all my information. It will probably be broken down into its constituent parts and used for other purposes. Now, you mentioned before your wife and child. Were they with you when you were captured?”
“Yes, well not quite. I told them to run when the raiders came, I have no idea if they managed to get away. But we were in the same camp at the time. Sadra and Varil, have you seen them? Please, tell me they’re not here. Tell me they’re not….”
He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Quennus nodded, seemed to understand. “One moment.” He took a step back from the operating slab, deftly tapping his metallic temple with a hand. His artificial eye whirred clicked and sparked for a few seconds, rotating madly this way and that, zooming in and out. Eventually it came to a stop, the chrome iris retracting to reveal more of the crimson light. Suddenly light shot out of the eye, forming a projection a few centimetres from Quennus. The projection shifted, it seemed to be some kind of moving pictures. Tarrin squinted, tried to make them out, but they were back to front and the wrong way up from where he was, the images flashing by at lightning speed: corridors and hallways, shapeless things that filled the projection and disappeared, racks of strange and disturbing devices, and last, a row of what looked like faces with collars around their necks….
Quennus tapped his temple again, and the projection vanished, his artificial eye returning to its prior state. He looked Tarrin straight on. “I think I have seen them. Your son, he has your eyes?”
“Yes! Yes! That’s Varil! Can you save him? Is he okay?”
Quennus raised a hand abruptly.
“Hush, calm yourself.” He walked over to his tray of implements, facing away from Tarrin. He spoke without looking back, his tone less mechanical, but more serious than anything he’d said so far.
“Tarrin, would you do anything to save your family?”
“Of course, of course, but what are you talking…..”
“Anything, Auriok?”
“Yes, of course. Please, please. Save them.”
“Very well. Then you’ll need to take this.”
To Be Continued…
Joshua Olsen
Email: jarraltandaris@hotmail.com
