The Fifth Dawn

PROLOGUE

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.