gotten up from their settees to stand along the rail and watch in awe.
The island of Argoth was wide and gray in the afternoon light, reaching arms out to encompass the eastern horizon and threaten Nunieve. She lay in deep waters beyond the harbor where Mishra's war crafts crowded. Against the shoreline, their masts and spars formed a forbidding thicket. If man or machine had remained aboard any of those ships, Captain Crucias would have done well to prepare for a quick departure, but every ounce of muscle and mechanism was currently engaged inland.
In front of Crucias's pestering passengers lay the Argoth plains-what had been immemorial forest only a year ago. There the titanic armies of Mishra and Urza clashed. Atop shorn tree trunks and shredded vines, soldiers swarmed like insects. Yotian warriors gleamed in the sunlight amid Mishra's defenders in black-ant armor. Among them moved clay automatons, maggots tearing into whatever flesh presented itself. Men charged and fought and fell and died.
'They are really killing each other, aren't they?' enthused one codger between sips of red wine.
'Yes, ' Captain Crucias answered flatly. 'Six months ago, you would have seen them killing only forests. Now you get to see them killing each other. '
Madame Gheiri's face had flushed healthily once the anchor was down and the war was unfolding before them. 'You say they fight at night, too? They will be fighting all through supper and on into the evening?'
Crucias' face was grim. 'Anymore, yes. They'll fight certainly through supper, and probably until they can see only by the light of the bombs they drop on each other. '
'Splendid. ' She was at last pleased with some aspect of the journey. 'It will be glorious to watch the fires and flares under a starry sky. Perhaps my niece Elgia will at last feel well enough to come on deck. There must be plenty of eligible bachelors on that battlefield. '
The codger giggled in delight. 'I can hardly imagine there will be any left after this evening's show. ' He took another sip, and his lips were limned in red as he said, 'I suppose if they run out of men, there'll just be more arriving on ships. '
'Look at that dragon engine, ' Crucias said, wanting to divert his own attention from the massacre.
A massive mechanism waded into combat. Its steely tail scythed through charging lines of mortal flesh. Men counterattacked, spears jagging into the air. The artifact dragon spread wings of titanium mesh and drew them inward. Spears and men both tumbled in twin cyclones.
Ornithopters darted like dragonflies and dropped bombs among the toiling armies. Smoke and dust and body parts bounded up in violent clouds from the explosion. Moments later, the popping reports reached Nunieve. These blasts were dwarfed, though, by a huge explosion in the center of the battlefield.
'Ah, did you see that?' asked Crucias. 'That pillar of black smoke rising now into the sky?' His speech was interrupted by a thunderous boom, the combined ignition of hundreds of bombs. The soundwave echoed out over the glassy sea and riffled the sails of Nunieve. 'One of Mishra's titans has stumbled into a trap. I'm told that Urza's army digs gigantic pits, large enough to swallow a dragon engine whole, and then they line the bottom with bombs and cover it. When the time is right they lure a machine onto the spot. That must be what you just witnessed. It fell and ignited the bombs and-ah, see, there,… it's climbing out!'
Something emerged from the base of the rising smoke cloud. The gigantic mechanism did not so much climb as crawl. Misshapen and trembling, the titan clawed onto the blasted plain. Its legs were gone below the knees, and riven sinews of wire and plate dragged across the torn ground. It heaved itself along, above Mishra's shrieking, retreating forces. The sound of its shearing gears reached Nunieve. With a terrific groan, the titan collapsed atop its own mired men.
An excited cheer went up from the noble passengers, and more than a few raised appreciative wine glasses to toast the machine's demise. A ravening boom caught the cheer and swept it away amid dying screams.
'Well, Captain,' said Madame Gheiri, 'despite a week of tortures at sea-everything short of sea monsters and scurvy-you have certainly delivered the promised entertainment of this voyage.'
'Enough mayhem for you?'
'Enough, for the moment. The clamor of it all has even elevated the bouquet of this rather vulgar wine you serve. Bathed in the glow of bombs and the sound of falling titans, the supper fare might even seem palatable!' She laughed lightly.
Another column of smoke had gone up since she began speaking, this one in the woods behind the battle lines. After rising through curtains of moss and continents of leaf, the soot was broadly spread. Wind drew ash and a putrid scent across the gunwale.
'They're burning the dead from yesterday's battle,' Crucias noted.
'I do hope the wind shifts,' said Madame Gheiri distastefully. 'I'm getting bits of ash in my wine-'
She was looking down into her glass, picking at an offending particle, when the blast went off.
First came only a searing light, a bright yellow-white that split the center of the battlefield. It seemed to Crucias that the island actually jumped. The land looked unreal, only a vivid painting on canvas, and even now the canvas tore in half and admitted the blazing sunlight. That's what it seemed-that there was a second sun hidden behind the isle, a blue sun, and it was burning through the fabric of reality. A vast ring of dirt and bodies and machines leaped up around the blinding blaze. The blast carved a deep well in the center of the island, pulverized rock and man and machine-flinging them up in a brown bowl all around it. The next moment, the bowl doubled in size, then quadrupled. Forests that had withstood even the onslaught of Urza and Mishra stood no longer, laid down like blazing jackstraws. Mounds that had lain round and solemn against the bright sky disintegrated in the face of the swelling sphere of force.
'''Mayhem,' Crucias gasped out.
The whole island disappeared. It was gone, down to a mile below the waterline. Titans, dragon engines, ornithopters, warriors-all gone. The ocean would have poured into the void except that even now, the advancing wall of the sphere pushed it back. The merfolk observers darted off trying to stay ahead of the crushing mass. Water piled into a great mountain that ringed the flash. Already, Nunieve's bow strained upward on the swell. The child-shaped figurehead stared into the bright flash of the end of the world.
'Weigh anchor!' Crucias shouted.
He took a step toward the capstan but got no farther.
The deck pitched-stealing his feet from under him. Nobles and crew tumbled amid bolted settees. Blood-red wine hung in weird arcs in the air as the ocean sucked its belly away beneath the passengers. Then they were rising. Wine spattered groaning planks. Nunieve crawled up the wave. Foaming water scraped the very clouds.
Roaring, Crucias clung to the leeward rail. Through black water, he glimpsed the ocean bed, horrifically close as the ship heeled away from the slope. He was sure Nunieve would capsize and kill them all, but the welling flood yanked the anchor chain tight and brought the hull upright again. With a visceral jolt, the anchor pulled free of the ocean bottom. Nunieve mounted up the wave. Nobles tumbled from the port side. Crucias could only watch, heart in throat. They would all be dead soon enough.
There was mayhem and death enough for everybody.
The ship bobbed corklike up the wave. Through the wall of water, the blast glared. It had grown only more intense. It gleamed brilliantly through half a mile of turgid brine. In moments, Nunieve reached the foamy peak, a region where wind and water and fire were mixed. Crucias couldn't tell up from down, light from dark.
They were over the crest, in winds that tore the masts down as they had the trees, in the bowl of the blast. Sea-water rushed to fill the crater where Argoth had been. Nunieve sailed pell-mell down the concave slope. It followed the bright interior of the new sun awakened on Dominaria.
That was the last any of them saw. The eyes of every person on deck burned from their skulls. Blindly, they clutched to the mad ship as it coursed down the wave, toward the roaring foundations of the world.
'Sit, Daddy. Aren't you thirsty?' Pretty and small at nine years old, Nunieve sat on the twilight verandah. A Jamuraan tea service rested on a platter before her. Steam rose brightly from the dark brew. 'It's getting cold.' Nunieve wore her best dress, what she called her tree dress because she got to wear it only when they were on shore, where the trees grew. At sea, she was garbed in a waistcoat and pantaloons, like any good captain's son.
The captain himself stood before her. No longer a privateer, Crucias had become a respected freighter captain. As fair, hard-working, and reliable as the sun itself, Crucias was among the richest sea captains on the continent, and he had only Nunieve to thank. Just now, Crucias did not heed his daughter, though. He looked past
