"02.Planeswalker" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

LYNN ABBEY
"PLANESWALKER"

(Magic: the Gathering. Artifact cycle. Book II.)




CHAPTER 1

A man descended.
His journey had begun in the clouds, riding the winds
in search of a place remembered but no longer known. He'd
found the place, as he'd found it before, by following the
ancient glyphs an ancient folk had carved into the land,
glyphs that had endured millennia of neglect and the
cataclysmic finale of the Brothers' War five years ago.
Much of Terisiare had vanished in the cataclysm,
reduced to dust by fratricidal hatred. That dust still
swirled overhead. Everyone coughed and harvests were
sparse, but the sunsets and sunrises were magnificent
luminous streaks of amber reaching across the sky, seeking
escape from a ruined world.
The brothers in whose names the war had been fought had
been reduced to curses: By Urza's whim and Mishra's might,
may you rot forever beneath the forests of sunken Argoth.
Rumors said that Urza had caused the cataclysm when he
used Lat Nam sorcery to fuel his final, most destructive,
artifact. Others said that the cataclysm was Mishra's curse
as he died with Urza's hands clasped around his throat. A
few insisted that Urza had survived his crimes. Within a
year of the cataclysm, all the rumors had merged in an
increasingly common curse: If I met Urza on the road, I'd
cripple him with my own two hands, as he and his brother
crippled us, then I'd leave him for the rats and vultures
as he left Mishra.
Urza had survived. He'd heard the curse in its infinite
variations. After nearly five years in self-chosen exile,
the erstwhile Lord Protector of the Realm had spent another
year walking amongst the folk of blasted Terisiare: the
dregs of Yotia, the survivors of Argive, the tattered, the
famished, the lame, the disheartened. No one had recognized
him. Few had known him, even in the glory days. Urza had
never been one to harangue his troops with rhetoric. He'd
been an inventor, a scholar, an artificer such as the world
had not seen since the Thran, and all he'd ever wanted was
to study in peace. He'd had that peace once, near the
beginning, and lost it, as he'd lost everything, to the
man-the abomination-his brother had become.