Liliana Vess (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deathsmajesty) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2025-08-21 01:30 am
deathsmajesty) wrote in fandomhigh2025-08-21 01:30 am
...And The One Time It Was A Draw, Thursday, Per. 1
Their last class together. Liliana wasn't particularly sentimental, but she would miss a class devoted to ranting about someone she particularly loathed. There had been minimal prep needed, mostly just making sure she had a thermos of warm tea and sometimes some maps. That would change next semester, and she enjoyed the ease while she had it.
But then the clock showed nine am. "Welcome to our last class," she greeted. "This is also going to be the class with the least information, sadly. There are many, many holes in this section of the historical record, in no small part because nearly everybody died." Nice, cheery place to start.
"So, when we last spoke, the Phyrexian invasion had begun. Phyrexian soldiers stormed onto Dominaria bent on slaughter. Phyrexian infiltrators, some of whom had been in place for decades, committed acts of sabotage, whether it was unlocking gates to the city, kidnapping vital officials, poisoning water supplies, or planting bombs. Plague bombs fell all over the plane carrying a weaponized version of phthisis, which, as far as I can tell, is roughly analogous to your radiation sickness, at least as far as symptoms and timelines go. Another plane, Rath, had planeshifted onto Dominaria, which would be like if someone phased Venus into Earth. In an effort to stop Phyrexia and win the war, Urza, on top of everything else he'd done, created bombs that required sapient creature's souls to work and allowed one of his Nine Titans to kill two others in order to have 'just cause' to kill him and use his soul for the bombs. While the others hastily put the soul bombs everywhere in Phyrexia, Urza became enamored with the intricacy of the mechanical plane, decided he would rather work with Yawgmoth than save his native plane, and wrecked the master bomb, which would have caused all of the planted soul bombs to detonate at the same time, while also killing a fourth Titan who dared point out that this was pretty shit behavior actually.
"Here's where things get wibbly. We have only a handful of accounts of what happened, and most of those are secondhand, told to them in a few short hours, in the midst of a literal apocalypse. We don't know how truthful Gerrard and Urza's accounts were to the actual events, we don't know how accurate the accounts of their friends were to what they were told. So bear in mind that this may have all the accuracy of a fairy tale, but it's all that we have to go on. So! Not only did Urza defect to Yawgmoth's side, so did Gerrard of Clan Capashen, the end result of Urza's Bloodline Project. Gerrard had been in love with Hanna, Barrin's daughter, and was told that Yawgmoth could bring her back to life--with some measure of proof, actually, in that they murdered Squee, another member of the Weatherlight crew and then brought him back to life. Once Yawgmoth had both of his greatest enemies kneeling before him, he created an arena, stripped Urza of his Planeswalker powers, leaving him the equivalent of a mortal mage, and set the two of them to fight. If Gerrard won, he would return Hanna to life. If Urza one, he would apprentice under Yawgmoth. Apparently, however, Urza won several times, Yawgmoth declared each of those wins invalid, and reset the battle. For reasons of really hating Urza a lot, I imagine. The final time, Gerrard won and cut off Urza's head. Upon his win, Yawgmoth increased Gerrard's strength, endurance, knowledge, and will ten-fold - for reasons, apparently - and then sent Hanna to him. Gerrard, now new and improved, realized that Hanna was not actually Hanna, but actually a simulacrum with Yawgmoth's essence in it. Whether Gerrard would have realized that before Yawgmoth's improvements? We'll never know, but in the name of spite and irony, I like to think he would have had no idea. You'd think 'don't empower your enemies' and 'don't put your essence near your enemies, especially after they've been empowered' were obvious rules, but that's the trouble with gods. Too convinced of their own power and superiority to listen to common sense, and by this point, Yawgmoth was absolutely a god."
Oh, pre-Mending times, how Liliana missed you.
"In another shocking, unforeseeable twist, Gerrard killed the simulacrum with Yawgmoth's essence in it, grabbed Urza's decapitated head, and fled Phyrexia, while the soul bombs that the other Titans had placed and then manually set off, gutting much of Phyrexia itself. Having an avatar with his essence in it guaranteed that no matter what happened to Yawgmoth, there would always be a backup available if necessary. Again, common sense would dictate that after losing your avatar, you should probably make another before doing anything risky, but we've left common sense behind in the first class and it hasn't made a comeback yet. With much of Phyrexia destroyed around him, Yawgmoth himself made his way to Dominaria, the plane of his birth, to finish what his shock troops had started. He took the form of a world-spanning cloud of death. It sounds like a joke, but it's not. Anywhere Yawgmoth's cloud passed, everything below it died. People. Animals. Plants. Even the earth itself. And then, just as quickly, it resurrected them - and anything else that had already been killed - to fight for Phyrexia. Among the armies of resurrected Dominarians were gigantic humus elementals, created by the death and resurrection of formerly living soil. The accounts of various last stands, sacrifices, and suicides in the face of that cloud are chilling. The two previous stages of the invasion had lasted months and resulted in a death total in the hundreds of millions. In the few hours after Yawgmoth's arrival, they totaled in the billions."
Okay. So maybe a little hubris was justified on his part. Maybe.
"Once back on the Weatherlight, attempting to figure out how to fight a cloud, the decapitated head of Urza began talking. Even dead, he had time for one last terrible idea: to open up the Power Matrix of the Weatherlight to recreate Serra's Realm on Dominaria. In fact, the collected artifacts of the Legacy contained many worlds, while Gerrard somehow contained many heroes." All she could do was shrug at this. She didn't know, guys, she really didn't. "He wanted to crack open both, destroying half of Dominaria by letting out those planes, and then having the army of heroes that would spring from Gerrard's head reconquer the other hemisphere. Fortunately, everyone else told him that Sylex Blast 2.0 was an incredibly stupid fucking idea, and Karn pointed out that Dominaria's second moon, the Null Moon, was actually a Thran artifact that had been building up a reserve of white mana for the last nine thousand years. They drained the mana from the Null Moon, and used the Weatherlight to create a beam of white mana directly into Yawgmoth, which... blasted the cloud and tattered it--but did not destroy it. He pulled himself back together, and created tentacled to grasp the Weatherlight and drag it to himself. And then Urza explained that the Legacy was actually a weapon, and they could harness the power of all those previously mentioned planes and heroes into an ultimate attack by removing the powerstones of Urza's eyes, placing them in Karn's body, and sacrificing Gerrard's life. The rest of the crew leapt off the ship, and a radiant, possibly even sentient? light was created that absorbed all parts of the Legacy in it: Urza, Gerrard, and Karn first, the collected artifacts, and finally the Weatherlight. It continued expanding until it came in contact with Yawgmoth, which it then destroyed. How?" Another shrug. Honestly, once you threw 'sentient light' into the mix, you'd lost Liliana completely. "The remaining Phyrexian armies were struck brain-dead from the feedback from their god's death, and were eventually wiped out by survivors. Finally, after four thousand years, Urza had done something useful for Dominaria: he died. And in so doing, saved the tattered remnants of Dominaria."
And the Phyrexians were dead forever and ever and would never be a problem for anyone ever again.
"And that, darlings, was five times Urza ruined everything, and the one time it was a draw. Though, I do want to make it perfectly clear - this is not a full recounting of everything horrible Urza has ever done. It's not even a full recounting of everything Urza has done that we have records of. It's just a high-level overview of the stuff that we had time for this session. Anyone interested in further stories of his many, many, many atrocities will just have to buy me a drink sometime."
But then the clock showed nine am. "Welcome to our last class," she greeted. "This is also going to be the class with the least information, sadly. There are many, many holes in this section of the historical record, in no small part because nearly everybody died." Nice, cheery place to start.
"So, when we last spoke, the Phyrexian invasion had begun. Phyrexian soldiers stormed onto Dominaria bent on slaughter. Phyrexian infiltrators, some of whom had been in place for decades, committed acts of sabotage, whether it was unlocking gates to the city, kidnapping vital officials, poisoning water supplies, or planting bombs. Plague bombs fell all over the plane carrying a weaponized version of phthisis, which, as far as I can tell, is roughly analogous to your radiation sickness, at least as far as symptoms and timelines go. Another plane, Rath, had planeshifted onto Dominaria, which would be like if someone phased Venus into Earth. In an effort to stop Phyrexia and win the war, Urza, on top of everything else he'd done, created bombs that required sapient creature's souls to work and allowed one of his Nine Titans to kill two others in order to have 'just cause' to kill him and use his soul for the bombs. While the others hastily put the soul bombs everywhere in Phyrexia, Urza became enamored with the intricacy of the mechanical plane, decided he would rather work with Yawgmoth than save his native plane, and wrecked the master bomb, which would have caused all of the planted soul bombs to detonate at the same time, while also killing a fourth Titan who dared point out that this was pretty shit behavior actually.
"Here's where things get wibbly. We have only a handful of accounts of what happened, and most of those are secondhand, told to them in a few short hours, in the midst of a literal apocalypse. We don't know how truthful Gerrard and Urza's accounts were to the actual events, we don't know how accurate the accounts of their friends were to what they were told. So bear in mind that this may have all the accuracy of a fairy tale, but it's all that we have to go on. So! Not only did Urza defect to Yawgmoth's side, so did Gerrard of Clan Capashen, the end result of Urza's Bloodline Project. Gerrard had been in love with Hanna, Barrin's daughter, and was told that Yawgmoth could bring her back to life--with some measure of proof, actually, in that they murdered Squee, another member of the Weatherlight crew and then brought him back to life. Once Yawgmoth had both of his greatest enemies kneeling before him, he created an arena, stripped Urza of his Planeswalker powers, leaving him the equivalent of a mortal mage, and set the two of them to fight. If Gerrard won, he would return Hanna to life. If Urza one, he would apprentice under Yawgmoth. Apparently, however, Urza won several times, Yawgmoth declared each of those wins invalid, and reset the battle. For reasons of really hating Urza a lot, I imagine. The final time, Gerrard won and cut off Urza's head. Upon his win, Yawgmoth increased Gerrard's strength, endurance, knowledge, and will ten-fold - for reasons, apparently - and then sent Hanna to him. Gerrard, now new and improved, realized that Hanna was not actually Hanna, but actually a simulacrum with Yawgmoth's essence in it. Whether Gerrard would have realized that before Yawgmoth's improvements? We'll never know, but in the name of spite and irony, I like to think he would have had no idea. You'd think 'don't empower your enemies' and 'don't put your essence near your enemies, especially after they've been empowered' were obvious rules, but that's the trouble with gods. Too convinced of their own power and superiority to listen to common sense, and by this point, Yawgmoth was absolutely a god."
Oh, pre-Mending times, how Liliana missed you.
"In another shocking, unforeseeable twist, Gerrard killed the simulacrum with Yawgmoth's essence in it, grabbed Urza's decapitated head, and fled Phyrexia, while the soul bombs that the other Titans had placed and then manually set off, gutting much of Phyrexia itself. Having an avatar with his essence in it guaranteed that no matter what happened to Yawgmoth, there would always be a backup available if necessary. Again, common sense would dictate that after losing your avatar, you should probably make another before doing anything risky, but we've left common sense behind in the first class and it hasn't made a comeback yet. With much of Phyrexia destroyed around him, Yawgmoth himself made his way to Dominaria, the plane of his birth, to finish what his shock troops had started. He took the form of a world-spanning cloud of death. It sounds like a joke, but it's not. Anywhere Yawgmoth's cloud passed, everything below it died. People. Animals. Plants. Even the earth itself. And then, just as quickly, it resurrected them - and anything else that had already been killed - to fight for Phyrexia. Among the armies of resurrected Dominarians were gigantic humus elementals, created by the death and resurrection of formerly living soil. The accounts of various last stands, sacrifices, and suicides in the face of that cloud are chilling. The two previous stages of the invasion had lasted months and resulted in a death total in the hundreds of millions. In the few hours after Yawgmoth's arrival, they totaled in the billions."
Okay. So maybe a little hubris was justified on his part. Maybe.
"Once back on the Weatherlight, attempting to figure out how to fight a cloud, the decapitated head of Urza began talking. Even dead, he had time for one last terrible idea: to open up the Power Matrix of the Weatherlight to recreate Serra's Realm on Dominaria. In fact, the collected artifacts of the Legacy contained many worlds, while Gerrard somehow contained many heroes." All she could do was shrug at this. She didn't know, guys, she really didn't. "He wanted to crack open both, destroying half of Dominaria by letting out those planes, and then having the army of heroes that would spring from Gerrard's head reconquer the other hemisphere. Fortunately, everyone else told him that Sylex Blast 2.0 was an incredibly stupid fucking idea, and Karn pointed out that Dominaria's second moon, the Null Moon, was actually a Thran artifact that had been building up a reserve of white mana for the last nine thousand years. They drained the mana from the Null Moon, and used the Weatherlight to create a beam of white mana directly into Yawgmoth, which... blasted the cloud and tattered it--but did not destroy it. He pulled himself back together, and created tentacled to grasp the Weatherlight and drag it to himself. And then Urza explained that the Legacy was actually a weapon, and they could harness the power of all those previously mentioned planes and heroes into an ultimate attack by removing the powerstones of Urza's eyes, placing them in Karn's body, and sacrificing Gerrard's life. The rest of the crew leapt off the ship, and a radiant, possibly even sentient? light was created that absorbed all parts of the Legacy in it: Urza, Gerrard, and Karn first, the collected artifacts, and finally the Weatherlight. It continued expanding until it came in contact with Yawgmoth, which it then destroyed. How?" Another shrug. Honestly, once you threw 'sentient light' into the mix, you'd lost Liliana completely. "The remaining Phyrexian armies were struck brain-dead from the feedback from their god's death, and were eventually wiped out by survivors. Finally, after four thousand years, Urza had done something useful for Dominaria: he died. And in so doing, saved the tattered remnants of Dominaria."
And the Phyrexians were dead forever and ever and would never be a problem for anyone ever again.
"And that, darlings, was five times Urza ruined everything, and the one time it was a draw. Though, I do want to make it perfectly clear - this is not a full recounting of everything horrible Urza has ever done. It's not even a full recounting of everything Urza has done that we have records of. It's just a high-level overview of the stuff that we had time for this session. Anyone interested in further stories of his many, many, many atrocities will just have to buy me a drink sometime."
Re: Talk to Liliana
Re: Talk to Liliana
"And I am quite eager he said, "to discover all that may lie ahead. Now." His expression might have gone stern and serious if not for the smirk still linger there. "What shall we do to celebrate?"
Not too long ago, he might have asked if they should go celebrate, but these days, was it really a question anymore?
Re: Talk to Liliana
"Well, I suppose it depends on whether you feel like combining celebration with a bit of industriousness..." she teased.
Liliana, you were still in public.
Re: Talk to Liliana
"You know," Ignis said, with a voice that could use a bit of that narrative warning as well, especially nuzzled into her like that, "how much I enjoy that particular recipeh...what is it your beautiful, wickedly clever mind is concocting now, my love?"
Re: Talk to Liliana
"A long weekend in Ravnica house-hunting?" she suggested, though that rumble in his tone meant they were absolutely not going anywhere but home (or maybe her office) immediately. "...Or Eos?"
Re: Talk to Liliana
'House hunting', it would seem, was now joining that list of things to pull that all-too-familiar deep hum of appreciation from Ignis's chest. "Ravnica," he didn't even need to think about it, "sounds perfect, darling, especially since, with Eos already on the agenda for next weekend, I may have already scheduled us for an appointment in the city next Sunday..."
What? Did you expect Mr. Efficiency over here to plan a big trip home and not try to pencil one in while thry were already there?
Re: Talk to Liliana
"I'd rather assumed you had," she said with that laugh of hers. "But you hadn't mentioned it yet, and I wasn't going to say in case you wanted it to be a surprise."
Re: Talk to Liliana
And, quite frankly, he would not be able to continue with this conversation until his grievances on the matter were liberally made in the proper fashion: merciless kissing down her throat, then back up again to her lips with a sense of finality.
"Well, it was," he finally drawled, "supposed to be a surprise. And compensation. For having dragged you out into the wild Duscaen wilderness..."
Don't worry, Liliana, he was teasing. The chocobo ranch actually had excellent accommodations.
Re: Talk to Liliana
"Stumbling into surprises early appears to be a trait we both possess," she said, laughing again. "Though I do love receiving adequate compensation for things..."
Of course you were teasing, darling. Because it was no secret that Liliana would just Planeswalk elsewhere the moment the concept of roughing it actually got...rough. Though she'd probably return. Just after a good night's sleep, a hot shower, and a catered breakfast.