The Dark Depths

Act III - Mother of Machines

She looked out towards the vast fields of her crop from the highest balcony on her citadel. She had everything and yet could not fulfil her deepest desire, the purest purpose for which her entire world was built for. She needed to grow, had grown these last few cycles. Her orthodoxy was the strongest force on the plane, and it had expanded to cover nearly the entirety of this metal rock. The Phyrexian nature of compleation was its core reason for being, and now that was all but complete, she felt a sudden surge of frustration that her needs were not being satisfied anymore. New Phyrexia had been born, but she was bigger than that. Her perfect form of the Phyrexian image needed to be shared with all creation, and yet her Praetor rivals were preventing her from seeing that dream through.

She needed to kill them all, bring them within the confines of her porcelain dream, and then take over more worlds like her kind hundreds of years prior. She needed a vessel, and there was one Vulshok that could fill the role.

The citadel was a shining example of Elesh's persona. It was a preposterously tall and imposing building, built of shining white metal without so much as a scratch adorning a single inch of its walls. The tower was surrounded by a great annex a hundred meters tall, a compleated angel standing watch on each pillar. It served no real purpose other than to instil respect in the shattered minds of every Phyrexian that laid eyes upon her domain. The security of the annex was irrelevant in a world that she ruled, and with no more living remnants on Mirrodin, the machines that made more of her kind in the dozens of floors of the citadel served no purpose. It was all a façade to maintain her rule.

She ran one sharp finger down her crescent head, feeling for the cracked and rotting imperfections of flesh and bone. She felt a small notch along the curved edge just before the point and lopped it off with a sharp flick of her finger. She looked down an inspected the first signs of rust on the slither she had just removed. Flesh felt like a disease, but this entropy of metal was what she feared most. It was a sign of coming weakness, of age. She flicked it away into the air and continued to scour her arms for any speck of irregularity. Her obsessive inspection was interrupted as her crop of soldiers began to part.

Down below, a hundred thousand white faceless legionnaires stood awaiting her orders, willing to wait days if not weeks. They would not breathe if she commanded them not to, but she knew more than any other their thirst for an invasion. The orthodoxy was being denied its rightful duty to invade. If they were not given the opportunity soon, they would make one themselves. They had not only taken the plane, but decimated the domains of nearly every other Praetor. One of which, was making his way through the parting ranks, flanked by his pitifully small brood.

Elesh's clawed hands clamped onto the railing in front of her and bared red teeth in her skinless mouth. Before her walked the impure embarrassment of Phyrexian progress. Urabrask had been a disappointment in every right, had failed in his duty to cleanse his lands of the Mirran, and faltered from the very beginning. He needed to be cleansed and rebuilt in the true image of Phyrexia. He was fast, but small and weak; his force of poorly reconstructed Leonin that followed him would be stopped at the annex. She would welcome him in and then tear him limb by limb. He would be remade in her image, and he would become beautiful.

Her attention was quickly diverted by a corpse being carried by four of Urabrask's shambling creations. Her false heart raced in anticipation, and she could not wait.

"Stop." Elesh muttered, no louder than a murmur.

The crowd of legionnaires far below faced inwards to the approaching party, the front line refusing to budge unless their leader demanded it. A circle of spears dropped around Urabrask and his cohort stopping them in their tracks. Urabrask was visibly flustered.