Work Text:
Orthodoxy
Author’s Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Card Reference: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=420645
Summary:
Atraxa: The praetors manufactured her as a testament to their singular purpose. But the scars etched on (or not etched on) the angel horror’s body present the physical symbol of a Phyrexia disunited.
Underling Ethu’s 263rd report read simply “Yes, my lord. Overwhelmingly, my lord.”
The Resistance was slag. Those soldiers who weren’t dead died in retreat or retreated with nowhere to retreat to.
Phyrexia extended its command until there was nothing left to take. Its glorious infection had taken hold, and saving the plane was a lost cause.
The Outcast’s immunity couldn’t remove this poison. Not when so few scraps of Mirrodin’s purity remained. How corrupt his artificial world had become! Even Karn deserted the metal tumour that grew out of and reforged Argentum.
He was not the last. The Oldwalkers, detached from reality as much as Phyrexia disregarded its victims’ “souls,” would see their monumental works destroyed.
An archangel guided the blades defending the Mirran refuge. Her cry for justice affected the survivors, but not the biomechanical converts stripped of such spiritual impediment.
“We shall not shatter this dissenter’s parts to make a null seraph. A tenacity as indomitable on the battlefield, we will honour with our magnificence,” the Grand Cenobite blessed.
Elesh Norn’s Apostles sent ambassadors. A collaboration, to mark the end of the Mirran-Phyrexian War!
Jin-Gitaxias, Sheoldred, and Vorinclex agreed.
Urabrask refused. He disputed the unity his fellow praetors hypocritically undermined through inter-faction power struggles and spying, except this was baseless conjecture among Gitaxian pontiffs, not a direct decree by the Quiet Furnace’s reticent foreman.
In consuming Mirrodin, the infectors too had been infected – by an instinct to be led, critical thinking, ambition, compassion, and renunciation of goals. Urabrask’s direction the Mirrans be let alone and the furnace vents sealed merely stood in deepest contrast.
The memories of Phyrexia’s ancient defeat came hardwired into every golem, construct, and beast. Synthesis wasn’t always its own arm separate from evolution. Perhaps eons in the future from their initial purge, after the plane of Phyrexia was no more, they would be incompatible ideas on a new Phyrexia – an open sore promoting competition – but that had not always been the case.
Gix failed, but his failure wasn’t tied to his Phyrexian-ness. Dissimilarly, within their programming, the evangels of New Phyrexia contained core conflicts and opinions of error. Simultaneous warnings against repeating what they considered their unprotected tendon, and the seeds for disharmony in their ranks.
They saw beauty, when the rest of the Multiverse would see monsters. Only through their conditioning and forced “improvements” or the treasons of the already self-serving would the planes bow.
Jin-Gitaxias could despise Vorinclex and his slobberings of “evolution.” He could claim only he knew the meaning of true progress, and that perfection is not a goal, but a process. Yet long ago in Dominaria’s past – long ago in Phyrexia’s past – there was but the Great Evolution, of which “synthesis” was a synonym.
Where ingenuity meets inhumanity. When dreams of steel and oil forged the future in metal and oil!
Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice orated her first note. Metal and flesh smashed, spliced, and sutured to singularize Phyrexia’s ideal.
“A hole prevents a sphere from forming.” So it is scraped in the plates and passages of the Argent Etchings.
Uniformity was coerced and it was bred. It was achieved through corruption and under duress, oppression, and bereavement. All true, as in the present.
But the Phyrexians of the past were not a hierarchy fivefold spread compared to their modern-day descendants. They followed Yawgmoth, whereas leadership on New Phyrexia was hotly contested; at least, before Elesh Norn stepped it up stamping out her challengers.
To sculpt an angel missing the influence of red mana…That created a hole.
Ironically, the contradiction poisoned the Progress Engine, Steel Thanes, and Vicious Swarm slower than it did the Machine Orthodoxy, when the goal of fabricating Atraxa – of fashioning an image of Phyrexia’s absolute order – was plucked from the tree of Norn’s designs.
That was the imperfection shining through. For all diabolic intents, Yawgmoth’s Phyrexia was a well-oiled machine, so black in its construction and constitution, there was a loyal understanding even among the “mistakes” that the world ended with him (in a very literal way).
A machine controlled by a white-aligned denomination was precisely that. A smaller division of something else.
Yawgmoth’s ego surrounded and pervaded everything. He was Phyrexia’s body. Phyrexia’s blood. Indeed, he was the plane of Phyrexia itself.
Norn, on the other hand, covered over the flaws, hiding her Phyrexians’ weaknesses under bulky layers of metal as desperately as she did her hesitations.
Machines feel no fear, no sorrow, and no hunger. Only glorious purpose, true and pure. This was not true of New Phyrexia. No matter how powerful Norn’s branch became, her hold on her puppets was parasitic. It wasn’t pure. It wasn’t true rulership.
These machines were capable of feeling fear. Not fear of a ruler, but useless bog-standard nerves born out of run-of-the-mill maladies in any species such as doubt, grief, and love.
Their leader was susceptible to nightmares. Delicious miseries sown, which Ashiok gleefully tilled.
Jin-Gitaxias’ solution to imperfection was to surgically remove the undesirable pulp.
Vorinclex’s was to let nature run its course, the strong culling the weak.
Sheoldred’s…was to lie. To whisper false promises she thought Norn wanted to hear, and wait for an opening to wrest power for herself in authority’s arena.
The core ethos of being Phyrexian had fragmented due to exposure to Mirrodin’s suns. A painful quandary, and a fragile spot Urabrask would capitalize on.
Revolution was building. Riveting revolution. It would explode and light ’em up in a place experienced in repelling the Phyrexians. A city on fire, on the plane the Mother of Machines’ fear was acquainted with hers.
Ablution in glistening oil did not wash away the stink of Mirrodin or Dominaria or any of the other worlds they’d infiltrate. The caress of those worlds was too deep. Too poisonous to New Phyrexia.
Grandest was Mother’s fallacy. The might and heart of the invaders.
The Phyrexians of New Phyrexia weren’t perfect. They were imperfect. Norn’s sects’ literalism showed them this imperfection in their allegedly perfect whole, although they were without the ability to speak out of turn.
What crossed their minds defied Orthodoxy.
Could there be perfection beyond compleation?