"You're not alone my doves, I'm here, I'm here." The only other gorgon calls to the rest of us from across the prison cell. He is an Azorius prison guard, and I want to tear him apart with my hands. I want his tongue to crumble to sandstone. His voice is gravelly and close to my ear.
"I'll tell you what's happening, how about that?" The hands holding me are not familiar, they belong to a stranger. Everything is dark and smells of misery and piss. I would overpower him any other day, but half my ribs are broken, blood pours from my side. I hiss and wrestle with teenaged might, but someone is holding me back-his nails dig into my arms as he holds me close. My feet have been submerged in standing water for weeks, and I pry at a blindfold with my tendrils. I guide my branch downward and the breadths of my forces join alongside as. My heart pounds in the memory of the fear and it is confusing, why does this body panic so? Panic is a weak and fleshy state. It is the prison I was held in, the prison I tried, and succeeded, in escaping, and here from the depths of my own mind, the horrid memory burst forth like a spring. Realmbreaker's great limbs dive into the cobblestones and lift it to the sky, but we order caution amid the chaos- I want to enter that one building but am not sure why. Dozens answer our command, and Realmbreaker continues to plunge downward. There is a building that catches my eye, to the side of the pool where one fountain used to spill, its appearance is unremarkable, but its gravity draws us close. What dust and clouds arise in the impact are softened by the rain, and we can see the branch probe the insides of the Senate like a finger in a wound. I choose the simplest one and order a branch to dive straight through its center. The trifold structure of the Azorius Senate looms ahead and I smile, so many reasons to flatten it, so many methods. From up here I can hear the public panic, see clusters of flesh skitter like rats through the streets. I sit side-saddle on a great branch of the greatest tree, a gleaming limb of the mighty Realmbreaker, guiding it through Ravnica's slate-gray sky, descending the branches like a claw of slow-moving lightning. Surrounded by the majesty of Phyrexia I come to the city of Ravnica to envelop it in our embrace. And yet still I feel awake and alive and glorious, charged with purpose by Elesh Norn herself. It feels as if I cannot tell if I got out of bed or not. I am having a challenging time discerning the difference between the nightmares we are enacting and the pleasant memories I recall. Watching us now, riding a cold and inorganic branch of a strange and alien tree, leading the destruction of the city I love so much, feels like sleepwalking.
Now, I watch what we do through the haze of memory and dream. I dive deeper to forget the sensation, the fear that my body had done what my heart would never want. There's a moment I feel my body kiss, but not the way I want, and the dream turns sour. I fled into that private little place, that secret door behind a metaphorical bookcase, and as what was left of me dove in to flick the latch and vanish into my dreams. Like my body knew where to put my mind, like it would be safe here. I sink into the walls of my mind, and as I descend, as the metal leeches into every vein, I find something untouched in the walls of my mind. Fall and collapse into the depths of myself. I am not one to retreat, but all I can do was sink. The growing pile of statues of former enemies crumbled and fell on my leg, but I did not feel it, because my leg had turned to living iron. The Phyrexian agents that I had turned to stone above me were shoved out of the way by more metal bodies, whom I quickly turned to stone, who were knocked over and replaced by more metal bodies, whom I then turned to stone. "Unhand me! You'll pay! You'll die for this a thousand times over!" is what I tried to snarl, but all that came out was the scrape and clank of aluminum dragged over iron. I writhed and arched my back as Phyrexian oil rushed past my teeth. The rest of me screamed, charged my gaze, and turned a half-dozen around me to stone. I feel my faraway body tense at the memory of nothingness and panic, desperately afraid, and try to claw my way back to the surface of light and color with all my might. The sensation of falling into darkness, the memory of an endless and empty void. Phyresis hurt, of course, but as soon as my throat turned to metal and my tendrils hardened to wire and coils, I felt the part I knew to be myself descend, tuck away, become small and curled like a fiddlehead fern.
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