This deck relates the story of Karn and the plane that he created, Mirrodin, and what happened when he finally decided to go back and visit...
~ ~ ~
Karn, Silver Golem *oversized*, had been thinking... About Mirrodin... About how Mirrodin had become New Phyrexia... He thought about feelings...
Eventually, after much thinking, Karn decided that, maybe, he should do something...
He went and told his friend Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, that he was going to New Phyrexia... to look at it... and think about some things...
When Karn finally got around to checking in on his own creation, he was faced with a reality that he had not thought about, despite all the time that he spent thinking...
~ ~ ~
Karn had expected the typical Phyrexian flavor of what had previously been his own Mirrodin. However, when he arrived, he could not even recognize the place. In fact, there wasn't really anything to recognize. Karn found himself in grey... void, of sorts...
He was standing. The ground beneath him was brittle, as if made of sugar crystals, and it crumbled under Karn's weight, causing each of his feet to sink several feet into it, with a tinkling crumble. There was also several feet of fine, grey, crystalline powder covering as far as Karn could see. Karn was waste deep in the powder, after already sinking several feet into the ground.
The air was dry, and opaque, suffused with a dim grey light, not bright at all, just not dark. There was no sound, or movement anywhere, just completely motionless silence. Yet, there seemed to be a strange, non-descipt card:Spacial Distortion which warped the air, or the space that it occupied, which gave an uncanny sense of movement while standing still. It was hard enough for Karn to see in the strange grey air, but as soon as he moved, the fine powder all around him flooshed up into the air, and stayed there, suspended in the motionless air. It created a cloud around Karn, such that once he started moving he couldn't see anything around him at all. It took a long time for the powder to settle. Karn thought to himself, "All is Dust"...
Karn was used to staying still, he had done much of it as a pacifist. He decided to stay still for a while, and think, and see if anything happend.
Karn sat and thought for what could've been a long time, or it could've been a short time, it was hard to tell. Karn thought about Mirrodin, and how this place was actually similar to his original vision for Mirrodin. Then he thought about Memnarch, and how he had ruined it by brining a bunch of stuff here. And then how the Phyrexian oil that was stuck to his boot when he came to visit once ended up turning the place into New Phyrexia... Then he thought about the Phyrexians, and why weren't they here? Where were they...?
Karn could keep standing there, still, thinking, and gazing out upon the un-gazeable void around him, or he could set out into, in a blind cloud of powder, not able to see where he was going or what was ahead of him. He decided to start walking, to see if anything happened, and to clear his mind...
So Karn traversed the void of his mind, and his new surroundings, for days, weeks, and months, through a landscape without form, color or sound, under a sky of nothingness... a nothingness that, Karn realized, once he considered it was no longer nothing, but the nothingness of this world quickly consumed that as well, and Karn forgot what he had been considering. It felt familiar to him.
At some point, Karn decided to stand still again. The powder around him eventually settled.
After much stillness and silence, there was movement. The powder around Karn began to move, even though Karn himself was not. It was a whisper of a faint breeze. A sign that somewhere, there was something.
The the whisper became a breeze, and the breeze became a wind, and the powder swirled all around Karn. Karn, once again, could see nothing, as he was immersed the swarming powder. Yet, there was something, in what might have been the distance, Karn percieved an irregularity, an amorphous grey shaddow within the grey powdery void.
Then, suddenly, with a deafening, Warping Wail, all the dust around Karn was blasted away, swirling in a massive cyclone around him, to reveal a the ground, a glistening, geometric, crystalline lattice beneath his feet. In the edges of the dust cyclone, Karn could see large shapes, and the flickering, writhing shadows, of what looked like tentacles.
In a crackling flash, the dust, and the space around Karn shattered, and there before him appeared three massive figures, infinitely large. Karn could not tell where they ended, or where his reality started.
Karn started to think about how this whole situation seemed to remind him of something that he thought he had heard the Gatewatch talking about once...
"Hm... Eldrazi...", Karn thought.
He was right. Karn was right in the middle of an Eldrazi Confluence of the thee titans. Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and Kozilek, the Great Distortion wasted no time in contorting Karn's metally body, and shredding his perception, tearing at his existence, as Emrakul, the Promised End attempted to process Karn's mind, but that was a lost cause.
Karn tried to summon the metallic ground beneath him to his aid, but there was nothing. The ground was not metal. Although Karn could see the jagged, irregular, crystalline chrome beneath his feet, it was nothing. The dust was nothing. The Eldrazi were nothing. Emrakul and the other Eldrazi did not need to process Karn's mind in order to ingest him. Karn's mind was nothing. And now, Karn, was nothing. In Karn's first, and last, Introduction to Annihilation, The Eldrazi titans would card:Sour from Existence, any trace, of Karn's previous existence.
~ ~ ~
Now it wasn't unusual for years to go by without hearing a word from Karn, Silver Golem. Sometimes he would just stand there for weeks, without saying anything, even though there were a bunch of other people around him.
But Ugin kept thinking about him this time. About him going to New Phyrexia, and thought that if something bad were to happen to him, it could be a long time before anyone knew, since Karn was usually M.I.A. anyways. So, Ugin decided that he would just go check in on New Phyrexia too, and see if everything was okay.
Upon his arrival, Ugin immediately immediately realized that the Eldrazi had completely consumed New Phyrexia.
How they got here he did not know, but he knew this was bad, really bad. He also knew that the Edrazi would already be aware of his presence as, and before he had even finished that thought to himself, the fog of dust surrounding him became a screeching vortex of distortion. Without hesitation, Ugin engulfed himself in Ghostfire, as his colorless magic was strong against the Eldrazi's colorless void magic.
The three titans now towered around Ugin, three points of a triangle with Ugin in the center, alight in ghostfire. Ugin knew that the Eldrazi were much stronger here, and now, than they had been on Zendikar, as they had already consumed the entire plane, as well as the power and energy of all the phyrexians. He also knew that they were hungry, as there was nothing left here.
Ugin could not planeswalk away, as the titans were distorting the nature of reality around him, and were it not for the ghostfire, he would already have been twisted asunder. Ugin did not know if the Eldrazi had feelings, but if they did, the ones they held towards Ugin would not be pleasant. Ugin thought he could sense anger, or something like it, in the intensity of the Eldrazi's presence, and although his ghostfire would protect him for now, he could not fend them off alone.
Although the Titans had Ugin trapped, and were trying to penetrate his ghostflame, they were not approaching him. As Ugin was contemplating why this might be, he started to hear a rhythmic, metallic beat, like dozens of enormous, muffled bells, echoing through the a canyon in the haze, and as the sound grew closer, a metallic tinkling, and scratching, and whispering.
From between the three Titans, came marching enormous conglomerations of card:Phrexian Colossuses and card:Phyrexian Dreadnoughts which had been twisted and defiled with the maddening chaos of the Eldrazi. Apparently the Eldrazi had not devoured everything here. They had kept some of the most hideous and terrible Phyrexian abominations and constucts (and some cute little artifact animals too) to further warp and corrupt in their own twisted ways. On Kozilek's Command, the Phyrexdrazian monstrosities marched ferociously towards Ugin. Now, Ugin would be forced to fight with these putrid colossuses as the Titans remained at a distance, continuing to try and diffract his ghostflame with their eldritch void magic.
Ugin could not hesitate any longer, and in a blazing colorless infero, he charged at the horrible beasts.
Ugin's blasts of ghostflame sent masses of writhing flesh and chunks of steaming metal flying all around. But the goliaths were not deterred, as the blasted and charred pieces of themselves came crawling and slithering back together, and soon, Ugin would have no place to turn. As Ugin fought desperately to create space between him and the Phyrexian Eldrazi, he realized that he was still not even fighting the Titans, while their influence on him was growing stronger, refracting and dimming his ghostflame, and exhausting and cracking his mind.
It was beginning to look hopeless for Ugin, but he just he kept on blasting those big, nasty Phyrexians.
As Ugin just kept on blasting those big, nasty Phyrexians, he thought of his friend, Karn. Ugin wondered what had happened to him? It may have taken the Eldrazi some time to notice his presence, as there wasn't a whole lot going on up there, and his metal body would have appeared to the Eldrazi as any other soulless rock, hiding the energy of his spark within. Maybe they hadn't even found him... Maybe he was just standing still somewhere and they didn't even know he was here... If they had found him though... Ugin himself, the ancient Planeswalker, twin of the Elder Dragon Nicol Bolas; Ugin, who had once trapped the Eldrazi on Zendikar with the aid of two ancient Planeswalkers, was struggling stave off the three Eldrazi titans and their army of Phyrexdrazi. Karn, although powerful, would not have stood a chance against this onslaught.
Just as Ugin was wondering if his friend had been consumed by the Eldrazi as he surely would be soon, amidst the Phyrexdrazi hordes, atop of a huge writhing mound of them, arose his friend, Karn!
Karn was standing upon the massive pile of Phyrexdrazi, which Ugin assumed that Karn had defeated, and was using to look out over the Skittering Invasion to locate him and come fight by his side. But, as the mass that Karn was standing on started moving towards Ugin, what was hope and joy within him, transformed to dread, and horror, as he realized that Karn was not standing triumphantly atop a mountain of defeated Phyrexdrazi, Karn was controlling the heap, and it was carrying Karn towards him, but not as a friend...
Karn and the impossible mass of greasy metal and wriggling offal swelled around Ugin, a tide of gore and slag. Slimy tentacles and pulsating tubes twisted around Karn, as they slithered in and out of his orifices and the within his hollow body which had been fused with unrecognizable parts of flesh and machine. Karn and the the horde were one and the same now. They were him, and he was them.
It would be futile for Ugin as he was engulfed by Karn and the Phyrexian Juggernauts, his ghostflame extinguished, his mind and body wracked and shattered, and he would succumb.
~ ~ ~
Karn, the Great Creator, had become, Karn, the Terrible Devourer!
Ugin, the Ineffable, had become, Ugin, Eldrazi Harbinger!
Karn and Ugin, Eldrazi Conscriptions, would become the Eldrazi's apocalyptic horsemen, their Conduit of Ruin, sent to whatever plane they would devour next, to annihilate any would-be resistance ahead of their arrival, upon which the Eldrazi would Desecrate Reality itself, until every opponent in the Multiverse was controlled by Emrakul during their next turn... but they get an extra one after that...!
THE END
