DRAGONS: Worlds Afire

 

Writer - Scott McGough (just the Magic story)

Cover Art - Duane O. Myers

Internal Art - Greg Staples (again, just for the Magic story)

First Printing - June 2006

SUMMARY

The story we're covering today is called Unnatural Predator.

A pixie called Vaan gathers a group of adventures to kill a dragon, despite being under a spell from the beast that prevents him from revealing all its secrets. During the battle it is revealed the dragon is actually a merger between a natural dragon and a dragon engine. The group seemingly manages to kill the creature despite heavy losses, including Vaan himself. In the epilogue though the beast regenerates and resurrects the pixie, who resigns himself to having to come up with an even better plan to kill the monster that has enslaved him.

I'd give a more detailed summary, but there's already one up on the Wiki so I wont bother. And if you think that is cheating... check out that article's history to see who wrote that summary in the first place.

You know, if the big reveal of your story is that the dragon in question is a robot, perhaps you shouldn't put a honking big picture of a mechanical dragon on the opening page...

DRAGONS is a weird book. It's an anthology containing three Dungeons & Dragons stories and then suddenly a Magic one as well. It was released without any fanfare in the Magic community though, so I would've never known it existed if Scott McGough himself hadn't mentioned it on the MTGSalvation forums back in the day.

Up until the big reveal (the proper one, not the opening image) this story feels more D&D than Magic. It features a bunch of adventurers setting out to slay a baddie, we get no card references, nor any namechecks of known cultures or locations from the novels. It gets to the point where you start to wonder if this wasn't a repurposed D&D story to begin with. Especially considering the use of a pixie as the main plot instigator, while pixies hadn't been seen in Magic for over a decade at that point!

After the backstory of the dragon in revealed though there are a bunch of other Magic related references, including one really quite niche one (see below), so I guess the opening was just done not to scare off people coming to the story from a D&D background. Personally I would've liked a bit more worldbuilding though (what, me, liking worldbuilding?!), as this is one of the few stories we have set on Dominaria between the Invasion and the Time Spiral era outside of Otaria. It would've been neat to hear how the place was doing. But we just get generic descriptions like a poisoner being known in "five kingdoms", no specifics.

Judging the story on its own though, it's quite nice. Tania Cayce is a fun main character who, sensibly, really doesn't want to be there. The other characters are perhaps a bit broadly drawn (the artifice-hating druid, the vengeance driven soldier) but you can see that as Tania simply not taking an interest in them. The action is bombastic and the mystery is okay and not overly drawn out. Just a fun story, but as it's neither a top tier Magic story, nor a clear showcase of what is unique about the setting, I doubt many D&D fans reading this would be inspired to chase down more MTG lore.

The other three stories in the book are set in the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Ebberon settings of D&D. They're written by R.A. Salvatore, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman and Keith Baker respectively, who are such big deals in D&D that even I have heard of some of them! Though I must admit to never having read any of their work other than Weis's only Magic story, the Serra Angel comic, which I didn't like much. Still, it must've been cool for Scott McGough to be included in this company!

The other stories are fine. The Forgotten Realms one deals with a lich who gets dragons to work for him, but didn't really grab me. The Dragonlance story is a comedy about a kleptomaniac halfling and an amnesiac dragon and is fun enough. The Ebberon story is a whodunnit, and although it was pretty obvious who the baddie was (anthologies often don't have the space to introduce and develop multiple suspects) it was the most enjoyable of the four for me.

Tell you what though, those D&D stories aren't as shy about presenting their setting as the Magic one! Here's the first line of the second paragraph of the Dragonlance story: 

"Tasselhoff [the main character] ... arrived at the walled city of Pigeon Falls, located west of the city of Barter near the River Swift in the foothills of the Highguard mountain range on the continent of Ansalon in the world of Krynn"

None of these words mean anything to me, but I assume this is very specific information for Dragonlance fans! Oh, the story takes place a few years after "The War of the Lance" by the way. No idea what that means either, but as a timeline goober I felt obligated to mention it.

TRIVIA

The dragonslaying crew is made up of...

• Apprentice Tania Cayce and her master Donner Rus ("known throughout five kingdoms as a poisoner without peer"). Rus plans to grab some good alchemy ingredients like dragonscales and then ditch the party, but gets incinerated by the dragon.
• Kula, an anchorite (some sort of druid). She offers to train Tania afterwards, but she prefers to not to go straight back to be an apprentice after what Rus put her through.
• Captain Allav Hask, 4 soldiers & a golem called Boom, whose garrison was destroyed by the dragon. Three of the soldiers don't make it out alive.

And the other two characters are...

• Zumaki of the Bottomless Pool, an old dragon who "indulged" in pixie glamours (basically he was tripping on pixie dust). When a broken dragon enige showed up, Zumaki tried to read its mind, and it tried to infect him with "its machine virus". That led to the weird merger.
• Vaan himself is also phyrexianized. Or something like that at least; there's cogs and the like in him. The rest of his tribe's mummified remains lie under the dragon's mountain, as it took Robo-Zumaki a while to figure out a way to bring pixies back to life, and by then only Vaan was still around.

CONTINUITY 

• The soldiers mention fighting against "an entire battalion of refurbished Yotians" two years prior. This might seem like a continuity error, as Yotian Soldiers are from the Brothers' War era, but somebody could've dug some up and rebuild them. Also, remember that we know from all the way back in Whispering Woods that there were still Yotian Soldiers around in 4073 AR. Back in that review I speculated that they had been roaming Dominaria, rebuilding themselves when necessary, all this time. Who knows, perhaps these are the same Yotians several centuries later! Or maybe some artificer had a dream about them, as apparently happened on Mirrodin, or this is an early example of creatures coming through the time rifts that we'll see a lot more off in Time Spiral. So we have many different ways there could be Yotians around, though tying them into those form Whispering Woods would be the coolest explanation in my book!

• That's not the niche reference I mentioned though, that comes when the group looks through the dragon's hoard and find gold, silver and watersilver! Watersilver was introduced in The Gathering Dark as a metal that can prevent wizards from casting spells. It never got used outside of the Ice Age cycle, which seems odd for something so useful in a high magic setting, so it's cool to get it referenced here.
• Captain Hask has an enchanted sword that can fire energy blasts, which he describes thus:

"The Twice-Drawn Sword, the Hand of Righteousness. Blessed by the High Primate of Angelfire and the Serran Mother Superior alike"

• This suggests the story takes place somewhere near Benalia, where the Church of Angelfire and the Church of Serra are the main religions. Since those two have a history of conflict, this sword must be a big damn deal! Unfortunately it gets lost in the final confrontation, after Cayce uses it to kill both the dragon engine and destroy the skeleton of Zumaki. Vaan had hoped destroying those simultaneously would end the merged threat forever and had recruited Hask specifically to get the sword there. Too bad it didn't work...
• There is one continuity mistake, when Vaan calls the dragon engine a "fak mawa". The term is actually "Mak Fawa". We can easily explain this away by saying Vaan doesn't know Phyrexian (or was it a Fallaji term?) And the dragon engine itself was completely nuts so it presumably couldn't correct him.
  

TIMELINE

We don't have a very specific time frame for this story. We are at least several decades past the Phyrexian Invasion, as Vaan has been the creature's slave for decades, and Tania finds old scales, "shed decades ago", but we're also told this:

"They came by the hundreds during the Machine Invasion, and this one came to us bearing wounds from some titanic battle  ... We never knew how long it wandered after sustaining such terribly injuries. Months? Years? Decades?"

If Vaan thinks it's possible for the thing to have wandered for decades before stumbling upon Zumaki, that must have happened decades after the Invasion, so this story is two instances of "decades" removed from it (at least 40 years, probably longer). However, we also hear this:

"He's a weapon", one soldier said. "Like the ones the old soldiers describe. A living siege engine like the ones that attacked during the Machine Invasion. The Phyrexians used all sorts of tricks back then, including camouflage and infiltration"

We know from stories like True Enough, from The Monsters of Magic, that there were still Phyrexian around for a while after the Invasion, so those old soldiers mentioned here don't necessarily have to have been around during the Invasion itself, but that does seem to be the implication. 

Also, while we don't get to see much of the wider world, what we do see doesn't appear to be the desolate wasteland we'll see in Time Spiral. There are still forests around, there are at least 5 kingdoms up and running nearby... from the looks of things this fits much better in the era between the Invasion and Odyssey, when, according to various stories we've seen in the anthologies (and the flavor text of Tremble), Dominaria bounced back surprisingly well form the Invasion only to be subsequently wrecked by Karona.

Everything considered, this story fits best somewhere around 4250 AR. That leaves several decades for both the dragon engine to wander and for Vaan to be enslaved by it, but also leaves the possibility of some veterans who were young soldiers during the Invasion to still be around.