based on an “Atraxa, Grand Unifier” deck
decklist here
“Atraxa, Grand Unifier” by Anato Finnstark
The angel opened her eyes and breathed in the grey. With a laboured effort, she tried to force her neck up. The pain was instantaneous and overwhelming. A distorted scream rose high into the air and then fell short as the angel slumped into unconsciousness.
The crowd bustled around her, jostling her this way and that. The bright glow of the morning sun shone down, the streets around her not yet warmed in the early rays. A crisp breeze whistled through the thoroughfare and she shivered, the shuddering running right to the tips of her wings. She started at the sensation, like it was a long-forgotten memory returning unbidden. She couldn’t remember when last she had felt the bite of the wind.
A shout from behind caught her attention and she half-turned back towards it before a wayward elbow dug into her side, hard. She tumbled down, glancing her shoulder off the cobbles. She looked up and saw an eye, glaring down on her. Its pupil was a gleaming ivory, ringed by concentric circles of burnished bronze. The entire thing was framed in a blue and gold triangle. It was set in a keystone above a looming gate, far above her. As she stared into it, a crack formed at the top of the triangle. It snaked down in a jagged line, bisecting the eye and breaking the keystone into offset halves. Suddenly she felt herself being lifted back to her feet as slender blue-skinned fingers wrapped around her arms and pulled her up. She didn’t hear the vedalken’s hurried apologies; the edges of her senses were filled with a grinding sense of wrongness but it was distant and when she tried to focus on it, it slipped away like a mote of dust dancing in a puff of air. Behind her the eye sigil was whole. There was no sign of a crack.
The angel came to her senses once again. She had no idea of how long she had been out, and no way of knowing. Sensors flickered to life with a high-pitched whine and a faint clicking echoed around her head as she tried to focus on the empty space. Her neck ebbed with pain, sagging under the weight of her great, wide headpiece. She lifted a tentative hand up to it and felt a sharp stabbing as a shattered piece of it slid through the end of her inquisitive finger. A bead of black oil welled at the entry point and began to run down to her wrist. As she turned her arm to examine it the oil seemed to shimmer and shift through the spectrum, at times deep ink black, then a glimmering silver, then a glittering coruscating rainbow as colours cascaded into one another. The sight stirred something in the angel’s memory banks. She had seen colours like that emerging from the black once before. She tried to remember.
When she held her fingers up to her face she saw starlight shining between them. The balmy wind carried the tang of saltwater on the air, mixing with the gentle smell of the gardens. A building stood some distance away, along a path framed by marble pillars. They were carved with deep vertical grooves down their length leading up to delicate swirling patterns at their pinnacle. She took slow steps around the one nearest to her, marvelling at the feeling of her fingertips dipping in and out of the stone channels. Looking up she took a breath and ascended with unhurried ease. At the edges of her vision the starlight flashed again and when she turned to see she saw her wings were made of it. As they unfurled, she felt a sensation tugging at her mind. “Come up the path, bright one,” came a voice, deep and sonorous. She obeyed.
When she reached the path’s end she found that she had come upon a temple. It glowed in the noon sun, the marble catching the light and directing it into the angel’s eyes, forcing her to approach bowed, eyes fixed to the floor. In this pose she could see clearly the relief etched into the stone slabs that led the way to the temple entrance. It told the story of a god, how he emerged from the sky and smote great monsters that terrorised the world below. Later, a second story showed the god elevating a warrior to status as his champion, fashioning a weapon for them and guiding their hand as they struck down an ephemeral nightmare enemy. She learned of the trials he underwent to prove his worth to his believers, lifting the world above his shoulders and placing it in its rightful place in the cosmos, and forging chains to bind otherworldly threats forever in the realms below.
As she began to climb the wide steps to the temple doors, the sun abruptly disappeared. Above, the idyllic blue of the sky gave way to a tempestuous boiling sea of colours. Reflected in her eyes, waves of deepest blue rose and crashed against imploding crimson suns and abyssal darkness erupted with blossoming rays of purest white. Colours she had no name for swirled before her, each one existing for a fragment of a second before giving way to another. Her entire body sparkled, flickering into translucency, yet somehow seeming more real than it had before. “Child.” The sky spoke to her. “Light of my light.” A face coalesced from the stars above. It looked down at her with harsh, blank eyes. “Return to me!” The sound was a roar made from nothingness, enveloping her in a sound from beyond hearing. A hand formed, holding a massive spear that stretched across the horizon. At its end, the blade was shaped like a leaf, with a sun at its centre. A shooting star fell in a perfectly straight line, from the tip of the spear until it bisected the sun, like an eye split in half. It burned with a searing heat until it was all she could see. She screamed and it sounded like grinding gears.
The angel doubled over and heaved, blood and oil mixing, sending spatter through the void. She forced herself to take shuddering, gasping breaths. Suddenly, she realised hers was not the only breathing she could hear. Slowly she straightened her back, pulling herself upright. In front of her stood a woman. A halo of golden hair fell around her slender face; the eyes that stared down were kind, but worn as if through long years of war and suffering. White tattoos framed them, like wings. She was dressed as if for battle, her white robes falling in ribbons from beneath golden armour. On one shoulder was an ornate pauldron in the shape of an unfurling wing. She held out a hand but the metal angel shunned it, servos whining as she stood.
“Who are you?” The words felt flat in the vastness of the void.
“I am the ideal,” came the reply.
“I am justice.” “I am anguish.” “I am righteous.”
“I arm the broken.” “I light the blind.” “I preserve the silence.”
“I am the wing and the sword.” “I am betrayal and order.”
“I am unbending love.”
“I am unfaltering courage.” “I am the answering steel.”
The sudden rush of sound sent waves of pain radiating through the angel’s head. The woman before her had spoken only once, but with a thousand voices. The angel clutched her face and tried to focus on the woman who spoke as a legion. She seemed almost to blur as her features refused to stay put, her face rapidly shifting as if a million souls fought to control a single form. With each new voice, another scene thrust itself into the metal angel’s memory until it became an overwhelming tidal wave of recollections of lives she was sure she had never seen but felt an innate kinship with.
She remembered…
She remembered standing firm against a beast with endless heads that burst from the burning skies where one plane crashed into another. She was but a speck of light against infinite gaping maws, each one a foetid chasm of rot and gore. Teeth gnashed as the beast let out a terrible wailing roar that cracked the earth beneath and sent scores of knights tumbling down into the maelstrom, tearing them apart in a single unending moment as time and mana and existence fought one another. She held the line.
She remembered shaking off the ice of the ages with each flap of her great wings. She landed with an unearthly grace despite the land littered with corpses. She stood listening to the silence of the dead for a long time. Slowly, she made her way across the battlefield. Every now and again she would stop and stoop low and whisper into the ear of a fallen warrior. Her hands were held loosely at her side, fingertips brushing across stiffened brows and skin brittle in the harsh cold. She knelt by a young man, a boy too young for anything more than the earliest growth of patchy stubble. His fingers were frozen around the pommel of a sword rammed deep into the chest of an old king who had in turn buried an axe between the boy’s eyes, shattering his skull. She gathered them both close with embracing arms and flew into the aurora above.
She remembered a world of biting sands that screamed when she rose clad in blue armour and proclaimed profane fealty to a god-emperor. She remembered being clad in finely-worked filigree and walking streets of aether-fueled clockwork. She remembered flying in formation with her sisters and bringing burning light to armies of undead, and she remembered turning that same light onto ranks of screaming devotees as the madness took hold of her brain and twisted prayers into unutterable syllables that snapped the plane like glass.
She remembered the black oil and the lancing syringes that pierced her skin and filled her with a boiling ichor. She remembered the face of her mother, and the first words she offered in serene, grateful supplication.
She remembered breaking the barriers between existence and leading her alabaster host down wide roads in a city of glittering lights. She remembered the fleeing hordes and the futile resistance and waving a hand and seeing the oil from long ago return to life and come pouring out of the eyes and mouths of statues and seeping into the skin of the living.
She remembered dying. She looked down and saw a girder, slick with black oil, jutting from her chest. And then there she was, sprawled in death, in the grey. She couldn’t move. She could only watch as the woman knelt down and cradled her face.
She saw three angels. Each one was made of gleaming metal. The first glowed in the eerie blue fire that burned atop her crown. The second was cast in perfect platinum, golden lights blinking slowly. The third she could only see a shadow for behind her came sunlight, brilliant and blinding. When they spoke, they spoke together.
“I am every sword drawn in defence.”
“I am the spirit of all that is divine.”
“I am the spirit of all that is divine.”
“And we are you.” Now the first woman the angel had seen returned to prominence. “All the Multiverse’s angels are born of white mana, coalesced from the aether between existence. And it is to the aether to which we return, to be born and shaped anew. Every act of kindness or ill, of vengeance or justice, of hope or cowardice, is one we share. What one does, she does to all.
And that is the truth which we pass on, sister. To those below. To the ones praying for help, for guidance, for the light.
But I brought genocide to the Multiverse.
Yes.
I killed countless scores. Even of my own kind.
Yes.
I was not born of mana, but reforged in the furnace at the heart of the nine-layered realm and sent out to preach poison and obeisance to a self-made god.
Yes.
And I am still forgiven.
Yourself is the last person everyone must forgive.
And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do.
And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do.
And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do.
And I do.”
Before the angel opened a gap of perfect white. She peered into it. At the end she could see a figure, small, indistinct. It lay curled and weeping on the floor. She looked around for the woman, but found she was alone. “No, never alone,” came the thought, voiced by a million souls at once. She smiled as she heard her own voice amidst them.
She walked into the last gate until she stood before the crying girl, and held out a hand.
Card Explanations
This month’s story is all about Atraxa, and the nature of angels. Atraxa is the most infamous of New Phyrexia’s angels, compleated by the combined efforts of four of the plane’s five praetors. During Elesh Norn’s Multiversal invasion in the 2023 set March of the Machines, Atraxa is selected to be her general, leading her forces across the planes until she meets her demise on New Capenna after she gets a skyscraper dropped on her. This story explores that odd, eternal moment after her death, positing an idea that angels, since they are manifestations of each plane’s white mana, return to a shared aetheric consciousness.
The deck this story was born from was a personal deck of mine that I called “Gatekeeping”. It was, as the name might suggest, a deck built around using lands with the subtype Gate, amassing enough of them to win with the card “Maze’s End”. Although the deck was too strong for my regular rotation and lasted only a few months before being retired, I still remained fascinated by the character of Atraxa, of whom we have seen precious little in Magic’s lore.
The story here, admittedly, retains very little of the deck. It came from a notion of exploring Atraxa’s passage through gates after her death, reliving the experiences of the planes she helped invade, watching through the eyes of each plane’s angels as Phyrexia massacred the people they swore to protect. While the narrative morphed a little in the telling, the idea of Atraxa being forced to confront her actions, understanding that all angels are linked through their shared genesis and eventually coming face to face with both Magic’s most famous angel as well as the metallic angels of Mirrodin that she herself might have been created from, remained intact.