When Jace’s eyes next cracked open he realized it was not of his own free will. Small slender needles had pierced his eye-lids and drawn them back taught. He quickly suppressed his immediate reaction, which was to leap from where he lie, when he realized, firstly, that he was now very securely embedded into the operating table where he was held and, secondly, any attempt to move from this position would cause him to collide with any number of the sharp implements that now surrounded him. Very quickly between this point in time and when he had stumbled whole again from the Blind Eternities he had lost his excitement at the idea of outside forces acting upon him. He had reassumed his knowledge of reality and the oppressive truths it necessitated. He was still unable to recall the events that led to his exile into ignorance in the depths of the void, but he already found the thought of going back so comparatively pleasant to his current situation that he would’ve believed that he had done it on purpose if it weren’t for what it entailed. What it entailed, of course, was that Jace had surrendered knowledge willingly, and this, he knew, was impossible.
The room Jace found himself in now was mostly dark, save for harsh turquoise lights that illuminated a row of operating tables, one of which Jace was currently strapped down into by spiny metal cages that wrapped around his limbs and head. The table was angled such that he was half upright, and could see into the shadows beyond. He saw mixtures of mechanical and organic shapes pulsating in methodical fashions, all of them obscured to the point where Jace could not identify them. He could not tell which were devices of surgery and mutilation, and which were limping horrors that stalked about the operating room, or if there was even any distinction to be made between the two. Great bundles of tubes wrapped around mechanical arms that descended from the ceiling. Through their transparent exteriors various fluids could be seen as they were pumped haltingly down to large bladed appendages; dark shimmering oil, glowing green toxic sludge, and deep red blood. Where leaks had sprung small puddles formed on the ground. A mixture of coagulated blood and bubbling oil sizzled beneath Jace’s feet.
A collection of blades and needles hung on shifting, many-jointed arms before him; all converging on the base of a long segmented cylinder that hung from ceiling, on the end of which was a great eyeball that regarded him with a sinister curiosity. He also noticed a large bent form approaching at a leisurely pace from the distance. It was metallic and spindly, with great thin appendages that terminated in sharp points. It moved with a bizarre sort of grace, a sort of twisted nobility, and as it closed in on the operating table the worm-like probe turned its great eye to regard the figure submissively.
Jace receded into his mind. The questions that seemed so pressing when he was adrift in the eternities resurfaced. “Where am I?” he questioned himself. He didn’t know. He was somewhere he had never been before, some new plane he had stumbled upon blindly surfing through waves of raw of existence. He couldn’t remember why he had fallen into such a stupor; what could have forced him into that state. A great span of time seemed to be inaccessible in his memory. Not missing, mind you, but inaccessible, as though there were a mental block. He prodded at the memories from every angle, but every avenue he traveled down lead to a dead end.
There was another question that still hung in his mind, and that it still remained after he had reassumed himself was a troubling matter of its own. “Who am I?” he asked again. Every aspect of his autobiographical knowledge had returned to him, but for some reason his identity still felt veiled. It was as though the hazy shroud still hung over his mind and he continued to be revealed to himself merely in silhouette.
In his present situation, however, this was of little consequence. Jace urgently needed information. He felt blue mana surging through this place, but it was strange, wrong. It was as though it were barbed, sharp spindles of pain struck out of him as he attempted to gather it. Even the fundamental material of this plane was hostile. Jace endured it, gathered his mind together and delved into mental space.
Immediately Jace realized things were very wrong, more so than he had assumed up to this point. First of all, from the blurred splashes he could sense about him he realized he had most certainly been drugged. A lesser mind mage would’ve been completely shut off from traversing the mental space that existed in the layer between the plane’s material existence within and the Blind Eternities without. For Jace, it just made it difficult for him to navigate. What commanded Jace’s attention, however, was a pervading sense of abject horror. Just as disturbing shapes were obscured on the edge of his vision in the operating room, looking further out through his mind’s eye he witnessed a bizarre and terrifying mass of undulations occupying the mental realm, more perverse than any stitched monstrosity of flesh and machine. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. These weren’t normal minds, these weren’t even the minds of twisted psychopaths, these were utter abominations of concept and thought. They were crimes against nature.
Two factors pushed Jace onward in his probing. Clearly, he would have to discover something about this place if he intended to survive. Already dark fantasies danced on the edge of his awareness concerning his coming fate. More to the point, though, no matter how appalled he might be Jace was a creature driven by curiosity. To not further investigate would be, to him, an unforgivable crime. This was especially pressing given the extremes he had already witnessed on this plane. Not on Grixis, a plane formed wholesale from carnage and slaughter, where the very ground was rotten flesh, not there had he witnessed something like this. In comparison, their minds, while violent and sadistic, were simple and natural extensions of the brutality inherent in nature. No, this plane was novel in its depravity and it compelled Jace inexorably.
Jace stumbled blindly, but carefully, between the mutated and swelled shapes of the resident minds. He was completely unable to connect a location here to a physical location on the plane, but he was able to at least determine that all of these minds were nearby. He searched for and failed to find the mind belonging to the sharp metallic creature that continued to slowly approach him. Instead he decided to take the cautious route. He found a small, shriveled little mind. It was probably already broken and quiet, but it couldn’t possibly present a threat to him and it would perhaps give him some inkling of what was going on. Carefully, delicately he delved into the mind.
Jace screamed. He had ventured only the lightest caress of the withered psyche, but that alone filled him with immense, burning pain. The intensity of which flooded his mind as though his own body were being stripped slowly apart tissue by tissue. The few seconds he endured of merely being in contact with the shattered mind constituted the worst torture he had ever been subjected to. Worse was the fevered babbling that dominated its every thought, as though its sole mental capacity had been reduced to repeating a single phrase. The mind begged, it pleaded, its every desire encapsulated in a singular need. Jace couldn’t help but plead along with it, raising his voice in a pathetic shriek. But it was not begging for freedom from its torture, it was not pleading for a reprieve from this pain. No, when Jace opened his mouth to scream again his voice could only produce one request “I beg you – make me perfect!”
The twisted metal figure that approached him bent its jagged jaw into a mockery of a smile. “What zeal! If only all my subjects were so willing from the start!” It spoke in a voice like the scraping of bone upon metal.
Jace had already lost control of the course of his mind. He pulled back violently from the burning pain and his mind crashed into another. This one was lobotomized, calm and lethargic. Jace stumbled backwards through its simple memories. He vividly relived its perpetual wanderings through the darkened halls of this labyrinthine laboratory. He assumed the identity of the misshapen brute as it mindlessly dragged itself through the wards, pausing periodically to have great globs of flesh painfully sheared from its body, taken by emotionless, intricately masked surgeons who then incorporated the flesh into their disgusting experiments. The monotony of this process was only broken by the brute’s periodic visits to the flesh piles, where new pieces were slowly, excruciatingly, grafted onto its body so that it might drag this raw material back to the operating rooms. All throughout, the only protests the flesh courier could generate were pitiful muffled grunts. Jace lived these memories for what felt like a lifetime in the timeless expanse of mental space.
When he finally struggled free from the morass of the lobotomized mind he continued to bounce aimlessly between the broken minds of the denizens and victims of the laboratory. He witnessed grotesqueries beyond his wildest imaginings. He experienced minds that has been severed in twain; their component parts operating isolated, confused half-existences. He witnessed minds that had been carefully deconstructed, reconstructed, and compartmentalized all the while fully self-aware, consciousnesses trapped within their own bodies but incapable of doing anything but witnessing in horror the atrocious acts their own limbs carried out mechanically. There were bizarre conjunctions of minds, brains strung together haphazardly, multiple identities struggling over domain of the same physical substrate. One he encountered was like a depraved cat organ of human minds, through which the subtle tone and signatures of their combined agonized screaming formed, in whole, exaltations of “Phyrexia’s beauty and grace”.
Jace wasn’t sure how many hours or days he had been lost when he finally returned to his own mind, panting with exhaustion. The twisted metal creature had been standing patiently over him the whole time, observing intently, etching methodically with his long, sharp finger into a plate of metal. When he realized that Jace’s mind had returned he tapped the edge of the plate and the metal turned liquid, reforming his etchings into new shapes. What Jace could observe of the language was made up of harsh, sharp-edged characters. It was brutal, but orderly, like someone had rearranged the terrified scratching of a dying beast into intricately complex patterns.
“There will be little use for us to probe your mind, Traveler, if you insist upon losing it,” the creature made a sound like the screeching of an eviscerated horse that Jace could only interpret as laughter. “I am Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, Praetor of Phyrexia and Creator of the Great Synthesis,” his metallic voice boomed with power despite his hunched metal spine. “And you, Traveler, are a creature from another world.”
