Zeth awoke, alone, in a room of hideously smooth and slimy metal. He was naked. He was cold. He was afraid.
How had they captured him? his camp was hidden so well and so deep in the furnace. Why had they captured him? Why not dip him in that Glistening Oil and be done with it? Was this torture? An experiment? Perhaps this was all in his head, a mental prison as a Phyrexian slave wandered around in his mutilated body.
Escape quickly became his singular goal. He searched the room for hours trying to find any sign of an exit. After what must’ve been a day straight of hopeless searching, the walls seemed to breathe A gas filled the room, was this it? His death, why the…why the…unconsciousness overtook him before he could finish the thought.
When he awoke again, the burgeoning sense of hunger he had felt was gone, though, in its place he felt anemic he was still in the room, this hideous, horrid room. But the air smelled different now. Was it leftover from the gas? This time, he did not scour the cell for an exit, too little hope remained for that. Most of him wanted to just curl up and die, but his adrenal gland thought differently. He charged and thrashed at the walls for hours more until the walls began to breathe again.
Awake again, a sense of disgust immediately filled him with panic. They’d coated him in something some gross pulsating this that had latched itself onto him. He screams and clawed at it, he clawed at it and clawed at it, working to free his arms first. Hours later, his hands full of oozing chunks. He came to the realization:
oh,
oh,
It was his skin.
They had made him hate his skin tear at it, ignore the pain, and…it wasn’t that part that disgusted him, it was the fact that now, having ripped half the skin from his body, that part of him felt proud.
The man awoke to a beautiful room of blessed metal. He hated it. He could feel the scars on his head, where they had probed him and forced him to love this rotten husk of life. They had taken his name while they were in there too.
The man thought it was strange they had left him resistance, or perhaps leaving hope after the lobotomy was yet more torture, they wanted him to forsake it willingly. But why? Why go through all this for one pathetic piece of weak, mortal flesh? Why have they not baptized him in oil? What was the purpose of this glorious experiment?
The experiment awoke, pleased to see the wondrous cell he had been blessed with. The holy metals and rot that signaled that he—it, it was part of the Great Work. It looked down at itself.
Ah, at last, the oily metal outmatched the putrid skin. At last, he was Phyrexian. And as this final realization overtook the experiment, something in it faded and died.
____________
Outside experiment cell five, two Gitaxian test-preists languished in their failure.
“The trait failed to make the transition to purity” One observed.
“Indeed, the exact moment at which it is unsalvageable continues to elude us.”
“Finding another heretic that has the trait will take time.”
“Have the others not yet found it’s relation to other traits?” One tilted its head.
“No, the trait appear to be Extra-aetheral, as opposed to encoded in their biology, it’s position is uncertain.”
“Then the tests must continue. Jin-Gitaxis demands a Phyrexian capable of spreading our gospel beyond this realm, to deny him this would be the highest heresy”