Planeswalker (2 page)

He could have sharpened those memories, his eyes had
that power, but Urza knew better than to make the
suggestion. Loran would sooner die than help him, so they
drank tea, watched a brilliant sunset, then went their
separate ways.

Urza had learned enough. The Thran, the vanished race
who'd inspired his every artifact, had made the sylex, and
the sylex had

saved Dominaria from Phyrexia. Although mysteries
remained, there was symmetry, and Urza had hoped that
symmetry would be enough to halt his dreams. He'd resumed
his planeswalking. It had taken five years-Urza was nothing
if not a determined, even stubborn, man-before he'd
admitted to himself that his hopes were futile. A year ago,
he'd returned to Dominaria, to Argoth itself, which he'd
avoided since the war ended. He'd found the ruined hilltop
where he'd unleashed the land's fury and pain. He'd found
Tawnos's coffin.

Tawnos had spent five years sealed in stasis within the
coffin. For him, it was as if the war hadn't yet ended and
the cataclysm hadn't yet happened. The crisp images on the
surface of Tawnos's awakened mind had been battlefield
chaos, Ashnod's lurid hair, and the demon from Phyrexia.

"... if this thing is here ..." Tawnos had recalled his
erstwhile lover's, onetime torturer's words.

Ashnod's statement had implied, at least to Tawnos and
from him to Urza, that she'd recognized the demon: a man-
tall construction of strutted metal and writhing, segmented

wires. Urza recognized it too-or parts of it. He'd seen
similar wires uncoiled from his brother's flensed body,
attaching Mishra to a dragon engine.

"This one is mine... ." More of Ashnod's sultry words
lying fresh in Tawnos's mind.

Urza's only friend had wanted to argue with Ashnod, to
die beside her. She wouldn't grant him that dubious honor.
Instead she'd given him the sylex.

Tawnos's memories had clouded quickly as he'd absorbed
the vastly changed landscape. While Tawnos had sorted his
thoughts, Urza had looked westward, to the battlefield, now
replaced by ocean.

Ashnod, as treacherous as she'd been beautiful, had
betrayed everyone who fell into her power. Tawnos's back
still bore the scars. Mishra had judged her so unreliable
that he'd banished her, only to let her back for that last
battle.

Or had he?

Had Mishra known Ashnod carried the sylex? Had the
traitor himself been betrayed? Which was the puppet and
which the

master? Why had the demon stalked Ashnod across the
battlefield? What was her connection to Phyrexia?

Urza had wrestled with such questions until Tawnos had
asked his own. "Your brother?"

"Dead," Urza had replied as his questions converged on
a single answer. "Long before I found him."

The words had satisfied Tawnos, who began at once to
talk of other things, of rebuilding the land and restoring
its vitality. Tawnos-dear friend Tawnos-had always been an
optimist. Urza left him standing by the coffin, certain
that they'd never meet again.

For Urza, the realization that he hadn't slain Mishra
with the sylex had given him a sense of peace that had
lasted almost a month, until a new, stronger wave of guilt
had engulfed it. He was the elder brother, charged from
birth with his younger sibling's care.

He'd failed.

When Mishra had need of an elder brother's help, that
elder brother had been elsewhere. He'd failed Mishra and
all of Dominaria. His brother had died alone, betrayed by
Ashnod, transformed by a Phyrexian demon into a hideous
amalgam of flesh and artifice.

Urza had returned to Argoth and Tawnos as the snows had
begun, almost exactly one year ago. He'd denied himself
sleep or shelter, kneeling in the snow, waiting for Mishra,
or death; it hadn't mattered which. But Meshuvel had been
correct: Urza had transcended death, and he'd found, to his
enduring dismay, that he lacked the will for suicide. A
late spring had freed him from his icy prison. He'd stood
up, no weaker than he'd been when he'd knelt down.

The left side of his face had been raw where bitter
tears had leaked from the Weakstone, but it had healed
quickly, within a few moments. He'd walked away with no
marks from his season-long penance.

In his youth, when his wife's realm of Yotia had still
sparkled in the sun, a man named Rusko had told Urza that a
man had many souls throughout his life, and that after
death each soul was judged according to its deeds. Urza had
outlived his souls. The sylex had blasted him out of

judgment's hands. No penance would ever dull the ache of

failure.

All that remained was vengeance.

Urza had spent the spring and summer assuring himself
that Ashnod had not survived. He'd skipped through the
planes, returning after each unreal stride to Dominaria in
search of a woman who was too proud to change her
appearance or her ways. When fall had arrived without a
trace of her, Urza had turned his attention to Koilos,
where he and Mishra had come to manhood pursuing relics of
the Thran.

His immortal memory, he'd discovered, was fallible.
Planes-walking couldn't easily take him to a place he
didn't quite remember. In the end, searching for places
that had faded from memory, he'd been reduced to surveying
vast tracts of barren land from the air, as he and his
brother had surveyed in their youth.

He'd have given his eyes and immortality to have back
just one of those days he and Mishra had spent in Tocasia's
camp.

Sleety wind shot up his sleeves. Urza wasn't immune to
the discomforts of cold, merely to their effects. He
thought of a felted cloak; it spread downward from his
shoulders, thickening as he added a fur lining, then
gloves, fleece-lined boots and a soft-brimmed hat that
didn't move in the wind. He continued along the path
Mishra's workers had left. As before, and despite his new
boots, Urza left no footprints.

With each stride, pain ratcheted through his skull.
This close to the place where they'd been joined for
millennia, his jeweled eyes recalled another purpose.
Hoping to dull the pain, Urza turned his back to the
cavern. His throbbing eyes saw the snow-etched ruins as
shadows painted on gauzy cloth; nothing like the too-real
visions he'd suffered the day he'd acquired the Might-
stone. Then, the shadows expanded and began to move. They
were different from his earlier visions, but not entirely.
Where before he had watched white-robed men constructing
black-metal spiders, now he saw a battlefield swarming with
artifacts, another Argoth but without the demonic disorder.

At first Urza couldn't distinguish the two forces, as
an observer might not have been able to distinguish his
army from Mishra's. But as he looked, the lines of battle
became clear. One side had its back against the cavern and
was fighting for the freedom of the plains beyond the
hollow plateau. The other formed an arc as it emerged from
the narrow defile that was the only way to those plains,
meaning to crush its enemy against the cliffs. Blinding
flashes and plumes of dense smoke erupted everywhere,
testaments to the desperation with which both sides fought.

Urza strained his eyes. One force had to be the Thran,
but which? And what power opposed them?

During the moments that Urza pondered, the defile force
scored a victory. A swarm of their smaller artifacts
stormed the behemoth that anchored the enemy's center. It
went down in a whirlwind of flame that drove both forces
back. The defile force regrouped quicker and took a bite
from the cavern force's precious ground. A mid-guard cadre
from the defile brought rays of white light to bear on the
behemoth's smoldering hulk. Soot rained and the hulk glowed

red.

Caught up in the vision, Urza began to count, "One . .
. two ..."

The hulk's flanks burst, and all-too-familiar segmented
wires uncoiled. Tipped with scythes, the wires slashed
through the defile cadre, winnowing it by half, but too
late. The Thran pow-erstones completed the destruction of
the Phyrexian behemoth.

Millennia after the battle's dust had settled, Urza
clenched his jaws together in a grimly satisfied smile. Ebb
and flow were obvious, now that he'd identified the Thran
and their goal: to drive the Phyrexians into the cavern
where, presumably, they could be annihilated.

It was, as the Argoth battle between him and Mishra had
been, a final battle. Retreat was not an option for the
Phyrexians, and the Thran offered no quarter. Urza lost
interest in his own time as the shadow war continued. The
Phyrexians assembled behind their last behemoth, charged
the Thran line on its right flank and very nearly broke
through. But the Thran held nothing back. As ants might
swarm a fallen bit of fruit, they converged upon the
Phyrexian bulge.

Again, it became impossible to distinguish one force
from the other.

Urza counted to one hundred and ten, by which time
there was no movement within the shadows. When he reached
one-hundred and twelve, the shadows brightened to desert-
noon brilliance. Reflexively, Urza shielded his eyes. When
he lowered his hand, there was only snow. The pain in his
skull was gone. He entered the cavern thoroughly sobered by
what he had seen.

His eyes had recorded the final battle between the
Thran and the Phyrexians. It seemed reasonable to assume
that recording Phyrexian defeats was part of their
function. From that assumption, it was easy to conclude
that the Thran had intended the recording stones as a
warning to all those who came after.

Urza had had a vision when he first touched what became
his Mightstone. He recalled it as he entered the cavern.
Despite his best efforts, the images were dreamlike yet
they strengthened his newborn conviction: The Thran had
vanished because they'd sacrificed themselves to defeat the
Phyrexians.

Within the cavern, Urza gazed up at the rough ceiling.
"We didn't know," he explained to any lingering Thran
ghosts. "We didn't know your language... . We didn't
guess what we couldn't understand."

He knew now. The artifact in which they'd found the
single stone-the artifact that he and Mishra had destroyed
utterly- had been the Thran legacy to Dominaria and the
means through which they'd locked their enemy out of
Dominaria.

"We didn't know...."

When the stone had split into its opposing parts, the
lock had been sprung and the Phyrexians had returned. The
enemy had known better than to approach him, the bearer of
the Mightstone, but they had-they must have-suborned,
corrupted, and destroyed Mishra, who'd had only the
Weakstone for protection. The stones were not, after all,
truly equal. Might was naturally dominant over weakness, as

Urza, the elder brother, should have been dominant over the
younger.

But blinded by an elder brother's prejudice and-admit
it!- jealousy, Urza had done nothing.

No, he'd done worse than nothing. He'd blamed Mishra,
gone to war against Mishra, and undone the Thran sacrifice.

Guilt was a throbbing presence within Urza's skull. He
closed his eyes and clapped his hands over his ears, but
that only made everything worse.

Why hadn't he and Mishra talked?

Through their childhood and youth, he and Mishra had
fought constantly and bitterly before repairing the damage
with conversation. Then, after the stones had entered into
their lives, they hadn't even tried.

Then insight and memory came to Urza. There had been
one time, about forty-five years ago in what could be
called the war's morning hours. They'd come together on the
banks of the river Kor, where it tumbled out of the Kher
mountains. The Yotian warlord, his wife's father, had come
to parley with the qadir of the Fallaji. Urza hadn't seen
or heard from his brother for years. He'd believed that
Mishra was dead, and had been stunned to see him advising
the qadir.

He, Urza-gods and ghosts take note-had suggested that
they should talk, and Mishra had agreed. As Urza recalled
the conversation, Mishra had been reluctant, but that was
his brother's style, petulant and sulky whenever his
confidence was shaken, as surely it would have been shaken
with the Weakstone burden slung around his neck, and the
Phyrexians eating at his conscience.

Surely Mishra would have confessed everything, if the
warlord hadn't taken it into his head to assassinate the
qadir as the parley began.

Urza recalled the carnage, the look on Mishra's face.

Back in Koilos, in the first snows of the fifth winter
after the cataclysm, Urza staggered and eased himself to
the ground. For a few moments the guilt was gone, replaced
by a cold fury that reached across time to the warlord's
neck. It was YOUR fault.' Your fault! But the warlord
shrugged him away. He was your brother, not mine.

If the Phyrexians had not taken Mishra's soul before
that day on the banks of the Kor, they had surely had no
difficulty afterward.

The blame, then, was Urza's, and there was nothing he
could do to ease his conscience, except, as always, in
vengeance against the Phyrexians. For once, Urza was in the
right place. Koilos was where the Thran had stopped the
Phyrexians once and where his own ignorance had given the
enemy a second chance. If there was a way to Phyrexia, it
was somewhere within Koilos.

Urza left tracks in the dust as he searched for a sign.

The sun had set. Koilos was tomb dark. Urza's eyes made
their own light, revealing a path, less dusty than any
other, that led deep into the cavern's heart. He found a
chamber ringed with burnt-out powerstones. Two sooty lines
were etched on the sandstone floor. Marks that might have
been Thran glyphs showed faintly between the lines. Urza
used his eyes to scour the spot, but the glyphs-if glyphs
they were-remained illegible.

He cursed and knelt before the lines. This was the