Planeswalker (42 page)

As for her and Ratepe, they were together.

Nothing else mattered.

And Rat's face, joyous as they embraced, was a glorious
sight to carry into the darkness.

For Urza, the battle had ended suddenly, in a matter of
moments and without easy explanation. One moment Mishra and
Xantcha had been blocking the light, arms outstretched and
reaching toward each other, not him. The next moment-less
than a moment-a fireball had filled the lower chamber. Once
again his eyes had lifted him out of death's closing fist.
His Thran eyes had guarded this cavern for four thousand
years before he and his brother found them, and they still
preferred to see it in its glory, filled with engines,
artifacts and powerstone mirrors.

Or should he say his Phyrexian eyes?

It scarcely mattered. Urza's borrowed eyes preserved
him as the fireball raged like a short-lived sun.

The sun-ball consumed itself... quickly, Urza
thought, though he remembered Argoth and that the time he'd

spent completely within the powerstones could not be
measured. As his eyes recorded it, there was fire and then
the fire was gone, two edges of the cut made by an
infinitely sharp knife, without a gap between them.

There'd been no visions, as there had been the other
times when the Mightstone and Weakstone had held him in
their power. No explanations, however cryptic. Nothing,
except a dusty voice that said, It is over. He had a sense,
much less than a vision, that Mishra had grasped Xantcha's
hand just before the explosion consumed them.

In the aftermath silence reigned. A natural silence:
Urza wasn't deaf, but there was nothing left to hear. Urza
thought light, and it flowed outward from him.

"Xantcha," he called, because he'd been without his
brother before.

Her name echoed off the chamber's scorched walls. He
was alone.

At the end, she'd chosen Mishra, charming, lively
Mishra.

Urza wished them joy, wherever they'd gone. He wished
them peace, far away from any Phyrexian or Thran design.
They had earned peace, vanquishing their shared enemy: Gix.

The demon had vanished within the powerstone-derived
fireball. There was nothing left. Urza's eyes told him
that. He could hear them now, faint and smug in his skull.

The truth was written on the upper chamber ceiling. The
Thran had fought among themselves, fought as only brothers
could fight, with a blindness that transcended hatred.
Remembering the battle the Weakstone and Mightstone had
shown him the last time he'd come to Koilos, Urza realized
he truly did not know which army had escaped to Phyrexia,
if, indeed, Xantcha's Ineffable hadn't slipped away to
create Phyrexia before that fatal day.

Standing in the Koilos cavern, Urza concluded that he'd
have to continue his experiments with time because he'd
have to go back himself, not to a moment in his own
lifetime, but to the Thran, Gix and all the others. ...

"Not yet," Urza cautioned himself.

This would be a cunning war. Gix was still extant in
the past; Yawgmoth and the other Phyrexians were in the
past, the present, and the future, too. The battle-the real
and final battle for Dom-inaria-had, in a sense, just
begun. It would be fought in the past and in the future.

And Urza would have no allies, none at all: not Tawnos,
not Mishra.

Urza recalled light and moved along the blackened
corridor to the surface. No real body. No real need for
light, or anything else.

A weight tugged against him.

Xantcha's heart, which the powerstones, his eyes, had
preserved.

He wasn't alone.

Urza would never be alone.

Document ID: e2ac1ac7-6bf7-1014-9ed0-94c72cb8e997

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Document creation date: 06.06.2008

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