Lynn Abbey - Artifact Cycle 2 - Planeswalker

LYNN ABBEY

"PLANESWALKER"

(Magic: the Gathering. Artifact cycle. Book II.)

CHAPTER 1

A man descended.

His journey had begun in the clouds, riding the winds

in search of a place remembered but no longer known. He'd

found the place, as he'd found it before, by following the

ancient glyphs an ancient folk had carved into the land,

glyphs that had endured millennia of neglect and the

cataclysmic finale of the Brothers' War five years ago.

Much of Terisiare had vanished in the cataclysm,

reduced to dust by fratricidal hatred. That dust still

swirled overhead. Everyone coughed and harvests were

sparse, but the sunsets and sunrises were magnificent

luminous streaks of amber reaching across the sky, seeking

escape from a ruined world.

The brothers in whose names the war had been fought had

been reduced to curses: By Urza's whim and Mishra's might,

may you rot forever beneath the forests of sunken Argoth.

Rumors said that Urza had caused the cataclysm when he

used Lat Nam sorcery to fuel his final, most destructive,

artifact. Others said that the cataclysm was Mishra's curse

as he died with Urza's hands clasped around his throat. A

few insisted that Urza had survived his crimes. Within a

year of the cataclysm, all the rumors had merged in an

increasingly common curse: If I met Urza on the road, I'd

cripple him with my own two hands, as he and his brother

crippled us, then I'd leave him for the rats and vultures

as he left Mishra.

Urza had survived. He'd heard the curse in its infinite

variations. After nearly five years in self-chosen exile,

the erstwhile Lord Protector of the Realm had spent another

year walking amongst the folk of blasted Terisiare: the

dregs of Yotia, the survivors of Argive, the tattered, the

famished, the lame, the disheartened. No one had recognized

him. Few had known him, even in the glory days. Urza had

never been one to harangue his troops with rhetoric. He'd

been an inventor, a scholar, an artificer such as the world

had not seen since the Thran, and all he'd ever wanted was

to study in peace. He'd had that peace once, near the

beginning, and lost it, as he'd lost everything, to the

man-the abomination-his brother had become.

A handful of Urza's students had survived the

cataclysm. They'd denounced their master, and Urza hadn't

troubled them with a visit. Urza's wife, Kayla Bin-Kroog

had survived, too. She now dwelt in austere solitude with

her grandson, writing an epic she called The Antiquity

Wars. Urza hadn't visited her either. Kayla alone might

have recognized him, and he had no words for her. As for

her grandson, Jarsyl, black-haired and stocky, charming,

amiable and quick-witted . . . Urza had glimpsed the young

man just once, and that had been one time too many. His

descent continued.

Urza had not wanted to return to this place where the

war had, in a very real sense, begun nearly fifty years

earlier. He wasn't ashamed of what he'd done to end the

war. Filling the bowl-shaped sylex with his memories had

been an act of desperation; the sylex itself had been a

sudden, suspect gift, and until that day he'd neither

studied nor practiced sorcery. He hadn't known what using

the sylex would do, but the war had had to be stopped. The

thing his brother had become had to be stopped, else

Terisiare's fate would have been worse. Much worse.

No, Urza would not apologize, but he was not pleased by

his own survival.

Urza should have died when the sylex emptied. He

suspected that he had died, but the powerstones over which

he and his brother had contended had preserved him. When

Urza had awakened, the two Thran jewels had become his

eyes. All Thran devices had been powered by such faceted

stones, but his Might-stone and Mishra's Weakstone had been

as different from ordinary powerstones as a candle to the

sun.

Once rejoined within Urza's skull, the Thran jewels had

restored him to his prime. He had no need for food or rest,

though he continued to sleep because a man needed dreams

even when he no longer needed rest. And his new eyes gave

him vision that reached around dark corners into countless

other worlds.

Urza believed that in time the battered realms of

Terisiare would recover, even thrive, but he had not wished

to watch that excruciatingly slow process, and so he'd

walked away. For five years after the sylex-engendered

cataclysm, Urza had explored the 'round-the-corner worlds

his faceted eyes revealed.

In one such world he'd met another traveler, a woman

named Meshuvel who'd confirmed what he'd already guessed:

He'd lost his mortality the day he destroyed Mishra. The

blast had slain him, and the Thran powerstones had brought

him back to life because he was-had always been-a

planeswalker, like Meshuvel herself.

Meshuvel explained to Urza that the worlds he'd visited

were merely a handful of the infinite planes of the

multiverse, any of which could be explored and exploited by

an immortal planeswalker. She taught Urza to change his

shape at will and to comprehend thought without the

inconvenience of language or translation. But even among

planeswalkers Urza was unique. For all her knowledge,

Meshuvel couldn't see the multiverse as Urza saw it. Her

eyes were an ordinary brown, and she'd never heard of the

Thran. Meshuvel could tell Urza nothing about his eyes,

except that she feared them; and feared them so much that

she tried to snare him in a time pit. When that failed, she

fled the plane where they'd been living.

Urza had thought about pursuing Meshuvel, more from

curiosity than vengeance, but the plane she'd called

Dominaria-the plane where he'd been born, the plane he'd

nearly destroyed- kept its claws in his mind. Five years

after the cataclysm, Dominaria had pulled him home.

Urza's descent ended on a wind-eroded plateau. Clouds

thickened, turned gray. Cold wind, sharp with ice and dust,

plastered long strands of ash-blond hair across Urza's

eyes. Winter had come earlier than Urza had expected,

another unwelcome gift from the sylex. A few more days and

the glyphs would have been buried until spring.

Four millennia ago, the Thran had transformed the

plateau into a fortress, an isolated stronghold wherein

they'd made their final stand. Presumably, it once had a

name; perhaps the glyphs proclaimed it still, but no one

had cracked that enigmatic code, and no one cracked it that

afternoon. Urza's jeweled eyes gave him no insight into

their makers' language. Fifty years ago, in his natural

youth, Urza and his brother had named the great cavern

within the plateau Koilos, and Koilos it remained.

Koilos had been ruins then. Now the ruins were

themselves ruined, but not merely by the sylex. The

brothers and their war had wrought this damage, plundering

the hollow plateau for Thran secrets, Thran powerstones.

In truth, Urza had expected worse. Mishra had held this

part of Terisiare for most of the war, and it it pleased

Urza to believe that his brother's allies had been more

destructive than his own allies had been. In a dusty corner

of his heart, Urza knew that had he been able to ravage

Koilos, even the shadows would have been stripped from the

stones, but Mishra's minions had piled their rubble neatly,

almost reverently. Their shredded tents still flapped in

the rising wind. Looking closer, Urza realized they'd left

suddenly and without their belongings, summoned, perhaps,

to Argoth, as Urza had summoned his followers for that

final battle five years earlier.

Urza paused on the carefully excavated path. He closed

his eyes and shuddered as memories flooded his mind.

He and Mishra had fought from the beginning in a sunlit

Argive nursery. How could they not, when he was the eldest

by less than a year and Mishra was the brother everyone

liked better?

Yet they'd been inseparable, so keenly aware of their

differences that they'd come to rely on the other's

strengths. Urza never learned the arts of friendship or

affection because he'd had Mishra between him and the rest

of the world.

And Mishra? What had he given Mishra? What had Mishra

ever truly needed from him?

"How long?" Urza asked the wind in a whisper that was

both rage and pain. "When did you first turn away from me?"

Urza reopened his eyes and resumed his trek. He left no

footprints in the dust and snow. Nothing distracted him.

The desiccated corpse propped against one tent pole wasn't

worth a second glance, despite the metal plates rusting on

its brow or the brass pincers replacing its left arm. Urza

had seen what his brother had become; it wasn't surprising

to him that Mishra's disciples were similarly grotesque.

His faceted eyes peered into darkness, seeing nothing.

Now, that was a surprise, and a disappointment. Urza

had expected insight the way a child expects a present on

New Year's morning. Disappoint Mishra and you'd have gotten

a summer tantrum: loud, violent and quickly passed.

Disappoint Urza and Urza got cold and quiet, like ice,

until he'd thawed through the problem.

After four thousand years had they plundered the last

Thran powerstone? Exposed the last artifact? Was there

nothing left for his eyes to see?

A dull blue glint caught Urza's attention. He wrenched

a palm-sized chunk of metal free from the rocks and rubble.

Immediately it moved in his hand, curving back on itself.

It was Thran, of course. An artificer of Urza's skill

didn't need jeweled eyes to recognize that ancient

craftsmanship. Only the Thran had known how to forge a sort

of sentience between motes of metal.

But Urza saw the blue-gray metal more clearly than ever

before. With time, the right tools, the right reagents, and

a bit of luck, he might be able to decipher its secrets.

Then, acting without deliberate thought, as he very rarely

did, Urza drove his right thumbnail into the harder-than-

steel surface. He thought of a groove, a very specific

groove that matched his nail. When he lifted his thumb, the

groove was in the metal and remained as he slowly counted

to ten.

"I see it. Yes, I see it. So simple, once it can be

seen."

Urza thought of Mishra, spoke to Mishra. No one else,

not even his master-student, Tawnos, could have grasped the

shifting symmetries his thoughts had imposed on the ancient

metal.

"As if it had been your thumb," Urza conceded to the

wind. Impulse, like friendship, had been Mishra's gift.

Urza could almost see him standing there, brash and

brilliant and not a day over eighteen. An ice crystal died

in Urza's lashes. He blinked and saw Mishra's face, slashed

and tattered, hanging by flesh threads in the cogs of a

glistening engine.

"Phyrexia!" he swore and hurled the shard into the

storm.

It bounced twice, ringing like a bell, then vanished.

"Phyrexia!"

He'd learned that word five years ago, the very day of

the cataclysm, when Tawnos had brought him the sylex.

Tawnos had gotten the bowl from Ashnod and, for that reason

alone, Urza would have cast it aside. But he'd fought

Mishra once already that fateful day. For the first time,

Urza had poured himself into his stone, the Mightstone, and

if his brother had been a man, his brother would have died.

But Mishra had no longer been a man; he hadn't died, and

Urza needed whatever help fate offered.

In those chaotic moments, as their massed war engines

turned on one another, there'd been no time to ask

questions or consider implications. Urza believed Mishra

had transformed himself into a living artifact, and that

abominable act had justified the sylex. It was after, when

there was no one left to ask, that the questions had

surfaced.

Tawnos had mentioned a demon-a creature from Phyrexia-

that had ambushed him and Ashnod. Never mind the

circumstances that had brought Urza's only friend and his

brother's treacherous lieutenant together on the Argoth

battlefield. Tawnos and Ashnod had been lovers once, and

love, other than an abstract devotion to inquiry or

knowledge, meant very little to Urza. Ask instead, what was

a Phyrexian doing in Argoth? Why had it usurped all the

artifacts, his and Mishra's? Then, ask a final question,

what had he or Mishra to do with Phyrexia that its demon

had become their common enemy?

Some exotic force-some Phyrexian force-had conspired

against them. Wandering, utterly alone across the ruins of

Terisiare, there had seemed no other explanation.

In the end, in the forests of Argoth, only the sylex

had prevented a Phyrexian victory.

Within a year of the cataclysm, Urza had tracked the

sylex back through Ashnod's hands to a woman named Loran,

whom he'd met in his youth. Though Loran had studied the

Thran with him and Mishra under the tutelage of the

archeologist Tocasia, she'd turned away from artifice and

become a scholar in the ivory towers of Teresia City, a

witness of the land-based power the sylex had unleashed.

The residents of Terisia City had sacrificed half their

number to keep the bowl out of his or Mishra's hands. Half

hadn't been enough. Loran had lost the sylex and the use of

her right arm to Ashnod's infamous inquiries, but the rest

of her had survived. Urza had approached Loran warily,

disguised as a woman who'd lost her husband and both her

sons in what he bitterly described as "the brothers' cursed

folly."

Loran was a competent sage and a better person than

Urza hoped to be, but she was no match for his jeweled

eyes. As she'd heated water on a charcoal brazier, he'd

stolen her memories.

The sylex, of course, was gone, consumed by the forces

it had released, and Loran's memory of it was imperfect.

That was Ashnod's handiwork. The torturer had taken no

chances with her many victims. Loran recalled a copper bowl

incised with Thran glyphs Urza had forgotten until he saw

them again in Loran's memory. Some of the glyphs were sharp

enough that he'd recognize them if he saw them again, but

most were blurred.

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

place, it had to be the very place, where the Phyrexians

had entered Domi-naria. There could be no doubt. Looking

straight ahead, past the lines and the exhausted

powerstones, there was a crystal reliquary atop a waist-

high pyramid. The reliquary was broken and empty, but the

pyramid presented an exquisitely painted scene to Urza's

glowing eyes: the demon he had seen in Tawnos's memory.

Circling the pyramid, Urza saw two other demonic

portraits and a picture of the chamber itself with a black

disk rising between the etched lines. He tore the chamber

apart, looking for the disk-either its substance or the

switch that awakened it- and not for the first time in his

life, Urza failed.

When Urza walked among the multiverse of planes, he

began his journey wherever he happened to be and ended it

with an act of will or memory. He realized that the

Phyrexians had used another way, but it lay beyond his

comprehension, as did the plane from which they'd sprung.

The multiverse was vast beyond measure and filled with

uncountable planes. With no trail or memory to guide him,

Urza was a sailor on a becalmed sea, beneath a clouded sky.

He had no notion which way to turn.

"I am immortal. I will wander the planes until I find

their home, however long and hard the journey, and I will

destroy them as they destroyed my brother."

CHAPTER 2

"Nearly five years after Argoth was destroyed and the

war between the brothers had ended, Tawnos came to my

courtyard. He told me much that I had never known, much

that I have written here. He told me that my husband was

dead and that he'd died with my name on his lips. It is a

pretty thought, and I would like to believe it, but I am

not certain that Urza died and, if he did, he would have

died calling to Mishra, not me."

Xantcha lightly brushed her fingertips over brittle

vellum before closing her tooled-leather cover of The

Antiquity Wars. It was the oldest among her copies of Kayla

Bin-Kroog's epic history, and the scribe who'd copied and

translated it nearly twelve hundred years earlier claimed

he'd had Kayla's original manuscript in front of him.

Xantcha had her doubts, if not about the scribe's honesty,

then about his gullibility.

Not that either mattered. For a tale that had no heroes

and a very bitter ending, The Antiquity Wars had been very

carefully preserved for nearly three and a half millennia.

It was as if everyone still heeded the warning in Kayla's

opening lines: "Let this, the testament of Kayla Bin-Kroog,

the last of Yotia, serve as memory, so that our mistakes

will never be repeated."

Xantcha stared beyond the table. On a good night, the

window would have been open and she could have lost her

thoughts in the stars twinkling above the isolated cottage,

but Dominaria hadn't completely recovered from the

unnatural ice age had that followed the Brothers' War.

Clear nights were rare on Xantcha's side of the Ohran

Ridge, where the cottage was tucked into a crease of land,

where the grass ended and the naked mountains began. Mostly

the weather was cool or cold, damp or wet, or something in

Lynn Abbey - Artifact Cycle 2 - Planeswalker

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: