Planeswalker

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

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-thansteel
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.