Lynn Abbey: Planeswalker

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.