Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

The sphere reeked of cheese when she yawned it at dawn. Ratepe, displaying a healthy sense of self-preservation,

said nothing about the smell.

It was all willpower that morning. The wind streams flowed out of the mountains, not into them. She'd been about to give up and let the sphere drift back to the desert when Ratepe spotted another stone, toppled by age. Xantcha banked the sphere into the valley it seemed to mark. They hadn't been in it long when it doglegged to the right and they saw, in the distance, a saddle-back mountain overshadowing three smaller peaks.

With Mishra's memories to guide them, they had no trouble weaving through the mountain spurs until they came to the cleft and hollowed plateau Urza had named Koilos, the Secret Heart. Xantcha could have sought the higher streams and brought them over the top. She chose to follow the cleft instead and couldn't have said why if Ratepe had asked. But he stayed silent.

Seven thousand years, and the battle scars remained: giant pockings in the cliffs on either side of them, cottage-sized chunks of rubble littering the valley floor. Here and there was a shadow left by fire, not sun. And finally there was the cavern fortress itself, built by the Thran, rediscovered by two brothers, then laid bare during the war: ruins within ruins.

"That's where they hid from the dragons," Ratepe said, pointing to a smaller cave nearly hidden behind a hill of rubble.

"I didn't expect it to be so big."

"Everything's smaller now. Smell anything?"

"Time," Xantcha replied, and not facetiously. The sense of age was everywhere, in the plateau, the cleft which had shattered it, the Thran, and the brothers. But nowhere did she sense Phyrexia.

"You're sure?"

"It will be enough if I know that Gix lied."

Xantcha started up the path to the cavern mouth. Ratepe fell behind as he paused to examine whatever caught his eye. He jogged up the path, catching her just before she entered the shadows. "There's nothing left. I thought for sure there'd be something."

"Urza and I, we're older than forever, Ratepe, and Koilos is older than us."

Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the darkness. Ratepe found the past he was looking for strewn across the stone: hammers and chisels preserved by the cavern itself. He hefted a mallet, its wood dark with age but still sturdy.

"Mishra might have held this."

"In your dreams, Ratepe," Xantcha retorted, unable to conceal her disappointment.

Koilos was big and old but as dead as an airless world. It offered no insights to her about the Thran or the Phyrexians or even about the brothers, no matter how many discarded tools or pots Ratepe eagerly examined.

"We may as well leave," she said when the afternoon was still young and Ratepe had just found a scrap of cloth.

"Leave? We haven't seen everything yet."

"There's no water, and we don't have a lot of food with us, unless you want to try some of that cheese. What's here to see?"

"I don't know. That's why we have to stay. I'm only

halfway around this room, and there's an open passage at the back! And I want to see Koilos by moonlight."

Urza's idea, in the beginning, had been to get her and Ratepe away from the cottage, to give them some time together. Koilos surely wasn't what Urza had in mind, but Ratepe was enjoying himself. Whether they left now or in the morning wasn't going to make much difference in the return trip to Gulmany, and considering what that journey home was going to take out of her, Xantcha decided she could use some rest.

"All right. Wake me at sunset, then."

Xantcha didn't think she'd fall asleep on the stone but she did until Ratepe shook her shoulder.

"Come see. It's really beautiful, in a stark way, like a giant's tomb."

Sunset light flooded through the cavern mouth. Ratepe had stirred enough dust to turn the air into ruddy curtains streaked with shadows. They walked hand in hand to the ledge where the path ended and the cavern began. The hollowed plateau appeared drenched in blood. Xantcha was transfixed by the sight, but Ratepe wanted her to turn around.

"There are carvings everywhere," he said. "They appeared like magic out of the shadows once the sunlight came in."

Xantcha turned and would have collapsed if Ratepe hadn't been holding her. "What's wrong?"

"It's writing, Ratepe. It's writing, and I can read it, most of it. It's like the lessons carved into the walls of the Fane of Flesh." "What does it say?"

"Names. Mostly names and numbers-places. Battles, who fought who... ." Her eyes followed the column carvings. She'd gone cold and scarcely had the strength to fill her lungs. "What names? Any that I'd recognize?"

"Gix," she said, though there was another that she recognized: Yawgmoth, which she didn't-couldn't-say aloud. "And Xantcha, among the numbers." "Phyrexian?" "Thran."

"We know they fought." Ratepe freed his fingers from her death grip.

Xantcha grabbed them again. "No, they didn't fight. Not the Phyrexians against the Thran. The Thran fought themselves." "You can't be reading it right."

"I'm reading it because it's the same writing that's carved in the walls of every Fane in Phyrexia! Some of the words are unfamiliar, but-Ratepe! My name is up there. My name is up there because Xantcha is a number carved in the floor of the Fane of Flesh to mark where I was supposed to stand!" She made the familiar marks in the dust then pointed to similar carvings on the cavern walls.

Ratepe resisted. "All right, maybe this was the Phyrexian stronghold and the Thran attacked it, instead of the other way around. I mean, nobody really knows."

"I know! It says Gix, the silver-something, strong- something of the Thran. Of the Thran, Ratepe. If Urza could go back in time, he'd find Oix here waiting for him. That's what Gix meant! Waste not, want not, Ratepe. Gix was here seven thousand years ago! He wasn't lying, not completely. Those are Thran powerstones that you and Urza call the Mightstone and the Weakstone. The stones made the brothers what they were, Ratepe, and Gix might well have made the

stones!"

"The Phyrexians stole powerstones from the Thran?"

"You're not listening!" Xantcha waved her arms at a heavily carved wall. "It's all there. Two factions. Sheep and pigs, Red-Stripes and Shratta, Urza and Mishra, take your pick. 'The glory and destiny is compleation'compleation, the word, Ratepe, the exact angle-for-angle word that's carved on the doors of the Fane of Flesh. And there." She pointed at another section. " 'Life served, never weakened' and the word Thran, Rat, is the first glyph of the word for life." She recited them in Phyrexian, so he could hear the similarities, as strong as the similarities between their pronunciation of Koilos. "If language drifts in three thousand years, imagine what it could do in seven, once everyone's compleat and only newts have flesh cords in their throats."

The sun had slipped below the mountain tops. The marks, the words, were fading. Xantcha turned in Ratepe's arms to face him.

"He's been wrong. All this time-almost all his lifeUrza's been wrong. The Phyrexians never invaded Dominaria! There was no Phyrexia until Gix and the Ineffable left here. Winners, losers, I can't tell. We knew that. We spent over a thousand years looking for the world where the Phyrexians came from, so we could learn from those who defeated them .. . and all the time, it was Urza's own world."

Xantcha was shaking, sobbing. Ratepe tried to comfort her, but it was too soon.

"Urza would say to me, that's Phyrexian, that's abomination. Only the Thran way is the right way, the pure way. And I always thought to myself, the difference isn't that great. The Phyrexians aren't evil because they're compleat. They'd be evil no matter what they were, and those automata he was making, he was growing them in a jar. Is it right to grow gnats in a jar but not newts in a vat?"