Xantcha wasn't a name, not as she later came to understood names. When Urza had asked, she had explained that Xantcha was the place where she stood when newts were assembled for instruction, the place where she received her food, and the box where she slept at night.
If days or nights had played a part in her early life.
Phyrexia was a world without sun, moon, or stars. Deep in the Fane of Flesh, priests called out the march of time:
when she learned, when she ate, when she slept; there was no time for rest, no place for companionship. When she was returned to her box for sleeping, Xantcha dreamed of sunlight, grass and wind. She might have thought it strange that her mind held images of a place so clearly not Phyrexia, if she'd thought at all.
Even now, more than three millennia after her first awakenings, Xantcha didn't know if she'd been the only newt who'd dreamed of a green, sunlit world, or if the Ineffable had commanded the same dreams and longings for every newt that learned beside her.
You are newts, and newts you will remain, the teacher- priests had taught her. You are destined to sleep in another place and prepare the way for those who will follow. Listen and obey.
There were many other newts in the Fane of Flesh, organized into cadres and marched together through their educations. All newts began the same way, with meat and bones and blood-filled veins, then-according to their place in the Ineffable's design- tender-priests excised their flesh and reshaped their bodies with tough amalgams of metal and oil, until they were compleated. After each reshaping, the priests sent the excised flesh and blood to the renderers; eventually it was returned it to the vats. When the newt was fully reshaped, the tenders immersed it in the glistening oil; a Phyrexian's first time in the great fountain outside the Fane of Flesh. When it emerged, the newt was compleat and took its destined place in the Ineffable's grand plan for Phyrexia.
Xantcha remembered standing in her place on a Fane balcony, as fully reshaped newts were carried to the fountain. She remembered the cacophony as newly compleated Phyrexians emerged into the glare and glow of the Fourth Sphere furnaces. To the extent that any newt felt hope, it hoped for a good compleation, a privileged place. The knowledge that she would be forever bound in a newt's body was greater pain than any punishment the priests ever lashed across her back.
Hatred had no place in Phyrexia. Contempt replaced hatred and looked down on the special newts, whose destiny was to sleep in another place. Xantcha looked forward to the moments when she was alone in her box with her dreams.
Once she went to sleep, dreamed her dreams, as she'd always done, and awoke beneath the bald, gray sky of the First Sphere. There were different teacher-priests tending her cadre. The new priests were larger than those in the Fane of Flesh. More metal than leather, they had four feet and four arms. Their feet were clawed, and each of their arms ended in a different metal weapons. They were supposed to protect the newts from the dangers of the First Sphere. Newts had never dwelt on the First Sphere, but the four- armed teachers were not honored by their new responsibilities. They obeyed their orders without enthusiasm, until one of the newts made a mistake.
Newts you are, and newts you shall remain forever, they'd recite as they dealt out punishment with one hand after the other. You are destined to sleep on another world. Now learn the ways of another world. Listen and obey.
Xantcha wondered what would have happened if she'd
failed to listen or obey. At the time, the notion simply didn't occur to her. Life on the First Sphere was hard enough without disobedience. The newts were taught farming, in preparation for the day when their destiny would be fulfilled, but the slippery dirt of the First Sphere resisted their every effort. The plows, sickles, hoes, and pitchforks that they were commanded to use left their muscles aching. The whiplike, razor-grass-the only plant they could grow-slashed them bloody, and the harsh light blistered their skin mercilessly.
Xantcha remembered another newt, Gi'anzha; whose place was near hers in the cadre. Gi'anzha had used a grass sheaf to hack off its arm, then shoved a pitchfork shaft into the bloody socket. Gi'anzha was meat by the time they found it, but Xantcha and the other newts understood why it had done what it had.
Newts were small and fragile compared to everything else that dwelt on the First Sphere. Their uncompleated bodies suffered injuries rather than malfunctions. They could not be repaired but were left to heal as best they could, which sometimes wasn't good enough. Failed newts- meat newts-were whisked back to the Fourth Sphere for rendering. Waste not, want not, nothing in Phyrexia was completely without use, though meat was reviled by the compleat, who'd transcended their flesh and were sustained by glistening oil.
As her cadre was reduced to meat, Xantcha's place within it changed. Another newt should have been Xantcha, she should have become G'xi'kzi or Kra'tzin, but too much time had passed since the vat-priests had organized the cadre. The patterns of their minds were as fixed as those of their soft, battered bodies. Xantcha she was, and Xantcha she remained, even when the cadre had shrunk so much that the priests alloyed it with another, similarly depleted group.
Xantcha found herself face-to-face with another Xantcha. For both of them, it was... confusion. The word scarcely existed in Phyrexia, except to describe the clots of slag and ash that accumulated beneath the great furnaces. Together they consulted the priests, as newts were trained to do. The priests judged that as a result of the recombination, neither of them truly stood in the spot of Xantcha. The alloyed cadre's Xantcha was a third newt, who thought of itself as Hoz'krin and wanted no part of this Xantcha confusion. Xantcha and Xantcha were each told to recognize new places within the alloyed cadre or face the lash.
Lash or no, the priests' judgment was not acceptable. Places had become names that could not be surrendered, even under the threat of punishment. The Xantchas stayed awake when they should have slept in their boxes. They slipped away from the priests and spoke to each other privately. Meeting in private with another newt was something neither had done before. They negotiated and they compromised, though there were no Phyrexian words for either process. They agreed to make themselves unique. Xantcha broke off a blade of the razor-sharp grass and hacked off the hair growing on the left side of her skull. The other Xantcha soaked its hair in an acid stream until it turned orange.
They had rebelled-a word as forbidden as the
Ineffable's true name and almost as feared. Only the tender-priests could change a newt's shape and only according to the Ineffable's plan. When the Xantchas returned to the place where their cadre gathered for food and sleep, the other newts gaped and turned away, as the teacher-priests came rumbling and clanking from the perimeter.
Xantcha had taken the other newt's flesh-fingered hand. Thirty-three hundred Dominarian years afterward, Xantcha knew that the touch of flesh was a language unto itself, a language that Phyrexia had forgotten. At the time, the gesture had confused the priests utterly and left them spinning in their tracks.
Not long after, the bald, gray sky had brightened painfully.
Xantcha had recalled her heart and the vat-priests' threat: too many mistakes and the Ineffable would seize her heart. Until the other Xantcha had tumbled into her life, she'd made less than her share of the cadre's mistakes, but perhaps one mistake, if it were great enough, was enough to rouse the Ineffable.