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
between. Tonight, gusty winds were propelling needle-sharp sleet against the shutters.
The room had cooled while she read. Her breath was mist and, with a shivering sigh, Xantcha made her way to the peat bin. There were no trees near the cottage. Her meager garden sprouted a new crop of stones every spring, and the crumbling clods that remained after she'd picked out the stones were better suited for the brazier than for nurturing grains and vegetables. She'd had to scrounge distant forests for her table and shutters. Even now that the cottage was finished, she spent much of her time scrounging the remains of Terisiare for food and rumors.
Shredding a double handful of peat into the brazier beneath the table, Xantcha found, as she often did, the squishy remains of an acorn: a reminder of just how much Urza and his brother had changed their world with their war. When whole, the acorn would have been as large as her fist, and the tree that had dropped it would have had a trunk as broad as the cottage was wide. She crumbed the acorn with the rest and stirred the coals until palpable heat radiated from the iron bucket.
Xantcha forgot the table and hit her head hard as she stood. She sat a moment, rubbing her scalp and muttering curses, until she remembered the candlestick. With a louder curse, she scrabbled to her feet. Waste not, want not, it hadn't toppled. Her book was safe.
She returned to her stool and opened to a random page. Kayla's portrait stared back at her: dusky, sloe-eyed, and seductive. Xantcha owned four illustrated copies of The Antiquity Wars. Each one depicted Kayla differently. Her favorite showed Una's wife as a tall, graceful and voluptuous woman with long blond hair, but