She started to say that she couldn't see anything changing and swallowed the words. Shadows were growing in the Koilos chamber. Not shadows cast by the web's light, but shadows cast by time, growing more substantial as each moment passed. Metal columns grew along the walls. Great machines, worthy of Phyrexia, loomed up from the floor.
Beneath the widest part of the light-woven spindle a low platform came into being. Mirrors sprang up in a circle behind both Gix and Urza, behind Xantcha and Ratepe, as well. An object similar to Avohir's great book, but made from metal like Urza's staff, grew atop the platform. As Xantcha watched, Phyrexian glyphs formed on the smooth metal leaves.
Xantcha was waiting for those glyphs to become legible when dull-colored metal sprang out of the central platform. The metal shaped itself into four rising prongs, like uplifted hands.
"His eyes, Xantcha! His eyes! They're going back. Gix is dragging them back through time!"
The Weakstone and the Mightstone had pulled out of Urza's skull and were advancing through the spindle. Gix had said, The Thran are waiting.... And when the powerstones merged into the prongs, Urza would be in the hands of the Thran. Ratepe shouted, "We can stop them." "No." "We can!"
"Not if you're getting influence from the Weakstone. It's Thran. It belongs to Gix. No wonder he was waiting here." Xantcha would have sobbed, if the armor had let her.
"We can stop this, Xantcha. Gix is sending the powerstones into the past. All we have to do is get there first."
Xantcha shook her head-never mind that she couldn't see Ratepe. "That's the Weakstone influencing you," she shouted. "Gix. Phyrexia." Her gut said anything she did would only make things worse, if anything could be worse than watching Urza become a tool of the Phyrexian Thran. She was paralyzed, frightened as she had never been before- except, perhaps, at the very beginning when the vat-priests told the newts Listen, and obey. "Meet me in the light, Xantcha!"
On the other side of the spindle, Ratepe thrust his hands into the web. From Xantcha's side, looking into the spindle, his flesh had become transparent and his bones gleamed with golden light.
"Now, Xantcha!"
The powerstones had traveled half the distance to the prongs. The etched-metal glyphs were legible, if she could
have concentrated and read them. She walked to the right place, the place opposite Ratepe, then hugged herself tightly, tucking her hands beneath her arms, lest she move without thinking.
"I need to be sure!" she shouted.
"Be sure that Gix wants the Weakstone and Mightstone, not you and me. At least we can give him what he doesn't want. It's all we've got to give."
Xantcha reached for the spindle. The light repelled Urza's armor. A good omen or a bad one? For whom? She didn't know and tucked her hands beneath her arms again.
"I can't, Ratepe. I'm Phyrexian. I can't trust myself. I'm always wrong."
The powerstones were three-quarters of the way. The devices beyond the ring of mirrors thrummed to life.
"I'm not! And I'm never wrong about you. Meet me in the light, Xantcha. We're going to end the war."
Xantcha shed her armor and thrust her hands into the spindle.
Begone! Listen and obey. Begone! Do not interfere.
The demon's anger, roaring through Xantcha's mind could have been deception. Gix should have known that she would, in the end, disobey his command, in which case Gix had outwitted them all and wanted her to reach into the light. But, on the chance that he wasn't quite that imaginative, Xantcha extended her arms to their fullest reach.
Time and space changed around her. She'd left her body behind. To the right, the Weakstone and the Mightstone, two great glowing spheres, rolling toward her, fighting, losing. To the left was the unspeakable, blood-red maw of Gix, calling the stones, sucking them to their doom.
Straight ahead stood Ratepe, son of Mideah, with a radiant smile and outstretched arms.
Their fingers touched.
Gix turned his wrath on her and on Ratepe. It was the last thing the demon did. Xantcha felt the stones free themselves to destroy the enemy they'd been created to destroy.
As for her and Ratepe, they were together.
Nothing else mattered.
And Rat's face, joyous as they embraced, was a glorious sight to carry into the darkness.
For Urza, the battle had ended suddenly, in a matter of moments and without easy explanation. One moment Mishra and Xantcha had been blocking the light, arms outstretched and reaching toward each other, not him. The next moment-less than a moment-a fireball had filled the lower chamber. Once again his eyes had lifted him out of death's closing fist. His Thran eyes had guarded this cavern for four thousand years before he and his brother found them, and they still preferred to see it in its glory, filled with engines, artifacts and powerstone mirrors.
Or should he say his Phyrexian eyes?
It scarcely mattered. Urza's borrowed eyes preserved him as the fireball raged like a short-lived sun.
The sun-ball consumed itself... quickly, Urza thought, though he remembered Argoth and that the time he'd
spent completely within the powerstones could not be measured. As his eyes recorded it, there was fire and then the fire was gone, two edges of the cut made by an infinitely sharp knife, without a gap between them.
There'd been no visions, as there had been the other times when the Mightstone and Weakstone had held him in their power. No explanations, however cryptic. Nothing, except a dusty voice that said, It is over. He had a sense, much less than a vision, that Mishra had grasped Xantcha's hand just before the explosion consumed them.
In the aftermath silence reigned. A natural silence: Urza wasn't deaf, but there was nothing left to hear. Urza thought light, and it flowed outward from him.
"Xantcha," he called, because he'd been without his brother before.
Her name echoed off the chamber's scorched walls. He was alone.
At the end, she'd chosen Mishra, charming, lively Mishra.
Urza wished them joy, wherever they'd gone. He wished them peace, far away from any Phyrexian or Thran design. They had earned peace, vanquishing their shared enemy: Gix.
The demon had vanished within the powerstone-derived fireball. There was nothing left. Urza's eyes told him that. He could hear them now, faint and smug in his skull.
The truth was written on the upper chamber ceiling. The Thran had fought among themselves, fought as only brothers could fight, with a blindness that transcended hatred. Remembering the battle the Weakstone and Mightstone had shown him the last time he'd come to Koilos, Urza realized he truly did not know which army had escaped to Phyrexia, if, indeed, Xantcha's Ineffable hadn't slipped away to create Phyrexia before that fatal day.
Standing in the Koilos cavern, Urza concluded that he'd have to continue his experiments with time because he'd have to go back himself, not to a moment in his own lifetime, but to the Thran, Gix and all the others. ...
"Not yet," Urza cautioned himself.
This would be a cunning war. Gix was still extant in the past; Yawgmoth and the other Phyrexians were in the past, the present, and the future, too. The battle-the real and final battle for Dom-inaria-had, in a sense, just begun. It would be fought in the past and in the future.
And Urza would have no allies, none at alclass="underline" not Tawnos, not Mishra.
Urza recalled light and moved along the blackened corridor to the surface. No real body. No real need for light, or anything else.
A weight tugged against him.
Xantcha's heart, which the powerstones, his eyes, had preserved.
He wasn't alone.
Urza would never be alone.