Urza Returns to Koilos After the Brothers War
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Chapter 1 drops us right into Urza’s headspace, and honestly, it’s a rough place to be.
A Man Descends
Five years after the Brothers’ War ended and the sylex blast shattered Argoth, Urza is back on Dominaria. He’s spent the time since the cataclysm exploring other planes. He met another planeswalker named Meshuvel, who taught him to shapeshift and confirmed what he already suspected: the sylex blast killed him, and the Thran powerstones brought him back because he was always a planeswalker.
But Meshuvel feared his eyes. She tried to trap him in a time pit and then ran. That’s the kind of effect Urza has on people.
Dominaria pulled him back. The dust from the cataclysm still swirls in the sky. Harvests are thin. People use the brothers’ names as curses. “If I met Urza on the road, I’d cripple him with my own two hands.” Nobody recognizes him though. He walked among the survivors for a year. Just watching.
The Weight of Memory
Lynn Abbey does something really smart in this chapter. She gives us Urza’s internal monologue, and it’s all guilt. Layer after layer of it.
He visited Kayla Bin-Kroog, his ex-wife, but didn’t reveal himself. She was writing The Antiquity Wars. He saw her grandson Jarsyl once and couldn’t handle it. He tracked down a woman named Loran who had studied under Tocasia with him and Mishra, and stole her memories over tea. Just casually violated her mind to learn about the sylex. Then they watched a sunset and went their separate ways.
That detail kills me. Urza does terrible things and then acts like nothing happened. He’s not cruel exactly. He just doesn’t register other people as fully real. His brother is the only person who ever mattered to him, and his brother is dead.
Koilos
Urza makes his way to Koilos, the ancient Thran cavern where he and Mishra first found the powerstones as teenagers. The ruins are wrecked. Mishra’s workers left suddenly, summoned to Argoth for the final battle. There’s a desiccated corpse with metal plates on its brow. Urza doesn’t give it a second glance.
Then his eyes show him something incredible. A shadow-vision of the ancient battle between the Thran and the Phyrexians, four thousand years ago. He watches the Thran drive the Phyrexians back into the cavern. He sees segmented wires burst from a Phyrexian behemoth, the same kind of wires he saw uncoiled from Mishra’s body.
This is the moment Urza puts it together. The Thran didn’t just vanish. They sacrificed themselves to defeat the Phyrexians and lock them out of Dominaria. The artifact where he and Mishra found the powerstones was the lock. When the stone split in two, the lock was broken.
And the Phyrexians came for Mishra first because the Weakstone was weaker protection than the Mightstone. Urza, the elder brother with the stronger stone, did nothing.
The Guilt Spiral
Here’s the thing about Urza’s guilt: it’s both completely justified and completely self-serving. He failed his brother. That’s real. But the way he processes it is all about himself. He tried to kill himself by kneeling in the snow for an entire winter. His immortal body didn’t even notice. The Weakstone leaked bitter tears that scarred his face, but it healed in moments.
He can’t die. He can’t repent. All he has left is vengeance.
So he tears Koilos apart looking for a portal to Phyrexia. He finds a chamber with burnt-out powerstones and a painted pyramid showing demons. He finds the exact place where the Phyrexians entered Dominaria. But the portal is gone, and he can’t figure out how it worked. Phyrexians don’t travel the planes the way planeswalkers do.
The chapter ends with Urza making a vow: “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.”
It’s dramatic and epic and also kind of hollow, because as we’re about to learn, Urza has been making these vows for thousands of years without following through.