Urza Builds a New Dragon Engine
This is post 11 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Previous: Ratepe Becomes Mishra For Urza
Ten Years of Building
Chapter 10 covers a massive stretch of time. Ten years pass. The Phyrexians never came back for the insect warriors they left in the cave, and Urza dismantled every single one, incorporating their parts into a redesigned dragon engine.
The new dragon is seriously impressive. It has a spider’s eight-legged body instead of two legs. Any two legs can be the front. Three can be destroyed without unbalancing it. It still has the original many-toothed head, but now it spits lightning bolts and exploding fireballs in addition to gouts of burning naphtha. All of this powered by “phloton,” a kind of powerstone fuel Urza found inside the insect warriors’ ring-shaped hearts.
Xantcha’s assessment? Still not enough. “Mountains don’t defend themselves.” One dragon is impressive. It’s not an army.
Life on Her Own
While Urza obsesses over the dragon, Xantcha builds a life. She learns to control the cyst substance and expand it into a sphere instead of just clinging armor. She travels around the surrounding villages, learns local languages, trades with women who think she’s a boy living with “an old man of the forest.”
She also discovers she has to disguise herself as male. Born-folk have strict ideas about where young men and women belong, and no place at all for someone who is neither. After a few close calls where well-meaning families tried to absorb her, or worse, she settles into her role as “an incorrigible lad, a rogue in the making.”
This is one of the most interesting ongoing threads in Planeswalker. Xantcha’s identity as something outside the binary of human gender isn’t played for drama. It’s just a practical reality she has to navigate. She picks the disguise that causes less trouble and moves on.
The Nightmares
Urza’s dreams are getting worse. About one night in four or five, he closes his eyes and his nightmares leak out of his mind and into the physical world. Silent ghosts walk the forest, recreating scenes of anger and betrayal. Xantcha built the cottage specifically to put a wall between herself and Urza’s screaming dreams.
At the climax of every nightmare, Urza cries out for Mishra to forgive him.
But if you bring up Mishra when he’s awake? He flies into a bleak rage. Ten or twelve silent days might follow. Then, without warning, the questions start again. How high are the First Sphere mountains? Where are the Fanes? Would his dragon fit through the fumaroles?
Xantcha starts looking forward to when Urza leaves on his between-worlds wanderings. When he’s gone, her life is her own.
Sneaking Into Phyrexia
Two hundred years of waiting. Then the Phyrexians finally return to the cave with diggers, bearers, and a handful of gremlin dodgers. Xantcha breaks Urza’s summoning crystal. He arrives with his dragon less than a day later and destroys them.
But Xantcha sees something Urza misses. A searcher-priest is hiding in the trees, watching the dragon, memorizing it for Phyrexia. When it bolts for the ambulator, Xantcha chases it. The priest vanishes into the portal. Urza goes through next, leaving the dragon behind.
And then Xantcha makes a choice that is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. She has an ambulator. She has a heart to find. She crawls to the portal and goes to Phyrexia.
The Fane of Flesh
The Fourth Sphere is everything she remembers. Acrid air. Oily ash drizzling from soot clouds. The roar of a thousand furnaces. But Urza is burning his way through the outer spheres, and the whole place is in chaos. Alarms clanging. Priests running. Gremlins getting trampled.
Xantcha bluffs her way through. She tells a vat-priest she was sent to guard the hearts. She tells a teacher-priest that “the Great Gix” sent her. The bluff works because priests need a name, any name, and no one questions a newt with a hook and an order from a demon.
She finds the vault. A pit filled with countless glowing amber stones, each one a Phyrexian’s detached heart. As Phyrexians die in Urza’s assault above, their hearts pop and go dark. She watches it happen in real time.
Finding her own heart among millions seems impossible. But then she hears laughter. Not from the corridor. From within her. Within her mind, within her heart. She wades into the pit, sweeping her hands through the stones, following the sound. And she finds it. Nothing special to look at. A few scratches. Glowing like the rest. But when she touches it, Urza’s armor absorbs it into her hand.
It’s hers. She tucks it in her boot and runs.
Getting Out
The escape is harrowing. Urza’s dragon is surrounded, its wings shredded, legs being destroyed one by one. The demons have mounted a counterattack with countless warriors that die by the score but keep coming. Xantcha climbs a collapsing dragon leg, runs across its back, and finds Urza slumped in a wire-shrouded couch, covered in bruises and charred clothes.
She’s never seen him hurt before. She didn’t even know he could be hurt.
“Urza? It’s time to ‘walk away from here, if you can.”
His eyes open. They’re horrible. He starts to say a word that should never be spoken. “Yawg-”
The Ineffable’s true name. The one that every Phyrexian is born knowing but must never speak. If Urza says it, the Ineffable will hear.
Xantcha screams her own name at his face. He grabs her wrists. Her vision goes black.
Why This Chapter Hits Hard
Chapter 10 is the big one. It covers centuries in a few pages, and yet the scenes that matter, the heart vault, the dragon battle, Xantcha screaming her name to drown out the unspeakable word, are written with an intensity that makes them feel immediate.
The heart is the key symbol here. Urza spent ten years building a machine of destruction. Xantcha spent two hundred years building a life. But when the moment came, she risked everything for a small glowing stone that a priest told her was important. The Phyrexians lied about everything. But they didn’t lie about this. Her heart was waiting for her.
And she found it not through logic or strategy. She found it by listening to laughter only she could hear.