Urza Invades Phyrexia on His Dragon
This is post 13 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
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After Phyrexia
Chapter 12 is enormous. It covers what feels like several lifetimes, because it literally does. We pick up right after Xantcha dragged Urza out of Phyrexia, and the chapter follows them through centuries of wandering, building, fighting, and running.
The chapter opens with a brief, beautiful statement about their relationship. Urza is honorable and honest. He never cared much for romance or affection, but he tolerated friendship, one friend at a time. After Xantcha pushed him out of Phyrexia, he accepted her as that friend.
In three thousand years, she has never asked for more. Never settled for less.
Burning the Name
They stumble through three worlds in one day after escaping Phyrexia. Urza is in rough shape. His charred clothes are falling apart. He keeps trying to say the Ineffable’s name. “Yawg-” and Xantcha cuts him off every time.
“Every time you say that name, the Ineffable can hear you.”
Urza actually listens. He literally burns the name from his memory, radiating heat from his face. It works. His eyes clear from featureless black back to mortal colors.
They end up on a three-moon world where Xantcha wrings water from her own soaked tunic to give Urza something to drink. He can’t see. His vision is all spots and bubbles. He sits on a rock while she fetches water. She comes back to find him still there, shoulders slumped, chin down, hands limp in his lap.
For the first time, Urza looks exactly as old and broken as he is.
The Aftermath
Urza makes a miniature battlefield out of grass and twigs and pebbles. His dragon model, woven from grass, towers over the others in exact proportion. The man just got beaten nearly to death and his response is to play war games with sticks.
“As good as a fool can feel,” he tells Xantcha. And then something surprising: he admits he was wrong. “I underestimated my enemy. I’ll never do that again.”
Xantcha shows him her heart, the amber stone she found in the vault. He examines it and calls it “the greatest abomination.” He can’t quite say what it is. Not a heart. Not a powerstone. But something bound to her in a way he can see but can’t explain.
He tries to take the ambulator she smuggled out of Phyrexia. He says Phyrexian artifacts corrupt. He says she’s too weak to resist. Xantcha watches herself argue like a child and hates it. She hands over the ambulator. But she keeps her heart. That, she will not give up.
Later that night, by a fire on a dead world, she cuts a slit in her flank and tucks the amber heart inside, sealing it with ash paste and cloth bandages. She puts it inside her body where she’ll never lose it.
Urza knows immediately. Of course he does.
“I swallowed it my own way,” she tells him. “It’s part of me now.”
The Search for Home
Urza discovers that Dominaria, his home plane, is sealed behind some kind of barrier. He calls it a shard of the multiverse. He can feel Dominaria but can’t reach it. They spend months, visiting dozens of worlds, as Urza maps the boundary and confirms it’s complete.
This section is important for the larger Magic: The Gathering lore. The multiverse itself has changed. Something shattered the connections between planes. Dominaria is locked away, and the Phyrexians can’t reach it either. Cold comfort for Urza, who aches with homesickness but takes satisfaction in knowing his home is safe.
Meanwhile, Xantcha just wants to stop moving. “I want to see the seasons change,” she says. “I want a home.”
They find Moag. Urza builds a sheer-walled tower on a lonely island. He fills it with artifacts and starts warning pilgrims about Phyrexian evil. Xantcha builds a cottage with a garden. They meet at his island every full moon and talk about everything because they’ve learned which questions to avoid.
For thirty years, life is good.
Phyrexians on Moag
Then Xantcha smells glistening oil in a southern city. She follows it to a fire god’s temple. A Phyrexian priest, disguised in robes with a fake human face, attacks her with a golden web of power. She kicks its head off. Literally. Its head separates from its neck, leaving the flesh-face behind like a discarded mask.
She grabs the head and runs, bleeding inside the sphere, barely escaping. She hides in a midden pit, shoulder-deep in fermenting garbage, holding a metal skull. She waits until sunset, then forces the cyst to recharge and flies to Urza’s tower.
Urza is furious. Not about the Phyrexians being on Moag. About Xantcha being stupid enough to expose herself. He paralyzes her with a spell and lectures her for hours. Then he raises a silver globe, ready to throw it at her.
Xantcha doesn’t blink. “Go ahead, throw it. Then what? Make me into another mistake you can mourn?”
The globe vanishes in red sparks.
Leaving Moag
Urza’s plan is chilling in its practicality. He destroys the fire god’s temple from orbit, basically. A ball of fire descends from the stars and obliterates the building. While the city burns, Xantcha sneaks back in, finds the Phyrexian portal (a new vertical disk instead of the old flat ambulators), and smashes its control gems. Screams and smoke belch from the disk before it collapses.
Then Urza walks them both away from Moag, deliberately leaving a trail for the Phyrexians to follow. His plan is to draw them away from this world. “I want them to pursue us with all their strength and leave Moag in peace.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Xantcha says.
She’s right. The Phyrexians pursue them across world after world. They get maybe a year of peace between attacks. Urza builds ice sentinels, clay guardians, stone watchers. He fights off avenger teams with increasing difficulty. And his nightmares get worse. Much worse.
The Long Decline
This is the darkest section of the book so far. Years without sleep have destroyed Urza. He paces constantly. He babbles. He wrings his hands. The forbidden name has come back to his memory. His ability to hold a human shape becomes erratic. Sometimes he’s transparent. Sometimes he’s just light.
Xantcha makes wax earplugs so she can sleep through his ranting. She reminds him to build the Yotian sentinels. She stops him from gouging the powerstone eyes from his own skull.
On an ice world, eight hundred years old and looking every day of it, Urza is so far gone that he can’t tell what’s real from what’s not. The Phyrexians attack with turtle-shaped avengers that shoot beams of dark radiance. The ice sentinels shatter without bringing down a single one. Urza starts strong, destroys a few, then goes vaporous. His strikes pass through the enemy. Their strikes pass through him.
Xantcha figures this is the end. She leaps onto a turtle’s back with nothing but a short iron club. The avengers target her instead of Urza. Her armor holds barely. She feels her ribs cracking one by one.
The last thing she sees is Urza, brighter than the sun.
Why This Chapter Is Important
Chapter 12 is the spine of Planeswalker. It compresses centuries of story into one chapter and somehow makes every scene count. The friendship between Urza and Xantcha is complicated, painful, and real. He calls her a fool and nearly kills her with a silver globe. She hides in garbage for him and cracks her ribs fighting turtle robots.
The heart scene is the emotional centerpiece. Xantcha cuts herself open to put the amber stone inside her body permanently. It’s a radical act of self-ownership. Everything else in her life belongs to someone else. Her body was made in a Phyrexian vat. Her armor is Urza’s artifact. Even her role as Urza’s companion is on his terms. But the heart is hers. She found it. She fought for it. She claimed it.
And that matters, because as this chapter shows over and over, loyalty without autonomy is just a nicer word for slavery.