Summer Journey to Efuan Pincar
Previous: Urza Invades Phyrexia on His Dragon
Chapter 13 is where Planeswalker stops being a story about cosmic battles and becomes something more personal. And honestly? It’s better for it.
The Road Trip From Hell
Summer has hit the Ohran Ridge. Two months after Ratepe showed up, Xantcha loads up her sphere and they head west to Efuan Pincar. The goal is simple: scatter some of Urza’s detection artifacts around the places where Phyrexians might be hiding. Basically magic pebbles that change color if something nasty walks past them.
Ratepe is not thrilled about the pebble plan. He wants real action. He wants to march into Tabarna’s palace and confront the king directly. And honestly, you can understand his frustration. His homeland is burning and Urza’s response is… pebbles.
But the real meat of this chapter is what’s happening between Xantcha and Ratepe. They’re together now. Like, together together. Lynn Abbey handles it with surprising tenderness. Xantcha is a Phyrexian newt, a vat-grown creature who was never designed for love. Ratepe is persistent and patient. And Xantcha is “astonished beyond all the words in all the languages she knew” to discover that being in love has nothing to do with being born.
That line hit me.
The Fight Nobody Expected
They argue about Efuan Pincar, about whether Tabarna is still human or a Phyrexian puppet, about whether Urza cares enough. Ratepe sulks. And then the chapter takes a personal turn. He realizes he missed his own birthday. He’s eighteen, and the Festival of Fruits passed without him noticing. Last year his mother roasted a duck. His little brother gave him a honey-cake full of sand. His father gave him a book. The Shratta burned it.
Ratepe sits on a fallen tree at sunset and cries, and Xantcha has no idea what to do with grief that flows freely from someone’s heart. Urza’s grief hardened into obsession. That she understands. But this open, messy human sadness mystifies her. She offers to roast a duck and it’s simultaneously the most clueless and most genuinely sweet response possible.
Then Things Get Real
They reach Pincar City six days later and things go sideways fast. Ratepe spots six cloaked men sneaking out of the palace before dawn. He’s got a feeling about them. Xantcha doesn’t smell any Phyrexians on them, but she follows them anyway because she promised.
Good call.
The men ride south to an abandoned orchard and pull out a black disk. Xantcha recognizes it immediately. It’s an ambulator, a portal to Phyrexia. They’re rolling out the welcome mat for sleepers or worse.
What follows is one of the best action sequences in the book. Xantcha sets up firepots while Ratepe feeds explosive canisters into them. She charges in with her sword and starts cutting down the Efuands one by one. There’s a brutally efficient fight scene where Xantcha uses her small size and Urza’s invisible armor to trick swordsmen who think they’re fighting an undersized kid.
But the real problem arrives through the portal. A Phyrexian priest. Not a tender or a teacher. Something new, with compound eyes and weapons Xantcha has never seen before. A nozzle arm that shoots something that makes Urza’s armor flash cobalt blue. A cable arm with razored steel petals.
Xantcha fights it hand to hand. She gets her elbow shattered within the armor. She’s about to lose when two more of Ratepe’s explosive canisters come raining down. A shrieking canister scrambles something inside the priest and it collapses.
Ratepe saved her life. The damn fool who she told to run saved her life.
The Aftermath
Xantcha manages to partially disable the ambulator, and Ratepe comes up with the idea to stuff the control lens into a firepot and blow it up. They do. Xantcha remembers flying through the air and landing in a tree.
This chapter is doing a lot. It’s building the Xantcha-Ratepe relationship into something that matters emotionally. It’s showing us Ratepe’s grief and anger about his homeland. And it’s delivering a genuinely tense battle where the stakes feel real because these two characters are fighting side by side without Urza’s godlike protection.
Also, Ratepe killed the sixth Efuand himself with those explosive coins Xantcha left him. That detail is easy to miss but it matters. He’s not just a face for Urza’s dead brother anymore. He’s becoming a fighter.