Xantcha and The Antiquity Wars
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Chapter 2 shifts the point of view to Xantcha, and the book immediately gets better for it.
Meet Xantcha
We find Xantcha in their cottage on the Ohran Ridge, reading one of her copies of The Antiquity Wars. Yes, copies. She owns four illustrated editions of Kayla Bin-Kroog’s history, each one depicting the characters differently. She’s a collector and a scholar in her own right.
The time jump here is massive. We’ve skipped ahead about three thousand years from Chapter 1. The Brothers’ War is ancient history now. Xantcha has been with Urza for most of that time.
The cottage is modest. Two rooms, no locks, tucked into the edge of the mountains. No trees nearby. Xantcha scrounges peat for the brazier and finds fossilized acorns from trees that existed before the cataclysm. She grows a “meager garden” that sprouts rocks every spring. It’s a bleak domestic picture.
But what makes this chapter great is watching Xantcha think about the characters in The Antiquity Wars. She’s fascinated by the portraits of Kayla and Mishra. She notes that Urza neglected his wife and never mentioned his son or grandson. She imagines Kayla going to bed, frustrated that she got the chaste brother instead of the charming one. Xantcha reads these ancient stories like a person, not like a scholar. That’s what makes her compelling.
The Table
Urza calls her into his workroom, and it’s been sixteen days since she heard his voice. He’s been in there building again.
The scene that follows is one of the most unsettling in the book. Urza has recreated the plain of the river Kor in miniature. Mountains made from clay and crockery. Quicksilver streams. And tiny automatons, each one perfectly formed, going about their lives on the tabletop. Horses with swishing tails, ornithopters that actually fly. He’s recreated “The Dawn of Fire,” a pivotal moment from The Antiquity Wars.
But here’s the disturbing part. Urza believes in something he calls “motes of time.” He thinks that if he recreates the past accurately enough, he can attract fragments of actual time and learn the truth about what really happened. Not just simulate it. Actually reach into the past.
“Truth attracts truth as time attracts time,” he tells Xantcha.
And this time, he says he’s finally proven that Ashnod was a Phyrexian agent. He’s made her gnat-figurine skulk outside the parley tent and cast a spark on Mishra. In Urza’s mind, this is evidence. To Xantcha, and to us, it looks like a man playing with dolls and calling it research.
The Confrontation
Xantcha pushes back, and this is where the chapter really shines. She argues with Urza the way nobody else can, because nobody else has been around for three thousand years.
She points out the logical holes in his theory. If Ashnod was a Phyrexian from the start, how did she send Tawnos with the sylex thirty years later? A compleat Phyrexian doesn’t have a conscience. Mishra never showed remorse, but Ashnod did.
Urza can’t handle the contradiction. He freezes up. Literally stops blinking and breathing.
Then Xantcha goes for the kill: “The Phyrexians spent three thousand years trying to slay you, before they gave up. I think they gave up because they’d found a better way. Leave you alone on a mountainside playing with toys!”
His fist comes up. For the first time, he actually touches her. His hand lands on her hair and stops. She whispers his name until he comes back to himself. And then he doesn’t even remember what happened.
The Plan Takes Shape
Xantcha tells Urza about real, present-day Phyrexian activity. Sleeper agents in Baszerat and Morvern. A new war starting. She’s been scouting and found glistening oil wherever conflict brews. The same pattern that led to the Brothers’ War is playing out again.
Urza finally goes to investigate, and Xantcha gets to work on her real plan. After gathering up the surviving gnats from Urza’s smashed tabletop and dissolving them in phloton, she lays it out for us: find a young man who looks like Mishra. Teach him to answer Urza’s guilty questions. Use him to snap Urza out of his spiral.
She knows it won’t cure his madness. She says so plainly. But if a fake Mishra can convince Urza to walk away from his worktable, that would be enough.
It’s a desperate plan from a desperate companion. And the fact that she came up with it the moment Urza’s fist touched her hair tells you everything about how close to the edge they both are.