Crossing the Sea of Laments
Chapter 22 starts with a storm and ends with Urza casually dismantling the life Xantcha and Ratepe have built together. It’s a lot.
The Storm
Three days after leaving Koilos, Xantcha and Ratepe are over the Sea of Laments and completely lost. Thick clouds block the stars. The wind isn’t steady. Xantcha is exhausted and navigating on instinct that’s getting less reliable by the hour.
Then a wall-cloud shows up. Lightning. Waterspouts. The works.
The storm catches them. The sphere gets flattened by the waterspout’s force but holds. They slam into the waves, get launched back up, slam down again. Lightning strikes the sphere continuously because Urza’s tech attracts it. The air goes acrid and glows blue-white. They rise until rain turns to ice around the sphere, then plummet. Nine times.
In the middle of all this, Ratepe leans close to Xantcha’s ear and says, “I love you.”
She shouts back, “We’re not dead yet!”
That’s maybe my favorite exchange in the whole book. It’s so perfectly Xantcha. Love confessions don’t compute for her. Survival does. She answers a declaration of love with a status update.
They end up bobbing on the ocean. Ratepe is too seasick to move. Xantcha can’t lift the sphere. She can’t swim. They’re stuck.
Then she remembers the crystal pendant. The one Urza gave her thousands of years ago as an emergency signal. She bites it open (breaking a tooth in the process, because apparently Urza built it too well). Nothing visible happens, but hours later Urza shows up, furious, and drags them through the between-worlds to the cottage.
Urza’s Plans
Once they’re safe, Urza does what Urza does. He ignores the parts of the situation that don’t interest him and focuses on his own agenda.
Ratepe plays Mishra perfectly. He takes the blame for the Koilos trip. He says he “needed to see it with his own eyes.” Urza doesn’t question this. To him, of course Mishra would want to see Koilos. The brothers’ old wound is still the lens through which he sees everything.
Then Urza drops his bombshell. He’s been thinking about the future. He wants to build massive artifact sentries across all of Dominaria. Permanent defenses. This will take generations. He’ll need assistants who’ll become guardians of these sentries, who’ll become patriarchs and matriarchs of permanent communities.
And Xantcha and Ratepe are not invited.
Urza tells Xantcha, politely, that he hoped she would choose to stay with Ratepe. Somewhere else. He says Ratepe is mortal and will age and die. He implies he’ll find a new Mishra eventually.
This is Urza at his most coldly rational. He’s not being cruel on purpose. He genuinely thinks this is best. He’s planning centuries ahead and has decided that emotional attachments are inefficient. Xantcha recognizes the man Kayla Bin-Kroog wrote about in The Antiquity Wars: self-centered, self-confident, selfish.
Xantcha decides not to tell him about the Thran revelation from Koilos. “Urza is immune to truth.”
The Goodbye Nobody Says
Xantcha tells Ratepe what happened. That Urza is sending them both away. Ratepe takes it with the resignation of someone who’s been a slave and knows what it means to not control your own life. He’ll go back to Efuan Pincar. Maybe serve Tabarna.
“What about you?” he asks. “We could work together.”
Xantcha walks to the window. “I am part of the past, Ratepe, and I’m tired. I never realized just how tired.”
Three thousand years of tired. That line hits hard because you believe it. She’s been carrying Urza’s weight for millennia, and the one year she spent with Ratepe showed her what it felt like to be something other than a caretaker.
Ratepe rubs her shoulders. She thinks about how it took only a year, after more than three thousand, to become dependent on the touch of living fingers.
Then Urza puts her to work planting spiders across Gulmany for the next seventeen days. No time for side trips to the cottage. No time for goodbyes that matter. The Glimmer Moon is coming, and everything they’ve been building toward is about to happen.
This chapter is the quiet before the storm. Abbey lets her characters sit with the weight of what’s coming. Nobody is happy. Nobody is ready. And the reader knows that whatever happens with the screaming spiders and Gix and the Glimmer Moon, these three people will never be in the same place again the same way.