Ratepe Tells His Story by the Fire
Previous: Xantcha Frees Ratepe From Slavery
The title of this post is a bit misleading, because Chapter 6 is actually about Xantcha’s past. Rat falls asleep by the dying fire, and while she watches over him with one hand on his chain, Xantcha’s mind goes back to Phyrexia again. This time, deeper.
The Dodger
After Gix was exiled to the Seventh Sphere, Xantcha tried to hide among the gremlins. It didn’t last. The Fane of Flesh caught her, punished her, and sent her to the furnaces. She worked beside metal-sheathed stokers in air so hot it burned her lungs. She staggered under impossible loads. When her strength gave out, a stoker tripped over her body and fell into a crucible of molten brass.
Nobody wanted her after that. So they sent her to the arena, where Phyrexian warriors trained. She was given the jobs no warrior would take: feeding monsters, repairing damaged engines, destroying artifacts the warriors had only wounded. Her death was expected. But when a pack of wyverns went on a rampage that destroyed a hundred priests and warriors, Xantcha walked away without a scratch.
Since she wouldn’t die, the planner-priests decided she’d make a good dodger. And this is where things get interesting.
What a Dodger Does
Phyrexia explores other worlds constantly, stripping them of metal, oil, and useful artifacts. Compleat Phyrexians are thorough but terrible at handling surprises. They bump into things they don’t understand and blow themselves up. Gremlins were used as the expendable scouts, but Xantcha proved cannier than any gremlin.
Her first assignment, she watched a gremlin reach for the shiniest lever on an artifact. She stabbed the gremlin in the throat before its imagination could get them all killed. Then she found and disconnected the wires that would have detonated the thing.
The planner-priests gave her a golden cloak and a featureless mask. For the first time, Xantcha looked compleat. She became the fifth dodger, then eventually the second, earning the name Orman’huzra. Within the hierarchy, she was untouchable. And she found something close to happiness.
The Wind-Crystal
Then came the turning point. On a world with three small moons, Xantcha found an artifact covered in hollow crystals and flexible mirrors. When the mirrors moved, sound and light poured from the crystals. The born-folk of this world had died defending it. The searcher-priests were convinced it was a weapon of incredible power.
But it wasn’t a weapon. It was art. It caught sunlight, moonlight, wind, and rain, and turned them into patterns of light and sound. It reached into Xantcha’s dreams and woke up ideas about beauty that couldn’t be expressed in Phyrexian.
She refused to prepare it for extraction. “It has no secrets, nothing that Phyrexia can use. It simply is, and it belongs here.”
The diggers stripped away her golden cloak and beat her bloody. They destroyed the artifact, every crystal, every mirror. Then they told the searchers that Orman’huzra was to blame for losing a weapon that could reduce whole worlds to dust.
Xantcha was dragged to the brink of the same fumarole where Gix had been exiled. One push and she would have been gone. But the planner-priests thought flesh could be punished into compliance. They locked her in a dark cell for an eternity, and she survived on memories of dancing light and music.
A Newt Declares War
When they let her out, Xantcha groveled and begged. The priests thought she was broken. They sent her back to work. They never guessed that “a lowly newt, mourning the loss of beauty, had declared war on Phyrexia.”
This is one of my favorite lines in the entire book. Xantcha didn’t rebel because of freedom or justice or any grand ideal. She rebelled because they destroyed something beautiful. And that motivation feels more genuine than any heroic declaration could.
Over the next thirty artifacts and twenty-two worlds, she rigged some to explode when the next Phyrexian touched them. She “lost” others. She grew quite pleased with herself. And then she pushed it too far.
How She Met Urza
On her twenty-third world, Xantcha found golden insect-artifacts buried in a cave. Fully articulated, warm to the touch, vibrating faintly. They were alive in some way. Not Phyrexian. Something else entirely.
She planned to use them as weapons against Phyrexia, binding them with cloth and wire so they’d awaken once they passed through the ambulator portal. But the bearers moved the bound artifacts to Phyrexia before she was ready, and the searcher-priests caught on.
The punishment was worse than before. Fifty lashes with an antenna stripped from one of her own insect warriors. A grave dug by her own hands. She heard the diggers count to twenty, then forty, then fifty. Everything blurred.
Then a stroke didn’t land. Nobody counted it. No more strokes came.
There was bright light. A voice speaking the language of her dreams. Warm hands. Someone pulled the wire from her wrists and closed her eyes.
When she woke up, a man with many-colored eyes was staring at her. She thought of Gix and fainted.
The next time she woke, the pain was gone. She was lying on softness. The man was there. He spoke one word: “Why?” No wait, she spoke it. “Why?”
He said: “I thought the Phyrexians would kill you.”
He’d thought she was a captured person, not a Phyrexian herself. When he discovered the truth, he made fists above her face. She closed her eyes. But the blows didn’t fall.
Instead he told her: “You belong to me, now. After what was done to you, you have no cause for love or loyalty to Phyrexia.”
And Xantcha, clever as Gix himself had conceded, measured her words carefully: “There is a shelter at the bottom of the hill. Take me there. I will show you the way to Phyrexia.”
Why This Matters
Chapter 6 is the bridge between Xantcha’s two lives. Everything before this moment was Phyrexia. Everything after is Urza. And the beautiful symmetry is that both relationships start the same way: with someone powerful claiming ownership. Gix said, “You are mine forever.” Urza said, “You belong to me now.”
The difference is that Xantcha chose Urza. Not because he was kind or safe. But because he was already at war with her enemies. And because he spoke the language of her dreams.
Now she’s trying to save him from himself by finding a young man named Rat to play his dead brother. It’s a plan born from three thousand years of watching a genius self-destruct. And watching Rat sleep by the fire, still chained, still bruised, she has to wonder if she’s doing the same thing to him that was done to her.