Ratepe Becomes Mishra For Urza
This is post 10 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Previous: Arriving at the Cottage on Ohran Ridge
A Night of Memories
Chapter 9 is mostly a flashback. While Urza and Ratepe talk behind a closed door all night, Xantcha sits alone in her cold room, too tired to sleep, listening to muffled conversation through the wall. She can hear their voices but not the words. She piles pillows on her face. Throws everything aside. Wedges herself into a corner at the foot of the bed with a blanket over her head.
It’s a lonely image. The woman who made all of this happen is sitting in the dark, shut out from the thing she created.
And so she remembers how it all started.
Meeting Urza
The flashback takes us back to Xantcha’s first conversation with Urza, right after he rescued her from Phyrexia. She’s in a small stone chamber with no doors and no windows. Urza is this strange being with glowing eyes. She offers to show him the way to Phyrexia through an ambulator. He laughs.
He calls her “child.” She insists she’s not one. “Children are born. Children grow. Phyrexians are decanted by vat-priests.” She was never a child. Gix said he made her.
Urza won’t accept this. He believes she was born somewhere, stolen by Phyrexians as a young girl, and transformed. He says her mind is “empty” because the Phyrexians took everything from her. Xantcha knows this is wrong. Her mind has a sanctuary that even Gix couldn’t break into, and even Urza can’t reach. But she doesn’t correct him. She learned from Gix that correcting powerful beings is a bad idea.
This dynamic, Urza being confidently wrong about Xantcha’s nature and Xantcha quietly letting him believe what he wants, sets up their entire relationship for the next three thousand years.
Swallowing the Cyst
The chamber has no door. No way out. Urza vanishes for what feels like forever. When he comes back, Xantcha has pinched herself bloody trying to stay awake, terrified she’d miss his return and be trapped in the dark forever. She grabs his sleeve and refuses to let go.
“I won’t remain here! Bring back the door. Let me out or destroy me!”
Urza’s solution: swallow this thing. He calls it a cyst. It’s a nearly transparent lump, half the size of her fist. It will settle in her stomach and harden into a stone. When she needs protection between worlds, she says a rhyme, yawns, and the cyst releases an armor that covers her completely.
“You will compleat me?” she asks.
Urza’s reaction to that word is intense. He hates it. “No. Compleation is a Phyrexian taint. My artifact will be inside you, but it is a tool, nothing more and never a part of you.”
The swallowing scene is genuinely uncomfortable. The lump is cold and clinging. She nearly faints trying to get it to her mouth. It feels alive as it oozes down her throat. She’s on her knees, banging her forehead on the floor when it finally stops moving.
“See? All over. Nothing to it,” says Urza, with all the bedside manner of a brick wall.
The Dragon Engine
Urza takes her to a barren world with no life, no atmosphere, nothing but rock and wind. And there, she sees his dragon for the first time. It’s dead black metal, bipedal, taller than she can reach. Its torso is a maze of tanks and tubes filled with naphtha. Its teeth are a terrifying collection of spikes, wedges, rasps, and crushing anvils.
Xantcha climbs all over it, hanging from its legs and forearms like a kid on a jungle gym. She inspects it thoroughly. And when she comes down, she gives her honest assessment:
“If you had a hundred of them, you could take one of the Fanes and hold it against the demons, but not against the Ineffable.”
Urza doesn’t want to hear this. He insists one dragon is enough. It’s ten times stronger than anything from the Brothers’ War. But Xantcha has actually seen Phyrexia. She knows what’s waiting there. Mountains don’t defend themselves, she tells him.
He takes it as a joke.
What This Flashback Tells Us
Lynn Abbey is doing something clever with this chapter. On the surface, it’s backstory. Here’s how Xantcha got the cyst. Here’s how she first saw the dragon. But the real purpose is to show us the pattern that has defined Xantcha’s entire existence.
Urza rescues her. Urza gives her tools. Urza ignores her advice. Urza calls her empty-headed. Xantcha goes along with it because what else is she going to do?
She’s not wrong about the dragon. She’s not wrong about Phyrexia’s strength. But Urza treats her honest assessments like the babbling of a child. And yet she stays. She stays because she has nowhere else to go, because she genuinely wants Phyrexia destroyed, and because somewhere in Urza’s madness there is a flicker of something almost like friendship.
The flashback ends with Xantcha back in the present, still sitting in her dark room, listening to voices she can’t hear. Three thousand years, and she’s still the one on the outside.