Planeswalker

Urza spoke a word, and the ambulator-creature became a sooty smear. He did nothing at all that Xantcha could see, and yet Gix was slammed against the chamber's far wall. A crystal sarcophagus surrounded the demon. Xantcha thought that might be the end, but purple fumes rose from the crystal, and Urza disappeared as manic wailing filled the barren chamber. Gix shook off the dissolving crystal and clambered to his metallic feet.

Xantcha took heart from the fact that the demon wasn't claiming victory by targeting her or Ratepe. His oddly shaped head swiveled frantically. The rubine light danced over the naked stone, leaving a trail of smoke as Gix sought a target. Twice the demon blew futile craters in the rock, but he was ready when ghostly blue arms seized him from behind. Urza landed on his back in the middle of the chamber. The impact shook jagged stones the size of a man's torso from the ceiling.

Both combatants righted themselves and backed away from each other.

The testing phase was over; the duel began in earnest with flurries of attacks that ebbed and flowed too fast for Xantcha's eyes. The demon was stronger, cleverer, and much more resilient than she'd believed after seeing him flee the dragon in Pincar City. She thought of the excoriation. It had taken a clutch of demons to wrestle Gix into that fumarole. She suspected that he was the only one who'd survived.

Urza succeeded in melting away one of Gix's legs, though that was little more than inconvenience in a battle that wasn't about physical injury. And though Urza seemed to have the advantage more often than not, he couldn't deliver a killing attack. Not that he didn't try a in a hundred different ways from elemental ice to conjured beasts and the ghosts of artifacts he and Mishra had wielded against each other. Gix countered them all, sometimes barely, with an equally bewildering assortment of arcane memories and devices.

Eventually, when it had become apparent that neither flash nor guile was going tilt the balance, Urza and Gix locked themselves in a contest of pure will that manifested itself in an increasingly complex web of blue-white and crimson light. The spindle-shaped web stretched between Urza's eyes and Gix's gem-studded forehead. At its widest, which was also its middle and the middle of the chamber, the web did not descend to the floor. Sparing nothing for effect, the web gave off neither heat nor sound and endured, without really changing, until Xantcha had to breathe again.

How long, she asked herself, could they remain enrapt

in each other? Her best answer: for a very long time. She got up on her feet.

"Look at Urza's eyes!" Ratepe shouted from the other side of the chamber.

Xantcha had to walk closer than she considered wise before she found a slit in the web that let her look down the spindle to Urza's face. She didn't see anything strange-nothing stranger than two specks as bright as the sun-but she didn't have Ratepe's rapport with the Weakstone. And, as Ratepe's voice had seemed to have no effect on the duel, she asked, "What am I looking for?"

"You can't see everything changing ... coming back from the past, or going back to it?"

She started to say that she couldn't see anything changing and swallowed the words. Shadows were growing in the Koilos chamber. Not shadows cast by the web's light, but shadows cast by time, growing more substantial as each moment passed. Metal columns grew along the walls. Great machines, worthy of Phyrexia, loomed up from the floor.

Beneath the widest part of the light-woven spindle a low platform came into being. Mirrors sprang up in a circle behind both Gix and Urza, behind Xantcha and Ratepe, as well. An object similar to Avohir's great book, but made from metal like Urza's staff, grew atop the platform. As Xantcha watched, Phyrexian glyphs formed on the smooth metal leaves.

Xantcha was waiting for those glyphs to become legible when dull-colored metal sprang out of the central platform. The metal shaped itself into four rising prongs, like uplifted hands.

"His eyes, Xantcha! His eyes! They're going back. Gix is dragging them back through time!"

The Weakstone and the Mightstone had pulled out of Urza's skull and were advancing through the spindle. Gix had said, The Thran are waiting.... And when the powerstones merged into the prongs, Urza would be in the hands of the Thran. Ratepe shouted, "We can stop them." "No." "We can!"

"Not if you're getting influence from the Weakstone. It's Thran. It belongs to Gix. No wonder he was waiting here." Xantcha would have sobbed, if the armor had let her.

"We can stop this, Xantcha. Gix is sending the powerstones into the past. All we have to do is get there first."

Xantcha shook her head-never mind that she couldn't see Ratepe. "That's the Weakstone influencing you," she shouted. "Gix. Phyrexia." Her gut said anything she did would only make things worse, if anything could be worse than watching Urza become a tool of the Phyrexian Thran. She was paralyzed, frightened as she had never been before- except, perhaps, at the very begi

On the other side of the spindle, Ratepe thrust his hands into the web. From Xantcha's side, looking into the spindle, his flesh had become transparent and his bones gleamed with golden light.

"Now, Xantcha!"

The powerstones had traveled half the distance to the prongs. The etched-metal glyphs were legible, if she could

have concentrated and read them. She walked to the right place, the place opposite Ratepe, then hugged herself tightly, tucking her hands beneath her arms, lest she move without thinking.

"I need to be sure!" she shouted.

"Be sure that Gix wants the Weakstone and Mightstone, not you and me. At least we can give him what he doesn't want. It's all we've got to give."

Xantcha reached for the spindle. The light repelled Urza's armor. A good omen or a bad one? For whom? She didn't know and tucked her hands beneath her arms again.

"I can't, Ratepe. I'm Phyrexian. I can't trust myself. I'm always wrong."

The powerstones were three-quarters of the way. The devices beyond the ring of mirrors thrummed to life.

"I'm not! And I'm never wrong about you. Meet me in the light, Xantcha. We're going to end the war."

Xantcha shed her armor and thrust her hands into the spindle.

Begone! Listen and obey. Begone! Do not interfere.

The demon's anger, roaring through Xantcha's mind could have been deception. Gix should have known that she would, in the end, disobey his command, in which case Gix had outwitted them all and wanted her to reach into the light. But, on the chance that he wasn't quite that imaginative, Xantcha extended her arms to their fullest reach.

Time and space changed around her. She'd left her body behind. To the right, the Weakstone and the Mightstone, two great glowing spheres, rolling toward her, fighting, losing. To the left was the unspeakable, blood-red maw of Gix, calling the stones, sucking them to their doom.

Straight ahead stood Ratepe, son of Mideah, with a radiant smile and outstretched arms.

Their fingers touched.

Gix turned his wrath on her and on Ratepe. It was the last thing the demon did. Xantcha felt the stones free themselves to destroy the enemy they'd been created to destroy.

As for her and Ratepe, they were together.

Nothing else mattered.

And Rat's face, joyous as they embraced, was a glorious sight to carry into the darkness.

For Urza, the battle had ended suddenly, in a matter of moments and without easy explanation. One moment Mishra and Xantcha had been blocking the light, arms outstretched and reaching toward each other, not him. The next moment-less than a moment-a fireball had filled the lower chamber. Once again his eyes had lifted him out of death's closing fist. His Thran eyes had guarded this cavern for four thousand years before he and his brother found them, and they still preferred to see it in its glory, filled with engines, artifacts and powerstone mirrors.