Planeswalker

Or should he say his Phyrexian eyes?

It scarcely mattered. Urza's borrowed eyes preserved him as the fireball raged like a short-lived sun.

The sun-ball consumed itself... quickly, Urza thought, though he remembered Argoth and that the time he'd

spent completely within the powerstones could not be measured. As his eyes recorded it, there was fire and then the fire was gone, two edges of the cut made by an infinitely sharp knife, without a gap between them.

There'd been no visions, as there had been the other times when the Mightstone and Weakstone had held him in their power. No explanations, however cryptic. Nothing, except a dusty voice that said, It is over. He had a sense, much less than a vision, that Mishra had grasped Xantcha's hand just before the explosion consumed them.

In the aftermath silence reigned. A natural silence: Urza wasn't deaf, but there was nothing left to hear. Urza thought light, and it flowed outward from him.

"Xantcha," he called, because he'd been without his brother before.

Her name echoed off the chamber's scorched walls. He was alone.

At the end, she'd chosen Mishra, charming, lively Mishra.

Urza wished them joy, wherever they'd gone. He wished them peace, far away from any Phyrexian or Thran design. They had earned peace, vanquishing their shared enemy: Gix.

The demon had vanished within the powerstone-derived fireball. There was nothing left. Urza's eyes told him that. He could hear them now, faint and smug in his skull.

The truth was written on the upper chamber ceiling. The Thran had fought among themselves, fought as only brothers could fight, with a blindness that transcended hatred. Remembering the battle the Weakstone and Mightstone had shown him the last time he'd come to Koilos, Urza realized he truly did not know which army had escaped to Phyrexia, if, indeed, Xantcha's Ineffable hadn't slipped away to create Phyrexia before that fatal day.

Standing in the Koilos cavern, Urza concluded that he'd have to continue his experiments with time because he'd have to go back himself, not to a moment in his own lifetime, but to the Thran, Gix and all the others. ...

"Not yet," Urza cautioned himself.

This would be a cu

And Urza would have no allies, none at all: not Tawnos, not Mishra.

Urza recalled light and moved along the blackened corridor to the surface. No real body. No real need for light, or anything else.

A weight tugged against him.

Xantcha's heart, which the powerstones, his eyes, had preserved.

He wasn't alone.

Urza would never be alone.