Artifacts Cycle 02 Magic the Gathering Planeswalker

716 Pages·1998·7.39 MB·English

by  Lynn Abbey

Artifacts Cycle

Book II

Magic the Gathering

Planeswalker
LYNN ABBEY

PLANESWALKER

* Pub. Date: September 1998
* Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
* Format: Mass Market Paperback, 368pp

* Series: Magic the Gathering: Artifacts Cycle Series, #2
* ISBN-13: 9780786911820
* ISBN: 0786911824
Synopsis

Urza Triumphant.

The war between Urza and Mishra is over. Brooding on the death
of his brother at the hands of extraplanar forces, Urza drifts
among the planes.

But the end of the Brother's War has transformed him into
something greater. Deep within his heart, a spark has been
kindled to a flame that cannot be quenched.

Urza has become a planeswalker.
Artifacts Cycle Book II Magic the Gathering Planeswalker

CHAPTER 1

A man descended.

His journey had begun in the clouds, riding the winds
in search of a place remembered but no longer known. He'd
found the place, as he'd found it before, by following the
ancient glyphs an ancient folk had carved into the land,
glyphs that had endured millennia of neglect and the
cataclysmic finale of the Brothers' War five years ago.
Much of Terisiare had vanished in the cataclysm,
reduced to dust by fratricidal hatred. That dust still
swirled overhead. Everyone coughed and harvests were
sparse, but the sunsets and sunrises were magnificent
luminous streaks of amber reaching across the sky, seeking
escape from a ruined world.
The brothers in whose names the war had been fought had
been reduced to curses: By Urza's whim and Mishra's might,

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Artifacts Cycle Book II Magic the Gathering Planeswalker

may you rot forever beneath the forests of sunken Argoth.
Rumors said that Urza had caused the cataclysm when he
used Lat Nam sorcery to fuel his final, most destructive,
artifact. Others said that the cataclysm was Mishra's curse
as he died with Urza's hands clasped around his throat. A
few insisted that Urza had survived his crimes. Within a
year of the cataclysm, all the rumors had merged in an
increasingly common curse: If I met Urza on the road, I'd
cripple him with my own two hands, as he and his brother
crippled us, then I'd leave him for the rats and vultures
as he left Mishra.
Urza had survived. He'd heard the curse in its infinite
variations. After nearly five years in self-chosen exile,
the erstwhile Lord Protector of the Realm had spent another
year walking amongst the folk of blasted Terisiare: the
dregs of Yotia, the survivors of Argive, the tattered, the
famished, the lame, the disheartened. No one had recognized
him. Few had known him, even in the glory days. Urza had
never been one to harangue his troops with rhetoric. He'd
been an inventor, a scholar, an artificer such as the world

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Artifacts Cycle Book II Magic the Gathering Planeswalker

had not seen since the Thran, and all he'd ever wanted was
to study in peace. He'd had that peace once, near the
beginning, and lost it, as he'd lost everything, to the
man-the abomination-his brother had become.
A handful of Urza's students had survived the
cataclysm. They'd denounced their master, and Urza hadn't
troubled them with a visit. Urza's wife, Kayla Bin-Kroog
had survived, too. She now dwelt in austere solitude with
her grandson, writing an epic she called The Antiquity
Wars. Urza hadn't visited her either. Kayla alone might
have recognized him, and he had no words for her. As for
her grandson, Jarsyl, black-haired and stocky, charming,
amiable and quick-witted . . . Urza had glimpsed the young
man just once, and that had been one time too many. His
descent continued.
Urza had not wanted to return to this place where the
war had, in a very real sense, begun nearly fifty years
earlier. He wasn't ashamed of what he'd done to end the
war. Filling the bowl-shaped sylex with his memories had
been an act of desperation; the sylex itself had been a

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Artifacts Cycle Book II Magic the Gathering Planeswalker

sudden, suspect gift, and until that day he'd neither
studied nor practiced sorcery. He hadn't known what using
the sylex would do, but the war had had to be stopped. The
thing his brother had become had to be stopped, else
Terisiare's fate would have been worse. Much worse.
No, Urza would not apologize, but he was not pleased by
his own survival.
Urza should have died when the sylex emptied. He
suspected that he had died, but the powerstones over which
he and his brother had contended had preserved him. When
Urza had awakened, the two Thran jewels had become his
eyes. All Thran devices had been powered by such faceted
stones, but his Might-stone and Mishra's Weakstone had been
as different from ordinary powerstones as a candle to the
sun.
Once rejoined within Urza's skull, the Thran jewels had
restored him to his prime. He had no need for food or rest,
though he continued to sleep because a man needed dreams
even when he no longer needed rest. And his new eyes gave
him vision that reached around dark corners into countless

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