They were some thirty worlds beyond the elven forest

world when Urza announced, as Xantcha shook herself free of flaking armor:

"Here you do not need to look for Phyrexians. Here we will find others of my kind."

Urza didn't mean that he'd brought her to Dominaria. Every so often, he journeyed alone to the brink of his birth-world to assure himself that it remained safe within the Shard they'd discovered long ago. Urza meant, instead, that he'd broken an age-old habit and set them down on a plane where other 'walkers congregated.

He'd never insinuated that he was unique, at least as far as 'walking between-worlds. Serra was a 'walker and so, Xantcha suspected, had been the Ineffable. But Urza had avoided other 'walkers until they came to the abandoned world he called Gastal.

"Be wary," he warned Xantcha. "I do not trust them. Without a plane to bind them, 'walkers forget what they were. They become predators, unless they go mad."

Knowing Urza fell in the latter category, Xantcha stayed carefully in his shadow as they approached a small, fanciful, and entirely illusory pavilion standing by itself on a barren, twilight plain, but the three men and two women they met there seemed unthreatening. They knew Urzaor knew of him-and welcomed him as a prodigal brother, though Xantcha couldn't actually follow their conversation: planeswalkers conversed directly in one another's minds.

But Urza was not the only 'walker who tempered his solitary life with a more ordinary companion. Outside the pavilion, Xantcha met two other women, one of them a blind dwarf, who braved the between-worlds on a 'walker's arm. Throughout the balmy night, the three of them sought a common language through which to share experience and advice. By dawn they'd made progress in a Creole that was mixed mostly from elven dialects from a hundred or more worlds. Xantcha had just pieced together that Varrastu, a dwarf, had heard of Phyrexia when Urza emerged to say it was time to move on.

Xantcha rose reluctantly. "Varrastu said that she and Manatar-qua have crossed swords with folk made from flesh and metal-"

Words failed as a second sun, yellowish-green in color, loomed suddenly high overhead. The air exploded as it hurtled toward them. Xantcha had the wit to be frightened but hadn't begun to guess why or to yawn Urza's armor from the cyst, when the pavilion burst into screaming flames, and Urza seized her against his chest. He pulled her between-worlds. Without the armor to protect her, she was bleeding and gasping when they re-emerged.

Urza laid her on the ground then cradled her face in his hands. "Don't go," he whispered.

It seemed an incongruous request. Xantcha wasn't about to go anywhere. The between-worlds had battered her to exhaustion. Her body seemed to have already fallen asleep. She wanted only to close her eyes and join it.

"No!" Urza pinched her cheeks. "Stay awake! Stay with me!"

Power like fire or countless sharp needles swirled around her. Xantcha fought feebly to escape the pain. She pleaded with him to release her.

"Live!" he shouted. "I won't let you die now."

Death would have been preferable to the torture flowing from Urza's fingers, but Xantcha hadn't the strength to resist his will. Mote by mote, he healed her and dragged her back from the brink.

"Sleep now, if you wish."

His hand passed over her eyes. For an instant, there was darkness and oblivion, then there was light, and Xantcha was herself again. She exhaled a pent-up breath and sat up.

"I don't know what came over me."

"Death," Urza said calmly. "I nearly lost you."

She remembered the yellow-green sun. "We must go back, Varrastu-Manatarqua-"

"Crossed swords with the Phyrexians. Yes. Manatarqua was the pavilion. She died on Gastal."

A shudder raced down Xantcha's spine. There was more that Urza wasn't saying. "How long ago?"

"In the time of this plane, nearly two years."

Xantcha noticed her surroundings: a bare-walled chamber with a window but not a door. She noticed herself. Her skin was white. It cracked and flaked when she moved, as if her armor clung in dead layers around her. Her hair, which she always hacked short around her face, hung below her shoulders. "Two years," she repeated, needing to say the words herself to make them true in her mind. "Long years?"

"Very long," Urza assured her. "You've recovered. I never doubted that you would, if I stayed beside you. You'll be hungry soon. I'll get food now. Tomorrow or the next day we'll move on toward Equilor."

Already Xantcha felt her stomach churning to life-after two empty years. Food would be nice, but there was another question: "At Gastal, Manatarqua-you said she 'was the pavilion." Do you mean that she was Phyrexian and that you slew her?"

"No, Manatarqua was a 'walker like myself, but much younger. I have no idea why she presented herself as an object. I didn't ask, it was her choice. Perhaps she hoped to hide from her enemies."

"Phyrexians?"

"Other planeswalkers. I told you, they-we-can become predatory, especially toward the newly sparked. I was nearly taken myself in the beginning-Meshuvel was her name. She was no threat to me. My eyes reveal sights no other 'walker can see. Until Serra, I avoided my own kind. They had no part to play in my quest for vengeance. I'd been thinking about 'walkers since leaving Serra's realm. I thought I might need someone more like myself."

"But they died."

"Manatarqua died. I suspect the others escaped unharmed, as I did. They prey on the young and the mortal because a mature 'walker is no easy target. But I had made up my mind almost from the start. I don't need another "walker. I need you. To finally realize that and then feel you die so soon afterward-it was almost enough to make me worship the fickle gods."

Xantcha imagined Urza on his knees or in a temple. She closed her eyes and laughed. He was gone when she reopened them, and she was too stiff yet to climb through the window. Her saner self insisted that Urza wouldn't abandon her, not after sitting beside her for two years, not after

what he'd just said about needing her. Then this world's sun passed beyond the window. Sanity's voice grew weaker as shadows lengthened. Of all the ways Xantcha knew to die, starvation was among the worst. She had dragged herself to the window and was hauling herself over the sill when she felt a breeze at her back. The breeze was thick with fresh bread, roasted meat, and fruit. Urza had returned.

He called the meal a celebration and ate with her, at least until a more ordinary sort of tiredness drove Xantcha back to the bed where she'd lain for so long. She awoke with the sun. There was a door beside the window, more food and, somewhere beyond the sun, near the edge of time, a world called Equilor.

Later, after they'd gotten to Dominaria, when Xantcha sorted through her memories, the largest pile belonged to the years they had searched for Equilor. Every season, for much more than a thousand Dominarian years, she and Urza wandered the multi-verse, taking other worlds' measure. There were surprises and excitement, mostly of the minor variety. After Serra's realm, Phyrexia seemed to lose interest in them-or, at least, had lost their trail. Though they sometimes found evidence of searcher-priests and excavations. Eventually, everything they found was long abandoned.

"I'm headed in the right direction," Urza would say whenever they came upon eroded ruins no one else would have noticed. "I'm headed toward the world that cast them out."

Xantcha was never so confident, but she never understood how Urza found anything in the between-worlds, much less how he distinguished hospitable worlds from inhospitable ones, near from far. She was content to follow a path that led endlessly away from the Phyrexia she knew and toward the vengeance that seemed equally distant. Until the day when they came to a quiet, twilight world.