"J. Robert King - Artifact Cycle 3 - Time Streams" - читать интересную книгу автора (King Robert J)

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 Time Streams

couldn't defeat a whole world and was nearly torn to pieces
trying.
Tail between his legs, Urza retreated to Serra's Realm, a
place of angels and floating clouds. There he convalesced,
but he never truly recovered. Madness still haunted him,
and so did Phyrexia. Gix followed on his tail. No sooner
had Urza left Serra's Realm, thinking himself whole and
hale, than Gix and his demons arrived. A war began in
heaven. That place, like any other where Urza had chosen
to dwell, was decimated. Centuries later, it is still shrinking
in its long collapse.
When I point out these mad indiscretions, Urza shrugs.
He claims he regained his sanity after all that. He credits
his newfound perspective to Xantcha and RatepeтАФ"two
dear friends who sacrificed themselves to slay the demon
Gix, close the portal to Phyrexia, and save my life. To
them, I am forever grateful."
True gratitude would be a good sign, too.
Urza has never, in his three millennia of life, shown
true gratitude nor had a "dear friend." I have known him
for three decades. For two of those, I have worked side by
side with him at the academy we established here on
Tolaria. I am not his dear friend. No one is. Most of the
tutors and students at the academy don't even know his
real name, calling him Master Malzra. The last person who
was close enough to Urza to be a dear friend was his
brother, and everyone knows what happened to him.
No, Urza is incapable of regret and gratitude, of having
dear friends, not that there haven't been folk like Xantcha,
Ratepe, Serra, and I, who genuinely love the man and
would give our lives for him. But he seems incapable of
returning our affection.
That's not enough to declare him insane, of course. As I
said, measures of sanity among planeswalkers are hard to


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 J. Robert King

come by, but there is something mad about Urza's blithe
belief that Xantcha and Ratepe sacrificed themselves, that
Serra's Realm and Argoth sacrificed themselves, that
Mishra sacrificed himself.... It seems everyone and
everything Urza claims to care about gets destroyed. And
what does that mean for me, his newest dear friend?

тАФBarrin, Mage Master of Tolaria