"02.Planeswalker" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

wires. Urza recognized it too-or parts of it. He'd seen
similar wires uncoiled from his brother's flensed body,
attaching Mishra to a dragon engine.
"This one is mine. . . ." More of Ashnod's sultry words
lying fresh in Tawnos's mind.
Urza's only friend had wanted to argue with Ashnod, to
die beside her. She wouldn't grant him that dubious honor.
Instead she'd given him the sylex.
Tawnos's memories had clouded quickly as he'd absorbed
the vastly changed landscape. While Tawnos had sorted his
thoughts, Urza had looked westward, to the battlefield, now
replaced by ocean.
Ashnod, as treacherous as she'd been beautiful, had
betrayed everyone who fell into her power. Tawnos's back
still bore the scars. Mishra had judged her so unreliable
that he'd banished her, only to let her back for that last
battle.
Or had he?
Had Mishra known Ashnod carried the sylex? Had the
traitor himself been betrayed? Which was the puppet and
which the
master? Why had the demon stalked Ashnod across the
battlefield? What was her connection to Phyrexia?
Urza had wrestled with such questions until Tawnos had
asked his own. "Your brother?"
"Dead," Urza had replied as his questions converged on
a single answer. "Long before I found him."
The words had satisfied Tawnos, who began at once to
talk of other things, of rebuilding the land and restoring
its vitality. Tawnos-dear friend Tawnos-had always been an
optimist. Urza left him standing by the coffin, certain
that they'd never meet again.
For Urza, the realization that he hadn't slain Mishra
with the sylex had given him a sense of peace that had
lasted almost a month, until a new, stronger wave of guilt
had engulfed it. He was the elder brother, charged from
birth with his younger sibling's care.
He'd failed.
When Mishra had need of an elder brother's help, that
elder brother had been elsewhere. He'd failed Mishra and
all of Dominaria. His brother had died alone, betrayed by
Ashnod, transformed by a Phyrexian demon into a hideous
amalgam of flesh and artifice.
Urza had returned to Argoth and Tawnos as the snows had
begun, almost exactly one year ago. He'd denied himself
sleep or shelter, kneeling in the snow, waiting for Mishra,
or death; it hadn't mattered which. But Meshuvel had been
correct: Urza had transcended death, and he'd found, to his
enduring dismay, that he lacked the will for suicide. A
late spring had freed him from his icy prison. He'd stood