The Brothers' War (The Artifacts Cycle, Book 1) (Part 3 - Character & Worldbuilding)
Hello, everyone. I hope your week is off to a good start.
This is the conclusion to the 3-part analysis of The Brothers’ War. Please see the previous parts if you’d like the general overview or the analysis of the plot. Today, we’ll be wrapping things up by looking as the characters and the worldbuilding.
Let’s take a ‘walk.
STATS
Title: The Brothers’ War
Series: The Artifacts Cycle (Book 1)
Author(s): Jeff Grubb
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: May 1998
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
Rating: 7/10
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for The Brothers’ War will be provided throughout this review. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labeled sections. I will keep the first paragraph of any given section spoiler-free.
Throughout this review, I will also be providing heavy spoilers for later events within the Magic: the Gathering (MTG) canon. While I will be steering clear of details that would spoil the progression of this book specifically, there is a strong chance that you will figure out certain spoilers if you pay attention to these bits of lore. Most of these will be concentrated to a dedicated section discussing the role of this story within the overall timeline. However, a few other unmarked lore spoilers will be present throughout the review.
TERMINOLOGY
While the title of the book is The Brothers’ War, the actual conflict being fought is itself called the Brothers’ War (at least, it is when referred to by later entries in the MTG timeline). I will need to refer to the conflict, rather than the book, at a couple points. Whenever I need to refer to the conflict, I will simply refer to it as “the War”.
CHARACTER
Ultimately, this narrative is driven by characters. We are here to learn how Urza and Mishra became the men who they were the end of the war and the impact they had on the people around them. While I found the evolution of Urza’s and Mishra’s characters to be lacking, I still feel they get strong moments. I also feel the secondary characters are handled well.
Urza
The way Urza was handled in this story was a pleasant surprise for me. I assumed he would fall towards one of two extremes:
As an unambiguous hero, to amplify the dichotomy between him and Mishra.
As the cold, detached Chess Master archetype he’d become over millennia as a Planeswalker.
The Urza we get instead is nuanced. He’s detached, yes, but it’s clear that he just prefers working with machines to interacting with people. Were he conceived today, I’m sure WotC would be waving him around as Representation for the autism spectrum. He does show genuine care for his apprentice, his wife, his son, and of course Mishra, merely losing perspective when an artifact or a challenge snares his interest. He also shows a measure of self-awareness and remorse for both the terrible things he does in the name of fighting Mishra and for neglecting the people in his life.
That isn’t to say Urza is a hero. He is just as much to blame as Mishra for the schism over who gets to control the Mightstone and the Weakstone, and thus, he’s responsible for how their brotherly conflict spiraled out of control and got may people killed. He also continued to prosecute the war long after he realized he was perpetuating and escalating cycle of violence and consumption. Still, he comes across as less villainous and more tragic. The audience goes into his story knowing that things will end badly and that Urza plays a part in events. His portrayal simply shows us that he’s human.
Mishra
This brother is far simpler than Urza. Mishra is the hotheaded younger sibling with an inferiority complex. From his introduction, he wants it known to all that he is less than a year younger, with Urza born on the first day of the year while he was born on the last, making them the same age whenever his birthday rolls around. He is the impulsive, instinctive, and emotional foil to Urza’s cold and methodical reason. As if often par for the course for such characters, this emotional perspective fuses with ambition to transform him into a moustache-twirling villain who always grasps for more because he feels he is entitled to it. This is ultimately what leads him to embrace compleation as a means to overpower Urza.
I don’t think that Mishra’s simplistic arc is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just rushed. The back half of the book felt like it was learning on archetypes to speed-run his development.
Gix
A Phyrexian demon (later designated as a “Phyrexian Praetor” when a card for him was finally made), Gix initially touches Mishra’s mind when Mishra claims the Weakstone. When Mishra later enters Phyrexia to steal dragon engines, Gix pursues, eager to claim the Weakstone from Mishra. This leads to him discovering the portal that Urza and Mishra activated when they claimed the two stones. He spends most of the plot sitting out the story, merely leveraging the monks of the Brotherhood of Gix to spy on Urza and Mishra. When he realizes that he can’t simply take the stones away from the brothers, he conspires to feed their conflict, allowing them to destroy one another so that he can swoop in and claim the stones after the fact.
Gix is fine as a villain. I feel like he should have been a bigger part of this story, at least if Grubb really wanted to earn the payoff of Mishra embracing Phyrexia while Urza rejects that path. Still, his limited involvement does make sense in light of his motivations and the means available to fulfill them.
Tawnos
A toymaker who becomes Urza’s apprentice after the later is installed as the Chief Artificer of Yotia, Tawnos quickly becomes the main POV character for Urza’s side of the conflict. His primary role is to serve as the closest thing this book as to an Everyman POV, observing Urza’s interactions with others from an outside perspective. He also serves as the closest things Urza has to a trusted confidant.
Tawnos is a very likeable character, though not necessarily the most interesting. While he does have a few moments where he shines, he’s mainly here so the audience can see what’s going on.
Kayla bin-Kroog
The princess of Yotia, Kayla serves as the initial POV character for Urza’s story within Part 2 of the narrative, first noticing him when visiting the clock shop where he works at that point in the narrative. When Urza completes the challenge set by her father to win her hand in marriage (which he does to claim a Thran tome that was included in her dowry), Kayla put her foot down and stated her willingness to go through with the marriage when her father tried to back out of the agreement. Once she and Urza are married, though, Kayla is pushed to the side by Urza’s duties as Chief Artificer, at which point Tawnos moves in to take over her role as POV.
Kayla is very much a victim within this tragedy. She is neglected and ignored by Urza, despite doing her best to be a supportive wife, and then her homeland is ravaged as a result of Mishra’s desire to reclaim the Mightstone from Urza. Even Urza wishes he could have been a better man for her. Still, I feel like makes sense for the story being told. Also, once Kayla’s agency within the narrative is lost, she’s not trotted out just to make the audience feel bad. She fades into the background, acknowledged as a presence who influences Urza but is unable to rein him in. This amplifies the sense of tragedy in her story - her powerlessness is reflected through her vanishing presence.
Ashnod
Ashnod is Mishra’s apprentice, introduced around the same time as Tawnos, and she shares the responsibility of POV for Mishra’s story with Hajar (more on him momentarily). Her obsession with treating the human body as a machine helps to push Mishra down the path towards Phyrexia, with him supporting her inhumane experiments in exchange for more powerful soldiers. While she does eventually turn on him, this is out of a desire to survive rather than any moral aversion to his actions. Her other defining feature is that she is a woman in a man’s world, constantly clashing with the Fallaji warlords who surround Mishra and maintaining her position only through the results she delivers.
While Tawnos and Kayla are here primarily as POVs, Ashnod has her own story going on, one that almost eclipses Mishra’s. She is bounced from one location to another as she fulfills his wishes and pursues her own agendas. This makes her interesting to follow throughout the story. She also gets something of an arc, reaching a measure of acceptance about Fallaji perceptions about her.
Hajar
Introduced in Part 1 as one of the diggers at Tocasia’s archeological site, Hajar forms a friendship with Mishra, and he intercedes from Mishra and helps him rise to power when their paths cross again in Part 2. He then serves as a POV character for Mishra’s story throughout the remainder of the book. While Hajar doesn’t get an arc, he does have motivations of his own, seeking to ensure his own position and survival as Mishra rises and then trying to care for Mishra as best he can as the years of the war drag on.
Much like Ashnod, Hajar is an interesting character to have as a POV; much like Kayla, his lack of agency feeds into the tragedy of the situation as he watches Mishra deteriorate and then become seduced by the Phyrexians. I haven’t got much to say about him beyond that. Like Tawnos, he’s here to serve the narrative rather than driving it.
Tocasia
Tocasia is the POV throughout most of Part 1. She observes the growth of the brothers from strong-willed youths to quarreling young men and is present for the events at Kolios. Afterwards, she also observes how the Mightstone and Weakstone inflame the divide between the brothers right up to the point that violence breaks out between them.
Tocasia is another character who’s mainly here for the POV, though she also serves as a suitable vehicle for exposition about the Thran and other setting details early in the story as as a mentor figure for the two brothers. Much like Part 1 itself, she is a functional for the purpose she was written for.
WORLDBUILDING
The era of Dominaria in which Urza and Mishra lived balanced between the ancient artifice of the fallen Thran civilization and the mana-fueled magic that is an integral feature of MTG. Urza and Mishra shape the civilizations of their day into industrial powerhouses that strip Terisiare (and later Argoth) of natural resources to sustain their mechanical armies. As the war heats up, a conclave of scholars establish themselves as a Third Path, delving in the mystical traditions of various smaller cultures and discovering the truth of the mana-based magic system beneath. The result of this is that, despite MTG being defined by high-magic stories, this particular story is surprisingly low-magic. The elements that are overtly magical - powerstones, the Mightstone and Weakstone, Gix and the planar portal to Phyrexia - are all treated as very significant and mysterious things within the story itself.
Fanservice is a major component of this story. Aside from the obvious reality of this being a tie-in novel, there are tertiary characters and machines mentioned in passing that seem to only be here because they were mentioned in the names or flavor text of cards from the Antiquities expansion. This never gets distracting, nor does it reach a point that it felt like someone needed to understand the references to follow what was happening.
One minor issue that I will file as a worldbuilding issue is that it’s not clear at exactly what point Urza’s Planeswalker spark ignites. Books set later in the timeline left me with the impression that it ignited when he detonated the Sylex and absorbed the Mightstone and Weakstone into his skull. However, with how events are framed, having his spark ignite early in his battle with Mishra would explain why he has the sudden epiphany that allows him to tap into mana and activate the Sylex in the first place. This doesn’t break the narrative. It’s just a bit odd that this isn’t more clear, given how Urza ascending to be a Planeswalker is the culmination of his origin story.
NEW RELICS
Overall, I enjoyed revisiting this book. If you’re looking for a Fantasy e-book to try, I feel like this is a fun pick, especially if you are a fan of MTG or want to learn more about the setting. It is a tie-in that is respectful of its source material without relying on said source material as a crutch.
I will be continuing on to Book 2 of the Artifacts Cycle, Planeswalker. The review will be split into two parts, which are scheduled for April 3rd and April 10th. I hope you’ll all join me for it.
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Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, is now premiering over in Tales of the Five Worlds!
Kabarāhira is a city of necromancers, and among these necromancers, none are more honorable or respected than Master Japjot Baig. Yadleen has worked under him since she was a girl, learning how commune with bhūtas and how to bind these ancient spirits into wights. Her orderly world is disrupted, however, when a stranger appears with the skeleton of a dishonored woman, demanding that her master fabricate a wight for him.
To protect her master from scandal, Yadleen must take it upon herself to meet this stranger’s demands. Manipulating the dead is within her power, but can honor survive in the face of a man who has none?
All chapters of Volume I are now available! I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.
