Urza - Escapes Multani's grasp

But not preserving him. Urza felt his body dissolving away into wood. His fingers were the first to go, each burning with incandescent agony. His every nerve sizzled beneath the skin. His bones turned to chalk and rubbed away in the gnawing of the heartwood around him. His fingers and toes, harvested slowly by the massive tree, turned into mere minerals.

***

The words were needless. Urza had become Titania. His body had become a vast forest. He felt in every tissue of his being the destroying, despoiling work of his own armies. Minute creatures invaded his body and, mote by mote, turned him into mere minerals, mere resources.

Urza would have screamed, but he was no longer Urza. He would have planeswalked from the spot, but that would mean leaving his body, the forest, behind. He could only hang there, encased in wood, and endure.

***

In the deafening clamor of their voices, Urza remembered who he was.

The mind of the forest pressed in upon him with sudden violence, straining to quell the thought. After five years of torture and penance, Yavimaya’s fury was spent. The forest had come to know the man it had so hated. It had subsumed him into its web of life. No, Yavimaya’s fury was spent, and its rage was nothing beside the fury of the battle that summoned Urza.

He forced back the mind of the wood. He recomposed his being from the drifting shreds of it within the vast tree. He brought his mind into sudden, keen focus.

Yavimaya made one final grab at him. Multani, the soul of Yavimaya, impelled himself into the form of the awakening planeswalker. He fused with the forming figure, struggling to root him in place, but it was too late.

Urza vanished from the heart of the tree. He was suspended for only a sliver of time in the fold between worlds, but during that moment he could feel a presence imprisoned within him: Multani. In a single instant, his captor had become his captive.

***

Time Streams, Chapter 15, 17