The Moons of Mirrodin

Writer - Will McDermott
Cover artist - Brom
First printing - September 2003

SUMMARY

In the prologue Memnarch wanders around Argentum after Karn left him there as the new warden of the plane. He decides the whole thing is too mathematically perfect. Fascinated by the blinkmoths, which are the one thing Karn didn't create but imported from another plane, he decides to bring more lifeforms over. Before he can get to that he notices a weird black smudge which he wipes away, unknowingly infecting himself with a mysterious oil. He immediately decides to rename the world Mirrodin, after himself.

Chapter one starts an unknown amount of time later. We meet Glissa, an elf warrior who doesn't trust the rebuking ceremony in which the trolls of the Tangle let the elves forget painful memories. Elves get "flares" of these suppressed memories, but Glissa's are special: she gets flares in which she remembers a different world, one where all life isn't infused with metal.

When the trolls kidnap her though, it turns out to be to protect her. Every 100 cycles the levelers come to kill the greatest warrior in the Tangle but the trolls want to save Glissa because she has "a destiny" (they don't get more specific than that at this point). Glissa isn't happy to hear they'll let their family get leveled simply because they "don't have a destiny", so she steals a sword, escapes and heads home, but arrives too late. She fights off the levelers that have killed her parents and sister, but gets injured in the process. When the creatures suddenly stop fighting and head off she gets dragged along with them, but she sees a four-armed silhouette before blacking out.

The levelers go into a cave and deactivate. There Glissa meets Slobad, an outcast goblin, who takes her to the leonin city of Taj-Nar to heal an infected wound. Taj-Nar is being attacked by nim from the Mephidross but they manage to get in anyway. The leonin seer Ushanti foretells that Glissa will be involved in the end of the world, or at least that she saw "the leonin ripped from the world", but kha Raksha takes her side, as he was also attacked by levelers and saw the four-armed stranger as well. Ushanti then has a vision of the Mephidross, so Raksha sends Glissa and Slobad off to there.

The first thing they do, after fighting some nim, is find a submerged golem. Slobad cleans the dross-muck out of him to bring him back to life and he joins the crew even though he has lost his memories. Later, when more muck has been removed, he remembers his name is Bosh. They are then attacked by a reaper (which from its description is clearly a Dross Harvester. I guess they changed the name somewhere between the style guide and printing the cards) but they kill it and capture its controller, a Moriok named Yert, who they force to take them to Geth, the leader of the Dross, at the Vault ofWhispers. Glissa manages to defeat Geth’s pet vampire and threatens the guy until he reveals the vedalken payed him with serum to capture Glissa. She takes a vail of the stuff, tells Geth to give Yert a new reaper to control, and leaves. While they are traveling Bosh says his first word: Memnarch.

The three return to Taj-Nar, but after they arrive it is attacked by aerophins (Which oldy enough are called aerophuis elsewhere in the text) which are thopters designed by the vedalken, which cause great destruction and kill Rishan, Ushanti’s daughter and Raksha’s lover. After this they can’t stay, so Glissa takes Slobad and Bosh back to the Tree of Tales.

She talks to Chunt, the leader of the trolls, who tells her she’s a “nexus of great power” and that her flares are a racial memory of a world the elves lived on before they were transported to Mirrodin. Chunt knows this, because he alone is old enough to remember being transported himself. He also talks about the serum and how it can unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, but gives a “power corrupts” moral about why it shouldn’t be used. He's about to explain who Memnarch is, when he is shot by a corrupt troll elder. With his dying breath he tells Glissa the world is hollow.

Glissa chases down high priest Strang, the killer, but then a vedalken shows up with a bunch of aerophins and kills him, along with Glissa’s friend Kane, who was on guard duty at the Tree of Tales. This causes Glissa to freak out and unleash a blast of magic that destroys all the aerophins. Then she passes out.

She wakes up to find Slobad has taken her to a supposedly safe place: the lair of the Krark-Clan. He tells her about Krark’s belief about the world being hollow, but then the place is attacked by mainstream goblins, who think the Krark-Clan are heretics, and by aerophins as well. Glissa and Slobad manage to escape, but Bosh is captured. He and the Krarks are taken by the other goblins to be thrown into the Great Furnace. After some fighting Glissa and Slobad free them, and then Glissa, Slobad and Bosh discover the red lacuna, a giant hole that leads into the center of the world.

There's a hole in the world. Feel like we ought to have known. (Kudos if you get the reference!)

After leading the Krark-Clan to Slobad’s old hideout in the leveler cave, Glissa, Slobad and Bosh go to the quicksilver sea. Their plan is to get to the Pool of Knowledge at the center of Lumengrid, drink the vial of serum and dive in, to get all the answers they are looking for. They enlist the help of Bruenna, a woman who heads a Neurok village and whose father was killed by the vedalken. After *yawn* yet another aerophin attack they get into a submarine that Bosh drags across the bottom of the sea towards the vedalken home of Lumengrid. There they are attacked by eels and a quicksilver elemental, but Glissa is forced to drink the vial of serum to be able save Bosh.

They make it to Lumengrid, but while there Glissa and Bruenna are captured by Lord Pontifex, the most respected vedalken researcher and the one responsible for killing Bruenna’s father. Luckily Slobad and Bosh manage to cause a string of explosions as a distraction, and Glissa and Bruenna turn the tables on Pontifex. They force him to lead them to the Pool of Knowledge, but there they are ambushed by the vedalken that was trying to kill Glissa this whole time: Janus, one of the members of the Synod, the vedalken ruling body. He nearly kills them, but Glissa has another mysterious burst of power.

Defeated, Janus says he wanted Glissa dead to protect the vedalken’s way of life, because their god Memnarch “will use you to destroy Mirrodin, and it is our duty as the master race to protect the other races-from you!”. Pontifex was knocked into the Pool during the fight though, and emerges with some additional information: that Janus was planning to usurp Memnarch’s position as lord of Mirrodin. Glissa kills Janus, but then Pontifex tries to capture her to give her to Memnarch. Bosh comes to their rescue again and knocks Pontifex out.

The crew flees through the Pool of Knowledge, under which they find the blue lacuna. They decide to head down it to track down Memnarch. The novel ends with Bosh revealing the Pool has restored his entire memory.

REVIEW

Mirrodin is an absolutely crucial juncture in Magic’s history. Not just because it’s the first

expansion (after 8^th Edition) to use the new frames, or because it is the start of Modern, but also because it inaugurates a new period for the Magic storyline. After years of hanging around on Dominaria with only occasional excursions elsewhere, Magic finally starts utilizing the possibilities of having a Multiverse by visiting a new world every block. This new period was called the Planeshopping Era by fans, and is generally considered to last until Future Sight, although since we are still going from plane to plane with each set it could be argued the Planeshopping Era never ended.

This change seems to have been accompanied with a huge shift it the working of the creative team. While we know from various insights into the style guides released online during Odyssey and Onslaught blocks that they were already putting a lot of effort in creating new settings, this was now kicked into even higher gear with much more daring and out-there worlds. Mirrodin is a prime example of this. Its all-metal environment and metal-infused inhabitants are one of the most alien settings ever introduced in Magic. (I’ve speculated in earlier articles that this increase in work load may have played a role in the lack of quality control for the later Otaria stories).

So if you just looked at the cards, this was a time of new and exciting developments for Vorthoses, but it wasn’t all that great when you looked at what stories were being published. We still got a book per expansion, but the line was downsized, as the secondary novels and the anthologies were discontinued. And while Mirrodin block’s stories were not as bizarrely awful, nor as awfully bizar, as Legions and Scourge, they weren’t particularly well received either. Mediocre stories, continuity issues, dangling plotlines and barely any relation between story and cards did nothing to restore the faith of the storyline community at the time. So eh… you’ve been warned, I guess. Some more negative reviews coming up. Things don’t really pick up until Kamigawa block.

So, with the scene set, on to the Moons of Mirrodin specifically. What exactly is there to this story? Well, it is another tour of the five colors of Magic, just like Odyssey block was, and I’m afraid it isn’t done much better this time, except I guess that by doing the whole thing in one book it’s less dragged out. (Although it could be argued that this leaves the next two books very lacking in plot, but we’ll get to that in future reviews.) The whole thing gets very formulaic. The main characters go to a place, hear of more mysterious happenings, get a hint that the answers might be in the next place, then they head there, hear of even more mysterious happenings, get a hint that the answers might be in the next place, et cetera...

No, wait, I'm forgotting something: there is also fighting. Lots and lots of fighting. In the Tangle Glissa spends a whole chapter fighting Levelers, Before reaching Taj-Nar there is a whole chapter of Glissa and Slobad fighting nim. Then they go to the Mephidross and fight more nim. Only after the fighting do they get the new mysteries and the hints about where to go next. I guess I can't call these battles "random encounters", as the question why all these attacks are happening is the central mystery of the plot, but they do go on way too long every time to hold my interest.

Near the end it does turn into random encounters, with the eels and elemental in the Quicksilver Sea. That particular scene is made worse because the main characters need to do a lot of putzing around with invisibility spells and air bubbles to effectively fight in a completely opaque sea. It would be cool to have your roleplaying group figure out how to maneuver through an ocean of quicksilver, but it is just not very interesting to read about.

So we are taking a tour across the world and there is lots and lots of fighting. Does this book have anything else to offer? Ehm… very little, to be honest. I’m certainly not here for the characters, who are very lacking in personality. Glissa says she wants revenge for the death of her parents, but rarely actually seems sad or angry. Even her finding her mother's chopped off hand only evokes a flicker of emotion When she later tells the leonin what happens the text even tells us she's "half-feigning the emotion she showed". Similarly, Raksha says he missed Slobad, but he never really talks to him as a friend either. It’s a lot of telling rather than showing. And sometimes we barely even get that. I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what the personality of Bruenna the Neurok wizard or Glissa’s friend Kane was supposed to be. Only Slobad stands out with his, huh, interesting speech pattern, his grumbling about all the stuff that keeps happening to him and some genuinely funny moments.

It's through interaction with Slobad that the other main characters occasionally come alive. Parts of the book that deal the friendship between Glissa, Slobad and Bosh are actually kind of sweet, like Glissa curling up beside the golem to sleep, or Slobad affirming that he’d rather die alongside her than go back to his old life. I especially like the scene where Glissa has something of a nervous breakdown after Kane’s death and Bosh’s capture and accuses Slobad of having been bought by the vedalken. For a moment I was scared this was going to turn into the standard plot we’ve seen a thousand times before, where friends have a falling out but are later reunited at a crucial moment, but instead Slobad just recognizes his friend is not in a right state of mind and talks to her until she feels okay again. It’s surprisingly mature and poignant. Especially for a scene involving a goblin.

Ultimately though the main problem with reviewing Moons of Mirrodin is that it is just the first part of the story. This trilogy is based around a bunch of mysteries: why are the stars disappearing? Why do the elves lose their memories? What's up with the trolls and the removed parts of the history records at the Tree of Tales? What is up with the levelers? What mysterious powers does that sword Glissa stole from the trolls hold? Why are the nim attacking Taj-Nar, when they usually only raid the edges of leonin lands? What do Ushanti’s visions mean? What does Memnarch want? And the one that probably captured the attention of the Vorthos community the most: what is up with that strange oil in the prologue? Moons of Mirrodin introduces all of these, and whether the book is worth a (re-)read is really going to hinge on whether the next two novels deliver a good resolution to them. So, eh… watch this space, I guess? Although you can probably guess where this is going if you remember my warning from the start of the review...

I will say now though that for a mystery novel there is very little detective work being done. Despite Glissa’s card mentioning her wanting to “unlock the secret at the heart of her world”, and some Rei Nakazawa articles at the time describing the story as her setting out to uncover all these mysteries, she’s really just motivated by getting revenge for the death of her family. Nor does she do much research or deduction, she just goes to a place, learns a thing, and then someone tells her to go to another place. Or she gets injured and Slobad decides to take her to a place where she can heal and be safe (Taj-Nar, the Krark clan) and that place just so happens to have the next bit of info about Mirrodin’s secrets. The only real initiative she takes is deciding to talk to Chunt again, but of course he gets killed of before he can just tell her everything to prolong the mystery. So if you’re in the mood for a mystery novel where you can try to play along at home, this isn’t the book for you.

So we are not off to a great start to this new Planeshopping Era, but I’ll reserve my ultimate judgement until the end of the trilogy.

TRIVIA

• The elves call the things orbiting Mirrodin moons, the rest of the world calls them suns. Hence the name of the novel.
• Mirrodin is tiny. You can fly from Taj Nar to Mephidross in a few hours, and walk from the edge of the Tangle to Taj Nar in "two or three rotations". Will McDermott would later say on a forum that it has a circumference as long as the trip from Seattle to Minneapolis (Which, as a non-American, means pretty much nothing to me 😓)
• Karn's castle is called Galdroon
• It's not entirely clear to me how the rebuking ceremony works. Glissa says she once tried to get her friends to stop going to the ceremony, but that she later went through one to forget the memory of doing that. But... she still remembers doing it, and all her friends except Kane still shun her over it? That would suggest it only removed the emotions from the memories, though later it becomes very clear the memories are removed altogether, as the whole point of the ceremony is to make elves forget they came from another world...

Maybe this can be used to explain things?

• The elves never go outside the Tangle, believing there is nothing out there. Only some elders say there are races other than elves and trolls, but they get written off as suffering from flare-induced hallucinations.
• Glissa's sister is called Lyese. Her mom and dad never get a name, which is of course practically a death sentence in a fantasy story.
• Viridian elves polish their copper bits to look fancy. Glissa's friend Kane does this when he comes over for dinner. There seems to be interest for more than friendship from Glissa's side, but nothing comes from it. Lyese also fancies Kane.
• The trolls write down the entire history of the world in the Tree of Tales, though when Glissa went to read it she finds it only goes back "a few hundred cycles", as the earliest runes have been removed.
• How far the Tree of Tales goes back really isn't that much considering Glissa and Kane have been friends for “over a hundred cycles”. This might be a mistake though, as the trolls tell her the levelers came "exactly one phase of the moons before each of the last two convergences". The convergence is the moment each of the suns/moons is above the land that matches its color, which also happens "every one hundred cycles", so Glissa should've seen a leveler attack before. (Unless she had her memories of that removed?)
• All this talk of cycles gets dropped in favor of just talking about years in later novels, so I feel that they introduced this to make the world seem more alien, but never bothered to figure out how long a cycle was actually supposed to be.
• Glissa is racist against trolls, saying she doesn't trust them because "you couldn't even see their mouths under their huge noses until they opened them. How could you trust someone when you couldn't even see their mouth"... I'm guessing this line was written before the concept art for Mirrodinian trolls was finalized?

• Speaking of noses that are different in the book than in the card art (now there is a sentence I did not expect to ever write!), Slobad is supposed to have one made from metal. I'm interpreting it as a Tycho Brahe reference.
• The leaders of the trolls, Chunth, has no metal bits and is called the First One.
• Mirran goblins see in the dark, elves don't.
• Slobad lived in the cave where the levelers go to shut down. He reasons that's the safest place on Mirrodin. Until Glissa starts cutting them up as vengeance for her dead parents, as someone has to come and repair them at some point.
• Slobad was born under the blue sun, which means he is cursed according to goblin society. His mom didn't sacrifice him to the furnace as is appropriate though, but dropped him down an air duct, where he was adopted by the Krark cult. When the mainstream goblins raided the Krark heretics at some point he fled and was captured by the leonin, who gave him to Raksha as a training dummy. He didn't mind though. He was always getting hurt, at least the leonin healed him as well. He befriended Raksha, but when his friend became a famous warrior and was often send out of the city for raids the other leonin didn't treat him very well (even though he did a lot of stuff for them, including fixing the city walls!) He left again, ending up in the leveler lair.
• Krark was a goblin who claimed there were more worlds inside Mirrodin. The mainstream goblins killed him for “violating the Steel Mother”, as they call the planet, by entering her “Womb”, by which they mean going inside and seeing the mana core of the plane.

• Goblins call the black moon/sun Ingle, and they believe they go there after they are burned in the Great Furnace. The blue one is the Eye of Doom, the white one Bringer and the red one Sky Tyrant. No one really seems to wonder about the lack of a green one, though this will become very relevant in the next book.
• The first Kha of the leonin was called Dakan, "who took the Razor Fields form the beasts", build Taj Nar and crafted the Mask of Suns.
• In the Dross your status apparently comes from how powerful an undead you control, and Geth rules because he controls an vampire. “There is only one Geth, because there is only one vampire in the Mephidross. I control the Dross because I control the vampire”, he says. This also adds to the feeling that Mirrodin is small. The Dross does not feel like a country, more like a medium sized business.
• Leonin society is strictly gendered. There are no female defenders, but no male skyknights or healers. Glissa thinks she wouldn’t be comfortable living among them because of this.
• Elves light up their houses with gelfruit. When we get to Scars of Mirrodin the Vulshok seem to be eating it (and spell it "gel-fruit" or "gel fruit") rather than unsing it as illumination.
• Slobad says at one point: “The golems from before-time. The golems here before goblins or elves or anything, huh?” so it seems golems are legendary beings in the story, yet Mirrodin block is teeming with them. It sounds like Slobad is specifically talking about the Ur-Golems, who were mentioned in various flavor texts, but that’s not the case. Will McDermottwould later state he knew nothing about the Ur-Golems. Perhaps they were only created during flavor text writing.

• Before dying Chunt tells Glissa about the blinkmoths and the serum the vedalken make from them:

“They are what you see at night. You imagine they are the starts above and the fireflies that roam the Tangle. They are living creatures, lighting the sky with their serum-filled bodies, raining water down upon the land. [...] It is an amazing liquid. It unlocks the knowledge of the world, its creation, and its creator. A taste provides visions of the mysteries of the cosmos. A vial such as this can begin a journey to unlocking those mysteries.”

• Bruenna later adds:

“It expands all your senses. You become aware of the connections between all living things. I have heard it can even unlock racial memories.”

•  While we are at it with the quotes, this is Chunt’s explanation of the rebuking ceremony:

“For many hundreds of cycles now, I have tried to keep the elves and trolls safe in the Tangle. I kept knowledge of the blinkmoths a secret to prevent our races from falling victim to the allure of their power. I erased all mention of the old world from the histories so the elves and trolls would not search for their pasts.”

• Bosh later says “The Blinkmoths are eternal. Mycosynth arrived later", and also:

“I believe I may have been created to battle the mycoysnth infestation, but I lost the battle. That is all I remember. Everything else is blank until you and Slobad found me in the Mephidross”

• I prefer to show you all these quotes in full, because in many cases this is the only information we will ever get (in the case of Bosh’s creation, for example) or because it is pretty vague (How exactly does removing knowledge from the past protect the elves when it means they forget that the levelers come to kill their greatest warrior every once in a while?) If I were to rephrase these quotes or if I tried to draw conclusions from them, I think I would end up presenting things more clearly than they actually are in the book.
• Bruenna is a windmage, summoning winds and using curses along the line of “by the winds”. This will be pretty much forgotten in the next few books, when she becomes a general wizard, only occasionally summoning some wind.
• Bruenna “heard tales from long ago of a time when humans and vedalken worked as equals, but the serum changed all that. It changed the vedalken.” Again, no more details are even giving.
• Pontifex told Bruenna’s father Donnel to go into the Pool of Knowledge. He hadn’t had any serum, so he only saw flashes of images, but this was enough to convince him the vedalken were evil. He started a rebellion, and then the Synod, the Vedalken ruling council, had him killed.
• Oh, and I keep writing “Knowledge Pool”, like the card (and the flavor text), but it is consistently called “The Pool of Knowledge” in the novel.

 CONTINUITY

• Eh... well, Memnarch is the new form of the Mirari, which was central to the plot of Odyssey block and sort of integral to Onslaught block, and the very first line of the story mentions Karn and Jeska leaving to explore the Multiverse, like we saw at the end of Scourge.
• Memnarch says that as the Mirari he was flawed and leaked power, which infected its wielders with delusions of grandeur. Which is a better explanation for why everybody went mad than the explanations from Scourge and Judgment, which boiled down to "the Mirari merely gives power, you brought the madness yourself". He also says there are many other worlds that Karn send probes to. Let's hope that those were better made!
• Because it will be important for later discussion, this is how the oil describes itself at the end of the prologue:

"The oil already insinuated itself into the Warden's psyche, but there was time enough later to exert control. For now, it must divide and grow. Divide and grow. That was the first rule of any organism, especially one that had been created as a weapon. For what seemed an eternity, the oil had lain dormant, waiting to be unleashed upon a new world. The war for which it had been created had long since passed, but when a pair of travelers came. It awoke again and followed them to this new, this pristine, world."

 

• In one of her flare’s, Glissa-as-her-ancestor thinks about Gaea, which suggests the elves originally came from Dominaria.

Other than that, there is very little tying the Mirrodin story to the larger continuity, which will become something of a trend as we go further into the planeshopping era.

TIMELINE

The story starts moments after Scourge ends, with Memnarch watching Karn and Jeska leaving, but then it starts moving into the future very quickly. While he's admiring Argentum Memnarch stands around for decades just watching stuff. There is no indication just how much time passed between the prologue and the rest of the novel, and any temporal references get muddled by all that talk about cycles, convergences and rotations. 

Worse, the Mirrodin timeline will be handled incredibly inconsistently. Time Spiral says only a century passed between Scourge and Moons of Mirrodin, while various flavor texts and online articles talk about millennia instead. After we've covered the trilogy and all the online stuff, I'll do a fifth article to dive into that mess. For now I'll just put it on the timeline 100 years after Scourge.

For now, the only other point of interest relating to the timeline her is that we get confirmation that the Mirari was send to Dominaria 100 years after the Invasion. So it wasn’t hanging out in that house where Chainer found it for long.