Dissension

 

Writer - Cory J. Herndon
Cover Art - Zoltan Boros & Gabor Szikszai
First Printing - May 2006

SUMMARY

Three weeks after Guildpact ended the master thief Capobar is hired to go into the ruins of the Cauldron and retrieve cerebral fluid of the dragons Zomaj Hauc brought to life. He finds the third dragon, thought dead when part of the building collapsed on its egg, begging for death while being eaten by some nephilim. After retrieving the fluid Capobar is kidnapped by his own "shadewalker" accoplices. The nephilim grow to enormous sizes and start destroying the Utvara township. Master Engineer Crixizix rescues as many people as she can (Crix was granted a promotion and some new syllables by Niv-Mizzet for her conduct last novel) and requests aid from Niv-Mizzet himself. The dragon shows up and kills two nephilim before getting either bored or scared and flying off. Crixizix sends Pivlic to the main city to warn Teysa. Unfortunately, the nephilim also start moving that way. All of this is watched by one of the lupul shapeshifters.

Teysa was summoned to the city because a badly beaten Feather showed up at Prahv, the Azorius headquarters, and turned herself in for desertion, striking a superior, oathbreaking, failure to attend to her guild duties... and guild-matricide, then requested the baroness Karlov as her advokist.

In a third plotline we learn that after the decamillennial events Fonn and Jarad fell in love, married and had a son, Myczil, but have since divorced again. Oh, and Fonn has a cytoplast prosthetic hand now. "Myc" spends his time partly being trained by his dad as a Golgari hunter, and partly by his mom as a Selesnya scout. During an outing with the latter, their scouting party is attacked and captured by Rakdos cultists. Fonn is left behind. She contacts Jarad and the two exes, with some Golgari troops as back-up, rush to Rix Maadi to infiltrate the Rakdos headquarters and get their son back.

While all this is going on Parhelion has reappeared in the sky... on a collision course with Prahv. Which is unfortunate as that is where Teysa has requested a High Tribunal to be held for Feather; since the other angels are missing there is a chance Feather might be the new Boros guildleader by default, and thus she shouldn't be judged by a random judge, but by Grand Arbiter Augustin IV, the current Living Saint of the Selesnya and the commander-general of the wojek. The latter opens the tribunal by asking Feather where the rest of the angels are. She tells them they are all dead.

Feather reveals that Agyrem, the city of ghosts, isn't just a story but really exist. Usually it sort-off floats around Ravnica in an invisible state, but it got snagged on the Schism. Eventually the Parhelion entered Agyrem. Razia wanted to explore, but the ghosts went to war against the angels, eventually led by a ghostly Szadek. After some cryptic references to Feather and Kos "breaking the Guildpact" and Szadek luring the Parhelion into Agyrem, Razia is killed by the vampire, but not before she tells Feather to warn the Grand Arbiter about all this. Feather then spend 10 years wandering Agyrem before escaping through the Schism when Hauc tapped into it for his scheme last book. After Kos' funeral she flew back into Agyrem to make sure Szadek didn't escape as well, only to be badly beaten by the ghosts there. She escaped again and turned herself into the Azorius, reasoning that a tribunal was the quickest way to get the message out to the Grand Arbiter and other guildleaders.

After this revelation Feather is off the hook, and Augustin sends for Kos, who is now an Azorius spirit-guard (because of some small print in a contract he signed when he first joined the wojek) and puts his mind in the body of Obez Murzeddi, a lawmage and "ectomancer". Augustin reveals that the Dimir and the Rakdos were allowed into the Guildpact as an opposing force that strengthened its magic (Magic works better in complete cycles apparently). What happened at the end of Ravnica was actually Szadek manipulating Kos into arresting him, which caused a paradox within the Guildpact: Szadek's role was to fight against the pact, but now he was arrested for it. This caused the pact to start to break down, allowing for stuff like Szadek killing all the angels. But for that plan to work Szadek had to make himself deliberately vulnerable to Kos, thus Augustin plans on sending him to deal with the issue. He then brings in Capobar, the thief from the begining. It turns out his shadewalkers sold some of the cerebral fluid to the Rakdos, before delivering the rest to the person who originally hired him: Momir Vig, who in their meeting was flanked by a ghostly Szadek and by Svoghtir, who survived his head being crushed by jumping into Savra's mind and taking control of her after she died. Before Kos can go though, the Parhelion crashes into Prahv.

(And yes, this is all a bit complicated!)

Even if you haven't read this book, you probably suspected something bad was going to happen to the original Parhelion if you played War of the Spark...

While all this is going on, Myc is taking into Rix Maadi where the Blood Witch Izolda uses his blood and the draconic cerebral fluid to awaken Rakdos from centuries of slumber under the lava, and to increase his size like it did to the nephilim. (For this ritual to work she needed the blood of a guildmaster, but the Guildpact would've prevented her from moving directly against one. But now for the first time in forever a guildmaster has had a kid, who she could get her hands on...) Her plan is to mentally link herself to Rakdos, but at the climax of the ritual Fonn and Jarad storm in and disrupt it, leading to the demon being linked to Myc instead! Myc tries to control him, but can do little more than steer the direction of his carnage.

Most named characters actually survive the Parhellion crash, only the Boros acting guildmaster (and a whole load of unnamed Azorius members) are crushed. Pilvic shows up to tell Teysa about the nephilim... who promptly arrive at the scene (and incidentally squish Capobar). Kos and Pilvic go of to Novijen, where Kos's spirit jumps into the body of a "virusoid" guard and manages to get close to Momir Vig and Svogthir. Vig starts ranting about their greatest creation, Experiment Kraj, and how he will use it to conquer the world, with him ruling the surface and Svogthir the undercity. They notice Kos and toss him out of a window, but his spirit hops into Savra's dead body and he manages to wrest control of it from Svogthir. He is forced to play the role and activate Kraj (at which point all cytoplast in the world, including Fonn's prosthetic hand, flies off and merges into its body), but in doing so gets close enough to Momir Vig to stab him through the eye.

Rakdos bursts into the overcity and kills one of the nephilim. Fonn and the surviving scouts she managed to save from the Rakdos figure out a way to blow up the other two. Izolda captures & kills Jarad, using his blood to wrest control of Rakdos away from Myc, but just at that moment a mindless Kraj (who absorbed all the nearby Simic and Svoghtir/Savra) appears and absorbs him before going dormant. This absorption grievously wounds the demon (I guess Kraj put a +1/+1 counter on a Gelatinous Cube somewhere along the way), wounds that also appear on Izolda. Her fellow cultists see this as weakness and, ehm... they eat her. Meanwhile the Living Saint of the Selesnya goes mad from seeing all this slaughter and releases a new batch of quietmen (which were outlawed after the first novel, but secretly the Selesnyans had been building another army), which start taking apart Kraj and Rakdos alike.

While this madness is going on, Grand Arbiter Augustin IV summons the senate and uses mental magic to trick Feather and Teysa into running into the Parhelion to find Razia's body, where they are captured by Szadek and some lupul shapeshifters. No more than a dozen surviving senators show up in the ruins of Prahv, but Augstin still declares it a convocation of the full senate ("pending a check against surviving records") and has them declare martial law "without Boros or wojek assistance", in which Augstin would become a dictator and there would be a compulsory draft of the living population and of Agyrem. Turns out Augstin had  Szadek killed almost immediately after he was arrested and has been controlling all the spirits through the vampire's ghost ever since.

"Feather" picks up Kos (back in Obez's body), Pilvic, Fonn, Myc and the surviving scouts and brings them to the senate, only to reveal herself to actually be a lurker. It and Augustin herd the group into the ruins of the Parhelion. Apparently the Guidlpact isn't quite dead yet, as Szadek and the lurker holding the real Feather hostage say they have to make the angels extinct at exactly the right time (for some reason), but Kos & Co manage to defeat the shapeshifter and capture the ghost-pire in a standard issue wojek ghost-grounder. They set the Parhellion's engines to explode and run. Kos tosses Szadek's ghost at Augustin (who is already busy fending of a herd of quietmen who have come to depose him) and the Dimir and Azorius guildmasters are still fighting when the blast obliterates them.

In the last chapter we learn that Feather & Golgari forces have dragged Rakdos's unconscious body back into the lava pits. Jarad managed to force his own ghost back into his body and is now a lich. There was a new spark between him and Fonn while they were rescuing their son, but that is gone now, Jarad isn't the same man he was when he was alive. Myc decides to stay with the Golgari for now, though he wishes to remain a bridge between them and Selesnya. Crixizix begins rebuilding Utvara.

Two years later Kos is brought back as a proper ghost by the new Azorius guildmaster. Feather, now Boros guildmaster, tells him there is a new guildpact, mostly composed by Teysa, which is a not a magical document but "an agreement that works on true interdependence, negotiation". There's also no House Dimir this time around. She then shows him that Agyrem has become overlayed onto regular Ravnica, and that Szadek has survived and is somewhere in there gathering power. Kos is made the leader of the first police force of the Ghost Quarter.

Don't get too attached to it though...

REVIEW

You thought Ikoria was Magic's first foray into kaiju stories? After Ravnica did Magic/Detectives, and Guildpact did Magic/Western, here we have a bunch of humongous monsters brawling in a cityscape combined with a return of the Guildpact-breaking story from the first novel.

All the good points of the previous two novels still stand: Ravnica is a brilliant world, the characters are fun, and the action is mostly great as well. It's also good to see some of the lingering mysteries picked up upon. All of it comes together in a very fun read which unfortunately seems to run out of pages before it gets to wrap-up its story properly.

After a Niv-Mizzet/Nephilim brawl early in the novel and a Rakdos/Nephilim brawl later on the final kaiju fight turns out to be a bit of an anti-climax with Experiment Kraj just sort of glomping onto Rakdos before going dormant itself. Worse than that, the mystery plot also lacks the space for a complete explanation for what was going on, which leaves a bunch of scenes which don't seem to make a whole lot of sense: for example, Szadek and the lupul holding Feather captive rather than killing them because apparently the angels need to go extinct on a very specific moment, or Augustin deliberately herding Kos and co into the Parhelion... where they proceed to free Feather, defeat Szadek and blow the whole thing up to kill Augustin. Without a clear explanation of what the plan there actually was the two evil masterminds end up looking rather foolish. If you can live with a more general explanation of "when multiple masterplans collide there is bound to be some that go wrong" you'll have a lot of fun with these book though.

The end of the Guildpact is clearly intended to be a happy ending, or at least an improvement over what the world was before. Remember that this trilogy began with Kos telling us a bunch of Rakdos goons killing for fun wasn't actually illegal if their victims weren't guildmembers and we've been taught the "Ravnica is a horrible place because of the guilds" lesson time and time again in both the novels and the online coverage. So it's actually kind of odd that there is no good guys trying to topple the Guildpact in these stories. It's Szadek, Svogthir, Rakdos, Vig and Augustin who want it gone so they can rule the world themselves. The good guys start of trying to save the 'pact, and eventually settle on killing the would-be tyrants and setting up a new, non-magical and presumably more just, Guildpact up after the original has fallen.

It makes me wonder what the original plan was. Since there wasn't any hint of a guildless resistance (that wouldn't come until the Gateless in Return to Ravnica) I doubt the idea was to go for the catharsis of the overthrowing of an unjust system. Yet when we next see Ravnica in the Agents of Artifice novel we'll learn that this new Guildpact hasn't lasted and the guilds have been dissolved altogether. It seems getting rid of the guilds was the idea all along. Can you imagine a second Ravnica block without the guilds, that tries to capitalize entirely on the "Plane covered in a city" theme?

Or perhaps they had never intended for a return to Ravnica. Since the beginning Magic has had a habit of discarding its settings, either through making centuries long time jumps that irrevocably change them (see the Antiquities to Alliances period) or by just blowing them up (think of the complete depopulation of Mirrodin). We know Cory J. Herndon was dreaming of writing a second Ravnica trilogy (more on that below), but was anybody else? Whatever the case, Ravnica proved popular but so did the guilds, so when Magic finally started doing return blocks the dissolution of the guilds had to be awkwardly undone. And they'll get rid of Agyrem as well, so we've never seen Kos's ghost police adventures either.

Ultimately the original Ravnica trilogy may have some flaws and rough edges, but are still very fun books. Between them and the sets themselves it is no wonder that we'll see many returns to this plane. 

CONTINUITY

First, some minor points:

• There's one glaring continuity issue in this novel: Feather enters Agyrem in 10.002 Z.C., but thinks to herself "Kos came closest to figuring it [her supposed crime] out, but took his best guess to the grave."... but Kos didn't die until ten years later! I guess we could say the flashback chapter isn't a true flashback, but just Feather's memory of events.
• We also have one final unreliable near-extinction; Momir Vig is supposed to be the last of his kind, his species of elves having been killed in tribal wars with the Silhana and Devkarin in pre-Guidpact times. So... what is Simic Guildmage? Just a very twisted Silhana elf?
• Helligan, the coroner-replaced-by-a-lurker from the first novel, is seen investigating a crime scene during Fonn's introduction, and later the lupul/lurkers are prominent enemies again, but their replacement of Helligan isn't relevant, and doesn't even get revealed to the cast. For all we know there is still a Dimir infiltrant working as a wojek coroner to this day!
• Back in the first book of the trilogy Sunhome was called "the angel's floating sky citadel". Here this is fixed/clarified by saying Parhelion was just the detachable top of said building, which is what Matt Cavotta also stated in an online article on the Boros. We never see the rest of Sunhome though. I was actually wondering if this was a case of building getting confused, with Centerfort perhaps being an earlier name for Sunhome, or just the name of the stationary bit of the building, but both Matt Cavotta (in that article mentioned above) and Cory Herndon (in a MTGSalvation forum thread) have acknowledged that they are separate buildings.
• That actually got me thingking about Ravnica's geography. The Ravnica novel mentioned "The Center of Ravnica" as one of the few exposed bits of the plane's original surface, with many of the guild's most important buildings located there. Specifically Centerfort was mentioned, and the Hellhole (which I speculated might be an earlier name for Rix Maadi) was located at it's base. But a quick scan of the Ravnica artbook and the Guildmaster's Guide turn up no mentioned of "The Center of Ravnica", Centerfort or the Hellhole. In fact, the Guildmaster's Guide gives us a made of the Tenth District which place all the guildhalls there. Remind me to re-read the original trilogy and compare the geographies when we get to the reviews of those books!

A version of the Guildmaster's map taken from here.

• Myczil was forgotten for a long time after this novel, but eventually turned up in The Forsaken! (That was probably the best thing about that book...) Apparently he stuck around with the Golgari but became estranged from his undead dad.
• It is hinted that after the cultists eat Izolda the soul of Rakdos himself is now trapped in them. If that was the case it eventually makes it back to him in time for the next Ravnica block.
• There are also some spelling inconsistencies between the book and the cards. At one point an Azorius member exclaims “By Hesperia's wings”, and as mentioned in the summary while Rakdos sleeps his guild is led by "Izolda". Clearly these names were changed to "Isperia" and "Lyzolda" somewhere between writing the style guide and printing the cards and either nobody told Cory Herndon, or the book was already going to print at that point. I think we'll just assume those are alternative spellings to their names rather than separate characters. What's weirder is that "Izolda" apparently literally means "Blood Witch" in Old Ravi. If that's true, the character could be named "Lyzolda, the Izolda", which is a bit silly. She's been ruling the Rakdos for centuries, so I'm guessing she eventually just took the title as her own name. With variable ways of writing it. The Rakdos don't strike me as caring a whole lot about correct spelling.

And now the big thing: Feather's explanation of the history of Ravnica. I'm just gonna post the whole thing first.

“We-the angels- have long known, as have you, my lord, that Ravnica is sealed off from certain… eventualities,” Feather said, “other places and worlds and states of being. Long ago, when even the angels were young, there were those who came to this world from these other places-these worlds like this one but not like this one-with their own angels and demons, their own people and gods. Most of the newcomers did not even realize they had not always been here. A few of the visitors, powerful beings indeed, left again, for those other worlds. Sometimes they would return, with tales of these planes.”

…

“This was long before the Guildpact,” Feather said. “After a while, we noticed the visitors stopped coming as frequently, and the visits stopped completely. Only a few remembered that there had been such visitors at all. The first Azor knew and passed it down to his successors, did he not, your honor?”

…

“When the visitors stopped coming to Ravnica, a few angels decided to try to find them.”
“Were you among them?” the Selesnyan judge asked.
“I was one,” the angel agreed. “We did not understand how they traveled to these other places, nor do we to this day. But we built the Parhelion anyway, with scraps of what magic and artifacts the visitors left behind. We took the sky fortress to the ends of the heavens, trying to follow the strangers to their other worlds.”
“This is remarkable,” the wojek commander-general said softly.“What did you find?”
“We learned that there is a great … nothingness out there,” Feather said. “At a certain distance, existence ends. The universe that we know simply stops.” 

...

"Razia believed that the sky—that existence itself—stops out there because this world is isolated. Contained. No energy or matter ever leaves or arrives. A closed system. If not for this phenomenon, the Guildpact’s magic would not have been able to establish relative peace for so long. But the seal isn’t perfect. It overlaps and folds in on itself, like a blister on the skin. Agyrem is, to put it less than delicately, that blister. Souls can’t escape Ravnica, you see. There is no beyond for them to reach. That is why the dead linger, and when they depart the realm that humans occupy they are caught in the fold of Agyrem like fish in a net.” The angel turned to the Grand Arbiter. “As you know, your honor,” she added, “Razia did not figure this out until after the Parhelion had run aground, so to speak, in Agyrem.”

Don't you love Magic's Multiversal metaphysics?

In the Future Sight fatpack booklet (of all places) we'll learn that the rifts on Dominaria had effects on other planes in the Multiverse, including causing Ravnica to become "isolated from the rest of the Multiverse, causing the spirits of the dead to linger and accumulate there, eventually resulting in the Ghost Quarter of Agyrem."

A few points about this: Ravnica becoming isolated from the rest of the Multiverse predates the Guildpact, and it being a "closed system" was in fact a requirement for the pact to work. We'll talk more about the timeline below, but there's only one rift we know of that goes back that far: the one in Madara. So feel free to blame Nicol Bolas for all Ravnica's problems.

The second point: if the isolation had nothing to do with the Guildpact, the breaking of the pact shouldn't explain why the isolation ended. It would make sense if the Mending made Ravnica reachable again... except that in Future Sight Nicol Bolas and Leshrac visit the place before either the Madaran and Otarian rifts are closed. A further wrinkle is that Azor would later be revealed to be a planeswalker himself and he was able to leave Ravnica somehow. I think the best solution is to say that Ravnica's isolation wasn't as strict as the Shard of Twelve Worlds. It was hard to get into, and maybe even hidden from planeswalkers, but if you knew where it was and expended some extra energy you could get in or out. An alternative explanation would be that Azor did something special to get out, and that Bolas and Leshrac visited some other cityscape plane, as the plane they visit in Future Sight is never named (though it's clearly supposed to be Ravnica).

Final point: On the MTGSalvation forums Cory Herndon let us know that Ravnica's isolation is what led to humanity's longetivity on the plane... somehow...

TRIVIA

• With the explanation that the Dimir and Rakdos were allowed in the Guildpact because the magic is stronger for including opposing forces, we are finally told magic works in fives and tens. Way back in the Johan review I got annoyed when Hazezon states magic works in threes, which I felt was a lazy incorporation of a stock folklore/fantasy concept that didn't make much sense in the Magic canon: obviously Magic's magic should work in fives, not threes! It's nice to finally have that made explicit.
• Back in the first novel we learned the case were Myczil Zunich the elder died was Kos's "first case as a lead investigator after more than a few years spend keeping the peace in the City of Ravnica", and that he was 53 at the time. Here we learn Kos actually lied about his age to join the wojek early, so he really spend a lot of years as a beat cop!
• Capobar uses "swiftfoot magemarks" that allow him to, well, run super quickly. Funny to see the magemark cycle referenced with a mark that doesn't actually exist in-game.
• The five nephilim here are clearly the five from the game, though they are never given their cardnames. The Yore-Tiller has an ancient statue for a head due to a four-century nap “during which it had played the part of actual hillside a bit too well.” while the Ink-Treader has “an organ that had no known analog on the plane of Ravnica, a combination stomach and brain. It could see in every direction, and in seven dimensions." We don't get any explanation for what they are (though they do get references as "mutations" at one point), they are just weird.

• In the original draft of the story Niv-Mizzet would've died in battle with the nephilim! Can you imagine what Dragon's Maze or War of the Spark would be like in that alternate timeline?!
• Wojek have been relying on “auxiliary patrol officers”, mostly Selesnya ledevs and Azorius bailiffs, since the Decamillenial. Fonn is now one of these.
• There are more signs of decline: the Azorius are also slipping, with more opportunists and sycophants, and their buildings are no longer kept immaculate. The Ledev are turning into nothing more than Selesnya security guards, as those are needed following the cancelling of the quietmen. Vitu Ghazi has been fortified and refortified "It resembled, if anything, an organic version of the wojek citadel of Centerfort". 
• Fonn is introduced checking out a crime scene where a pet seller was murdered by his own rats (which foreshadows the rise of Rakdos, who is called “The Defiler, The Enslaver, The Demon-God, and, in more obscure histories, the Rat-King”). It's said the crime is more important than just a regular murder because his Birds of Paradise are also missing. Oh Ravnica, never change... and by that I mean, change as much as possible as quickly as possible!
• The Karlovs are "one of the three most powerful families in the Guild of Deals". Which makes sense given the (much) later revelations that Grandfather Karlov has been on the Ghost Council for centuries.
• Teysa describes herself as the "soon to be elected mayor of Utvara". That was before the nephilim completely trash the place though.
• The Schism has faded and is barely discernible at the start of the story. In the final chapter's opening header we learn it has completely faded away a year later.
• Feather's full name is Pierakor Az Vinrenn D'rav. Seems pretty pronouncable to me...
• We hear a bit more about Ravnica's poles. There are the "perpetually snowbound Monastery Territories in the far northwest", they Yore-Tiller Nephilim's napalm blowholes (yes, really) remind Fonn of "the blowholes the brachiosaurs of the southeast pole used to breathe the cold, thin, polar air”, and the final explosion of Parhelion can be seen from the northwest pole. So the poles are slightly wonky, suggesting Ravnica might have tilted on its axis at some point? Also, and more importantly, there are dinosaurs on Ravnica!

Ravnican Dreadmaw when?

• Jarad has banned human sacrifices among the Golgari, but the main Devrakin priest still tries to hide some children among fields that are to be burned as part of a harvest festival. Jarad spots it and tells the priest to return them to their parents.
• The Simic try to get Jarad to agree to cytoplastic augmentation of their minions. To do so they send Dr. Otrovac, one of Momir Vig’s personal ambassadors, who has a cytoplast eye and mouth in his chest through which Vig can spy and talk.
• The Wojek Commander-General Lannos Nodov is Acting Guildmaster in the angel's absence. He gets crushed by debris after the Parhelion crashes into Prahv.
• When the shadewalkers bring Capobar to Vig the Simic guildmaster disables their invisibility and we get the following description:

"He was surprised to see how small the shadewalkers were-each one came up to about his shoulder, with wiry bodies. They were wrapped loosely in blue, gauzy bandages, like the mummies of ancient Grand Arbiters resting on the great mall of Prahv. A pair of glowing eyes peeked out through the face wrappings, and their arms were longer than was quite right, simian and oddly double-jointed. Two primary arms, Capobar corrected. Each shadewalker also had a smaller vestigial arm tipped with  clawed hand growing from his torso. The third arm was bare, revealing pale, almost-transparent skin filigreed with black and blue veins. Around their necks each shadewalker wore some kind of silver collar with three blue gemstones set in a triangle at the throat"

• The bandaged look sounds very Dimir, but I don't think a Dimir agent with a third arm sticking from their torso ever made it into the cards...

• Feather’s crime "was not one mortals would probably have understood, and Feather never found a proper way to explain it to her wojek colleagues” like I mentioned in the continuity section, Kos came closest to figuring it out, but took his best guess to the grave. Cory Herndon has said they were probably trumped up charges to get Feather on the ground for some reason.
• Szadek says to Razia “I mastered the blade long before you were incarnated." So a) Szadek predates Razia, and b) Szadek is one of those "I studied the blade" weirdo's.
• One of the codes used to steer the Parhelion is “Pin Dancer” (about which a lurker-imitating Razia says “And mortals think we don’t have a sense of humor”). Since I learned about the "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" thing though the Discworld novels, I’m counting this as another Discworld reference.
• When all heck is going down the nine remaining titans Ferrous Rokiric created (The 10th, Zobor, was destroyed by the Golgari in the first novel) don't move at all. We're given various possible explanations, from the Boros having forgotten how they work, to the loss of Zobor breaking the circuit, to either the death of the angels or the breaking of the Guildpact robbing them of their power. Whatever the cause, it's a real shame, as adding in another 9 giants would've really pushed this kaiju story over the top!
• Augustin is blind and has no legs.
• For those interest in the fate of very minor characters: Garulsz and Dr. Nebun are seen running a field hospital in Utvara after the nephilim have left. Nebun's frog-bodyguard Uvulung also survived.
• Feather has Kos brought back as a proper spirit by the new Azorius guildmaster. We are told "He took the name Leonos II" as if that means anything to us. The only Azorius person we know the name of who is left standing in the end is Obez, the guy who was channeling Kos's spirit, so it's probably him.
• Agyrem ends up transplanted on top of regular Ravnica, translucent towers and all. There is even a ghostly Vitu-Ghazi not far from the real one! Feather says “I’m told it had something to do with the quietmen coming back” which is a really vague non-explanation.
• After his second spirit-resurrection Kos asks Feather whether she's brought him back because Niv-Mizzet made Vitu-Ghazi his scratching post, to which she replies “What? No, Niv-Mizzet has left for- Oh. That was a joke”. That one line about him leaving for somewhere spawned years of “Is Niv a planeswalker?” speculation. Cory was asked about this as well, but remained tight-lipped, saying he put in some dangling plotlines in the hope he might one day get to write a Ravnica sequel and explore them. On the one hand that's understandable. On the other it's really annoying, as WotC doesn't really work like that. Especially not at the time, when they were prone to make century long jumps in the storyline all the time and had never done a "Return to X" block ever! And sure enough, Cory was asked back to write more stories, but not for Ravnica, and we never did learn where Niv had gotten to. Probably just chilling in some polar resort while the guilds fell, having predicted they would eventually bounce back anyway. Or maybe he really was scratching Vitu-Ghazi, and that's the explanation for why the tree is apparently badly damaged (by an "Izzet magelord") in Ravnica Allegience stories.

TIMELINE

Timeline time! Finally we get to talk about the weird and annoying task of trying to match up Dominarian and Ravnican years! But first, a quick rundown of a few random dates given in this story:

• The book takes place in 10.012 Z.C., a few weeks after the last book. The epilogue with Feather telling ghost-Kos about Agyrem happens in 10.014 Z.C.
• Chapter 15 starts with a newspaper article from 11 Tevnember, 9211 Z.C. in which Momir Vig is mentioned as having been guildmaster for a few weeks.
• The Fonn/Jarad marriage didn't last past Myc's 6th birthday. He is now 11.
• “Izolda” has been the acting head of the Rakdos “for hundreds of years”
• Augustin IV came to power during the last Rakdos uprising, which was in 9990 according to the first novel. He replaced the "wise and respected Lucian III". He's also ordered more executions than any previous Grand Arbiter in guild history. 
• A Konstantin II was Grand Arbiter in 3209.

So, with all that done, let's do the hard work. How do we match Z.C. with A.R.?

The Ravnica artbook says it’s been 77 years since the first Ravnica block. The Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica says it is now 10.076 Z.C.. Since Dissension ends in 10.0014 it's actually only 62 years since the first Ravnica block, but we can assume those 77 years are supposed to be counted from 9999, the start of Ravnica: City of Guilds, if you're not counting the prologue.

The Artbook and the Guidmaster's Guide deal with the events on Ravnica directly before War of the Spark, during Jace’s absence on Ixalan. Which we know happens simultaneously to Dominaria block (there is some inconsistency on whether it took days or months depending on whether you’re reading the Ixalan story or Return to Dominaria, but we can table that discussion for now), and we know from the Dominaria artbook that that story takes place in 4560 A.R.. So if 10.076 Z.C. = 4560 A.R., we can simply detract 77-to-62 years from that to see when the first Ravnica trilogy takes place, right?

Well…

There is the little problem of Ravnican and Dominarian years…

Ravnican years are equivalent to earth years of 365 days. In fact, their twelve months match up to those of the Gregorian calendar. You can calculate this all from the various dates given in the original Ravnica trilogy, you can delve into the MTGSalvation archives to find Cory Herndon confirming this, and these days you can just pick up the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica where it is all conveniently spelled out.

When I say "convenient" there, I mean the printing of that book made it a lot easier to find that info. It's also inconvenient though, since now it is a lot harder to throw out. Why would you want to do that? Well... remember The Duelist #16? There it was stated that a Dominarian year is 420 days. Meaning that Dominarian years are 15% longer than Ravnican years?! Meaning the those 10.000 years between the signing of the Guildpact and this story are actually only 8690 years on my timeline?!? Meaning I have to do math more complicated than adding and subtracting for this blog now?!?!?!? Not okay! Not okay!

Luckily, or at least, luckily for the mathematically impaired among us and unluckily for those wanting consistency in continuity (so ambivalently for me I guess), there is an additional issue that throws the whole "different length years" thing out of the window again. The eagle-eyed and quick calculators among you will already have spotted it: the last scene in Dissension, where Kos gets jurisdiction over Agyrem, happens in 10.0014 Z.C.. It is currently 10.0076 Z.C.. That's only a 62 year gap. 62 times 365, divided by 420 gives us only 53 Dominarian years, which would put the original Ravnica cycle after the Mending. Which is entirely impossible, since the Mending is what unmoored Agyrem from Ravnica.

So now what? Do we bust out the "time happens differently on different planes" card to explain why years are different lengths on Ravnica and Dominaria? How about making that theory one step more ridiculous and suggesting days have different lengths on those two planes? The discrepancy certainly has caused confusion. Check out the timeline on the wiki: It puts the signing of the Guildpact on -4198 A.R. and the Decamillennial in 4494 A.R.. That's a 8692 year gap, clearly somebody recalculated the 10.000 Ravnican years into Dominarian years (although by my own calculations the gap should just be 8690?). Yet the "Notes on the Timeline" section says Ravnican years happen "at approximately the same rate as Dominarian years".

Although it pains me to say it, I think the best way to deal with this issue is to disregard the 420 days length for Dominarian years. The interdependencies of Agyrem and the Mending and of Dominaria and Guilds of Ravnica force us to accept that the years happen at an equal rate. So we're forced to throw out the length of one of their years, and when the Ravnican 365-day year is introduced in an actual story, and then reinforced in a book published in 2018, that clearly takes precedence over the 420-day Dominarian year which was only ever given in a magazine published in 1997 and never came up in an actual story. The fact that Gerrard's age was given as 26, which would mean he was actually nearing 30 in Earth-years, was never relevant to any plot, for example. Even when we do have unlikely ages for characters (like Tahngarth only being 11 when becoming first-mate) this discrepancy doesn't actually fix anything (12 is still far too young for someone to be employed in such a position of authority!)

The beauty of the 420 days never having mattered in any story is that while throwing it out doesn't matter, keeping it in doesn't really matter either. If you prefer to think time passes at different rates or that days are of different length on Dominaria and Ravnica that works perfectly fine as well. Both year lengths can exist as Schrödingers calendars so long as we get no new sources to further muddle things up!

So to wrap-up: if 10.076 Z.C. is 4560 A.R., then Myczil Zunich died in 4427 A.R., the Schism was created in 4449 A.R., Ravnica: City of Guilds happens in 4483, strentching into 4484 A.R., Guildpact and Dissension happen in 4496 A.R. and the epilogue with Kos going to Agyrem in 4498 A.R. Oh, and the Guildpact was signed in -5516 A.R. (Give or take a year depending on when New Year falls on either plane, but I'm just going to refuse to think about that)

By the way, I have no illusions about the 420 days thing ever going away. As a community we're just going to keep saying Dominarian years are 420 days, Ravnican years are 365 days, and the timeline discrepancy will just be a little known fact for us continuity obsessives to discus for the rest of time. But since I have to pick something to make a coherent timeline, this is what I'm going with.