Stuff Ethan Told Me

This is a quick little post covering some updates on a bunch of previous articles. It's all fairly minor things that don't merit reviews of their own, tenuously linked in that all this info comes from Ethan Fleischer (Tenuous as in, some of these things were brought to my attention by him but written by other people, some come from a set he was a designer for and some are from articles he wrote, so... eh, close enough). Originally I was going to include the Kamigawa/Legends II Timeline update as well, since it was Ethan who pointed out in the comments of the blog that there was relevant information in the (then) upcoming War of the Spark artbook, but luckily I spun that off in a separate article so I was able to get it out soon after the Kamigawa reviews themselves.

Well, on to the updates!

First, something Ethan told me literally years ago, but that I never found a good place to put:

In the novel Shattered Chains there is a scene where the main character Greensleeves is shown visions through the magical plot-driving artifact the Stone Brain. I didn't notice it at the time, but one of them is a reference to Roreca's Tale!

"Sprites dancing across flowers, together dragging a patch of bleeding dog skin."

That sounds utterly bizarre without context, but in Roreca's tale we hear that a bunch of Scryb Sprites stole some of Roreca's fur to use as a blanket. There wasn't much continuity to reference back then, as Shattered Chains was only the third Magic book ever printed, so its cool to have a quick reference to what little lore did exist at the time.

I don't think this helps us identify just what Roreca was though. Yes, it says "dog" here, and her species did wag their tails to express happiness, but she was also three times as big as a human, had two sets of teeth and had acid sacks, so that would be a pretty weird dog. (Then again, looking at Banehound or Mossdog...)

The big question is: does this have timeline implications? Shattered Chains says these visions come from "the linked mind of great wizards". If these are supposed to be the minds of the Sages of Lat-Nam who made the Stone Brain (and then launched it into space to keep it out of the hands of Urza and Mishra, where it stayed until the start of Greensleeves's story), that would suggest Roreca's Tale happens somewhere around the Brothers' War.

There is of course some weirdness with the Sages, as those early stories portray them as making a powerful weapon like the Stone Brain that can grant its users magical powers, while in current continuity they were pioneers learning the very basics of magic instead. But we also know they utilized more ancient artifacts they dug up (like the Golgothian Sylex), and the visions scene also has giants and reptilian voices yelling at Greensleeves when she makes contact with the Brain, so who knows, maybe those "great wizards" are from even further back in time. Introduction & Roreca's Tale can't take place before the Brothers' War though, as Worzil, Roreca's planeswalker mistress, mentions using Glasses of Urza at some point.

It's all a bit vague of course. Why would a wizard from Lat-Nam even know of these sprites stealing some fur? And while this is a clear reference, we don't get any confirmation that these are the same sprites. Perhaps the sages just put in some random disturbing images, including a non-diegetic reference to a previous story. Ultimately, while I think a case can be made for a Brothers' War era placement of Introduction & Roreca's Tale, I'm not 100% convinced and will keep it at Magic's "original present" of 4000 AR for now.

Since we were talking about the Sages of Lat-Nam, let's take a quick look at this cards from Dominaria:

For the first 2 years of this blog I kept noting inconsistencies in the depiction of Lat-Nam, which eventually culminated in the article The Lat-Nam Kerfuffle, which tried to untangle everything. I wont go over everything here, but the gist of it is this: in Magic's earliest stories the College of Lat-Nam was destroyed by Urza and Mishra, and their island remained poisoned until it was fixed in 4077 AR (by the aforementioned Greensleeves). In the Ice Age trilogy though, we learn Lat-Nam would turn into the City of Shadows and later the School of the Unseen and was only destroyed 20 years after the Ice Age. My proposed solution was to suggest the College was destroyed during the Brothers' War, but that some survivors moved to the City of Shadows, then later moved back to their former island when the lower sea-levels of the Ice Age had exposed non-poisonous lands, taking the name the School of the Unseen. Then after the Ice Age the School was destroyed and the sea reclaimed much land, leaving just the poisoned bits again.

This card doesn't add new information to this discussion, but it does confirm the destruction by the Brothers for the first time in a WotC-published source. Since Dominaria also brought back Jodah, and his story is very much tied up into City of Shadows/School of the Unseen stuff, this pretty much necessitates the survivors of the College moving a few times. So no clear confirmation, but it does fit in well with my proposed theory.

What is new, is the link to the Tolarian Academy. We already knew, albeit from an unpublished source, that survivors of the College of Lat-Nam founded the Institute of Arcane Study/Studies in Tamingazin (of Prodigal Sorcerer/Pyromancer flavor text fame), and that survivors of the School of the Unseen founded the Epityr College of Mages. An The Shattered Alliance does end with survivors of the School heading out to new lands. In my Kerfuffle article I speculated that maybe they would end up at either the Summit of Minorad or the Tolarian Academy, the two big gatherings of wizards that happened at the start of Dominaria's "Modern" era. Well, I guess half of that speculation was proven correct!

Speaking off Dominaria cards, I'd like to quickly mention Tempest Djinn as well. Dominaria is full off continuity references of course, but this one is a bit special, as its flavor text refers to the djinn of "their distant home", a.k.a. Rabiah, living in various tribes. This is a reference to the extensive discussion of Rabiah on Jeff Lee's website The Legends of Magic. But here's the thing: Jeff himself has said that most of it "was sourced from literature and outside sites. So it's not necessarily reflective of Magic continuity". Well, I guess that after two decades it has finally been brought into official continuity! (Sort off. Kinda. In not that much detail. But it's definitely there!)

Now back to some timeline discussion. Ethan pointed out I missed something in my review of The Art of Magic: Dominaria. In the Llanowar section it says that Queen Terena ruled the elfhame of Ruadach for over six centuries before she died in the Phyrexian Invasion. Terena is actually a character we have seen before, in the story Gathering the Taradomnu in the Tapestries anthology! Thus that story has to happen around 3600 AR.

There is something weird though: the paragraph goes on to say that Ruadach is now ruled by Terena's half-elven daughter Allenal, who is 400 years old. But Gathering the Taradomnu tells us how Terena got the throne... and how she got pregnant from a human! So shouldn't Allenal be far older? Well, no actually. The description on Ruadach makes it clear that human-elf relationships have become common since Gathering the Taradomnu, and that Allenal is "not expected to live beyond the next century", suggesting 400 years is quite old for a half-elf. So what most likely happend is that Terena's first child died well before the Phyrexian invasion, as half-elves simply don't live to 600, and that at some point Terena took a second human partner, with whom she had Allenal. A bit confusing if it isn't spelled out perhaps, but it fits on closer inspection.

Now the D&D set introduced Half-Elves, will we get creature type errata on the 3 Radha cards?

Next on our list... The Ghost of Ramirez DePietro.

In his article on the Legendary Creatures of Commander Legends, Ethan gave some official confirmation for what storyline fans have assumed for a long time:

"When he's in a talkative mood (which is always), DePietro has claimed to have served on Captain Crucias's Backstab as a privateer in the South Sea during the Brothers' War, to have fought alongside Tor Wauki the Elder against the Robaran Mercenaries in the Sea of Serenity during Johan's War, and to have raided shipping between the Edemi Isles during the Madaran reconquest. He claims variously to have died in a battle with the pirate queen Adira Strongheart, to have been assassinated by the Tolarian shapeshifter known only as Halfdane, and to have been outmatched by Gwendlyn Di Corci in Urborg. How many of these tales, if any, are true, is impossible to know."

These are all lovely continuity references, but so couched in "we don't know what is true" that we can hardly draw any conclusions from them. For those interested: there was a Ramirez DePietro, who looks like he is 15 but sounds like he is ancient, in Hazezon, boating around with a Tor Wauki, and in Emperor's Fist Halfdane says he killed DePietro two years ago. There is a 300 year gap between those two stories though, and a more than 3000 year gap between those and when Captain Crucias was sailing around during the Brothers' War! Perhaps he was already a ghost when Halfdane attacked him, or even back when he appeared in Hazezon, but that book mentioned him finding the Fountain of Youth as well, so who knows!

Ramirez-Jodah team-up when?

What I'm really interested in though, is one single word: Tor Wauki the Elder. As I've talked about before, there are a bunch of characters who show up in both the Legends I and Legends II cycles and there is basically no way of untangling them except for accepting that there are multiple Tor Wauki's, Xira Arien's and Boris Devilboon's. Calling Tor Wauki "the Elder" here clearly indicates there are multiples of them running around, finally giving some official credence to this theory. 

The verdict is still out on whether Tor Wauki, Bandit Lord is a third Tor or one of the other two later in life.

And finally; Crosis is the child of Chromium and Piru! This revelation from the article The Returning Legends of Modern Horizons 2. Beyond this family connection the Piru entry doesn't tell us anything new, it just recaps the Dakkon Blackblade comic, but it is the first explanation we've ever gotten of a link between the Elder Dragons and the Primeval dragons, something fans have been asking for since Planeshift! (The primevals were printed in Invasion, but their story wasn't revealed until the next set came along.)

I'm assuming this means the other Primevals are also children of the Elders, with Darigaaz most likely being a child of Vaevictus Asmadi (since he's the ancestor of all Shivan dragons), but that still leaves many questions. Why were these five so immensely powerful? And how does the timeline of these two oldest generations of dragons fit together exactly, since the post-Chronicle of Bolas timeline suggests the rule of the Primevals and the subsequent rule of the Numena happened during the Elder Dragon War...

For the moment there isn't anything we can say about that, but let's give Ethan some more time. I'm sure that over the next decade he will slowly fill out the entire picture for us!

Those were all the updates! Nice to finally have place to put some of them. Now back to finishing the Time Spiral reviews!