Future Sight

 

Author - Scott McGough & John Delaney

Cover art - Aleksi Briclot

First printing - April 2007

SUMMARY

We start on the shores of Madara, where Leshrac (did you guess it was him?) is approached by the Myojin of Night's Reach. She offers him a mask with the power to steal powers, in the hope that he will use it against Nicol Bolas, who is currently hunting her for dropping off the Umezawa clan on Madara centuries ago. Leshrec then heads to Urborg where he recruits the Weaver King's foremost killer, Dinne il-Vec, sending him to find Radha. After that he begins to manipulate Jeska, hoping to bring Phage out in her.

Jeska has been brought up to date by Jhoira, Teferi & Venser, but didn't like their plans and went off to look into the rifts on her own. Leshrac tells her the Otaria and Yavimaya rifts are very complex, and that sacrificing their own sparks might not even work on them, but that they could use Venser & Radha's link to the rifts in a way adapted from how Bolas used Venser to bring himself back to life in Time Spiral. Jeska goes to inspect Radha, but Leshrac interferes by having Dinne attack the Keldon warhost just as Jeska is talking to Radha, making the half-elf mistrust her. Some fighting later (during which Jeska seems to subconsciously use a minor version of Phage's touch) Radha is beaten and claimed by Jeska.

Jhoira and company meanwhile leave for Yavimaya, where they find Multani stretched over the forest to protect it from the rift (as in, when you look at it from above you see a giant Multani face looking back at you, and when you get to the actual rift there is another Multani face covering it, but this one covered in cancerous growths)

Poor guy goes through a lot in his later appearances.

Leshrac returns to Jeska and offers her the mask Night's Reach gave him, telling her it would help her control the black mana side of her and send that mana to him. She refuses.

Venser saves Multani, but then Teferi feels Jeska is about to do something to the Zhalfirin rift. They teleport over, but are unable to stop her from closing the rift before Zhalfir can return. Learning from Teferi that Zhalfir can now no longer phase back in (Teferi doesn't even feel it outside the timestream anymore) rattles Jeska, but she's determined to continue. 

The group trick her into going to Yavimaya next, as Multani reckons he can reason with her. He does the same "trapping a planeswalker" trick he used on Urza way back in Time Streams. Leshrac meddles with the plans though, enabling Jeska to free herself, and then using Multani and Radha to close the Yavimayan rift.

Jeska then takes Radha to Madara. Radha has been seeing Jeska's memories while she was used to close rifts and almost gets through to her, but then Leshrac appears again, putting Radha to sleep and imprisoning Jeska. He uses Night's Reach's mask to steal Phage's lethal touch power from her. He intends to use it to usurp Bolas as the strongest planeswalker. Jhoira, Venser and Teferi show up. To create a distraction Leshrac wakes Radha and summons Dinne. Then Bolas himself shows up. 

Leshrac reveals he has woven spells into the Talon Gates, robbing the dragon of his mind-destroying touch, which through Night's Reach's mask is now Leshrac's. Bolas seems to have the upper hand in the ensuing duel, until Leshrac uproots the Talon Gates themselves to distract Bolas and use his new mind- and body killing power on the dragon. Unfortunately Bolas then reveals he has already defeated Night's Reach and is now carrying around her face, the origin of the mask, which means all the powers Leshrac stole actually went to him. He traps Leshrac in the mask and then uses his spark, and life, to seal the Madaran rift. Then he leaves to some safe spot in the Multiverse to ride out either the coming mending or the coming destruction of most of the Multiverse.

Meanwhile, Radha uses a new link to green mana she got in Yavimaya to root Dinne in the real world and kill him. The crew then make up with Jeska, and they all leave to the last rift left: Otaria. There Jeska, Venser and Radha work in unison to close it, though it costs Radha her spark and Jeska her life.

Radha returns to her warhost, Teferi goes to explore what is left of the subcontinent where Zhalfir used to be, and Jhoira goes to reconnect with Jodah. Venser, after promising Teferi to guide any new planeswalkers he might meet, goes to explore the Multiverse.

REVIEW

This book's shortcomings are pretty much the same as in the previous two. Once again scenes are very drawn out with needles details. We get five pages of Teferi, Jhoira and Venser giving non-answers to Jeska and detailed descriptions of how she can't read their mind before Jhoira tells her what is happening anyway. Later we get multiple pages of discussing how to get Multani's attention. Shall we walk into the forest? Teleport to the rift? Build a beacon? Set a fire? Have Venser take a trip to the Blind Eternities? This doesn't need to be spelled out in this much detail! I get enough brainstorming and soundingboard sessions at work, I'm more than willing to fast forward through those in fiction. Especially if the end result is "teleporting up to his face and phasing a staff in-and-out" (the magical fluctuations of that are apparently very noticeable. Somehow.)

The lack of urgency regarding the immenent destuction of the Multiverse also rears its head again, albeit with a strange wrinkle. The rifts don't do anything here, and the problem is suddenly Jeska trying to close them too quickly. Which, sure, introduces a kind of urgency, and if you're very charitable could be seen as the last hurrah of planeswalkers as "mammoths in your bed" as described by Jodah in The Eternal Ice, but it does add to the failure of the rifts as plot-drivers in the trilogy as a whole. Oh, and it is of course massively undercut by all the time wasting discussions mentioned above.

I guess those issues have been brought up enough in the last few reviews. The other big thing people dislike about Future Sight is of course the Mending itself, but we'll save that for a separate article to wrap up this block. So... is there anything positive to say here?

Well, the characters are still great. And I think I've been underselling how cool it was to see everyone again! Nowadays we're very used to seeing the main planeswalkers pop up constantly, and even the minor ones and plane-bound characters have a reasonable chance to be mentioned every time we visit their homes. Unless your favorite character lives on a plane with a high rating on the Rabiah Scale (well, or if your favorite character got killed, and even then there is stuff like Commander Legends!), there is a decent chance that they will be brought back eventually. In pre-Mending times though, Magic had a very love 'm and leave 'm attitude to their characters. Oh, you liked that legendary creature? Too bad, the story has now moved on a few centuries and we'll never see them again. This changed with the Weatherlight Saga, but came back with a vengeance after that. Even the immortal planeswalkers, supposedly central to the lore, tended to get shuffled off. Jeska and Jaya ascended only to promtly disappear, Karn only got wheeled out to play plot instigator in some pro- and epilogues, Freyalise and Windgrace got parked somewhere with no further mention post-Apocalypse...

So for this trilogy to bring back a whole host of characters not seen in years, including characters like Jodah and Nicol Bolas, who seemed up to this point as darlings of Jeff Grubb and Scott McGough respectively that would be forever ignored by the rest of continuity, and now even Leshrac, who made a few small appearances in The Eternal Ice, but who hadn't been a main character since the Armada comics? That was a big deal! And while I don't like that they were brought back only to then be taken of the board permanently (well, permanently until a few recent reversals), I do appreciate that they were at least given one more story. Other than Jodah they all feel in-character and get to do something. This is not Taysir, Kristina and Daria getting brought back to play red-shirt in Invasion.

One thing I will say, but this is more of an Invasion cycle issue that the Time Spiral cycle got saddled with, is that it would all have made a lot more sense if Tevesh Szat's role in Invasion had been played by Leshrac and vice versa. It never made sense that the other Titans didn't immediately walk out on Urza when he included Szat in their crew, nor did Szat's betrayal to the Phyrexians make much sense, when he was always looking for Multiversal sssssilence. Leshrac, with his history of being imprisoned in Phyrexia, could make a very good case for vengeance being his reason for joining the other Titans, and the mentions from the Battlemage game that he may have been converted to Yawgmoth's cause would then explain his betrayal. Conversely, Szat's desire to end all life everywhere would be a great motivation for him to try and screw up the closing of the rifts. No more Multiverse, blessssed ssssilence everywhere!

Although... it was Szat who manipulated Darigaaz into freeing the other Primevals. It would make sense if that somehow tied into the rebirth of the Numena, which led to the rebirth of Karona, which in turn led to the rifts turning into a mana-sucking, temporal disaster... Was this Szat's plan all along, and is Leshrac just trying to honor his old buddy? 

In the past I may have said that Leshrac's motivation here are out of character, but a closer read, and a better understanding of his portrayal in Battlemage and the unpublished Planeswalkers War comic, force me to take those words back. It's true that in his published stories (the Ice Age and Shandalar comics, and the novel The Eternal Ice) he was much more of a conqueror and planner, not someone who wants to blow up all of reality. His post-imprisonment "appearances" though show him as completely insane. In the Planeswalkers War script he happily joins in with Szat's attempt to assemble the Grey Chime to inflict another Sylex blast on Dominaria. The man even calls himself a Cosmic Ferret of Death at one point! (I hope we can all agree that when Leshrac finally gets his appearance in a supplemental set his first card should be called "Leshrac, Nightwalker" or "Leshrac, Walker of Night", but after that his second card should definitely be "Leshrac, Cosmic Ferret of Death", with or without exclamation mark.)

The Leshrac we see here is a bit more sensible, so presumably a few more centuries of freedom have been good for him. He's much more subdued and not necessarily all about Multiversal destruction. He does say "Entropy on a grand scale is a passion of mine" at one point, but at other points he seems to have more of a plan. He says "I think only Dominaria and a few other realms will be affected", when Jeska calls him out on the Multiverse ending. Later he says that "Whatever the Multiverse became in the wake of the time rifts, Leshrac would be its king", by wresting power from Bolas. So his power hungry conqueror's attitude is back, he's just much more willing to take gigantic risks to get it. Before his centuries of imprisonment he had just had all his meticulous plans ruined by Lim-Dûl getting defeated by Jodah, and then again by Shandalar rejecting him, so I can't blame him for living a bit more in the moment after all that. I guess this final quote sums Future Sight-Leshrac up pretty well:

"Maybe the Walker of the Night is mistaken, blinded by ego, or stubbornly deluded. Maybe everything everywhere will collapse into itself as Teferi believes ... Maybe I just don't care"

Oh, and when we do get a Leshrac card? Make sure he has partner, so I can play these guys together!

TRIVIA

• If the cover of Time Spiral got to be on Undying Rage (despite Radha looking more serene than raging to me), what cards could we get for the Planar Chaos and Future Sight arts?
• The acknowledgements thank, among others, various posters on the Wizards.com forums "for helping me keep my facts straight", and to Tahngarth "for being on two different cards in the same booster pack at the right time".
• When Leshrac didn't name himself but just said he prefers "to walk the night" in Planar Chaos, there was some debate in the community about whether this character was him, or the Myojin of Night's Reach (as she had already come up in Time Spiral when Nicol Bolas was ranting about her dropping of the Umezawa lineage on Madara). When Future Sight then opened with Leshrac and the Myojin having a chat several people tried to say "see, we were both right!" But while the Myojin in the story, she is not the one who appeared in Planar Chaos and brought the Weaver King into Dominaria.
• The Myojin of Night's Reach says Bolas intends "to withdraw from the Multiverse and ride out the coming storm in a safe place of his own devising." At the time people assumed that meant he had somehow devised a way to escape the Multiverse to some place beyond, but it will turn out he's just going to hide out on Grixis.
• She also says "He has already destroyed my home, driven me out, and set my own acolytes against me"
• Bolas himself says "Dominaria may yet be destroyed and with it countless other planes ... But I have prepared a suitable place for myself in that eventuality." He offers Radha a place there in the "endless battle" he will arrange there, which seems like a decent description of the horror he will bring to Amnkhet. He won't name her his champion though, as "such political concerns have turned out badly in the past" (read: his last champion killed him.) When she refuses he hints he may just come and get her one day, but nothing ever comes from that. I guess he didn't count on no longer being able to take people to other planes post-Mending.
• Jhoira notes Jeska is supposed to be bronze colored, like all the Pardic barbarians, but is pale instead. A reference to her card art? Or a remnant of her time as Phage?

• Here's a description of Otaria at this point: the plains are dust-covered, "The mighty Krosan forest had burned and was still burning in places", Balshan Bay is choked with reefs, the Pardic mountains weathered and eroded into rounded stubs, Cabal City is nothing but ruined buildings. Aphetto is almost nothing, just flattened buildings and the marsh reclaiming the foundations. Jeska's birth village is also ruined, though the big "story wall" that contains their tribal history is still standing, telling Jeska's history. She also visits Topos, Averru/Sanctum and Eroshia, but we don't get descriptions of how they look now. 
• Leshrac calls Jeska "Trice-Touched by Infinity". He claims to have heard her story from Pardic barbarians from Jeska's own village.
• "Target", the kid who was blinded by the Gathans in Time Spiral and resqued by Rahda is now already capable warrior with magical powers, somehow drawing strenth from the heart of a frost giant that the warhost brought home from their excursion into Parma.
• The power flowing from the Keldon warhost to their warlord is somehow not mana based. "Beyond mana. This was as essential, elemental force channeled directly through living beings".... sounds a lot like mana to me... but apparently Jeska couldn't perceive it when looking for mana lines.
• Karn's actions have ended the "large scale" time distortions already. Minor ones will be continuing for a while though, as the flavor text of Armored Cancrix tells us.
• When the Zhalfirin rift is closed it shows images of Zhalfir itself, which are then sucked into Radha. Who knows what's still in her?

• Without Multani the elves of Yavimaya have "fallen into barbarism and intertribal warfare"
• Multani restores Radha's link to green mana, which she had lost with the destruction of Skyshroud.
• Some part of Night's Reach has eluded Nicol Bolas, so presumably she's still out there somewhere.
• It's actually Bolas who coins the term "Mending". He says that while he was out of the story during Planar Chaos he "peeled back the flesh of the Multiverse to study its mechanism", and that it is "cracked, but a great mending is ready to begin".
• Here's how the final plan actually works: Radha represents the physical world, Venser the ability of planeswalkers and Jeska near-limitless mana... eh... They also represent a mirror to Jeska, Akroma and Zagorka forming Karona... somehow... Okay, maybe you need a planeswalker's view of the Multiverse for it to make sense.
• As Jeska dies she is greeted by Kamahl, who says he's "gone where everyone goes, sooner or later", but that he waited for her. Let's not tarry the moment by asking whether that's evidence of a canonical afterlife or just in her mind.

Hmmm... probably not enough of these kinds of scenes for a full alternate art Secret Lair. Would be neat to include one of these as the bonus card in that Cathartic Reunion Secret Lair though.

CONTINUITY

First, the annotations:

• Leshrac first appeared in the Ice Age comics and was last seen in The Eternal Ice, the novel that sort-off replaced those comics (it ret-conned parts of them, but assumes other parts still happened. It's fuzzy.) Chronologically he was last seen in the Battlemage videogame. Since the progress of that game depends on the choices you and the AI make, there isn't really a set story for it, so I guess technically his last appearance is specifically the opening scene of that game. As mentioned he also has quite an interesting unpublished history, but more on that below.
• Night's Reach is an easy one. First introduced in Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa, last seen dropping Toshi off in Madara in the Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa epilogue.
• Jeska first appeared in Chainer's Torment. She was last seen in the prologue of The Moons of Mirrodin, where she went of exploring the Multiverse with Karn.
• Multani was first shown in a flashback in the Gerrard's Quest comic. He first appeared as a character in Time Streams. In Apocalypse he was dissipated after transporting part of Yavimaya to Urborg (to bring more fighters against the Phyrexians), then in Scourge Karona reconstituted him. That happened in the same part of the story where she also summoned Teferi, which was chucked out of continuity in Time Spiral. So... either his last appearance is Scourge, or that's no longer canon and his last appearance is in Apocalypse. In the latter case he must've reconstituted himself over time. I prefer the first option, as we know that at least some of the people Karona met (most notably Karn) were in fact real, so Multani's appearance might as well have been genuine.

Before I move on that the smaller references, there is one big continuity issue here: Yavimaya, which is called "formerly Argoth", and is where the rift created by the Sylex Blast is located. Yavimaya and Argoth are entirely different places though. In fact, there was once a comic planned about how Fyndhorn, which is what Argoth became, was flooding after the end of the Ice Age and it's elves journeyed to Yavimaya as refugees! And before you say "but that comic was never published!", its plot was actually woven into the backstory of Jaya in The Shattered Alliance. The two forests are also clearly in different places if you compare the Antiquities & Ice Age maps.

Oh, and if you believe flavor text we have another problem: Yavimaya is supposed to be gone.

At the time my go-to explanation was that old Yavimaya must have fallen, but before it did Multani transported part of it (like he did with the bit that was brought to Urborg) to whatever is left of Fyndhorn/Argoth. That would explain two mistakes in one go. But Return to Dominaria made that impossible by placing Yavimaya on it's original location. Confusingly it also doubled down on the "Yavimaya is Argoth" bit by having Karn dig up the Golgothian Sylex there.

In their Storyline Podcasts for Dominaria Ethan Fleischer and Kelly Digges suggest that the rift either moved, or was so big that it stretched across both forests. These are probably our best options at this point. We'd also have to assume that when Jhoira thinks to herself (and later tells Venser) that "Once Yavimaya had been Argoth" she's refering to... I dunno, a cultural or magical link between the two? Or she's being metaphorical somehow? Either that or she's simply mistaken, but that seems very unlikely for someone who studied under Urza and who has been friends with Multani for centuries.

Finally, we also get this quote from her:

"Yavimaya forest rose from the ashes of Argoth with a kind of sentience and a strong collective memory of the horrors it had already endured. The destruction left by the brothers made more than a physical scar on the land, more than a magical one, and as Yavimaya's nascent hive-mind coalesced it was already taking steps to defend itself if anyone ever tried to repeat the brothers' sins"

This seems to be contradicted in the Dominaria art book, which says that Yavimaya grew during the Ice Age "in the void left by the suppression of the human population", and that its consciousness only stirred after the Worldspell. You've gotta squint quite a bit to square that with the quote above. Then again, the origin of Yavimaya has always been a bit garbled. Those maps of Terisiare don't mention it during the Brothers' War (although there are a few trees directly west of Kroog, which I guess could be Yavimaya), but Invasion mentioned the Sylex Blast creating the Mori Tumulus there, and Planeshift put magnigoth tree(folk)s there as far back as the days of the Primeval Dragons...

You know what, let's do a quick "Yavimaya Kerfuffle" list here, see if we can work things out.

• 17.000 years before Urza there were magnigoths at Yavimaya, most notably Nemata, in whom the Primeval Rith was imprisoned.
• During the Brother's War we got no references to Yavimaya. Given how the brothers cut down entire forests throughout the continent you'd think that if there was a massive forest right next to Kroog they would have focused on that, and thus never have bothered with Argoth. Perhaps it had dwindled to a small forest at this point, or maybe it had never been that big before, and when the loggers of Urza and Mishra turned up Nemata and the other magnigoth simply walked off into the sea?
• In 63 AR the Sylex Blast destroys Argoth and cracks the continental shelf at Yavimaya's former/later location, forming the Mori Tumulus. The Sylex rift is created, and is possibly so big it stretches from Argoth to Yavimaya. In the wake of this the magnigoth treefolk must've come back to start trying to close the Mori Tumulus (trees are shown to straddle it "like massive stitches" in Invasion).
• During the Ice Age the forest began to grow, and somehow the destruction of Argoth caused it to develop a "nascent hive-mind" and "a kind of sentience", through whatever proces governs the sentient forests of Dominaria, but not yet "consciousness". Argoth itself also eventually revives and becomes Fyndhorn.

Karn putting it more succinctly than I can.

• In 2934 AR Freyalise casts the Worldspell, ending the Ice Age. If we're going with the "moved rift" theory rather than the "big rift" one, this is most likely when that move happened. Either the Worldspell or the rift causes "something ancient" to stir in Yavimaya (as said in The Eternal Ice). This must be the forest gaining consciousness, which would eventually be embodied in Multani.
• The consciousness/Multani must be as violent in its first awakening as we later see in its reawakening in Return to Dominaria, considering Jaya talks about "something nasty" growing in Yavimaya in The Shattered Alliance, and The Story of the Battlemage Ravidel mentioning a conflict when the refugees from the sinking Fyndhorn arrive.
• By the time of Coldsnap (Between 2954 and 2956 AR) this conflict has been resolved, as King Darien can call upon the elves of Yavimaya to help him against the forces of Heidar.
• We then get the well established history of Yavimaya: in Time Streams Urza shows up and is initially treated as an enemy, but eventually Yavimaya becomes his ally against the Phyrexians. In Bloodlines we see the forest preparing for the invasion, which pays off in Invasion block, as the Phyrexians are repelled pretty successfully. In Apocalypse Multani transports part of the forest to Urborg, which causes him to go dormant. (This bit of Yavimaya-in-Urborg is later occupied by Lord Windgrace, and later still gives rise to Muldrotha.)
• In the century between Apocalypse and Scourge something terrible must have happened to Yavimaya to explain Defiant Elf's flavor text, though the use of "destroyed" must be hyperbole.
• In 4306 Karona reconstitutes Multani, who presumably helps Yavimaya rebuild...
• ...only for the slivers to attack at some point (looking at when the Gathans arrived in Keld, the sliver probably also arrived in the last half century before Time Spiral), which was bad enough for the Greenseekers to give up on the place. After they left the tide must somehow have turned, as the forest is doing great when Jhoira and co visit it in Future Sight.
• Around 4500 Multani is once again discorporated when Jeska uses him to close the Sylex rift.
• Which finally brings us to 4560 and Return to Dominaria, where the reemerging Multani lashes out, leading to the temporary expulsion of sentient life from Yavimaya, until Chandra helps calm him down.

That's quite a few off-screen disasters and rebounds, but I don't see how we can otherwise make the sources match. I'd say it makes about as much sense as Lat-Nam's constant moving and name changing.

The fact that Freyalise casting the Worldspell in Fyndhorn/Argoth causes Yavimaya's consciousness to awaken can be seen as further proof of the link between the two forests, possibly via the big/moved rift.

And the Golgothian Sylex? Well, either it must've fallen through the rift somehow, or maybe the big boom just launched it into the sky until it crashed in Yavimaya. Which in turn must mean that the Golgothian Sylex that Ravidel had until Jared Carthalion destroyed it in Wayfarer must've been a fake. When it appeared there it did have the strange property to "annihalate anything or anyone with a direct lineage to the time of the Brothers' War", rather than just going boom, and The Story of the Battlemage Ravidel did call it the "Argivian Sylex" rather than Golgothian, so there is some basis for such a ret-con.

Apparently there was also a disaster in the later days of the Ice Age when a ice dam broke. Let's just say that's a minor event in the grand scheme of things.

Now, on to some non-Yavimaya related subjects!

• Leshrac's eyes are "a uniform, featureless gray without iris or pupil". In previous appearances they were bright red, flickering with fire. This transformation is a reference to some unpublished stories. In the Walker of Night comic it was supposed to have been revealed Taysir and Ravidel imprisoned him in Estark, the land featured in the first Magic novel ever, Arena. That comic was never published though, and in The Story of the Battlemage Ravidel we get an alternative version in which he's imprisoned in Phyrexia instead. When he gets out (either in the unpublished Planeswalkers War comic, or the Battlemage videogame), his eyes have turned a dull grey.
• It's also said in this novel that "He hasn't been seen or heard from in almost a thousand years". He was actually imprisoned a bit over a thousand years ago, and has of course been free since the Planeswalkers War, but I guess whatever happened in that conflict, Leshrac's involvement wasn't widely published.

Before...

...be after

• Jeska has already checked all the places Karn would go, which you would assume includes Mirrodin. She probably only popped in and tried to find his spark signature, or whatever planeswalkers use to recognize each other, but failed to spot him in his corrupted state. Or maybe she was specifically looking for the spark he sacrificed to close the Tolarian rift. More on Karn and his sparks in two weeks time.
• Jeska says that "over the years she had extensive dealings with the Cabal and its monstrous Patriarch". In the Legions and Scourge reviews I mentioned that those novels were incredibly wonky with time, with some pages suggesting multiple years had passed since Onslaught, but later pages saying it's been only a single year. There's even a bit where Jeska/Phage is 11 months pregnant, another month passes... and she's still 11 months pregnant! Maybe Karona warped time so badly that it even went screwy before she emerged. All that to say, those years of extensive dealing might be a reference to Legions and Scrouge. But the Cabal was active across all of Otaria for Jeska's entire mortal life, so it could also be a more general remark.
• She also says Kamahl "agonized over it [wounding her] for years afterward, but remorse did not set in until long after he had abandoned Jeska and left her care to whomever had happened by. As it happened, the Cabal had happened by." That's a bit unfair, since Kamahl left her with his friend Seton. How was he to know he would get killed by Braids?
• The depiction of Karona's birth on the story wall in Jeska's village even includes Zagorka dropping into the mix! Perhaps it was Kamahl himself who brought the story back. It would be hard for any other witness to spot that detail. The last pictogram, described as a "confused collection of all the previous icons" shows Kamahl cutting Karona open, spilling out her "component parts". Sensibly, they have left out Sash and Waistcoat.

The only reason why I would want them to print cards of the Unmen is too see what artists make of their portal-bodies.

• Multani "swallows" Venser to communicate with him, Teferi thinks this is like the time Urza was imprisoned in a tree in Yavimaya, only less hostile. That was back in Time Streams, and lasted five years! He later tries to do the same with Jeska, but Leshrac intervenes.
• At one point Jeska imagines herself lying on a stone slab with the wrong skin and the wrong hair, supposedly her first morning as Phage. If the memory had started earlier Radha, who is mentally connected to her at that point, would've seen Jeska/Phage waking up screaming. We never actually saw this moment in Onslaught.
• Krosa is said to be famous for giant dragonflies and grendelkin, the later of which were described in Chainer's Torment as "hairy, warty things with natural armor plates, with a huge head but spindly legs that drag uselessly behind them as they walk on their knuckles."
• Later there is a reference to "Otaria being overrun with hybrid snake-men". This also happened in Chainer's Torment, when Chainer was under the influence of the Mirari.
• Multani is described as "the hero who had changed the course of Urza's lifelong obsession, trained Dominaria's heroes in maro-sorcery, and beaten back Phyrexian armies on two continents." We know he trained Gerrard and Mirri in maro-sorcery in their backstory (it rarely ever came into play in the stories themselves). The "two continents" is a reference to his work in Yavimaya and Urborg. I don't think he really changed Urza's plans much, but he did give him the Weatherseed from which the Weatherlight grew, so that's something.
• Teferi says "I can still see them, my people ... So many of them went willingly into phase. Some even celebrated", making it clear he shared his plans with the people of Zhalfir.

I think it would've been cooler to see Zhalfir return in the Rift Era, contrasting it's pre-Invasion state to the post-apocalyptic world, but it would still be really great to see it coming back these days.

• Here's a very important revelation, given to us by Leshrac:

"Madara is not the largest rift, nor the most dangerous, but it is the oldest. Twenty thousand years ago this was the site of Dominaria's first-ever duel between planeswalkers

A mighty dragon on one side, a demonic leviathan on the other. They met and fought here, two powerful planeswalkers. Did you know Madara's castline use to stretch all the way to the outlying islands? The duelists shattered over a third of the continent in their struggle. In my more reflective moments, I think it's no wonder Dominaria's history is so violent and combative-one of the first things to ever happen here was a battle to the death between gods. 

They fought for a full month, but in the end it wasn't force that decided the outcome. The dragon attacked the leviathan's mind with his magic, and shredded it like tissue paper. Overwhelming size and strength mean nothing without the will to employ it.

With his foe helpless, the dragon gathered his strength for a final blow. Tenacious to the end, the leviathan responded in kind, summoning up its ultimate effort in an instinctive bid to take its foe into oblivion with it. They struck as one, breaking the foundations of reality here and creating a fissure that stretched deep into the Multiverse.

The duel ended, but the victory had only just begun. He didn't understand the full ramifications of the rift, and dragons are always hungry, so he set about consuming his conquered foe. Bolas was well on his way to setting a new standard for greed and self-indulgence, but this meal went beyond simple gluttony. The leviathan's corpse lasted for almost a year. Its flesh and bones were still steeped in arcane power, and Bolas gorged himself for weeks at a time, pausing only to digest. His power increased as he dined in the shadow of the fresh rift, and even I cannot say how the dragon and the phenomenon affected each other during that time.

What I do know is that when the dragon was through, all that was left were a few scraps of blubber and two gigantic talons. Bolas made these into a monument, framing the rift that marked the site of this historic event. Then he left Dominaria, to prey on other realms, to prowl the wide, wild universe in search of sustenance and glory. He would always return to Madara to exercise his authority over his first and most cherished holding, and to gorge himself on the rich blend of Madaran mana."

• So we have the origin story of Nicol Bolas, his link to the Madaran rift that brought him back to life, the Talon Gates, and in a way that of Dominaria itself, with its "first planeswalker battle". Later on Chronicle of Bolas would give us an even earlier prequel featuring his ascension. The flashbacks in that story end with him crashing on Madara after fighting Ugin in the Meditation Plane. It's not entirely clear to me if he then hangs out there until the demonic leviathan show up, or if the implication is that he's already fought that battle between flashbacks, and that he crashes on Madara because he already has the link to the rift there.
• Bolas does some more boasting about being eternal and seeing Dominaria born. He also says "I am the last of the elder dragons, the only one who endured, as the only beings I've ever acknowledged as peers turned and destroyed each other". A very oblique reference to the Elder Dragon War. In Chronicle of Bolas we'll learn he himself was the instigator of that conflict.
• His fight against the leviathan being the first planeswalker duel on Dominaria lends some credence to the idea that Dominaria is not that old, but Bolas's claims that he saw the plane born are pure boasting, since we have since seen his own birth on Dominaria. Personally I prefer Dominaria to have a proper geological timescale, since Pete Venters went through all the trouble of figuring out its tectonic plates. Still, the fact that the first planeswalker duel only happened 15.000 years before Urza suggests something big changed around that time. Before we had any official information on the Elder Dragon War and had to rely on Jeff Lee's website, which claimed it was a Multiverse-wide war, I proposed that such a conflict might have had a similarly debilitating effect on the Multiverse as the rifts, and thus that there may have been an Mending at the end of that as well. Maybe one that took the powers of planeswalking away from the Elder Dragons and spawned a new type of planeswalkers, the one we've been seeing up to this point. Another possibility would be that this earlier Mending made Dominaria the Nexus of the Multiverse, which would lure planeswalkers to it for the first time. Subsequent revelations about the Elder Dragons have downgraded their conflict to a purely Dominarian affair and thus completely chucked out my theory. I don't have a replacement for it yet, but still the fact that there wasn't a planeswalker duel on Dominaria before Bolas and the leviathan suggests to me that something big happened with either planeswalkers or Dominaria not too long before that event. Maybe we'll find out what in another 20 years.

• Leshrac refers to Tetsuo Umezawa as "a servant who forgot his place" and says "if you knew the price that cursed servant and his ilk have paid for that victory ... you would not be so merry". We know Bolas went after his descendants, but I wonder what befell Tetsuo himself.
• During the Leshrac/Bolas duel the former summons "an ugly, bat-shaped thing that hadn't been seen on Dominaria since the great Ice Age", obviously a reference to Minion of Leshrac. We also saw one in The Eternal Ice. Bolas just eats it.
• After Bola is seemingly afflicted by Leshrac's destructive touch he feints running away, going on a jaunt through the Multiverse. Among the locations visited are...
• "a near-endless megalopolis of disparate architecture", a.k.a. Ravnica.
• a place with "a bizarre, inverted mountain" looming on the horizon, a.ka. Mercadia.
• One with "two tear-shaped bodies that together formed a perfect sphere" where Leshrac is told to leave by two twin women of which "the one to his left had the aspect of a serpent, sharp and quick and deadly, while the other bore herself with the solemn dignity of a queen". This one is quite interesting in the light of the recent revelations of Kamigawa's history between the original block and Neon Dynasty. It suggests Michiko became a kami herself after her Reign of Truth, probably in the same vein that the Maro's from Saviors of Kamigawa were. I wonder if she's still around these days, now Kyodai is hanging out in the emperor's house and no longer looks like a thin woman.

• Continuing our tour, we see a "dusky, green world that seemed permanently wreathed in twilight". Leshrac spots a big castle, and an army of vampires led by a "huge giant" in "gleaming, black armor" whose "heart may have been noble once, and whatever remained of that heart broke every time he led his verminous legions into the field". This is clearly Ulgrotha, with Ihsan's Shade looking over the army of Baron Sengir. To this day I hope the Baron and his family marched out through their portal moments after this scene so they could have gotten off Ulgrotha before all inter-planar portals closed in the Mending. It would be a shame for Magic's original bad guy to be locked in a plane we're probably never going to return to again.
• Last time we saw the place there wasn't any permanent twilight, and it might not even be that permanent in this scene (I mean, they're only there for a few moments, how do they know how long the twilight has lasted?), but interestingly enough the novel The Purifying Fire will feature Diraden, a plane in permanent darkness that the author originally intended to be Ulgrotha.
• The explanation for why the rifts suck in mana is that "Karona characterized the rift, in a manner of speaking. He voracious nature infected the entire rift network and turned each of the phenomena into mana sinks like her".
• Suq'ata and Femeref are said to be the dominant nations on the subcontinent where Zhalfir used to be. This created some confusing back in the day since the Planeshift map from MagicInvasion.com showed the entire continent up to the Great Desert being gone entirely. I'm guessing the Phyrexians were working on incomplete information when making said map though, as later depictions, like the full Dominaria map, show only Zhalfir being phased out.

• Jhoira tells Jodah what she's read about him: "The brash mage who overthrew a magical tyrant. The wise wizard-warrior who helped shape nations. Confidant and lover of planeswalkers." The magical tyrant is Mairsil the Pretender, who he helped overthrow in The Gathering Dark, the nations he shaped were Kjeldon and Balduvia, which he suggested should unify into New Argive in The Shattered Alliance. His relationship with planeswalkers was a bit more frought than "confidant and lover" though.
• Jhoira has also picked up the mirror Freyalise dropped in Planar Chaos. He says he made it "in the wake of Jaya Ballard's death", to which Jhoira replies "But Jaya never died ... Or at least, there is no mention of her death in my archives ... Which means your history is not exactly the same as the history recorded for Jodah. You are Jodah... but you are not that Jodah. Are you?" To which he replies "I never was ... and I doubt he ever was, either". Which seems to very heavily hint this is an alternate timeline Jodah and that Jaya might still be alive. Or... it could be a reference to the end of The Shattered Alliance, where Jodah says he's going to spread misinformation about himself. Subsequent stories have sort of gone both ways. Return to Dominaria reveals that Jaya is still alive, but also references the relationship between Jhoira and Jodah. Supplementary sources surrounding that set talk about that Jodah being the real deal, as well as him hiding behind "extravagant and sometimes contradictory legends". We could make strange explanations for this all by saying Jhoira hooked up with this alternate Jodah, and after he was yanked back to his own timeline tried to get with our version of Jodah without much succes, but that seems unnecessary. I much prefer the idea that this Jodah is the proper version, and that his remarks to Jhoira about not being the Jodah she's heard about is just him needlesly obtusely referencing the myths surrounding him.

This thingy doesn't make an appearance.

TIMELINE

As you know by now, this story happens around 4500 A.R. There's a few more temporal references though.

• The big news is of course the birth and ascension of Nicol Bolas. For years the Elder Dragon War floated a the top of the timeline at some unknown date before the rise of the Primevals, but here we finally heard that Bolas "He had lived for twenty-five thousand years", followed a few pages later by "Twenty thousand years ago this was the site of Dominaria's first-ever duel between planeswalkers."
• These dates aren't as hewn in stone as we might like though. Later, when Bolas restores the Talon Gates it's said they are standing "as they had for twenty-five millennia", mixing up their age with that of Bolas himself. Later sources occasionally make Bolas 20.000 or even 30.000 years old. Him being 25.000 years old is the most consistent, and most specific date though, and Chronicle of Bolas does put about five millennia between his birth and ascension, so we're sticking with the dates given here. Just be aware they might be centuries out, as the margins of error are quite big with periods of tens of thousands of years.
• Oh, and one final entry for the list of screwed up timelines: Urza & Yavimaya apparently became allies "for thousands of years"... It's actually closer to just 900 years. I'm beginning to suspect planeswalkers, even Teferi, lose all perspective of time at some point. Or maybe it's just Tolarians...