Planar Chaos

 Writer - Scott McGough & Timothy Sanders
Cover Artist - Daren Bader

First Printing - January 2007

SUMMARY

With Rahda back in Keld and Teferi dealing with his sudden lack of godliness, Venser and Jhoira come to the fore in this book. Jhoira creates a barrier of glass shards to protect them form the angry Shivans that attacked the crew at the end of Time Spiral, but mana-surges of the returned Shiv cause it to go out of control and shred the attackers. This makes their last companion Corus go mad, which leads to him breaking an artifact Teferi gave him, blowing himself up in the proces. Eventually they make it to a Ghitu tribe though, where they build an ambulator over the course of several weeks. Unfortunately, there's also a strange giggly voice who starts talking to Venser, trying to distract him in dangerous situations.

Jhoira and Venser teleport to Urborg, which is suddenly freezing. They are divided, with Jhoira being found by Jodah, the Archmage Eternal (Emeritus) of the School of the Unseen, and Venser getting captured by Lord Windgrace, whose gladehunters are warring with an army of Phyrexians that suddenly came alive after Venser's ambulator interacted with the Urborg rift last novel. Windgrace temporarily separates Venser from the giggly voice, which we learn is the Weaver King, a former il-Dal with tremendous telepathic abilities who became a shadow creature in the Rathi overlay.

Windgrace also collects Teferi, Jhoira and Jodah. Learning from them about the danger of the rifts, he then contacts Freyalise, who tells them the unnatural cold and the Phyrexians have also come to Keld. The two planeswalkers agree to each work on their own rift, their last team-up with the Nine Titans having left a sour taste in their mouths, but Freyalise does request to take Jhoira with her. 

In Skyshroud Jhoira discovers Freyalise has taken over the local slivers to fight Phyrexians, but that she's almost drained of power herself. Thinking Jhoira the only one who ever controlled Radha, Freyalise has her swear to bring Radha back to take over the role as Skyshroud's champion, but events move to quickly for that to actually happen. Jodah and Venser hatch a plan to use Jodah's magical caves and Venser's ambulator to save Jhoira, but this allows the Weaver King to follow them to Skyshroud and take control of the slivers and Phyrexians.

Venser gets stuck with his ambulator in the Blind Eternities while traveling to Skyshroud. There he meets Karn for a moment, which convinces Jhoira she doesn't need to get Radha, but Karn (she build something into the ambulator that called out to her old friend). Saddened by Jhoira's "betrayal" of her promise, Freyalise leaves. Unfortunately Jhoira turns out to not be able to reach Karn, just the Weaver King impersonating him. After that encounter the King is visited by a mysterious planeswalker, who we learn is the one who enabled the King to interact with the real world after getting stuck during the overlay, who commands him to attack both Freyalise and Windgrace at once.

Freyalise takes back the magic sustaining Skyshroud, which withers away almost instantly. She uses that power to close the rift and kill all the slivers and Phyrexians, dying in the proces. Jodah, who had been trying to reach Freyalise but was forced through a teleportation tunnel by Venser, angrily leaves the story at this point.

The Urborg rift (which is linked to the Skyshroud one, both being created by the Rathi Overlay) suddenly doubles in activity. The crew, including a newly arrived real Karn, convince Windgrace that he must follow Freyalises lead. He imbues some of his essence into the land and sacrifices himself to close the rift.

The next plan is for Karn to travel back in time before Barrin's obliteration of Tolaria and to seal the rift at that point, since in present day it has become untreatable. Karn wants Venser, whose planeswalking ability has slowly been developing over the course of the story, to witness this from the Blind Eternities so he'll better understand the workings of the Multiverse. While Karn is working Venser is contacted by the Weaver King, who wants to take over his body to gain planeswalking powers himself. Luckily Venser brought the powerstones that used to power his ambulator. He teleports away with just the surface of them, which causes all the energy to burst out and consume the King. Karn also succeeds in closing the Tolarian rift, but is then suddenly gripped by... some kind of corruption (what could it be?!) and planeswalks away, telling Venser not to let anyone follow him.

In the epilogue Venser, Jhoira and Teferi are happy to learn the intruding Ice Age has now ended, but also wondering how to proceed from here. Then Jeska appears, angrily demanding to see Karn.

REVIEW

I complained that Time Spiral felt like just a bunch of characters walking around rather than a natural disaster story, and that it really needed either an escalation of threat or an actual bad guy to make it work. Well, there is escalation of threat now, but it still falls a little flat. You'd think that the return of the Phyrexians and the Ice Age would be pretty shocking, but neither has particular gravitas, it's just part of the already existing rift problem. Teferi actually says he's "not so concerned about the danger they [the Phyrexians] posed as the danger they represented [the rifts]" I mean... this is the Invasion replaying itself, yet there is a distinct vibe that everything could be solved easily if Freyalise and Windgrace would just get over their hangups about Teferi and do something. Closing the Shivan rift calmed the others for a while. Teferi thinks closing the Skyrshroud and Urborg rifts nigh-simultaneously will have an "exponentially larger effect", but they don't listen and just let things get worse and worse. I guess they are the "politicians that don't listen" in this disaster movie now? Not really the roles I would've chosen for them.

I know Teferi's playfulness can make him be a bit of a dick, but what did he do to be so mistrusted by the other 'walkers? Is it purely his association to Urza? And if so, shouldn't his "rebellion" in Invasion count for something? But no, Freyalise and Windgrace just refuse to listen until the rifts have deteriorated so much (in some esoteric way) that they now need to sacrifice themselves to close them.

The Weaver King as a baddy does add some urgency, and his shadowy planeswalker benefactor adds some interesting mystery (though longtime fans will know who it is the moment he starts describing himself). The King is not very compelling, just another insane sadist, but at least he adds some sense of jeopardy.

What also doesn't help the lack of urgency is that there is again lots of padding. A whole chapter is spend on Jodah going to Skyshroud to warn Jhoira, coming back to help Venser grab the ambulator, then back to Skyshroud with a beacon for Venser to home in on... Not to mention all the pages taken up by these three talking about who is going to take which form of teleportation where. Other examples include a fight between the Weaver King's minion Dinne and a random gladehunter, which doesn't tell us anything about Dinne that wouldn't have become apparent form his later interaction with the main cast, or several pages of Windgrace killing Phyrexians, even though it was already established that this would do nothing in the greater picture.

The worst padding though, and it pains me to say this, is the character of Jodah. I love that he's been brought back, which wasn't a given at all considering how many characters Magic had been contend to quietly forget about at this point, but he's a completely pointless addition to the plot. He shows up just to warn Jhoira about the Weaver King, runs along with the crew's teleportation conga, eventually gets convinced Freyalise is about to cast another devastating World Spell (which she isn't), hands her a replica of his old mirror (which she then just chucks away) and in the end just slinks off annoyed. Which is of course accompanied by several pages of Teferi failing to convince him to stay, which itself is preceded by Teferi convincing Venser to go after the archmage. Gotta pad this out somehow! He talks about having loads of resources, but he doesn't get to use them, doesn't have a plan for the time rifts, or for anything at all really. He was a great character back in the Ice Age trilogy, but here he gets to do nothing but have the hints of an awkward love triangle with Jhoira and Venser.

About that triangle... Venser's interest in Jhoira I can imagine. For one, she's awesome. For two, he's been alone almost his entire life, obviously he'd show some interest when someone who's just as much into artifacts as him shows up. The Jodah/Jhoira love story is not very convincing however. There isn't much chemistry there beyond "Hey, you are immortal, I'm immortal...", which doesn't feel like a big deal when Jhoira has been hanging out with fellow Tolarian immortals for centuries. Considering what we hear about their relationship in Dominaria, I guess it was just a "the world is ending" type of thing that didn't last very long when Dominaria was saved.

And finally there is the death of Freyalise and Windgrace, and the throwaway reference to Jaya already having died some time before this story. That really rubbed people the wrong way, and I'd say that was the beginning of the enormous anti-Mending sentiment that made the storyline community a pretty miserable place for... oh, years after this. I think killing of so many characters was a mistake if they wanted to sell a big change like the Mending to the community, but I'll go more in depth on that when we get to the Mending itself. For now I'll just say that at least the deaths of Freyalise and Windgrace weren't as egregious as that of their fellow Titans Daria, Kristina and Taysir. They got brought back just to be cannon fodder. At least these two go out in what is undoubtedly their own story, where they actually get to feature as characters rather than glorified redshirts. Jaya though... well, let's just say that while I very much agree with Brady Dommermuth that there shouldn't be "careless resurrections", I don't mind the return of Jaya at all. "No careless resurrections" should be balanced out with "No careless deaths".

One final thing to discuss: this book has a co-author; Timothy Sanders. He and John Delaney, the co-author of Future Sight actually got the job through a call for novel proposals on the Magic Book Archive. If you don't remember the Magic Book Archive, it's because we've last talked about it during our coverage of Champions of Kamigawa. The call for proposals was the only update since then of that, already quite obscure at the time, part of the Wizard's website. That article asked for story proposals set in a "post-apocalyptic Dominaria and, in particular, the phased-out lands of Shiv and Jamuraa, taking advantage of the rich story elements, characters, and plot available from the Invasion cycle".

I have no idea how much of their proposals made it into the final story, but I do remember one of the two authors talking on the MTGSalvation forums about how the experience was very different from what he was expecting. Not only does the open call not mention working with Scott McGough as a co-writer, apparently the book he was envisioning dealt much more directly with continuity, like explaining what happened to Kamahl between staring down a tidal wave at the end of Odyssey and popping up again halfway through Chainer's Torment. (Disclaimer: I can't find that post now, over a decade later, so I'm going by my own memory here.)

It might be tempting to point to the co-authors for the quality of these novels, considering Scott McGough wrote some very well received Magic novels previously, but I don't think that's the case. Time Spiral suffered from exactly the same issues as Planar Chaos and Future Sight, and I can't clearly identify any quality shifts between chapters in the latter two novels that would point to a handover between writers. While we don't know much about the behind the scenes situation, I would expect the problems stem more from editorial meddling. We know that the Mending itself was a mandate from higher up, and the fact that the call for proposals doesn't mention co-authorship suggests plans were changed somewhere along the way.

TRIVIA

• On the cover we see a ridiculously evil looking Venser, backed by an (apparently split-second) Karn. This is clearly the skinnier Karn we previously only saw in an Inquest article. There are several references in the book to him appearing "leaner"
• Jhoira "had honed her survival skills in some of the most dangerous terrains across the multiverse, realms of fire and snow alike". Now I really wanna know what she got up to between Scars of the Legacy and Invasion! Did she explore the Multiverse on the Weatherlight? Did she go along with Teferi when he went exploring? Perhaps both, as she is later referred to as "Teferi's companion and the former captain of a plane-spanning ship"
• The Weaver King's main minion is Dinne, a former Vec warrior, left catatonic after battles with a poisonous Rootwater merfolk and a Kor shaman. The Weaver King forced him to exert his mind until he could manifest in the real world. He fights and kills in order to feel something like his former life, and uses darts made of his own shadowy substance.

Something tells me Scott McGough saw this art, or something like it from the style guide, when thinking up Dinne.

• Jhoira & Windgrace call Jodah "Archmage Eternal of the Unseen Academy", rather than the School of the Unseen. They're not the only ones who haven't been able to keep the name of that place straight over the years.
• Windgraces gladehunter army includes beasts and humans, but also "two major lich lords", shades and phantasms. Oddly, he also has skirges serving him. Very weird to see that name, only used in Magic for Phyrexian imps, while dressing down Venser for using Phyrexian parts.
• Pantherfolk are said to be "all but extinct." I guess Purraj really was one of very few survivors.
• Windgrace says "I was a hero ... In ages past, the panther tribes ruled Urborg. I was their warrior chief, a man to be respected and feared", which suggests he hails from that 300 year period before the Brother's War.
• Freyalise wears "the traditional Llanowar eye patch of brass-colored metal and a single glittering gemstone". Just before the end she rips it off, revealing mismatching eyes "icy-blue on the left and ruby-red on the right". That's a new look for her.

• The Skyshroud saproling thicket is seen dying in the cold, and is presumably gone entirely after Freyalise takes back her magic.
• Radha has taken her warhost to invade Parma, Keld's ancestral enemy, hoping that killing the frost giants and ice monsters there would end the sudden cold. After nailing a dead Gathan to each tree on the perimeter of Skyshroud to scare of any remaining loggers. She's also got "Target" with her, a kid who last novel got the Kelden rune for "target" carved in his face by Gathans, blinding him. Now he already has a reputation for being an efficient killer. I guess Radha really knows how to train people!
• Teferi has met a few shadow creatures before. Urza must've taken him to see Rath at some point.
• Freyalise chose to put Skyshroud in Keld because there it would be safe, once she had made an agreement with the Keldon Council. Keldons are not interested in forest dwelling, and no one ever invaded Keld. Also it was "far enough from Llanowar to be independent but close enough for her two fiefdoms to support each other in times of trial." She admits herself it all went completely different than she had planned.
• The Tolarian rift is the cause of the time distortions throughout Dominaria: it's been "funneling temporal chaos" into the other rifts.
• Jodah calls Teferi the true heir to Urza "a glib, patrician, elitist, all-knowing and all-powerful high mucky-much who thinks everyone should simply get in line and follow his lead"
• Before sacrificing himself, Windgrace "infuses" part of himself into Urborg. "I may not return, but my spirit will continuity to watch over Urborg." Karn later says "he may well return when Urborg needs him most."
• The Ice Age Phyrexians became active after the Urborg rift was activated by Venser's ambulator. Presumably they all went catatonic the moment the rift was closed. But that does mean there should still be a whole host of them just lying around in Urborg... or perhaps the gladewalkers all cleared them up afterwards.

Nothing to do with these guys. Although... Lord Windgrace was a planeswalker...

CONTINUITY

Let's first remind ourselves were these characters came from:

• Lord Windgrace was first mentioned all the way back in 1995's Tapestries anthology. He was intended to show up in the Prelude to War comic, but when that was cancelled we had to wait until Invasion for him to finally see him in person! (he was also mentioned in Crovax's origin story, Born to Greatness, and I can't promise he can't be encountered at some point in the Battlemage game, but if you're willing to suffer through that game to find out you're a better person than me...). Anyway, he was last seen in Apocalypse, where he and Freyalise were the only ones of Urza's team of planeswalkers to survive.
• Jodah was introduced in The Gathering Dark, and officially last seen in The Shattered Alliance. As a character created by Jeff Grubb to string his Ice Age trilogy together he never showed up anywhere else, though he was mentioned in an online article in 2003 that suggested he might show up in a future novel. I guess that came true eventually!
• And then there is Karn, whose first appearance was... eh... I guess the Weatherlight preview articles in The Duelist? His first appearance in a story happened in the Gerrard's Quest comic. We last saw him having a chat with Slobad in the epilogue of The Fifth Dawn.

• Venser is once again said to have been solitary in the marshes of Urborg most his life, but we also get the quote "Losing him [Windgrace] was like losing his father all over again-along with his grandfather, his uncles, his mentor, and everyone else he had ever looked up to." So presumably the referenced to friends and family in the later The Quest for Karn novel refer to all those people that died at some point. Urborg isn't a very nice place to live...
• The Ghitu initially think Jhoira & Co are Phyrexian Infiltrators, since the Invasion has only just begun for them.
• There is something odd about what Jhoira and Teferi know about Karn. They say "The last report we have says he went on an extended tour of the multiverse with another 'walker as his traveling companion. They haven't been seen or heard from in centuries." So apparently they were receiving reports on him in their bubble outside the time stream? Jhoira says she has not spoken with him since he ascended, so I guess they were just looking at him via scrying or something.
• If this is the first time they're meeting post Karn's ascension, there is a good chance it's also the first time they're talking since they parted ways before Bloodlines! At least, this is the first time after that point we see them together. Unfortunately they have a world to save, and then Karn is lost again, so we get no pay-off to the "Jhoira is my friend" mantra he took up in order to remember her despite his capped memory.
• That mantra was brought up last novel, and again here: Karn mentions he had quietly mourned the loss of Jhoira when the Weatherlight crew saw part of Shiv missing (no indication of this was just him remembering her through his mantra, or if the two had a reunion at some point we never got to see), and he also reveals that on a plane that reminded him of Shiv he left a bust of her, inscribed "Jhoira is my friend".

We should get a Secret Lair that's just a whole bunch of Cathartic Reunions with art showing different duos throughout Magic's history.

• At one point Jeska says Karn's heartstone was taken from Phyrexian by Urza himself, though she later admits the real story is much longer. Poor old Xantcha, whose heartstone it is, and who collected it herself in Planeswalker, gets left out of the telling.
• The claim is repeated that Karn doesn't have a spark, but contains "the mechanisms to move himself and others from plane to plane". We're also told his "being contained worlds", which is probably a reference to Serra's Realm being absorned in the Weatherlight's power stone, but also might be a general reference to the idea that powerstones can contain entire planes.
• Jeska wants to go see Rabiah, but Karn things the plane might not be ready for her, instead suggests going to Mercadia, "a mercantile plane", where he has friends. It's not said who, but they're presumably the Cho-Arrim, or more specifically the descendants of Orim.
• When she first spots Jodah, Jhoira confuses him for Urza. I guess that specific look runs in the family. When she spots his "old eyes" though, she figures out who he is, having heard of him before.
• Teferi thinks the cold is coming from a world where the Ice Age never ended, and where the Phyrexians invaded much earlier, thus explaining why they are so different. It's not made explicit, but this earlier invasion would also explain why the Phyrexians were able to get into the alternate Dominaria in the first place, since the Ice Age is linked to the Shard, which locked the Phyrexians away from Dominaria.
• They are also nearly mindless, only capable of  "accepting rudimentary commands and making basic decisions". Much less advanced than the Phyrexians we've seen previously.
• The Weaver King used to be called Oleg en-Dal, a leader of prominence and a great warrior. He then turned il-Dal when he pledged service to Volrath after his tribe had been whittled down by disease and Rath's many dangers. Volrath experimented on him, turning him into the psychotic telepath we see in this story. He was forgotten after Crovax took over, and then became a shadow creature in the Rathi overlay.
• He was coaxed into the real world (sort off, he's still a spectral figure, but at least he's now capable of affecting Dominaria again, rather than being entire trapped in some interplanar nothingness) by a planeswalker who says he prefers "to walk the night". I wonder who that could be!

• Jodah says "My best friend was possessed by my worst enemy once, and I didn't notice", which is a very quick summary of The Shattered Alliance. He has since been studying up on mind control. He faced the Weaver King before at some point, but faked senility until the monster got bored.
• He also has "access to a wonderful library, one that Commodore Guff himself considered an annex to his own", that's where he learned about Jhoira. We never see it, or even learn where it came from or is now located though. Was he already working with the new Tolarian Academy at this point?
• Jodah gives Freyalise a new mirror. She asks "is that the original? ... Or a decoy?" to which he just responds it will work "as it always has." Later she says "You have truly exceeded your mentor, Archmage. This is a masterpiece, every bit as powerful as Voska's mirror was. More so." Voska was Jodah's mentor at the beginning of The Gathering Dark, who indeed gave him the original mirror.

• In addition to his mirror, Jodah has also recreated the teleportation tunnels he learned to use in The Gathering Dark, and which were blown up in The Eternal Ice when Freyalise channeled the Worldspell through them. This time it's not a specific set of caves though, but he can enchant doorways to turn into portals that somehow follow the leylines.
• Windgrace says Teferi has changed since they last met. Teferi can't remember ever having met him. Which may be because he spend a lot of time with severe brainfog after losing his spark, but perhaps Windgrace was just testing to see if the Weaver King was influencing him or not. After all, we've never seen the two meet before either.
• Windgrace tries to collect Jodah as "a longtime ally of Freyalise" because he was "instrumental in her casting of the World Spell". When Jodah reveals he's not exactly on speaking terms with her (he wasn't so much an ally as coerced to work with her spell in The Eternal Ice) Windgrace glares at him, Jhoira and Teferi and goes "why is everything so difficult with you people?" Which is pretty funny, but also pretty hypocritical coming from mister "I don't wanna work with students of Urza".
• Jhoira thinks the slivers developed their symbiosis through Volrath breeding them on Rath. This fits pretty well with some old The Duelist issues that suggest slivers were created by him in the first place. Later Onslaught block era articles introduce the idea that they might have been brought from another plane, but keeps it vague what their origin is and where their powers came from. Their appearance on Shandalar in future sets suggests they might have an earlier history on other planes, but we still don't know the whole story.

• When Venser is stuck in the Blind Eternities he sees...

"There was a globe of fire, a sphere-shaped world dense with red and orange flames. There was a city as big as a moon, every inch of its surface covered in towering architecture through which streamed multitudes of humans and monsters. There was a world that mirrored itself, its shape formed by two symmetrical parts that fitted together to form a perfect circle. And there was a world of silver and black metal, a vast and complicated crucible of alloy and oil"

• Presumably these are Wildfire, Ravnica, Kamigawa and Mirrodin.
• All we learn about Jaya's fate is that Jodah thinks her "impetuousness made her careless and eventually cost her her life". Up to now we never learned what happened, how Jaya survived, what Jodah thinks happened, or how he even knew of her supposed demise. Some references in the next book suggest that this Jodah may have been an alternate timeline version of him, and thus that it was an alternate Jaya who died, but Jhoira's remarks on their relationship in the Return to Dominaria story make it clear that the Jodah we see here is the same one from Dominaria, and that one was clearly treated as the original, so that theory goes out the window... Here's hoping for a Jodah/Jaya reunion in Dominaria United that would explain why he thought she was dead!

We should get a Secret Lair that's just a whole bunch of Cathartic Reunions with art showing different duos throughout Magic's history.

• Despite his new, streamlined look, Karn still has the Old Thran glyph for "Strength" on his chest.
• Jhoira describes Jeska as a "wild-tempered barbarian with histories of attempted world conquest"... so Jhoira and Teferi don't know Karona, but they think Jeska tried to conquer the world? Or did they somehow learn about her at some point since their return?
• At another point Jhoira is telling Venser about Karn, when we get this line: "The world went mad just as Jhoira reached the point in Karn's story where the planeswalking golem regained control over his all-metal plane" So... she knows about what happened on Mirrodin, but not about Karona? Despite Karona's story leading directly into Mirrodin? I'm very confused about how they're getting all (or rather, parts of) this information. The only extended period of time since their return not covered in detail is their weeks with the Ghitu, and how would they know anything about Karn and Mirrodin? More scrying perhaps?
• Freyalise thinks about "he own tribe in Fyndhorn and her beloved favorites in Llanowar". Her identifying the Fyndhorn tribe as "her own" suggests we're now going with her original origin of a Ice Age era half-elf (although back then we didn't know for sure she was from Fyndhorn, but it makes sense, it being the only big contemporary elf community in Terisiare that we know off), rather than Teferi's weird "4000 year old elf from Llanowar" theory.
• Teferi's first reaction to seeing Karn is calling him "Shovelhead", his (rather mean) nickname for the golem back in Time Streams.
• There is a "small powerstone-processing plant" on Mirrodin modeled after the Shivan Mana Rig.
• Karn mentions his years of pacifism "of letting foul goblins swarm over his body and carry him away. Letting half-Phyrexians sadists torture him with his own moral imperative. It took a full-on world war to shake him from his inertia". We got conflicting account of why Karn embraced pacifism in Gerrard's Quest and Rath and Storm, but both of those stories feature Karn being kidnapped by mogg goblins, and then Volrath putting him and a horde of moggs in a cell with a shifting floor, torturing him by making him kill the goblins each time he fell over. The "full-on world war" is of course the Invasion, in which he finally embraced violence again to save Gerrard from Tsabo Tavoc.

• About Karn's fate in the end: it's described as a corruption, and when asked what went wrong by Venser he replies "I did ... Long ago. An enemy I created has finally destroyed me." Which is... kinda correct, I guess? If you consider him bringing the Phyrexian oil to Mirrodin as creating the New Phyrexians. It's not entirely clear why he suddenly feels the corruption now. There is no indication he's lost his spark(s?) yet, though we know he eventually will. On the contrary, he can still travel away, so it doesn't seem to be a case of him suddenly becoming vulnerable after losing his planeswalkerial powers. Various sources will state he sacrificed his spark to seal the rift at Tolaria, like Teferi did with the one in Shiv, but we'll talk more about that a few weeks from now, when I cover the Future Sight Player's Guide, the first such source. In this novel there is no talk about sacrificing a spark, presumably because by traveling back in time Karn reached a point where the rift was small enough to close without such drastic costs.

TIMELINE

The main story takes place directly after Time Spiral, with a few weeks passing after the initial chapters and the main story, so it goes on the timeline at "~4500 A.R.". Other than that...

• When Karn looks at Mirrodin we're told "There had not been a major conflict or crisis on Mirrodin for over one hundred years, but something about the place troubled Karn", which we've talked about when we tried to place Mirrodin on the timeline. What I missed back then was that Jeska later says to him "I don't know why you come back here so often. The place hasn't changed in centuries", which rather mucks things up. But the timeline placement of Scourge and Time Spiral are set pretty much in stone, and Mirrodin has to happen between those two, so we'll just have to say that Jeska is not that concerned about the people on Mirrodin, or that she hasn't quite grasped how long centuries are exactly.
• We hear "Urborg hadn't seen a hard freeze, snow, or even frost for almost six hundred years", which doesn't seem to reference anything in particular.
• Lord Windgrace spend the first 100 years after Apocalypse "scouring away the living remnants of the Invasion", and then after that "has been enforcing a punishable-by-death artifact ban in the swamps for a hundred years". Which fits with the references to Phyrexian remnants in various stories.
• Teferi isn't the only one who can't keep the years straight. Karn repeatedly thinks he spend twenty years as a pacifist when it was 12 years at most, and then during his trip to Tolaria he says he is "a full four hundred years in the past"... The whole book says time and time again that Teferi and Jhoira have been gone for 300 years, and Tolaria got kersploded after they left, so how can you be 400 years in the past Karn? I guess all that time trying to get back into Mirrodin while Memnarch was warping time inside it confused him.