Lorwyn, Morningtide & Eventide

 

Writers - Cory J. Herndon & Scott McGough
Cover Artists - Mark Zug, Steve Prescott & Christopher Moeller
First Printing - August 2007, January 2008 & June 2008

SUMMARY

Lorwyn: There are a bunch of mysterious occurrences happening on Lorwyn. Magical creeping vines are killing elves, boggarts are being extra bloodthirsty, someone has razed the Murmuring Bosk, and a routine spell from elvish hunter Rhys blows up his whole hunting squadron (and his own horns).

Treefolk sage Colfenor has some idea what's going on. He's not telling anyone though, but he does have a plan, which involves getting Rhys, his former apprentice, to plant one of his seedcones in the remains of the Bosk, manipulating kithkin hero Bridgid into kidnapping flamekin pilgrim Ashling, and then using Ashling to lure a great elemental to set himself on fire. All of which is part of a ritual to be reborn in a "new world".

There's a bunch of other character tagging along, including the giant Brion, his brother Kiel, and the merfolk captain Sygg, but they add very little to the overarching story, so I'll give more detail on them below. The one important character is Maralen. In the prologue we see her mysteriously get killed by those vines, she then mysteriously shows up alive but amnesiac after Rhys's explosion. She eventually mysteriously gets control of the Vendilion Clique, after they discover she is unique in some mysterious but unexplained way and kidnap her for a mysterious meeting with Oona, the Queen of the Fae. Mysterious!

Between all that the crew is also followed by Rhys's former superior Nath and his former friend Gryffid, who want him dead for what he did to his fellow elves. Rhys ends up killing Nath.

Book one ends with the crew back in the Bosk, where Colfenor's sapling has miraculously grown into a full treefolk already.

Morningtide: The heroes plan to go to Rosheen Meanderer, a powerful oracle and Brion and Kiel's sister, hoping she has answers for everything that's going on. Their crew quickly falls apart though. Ashling goes on some sort of spirit quest involving the great elemental Colfenor lured, which is now tied to her somehow. The sapling, who has all of Colfenor's knowledge but can't access it all yet, still knows where to go, but can't explain how, conveniently stretching out the mystery, decides to follow her. Maralen tells Endry, one of the Clique, to go with her. Meanwhile Sygg just wants to go back to his people, and Brigid decides to follow him to make amends for wounding him while kidnapping Ashling last book.

The remaining characters eventually make it to Rosheen, who gives them a vague vision of Lorwyn turning into Shadowmoor. All the while they are chased by Gryffid and his new superior Eidren. In the end the elves catch up and Eidren offers Rhys a job doing the elves dirty work. Having just seen how embattled his people will become on Shadowmoor, Rhys accepts.

That doesn't matter much though, as in the meantime Ashling, her elemental and the sapling are starting some kind of mystic ritual that has... something... to do with the big change. Then things get very confusing as first Ashling decides to absorb the elemental and the sapling rather than merely be a conduit for... something. Then Endry interferes by dropping some magic mushrooms on the sapling that allow Maralen to gain Colfenor's memories and power... somehow. But then Endry interferes again and saves the sapling's life because he's come to like her over their travels. Then the Great Aurora happens.

Oh, and Sygg and Brigid discover the merrow are all going feral, which was caused by the Source of the Wanderwire, a powerful elemental, to prevent the merfolk from seeing the new world... somehow. This doesn't go anywhere, the main point of the whole plotline seems to be that Brigid ends up with the Crescent of Morningtide, a magical doohickey of Sygg, that makes her pass through the Aurora unchanged.

Shadowmoor: Shadowmoor is actually an anthology that doesn't further the main story, but a few of the main characters make a cameo appearance in the first story. In that story kithkin hero Jack Chierdagh heads out to prevent Rosheen from accidentally meandering over his hometown. He randomly runs into Brigid, who takes a liking to him. She then contacts Maralen and agrees to work for her in exchange for her helping Jack. Both the Vendilion Clique, on behalf of Maralen, and other faeries, on behalf of Oona, try to get Jack to steal Rosheen's scroll of prophecies for them in exchange for distracting the giant. In the end Rosheen gets diverted away from Mistmeadow and the Clique secures the scroll for Maralen.

Well talk more about this story and the others in the anthology next time.

Eventide: It's now a year after the Great Aurora. Ashling, known as the Extinguisher and the Destroyer has become ultra-power and insane. She spends that first two thirds of the book trying to burn down the entire world while everyone else tries holding her off. This is all interspersed with scenes of the heroes of the last book (Rhys and Sygg have been transformed, the rest remembers Lorwyn) regrouping to also fight Ahsling, and Oona making cryptic remarks about... fighting Ashling and stealing her powers.

This all culminates in Maralen using Rosheen's scroll and the Crescent of Morningtide to steal Ashling's power for herself... somehow. She then attacks Oona, planning on destroying her. At which point we finally get some answers about what has been going on:

Oona has been manipulating Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, stretching its days into centuries... somehow. We never learn how or why she did this. Colfenor wanted to stop it. Some disaster in another world (aka The Mending) caused the Great Aurora to appear sooner than usual which made Oona afraid she would be changed by it herself, so she tried to copy Colfenor's plan, turning Maralen into her version of the sapling so her memories would pass to the next world. She also planned to have Maralen ingratiate herself with Rhys to mess with Colfenor's plans (Oona was also responsible for the razing of the Bosk, for the same reason), but when Maralen "reached out" to Rhys that caused his spell to go haywire and blow up all his friends... somehow. It also gave Maralen independence from Oona... somehow. (We never get an explanation for this, other than Oona saying she was "careless" in creating Maralen.) We don't get an explanation why Oona then gave Maralen control over the Vendilion Clique, but presumably it was a ploy to get her back under control. It didn't work though, as Maralen kept trying to gain power to fight Oona, mainly by interfering with the ritual of Ashling and the sapling. This meddling was partly responsible for turning Ashling into the Destroyer... somehow. This story isn't big on clear explanations. Oh, and the cherry on the cake is that it was all entirely pointless, since Oona made it through the Aurora unchanged anyway.

By that point the book is almost over, so we get a very rushed fight scene where Oona kills the sapling but Rhys absorbs the treefolk's natural poison and Maralen loses control of the elemental power which goes back to Ashling. Rhys and Ashling then attack Oona with poison and fire, which distracts her long enough for Maralen to kill her using poisonous moonglove, which the original Maralen had been gathering in the Lorwyn prologue before being killed and reshaped into Oona's puppet. 

Killing Oona restores day and night to a 24 hour schedule. We don't whether that means everybody keeps changing from Lorwyn to Shadowmoor form and back, or if their personalities become integrated though. 

...and in the stinger we see Oona reborn, planning to regain her power eventually.

REVIEW

Yup. Three whole books in one review. Told you things would be different on this blog following the Mending! And don't think I'm just trying to rush through some of my least favorite novels, this is genuinely the best way to cover them. They all have the same two authors, so the same criticisms apply to all three books, which have made for very repetitive reading if they were split up. But more importantly: there is just so little happening in these novels!

I feel I've written longer summaries for individual novels than I have for this trilogy-and-a-bit, but that's genuinely all you've got left if you take out all the terrible padding in these books. We get entire chapters with stuff like detailed descriptions of Sygg swimming, Brigid following him, her nearly drowning only to be saved by him, all just so they can have a little chat at the end. Pages and pages of Endry and the sapling discussing whether they can cross a lava stream. A bunch of random monster attacks... I already mentioned the first two thirds of Eventide are mostly taken up by endless repetitive fighting against evil Ashling, but Lorwyn isn't much better. That book takes about a third of it's pages to get to the point where Rhys blows up his buddies, which is already spelled out in the back-cover blurb!

Probably the worst time wasters are the subplots involving the elves hunting Rhys though. Lorwyn spends entire chapters setting up Gryffid's hatred towards his former friend, and introduces the, admittedly interesting, concept of a secret society of scarred elves doing the dirty work of their society while glamored, despite that society hating them for their physical flaws. Morningtide then... just does that entire plot again! More chapters of Gryffid grumbling, more chapters of them chasing Rhys... It even introduces Eidren as a replacement of Nath so it can be even more similar! In the end there is a twist with Rhys actually returning to the fold, but Gryffid still swearing vengeance on him, but then the Great Aurora just cuts off any conclusion that storyline would ever have, as we never see those versions of Gryffid or Rhys after that! Eventide then takes a stab at replaying the story again, except this time far stupider: during a battle with Ashling the Vendilion Clique spirits Rhys away for a few moments, and Gryffid misinterprets him being yoinked into the sky as desertion, causing him to suddenly hate Rhys again. He's then out of the story until the very end when Oona sets him up against Rhys, only for Rhys to convince him Oona is the real bad guy. Gryffid returns to the elven capital, finds everyone there has been killed by Oona's magic-sucking vines, cuts those vines and turns to ash. An utterly baffling coda to an very pointless character whose story nonetheless, and I can't stress this enough, took up chapters and chapters and chapters!

You and me both, clouds

Something else that really annoys me about these stories is that it's a mystery story, but without a detective character. No one is investigating the mysteries, they just hope the all-knowing characters will explain things to them. Except they never do. In the first book it's Colfenor who promises to tell Rhys what's going on if he first plants that seedcone, but them immolates himself before they are reunited. In the second book the "investigation" is just a book-long slog to Rosheen, only for her to hand out some cryptic visions. 

Perhaps even more annoying is the way things get dragged out with characters who do know what is going on. At one point Rhys says he and Maralen will "one day" talk about her deal with the faeries. But then they just don't. The sapling thinks (for pages and pages, I might add) about her needing to do stuff to complete Colfenor's plan, but never tells us what the actual plan is. It's not until the final chapters of the fourth book that people suddenly get talkative.

When we do finally learn what is going on, I wasn't super impressed either. Oona being the secret bad guy is a neat idea, but I would've liked a bit more explanation about what she gains from lengthening the days and nights on her plane. There is one line where she says each iteration of Lorwyn grows in perfection, but that's all we get. The explanation for Rhys's spell going wrong and Maralen gaining independence is swept under the rug, and the plot about the merfolk going feral is just left hanging altogether.

Which brings up to the climax of the story, which is genuinely pathetic. After 200+ pages of trying and failing to defeat an out of control Ashling, Maralen just slams herself into Oona, the person who has been manipulating the entire world for centuries, and kills her in 4 pages. It's a ridiculous rush job that's even worse than Nicol Bolas's death at the end of Champion's Trial. Scott McGough hung out on several forums where I've seen people complain about Bolas's quick defeat, so why he fell into the same trap here, I have no idea.

Nor are these books saved by good characterization, which I find really baffling. Scott McGough and Cory Herndon wrote great characters in their previous outings. From main characters like Chainer and Agrus Kos, to supporting characters like Kolo Meha or Pivlic, they're all very memorable right from their introduction. The characterization was even the saving grace of Time Spiral block. But here? I can barely tell you what everyone's personalities are supposed to be! Well, except the Vendilion Clique. Their personality is "wacky".

Everybody just goes through the esoteric plot mechanics, doing whatever the all-knowing mystery people tell them to, which leads to strange situations where logical character moments seem to be omitted. Rhys comes from a society that literally hunts other races for being ugly. Now he's got to work together with kithkin, merfolk, faeries and flamekin... but that doesn't seem to bother him. Nor does the rest seem to bothered by him. Ashling is actually introduced stumbling upon the strung up remains of a fellow flamekin who was apparently lynched by elves, yet that never comes up again!

I have no idea why two writers who had written some of the best received stories in the previous years suddenly churned out such a clunker. Perhaps we are seeing the shadow side of Wizard's increasing attention to the storyline? With there being basically no storyline shown in the cards in Kamigawa and Ravnica, the authors must've had a lot of freedom. We know from multiple articles, which I've covered in the "[set X] online" reviews, that there was very little communication between the various teams after the initial worldbuilding, so as long as Scott McGough included a war with the Kami in Kamigawa, and as long as Cory Herndon ended his trilogy with a Dissension, they were presumably okay. Now that is changing. We've already seen Scott McGough deliver less than stellar work with the Mending story which was mandated from higher up, so maybe the need to have the Aurora happen halfway through, and perhaps more demands from the card developers, hobbled them in setting up a good plot? Or maybe they knew there was a complete overhaul of the novel line coming that would make this their last Magic stories, and thus their hearts just weren't in it? I have no idea. All I know is that I'm happy I'm done with these books.

TRIVIA

• Lorwyn ends with a glossary. I can always appreciate an appendix, so it's a neat addition to a novel, although it doesn't cover much that wasn't clear from the story itself. Or, you know, just from knowing English. Was a definition for the word "archer" really necessary?

• Maralen is introduced as the handmaiden of Peradala, a Perfect of the Mornsong tribe who is on her way to get married to a Eidren, a Perfect of the Gilt-Leaf tribe. This marriage would lead to the Mornsong eventually being subsumed into the Gilt-Leaf. Their entire convoy is slaughtered by mysterious plant-tendrils on their way though. And then later the Great Aurora happens, so who knows if anything every came of that merger. Later Oona says to the reshaped Maralen "I probably should have taken Peradala herself, but you seemed so much more versatile a tool". Quite why she is versatile... who knows?
• Early on in Lorwyn Rhys kills a boggart, his arrow burrowing into the tree behind said goblin. He then feels a twinge of sympathy... for the tree, because he studied with the treefolk. He also doesn't care when Nath kills an elf who fired his arrow early, ruining the surprise attack. But later on he reacts to the slaughter of goblins with "they are not a threat, they never gave us cause to chastise them". He still kills them though. He's also okay with hiring Brion and Kiel to help with the attack, which Nath thinks is shameful and leads to Rhys getting demoted. So I guess Rhys is a wishy-washy liberal elf.
• Ashling is picked as a tool by Colfenor for her "unorthodox interpretation of the Path of Flame", but neither the Path nor Ashling's interpretation of it gets explained enough for me to figure out what is unorthodox about her. The Path mostly seems to come down to seeking out a powerful non-flamekin elemental and somehow merging with it.

• Birgid is the youngest of seven children, known "semiaccurately" as the "Baeli Bastards".
• The giant brothers are out collecting stories for their sister. Brion is the smart(er) one, Kiel barely talks but has some prophetic ability and can see through Rhys's glamored horns. Rhys then asks if he's " some kind of ogre oracle", which is a pretty weird thing to ask on a plane without ogres.
• Colfenor and the Sapling know everything about Lorwyn, from the grand features of the world to the individual secrets of their companions. They're also neither male or female but use those pronouns because "the flesh-folk" are more comfortable with them. Apparently "it" would be most appropriate for them.
• Sygg has loads of kids with multiple mates, his favorite being Creiddylan. She made sure he kept in touch with his family, which is apparently rare for ferrymen. She's killed when the ferral merrow attack.
• In Morningtide we learn Sygg's full name is Sygg Gauhren Gyllalla Syllvar, and the he's the Heir to the Crescent of Morningtide. Apparently he fought all his siblings for that honor, despite spending all his time as a ferryman. Another mate of his is Reejereu Kasella, who is also his cousin. He says "it's complicated" when Brigid wants to inquire further. Kasella leads a bunch of merrow who blame the landwalkers for their kind going feral and want to go to war over it.
• Over the course of the books the Vendilion Clique falls apart. Maralen sends Endry to keep an eye on the sapling, but he bonds too much with it and end up picking it's side. In Eventide the faeries end up in a civil war over whether to support Oona or Maralen. Ilona picks Maralen, Veesa Oona. In the epilogue Endry finds the corpses of his sisters, who have killed each other simultaneously. He goes to sleep next to them, dreams about them all being together again, decides that's a good thought to go out on and dies. It's a shockingly grim ending to characters who spend most of their screen time as annoying comic relief, and probably the best scene in the entire quadrilogy.

• Gaddock Teeg is the cenn of Kinsbaile. He's tall, and said to have some elf blood. He's introduced as working with Colfenor (they are actually using the thoughtweft to make Brigid act out of character to kidnap Ashling), but Teeg doesn't trust Confenor and tries to sabotage the plan. Colfenor is on to him though and puts a stop to that. In Morningtide he is suddenly described as deceased, so presumably he died in the fire Colfenor caused. His predecessor as cenn was called Smitsmott
• Nath and Eidren's conspiracy think the elvish Sublime Council is too influenced by treefolk, and the monarch to influenced by the council. There's also some talk about flamekin being in or out of favor depending on who rules, but we don't get much specifics about elvish politics.
• Most of the secret cabal were scarred in the line of duty, but Eidren volunteered to become a vinebred, which makes him stronger, swifter and sharper, but will also kill him in a few months. He survives until the Aurora removes his vinebred-ness, but gets immolated by Ashling early on in Eventide.
• Rosheen sleeps with her feet in a cave as not to get cold feet. Her cloudgoat, mr. Choppers, is flying circles around her while she sleeps, and "dozens, maybe hundreds" of changelings are dancing around her head. According to Kiel her birth changed "everything" (somehow), and she started talking with her first breath and never stopped. She's older than Colfenor. After her first "Name Sleep" she called herself Rosheen Meanderer. She's had two more Name Sleeps since then, but always wakes up Rosheen Meanderer. Her babbling is unintelligible but if you listen long enough you start hearing the bits that pertain to you.
• Endry and the sapling find a bunch of groundlings, flightless faeries who want Oona to know about their plight. Endry is initially racist towards them, but later starts teaching them how to fly by riding birds and the like. They start following him around and helping him out.
• Oona at one point says "I am this world", and...

"Call me Shadowmoor or Lorwyn. Call me Oona, for I am both of them and more. Call me this world of vengeful darkness and staggering light [...] I am eternal. I am within the land, the rock, the rushing currents of air and water. MY roots run deep and call to each other from afar."

• This had some people speculating whether Oona might be Lorwyn/Shadowmoor's worldsoul. Later the sapling talks about her "unnatural grip on the heart and soul of this world" though, so I don't think that's the case.

• In Eventide a kithkin augur named Warree Tarcha shows up who is powerful enough to repel Destroyer-Ashling. Oona later takes her body over to steal her power. Tarcha feels like a very strange addition to the story. In a tale about mortals being used as pawns by grand immortal elemental forces, there is suddenly a random kithin with the power to stand up against the Destroyer?
• After the big explosion Rhys and Maralen caused (somehow) Purity shows up to give cryptic hints about the Great Aurora.
• Flamekin are spawned in Mount Tanufel, which is where Ashling's spirit quest takes her. There she runs into the Monks of Ember Fell/the Ember Fellowship of the Mountain, who are holy warriors and "spiritual descendants of the last flamekin to fight the elf tribes for dominance long ago. Or so they claimed". One wears a blue robe, the other a gold one. They fight her as part of her quest.
• After that Ashling fights "one of those rarest of the rare, a true stone elemental". Described as... well, a stone elemental, rather than a flamekin or chimera-like being like all the other elementals we've seen on Lorwyn.
• Eventide opens with two cinders building a wall. Considering their blue and gold robes they are probably the Shadowmoor versions of the monks that tested Ashling during her quest in Morningtide. They remain unnamed. They become the Destroyers elite fighters for one chapter and kill a whole load of groundlings, before Rhys and the sapling kill them in turn.

• The great elemental that Colfenor lures with Ashling is a giant white horse with a mane and hooves of fire. Oona later tells it "There was a time when I would watch you galloping endlessly across the skies from one end to the other. You were the Wanderwine's mirror image, a fiery river in the sky to match the watery one in the ground. You have fallen far indeed since you were shackled to that pitiful mortal shell." That's all the explanation we get about it.
• The Source of the Wanderwine looks like a female merrow made of water, another exception to the regular look of Lorwyn elementals.
• Endry calls the sapling "Saprolingaling" at one point. Do the faeries have Multiversal knowledge? Probably just a joke, but you never know!
• One of Oona's other names is the Godflower.
• Paperfin is actually Paupurfylln in Merrow. Shades of Etlan Shiis.
• The regular Aurora is a yearly event. The kithkin storytelling festival coincides with it.
• When Maralen gets Colfenor's knowledge she learns "Why faeries came in threes. The curious relationship between boggarts and elves. The oldest living thing in Lorwyn. The prophecies of giants. A forgotten war between treefolk and kithkin. Even the reason the source of the Wanderwine had chosen to poison and infect her own children rather than allow them to enter the dark, new world too soon"
• The sapling later describes Colfenor's memories as such: "I have seen armies of treefolk conquer great swaths of this world and rule with benevolent cruelty, aloof and arrogant. I grew from the seed casts by your mentor and master Colfenor the Red, who knew these things and worked his entire life to redeem the freefolk and most especially the yew".
• The merrow who survived the malignancy hide in "the redoubt", where their kind use to wall themselves in during "the wars". Apparently the schools were always at war in "the old days".
• I just thought I'd share those last few quotes to show that there is apparently a long history to Lorwyn, but that it is all very vague. I wonder if that is just the authors being obtuse, or if it is an in-universe thing that has something to do with the regular switchovers to Shadowmoor. But just how the change works is mysterious in and off itself. People refer to having a past on Shadowmoor despite the Aurora only having happened a year ago. Is everyone brainwashed, or did the past actually change as well?

• Brigid learns how to use watershaping magic thanks to the Cresecent of the Morningtide.
• Scarecrows react to the kind of magic cast near them, which Brigid and Maralen use in a very contrived way to lure Sygg at one point, using blue mana to get the scarecrows to walk on the water, then using black mana to make them poisonous. I guess this is a reference to the Blazethorn Scarecrow cycle? There is no explanation about where the scarecrows came from, and the Reaper King doesn't make an appearance.
• The Wilt-Leaf capital is called Cayr Ulios. It holds more living trees than anywhere in Shadowmoor and dawnglove is in abundance. The king and queen are described as the "most powerful male and female lifewards in the Wilt-Leaf Forest". Oona sucks up all their magic with her magic vines.
• The Murmuring Bosk is turned into Weeping Bosk by the Aurora, and in a stray references we learn the sapling is having new kinds of faeries born there.
• When the faerie civil war breaks out, with them picking sides between Oona and Maralen, Oona says "They need to do this every few centuries. Helps keep them in fighting trim." Just how that is supposed to help when faeries only live a few years, I dunno.

CONTINUITY

Not much to discus here. This is the planeshopping era's story formula to a t, meaning it's entirely planebound and doesn't reference any older continuity, outside of that one line referencing the Mending, which is the only thing tying this story to the larger Magic continuity. And since we've never returned to Lorwyn in any big way, there is also barely anything referencing back to these stories. Years down the line we learned Nissa visited Lorwyn during the Great Aurora, but that's about it.

About that one link, here is the full quote, coming from Oona:

"Around a hundred years before the next Auroa was due, I felt a great disaster far beyond the confines of our world. I know not whence it came or why, only that it was going to bring the change soon, too soon"

So technically we don't know for certain it was the Mending that caused all this, it could've been another one of effects the rifts on Dominaria had on other planes, or something we know nothing about. But that was the big event that just happened, so it's become accepted knowledge that it was the Mending.

TIMELINE

Nissa's Origin has Nissa witness the Great Aurora. That same story sets up her connection to Zendikar, which she would describe as her "constant companion for two score years" in the Kaladesh story. This put Lorwyn block around 4520 A.R.

Other than that, the only temporal reference we have is that the proscription against eyeblights was handed down by the Sublime Council "decades ago". Any other reference to the past doesn't get any clearer than "in the olden days".