The following contains spoilers for the Brother’s War Storyline. Like… obviously. It’s written with the assumption the reader has general knowledge about the MTG multiverse.
The Brother’s War set story is an interesting one in that it provides background on many events, but advances the modern plotline very little. Like a paltry amount.
The gang has a plan to use a Sylex replica to blow up New Phyrexia, but they need to know how the original device worked. But the last time it was used was thousands of years ago.
69 AR
The year is 69 AR, the place is Terisiare (a continent on Dominaria). It’s been five years since the Brothers’ War ended, which Urza famously culminated with the “Sylex Blast” which destroyed the continent.
Basically he blew a hole in the middle of it, so the region isn’t really a continent anymore. The latter image is probably an optimistic rendering of the land in 69 AR, since it depicts New Argive which was founded 2900 years later; water would have receded so probably less landmass is available than pictured.
The world is up-ended, already ravaged by decades of war, the blast ruined what cities were not already wiped from the face of Dominaria. And the world is cooling, warm seasons are shorter and cold ones are more severe. Crops yield less, trade routes are gone, and darkness prevails. Kayla bin-Kroog is queen regent of Penregon, the capital of what was Argive.
She is laboring to preserve the last hold-out settlement of her land, but she is merely the last surviving noble. Her father died when the blast leveled Penregon, her son died in the war, and her husband Urza died in the blast.
She resents Urza for having brought the war that took so much, and for ending it like this, taking even more.
She is happy he is gone.
Tawnos arrives in a sorry state, having wandered through years of cold and dark to return. She barely controls her seething anger at him, one of her husband Urza’s collaborators. Tawnos brings designs, those of Urza and his own, for automations and the news that he has found a stockpile of powerstones to power them. Kayla is reticent to accept any hint of power that Urza used to ruin the world.
Tawnos reveals to her that Urza is not dead, but changed somehow. He has morphed into something else. Tawnos is contrite and Kayla finally agrees to allow him use of a recovered factory. She knows they need this technology to survive.
Several months later Penregon is doing alright. The surrounding landscape is still a scarred waste, but the city is living. Kayla is overseeing reconstruction of the inland wall which has laid in rubble the past years.
Scouts have reported a mass of people moving towards the city, perhaps ten thousand. They flew flags of all sides of the war, as well as an unknown black banner and phyrexian creations bound in wire.
With the help of Tawnos’ civil automatons, the wall will be raised in time for their arrival. Kayla specifically told him no war machines, only civils, but now asks him if they could be equipped to fight. They can, but she’ll wait to see what the dark host brings
A further two months and the swarm begins to arrive. The line of march stretches so far, they span the horizon before camp is fully broken. Kayla estimates the numbers are closer to one hundred thousand. A group of emissaries rides forward and Kayla meets them outside the city walls, but they speak not to her but the soldiers on the walls.
They call themselves pilgrims, the remnants of humanity traveling the land with the single mission: to wipe all remnants of the demon machines from the land. The herald implores the people of Penregon to join them in their quest. They have swept though many cities and past kingdoms, smashing the remaining phyrexian threat, and now they ride for the Iron Tower. (Urza’s Tower) Kayla declines to join them but opens the city to them for provisions and trade, but does not allow any soldiers or weapons past the gate.
The Talites were mostly successful in their reactionary crusade to remove machines and magic from Dominaria. They were responsible for a time of persecution and strict control. That’s why the plane represented in the DOM block doesn’t really feature machines heavily in daily life the way they are in say Kaladesh.
The peace does not last. Some pilgrims tried to destroy a civil automation and were killed by city guards in return. The host riles up outside the gates and Kayla rouses any reserve troops, but they are hopelessly outnumbered. As a last resort she orders the civils armed.
Tawnos is concerned, but she assures him their use is only for this conflict. The army of machines will not rise again. The host leader accuses her of harboring machine demons she realizes they already knew, they’d had informants in the city for months or years.
She tries to reason with him that these are not machines of war, they are not Urza’s machines. He replies they are new demons for a new world and he demands they cast them out, beg forgiveness, and join them to march against any machines that remain. He again petitions the people of Penregon to come out and save themselves. Or die alongside machines. He casts down a spear and says they have till dawn.
The people of Penregon barely fought off the pilgrim horde with help from Tawno’s creations. But Tawnos realized that the civils were war machines all along, so easily repurposed to killing. How could they be anything else? That was their original design. He burned his workshop, and Urza’s secrets, possibly with himself in it. The city is left with a few dozen civils powered by second hand stones, which won’t last long. They will be back to manual labor in months.
79 AR
The city fell ten years after the siege began. But it was a consequence of the world, not the horde. It had continued to cool.
First the bugs stopped, then the birds. The harbor froze solid. The economy had turned to fishing since that was the last resource not claimed by the blast; but now even the fishing boats were inoperable.
Scouts returned with word of green lands in the distant west. People migrated little by little and the city was hollowed out of populace. More reports came of seas freezing into solid wastes, mountains crumbling, great glaciers sliding inexorably past, roiling seas frozen still creating mountains of ice. Kayla did her best to keep the city together but by night she would escape the city to her vacant manor house and scream in unbridled fear, hurt, anger, and grief.
She exerted herself so much she started fire-bending accidentally. She learned fire magic from ancient scrolls in Penregon’s library, and in time mastered the art, learning to channel her rage and grief into magic and healing.
Finally word came back about the lands of the west, that there was a man with a flying machine. Her son Harbin had been a pilot, and hope surfaced in her that he could have survived the war. And she finally agrees to quit Penregon as one of the last migrants west.
Things got better as she headed west as far as the climate was concerned. She spent a year in New Yotia, her homeland and birthright, but it was a new city and not the same. She lived as an old woman above a tea shop, not as a queen.
80 AR
Kayla was about to leave the city for parts further west, but her grandson told her of a school to the north for artifice and magic. He wanted to go and learn rather than stay with her. She sent him on his own path and continued on her own. The old “not goodbye” but she’s 77 years old now, so you do the math. She passed by Kroog, her birthplace, with a new warlord and a new city built in stilts above the watery remains of the old.
85 AR
We hear about the demise of the warlord who was driven mad by a ghost. It was actually Teferi visiting from the future. He was supposed to have been insubstantial, but accidentally interacted with the warlord. The temporal anchor wasn’t working right, and was off by many years.
28 AR
The fall of Kroog during the Brother’s War. New pilot recruits are commissioned new mechs in haste. There’s an attack coming for the city and they need every able fighter. Tawnos is there, Urza’s chief apprentice, ensuring every resource is leveraged.
There are dragon engines converging on the city. The attacking army is the Fallaji, a conglomerate of a bunch of nomadic tribes from Central and north terraria, but ruled by Mishra as the war progressed. Three of the new pilots are tasked with flanking the dragon engine, the rest of the squad are immediately immolated by fire.
They ran. Kroog fell.
We spend some time marveling at the mechs’ killing talent. Teferi appears before a dying invader. He says they’re too early, decades away. Then disappears. The man thinks it is death saying not to die yet, and ends up surviving the wounds.
44 AR
We join the Redcap foot soldiers stranded in trench warfare ten miles outside Tomakul. The army has been losing ground and needs to press back the advance of forces on the capital. These are the bad guys, but they’re just men; with fears and desires and families. It’s pretty miserable, they have no control. Pretty much imagine any trench warfare movie you’ve seen.
But the mortars and planes and machine guns are giant robots and hideous undead abominations crafted from fallen comrades. They press forward and take the opposing position 100 yards away, there are great losses, but the enemy retreats to another trench.
Teferi appears in the aftermath, again in the wrong time and place. Time in the brother’s war is knotted and confusing. He aims for places where light is blotted out, where lives are lost and possibilities end.
But these battles are not the final battle, where the most is lost and ended. He is spotted by a few phyrexian human amalgamations and flees back through time.
4562 AR
Moden Day! We’re regaled with the trials of Teferi’s efforts. They spent months testing to make sure sending just the spirit back doesn’t break the timeline. Teferi was very gunshy after his last experience. There’s a metal coffin of a machine he clambers into. Saheli runs the temporal anchor and Kaya serves as his medium; since sending your spirit away is like dying.
The sounds of battle outside have been getting closer. Remember, there’s another Phyrexian Invasion of Dominaria happening. Elspeth says to bar the door as she goes out to defend. Time is short.
63 AR
Teferi finally finds the final battle on Argoth. The two brothers’ massive war engines are rampaging. Mishra is a half machine monster, Urza sits atop a hill with the Sylex cradled in his legs. He cries and bleeds into the bowl.
Teferi halves time’s passage until it appears to have stopped. Kaya tells him there is banging on the door outside. He goes and sits by Urza, whose skin is burned to ash and his torso is half gone. His face is just a skull. There is the beginning of a bright light inside the base of the Sylex.
Teferi concentrates to align his time with Urza’s and speaks with him. He tells Urza he is from the future, that they are both planeswalkers, that Urza will be seen as a god by some and as a curse by others.
That he will live for thousands of years, study time travel, and teach Teferi himself at school. He also tells that Urza will spend his life fighting phyrexians; that this sacrifice doesn’t end it, that none of his sacrifices end it, that the phyrexians are again invading dominaria. All the information a kinder person might have spared a dying man.
As they talk Teferi can see the light of Urza’s spark brightening. It knits his flesh together and his eyes take on the red and green colors of the might and weakstones.
He asks Urza how to work the Sylex and Urza goes back to pick it up, burning away his skin again. He says he just knew what the runes meant when he held it and used a technique that channels the energy of the land, everything, into the Sylex.
He asks Teferi if he will remember this conversation and Teferi doesn’t think so. The time bubble collapses and they part ways. Teferi is horrified because the runes have been translated and analyzed for thousands of years. Hurkyl’s meditations were well documented.
There was no secret they didn’t know. It was a person that triggered the Sylex, not a spell.
Flavor Trivia
The Third Path was a collective of mages and artificers during the war who sought neutrality, siding with neither Urza nor Mishra. They were betrayed by the brotherhood of Gix, one of the member orders, because like people didn’t read their fuckin name tags. I guess maybe people didn’t know that Mishra represented phyrexian control during the war. He was corrupted over time until he was finally compleated just before the Sylex blast.
Third Path cofounder, Loran, fled Terisia City when it fell to Mishra, intending to keep the Sylex from both brothers. Ashnod (Mishra’s 2nd) captured her and ended up giving the Sylex to Tawnos (Urza’s 2nd and her lover) to end the war. Ashnod had seen Gix during the battle and was like “This is not what I signed up for”. She survives the war somehow and ends up forming the Conclave of Mages school with Tawnos. Which is where Kayla’s grandson is heading to study magic.
