Liliana Vess (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deathsmajesty) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2026-06-18 05:03 am
deathsmajesty) wrote in fandomhigh2026-06-18 05:03 am
Entry tags:
Song of Dominia, Thursday, Period 3
Wooooow did Liliana not want to talk about anything Dominaria-related today. But with five more rifts and only three more classes, what she wanted unfortunately had to take a back seat.
"Phasing," she began, "primary in white and blue mana, is a kind of magic that briefly removes something from reality and then returns it in the exact same state as it left. It is generally a very useful defensive spell; after all, you cannot be targeted if you are no longer in the same reality as your opponent." If Gale were still around, they could have a rollicking argument about whether or not phasing was the same thing as the Blink Spell (the answer was, 'obviously not, blinking is the same thing as flickering, which is a similar but distinct mechanic of its own.')
"While I loathe giving that man any credit, after Urza informed Barrin that he was taking the Coalition's forces out of Urborg, and also, by the way, his daughter had been dead for a fortnight, he did manage to defeat the Phyrexian general, Tsabo Tavoc, in Koilos. This defeat triggered the second stage of the Phyrexian invasion: the Rathi Overlay. Rath was an artificial plane likely created by Yawgmoth, and existed in a small pocket plane attached to Dominaria. There, Yawgmoth stationed millions of Phyrexian troops and monstrosities, waiting to be unleashed. After Tavoc's defeat, Phyrexia phased Rath out of its pocket plane and into Dominaria itself, merging the two planes together. If you're thinking that sounds awful, you're correct! It was! The least horrific thing the Rathi overlay did was allow those massed Phyrexians to be loosed upon Dominarian populations. Jagged spires of Rathi flowstone overwrote entire regions of Dominaria, rivers turned to glass, forests vanished, and whole populations were either displaced, fused, or phased into a twilight existence within the interstitial void between Dominaria and the pocket dimension that Rath had been hidden in. The merging disrupted the natural flows of magic, mangling the Aether and birthing bizarre mutations, and swallowed the entire populations of three sapient Dominarian races that we know of. That number might be higher, but we simply do not know. And, amongst all of the death, destruction, and horrors beyond imagining, Rath also tore open yet another rift, this one over Urborg. Again, it also went unnoticed, as everyone was busy dying at the time."
An unfortunately common theme in Dominarian history, you all might have noticed.
"The other two rifts caused by phasing out of entire landmasses were not, in fact, caused by Phyrexia. Nor were they caused by Urza!" Shocking, she knew. "These were the work of Teferi Akosa, one of the students who was attending the Tolarian Academy during the temporal disaster. Teferi was not one of the lucky students to be teleported away from Tolaria by Urza. He wasn't even one of the students lucky enough to be found by Karn. Instead, Teferi found himself trapped in a slow-time bubble, actively on fire. What felt like only thirty seconds to him was actually thirty years in real time. There is a story that a friend of his, Jhoira, tossed a blanket that she'd soaked in water into the slow-time bubble to put out the fire. Five years after she threw it, it finally landed on him and doused the flames. When they were finally able to free him - specifically, after Jhoira figured out how to free him, Urza was too busy rebuilding his failed school and launching failed attacks on the Phyrexians caught in a different, fast-time bubble - Teferi returned to the outside world and discovered that everyone he knew had either died horribly in the explosion, or was now thirty years his senior, as he was still a literal child.
"Understandably, that experience changed him. Always a brilliant student, Teferi became convinced that he could use time magic to protect people and prevent horrible things from happening to them. He returned to his native country, Zhalfir, on the continent of Jamuraa, and became the court mage." Liliana pointed on the map of Dominaria, although the place she pointed to was just water, with the words 'the Zhalfiran Void' written there. Honestly, Liliana had spent more time in this class pointing to places that weren't than she had pointing to places that were. "As his power and influence grew, he used it to conduct risky experiments related to time magic, theorizing that he could drop creatures in and out of the time stream, causing them to appear and disappear at will. This early version of phasing was incredibly dangerous, and it was only a matter of time until one of them went wrong. Fortunately, Teferi was both like and unlike his mentor Urza; unlike, in that this temporal disaster only affected himself, and like, in that instead of dying a horrible death, his spark ignited, turning him into a Planeswalker. And, as Ugin, Nicol Bolas, and Urza before him, he immediately left Dominaria to spend several centuries exploring the Multiverse."
Planeswalkers didn't have a gap year, they had a gap millennia, and you'd better believe Liliana was bitter that hers had been cut short.
"When he returned, he found the continent on the verge of war, part of which was his own damn fault for policies he'd put in place before he'd left. He spent years attempting to foment peace between the nations of Zhalfir, Femeref - which had been part of Zhalfir but had split off and became a theocracy due to aforementioned policies - and Suq'Ata, who was simply a greedy and opportunistic neighbor. Eventually, unable to unite the countries, Teferi left Zhalfir with a group of trusted advisors, sages, artificers, and sorcerers. And, like his mentor before him, he sailed off to a small cluster of islands to continue his experiments with time travel. Because being caught in two temporal disasters simply weren't enough, I suppose. Early results of his experiment were erratic, and over time, it became clear that the work was destabilizing the temporal continuum. The first experiments hand torn small rents in time, unnoticed at first, but compounding over the years.
"Because he had a sense of responsibility, Teferi knew he needed to heal the fabric of time before it unraveled across all of Dominaria. Unfortunately, he decided that the best way to do this was to release a powerful blast of raw mana directly into the time stream." Liliana pinched the bridge of her nose. "The explosion phased the entire island — its people, buildings, flora, and fauna, as well as the Planeswalker himself — out of existence. Only the bedrock remained visible in the physical plane, the rest trapped in a separate, timeless state. To the rest of the world, the Chaza Isles simply vanished."
She sighed. Heavily. "Eventually, the Chaza Islands phased back into existence again, settling exactly where it had left. The inhabitants had assumed they'd been gone for a mere handful of hours, perhaps as many as a few days. Leaving the isle, they discovered that, no, they had been gone for two whole centuries. Worse, they discovered that the political situation was worse than they'd left; the entire subcontinent of Jamuraa was in the bloody throes of the Mirage War, a direct result of the phasing out of the Chaza Isles, for reasons that are too lengthy to go into at this time, but feel free to ask me later if you're curious. Teferi felt incredibly guilty for his role in starting the Mirage War, but chose not to interfere directly; he had a responsibility to monitor and reconstruct the timelines. He aided the defenders with visions and sometimes helped empower their spells, but mostly stayed on the sidelines. Following the war, he remained a recluse in the Chaza Islands and gave up manipulating time, popping out only occasionally when necessity demanded it, like fighting in the Planeswalker War and assisting Urza with projects to repel future invasions of Phyrexians.
"While Teferi might have wanted to stay a hermit on his islands, he was hardly so lucky. Not even a full decade after the Mirage War ended and only a few months before the Phyrexian Invasion, the Prophecy War began. It was a vicious conflict, made worse by the influence of Greel, a Phyrexian agent, working with the invading and colonizing Keldons. Teferi reached out to Urza for help, but Urza was 'too busy' and, instead, Barrin's wife Rayne came to offer her assistance, and ended up getting ambushed and decapitated by Greel in the final days of the conflict. The Jamuraans won, but they suffered devastating losses, and the war itself left deep emotional and political consequences. For Barrin, the death of his wife and the brutal toll of the war left him embittered and increasingly disillusioned with Urza's grand plan to combat Phyrexia. Teferi, similarly shaken by the widespread destruction and what he perceived as Urza's indifference, withdrew from Urza's coalition. Determined to protect his homeland on his terms, Teferi resolved to act independently during the coming Phyrexian Invasion, even if it meant opposing Urza's 'strategy'." Yes, Liliana was absolutely using air quotes for that.
"For good reason! In the years leading up to the Prophecy War, Zhalfir had developed into the most magically and militarily advanced state on Dominaria. Urza intended to exploit Zhalfir's strength; he had plans elsewhere that needed Phyrexia distracted...and decided that Zhalfir was to be the bait Teferi, well-aware how expendable Urza considered most people, decided that he wasn't going to let Urza use his people as a buffer. During the opening stages of the Invasion, Teferi and Urza worked together using teleportation magic to overload and destabilize an interplanar portal from Phyrexia in the sky over Zhalfir. Using the massive amounts of energy released from the collapsing portal, Teferi cast a phasing spell of unprecedented scale, phasing out the entire nation of Zhalfir, along with significant portions of northwestern Jamuraa, including the areas bordering Suq'Ata and Femeref. The land, people, and culture were removed from Dominaria and were unreachable, even to planeswalkers. The only thing that remained of Zhalfir were translucent images of the coastline that were occasionally visible from neighboring regions.
"Urza was furious, as his plans for Zhalfir literally vanished before his eyes. Nor was Teferi done. He then traveled to Shiv, where Jhoira, his old friend and first love, had stayed for centuries, working on a project for Urza. Teferi turned the project over, and then removed the rest of Shiv from the time stream to save them from the horrendous attacks of the Phyrexians and depriving Urza of yet more resources and allies in the war. And, of course, creating yet more rifts. The Phasing of Zhalfir wrenched open the rift over Jamuraa that had been primed when he'd accidentally phased out the Chaza Isles. Phasing Shiv gouged a hole deep in the surface of Jamuraa and opened yet another rift there. Three hundred years later, during the Great Mending, Shiv was returned to Dominaria. Zhalfir remains phased out, its people lost."
"Phasing," she began, "primary in white and blue mana, is a kind of magic that briefly removes something from reality and then returns it in the exact same state as it left. It is generally a very useful defensive spell; after all, you cannot be targeted if you are no longer in the same reality as your opponent." If Gale were still around, they could have a rollicking argument about whether or not phasing was the same thing as the Blink Spell (the answer was, 'obviously not, blinking is the same thing as flickering, which is a similar but distinct mechanic of its own.')
"While I loathe giving that man any credit, after Urza informed Barrin that he was taking the Coalition's forces out of Urborg, and also, by the way, his daughter had been dead for a fortnight, he did manage to defeat the Phyrexian general, Tsabo Tavoc, in Koilos. This defeat triggered the second stage of the Phyrexian invasion: the Rathi Overlay. Rath was an artificial plane likely created by Yawgmoth, and existed in a small pocket plane attached to Dominaria. There, Yawgmoth stationed millions of Phyrexian troops and monstrosities, waiting to be unleashed. After Tavoc's defeat, Phyrexia phased Rath out of its pocket plane and into Dominaria itself, merging the two planes together. If you're thinking that sounds awful, you're correct! It was! The least horrific thing the Rathi overlay did was allow those massed Phyrexians to be loosed upon Dominarian populations. Jagged spires of Rathi flowstone overwrote entire regions of Dominaria, rivers turned to glass, forests vanished, and whole populations were either displaced, fused, or phased into a twilight existence within the interstitial void between Dominaria and the pocket dimension that Rath had been hidden in. The merging disrupted the natural flows of magic, mangling the Aether and birthing bizarre mutations, and swallowed the entire populations of three sapient Dominarian races that we know of. That number might be higher, but we simply do not know. And, amongst all of the death, destruction, and horrors beyond imagining, Rath also tore open yet another rift, this one over Urborg. Again, it also went unnoticed, as everyone was busy dying at the time."
An unfortunately common theme in Dominarian history, you all might have noticed.
"The other two rifts caused by phasing out of entire landmasses were not, in fact, caused by Phyrexia. Nor were they caused by Urza!" Shocking, she knew. "These were the work of Teferi Akosa, one of the students who was attending the Tolarian Academy during the temporal disaster. Teferi was not one of the lucky students to be teleported away from Tolaria by Urza. He wasn't even one of the students lucky enough to be found by Karn. Instead, Teferi found himself trapped in a slow-time bubble, actively on fire. What felt like only thirty seconds to him was actually thirty years in real time. There is a story that a friend of his, Jhoira, tossed a blanket that she'd soaked in water into the slow-time bubble to put out the fire. Five years after she threw it, it finally landed on him and doused the flames. When they were finally able to free him - specifically, after Jhoira figured out how to free him, Urza was too busy rebuilding his failed school and launching failed attacks on the Phyrexians caught in a different, fast-time bubble - Teferi returned to the outside world and discovered that everyone he knew had either died horribly in the explosion, or was now thirty years his senior, as he was still a literal child.
"Understandably, that experience changed him. Always a brilliant student, Teferi became convinced that he could use time magic to protect people and prevent horrible things from happening to them. He returned to his native country, Zhalfir, on the continent of Jamuraa, and became the court mage." Liliana pointed on the map of Dominaria, although the place she pointed to was just water, with the words 'the Zhalfiran Void' written there. Honestly, Liliana had spent more time in this class pointing to places that weren't than she had pointing to places that were. "As his power and influence grew, he used it to conduct risky experiments related to time magic, theorizing that he could drop creatures in and out of the time stream, causing them to appear and disappear at will. This early version of phasing was incredibly dangerous, and it was only a matter of time until one of them went wrong. Fortunately, Teferi was both like and unlike his mentor Urza; unlike, in that this temporal disaster only affected himself, and like, in that instead of dying a horrible death, his spark ignited, turning him into a Planeswalker. And, as Ugin, Nicol Bolas, and Urza before him, he immediately left Dominaria to spend several centuries exploring the Multiverse."
Planeswalkers didn't have a gap year, they had a gap millennia, and you'd better believe Liliana was bitter that hers had been cut short.
"When he returned, he found the continent on the verge of war, part of which was his own damn fault for policies he'd put in place before he'd left. He spent years attempting to foment peace between the nations of Zhalfir, Femeref - which had been part of Zhalfir but had split off and became a theocracy due to aforementioned policies - and Suq'Ata, who was simply a greedy and opportunistic neighbor. Eventually, unable to unite the countries, Teferi left Zhalfir with a group of trusted advisors, sages, artificers, and sorcerers. And, like his mentor before him, he sailed off to a small cluster of islands to continue his experiments with time travel. Because being caught in two temporal disasters simply weren't enough, I suppose. Early results of his experiment were erratic, and over time, it became clear that the work was destabilizing the temporal continuum. The first experiments hand torn small rents in time, unnoticed at first, but compounding over the years.
"Because he had a sense of responsibility, Teferi knew he needed to heal the fabric of time before it unraveled across all of Dominaria. Unfortunately, he decided that the best way to do this was to release a powerful blast of raw mana directly into the time stream." Liliana pinched the bridge of her nose. "The explosion phased the entire island — its people, buildings, flora, and fauna, as well as the Planeswalker himself — out of existence. Only the bedrock remained visible in the physical plane, the rest trapped in a separate, timeless state. To the rest of the world, the Chaza Isles simply vanished."
She sighed. Heavily. "Eventually, the Chaza Islands phased back into existence again, settling exactly where it had left. The inhabitants had assumed they'd been gone for a mere handful of hours, perhaps as many as a few days. Leaving the isle, they discovered that, no, they had been gone for two whole centuries. Worse, they discovered that the political situation was worse than they'd left; the entire subcontinent of Jamuraa was in the bloody throes of the Mirage War, a direct result of the phasing out of the Chaza Isles, for reasons that are too lengthy to go into at this time, but feel free to ask me later if you're curious. Teferi felt incredibly guilty for his role in starting the Mirage War, but chose not to interfere directly; he had a responsibility to monitor and reconstruct the timelines. He aided the defenders with visions and sometimes helped empower their spells, but mostly stayed on the sidelines. Following the war, he remained a recluse in the Chaza Islands and gave up manipulating time, popping out only occasionally when necessity demanded it, like fighting in the Planeswalker War and assisting Urza with projects to repel future invasions of Phyrexians.
"While Teferi might have wanted to stay a hermit on his islands, he was hardly so lucky. Not even a full decade after the Mirage War ended and only a few months before the Phyrexian Invasion, the Prophecy War began. It was a vicious conflict, made worse by the influence of Greel, a Phyrexian agent, working with the invading and colonizing Keldons. Teferi reached out to Urza for help, but Urza was 'too busy' and, instead, Barrin's wife Rayne came to offer her assistance, and ended up getting ambushed and decapitated by Greel in the final days of the conflict. The Jamuraans won, but they suffered devastating losses, and the war itself left deep emotional and political consequences. For Barrin, the death of his wife and the brutal toll of the war left him embittered and increasingly disillusioned with Urza's grand plan to combat Phyrexia. Teferi, similarly shaken by the widespread destruction and what he perceived as Urza's indifference, withdrew from Urza's coalition. Determined to protect his homeland on his terms, Teferi resolved to act independently during the coming Phyrexian Invasion, even if it meant opposing Urza's 'strategy'." Yes, Liliana was absolutely using air quotes for that.
"For good reason! In the years leading up to the Prophecy War, Zhalfir had developed into the most magically and militarily advanced state on Dominaria. Urza intended to exploit Zhalfir's strength; he had plans elsewhere that needed Phyrexia distracted...and decided that Zhalfir was to be the bait Teferi, well-aware how expendable Urza considered most people, decided that he wasn't going to let Urza use his people as a buffer. During the opening stages of the Invasion, Teferi and Urza worked together using teleportation magic to overload and destabilize an interplanar portal from Phyrexia in the sky over Zhalfir. Using the massive amounts of energy released from the collapsing portal, Teferi cast a phasing spell of unprecedented scale, phasing out the entire nation of Zhalfir, along with significant portions of northwestern Jamuraa, including the areas bordering Suq'Ata and Femeref. The land, people, and culture were removed from Dominaria and were unreachable, even to planeswalkers. The only thing that remained of Zhalfir were translucent images of the coastline that were occasionally visible from neighboring regions.
"Urza was furious, as his plans for Zhalfir literally vanished before his eyes. Nor was Teferi done. He then traveled to Shiv, where Jhoira, his old friend and first love, had stayed for centuries, working on a project for Urza. Teferi turned the project over, and then removed the rest of Shiv from the time stream to save them from the horrendous attacks of the Phyrexians and depriving Urza of yet more resources and allies in the war. And, of course, creating yet more rifts. The Phasing of Zhalfir wrenched open the rift over Jamuraa that had been primed when he'd accidentally phased out the Chaza Isles. Phasing Shiv gouged a hole deep in the surface of Jamuraa and opened yet another rift there. Three hundred years later, during the Great Mending, Shiv was returned to Dominaria. Zhalfir remains phased out, its people lost."