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deathsmajestyLiliana was still in human form when class began today, so already that was a great start. "I was unavoidably detained during last class," she said, which could almost be an apology if you ignored the part where she didn't actually say those words and also didn't ask what she was unavoidably detained by. "As such, we'll talk about two different topics today: Serra's Realm and the Tolarian Academy. When we last met, we had just discussed Urza's activation of the Golgothian Sylex, which, among many other, worse things, also created the Shard of Twelve Worlds, banding this is a magic joke and it's hilarious Dominaria and eleven other planes together and separating them from the rest of the Multiverse by a kind of impenetrable barrier. Some of the Planeswalkers I spoke to called it a 'wall of ebon ice' and 'a black glacier.' Writings from Urza himself called it 'a darkness, cold and repelling.' Every Planeswalker currently on one of those twelve planes was trapped within the Shard, and any Planeswalker outside of it could not enter. However infuriating this was for the Planeswalkers in question, it offered two benefits to the rest of Dominaria: it kept the Phyrexians from being able to open more planar gates for another invasion, and it locked Urza out, too. Thus we had roughly twenty-five hundred years of...well, peace certainly isn't the right word, but protection from the devastating influence of either those sources."
It was with a great deal of difficulty that she didn't tangent off into a discussion of how Freyalise had cast the World Spell, resulting in the end of the Ice Age and and brought down the barrier, using the energies of the rogue plane of Shandalar...It was a brilliant and incredibly complex spell and it wasn't Liliana's fault that it was a fascinating topic! Y'all were lucky that you were down a class and time was paramount. Lucky.
"Records of what Urza did during this time of exile are sketchy and incomplete, based primarily on his own recounting of the time once he returned to Dominaria. Roughly six hundred years after the Sylex Blast, he claims he attacked Phyrexia itself, accompanied by a single other companion, a Phyrexian defector. I fully believe this claim, because attacking a plane by one's self, even as a Planeswalker, is the height of arrogance and folly." Trust her! Liliana was no stranger to arrogance!or folly "Shockingly--" the word dripped with sarcasm "--he was unsuccessful in destroying Phyrexia, but he did succeed in attracting Yawgmoth's personal attention. Yawgmoth invaded his mind and supposedly 'drove him insane,' though I'm not sure how anyone could tell the difference. He spent the next two thousand and some-odd years bouncing around the Multiverse, attempting to learn more about the nature of artificial planes while being pursued by Phyrexian agents determined to drag him back to Yawgmoth. One such artificial plane was the realm of Serra, a Planeswalker worshipped on Dominaria as a goddess--" Her lips thinned briefly. "--who had created a realm from pure white mana as a so-called heavenly ideal." Even further thinning. "Serra made the Realm in the hopes that she could make a haven for humans and angels, her pet creations--" Liliana couldn't keep her expression from twisting in disgust, but then, she didn't try "--where they could exist in peace and harmony and worship, while suffering could be avoided forever. And, to her credit, her plane succeeded at that goal for thousands of years, until...you'll never guess what happened."
Actually, you all probably could guess. If you were having trouble, look at the title of the class.
"Urza arrived on Serra's Realm and spent five years there, learning more about artificial planes and having his mind healed from Yawgmoth's corruption. At some point, not long after Urza left, the Phyrexians who had been pursuing him invaded the Realm. Though Serra and her assembled angelic armies managed to rebuff the attack, many of the plane's inhabitants were killed. Worse still, the black mana essence of the Phyrexians tainted Serra's Realm so badly that Serra herself could no longer stand to stay there. She was driven out of her own realm, taking along whatever inhabitants wanted to leave with her, and appointing the archangel Radiant to guard and guide her Realm in her absence. Yes, I'm absolutely counting this as Urza's fault, considering every other plane he had traveled to and stayed for any significant length of time on drew Phyrexians and yet he traveled to and remained upon a plane devoted to peace so he could be healed, and then did not remain to help protect it, or attempt to draw off the Phyrexians in any way.
"With Urza was healed and the Shard destroyed by the World Spell a few hundred years prior, he returned to Dominaria, knowing that it was once again vulnerable to Phyrexian invasion. While he originally returned to build up the plane's defenses against the Phyrexians, he eventually became obsessed with the idea of reversing his brother's death." A long, slow exhale for exactly no reason. "That obsession kept him busy for about fifty years or so, after which he decided that he needed to build a time machine to go back and see how the Thran had defeated the Phyrexians about eight thousand years before. To do this, he founded the Tolarian Academy in 3285, which lasted an entire twenty-two years before being destroyed by Urza's hubris. In 3307, Phyrexian sleeper agents had managed to get around all of Urza's efforts at detection and countermeasures, and invaded the academy, murdering a number of students and faculty. Though he was aware that his time machine was already dangerously overloaded from previous experiments, Urza sent Karn back twenty-four hours in time to prevent the attack from occurring. Karn was successful in averting the attack, but this cause significant damage to the time stream, which damaged the time machine beyond repair. Urza managed to teleport away from the island with fourteen students and teachers before the machine had a catastrophic malfunction and ruptured the time stream completely. Wave after wave of blinding temporal light blasted the academy apart, killing hundreds of students - who, in an effort to avoid Phyrexian sleeper agents, were primarily children - and staff via 'drastic temporal disruption.' Still other students and faculty, as well as the Phyrexian sleeper agents, were caught in time bubbles - enclosed pockets of space where time flowed at different rates. Lastly, the the disaster also tore yet another time rift into the sky above the island, bringing his total up to two."
Which would be germane to their discussion during their last class.
"It should be noted that in the days immediately afterwards, Karn managed to rescue thirty-three survivors from the rubble of the academy, and sailed them away from the island. It should also be noted that not only did Urza not return in the immediate aftermath to help search for survivors, it took him another ten years to return at all. Upon returning to the island in 3317, Urza and a new batch of students and faculty spent the next thirteen years rebuilding the Tolarian Academy, which then reopened in 3330. Now then, you might be thinking to yourself that it is incredibly stupid to rebuild a school for children in the same place the previous school had been destroyed, especially when they knew the original Phyrexian agents were trapped in a fast time bubble, where ten years passed within the bubble for every year outside of it, and you would be exactly correct. It was. Not only did the Phyrexians have centuries to build a gigantic fortress and bolster their numbers, Urza launched not one but two failed attacks on them within the bubble, providing them with more metal and powerstones to increase their numbers and introduce a mutation which allows them to survive the extreme time disparities that occur upon leaving a time bubble. Starting in 3347, the Phyrexians are able to leave the bubble and attack the Academy, leading to five different full-scale invasion attempts over the course of about seven years. During this time, Urza designed a flying ship, capable of sonic speeds as well as the ability to planeshift between worlds. To complete this ship, Urza realized he needed a special kind of wood from the forests of Yavimaya. Though the headmaster of the Academy, Barrin, begged Urza to stay at the Academy and bolster their defenses, Urza decided that he had to be the one to travel to Yavimaya, and teleported away, leaving the Academy on its own."
Probably while saying, 'Don't worry, I'll be right back,' and 'What's the worst that can happen?'
"Ironically enough, not only is Yavimaya located in the shattered fragments of Terisiare, but if you remember your post-Sylex map, it actually encompasses what few ruins remain of Kroog. When Urza arrived in Yavimaya, he was greeted by the Maro-Sorcerer Multani, who had the land's memory of what Urza did to Argoth and Tatiana. To punish Urza, Multani ensorcelled him, shoved him into a tree, and forced him to feel the pain and anguish that his devastation had inflicted upon Argoth. This punishment lasted for three years--" proving that Multani was what the kids called 'a real one' "--until the Academy was overrun by the Phyrexians, and Barrin reached out to Urza mentally. The images of the students being slaughtered was enough to break through Multani's ensorcellment, and Urza Planeswalked away to gather allies before returning to the island. Multani accidentally came along for the ride and the sight of what the Phyrexians were doing was enough to get him to agree to ally with Urza, help him defeat the Phyrexians on Tolaria, and give him what he needed for his ship. After the Phyrexians were wiped out, Urza built his ship, the Skyship Weatherlight, but realized that in order to charge its mana battery enough for it to do what he intended, it would need an entire plane's worth of mana. Rather than taking the time - which, admittedly, might have been decades or even centuries - to harmlessly siphon off enough mana from a plane to the Weatherlight, he chose to sacrifice a plane instead to charge it all at once. And so, he returned to Serra's Realm, which had spent the last few centuries still under siege by Phyrexians and slowly deteriorating without Serra's presence, to harvest all of its mana. Skipping over a bunch of things because this lecture is already too long, though feel free to ask me about it further if you're curious, they managed to collect several hundred refugees on the ship, charge the powerstone, and escape the plane minutes before it ceased to exist. Once back on Dominaria, Urza settled in to breed 'the perfect human for his perfect ship,' as well as a race of perfect soldiers, spending about all those decades and centuries he couldn't spare letting the Weatherlight siphon mana harmlessly, performing various experiments on multiple bloodlines across Dominaria in the name of eugenics."
A sip from her thermos of tea. "And that catches us up with times three and four where Urza ruined everything. Next class, we'll be jumping ahead about a thousand years to the Phyrexian War." She gave them a thin smile. "Don't worry, it gets worse."
It was with a great deal of difficulty that she didn't tangent off into a discussion of how Freyalise had cast the World Spell, resulting in the end of the Ice Age and and brought down the barrier, using the energies of the rogue plane of Shandalar...It was a brilliant and incredibly complex spell and it wasn't Liliana's fault that it was a fascinating topic! Y'all were lucky that you were down a class and time was paramount. Lucky.
"Records of what Urza did during this time of exile are sketchy and incomplete, based primarily on his own recounting of the time once he returned to Dominaria. Roughly six hundred years after the Sylex Blast, he claims he attacked Phyrexia itself, accompanied by a single other companion, a Phyrexian defector. I fully believe this claim, because attacking a plane by one's self, even as a Planeswalker, is the height of arrogance and folly." Trust her! Liliana was no stranger to arrogance!
Actually, you all probably could guess. If you were having trouble, look at the title of the class.
"Urza arrived on Serra's Realm and spent five years there, learning more about artificial planes and having his mind healed from Yawgmoth's corruption. At some point, not long after Urza left, the Phyrexians who had been pursuing him invaded the Realm. Though Serra and her assembled angelic armies managed to rebuff the attack, many of the plane's inhabitants were killed. Worse still, the black mana essence of the Phyrexians tainted Serra's Realm so badly that Serra herself could no longer stand to stay there. She was driven out of her own realm, taking along whatever inhabitants wanted to leave with her, and appointing the archangel Radiant to guard and guide her Realm in her absence. Yes, I'm absolutely counting this as Urza's fault, considering every other plane he had traveled to and stayed for any significant length of time on drew Phyrexians and yet he traveled to and remained upon a plane devoted to peace so he could be healed, and then did not remain to help protect it, or attempt to draw off the Phyrexians in any way.
"With Urza was healed and the Shard destroyed by the World Spell a few hundred years prior, he returned to Dominaria, knowing that it was once again vulnerable to Phyrexian invasion. While he originally returned to build up the plane's defenses against the Phyrexians, he eventually became obsessed with the idea of reversing his brother's death." A long, slow exhale for exactly no reason. "That obsession kept him busy for about fifty years or so, after which he decided that he needed to build a time machine to go back and see how the Thran had defeated the Phyrexians about eight thousand years before. To do this, he founded the Tolarian Academy in 3285, which lasted an entire twenty-two years before being destroyed by Urza's hubris. In 3307, Phyrexian sleeper agents had managed to get around all of Urza's efforts at detection and countermeasures, and invaded the academy, murdering a number of students and faculty. Though he was aware that his time machine was already dangerously overloaded from previous experiments, Urza sent Karn back twenty-four hours in time to prevent the attack from occurring. Karn was successful in averting the attack, but this cause significant damage to the time stream, which damaged the time machine beyond repair. Urza managed to teleport away from the island with fourteen students and teachers before the machine had a catastrophic malfunction and ruptured the time stream completely. Wave after wave of blinding temporal light blasted the academy apart, killing hundreds of students - who, in an effort to avoid Phyrexian sleeper agents, were primarily children - and staff via 'drastic temporal disruption.' Still other students and faculty, as well as the Phyrexian sleeper agents, were caught in time bubbles - enclosed pockets of space where time flowed at different rates. Lastly, the the disaster also tore yet another time rift into the sky above the island, bringing his total up to two."
Which would be germane to their discussion during their last class.
"It should be noted that in the days immediately afterwards, Karn managed to rescue thirty-three survivors from the rubble of the academy, and sailed them away from the island. It should also be noted that not only did Urza not return in the immediate aftermath to help search for survivors, it took him another ten years to return at all. Upon returning to the island in 3317, Urza and a new batch of students and faculty spent the next thirteen years rebuilding the Tolarian Academy, which then reopened in 3330. Now then, you might be thinking to yourself that it is incredibly stupid to rebuild a school for children in the same place the previous school had been destroyed, especially when they knew the original Phyrexian agents were trapped in a fast time bubble, where ten years passed within the bubble for every year outside of it, and you would be exactly correct. It was. Not only did the Phyrexians have centuries to build a gigantic fortress and bolster their numbers, Urza launched not one but two failed attacks on them within the bubble, providing them with more metal and powerstones to increase their numbers and introduce a mutation which allows them to survive the extreme time disparities that occur upon leaving a time bubble. Starting in 3347, the Phyrexians are able to leave the bubble and attack the Academy, leading to five different full-scale invasion attempts over the course of about seven years. During this time, Urza designed a flying ship, capable of sonic speeds as well as the ability to planeshift between worlds. To complete this ship, Urza realized he needed a special kind of wood from the forests of Yavimaya. Though the headmaster of the Academy, Barrin, begged Urza to stay at the Academy and bolster their defenses, Urza decided that he had to be the one to travel to Yavimaya, and teleported away, leaving the Academy on its own."
Probably while saying, 'Don't worry, I'll be right back,' and 'What's the worst that can happen?'
"Ironically enough, not only is Yavimaya located in the shattered fragments of Terisiare, but if you remember your post-Sylex map, it actually encompasses what few ruins remain of Kroog. When Urza arrived in Yavimaya, he was greeted by the Maro-Sorcerer Multani, who had the land's memory of what Urza did to Argoth and Tatiana. To punish Urza, Multani ensorcelled him, shoved him into a tree, and forced him to feel the pain and anguish that his devastation had inflicted upon Argoth. This punishment lasted for three years--" proving that Multani was what the kids called 'a real one' "--until the Academy was overrun by the Phyrexians, and Barrin reached out to Urza mentally. The images of the students being slaughtered was enough to break through Multani's ensorcellment, and Urza Planeswalked away to gather allies before returning to the island. Multani accidentally came along for the ride and the sight of what the Phyrexians were doing was enough to get him to agree to ally with Urza, help him defeat the Phyrexians on Tolaria, and give him what he needed for his ship. After the Phyrexians were wiped out, Urza built his ship, the Skyship Weatherlight, but realized that in order to charge its mana battery enough for it to do what he intended, it would need an entire plane's worth of mana. Rather than taking the time - which, admittedly, might have been decades or even centuries - to harmlessly siphon off enough mana from a plane to the Weatherlight, he chose to sacrifice a plane instead to charge it all at once. And so, he returned to Serra's Realm, which had spent the last few centuries still under siege by Phyrexians and slowly deteriorating without Serra's presence, to harvest all of its mana. Skipping over a bunch of things because this lecture is already too long, though feel free to ask me about it further if you're curious, they managed to collect several hundred refugees on the ship, charge the powerstone, and escape the plane minutes before it ceased to exist. Once back on Dominaria, Urza settled in to breed 'the perfect human for his perfect ship,' as well as a race of perfect soldiers, spending about all those decades and centuries he couldn't spare letting the Weatherlight siphon mana harmlessly, performing various experiments on multiple bloodlines across Dominaria in the name of eugenics."
A sip from her thermos of tea. "And that catches us up with times three and four where Urza ruined everything. Next class, we'll be jumping ahead about a thousand years to the Phyrexian War." She gave them a thin smile. "Don't worry, it gets worse."
Sign In #5
Date: 2025-08-07 10:47 am (UTC)Re: Sign In #5
Date: 2025-08-07 04:24 pm (UTC)Re: Sign In #5
Date: 2025-08-07 07:34 pm (UTC)Re: Sign In #5
Date: 2025-08-08 05:18 pm (UTC)Listen to the Lecture...s?
Date: 2025-08-07 10:49 am (UTC)Also, you know, feel free to ask questions, get clarifications, make comments, eat popcorn, whatever.
Re: Listen to the Lecture...s?
Date: 2025-08-07 08:23 pm (UTC)Not that there would be any doubt, of course.
A Question of Blame...
Date: 2025-08-07 10:56 am (UTC)Re: A Question of Blame...
Date: 2025-08-07 05:55 pm (UTC)And then he went back to finished the job himself? Big yikes there, Urza.
Re: A Question of Blame...
Date: 2025-08-07 06:42 pm (UTC)Re: A Question of Blame...
Date: 2025-08-07 08:25 pm (UTC)This guy sucked, Liliana. So much.
Re: A Question of Blame...
Date: 2025-08-07 11:42 pm (UTC)"Urza was very bad at protecting people, places, and things," she said wryly.
A Question of Morals...
Date: 2025-08-07 11:00 am (UTC)Re: A Question of Morals...
Date: 2025-08-08 05:28 pm (UTC)"But when I do it, there isn't anything sentient left when I start -- no one to evacuate, no one who could get accidentally left behind."
Re: A Question of Morals...
Date: 2025-08-08 11:23 pm (UTC)Talk to Liliana
Date: 2025-08-07 11:00 am (UTC)OOC
Date: 2025-08-07 11:07 am (UTC)