Dominaria United

Read in order or choose a turning point

Story Chapters

1. 01

   The caves answer Karn

   Karn searched the Caves of Koilos for the Sylex’s operating secret and uncovered Sheoldred’s hidden staging ground instead.

   Karn entered the caves carrying two burdens that reinforced each other. He needed to understand how the ancient Sylex had been activated, and he believed New Phyrexia would eventually turn his creation against the Multiverse. Working alone felt responsible to him: machines did not become infected, friends did not die beside him and no one could dismiss a warning they had never been asked to hear.

   Fresh oil and living cables proved that the danger was already present. Beyond the excavated passages, the Society of Mishra was rebuilding Sheoldred, compleating prisoners and preparing engines assembled from Dominaria’s buried past. The discovery transformed Karn’s fear from a prediction into a military fact, but his attempt to destroy the operation gave the invaders time to collapse the caves around him.

   This opening matters because Karn is correct and still strategically wrong. Isolation helps him find the enemy, then ensures that nobody knows where he is or what he found. Phyrexia exploits his guilt as efficiently as it exploits metal: the instinct to protect everyone by acting alone leaves the most important witness buried without support.

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2. 02

   Proof inside the negotiation

   Ajani freed Karn, but warnings of sleeper agents followed them into a summit already strained by older conflicts.

   Ajani brought Karn to negotiations between Keld and New Benalia, where Jodah and Jaya were trying to prevent another local war. The diplomats did not dismiss Karn as a liar. Their hesitation was more ordinary and therefore harder to defeat: armies require locations, leaders must answer present crises and a threat without visible ranks competes poorly with disputes already on the table.

   Phyrexia supplied the missing evidence from inside the room. Benalish knights opened into engineered attackers, and a harmless-looking bird revealed itself as part of the same network. The survivors sealed themselves in a watchtower because any companion could be another weapon waiting for a signal. Trust became something they had to test while trapped with the consequences of mistrust.

   The attack also clarified the enemy’s scale. Sheoldred had not merely smuggled soldiers onto Dominaria; she had infiltrated the procedures by which Dominarians decide whom to believe. Every delay helped her, yet panic could dissolve the alliances required to oppose her. The defenders would need to build unity without pretending certainty was possible.

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3. 03

   A Coalition built in motion

   Jodah, Jaya, Teferi and their allies gathered nations that could not afford to settle every disagreement before fighting together.

   The new Coalition did not emerge from a single speech. Messages moved through old friendships and political obligations: Benalish knights, Keldon warriors, Yavimayan elves, Shivan dragons, goblin engineers and the crew of the Weatherlight each brought a different reason to resist. Jodah’s achievement was not erasing those differences but making cooperation useful before consensus became perfect.

   Phyrexia answered with symbols stolen from Dominaria’s own memory. Ertai returned from death, dragon engines walked again and the Weatherlight itself was corrupted into a carrier for the invaders. Familiar shapes no longer guaranteed familiar loyalties. The war forced the Coalition to fight its heritage while relying on other pieces of that same heritage to survive.

   At Shiv, the dormant Mana Rig became the centre of both defence and invention. Jhoira’s engineers prepared to wake it while Saheeli’s work offered a path toward recreating the Sylex. Teferi carried the additional task of reaching the past for knowledge that the present had lost. The response was already larger than one battle because the invasion was already larger than Dominaria.

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4. 04

   Victory at the Mana Rig

   The awakened Rig and a converging Coalition broke Sheoldred’s army just as the invaders reached their true targets.

   Sheoldred drove her host against the Mana Rig with dreadnoughts, the compleated Weatherlight and waves of bodies designed to be expended. The Coalition arrived from several directions rather than as one neat army. Dragons contested the sky, Magnigoths advanced across the desert and the Golden Argosy carried Keldons directly into machines too large for conventional assault.

   When the Mana Rig stood, the battlefield changed. Its mechanisms crushed attackers and cast molten stone across the desert while Yavimayan forces closed the retreat. For a moment the defenders had achieved exactly what stories about Dominaria promise: peoples divided by centuries of conflict joined their strengths and made an ancient enemy recoil.

   Yet Sheoldred had shaped the battle around acquisition. Karn and the Sylex mattered more than the survival of any particular soldier. The visible army could lose if a hidden asset reached both targets. Dominaria’s triumph therefore arrived at the same instant that the invasion’s deeper design became clear.

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5. 05

   Ajani was already inside

   Ajani’s sleeper conditioning surfaced beside the Sylex, turning a trusted defender into Sheoldred’s final weapon.

   Ajani had rescued Karn, recruited allies and fought with the Coalition because the infiltration did not replace every part of him at once. Phyrexia preserved enough loyalty to make his presence credible until the command hidden beneath it took control. His transformation on the Rig revealed why no test of recent behaviour could have made the alliance completely safe.

   Jaya tried to carry the Sylex away. Ajani struck her, endured her final fire and threw her from the Rig before crushing the device in his hand. The loss was not only tactical. Jaya was a survivor of Dominaria’s impossible ages, a teacher who made ancient power feel human and a friend whose humour kept catastrophe from defining every room she entered.

   Ajani then held the damaged Karn for Sheoldred. Jhoira chose to destroy the Mana Rig rather than surrender it, and Jodah opened escape routes for the Coalition, but the Planar Bridge removed Sheoldred, Ajani and Karn before the blast. The defenders kept their plane. The invaders carried away the person who knew their history most intimately.

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6. 06

   The new Sylex mission

   Grief became a plan: Saheeli rebuilt the weapon while Teferi prepared to cross time for its missing instructions.

   After the battle, Dominaria had to count survival without calling it victory. Jodah, Jhoira and Teferi built a memorial for Jaya while commanders returned home to recruit against the next attack. Mourning could not be postponed, but neither could preparation. Sheoldred’s departure confirmed that New Phyrexia possessed an interplanar route and intended to use it again.

   Jaya had preserved Karn’s drawings even when Ajani destroyed the original Sylex. Saheeli could reproduce its form, but form was not function: the ritual that had once filled and fired the weapon remained unclear. The answer existed in the Brothers’ War, at the moment Urza ended the conflict and changed Dominaria’s climate.

   Teferi accepted the task of entering that moment through a temporal anchor. His journey would connect an ancient catastrophe to a future assault on New Phyrexia, while the Coalition would build a strike team around the new weapon. Dominaria United ends by turning loss into infrastructure for the next resistance—and by acknowledging that every solution inherited from history also inherits its danger.

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