Without his memory, Jace found a truer self—and a friendship Bolas intended to weaponise.
Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan
Trapped on Ixalan without his memories, Jace joins Vraska’s pirate crew in the race for Orazca. Their unexpected trust survives his recovered past and becomes the secret with which they intend to undermine Nicol Bolas.
Why this story matters
The route in brief
Ixalan stripped Jace of the roles that normally defined him. He arrived without memory, allies or the ability to leave, forced to learn his magic and identity from the beginning. The person he became on a pirate ship was not free from his past, but he was temporarily free from expectations built around the Living Guildpact and the Gatewatch.
Vraska reached Ixalan with clearer memories and a concealed employer. Nicol Bolas had promised her political power on Ravnica in exchange for the Immortal Sun. Captaining the Belligerent gave her something the Golgari rarely had: authority that did not require performing the monster other people expected. Jace met that captain before he remembered the assassin.
Their expedition intersected with a conflict belonging to Ixalan’s peoples. Orazca and the Immortal Sun were not unclaimed prizes waiting for outsiders. The River Heralds, Sun Empire, Brazen Coalition and Legion of Dusk carried histories of invasion, stewardship and ambition into the race. Jace and Vraska changed because they learned to see one another, but the artifact still left the plane in Bolas’s hands.
Read in order or choose a turning point
Story Chapters
-
A mind washed ashore
Jace survived Bolas’s attack with his memory shattered and discovered that the plane itself prevented escape.
Jace’s failed attack on Amonkhet ended when Bolas reached into his mind and cast him away. He arrived on a tropical shore with language, instinct and fragments of magic but no stable account of who he was. Attempts to planeswalk failed, turning a temporary landing into confinement.
The loss exposed habits usually hidden beneath competence. Jace built illusions before he understood why the technique felt natural, distrusted his own thoughts and tried to infer identity from clothing and reflex. Without a remembered duty, curiosity and empathy emerged alongside the anxiety that had always shaped him.
Ixalan was not blocking only Jace. An artifact somewhere on the plane trapped every planeswalker who entered. Finding it offered a route home, but Jace first needed people willing to keep him alive long enough to understand the factions already searching the continent.
Open dedicated chapter -
Captain Vraska’s crew
Vraska welcomed the amnesiac Jace aboard the Belligerent, where cooperation replaced the hostility neither could fully explain.
Vraska commanded a pirate crew with clear expectations: share danger, respect competence and judge people by what they did aboard the ship. Her mission came from Nicol Bolas, who had offered the means to overthrow Golgari leader Jarad if she recovered the Immortal Sun. The crew knew the destination, not the full bargain.
Jace joined without remembering Vraska or their violent history on Ravnica. She recognised him and initially treated the advantage with caution. Life aboard the Belligerent made sustained deception harder than a single disguise. He contributed illusions and planning; she gave him room to become useful without demanding a past he could not provide.
Friendship grew through ordinary decisions rather than one grand reconciliation. Jace saw a captain trusted by people who had chosen her. Vraska saw a version of him capable of listening before imposing a solution. Each encountered qualities their earlier conflict had left no space to notice.
Open dedicated chapter -
The race for Orazca
Four factions followed different claims toward the golden city, turning one artifact hunt into a contest over Ixalan’s future.
The Immortal Sun rested in Orazca, a hidden city whose return would reshape the balance of power. The Sun Empire viewed it through ancestry and restoration, the River Heralds through stewardship, the Legion of Dusk through conquest and immortality, and the Brazen Coalition through freedom, profit and discovery.
Vraska’s thaumatic compass pointed the Belligerent inland while rival expeditions converged. Jungles, rivers and dinosaurs made geography an active force rather than empty distance between encounters. Alliances shifted because no faction could control every route or predict what awakening the city would do.
Jace learned that the object they sought was also the reason he could not planeswalk. That fact made recovery personal, yet his time with the crew complicated the wish to leave immediately. Escape now meant deciding what would happen to people whose home remained after the visitors departed.
Open dedicated chapter -
Memory returns in a flood
A fall near Orazca released Jace’s sealed memories, and Vraska stayed with him through truths that could have restored their enmity.
As Orazca awakened and the race tightened, injury broke the barriers holding Jace’s past. Memories escaped as uncontrolled illusions: Vryn, Alhammarret’s manipulation, Ravnica, the Gatewatch and earlier confrontations with Vraska. Recovery arrived as pain rather than a clean restoration of skill.
Vraska witnessed memories he had never chosen to share and recognised experiences of imprisonment and coercion that echoed her own. She also saw how he had once viewed her. Jace remembered that she was an assassin and enemy, but the months on Ixalan remained equally real.
They chose not to let older knowledge erase newer evidence. That decision did not absolve every action either had taken. It established that identity could include change and that restored memory should inform judgement without dictating it automatically.
Open dedicated chapter -
Azor and the Immortal Sun
Inside Orazca, Jace and Vraska found the sphinx whose sacrifice built the trap—and whose certainty mirrored older abuses.
The guardian of the Immortal Sun was Azor, a sphinx connected to Ravnica’s law and to Ugin’s ancient attempt to trap Nicol Bolas. Azor had spent his spark creating the artifact, expecting Bolas to be drawn to Ixalan and held where Ugin could confront him. Bolas never entered the trap.
Azor treated Vraska as a criminal category rather than a person and assumed authority followed naturally from his design. Jace recognised the pattern of a sphinx defining order for everyone around him. As the Living Guildpact, he used the office Azor had helped create to bar him from returning to Ravnica and restrict his interference.
The encounter revealed another failed anti-Bolas plan built on secrecy and certainty. The Immortal Sun was powerful enough to imprison planeswalkers, but its makers had not controlled who would eventually claim it. Sacrifice created a tool; it did not guarantee the wisdom of its use.
Open dedicated chapter
Keep exploring