March of the Machine

Read in order or choose a turning point

Story Chapters

1. 01

   The strike team falls

   An attempt to destroy New Phyrexia before the invasion began ended with corrupted heroes and the Sylex detonating between worlds.

   Before Realmbreaker reached the planes, a coalition of planeswalkers entered New Phyrexia with a replica of the Golgothian Sylex. Their objective was brutal but clear: reach the core, destroy the plane and prevent an invasion that no single world could survive.

   New Phyrexia turned the mission against them. The oil, the plane's layered defences and disagreement over the Sylex's cost shattered the team. Jace, Nissa, Vraska, Nahiri and Lukka were compleated, joining Ajani and Tamiyo among Norn's captured champions. The rescuers had become guides and weapons for the enemy.

   Jace still tried to trigger the Sylex, but doing so near Realmbreaker's connections threatened other planes. Elspeth seized the device and carried it into the Blind Eternities, where it exploded. She disappeared. The tree survived. Kaya, Kaito and Tyvar escaped with news that the invasion was no longer preventable.

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2. 02

   Realmbreaker reaches the Multiverse

   Elesh Norn activated the invasion tree and sent armies and compleated planeswalkers along its branches.

   Realmbreaker was New Phyrexia's answer to the limits of planar travel. Its branches opened stable breaches across the Multiverse, allowing troops, war machines and oil to arrive in living worlds. What had once required a planeswalker spark became a military network under Norn's control.

   The compleated planeswalkers led assaults where their knowledge could do the most damage. Nahiri turned Zendikar's ancient structures toward Phyrexian ends. Tamiyo attacked Kamigawa with stories made into weapons. Ajani targeted the faith of Theros, while Atraxa descended on New Capenna and Lukka tried to dominate Ikoria's monsters.

   Norn saw this as proof of unity: every army receiving one purpose, every conquered person remade into another instrument. Yet the invasion contained the flaw that would destroy it. A system centred on one will could spread quickly, but it had little room for doubt, adaptation or the value of anything it had not already understood.

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3. 03

   Every world fights its own war

   Resistance took a different form on every plane, turning local knowledge and identity into weapons Phyrexia could not standardise.

   There was no universal defence. On Kamigawa, Kaito, the Wanderer, Kaya and young Nashi confronted Tamiyo amid the devastation of Towashi and Boseiju. Tamiyo died, but a living memory she had prepared before her compleation survived through one of her scrolls. The invader could take her body without erasing every story she had chosen to preserve.

   On New Capenna, angels returned and Halo protected fighters from the oil. Atraxa dismissed the city's inhabitants and structures as decadent clutter. That contempt proved fatal when the Riveteers brought the city itself down on her. The defeat opened Realmbreaker's routes for angels to carry their protection to other battlefields.

   Similar reversals played out across the Multiverse. People used the ecology, magic and old enemies of their homes in ways an invading army could not predict. Not every defence succeeded and no plane escaped without loss, but each delay weakened the fiction that Phyrexian uniformity was the same thing as strength.

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4. 04

   Wrenn takes the tree

   Chandra and Wrenn reached New Phyrexia, where Wrenn bonded with Realmbreaker and learned to redirect its reach.

   Chandra refused to accept that the failed strike was the end of the war. She returned to New Phyrexia with Wrenn and found the remaining Mirran resistance: Koth, Melira and a dwindling group of survivors prepared to gamble everything on the invasion tree.

   Wrenn's gift had always been partnership with trees. Realmbreaker was vast, hostile and saturated with oil, but it was still a living intelligence with a desire to grow. With Chandra helping her master the fire inside her, Wrenn pushed through the tree's commands and formed a bond. She named this eighth partner Eight.

   Nissa tried to stop them, and the praetors closed in. Then Elspeth returned as an angel, shaped by the choice she had made with the Sylex and by her connection to New Capenna's angelic legacy. She held Norn and Nissa back long enough for Wrenn to search along Realmbreaker's impossible network.

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5. 05

   Zhalfir comes home

   Wrenn found Teferi and displaced Zhalfir, then used Realmbreaker to exchange its place with New Phyrexia.

   Hidden among the tree's pathways was the place Teferi had spent centuries trying to recover. Zhalfir had survived its isolation, built new generations and prepared itself in case the war outside ever reached it. Wrenn opened contact and asked Teferi for help.

   Her solution was larger than bringing one planeswalker through. Wrenn and Eight forced a change in the Multiverse's arrangement: Zhalfir moved into New Phyrexia's position while the Phyrexian plane was pushed out into the darkness between accessible worlds. The exchange gave Zhalfir a way home and denied Norn the network on which her invasion depended.

   Teferi did not come alone. Zhalfir's armies crossed the opening and joined the Mirrans, bringing discipline, time magic and numbers to a battlefield that had nearly run out of defenders. Teferi's oldest failure became the source of the resistance's final strength.

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6. 06

   The Machine Orthodoxy collapses

   The praetors turned on one another, Zhalfir broke the remaining armies and Karn personally ended Elesh Norn.

   Once the tree slipped from Norn's control, the unity she had proclaimed disappeared. Jin-Gitaxias openly rejected her authority, while Phyrexian factions attacked one another as readily as the defenders. Vorinclex fell to a Zhalfirin warrior, and the pressure of the planar exchange tore New Phyrexia's structures apart.

   Norn was reduced from untouchable ruler to a wounded survivor crawling toward escape. Karn chose to remain long enough to confront her. Mirrodin had begun as his creation, and the oil that corrupted it had arrived through his unknowing actions. He refused to leave the final responsibility to someone else.

   Karn dismantled Norn and then crossed to Zhalfir. With New Phyrexia phased away and its ruler dead, the command carried by the oil went silent. Remaining invaders became inert or disorganised. The war ended not because every trace of Phyrexia vanished, but because the system connecting those traces to a single controlling will had been severed.

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7. 07

   A different Multiverse

   Melira's last act restored Ajani and Nissa, while widespread desparking and new Omenpaths overturned the post-Mending order.

   Victory left difficult questions about those who had been compleated. Melira believed Ajani and Nissa could be restored because something of them remained and Norn's signal was gone. With Karn, Kaya and Teferi helping, she cleansed their bodies and sparks. The process worked, but it consumed Melira's life and the remnant of Venser's spark within Karn. Karn survived without a spark.

   The losses spread further than the battlefield. In the weeks after the invasion, planeswalkers across the Multiverse discovered that their sparks had vanished. Some retained theirs, many did not, and no simple moral rule explained the division. People whose identities had been built around limitless departure now had to live with place, distance and consequence.

   At the same time, Realmbreaker's damage left Omenpaths between planes. These passages could be stable or temporary, safe or treacherous, and they allowed non-planeswalkers to cross the boundaries the Mending had closed. March of the Machine therefore ends two orders at once: Phyrexia's attempt at enforced unity and the long monopoly of planeswalkers over travel between worlds.

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