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A world freed from dragonlords faces a storm it cannot command

Tarkir: Dragonstorm

Tarkir’s liberated clans face dragonstorms spreading beyond the plane. Narset seeks Ugin, Sarkhan raises an army and Jace tries to rewrite reality—until Ugin returns and Nicol Bolas escapes the Meditation Realm.

Why this story matters

The route in brief

Tarkir had already survived one rewritten history. In its new present, the five clans were no longer servants of Dromoka, Ojutai, Silumgar, Kolaghan and Atarka. Their khans had joined a dangerous ritual at the Crucible, bound themselves to newly born spirit dragons and forced the elder dragonlords back into the tempest that had sustained them. Liberation did not restore the old world. It created a third Tarkir, built from memories that no longer matched and institutions that had to discover what freedom meant in practice.

That unfinished work is the foundation of Dragonstorm. The crisis is immense—storms crossing planes, wild dragons multiplying and an elder dragon returning—but the story keeps asking who pays for grand solutions. Narset carries responsibility for a rebellion that saved her people and destabilised their sky. Sarkhan treats power as the cure for the helplessness he cannot bear. Jace decides that love authorises him to enter Loot's mind and remodel reality. Their choices turn the same question in different directions: when does the wish to repair damage become another form of control?

Beneath those cosmic decisions, the clans prove that Tarkir is more than its famous Planeswalkers. A soldier protects an Abzan Kin-Tree from corruption, a Jeskai monk learns that pride is not enlightenment, a Mardu candidate earns belonging through mercy, an undead Sultai veteran discovers the personhood his old masters denied, and Temur rivals restore a wounded community by sharing one fire. Their lives supply the measure by which every heroic promise must be judged. Saving Tarkir matters because ordinary people are already remaking it.

Ugin’s return stabilises the dragonstorms but breaks the prison that kept Nicol Bolas contained. Tarkir survives the immediate crisis with a larger danger once again loose in the Multiverse.

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Story Chapters

  1. Five clans after the dragonlords

    Freedom changes Tarkir from the ground up, and each clan discovers that its old wounds have survived the fall of its master.

    The khans' rebellion ended the rule of the dragonlords, but it did not erase the cultures their regimes had shaped. Each clan now worked beside a spirit dragon born from the Stormnexus Ritual: Betor with the Abzan, Shiko with the Jeskai, Neriv with the Mardu, Teval with the Sultai and Ureni with the Temur. These partnerships were neither a return to the ancient clans nor a smaller version of draconic tyranny. They were experiments in shared authority, performed while the weather itself grew less predictable.

    The new order could be seen in local choices. In besieged Qatros Karst, Lieutenant Mehtma uncovered officers who were prolonging Abzan suffering for profit and colluding with the Sultai. Defending her young Kin-Tree cost the life of Enti, one of the children entrusted to her, yet Enti's spirit became the tree's first ancestral blossom and helped Mehtma stop the betrayal. Among the Jeskai, Asham's hunger to avenge a bruised ego led him into a disastrous rematch with the Temur elder Ai Wen. Recovery, honesty with his friend Ru and the decision to study beyond one monastery taught him more than the victory he had imagined.

    The other clans faced equally personal tests. Paala climbed into a Mardu lightning trial while rivals questioned whether adoption could make her truly clan. She answered prejudice with aid, claimed the storm without abandoning compassion and chose a name that honoured service rather than conquest. In the Sultai lands, the resurrected soldier Nishang learned that sibsig retained feeling and dignity, only to be controlled by a rakshasa loyal to Silumgar's order and used to poison an honoured gathering of the undead. Far north, Eshki, Surrak and the whisperer Alniul ended a supernatural blight by welcoming the abandoned back to the Temur fire. Ureni watched a divided pack mend. Across Tarkir, liberation was becoming real through acts of responsibility that no proclamation could replace.

    Open dedicated chapter

  2. A sky without its anchor

    Elspeth arrives with evidence that Tarkir's worsening dragonstorms are no longer contained by the plane.

    Narset led the Jeskai as waymaster, a position earned through the rebellion and burdened by everything that followed it. The Stormnexus Ritual had produced the five spirit dragons and broken the elder dragonlords' hold, but the dragonstorms did not settle into harmless weather. They widened, changed the land and produced wild dragons in unfamiliar forms. Settlements saw water and earth move against old maps. Creatures carried scales and other draconic traits. The victory had removed one danger while disturbing a system nobody fully understood.

    Elspeth brought the crisis beyond Tarkir's horizon. Having encountered dragonstorms on other planes, she warned that the phenomenon was travelling through the Multiverse. Narset reasoned that Ugin had once steadied Tarkir's storms by his very presence. With the spirit dragon absent, and with the rebellion's ritual having drawn on the storm nexus, the plane no longer possessed the balance it once had. Elspeth proposed revisiting the ritual; Narset heard the possibility of another well-meant intervention whose consequences would be paid by everyone else.

    A wild dragon's attack turned theory into immediate danger. Narset and Elspeth protected Jeskai children, but Taigam used the incident to press a harder political line. He argued that an outsider and another experimental remedy were risks the clan should refuse. As waymaster, Narset publicly denied Elspeth the Jeskai's support. Then she separated office from conscience: the clan would not go, but Narset herself could. Leaving her people was not an escape from leadership. It was an admission that the threat crossed every border her title could defend.

    Open dedicated chapter

  3. Sarkhan feeds the wound

    While Narset searches for Ugin, Sarkhan sacrifices a wild dragon to recover the form and certainty he has lost.

    The road to the storm's heart passed through Tarkir's unresolved history. Narset and Elspeth found the Crucible marked by hedrons and a direction toward a temple hidden within the storms. They also found Sarkhan Vol. Desparked and unable to assume dragon form as he once had, Sarkhan had reduced his world to a single grievance: the Multiverse had taken from him the body and belonging he considered true. He imagined a cosmos ruled by dragons because anything else reminded him of that loss.

    Sarkhan attacked. Elspeth was prepared to end the threat, but Narset stopped the killing. She had already watched too many lives become acceptable costs in somebody else's design. Mercy did not heal Sarkhan, however, and Taigam was ready with a path aimed directly at his obsession. The ritual he offered resembled the clans' act at the Crucible but inverted its meaning. The khans had risked their own lives together; Sarkhan cut open a young wild dragon and consumed its living heart.

    The sacrifice restored his transformation with terrible additions. Sarkhan became a vast dragon able to command the wild creatures forming inside the storms. Ajani, living in self-imposed exile among the Abzan after his Phyrexian crimes, saw the new flight gather around him. That sight joined two wounded men at opposite edges of the same choice. Sarkhan made pain a licence to dominate. Ajani had made pain a prison, believing permanent shame was the only honest response. The approaching catastrophe would force both to decide whether remorse should serve life or merely keep the past in power.

    Open dedicated chapter

  4. The road beneath reality

    Narset and Elspeth reach the Meditation Realm and find Jace using Loot as a map to a place beneath the Multiverse.

    Abzan authorities detained Narset and Elspeth while their own borders strained under war and evacuation. Ajani carried Sarkhan's warning to Khan Felothar and argued that holding the travellers served nobody. His intervention opened the road again. It also began to open Ajani himself. Elspeth did not excuse what he had done while compleated, but she refused the idea that the dead were honoured by adding his life to their number. There were people in front of him who still needed help.

    Inside the nexus, Narset and Elspeth crossed from Tarkir into the Meditation Realm. The place resisted ordinary direction. Space folded according to expectation, reflecting each visitor's effort to impose a comprehensible shape upon it. Narset advanced by loosening that demand and listening to the realm on its own terms. The lesson echoed the healthier version of Tarkir's rebuilding: relationship required attention, not conquest.

    Jace was waiting with Loot, the small Fomori whose mind held an instinctive map of planes and Omenpaths. He described his own recovery from phyresis as proof that damage could be partitioned and corrected. Yet Loot was subdued, exhausted and frightened. Jace had repeatedly entered the child's mind to navigate toward this hidden junction of worlds. When Narset asked whether Loot had agreed, Jace answered the practical need instead of the moral question. His proposed rescue of reality already depended on treating one vulnerable person as an instrument.

    Open dedicated chapter

  5. The prison and the prisoners

    The travellers discover Ugin's living prison for Nicol Bolas, while Jace mistakes its power for a chance to undo history.

    Narset quieted the travellers' competing expectations long enough for the realm to reveal its centre. Ugin remained there, diminished but alive, entwined with his brother Nicol Bolas. The Meditation Realm was their prison. Ugin believed death might only provide Bolas another route back, so he had committed what remained of himself to containing the amnesiac elder dragon for millennia. Every conversation weakened that arrangement, and speaking Bolas's name began returning pieces of the tyrant's memory.

    Ugin could not leave to calm the dragonstorms without risking a greater disaster. Narset asked for knowledge instead, but the answer remained the same: his attention was the lock. Jace had come for something else. An illusion concealed his movement until he reached the gem suspended above Ugin's head. He seized its power, not to free Bolas, but to take control of the realm beneath reality. Loot's mental map had shown him a substrate touching countless worlds. Jace believed sufficient will could turn it into an instrument of repair.

    His argument made catastrophe sound compassionate. Phyrexia's invasion had shattered lives and worlds; with this power, he could restore the dead, remove scars and make every loss avoidable. The vision narrowed around Vraska. Jace wanted the woman he loved safe and untouched by what had happened to her, even after she told him to stop. His goal was tenderness stripped of consent, a perfect future imposed so completely that nobody would remember choosing another.

    Open dedicated chapter

  6. A future that refuses erasure

    Vraska rejects Jace's promised reset, and the Meditation Realm breaks under a mortal attempt to command it.

    Vraska had already challenged Jace over Loot. The child hid from him and resisted being placed under mental control, while Jace kept translating fear into proof that Loot was too young to understand necessity. Vraska recognised the pattern because she too had justified cruelty as service to a greater good. She asked him to release the dead, accept the family still beside him and build forward. Jace promised instead that he could make the damage disappear.

    When Vraska entered the Meditation Realm, she found Jace burning beneath power no human mind could safely direct. Elspeth prepared to stop him by force; Vraska protected him without endorsing his plan. She offered a harder form of love: no return to an innocent version of themselves, no transformation of Vraska into a reward for his sacrifice, only a future they might choose together. For a moment the realm displayed everything Jace desired—friends alive, planes unbroken, Vraska unscarred.

    The vision could not hold. Jace remained mortal, and the realm's obedience consumed the person trying to master it. Reality fractured into mirrored pieces and a void began to erase the prison. Jace broke apart within it. Narset fled with Loot while Elspeth carried them toward an Omenpath and Vraska emerged beside them. Ugin grappled with Bolas as both vanished into the collapse. Whether the mind-mage was dead remained uncertain; what was certain was the cost of his shortcut. The attempt to abolish pain had broken the lock on one of the Multiverse's oldest dangers.

    Open dedicated chapter

  7. The dragon who returned

    Tarkir survives Sarkhan's army when Ugin returns, but the spirit dragon brings news that turns victory into warning.

    The survivors reached Tarkir beneath a horizon darkened by dragons. Vraska took Loot away under camouflage while Narset and Elspeth stood between the temple and Sarkhan's flight. Sarkhan intended to destroy the one place whose power rivalled his control, then carry his draconic order beyond Tarkir. Wild dragons poured from the storm faster than defenders could bring them down. The clans' spirit-bound riders joined the fight, with Abzan forces buying time at a brutal cost.

    Ajani chose the present. He rescued Elspeth from Sarkhan's jaws and tried to reach the man who had once shown him kindness. Narset exposed the sacrifice behind Sarkhan's new form, forcing shame into the open, but he converted even that recognition into rage. Narset, Elspeth and Ajani prepared an attack they did not expect to survive. Their stand could not erase earlier failures. It could only prevent those failures from deciding the next life lost.

    Ugin returned before they made that sacrifice. Exhausted and wounded, he silenced the wild dragons and met Sarkhan's fire with ghostflame. Sarkhan burned, fled into the storm and lost control of the attack. Tarkir was spared, and Ugin could again discipline the dragonstorms, but he had not restored the old balance without consequence. Nicol Bolas had escaped the collapsing prison. Far beyond the battlefield, a blue-cloaked silhouette gathered over a silver surface, leaving Jace's fate unresolved. Dragonstorm ends with survival rather than restoration: the plane has a future because its people chose to defend one, and the Multiverse inherits every danger their victory could not contain.

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