Sarkhan went home to find dragons, crossed twelve centuries and returned to a present that had never made him.
Tarkir’s Rewritten History
Sarkhan travels twelve centuries into Tarkir’s past and saves Ugin from Nicol Bolas. Dragons survive, the khans fall and a rewritten present gives Sarkhan everything he wanted—except a history in which he was born.
Why this story matters
The route in brief
Tarkir first appears as a world organised by absence. Five clans carry the shapes and virtues of dragons their ancestors killed, turning extinct predators into banners for human wars. Sarkhan remembers those creatures as the only power large enough to give conflict meaning. Returning after years away, he finds the plane familiar, diminished and filled with echoes that no one else can hear.
The voice belongs to Ugin, the Spirit Dragon Bolas killed on Tarkir long ago. It draws Sarkhan toward the place of that death, while Narset’s forbidden scholarship uncovers a past her Jeskai elders prefer to control. Their journeys meet at a doorway made from fire, memory and the hedron fragment Sarkhan carried from Zendikar.
Time travel does not restore a lost golden age. Sarkhan saves one life and changes the pressure shaping twelve centuries. Dragons survive, then win, and the clans lose names, leaders and histories to the dragonlords. The route matters because it treats a changed timeline as a new world with real people and costs, not as a corrected version that replaces an error.
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Story Chapters
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Five clans beneath empty skies
The khans ruled cultures shaped by extinct dragons, each preserving part of the enemy their ancestors had destroyed.
Abzan houses endured through kinship and fortification, Jeskai students pursued cunning and discipline, Sultai rulers converted wealth and death into power, Mardu riders prized speed and Temur hunters trusted strength guided by the wild. Their identities were distinct, yet all five carried a dragon aspect as proof that humanity had once survived the sky.
Victory over dragons did not produce peace. The clans fought over territory, resources and competing ideas of what strength required. Bones became fortresses, trophies and teachings. Every battlefield reinforced Sarkhan’s belief that Tarkir had inherited the outline of greatness while losing the living force that once demanded more from its people.
Sarkhan had left this cycle after a dragon-spirit spell ignited his spark. Service to Bolas and failure at the Eye of Ugin brought him back with his mind fraying. The voice inside him offered direction: find the place where Ugin fell, and find the doorway Tarkir had hidden in its own past.
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Narset opens forbidden history
Narset’s search for truth placed her beside Sarkhan and against the Jeskai rules meant to contain what could be known.
Narset led the Jeskai as khan, but obedience never satisfied her curiosity. Records surrounding Ugin, the ancient dragons and the Nexus had been restricted because knowledge could unsettle the authority built around it. Sarkhan’s impossible claims matched gaps she had already learned to recognise in the official account.
Their alliance was not based on easy trust. Sarkhan followed a voice others could reasonably call madness, while Narset risked her clan on evidence only she could connect. Together they reached Ugin’s resting place and the temporal fire waiting there. Zurgo and Mardu warriors followed, turning inquiry into a final pursuit.
Narset stayed behind when Sarkhan entered the passage. Zurgo killed her, but the delay preserved Sarkhan’s chance to reach the past. Her death makes the rewritten present morally complicated from its first instant: the person who enabled the change would be restored only as a different Narset who never made that sacrifice.
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The Unwritten past
Sarkhan emerged 1,280 years earlier, when dragons still contested Tarkir and the five khans fought for survival.
The passage carried Sarkhan into an age the Temur called the Unwritten, a future vision reversed into his present experience. Dragons filled the storms and young versions of the clans had not yet won their defining war. The world he had idealised was not peaceful; people lived beneath constant predation and every alliance remained vulnerable.
Ugin and Nicol Bolas were drawing toward a confrontation whose outcome Sarkhan already knew. He could not overpower Bolas or explain the entire future to people trying to survive the day. His advantage was narrower: memory of where Ugin would fall, knowledge of hedrons and the willingness to act after the apparent battle had ended.
The journey reframed Sarkhan’s obsession. Living dragons were magnificent, but magnificence did not make them benevolent. Saving Ugin might preserve creatures he loved and also intensify the war consuming the clans. He proceeded without knowing the full result because the vanished future had offered no second attempt.
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Ugin falls but does not die
Bolas won the duel, but Sarkhan changed death into a long sleep protected by Zendikar’s stone.
Bolas defeated his twin and left Ugin broken on the canyon floor. Sarkhan arrived too late to prevent the strike and early enough to change its conclusion. The hedron shard he had carried from the Eye connected his failures on Zendikar to the one intervention Tarkir still allowed.
He shaped a cocoon around Ugin, preserving the Spirit Dragon while hiding him from the centuries ahead. Ugin’s magic continued to mingle with Tarkir, and the dragonstorms that had been weakening grew stronger. Sarkhan was pulled back toward his own time before he could observe the chain of consequences.
One saved life changed an ecosystem, a war and the political language of a world. This was not the old planeswalker power to rebuild a plane by decision. It was cause and effect given twelve centuries to spread, with Sarkhan unable to revise the parts that did not resemble his intention.
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Dragonlords replace the khans
Empowered storms produced more dragons until survival required the clans to submit and forget that khans had ruled.
Dromoka, Ojutai, Silumgar, Kolaghan and Atarka gained broods strong enough to reverse the ancient balance. The dragons killed khans, absorbed survivors and erased institutions that could support rebellion. Clan names vanished from public life even where habits, families and fragments of teaching continued beneath new authority.
Each surviving culture reorganised around a dragonlord’s preferred virtue. Endurance became obedience to Dromoka, Jeskai learning narrowed under Ojutai, Silumgar turned Sultai ambition toward himself, Kolaghan demanded speed without Mardu independence and Atarka consumed the abundance Temur hunters gathered. Continuity remained, but it was continuity edited by conquest.
The altered present therefore contained both the dragons Sarkhan wanted and people whose choices had been constrained by their victory. Tarkir had not simply exchanged war for wonder. It had traded five competing human powers for five draconic regimes and changed which histories were dangerous to remember.
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A man without a past
Sarkhan returned to a world that recognised none of his memories, then found Ugin and Narset alive within the history he made.
Zurgo no longer ruled the Mardu; he rang a bell for Kolaghan. Familiar figures carried different offices or had never become the people Sarkhan remembered. Dragons filled the sky, delivering the joy that had driven his journey, while every unrecognising face confirmed that home could survive without preserving his place in it.
Sorin awakened Ugin from the cocoon, and the Spirit Dragon helped Sarkhan understand the paradox. Sarkhan still existed because he had travelled from the erased timeline, but this Tarkir contained no childhood that produced him. His actions at Zendikar remained real even though his origin had become the Unwritten.
Narset also lived, now an Ojutai scholar whose forbidden research ignited her own spark. She recognised Sarkhan from secret histories rather than shared memory. Their meeting offered neither replacement nor restoration. It was a new relationship between two survivors of different pasts, standing in a present whose dragons proved that fulfilled wishes still require judgement.
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