The crisis that remade planeswalking
The Mending
Dominaria's accumulated wounds were pulling time, space and neighbouring planes apart. Closing them saved the Multiverse, but the repair demanded sparks, lives and a permanent rewriting of what a planeswalker could be.
Why this story matters
The route in brief
The Mending is the hinge between Magic's oldest cosmology and the modern age. It was not a single duel or spell, but the end of a crisis that had been building on Dominaria for centuries. Wars, magical experiments and attempts by immensely powerful beings to reshape history had left tears in the fabric of the plane. Eventually those tears stopped behaving like local scars. They began to destabilise the wider Multiverse.
For the people of Dominaria, the danger appeared in broken seasons, vanishing landscapes and impossible visitors from other eras. For planeswalkers, it exposed an uncomfortable truth: many of the disasters threatening reality had been created or enlarged by people with powers much like their own. Saving the Multiverse would therefore require more than another display of force. It required responsibility, sacrifice and the surrender of privileges once treated as permanent.
The repair changed every story that followed. Planeswalkers still carried sparks and could still cross the Blind Eternities, but they emerged mortal, physically limited and far more connected to the consequences of their choices. To understand the Gatewatch era, the War of the Spark or the Phyrexian invasion, it helps to begin here: on a wounded Dominaria where godlike travellers had to accept that survival meant becoming something less.
Read in order or choose a turning point
Story Chapters
-
A world out of time
Dominaria's history had become physically unstable, and every old catastrophe added pressure to a network of temporal rifts.
Dominaria had survived calamities that would have ended younger worlds. The Brothers' War scarred the land and altered its climate. Later conflicts with Phyrexia devastated continents, while experiments around Tolaria treated time itself as a tool. Otaria's magical upheavals added still more strain. Each era left a mark, and the marks began to connect.
The result was not ordinary ruin. Temporal rifts opened above places tied to the worst disruptions. Through them, fragments of the past intruded on the present, possible futures bled backwards and familiar laws of magic became unreliable. Dominaria was slowly dying under the weight of its own history. The problem spread outward as the damage weakened the structure separating planes.
This is what makes the crisis different from another invasion. There was no enemy army that could simply be defeated. The danger was woven into locations, decisions and old victories. Closing a rift meant understanding why it existed and finding a sacrifice strong enough to answer the event that had created it.
Open dedicated chapter -
Teferi's unfinished rescue
Teferi could restore Shiv only by giving up his spark, while Zhalfir remained beyond his reach.
Teferi entered the crisis carrying an old decision. During the first Phyrexian invasion he had protected Shiv and his homeland of Zhalfir by phasing them away from Dominaria. The act spared millions from the war, but it also isolated those lands and created wounds that later became part of the rift network.
When the danger returned, Teferi helped bring Shiv back. Repairing that breach cost him his planeswalker spark. The loss was not symbolic: it ended the vast reach and freedom that had defined his existence. He accepted it because the alternative was to leave the wound open and allow the crisis to grow.
Zhalfir was the part he could not save. Without his spark, Teferi lacked the power to repeat the repair, and his home remained displaced. The Mending therefore gave him both an achievement and a lifelong absence. Much later, his search for Zhalfir would become central to the final struggle against New Phyrexia.
Open dedicated chapter -
Sacrifice across Dominaria
Freyalise, Lord Windgrace, Karn and other ancient planeswalkers confronted rifts bound to places they had shaped.
The network could not be repaired from one point. Across Dominaria, powerful figures faced wounds linked to their own histories. Freyalise gave her life closing the rift over Skyshroud. Lord Windgrace died saving Urborg and bound an echo of himself to the land he had protected for ages.
Karn answered the Tolaria rift, a wound connected to the island's experiments with time. His intervention sealed it, but he vanished from the immediate struggle. Elsewhere, Nicol Bolas pursued his rivalry with Leshrac. Bolas won and turned the defeated planeswalker into the means of closing the Madaran rift, proof that even an act that helped stabilise reality could be driven by cruelty and self-interest.
These repairs did not form a clean fellowship of heroes. Some acted from love, some from guilt and some for their own ambitions. What united the events was their cost. Pre-Mending power could close the wounds, but it could not pass through the process untouched.
Open dedicated chapter -
Jeska and the final rift
Jeska used Radha as a living focus and spent her own life and spark to close the last, largest breach.
Jeska had already lived several lives: barbarian, cursed destroyer, false god and planeswalker. During the rift crisis, Leshrac tried to steer her power toward his own ends. By the time his schemes were exposed, the remaining wound over Otaria still threatened everything, and ordinary force offered no answer.
Radha, an elf whose heritage made her unusually attuned to Dominaria's mana, became the focus through which the repair could be directed. Jeska channelled the necessary power through that connection. The act closed the last great rift, but Jeska did not survive it.
Her death completed the physical work of the Mending. It also underlined the event's central idea: reality was not restored by planeswalkers proving they were above everyone else. It was restored when they accepted limits, answered for the damage around them and spent powers they would never regain.
Open dedicated chapter -
The modern spark
The repaired Multiverse imposed new limits on planeswalkers and closed the old routes that once carried others between worlds.
After the final rift closed, the nature of the spark was different. Planeswalkers no longer existed as ageless beings able to rebuild their bodies almost at will. They remained exceptional mages, but their strength depended on skill, circumstance and the mana available to them. They could be wounded, exhausted and killed.
The rules of travel changed as well. Most portals and vessels that had once moved ordinary living beings between planes ceased to function. Crossing the Blind Eternities became the defining gift of a spark, while a planeswalker generally could not carry companions along. Venser, whose spark ignited during the crisis, stood at the threshold of this new age rather than the old one.
That reduction in power made the Multiverse larger in a narrative sense. A planeswalker could no longer solve every crisis by arriving as a distant god. They needed allies, learned the customs of the worlds they visited and suffered losses that could not be wished away. The Mending saved reality, but its deeper legacy was to make responsibility inseparable from planeswalking.
Open dedicated chapter
Keep exploring