Zendikar Rising

Read in order or choose a turning point

Story Chapters

1. 01

   Before Rising: The Lesson of Fort Keff

   Historical context: during the earlier Eldrazi crisis, Gideon learns when protecting a place means helping its people leave.

   Fort Keff belongs to the earlier Eldrazi awakening, well before the Skyclave expedition. Gideon reaches a refuge whose defenders mistake unfamiliar horrors for an enemy they can manage. He holds off a wave of spawn, then sees a titan approaching. The victory at the wall cannot make the settlement safe.

   A captive surrakar knows an underground escape route. Gideon urges the fort's captain to release the guide and evacuate everyone, then leaves to seek other planeswalkers on Ravnica. His response combines courage with a willingness to accept that personal strength has reached its limit.

   Read beside Zendikar Rising, this episode offers a useful test of guardianship. A refuge matters because people can live there; preserving its walls is not worth losing those people. Nissa later draws on Gideon's memory while deciding how to defend Zendikar. The comparison is thematic, rather than evidence that Fort Keff caused the later dispute.

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2. 02

   The World and the Key

   Nahiri and Nissa recover the key to the Lithoform Core, but its first use reveals that their definitions of healing are incompatible.

   Nahiri and Nissa enter an Akoum Skyclave together, initially united by the wish to help Zendikar. The ruin preserves the scale of the old kor world. Nahiri values the architecture as evidence of what has been lost; Nissa finds companionship in an elemental that guides them through the living growth inside it.

   They recover a key that can lead Nahiri to the Lithoform Core. When she uses its power to still the Roil, the elemental and surrounding life are destroyed. Nahiri sees relief from chaos. Nissa sees the cost of imposing that relief on a world whose creatures cannot be separated from its spirit.

   Nissa confronts her, then goes to Jace for help. Their conversation carries both distrust and grief for Gideon. Jace wants the artifact brought somewhere it can be studied; Nissa wants its threat ended. From the outset, the problem is not a shortage of concern for Zendikar. It is that concern gives each guardian a different definition of what may be sacrificed.

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3. 03

   Roads, Ropes and Survival

   Akiri and Zareth's journeys along the Umara reveal the work of rebuilding and the limits of a promise to save everyone.

   Before Nahiri's expedition, Akiri and Zareth explore the Umara River Gorge. Their partnership joins a line-slinger's discipline to a trickster's resourcefulness, while memories of the Eldrazi repeatedly intrude on ordinary travel. Akiri wants recovered knowledge to give Zendikar's people practical control over their future.

   The Magosi Portage shows recovery taking a less spectacular form: trade, food, rest and a usable passage through dangerous terrain. Akiri and Zareth escort a merfolk caravan down the steps. When a vast serpent attacks, Akiri tries to protect the travellers while searching for a way through an encounter that offers no clean victory.

   Zareth throws himself away from the serpent, forcing Akiri to catch him rather than stay with the trapped caravan. She saves him, but the travellers are lost. She saves him, but neither can turn the choice into a triumph. They are left with the same painful pattern that followed the Eldrazi battle: the pair survives, while others do not.

   These journeys give the later expedition its emotional stakes. Akiri's wish to heal Zendikar is grounded in work done beside other people. Zareth knows how rapidly an impossible choice can become an excuse. Their bond contains loyalty, guilt and disagreement long before a planeswalker promises a cure.

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4. 04

   A Promise at Sea Gate

   Nahiri recruits a seasoned party, while Zareth questions whether her restored world would have room for the people already living in it.

   At Sea Gate, Nahiri recruits Akiri, Zareth, Orah and Kaza to reach the Murasa Skyclave. The party has suffered enough loss to understand the appeal of a safer world. Nahiri has the key, ancient knowledge and a promise large enough to make another dangerous climb seem worthwhile.

   Zareth remains suspicious. He tests her through a game and tries to take the key, then privately asks Kesenya to find a buyer for the Core who would leave it unused. His concern is political as well as practical: an old world of fortresses and armies might restore power to some people by taking it from others.

   Meanwhile, Jace returns to a rebuilding Sea Gate and encounters survivors who bear the cost of its defence. His search for Nissa brings their strained friendship back into view. Neither the city nor their relationship can simply be returned to an earlier state. The proposed cure must answer to what exists now.

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5. 05

   The Price Below the Skyclave

   The Core destroys Zareth, and Nahiri silences Akiri's objection by taking the artifact and pushing her from the ruin.

   Akiri leads the climbers through Murasa's unstable ruin, and when the Skyclave's Roil sends Nahiri over an edge, Akiri and Zareth pull her back to safety. Her willingness to rescue Nahiri makes the lithomancer's later betrayal all the more consequential. They reach the Core, but the escape leaves Akiri, Zareth and Nahiri facing an elemental. Nahiri activates the artifact. Its force removes the threat and kills Zareth, leaving Akiri with evidence that a weapon powerful enough to change the plane can erase the people it is supposed to help. Akiri mourns Zareth as the person she loved, not simply a colleague lost on an expedition.

   Akiri takes the Core and refuses to hand it back. Nahiri immobilises her through a hedron, reclaims the artifact and pushes her over the edge. An apology accompanies the act, but does nothing to change it. Akiri's expertise earned her a place on the expedition; her objection makes her expendable.

   Nissa saves Akiri from the fall. The survivor tells her what happened and also saves Jace from Nahiri's attack. For the reader, Akiri's testimony changes the question from whether Nahiri might be dangerous to how the others will respond to harm already done. Zareth is not an abstract cost in an argument about the future.

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6. 06

   Two Guardians, One Living World

   At the Singing City, Nissa learns to use the Core to undo damage while preserving Zendikar's capacity to live and change.

   Nahiri heads for the Singing City, whose focal point could carry the Core's power through Zendikar's leylines. Jace follows and establishes an uneasy truce: they should understand the mechanism before using it. He is drawn both to Nahiri's vision of stability and to the possibilities of a powerful artifact.

   Nissa arrives with Ashaya and other elementals. The confrontation exposes the limits of Jace's mediation. After asking Nissa to trust his wish to take the Core to Ravnica, he tries to take control of her mind. Nissa breaks the mental connection and orders Ashaya to hold him down. His attempt to impose a decision cannot be mistaken for an impartial peacekeeping role, even though he is trying to prevent another catastrophe. Nahiri treats her memory of Zendikar as authority to reshape it; Nissa treats its present life as something that must be heard. The artifact becomes more than the weapon either initially imagined.

   When Nissa listens, Zendikar speaks through the Core. She uses it to undo damage rather than enforce an ancient design. The release destroys the Singing City and nearby forest, briefly making the result look like another disaster. Then the elementals rise with renewed strength, new growth appears and the blighted land begins to heal.

   The Core falls inert. Nissa returns toward Bala Ged with a confidence built on her own relationship with the plane, while Jace recognises his mistakes. Healing has come with destruction and has not restored everything lost. The important distinction is that Zendikar keeps a future beyond any one guardian's preferred image of it.

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7. 07

   Roots, Relics and the Cost of Discovery

   Obuun and Anowon find different answers to the same question: how can the past help the living without demanding their surrender?

   In the Guum Wilds, Obuun struggles to reconnect with his Mul Daya ancestors after life among the kor. Seeking revenge on surrakar leads him beneath Riverroot, where he finds ancestral remains and awakens a connection to the land. Recovering the bones by force would uproot the tree that shelters his community.

   Obuun stops short of that destruction. His mother's spirit challenges the need to prove himself through recklessness, and his experience opens a relationship with Riverroot that anger had kept closed. The story offers a local counterpart to Nissa's choice: memory can guide belonging without requiring the living world to be broken around it.

   Anowon enters an Ondu Skyclave with hired adventurers to confront Grakmaw. The ruin reveals ancient kor experimentation and weapons research. A recovered potion helps the party overcome the hydra, yet the adventurers recognise that such knowledge could become a threat in someone else's hands.

   Placed together, these expeditions make the Skyclaves more than treasure sites. Their records require interpretation, their devices require judgment and their histories never grant automatic permission to repeat old methods. Zendikar Rising leaves that responsibility with everyone who explores the plane, not only with the three planeswalkers who fought over its most powerful relic.

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