A world shattered into five shards. Alara was once a single plane, but an ancient catastrophe split it into five distinct realms, each with access to only three of the five colors of mana. Now, after millennia of separation, the shards are beginning to converge — and chaos ensues.
This episode explores the plane of Alara and the Conflux crisis that drew the attention of Nicol Bolas himself.
[lore_illustration url="https://images.ctfassets.net/s5n2t79q9icq/5S5s5S5s5S5s5S5s5S/5S5s5S5s5S5s5S5s5S5s5S/alara-reborn.jpg" alt="The five shards of Alara converging" caption="The Conflux: when the five shards of Alara come together, chaos reigns. Art: Wizards of the Coast" ]The Five Shards
Each shard of Alara had developed its own culture, its own magic, its own worldview. Without contact with the other colors of mana, each realm had evolved in unique ways:
Bant — The Realm of Light
Bant knew only white, blue, and green. It was a world of knights, castles, and guardian angels. Honor was the highest virtue, and conflicts were settled through ritual duels called Conflux.
The inhabitants of Bant had never known natural death from disease or old age — angels watched over them. They had never known gratuitous cruelty or betrayal. Their world was, in many ways, a paradise.
Esper — The Realm of Artifice
Esper knew only white, blue, and black. It was a world of mages and artificers who had perfected the art of replacing flesh with metal — etherium, a magical alloy unique to their shard.
The inhabitants of Esper aspired to perfection through augmentation. Every citizen had at least one part of their body replaced with etherium. The most powerful were almost entirely mechanical.
Grixis — The Realm of the Dead
Grixis knew only blue, black, and red. It was a world of necromancers and demons, where life itself was a rare and precious resource.
Deprived of white and green mana — the colors of life — Grixis was a dying world. Its inhabitants survived by stealing the life force of others, animating the dead, and making pacts with demonic entities.
Jund — The Realm of Predators
Jund knew only black, red, and green. It was a world of volcanoes and jungles, dominated by massive dragons that regarded everything else as food.
Survival on Jund was a constant struggle. Humans lived in nomadic tribes, always on the move to escape predators. Strength was the only recognized virtue.
Naya — The Realm of Giants
Naya knew only red, green, and white. It was a world of lush forests and titanic creatures — behemoths, some of which were as large as mountains.
The elves of Naya worshipped these giants as divine manifestations. Their society was organized around respect for nature and its most imposing creatures.
The Conflux
After millennia of separation, the five shards began to converge. The boundaries between worlds thinned. Creatures from one shard appeared in another. Mana, once limited to three colors per shard, began to flow freely.
This Conflux was no accident. It had been orchestrated by an ancient power who saw in this event an opportunity for unprecedented power.
Nicol Bolas had found Alara.
Bolas's Plan
The ancient dragon had discovered that at the moment of the Conflux, a colossal amount of mana would be released — enough to restore some of the powers he had lost during the Mending.
Bolas manipulated events to maximize chaos. He stoked conflicts between the shards, ensuring the Conflux would be as violent as possible. The more deaths, the more mana to absorb.
The Heroes of Alara
Faced with this threat, heroes from each shard united. Ajani Goldmane, a leonin from Naya whose planeswalker spark awakened during the Conflux, became the leader of this resistance.
Ajani had a personal reason to fight Bolas: the dragon had manipulated his own brother, Jazal, causing his death. This tragedy transformed Ajani from a pacifist into a determined warrior.
The Battle for Alara
The Conflux culminated in an apocalyptic war. The armies of the five shards clashed in a chaos of magic and violence. The knights of Bant fought the undead of Grixis. The dragons of Jund battled the behemoths of Naya.
At the center of it all, Bolas absorbed the energy released by so much death and destruction. The dragon grew more powerful with every passing moment.
Ajani and his allies eventually managed to interrupt Bolas's ritual, but they could not stop it completely. The dragon escaped, significantly strengthened but not as powerful as he had hoped.
The Aftermath
Alara was reunified — the five shards merged into a single world. But this reunification was traumatic. Cultures that had never known of each other's existence were suddenly confronted with realities they could not understand.
The inhabitants of Bant had to learn of the existence of evil. The mages of Esper discovered the limits of their rationality in the face of green magic. The predators of Jund found new prey — and new predators.
As for Bolas, his partial victory over Alara was only a step in a much larger plan. The powers he had absorbed would serve even more ambitious projects.
In the next episode...
Episode 8c: Scars of Mirrodin
Mirrodin, the metal world created by Karn, is infected by a Phyrexian corruption. What begins as an isolated infection becomes a full-scale invasion, transforming the plane into New Phyrexia. The praetors emerge, and a new era of terror begins.
The corruption of Phyrexia was never truly defeated — it was simply biding its time...
Sources
- MTG Wiki: Alara — The history of the plane and its shards
- MTG Wiki: Conflux — The reunification of the five shards
- Shards of Alara (Magic expansion, 2008) — The five separate shards
- Conflux (Magic expansion, 2009) — The convergence
- Alara Reborn (Magic expansion, 2009) — The new unified world
