MTG's Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos excerpt reveals a multiverse in recovery

Seanan McGuire’s new Magic novel is set in the multiverse's most famous magical school

Written by Seanan McGuire, Omens of Chaos is Magic’s first full-length novel since 2019’s two War of the Spark books, Ravnica and Forsaken. The story takes place in the aftermath of the Phyrexian Invasion, in the streets of New Capenna. Everything changes when a young shield mage named Eula Blue receives an invitation to join the new class of students at Strixhaven. Like many of Magic’s planes, Arcavios (where Strixhaven is located) is still recovering from the invasion. But with omenpaths now making interplanar travel far more accessible, Strixhaven has invited a wide variety of new students to enroll.

“When Wizards of the Coast gave me the go-ahead to write the first long-form Magic: The Gathering novel since 2019, I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolic as I say that it was a dream come true,” author Seanan McGuire told Polygon via email. “I’ve been writing for Magic Story (Magic’s free online story articles: give them a gander) since Midnight Hunt in 2021, and I started asking about full-length books almost as soon as I began. Magic Story is an incredible sandbox, and has produced some genuinely fantastic work, but we’re always constrained by tight word counts and the limitations of our space. I wanted room to stretch and explore and tell a story that wasn’t tightly wedded to a specific set.”

While the timing and the setting draw a clear link between Secrets of Strixhaven and Omens of Chaos, the novel introduces a host of new characters from across the multiverse. McGuire dreams of establishing this as a new series of books with up to four titles, each exploring one of the students introduced in Omens. But that all begins now.

“Writing in Magic’s multiverse is always a joy, and meeting these students was doubly so,” McGuire said. “I am so grateful for this opportunity, and I can’t wait to share them with the rest of the Magic community.”

In the wake of the book’s April 7 release, Polygon is sharing an excerpt from the novel’s prologue, which centers on Planeswalker Kasmina as she grapples with the aftermath of the invasion. (And anybody who wants to follow that up with an excerpt of chapter one, Wizards of the Coast has that available as well.)

Prologue

Falling Stars

Kasmina isn’t sure she’s had a single other dream since the Phyrexian Invasion shattered the Multiverse as she knew it—since everything changed. She’s never been much of a dreamer, preferring to keep her flights of fancy to her waking hours, where the shifting stars and unfamiliar skies of the planes she walked between always satisfied her need for escape. What need for dreams when you live in them?

But now, every night when she sleeps, she finds herself back under the endlessly spiraling expanse of the Blind Eternities, buffeted by winds blowing from nowhere, everything around her painted in colors her eyes no longer understand. The Blind Eternities never look the same twice, for all that the dream they hang from is unvarying: change is the nature of the Blind Eternities, and here, in dreams, she sees them only as clearly as a non-Planeswalker ever can.

In her dream, she carries a candle, thin and ocean blue and guttering in the wind. She cups her hand around it as she searches for safety, for shelter, for someplace she can protect the flame, but there is nothing to hide her and nowhere she can go. She is lost.

She is alone.

As the dream progresses, the Blind Eternities sicken and shudder, fissures forming like cracks in the substance of creation itself, splitting the colors and swirling shapes asunder—cracks that, when she looks more closely, become the roots of Phyrexia’s mighty Invasion Tree, their terrible Realmbreaker. They grow denser and denser, tangling more and more tightly around one another until the Blind Eternities are all but consumed and only the horrors of the invasion remain.

And she runs.

Night after night, knowing it won’t save her, she runs, fleeing across formless ground under a root-scarred sky, unable to reach deep enough into herself to finish the transit she must have been attempting when she was trapped here, unable to escape the fast-approaching disaster.

And then the roots close over the last of the Blind Eternities, blocking their light, leaving only the candle in her hands. Until her flight hooks her toe under a root and sends her sprawling, and her candle hits the ground, and the flame is lost.

She wakes gasping and clutching her chest, her heart as hollow as an eggshell, the flame that once burned there as dead as her candle, extinguished in the dark.

It’s been months since she’s had a decent night’s sleep. She’s beginning to think she’ll never sleep properly again. She doesn’t deserve to rest.

She failed. She was entrusted with the legacy of all the Planeswalkers who came before her and with the preservation of the Multiverse, and she failed both her tasks and didn’t even see her failure coming. She deserves the emptiness in her chest and the sleepless nights in her room.

But the Multiverse deserves a chance to survive.

Breathing hard, her mind still swimming with a haze of shattered images, she rises from her bed. She doesn’t bother turning on the light; two of her owls are here, and borrowing their eyes is as easy as opening her own. She walks to her desk, reaching for pen and paper.

The administration listened when she recommended the Kenriths. It’s time for something larger now, something more important. And they’ll listen. Even if she has to change their minds herself, they’ll listen.

The work doesn’t end this way.

The work is just beginning.