Is it wrong to find balance with your passions?  You grow up believing that to truly love something is to give it your entire heart, your whole being. To do any less is an argument against your investment. If you love a work, surely that must mean you want more. In our current culture to be a fan is to be an advocate for the perpetual narrative.

Why on earth would you ever want your favourite world to go away. Why would you want any story to end?

There are times, however, when a work is singular. It could be part of a greater tapestry of a standalone piece that arrests your attention, lives in your mind and becomes the bar in which all else is measured. For years, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been a fixation for me, the only thing I would point to when asked about my favourite book. The novel has received a couple of companion works in the same universe and an adaptation, but much like Suzanna Clarke’s later, slighter Piranesi it stands for itself. The world is weighty¹, but it is self-contained. It doesn’t hurt that it is rife with another one of my interests, birds².

Clarke’s novel is rarely far from my mind, especially during the rollout of Reality Fracture’s captivating story by Alison Lührs³. I was drawn back to the game with 2015’s Magic Origins and Jace was one of the few cards from that time that I have managed to hang onto over the years. In the ever-churning release schedule, there has been nothing cooler than to find one of my favourite pieces of Magic art, with my favourite planeswalker no less, will be released this year.

Johnston’s work serves as a welcome reminder even in a set echoing the past, Magic isn’t content to rest on its legacy. Awe inspiring work comes from the talented artists, writers and designers lending their gifts to the game every year and the efforts are emotional, empowering, or even downright perplexing. Even better, Johnston sneaks in a few birds.

I’m on the other side of thirty, which requires me to pickup the binoculars, a guidebook and get into birding. My growing interest in ornithology doesn’t take away from the unnatural behaviour of birds, or even a somewhat irrational unease I have around them. Mammals are plenty scary give their size and tendency to have sharp claws and teeth, but how well can you understand the mind of a bird?

They don’t warn you before moving to a big city about the flocks of pigeons loitering around downtown⁴. At least once a week, I’ll watch a passerby cross to the other side of the street to avoid the silent, watchful bids. Hitchcock knew our aversion and his film exacerbated a longstanding fear rather than bringing it into the world⁵.

Then there’s the other side, perhaps more recent, perhaps as unknowable as birds. Call it the mounting pseudo-satirical conspiracy on the reality of birds. A laughable idea⁶ but there are plenty of other populous animals that could have been woven into the story of omnipresent drone masquerading as wildlife, but we chose birds. They feel so apart from us, strange relatives in the animal kingdom, but remain fascinating in both life and symbol. What does it say about a man who identifies with a bird?

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell concerns itself with the respectability of magic and magicians in proper English society. All the while, birds perch on the margins. Magic is gone from the isle, leaving on the heels of John Uskglass, the Raven King, and not to return until he steps again on proper English shores. Gilbert Norell is dismissive, perhaps frightened, by the hold the mythic Raven King holds over England and anyone who fancies themselves a magician. Such attitudes are not held by his protégé Jonathan Strange, who looks to the legend of the Raven King for how one with mastery over magic should conduct themselves. Strange wants to explore the limits of the arcane. He’s willing to push the bounds of not only polite society, but reality itself. In doing so, he begins to lose himself.

In pursuit of discovering the truth of the Raven King, Jonathan Strange parcels away bits of himself for the truth. So obsessed with the revival of English magic, after whether the mystical and psychological stress of the war, Strange set all considerations for his life and beloved wife aside to achieve what many in his circle deem impossible — the reinvigoration of English magic and return of the Raven King.

After repelling the Phyrexian Invasion, Jace shatters himself while attempting to rewrite reality into a state free from the sorrow and pain he believes comes from pivotal events in a tumultuous multiversal history. Instead, he creates a world of his own, a hollow imitation of the Blind Eternities, and fills it with birds. The set hasn’t been fully revealed⁷ but one of the distressing aesthetic choices in Reality Fracture is the proliferation of Jace, including in his avian sentries.

Big Brother analogies aside, one aspect I keep returning to is his ever-present blue eyes. There have been dozens of interpretations of Beleren and one of his defining characteristics are his pupils being subsumed by violent blue light. In some cases, this provides the planeswalker a mystique⁸ and he is far from the only character to have this trait, but in Reality Fracture, it’s, well, unnerving. There is nothing identifiably human in vacant blue stare of the all-powerful telepath. When his expression changes from the vacant stare depicted in much of the art, he isn’t happy; he’s in pain.

Note: ahead there are light spoilers for the now-concluded set story

The Jace rebuilding the multiverse is a fraction of himself, the totality broken and banished at the outset of the story. As readers we are left to wonder whether his sanity has been imprisoned with another piece. This isn’t the Jace who sat on the beach with Vraska or stepped into the role of the Guildpact. This iteration in unknowable.

Wizards could have opted for a dramatic alteration of Jace as he went further down the path of multiversal annihilation⁹, Mr. Hyde slowly overtaking the all-too ambitious Dr. Jekyll. This embodiment of Jace’s fracturing mind and decline would have made for some compelling artwork, but the subtlety of Lührs’ characterization would have been lost if he became another megalomaniacal villain of the Bind Eternities. Much like Jonathan Strange, the tragedy of Jace is our belief that there is still a decent person within their obsessive pursuit. In both stories, there are flashes of the man they once were, though it difficult to know until the end whether they are too far gone.

The story of Jace Beleren isn’t contained to a single novel or author, though Lührs is remarkable in her characterization of the planeswalker. His life has stretched across Magic history and, as players, we have seen him develop into one of the game’s most fascinating protagonists. Given the conclusion of Reality Fracture, the future is uncertain for Jace and where the greater narrative will go. We know about the sets coming in 2027, regardless of whether Jace will make an appearance or how the reverberations of the Echoverse will be felt through the Blind Eternities. If Jace’s story is allowed to end, it was a fitting one, and that another will fill the void he left behind, and that they’re waiting in the wings.