Core of Paradise

Core of Paradise
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Ixalan's Core.jpg}}|250px]]
Information
Plane	Ixalan
Status	Controlled by the Oltec

The Core of Paradise is the core of Ixalan. It is ruled by the Oltec.

Description

The Core of Paradise is a massive, hollow inverted sphere with a sun, Chimil, at its center. The sun is the plane's source of cosmium. It is a paradise of lush forests, mountains, valleys, freshwater oceans, rivers, and rolling plains. With a diameter of roughly 22 kilometers (13.7 mi), it has an internal surface area of around 1520 km² (587 mi²). Because of its small size, there is no visible horizon as such; the land rises in a slow arc, disappearing into the hazy distance above and reappearing on the opposite horizon. Gravity stays consistently down relative to the star, Chimil, that floats in the center of the Core. The gravity shift of entering the core was described by Quintorius Kand as a dizzying effect similar to planeswalking.

The Core is the oldest place on Ixalan. It is the birthplace of humanity, the gods, and likely the merfolk and Malamet. The only surviving civilization inhabiting the Core, the Oltec, are the ancestors of the Sun Empire.

History

Fourth Age

Little is known about the Fourth Age, and even less about the ages preceding it. The last survivor of the Fourth People was merely a mortal who would later be known as Aclazotz. His fear of death drove him to become godlike: he is understood by the Oltec to have slaughtered all others but himself and then feasted on their blood to sustain himself through "the ending of all things," finding a way into the divine nothingness where the next realm was being shaped.

Fifth Age

At the dawning of the Fifth Age, the Deep Gods, the children of Chimil, were born into the new world. Before the last God could emerge, Aclazotz slew him, eating him and taking his place. The first humans on the plane of Ixalan awoke inside the Core of Paradise under Chimil, and understood her to be their creator. They understood through her that the world was new, humanity was new, and yet they would be called the Komon Winaq, or the Fifth People.

The Komon Winaq spread out among the vast tracts and regions of this idyll, setting to the fields and jungles to draw from them the necessaries to support their lives. Their needs met by the bounty of the Core, the Komon Winaq could find time for leisure and study. They prized knowledge, so they set about mapping and charting the shape of this world. They developed a written language to record what they saw, numbers to count and measure what they encountered and came to understand the shape of paradise. This project produced the first figure of the Komon legend: Tan Jolom, the worldwalker. Tan Jolom was the first of the Komon Winaq to complete a circumnavigation of the Core and confirm that the world was a sphere built around a star.

Death, in this era of the Fifth People, was not a terror to the living. The Core was paradise: there was not an afterlife hidden from the waking world. Echoes, the spirits of those passed beyond, walked among the living: the veil between life and the afterlife was thin as gossamer. For Tan Jolom, the prospect of exploring the afterlife was simply another chance at adventure: So, he became an Echo and departed for the afterlife, seeking the Fourth World beyond its borders. Guided by a whispering voice, he passed to the realm of spirits, gods, demons, and devils, where he searched for the Deep Gods — Chimil's children — hoping to tell them that their people had mapped the Core and awaited their return.

Whispering War

Dark creatures from the afterlife slipped into the world through the door left open by Tan Jolom, none more terrible than the final child of the Fourth People: Aclazotz, the whisperer who had promised to show the worldwalker to the land of the Fourth People. He knew the power that fear could grant him, so he hardened the gossamer veil between life and death: the dead would no longer become Echoes, and the living recognized their mortality. Death became something to grieve and fear, and Aclazotz fed off that fear. In secret, he hunted the most terrified, bereaved, and desperate, and upon trapping them, he whispered his dark promise: give yourselves to me, and you will live forever.

Grief, fear, death, and whispers of an escape from that end spread through the Core. Pilgrims and evangelists raged through cities, forming cults intended to lure Aclazotz out into the light. Their desperate rituals horrified much of the Komon Winaq. When elders and leaders first attempted to stop them, Aclazotz's cults fought back, and the fields and cities of the Komon raged with violence.

The Whispering War ended after the other Deep Gods arrived and intervened. First to emerge was Ojer Axonil, who was drawn to the Core by the familiar sounds of battle. Axonil reached back into the firmament and warned his elder sibling, Ojer Taq, of what was happening in the Core. Then, he entered the Whispering War against Aclazotz, raising a company of one thousand champions to follow him into battle. When Aclazotz attempted to kill Taq, Axonil stopped the bat god and fought him in a climactic final battle. Axonil and his Thousand Moons faced down Aclazotz and his blood drinkers in their deepest lairs, where the god of fury and strength tore out one of Aclazotz's eyes and imprisoned him.

Age of the Sun

The veil of life and death once more thinned, allowing the return of honored Echoes. The foundations of Oteclan, the capital city of the Komon Winaq, were set on the shores of a great lake, Wachibal. As Ojer Taq looked on, the Komon Winaq built a golden age that lasted for millennia: this was the Age of the Sun. The Age of the Sun ended with the arrival of interplanar beings known as the Fomori or colonizers, and later named the Kisik by the Komon, an evocative word meant to convey these new beings' fearsome appearance and Imperial ambition.

Days later, one of these dark shards opened and from it dropped a smaller, cylindrical vessel. From it stepped a giant that spoke the Komon language and pleaded for the Komon to allow his people to shelter here in this paradise. The Kisik established de facto dominion over the Core, ruling from their shard ships which remained suspended in the sky around Chimil. More shards arrived, and in time, the Fomori completed their shell around Chimil, and total darkness fell throughout the Core. This occlusion had the secondary effect of separating the Komon from Chimil's children, the Deep Gods.

Night War

320 years of darkness followed, and the colonizers ruled the Core. Resistance to the colonizers sparked across the Core, first from Echoes, then by the living. One heroic figure stood above the rest: Olanem Teq, the Nine Hundredth Moon. From the city of Oq'tinimit, Teq led the resistance, raiding Fomori cylinders, capturing individual Fomori agents, and eventually making their way up to Chimil where they would strike at the heart of the colonizers.

In the final days of the war, when Komon warriors landed on the dark shards caging Chimil, the star was able to help them. Chimil, too, had been fighting back, lashing the inside of her cage with terrible, mighty energies. The shards were weak, attempting to heal through unknown magics but failing. The disruption presented by the resistance attacks across the Core hampered Fomori infrastructure; liberatory attacks on key shards by brave Komon warriors proved to be too much for the Fomori prison. Chimil shattered one shard, then another, and then a cascade began. Cosmium lashed out from Chimil, blasting away the Fomori while innervating the Komon — those present that day became semi-divine figures in their own right — the first angels of Ixalan. The Deep Gods followed, finally able to hear their mother's cry and their people's pleas.

The war ended with the Fomori expelled from the Core, leaving behind the shattered ruins of their shard-ships in orbit around Chimil, as well as various smaller installations and half-complete projects across the Core. Over the ages, the Komon worked to repair many of these wounds, but even in the present, some ruins remain.

First Exodus

As the Komon Winaq grew to recognize the extent of the world below their own, an age of exploration began, followed by an age of migration and settlement. Over centuries, hundreds of thousands of Komon Winaq traveled to the plane's surface, later becoming the Sun Empire. Those those who stayed behind began to call themselves Oltec. According to the Malamet, they and the merfolk fought alongside the Komon in the Night War, joining them on the surface afterward. After losing their empires to the nascent Sun Empire, the Malamet were later driven back into the caverns.

Birth of the Mycotyrant

Many centuries after the first exodus period, an outbreak struck Topizielo, one of the Komon's primary cities in the caverns. Oltec scientists in the Core determined that this disease was fungal, spread by spores, and highly advanced — possibly some living relic of the Fomori, loosed outside of the Core in eons past. This fungus was the beginning of the mycoids. Without any barriers to stop them, they rapidly began to spread through the caverns. Oltec and Komon humans worked together to try and stop the spread of the mycoids, but they could not. Whole civilizations and cultures fell to the infection, and then to the increasingly more advanced and larger forms of mycoids. The Komon and Oltec in the caverns fled, finding safety outside of the caverns. These settlers emerged aboveground on the continent that would later be called Ixalan, the ancient ancestors of the people who would create the Sun Empire. Those who remained in the caverns sealed all entrances to the Core to protect it from the spread of the mycoids.

Quiet Age

While the Core avoided the Phyrexian invasion, no part of the plane's surface was spared. In the aftermath of the Invasion, entrances to the plane's core were discovered across the war-torn continent of Ixalan. After the death of the Deeproot Tree, thousands of merfolk bands from across the plane gathered in Matzalantli. Both Sun Empire and Legion of Dusk entered the core, meeting the Oltec for the first time since the core was sealed. The latter faction freed Aclazotz, who then attempted to snuff out the plane's inner sun. At the same time, the mycoid hivemind known as the Mycotyrant attacked the Oltec. While the god and the fungus were defeated, both escaped to the plane's surface.

Meanwhile, the factions of the surface continued vying for power. A second Dawn Fleet was constructed in Queen's Bay in the Sun Empire, along with dozens of mechanoquetzacama, in preparation for an invasion of Torrezon. Hoping to prevent war, the emperor's sister Caztaca Huicintli plotted to depose her bellicose brother Atlacan, while Saint Elenda of Garrano hoped to subvert the rising faction under Vona, the Antifex. Admiral Beckett Brass crashed a meeting of the two factions, agreeing to support their causes in exchange for a Brazen Coalition state in the ocean between the two.

Notable locations

• Chimil, "the Riven Star," the star at the center of the Core. Worshiped by the Oltec for millennia.
  • The Cosmium Reefs. the long tail of cosmium gems, rare metals, and the dust of ruined Coin Empire shards orbiting around and trailing behind Chimil. The cosmium reefs are dangerous, but a key part of the Oltec coming-of-age ritual.
• Oteclan, capital city of the Oltec. A sprawling communal archology of canals, temples, large dormitories, markets, and various industrial sites. Built on the shores of Lake Wachibal, Oteclan is composed of a large central city and many satellites, all linked by great, high causeways and public cable cars. Oteclan is an open city: it is always busy with trade, foot traffic, migrants, pilgrimages, adventurers, and people going about their daily lives. Oteclan is the blueprint for all other Oltec cities: built in a circular arrangement as a stylized representation of Chimil and, in later years, the cosmium reefs that trail behind her.
  • The Night War memorial contains remains of Coin Empire colonizers.
  • The Temple of Civilization, temple to Ojer Taq and largest temple complex in the Core. It stands opposite the Temple of Cyclical Time.
  • The Temple of Cultivation, temple to Ojer Kaslem.
  • The Temple of Cyclical Time, temple to Ojer Pakpatiq and second largest temple complex in the Core. It stands opposite the Temple of Civilization.
  • The Temple of Power, temple to Ojer Axonil.
• Oq'tinimit, a citadel satellite of Oteclan.
• The Barracks of the Thousand Moons. Located in a valley, guarding the inside door of the door at Matzalantli. In a nearby town, a pyramid rises several stories, with a large, spiked disk at the top. Shorter buildings are scattered around it. Aqueducts wind their way through the town, pooling in stone reservoirs.
  • The Thousand Moons Smithy, where gnomes forge cosmium-infused weapons.
• A fetid swamp, where followers of Aclazotz dwell. The swamp features a thick fog and ankle-deep mud with a sulfuric smell and is devoid of animal life. It leads to a cave that appears nondescript from the outside. Inside the cave, a tunnel that smells strongly of corpses ends with a door ringed by glyphs. Followers of Aclazotz can prove their allegiance by enduring pain, causing the door to open by rolling to the side. Within, a proper temple is contained, with tall columns, carved walls, and swarms of bats. After Aclazotz's escape, the temple's location was revealed when bolts of red lightning erupted from within the mountain.
  • The Temple of the Dead
• Colony's End, an odd, haunted alpine landscape that surrounds the largest fallen shard of Chimil's shell. The shard contains a remnant of a Coin Empire ship. Half of the circular ship juts from the side of a mountain in the center of the zone, seemingly cast from a single piece of metal. Ancient Echoes wander this area.
• The Mututik Towers, the communication towers that stand in regular intervals throughout the Core, connecting every Oltec city. These towers are also small population centers, often surrounded by towns that are named after the tower, rolling fields where farmers cultivate maize, legumes, and squash, and connected by well-kept dirt roads and paths.
• The Myriad Pools
  • The Everflowing Well

In-game references

Represented in:

• The Core

Associated cards:

• Glimpse the Core

Depicted in:

• Windswept Heath (Modern Horizons III)

Referred to:

• Apex Observatory
• Cartographer's Companion
• Curious Altisaur
• Dusk's Landing
• Farseek (Lost Caverns Commander)
• Forgotten Monument
• Guardian of the Great Door
• Malicious Eclipse
• Merfolk Tunnel-Guide
• Oteclan Levitator
• Out of Air
• Scalesoul Gnome

^† Scryfall does not record flavor text for digital cards. See Alchemy: Ixalan/Flavor text