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.