MTG: Lore of the Multiverse – Glissa, the Unwilling Prophet
The MTG world has its fair share of unfair shakes, but none took that unfairness in stride quite like Glissa Sunseeker.
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The metallic world of Mirrodin/Argentum has seen more than its fair share of conflict in the relatively short years of its existence. From the twisted influence of the Mirrari on its steward Memnarch to the introduction of Phyrexian oil, the plane has gone through the ringer. Standing at the heart of this conflict is a young Viridian Elf named Glissa Sunseeker.
This young hero was responsible for the birth of Mirrodin’s true glory; she defeated its greatest threat and heralded its ultimate destruction. If not for the actions of Glissa and her comrades, Mirrodin would have been a Planeswalker’s deathtrap, but Phyrexia would have slumbered. Whether or not she made the right call is ancient history.
The Elf of Black Metal
Glissa was born in the Tangle, the realm of the Viridian Elves on Mirrodin. From an early age, she was treated with disdain by her fellows, both for her blatant distrust of the ruling Trolls and for the dark metal that covered her body. Where most elves were born with copper metallic scale, Glissa’s was dark black, almost resembling darksteel. However, for all their dislike, the elves could not dismiss that Glissa was the greatest of all their hunters. She possessed an almost preternatural gift for seeking out prey.
Due to her distrust of the trolls, she was rarely present at the rituals they enacted to ease the minds of the elves. She began to have vivid hallucinations of forests made of wood instead of metal, a material she’d never seen, and felt the glow of life-giving energy. At this time, Mirrodin only had four suns, and Green mana was almost nonexistent. Eventually, she began to ignore her hallucinations and simply treated them as aspects of her daily life.
Paranoia Justified
One night, as she was out on the hunt, she was abducted by the trolls of Tel-Jilad. They brought her to a mysterious troll with no metal on his body, who introduced himself as Chunth. Chunth told her that he had received a vision of Glissa’s importance to the plane, and had taken her to keep her safe. Little trusting the words of the trolls, Glissa grabbed a weapon and escaped their clutches. However, when she returned to the Tangle, she saw to her horror that the trolls had been right.
Her home was in ruins, with the bodies of her fellow elves littering the ground as destructive Levelers devastated her village. Glissa struck out against the Levelers, and was able to drive them off, but not before she was badly injured. When she awoke, she was deep underground in a massive cave. It was here that she met the goblin Slobad, a genius machist who helped free her from the subterranean prison. Her wound had become badly infected, and she needed healing quickly. Knowing the skills of the leonin, Slobad led Glissa across the Glimmervoid to Taj-Nar, the leonin capital city.
The Leonin Kha
In the leonin lands, Glissa met and befriended the ruling Kha, Raksha Goldencub. While tending her wound, Raksha told her he had been attacked at the exact same time. He had fended off the Levelers, but thought it no mere coincidence that their attacks had been simultaneous. Unbeknownst to them, they both had latent Planeswalker sparks, and a dark entity was trying to trigger their activation. Raksha agreed to help Glissa and Slobad uncover their secret enemy.
The party traveled to the dark lands of Mephidross, where they encountered a deactivated golem. Slobad repaired him, and he revealed himself to be a sentient creature named Bosh. With Bosh’s help, they made their way to the center of the Dross, where they encountered the necromancer Geth. They soundly defeated him, and he pointed them in the direction of the Quicksilver Sea.
There, they encountered the Lumengrid mage Bruenna. She joined the group in hopes of supplanting the Vedalken overseers who enslaved her people. Riding inside Bosh’s iron frame, they crossed the Quicksilver Sea and faced the Overseer Pontifex, who they believed to be behind the attacks. However, when he died, a more sinister threat was revealed as a guardian became a tyrant
The True Enemy
Glissa discovered that Memnarch, the golem Karn had left to guard Mirrodin, had gone insane. She searched across Mirrodin for the legendary Kaldra artifacts, bringing them together to summon the Kaldra Avatar, an artificial being of extraordinary power. She journeyed to the core to face Memnarch with the Avatar, but his mastery over artifice gave him control over the Avatar. It turned on Glissa and attacked her. She likely would have died if not for the eruption of the Green Sun from Mirrodin’s core. Memnarch was seeking to steal her latent spark for his own, but in the chaos of the Sun’s birth, she escaped.
She returned to the Tangle, but was immediately arrested for the murder of her parents. Her sister, Lyese, had taken control of the tribe, and blamed her for the deaths of their family. However, during her tribunal, another pod of Levelers attacked, and she was cleared. Rallying the support of her friends and family, she returned to the Dross to try and get Geth on their side. When she arrived, however, she found that Geth had been supplanted, and a time bubble encased her. She emerged five years later to find her plane changed. Her sister was at the head of the alliance, and all the allied forces of Mirrodin had barely withstood Memnarch’s constant assaults.
The Final Blow
Glissa dove back into the heart of Mirrodin to face the mad golem. She found a twisted planeswalking machine powered by her goblin friend Slobad. Memnarch planned to power this machine with the souls of all those he had slain and steal Glissa’s spark. Filled with rage, she tackled Memnarch into the core. Inadvertently, she transferred her latent spark into Slobad, thanks to the machine.
Slobad ran from the core, where he met a kind silver golem. This golem introduced himself as Karn, Argentum’s creator, and told Slobad what had happened. Without a second thought, Slobad relinquished his spark to not only return Glissa to life but restore the stolen lives of those Memnarch and Karn had brought in to populate Argentum. Raksha and several others were returned to their original home planes. Karn left Glissa, Slobad, and the rejuvenated Geth in charge of Mirrodin. Thinking his work was done, Karn again abandoned the plane he had created.
The Traitor
When Glissa and Slobad left the core, a panicked group of goblins attacked them. She and Slobad were separated, and she retreated back to the core, where a latent Memnite kept her in stasis. Unfortunately, all those who could speak for her good deeds had vanished from the plane, and those who remained blamed her for Mirrodin’s woes. They took to calling her “the Traitor” and blamed her for the disappearance of the trolls.
As the Phyrexian oil Karn had inadvertently left behind began to seep into the core, Glissa became corrupted. Her black metallic parts were turned to copper at last, but not in the way she would have liked. When she finally emerged, she was found by Vorinclex, and compleated. She turned her rage on those she had once sought to protect and became Vorinclex’s finest warrior. Glissa happily helped Vorinclex create deadlier predators for his Hunter’s Maze, and when the Planeswalkers attacked, she was able to subdue Lukka and Nissa and bring them before the Praetors.
When Phyrexia was sealed from the Multiverse, Glissa’s fate was unknown. Whether she perished in the battle or lives in the dying plane still is anyone’s guess.
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