Jace Beleren dies in Vraska’s arms. He gets a moment of being himself first, whole for the first time since he shattered, long enough to understand that the spell devouring the Multiverse is wired directly to his own life. Then he’s gone.
And that’s where the story gets good.
Wizards of the Coast has already installed his replacement in the short stories for the upcoming Reality Fracture set, and she’s not a resurrection or a copy. She’s a Strixhaven first-year who betrayed her friends one storyline ago.
Warning: Spoilers for the plot of Reality Fracture follow.
The mind mage turned heel
Jace has spent nearly two decades at the center of Magic: The Gathering. The most powerful mind mage in the Multiverse, a member of Gatewatch, a guy who spent his life defending worlds from every threat the game could invent alongside Chandra Nalaar and Liliana Vess. Those three are the closest thing the trading card game has to mascots, recognizable faces parked at the front of the ongoing narrative.
Then Jace turned up as the villain of Reality Fracture.
Wind the clock back. In the sixth short story covering 2025’s Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Jace works out that the Meditation Realm is a “substrate to all reality” that is “moldable by sheer force of will.” Using the magical power of the dragon Ugin’s Spirit Gem, he tried to rewrite reality and undo decades of disasters and deaths.
No Eldrazi. No Nicol Bolas. Vraska never turned Phyrexian. It’s the kind of plan that sounds reasonable right up until you say it out loud. Jace cast the spell, “shattered like glass” and apparently died.
One fragment took the wheel
Reality Fracture reveals what happened instead. Jace’s psyche fractured, and those pieces managed to build him a new body. One piece, the Theorist, seized complete control and started deleting the other aspects of his personality until only itself remained.
What’s left is cold and precise. The Theorist built an alternate reality called the Echoverse and set out to replace the core Multiverse with it, which would erase events like the War of the Spark and the Invasion of New Phyrexia from having ever happened.
Inside the Echoverse he raised a magical school called Hexhaven, a dark mirror of Strixhaven, and stocked it with Echoverse variants of characters like Liliana.
He also made one authentic person out of pieces of himself. Her name is Tamira, Tam for short, and she was always his backup plan for living on after his eventual death. In some sense, anyway.
You’ve already met her, and she already stabbed you in the back
Tam showed up in the Lorwyn Eclipsed storyline as a gifted but reserved first-year at Strixhaven, reading like another levelheaded student making new friends. As a student of Quandrix College she could bend probability and cut through problems with reality-warping magic.
Her friends noticed something off. She chose cold logic over compassion every time, and it pushed them away. Turns out that’s what happens when you’re a piece of Jace who trained under the Theorist for quite some time.
The heel turn landed in episode six of the Secrets of Strixhaven short stories, when Tam shoved Oracle Jadzi through a magical portal and abandoned the rest of her friends. “I was made to do this,” she admitted before stepping through herself. “The days we spent together were the happiest of my life.”
On the other side, the Theorist was waiting.
The math on killing an oracle
Reality Fracture picks up soon after. The Theorist wants Jadzi dead because the soul of every oracle is tied to creation, and her death would let him perceive the creation of the Multiverse itself. With that, he can overwrite everything with his Echoverse.
Liliana lays out the cost to Tam in episode two. Doing this would “smother the souls of everyone in the original,” she says, and the “doubles” walking around the Echoverse “don’t quite have full spirits.” Tam starts seeing all of it as “fake, fake, fake.”
Which raises a question she can’t shake: can anyone at Hexhaven actually be her friend? By Liliana’s read, they’re soulless husks queued up to consume and replace every real person in the Multiverse.
That tension boils over in episode six, when Tam confronts the Theorist and decides he has to be stopped. She was manufactured for the explicit purpose of helping him win. Choosing to oppose him is the first choice she’s ever made that belongs entirely to her.
Why she works when most replacement heroes don’t
Tam is the most interesting new character Magic has produced in years, and the reason is restraint. She came in as a student, did the villain turn, and grows into a genuine person who makes difficult and brave choices.
Reality Fracture lets her sit with her sins instead of erasing them with one heroic gesture. When she reunites with her former classmate Kirol as the two Multiverses start to collide, she doesn’t ask for forgiveness. “You trusted me, and I failed you. So it’s my job to fix it,” she says.
Kirol doesn’t trust her again. Tam acts anyway.
The rescue that becomes a funeral
While that’s happening, Vraska, Chandra, Ajani and Garruk spend most of these stories collecting the pieces of Jace’s mind that the Theorist locked in mind prisons. Vraska stabs the Theorist as those fragments come rushing back inside him.
Together the pieces sever his connection to the spell fusing the Multiverse with the Echoverse and take control of the body, welding all the disconnected parts of Jace back together. For a moment, he’s whole. He realizes the spell is tied to his life. He dies in Vraska’s arms.
The spell stops. The Echoverse stays tangled up in the original Multiverse.
The spark changes hands
In the grand finale, Jace’s Planeswalker spark rises out of his body and enters Tam. “Energy pummels her, as if she’s standing at the base of a waterfall,” the story reads. “Tam cries out in response, falls to her knees, the pressure and potency of magic overwhelming her, filling her. Her heart feels like it’s burst open, and all her insides are a modest cup doused with the water of a vast lake.”
She spends the power immediately. Tam calls the Eldrazi titan Emrakul, asking her to come down from the moon of Innistrad and eat the Echoverse. Emrakul agrees, and carefully peels the artificial reality away from the original Multiverse before consuming it.
As the Echoverse collapses, Jace speaks to her. Not the Theorist, not another isolated fragment, but a final impression carried inside the spark. He calls her his “fail-safe.”
Since the Desparking, Planeswalker sparks have become extraordinarily rare. Jace built Tam so she could inherit his when he died. “This spark was me, and now, it is you,” he tells her. “I only ask that you continue our work. Make things better.”
She is him, and she isn’t
The rest of Jace’s qualities then crystallize inside her: his curiosity, his diplomacy, his survival instincts, his capacity to begin again. The story says “she is him” and that “they are one,” though that doesn’t mean Jace comes back as a separate voice rattling around in her skull.
Tam is described at once as “a beginning,” “a continuation” and a “clean slate.” She was made from him and now carries his spark and pieces of his psyche, and she gets to decide what any of that means.
Ask her directly and she won’t pretend to know. When Kirol asks who she really is, Tam doesn’t reach for Jace, the Theorist, or the purpose she was built to serve. “I can’t wait to find out,” she says. Kirol offers to start over with a fresh introduction, and she supplies a name of her own: “I’m Tam. Just Tam.”
That’s the distinction doing the heavy lifting here. She’s strong enough to reach Emrakul across the Multiverse, save reality and planeswalk home to Strixhaven, and she inherits his abilities and bits of his personality without being bound to repeat his choices.
The last scene is a blue cloak at a graveside
After Jace’s funeral on Vryn, Tam goes to find Vraska. She shows up in a blue cloak, carrying his spark and his mannerisms in a gorgon body that mirrors the woman he loved.
Vraska feels like she’s looking at a ghost. Tam introduces herself as someone new, then makes a promise: “I’m here to help make things better.”
