Explore the Magic Multiverse and Strixhaven University with Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos, a brand-new novel from Seanan McGuire! As part of our celebration of Secrets of Strixhaven and the story of Magic, we're excited to share this excerpt from Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos. Think of it as a preview card, but for an entire novel!

Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos

Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos follows the story of Eula Blue, who comes to Strixhaven following the devastation of New Capenna. To make it through her first semester, Eula and her allies will have to fight for their place in this new world—or else they'll be dead before their final exams.

0001_MTGPRM_Manual: Command Tower

Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos releases on April 7, 2026, and is available for preorder now. As a special bonus for fans of Magic and its story, first-edition hardcover copies of Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos will include a traditional foil Commander Tower promo card.

Chapter One
Brokers and Bargains

"Blue! Watch yourself!"

The shout comes a bare breath before the sound of crumbling masonry. Eula Blue, unwilling cleanup worker and self-trained shield mage, throws her hands over her head, a dome of pale, misty light forming around them as the rest of her team presses in beside her. This has happened often enough that they've learned the safest place to be during a collapse is as close to Eula as possible.

The bricks raining down from above hit her shield and bounce harmlessly off, clattering to the pavement. The impacts stop. Eula holds the shield, watching the sky until she's sure the collapse has finished, then releases it and lowers her hands at the same time, sending the last of the dust and grit to join the rest.

Her foreman is already striding toward her. He's a big, barrel-chested ogre, a Riveteer by birth and allegiance, and he was openly dubious about allowing her to join the cleanup crews after the Invasion. "What good is some soft-handed little wannabe Obscura going to do?" he'd asked, and the other recruits had laughed, and any chance Eula would have been willing to try looking for another job had died. It was cleanup or nothing.

Not that she likes the work. If she's being honest with herself, she hates it. It's all hot, muggy Caldaia air and physical effort, and tears in her clothes that she can't afford to have properly mended. But the work needs to be done, and her family needs the money, and so here she is.

The foreman waits until he's only a few feet away, the rest of her crew already back to work collecting broken glass and shards of Phyrexian exoskeletons from the street around them. Elias is picking up the bricks that fell on them. They'll leave this stretch of New Capenna better off than they found it if it kills them—and based on what just happened, it still might.

"Blue," says the foreman brusquely. "You think about my offer?"

"Yes, sir."

"Make a choice yet?"

Eula composes her face. She needs this job, at least until she can save enough to hire a private tutor. There's always work to be done in New Capenna, but if you don't belong to one of the five Families, there are things much worse than cleaning up the streets. She was lucky to get this position, and she managed it only because the foreman's sister was a friend of her brother's when they were her age; that tenuous connection got her onto the crew when the foreman would have preferred another Riveteer.

Of course, the Riveteers don't tend to produce shield mages, and her talents have saved her coworkers often enough to attract attention that she wasn't necessarily looking for.

"I'm still discussing it with my parents," she says, as neutrally as she can.

Not neutrally enough. The foreman frowns. "This is a big opportunity, you know. Could open a lot of doors for you."

"I'm aware, sir."

"They may not be the doors you were hoping for, but with Park Heights gone, I don't know the Obscura will be opening their doors anytime soon. You could make a name for yourself among the work crews if you wanted to get serious about this."

"I know, sir. Thank you, sir."

The foreman looks at her carefully, but she controls her face, refusing to let her true feelings show. She did her primary schooling in Park Heights, at the best elevator school her parents could buy her way into. She should be halfway through her first year of university right now, learning how to bend the law to her own ends, courted by the Brokers and the Obscura alike. Instead, she's here, cleaning up the wreckage of the campus she's been dreaming of for most of her life. This isn't what she wanted. This isn't the way it's supposed to be.

This isn't right.

The whistle blows, signaling shift change. With this many workers in need of a paycheck, there's no overtime available, for anyone. Eula trades neutrality for a bright smile, tipping her cap at the foreman before she says, "I'll see you tomorrow, sir," and she's off and running.

He pushes his own cap back as he watches her go, and he doesn't try to call her back. She's done her hours, she'll draw her pay, and if she doesn't want to go the extra mile, that's no skin off his nose. It's her family that needs the money, not his.

There's always another pair of hands in New Capenna.

Eula puts his offer out of her mind as she runs. She can't delay him forever, but she can have tonight, and the days since the school fell have taught her that time is the dearest coin there is. Once it's spent, it's gone, and even the Obscura can't snatch it back for you.

She knows she's the best shield mage on the work crews, which is easy enough when she's the only shield mage on the work crews. Most of the shield mages in the city belong to the Brokers, and they're too important to waste their time on petty make-work and physical labor. That's the future her father wants for her, whereas she wants to join the Obscura in their dazzling dens of blackmail and illusion. She's not your standard Obscura, but a shield mage is welcome anywhere. That's why the Riveteers are willing to offer her a formal apprenticeship with their Family. They need her, and she needs them, and it could be so easy. All she has to do is say yes. They'll give her more hours, more responsibilities, and the shining golden chains of admission to their Family at the end of it all. If she becomes a Riveteer, she can grant her family the stability they lost when Park Heights fell.

She can save them. She can give them security, authority, respectability, all the things Phyrexia took away. And all she has to give up is her own future.

Not that her future has ever been her own. The Brokers have never offered her father membership, but he's always been their man, and he's all but promised her to them if she masters her magic well enough. Her mother's side of the family used to work for the Cabaretti. Most of them died with their masters when Park Heights fell. And here's Eula, dreaming of the Obscura and knowing she'll never have their attention the way she wants it. The way she needs it.

She moves fleetly through the Caldaia, the lowest level of New Capenna, where the Riveteers hold sway and the products of their endless industry are never far away. Before the Invasion, Eula had only ever come this low on dares and bets; she'd been a true child of the Mezzio, eyes fixed firmly on Park Heights, and she'd been sure nothing was going to stop her upward climb. There was no force in New Capenna that could contain Eula Blue.

Well, that had turned out to be true. There was no force in New Capenna. But there were forces outside it that didn't care about her dreams or aspirations, and Phyrexia had brought her hopes for an education crashing down to earth, tangled in the wreckage of the school where she'd been intending to craft her future. Now here she is, one more child of the Caldaia gutters, caught between a lifetime of hard labor and preserving her slim chance at an escape in exchange for locking her entire family into that same fate.

She's nineteen. This shouldn't be on her shoulders. So Eula runs, temporarily free, racing toward an uncertain future.

Before Park Heights fell and took both her family's fortunes and their neighborhood tumbling down with it, Eula knew exactly how her life was going to go. Now everything is uncertain, and she hates it, almost as much as she hates the tiny apartment she shares with her parents and younger siblings, who are young enough that they still view their new lives in the Caldaia as a long vacation from the expectations of the upper city, rather than a sudden and brutal limitation on their futures. Her older brother has his own place in a Riveteer neighborhood, more permanent, more secure, but the apartment she shares with the rest of her family is safe and quiet enough that Eula can sleep at night, and she wants to be grateful for that. She just doesn't know how.

Resting her backside against a silvered stairway rail, she half slides, half rides it to the bottom of the granite stairs and trots down the last short block between her and home, slowing as she nears the door. She hates her job. She hates coming home almost as much. She's never wanted to be an unhappy person, but she is now, because she hates it here.

Eula Blue is trapped.

She unlocks the door—no open doors this deep in the Caldaia—and lets herself into the crammed front room, packed with secondhand furniture and children's toys. The air smells, as always, like boiled vegetables and whatever Mom's roasting for dinner. She can't think about food yet—she never can before she gets a shower—and all it does is turn her stomach.

"Eula?" Her father's voice comes from the narrow doorway connecting the front room and kitchen. "Is that you?"

"Yes, Dad, it's me." Who else would it be? Unless someone's lost a key, everyone else who lives here should be home by now.

"Can you come in here?"

He sounds uncharacteristically serious. Eula frowns as she moves toward his voice, wiping her grimy hands on her jacket.

Maybe something happened to Alton? He doesn't have the physical presence or strength of most of the Riveteers he works with, and she worries about him every time he goes out on a job site—

No. No point in borrowing trouble. Eula takes a deep breath, lifts her chin, and steps into the kitchen.

The whole family is there, save for Alton, which just makes the fear she's trying so hard to suppress spike harder. The kids have bowls of cut fruit distracting them, and her parents sit at either end of the small breakfast table, her mother looking worn-out and worried, her father holding a letter in his hands. Eula's eyes go to it immediately. The paper is thick and looks expensive, with the texture that comes only from money. She doesn't recognize the seal at the top, but that looks expensive, too, like someone invested in making sure it would be identifiable at a distance.

"What's that?" she asks, and her voice is too loud for the space, and she can't pull it back.

"Eula," says her father, lowering the letter. "This came for you."

Anger flares atop fascination. It's not enough that she's been forced into a small room with two younger siblings, lost her neighborhood and her privacy and her future, but now they're opening her mail? She forces it back. They mean well, she knows they mean well, they're just not used to living on top of one another like this. Hopefully they never will be.

"Why did you open it?" she asks, as politely as she can.

"It was delivered by that new courier service, the one that brings messages through the omenpaths," he says. "We couldn't imagine what someone off-plane might have wanted with you, so we felt it was necessary to see for ourselves."

Depending on when the mail arrived, they would have needed to wait for only a few hours for her to get home. They didn't need to open something addressed to her. She wants to hold on to the anger over the invasion of her privacy, but in the end, curiosity is stronger, and the omenpaths are new enough to be sources of endless curiosity.

"You knew my shift was almost over. You could have waited until I got home."

"I'm sorry we didn't." It's a rare admission from her father, that he was wrong about something, and so she settles, irritation soothed by novelty.

"We just didn't know you knew anyone off-plane," adds her mother uncomfortably.

When the Invasion tore through the membrane dividing Capenna from the rest of the Multiverse, it left scars. Tunnels of a sort, bored through the fabric of reality itself, connecting the worlds in ways they had never been connected before.

Eula had already known Capenna is a plane—one of many—scattered across a near-infinite Multiverse. Wrapping your mind around the true nature of reality is one of the first challenges of a magical education, and people who couldn't manage it didn't tend to last long in her classes. But despite all of this, the omenpaths had been a shock. They made the Multiverse seem small and accessible in a way it's never been before, trading some of its grandeur for the hope that maybe someday, even people like her will be able to reach out and touch another world.

She's considered buying a ticket through one of the omenpaths and going off to seek her fortune in a place that might be able to put her talents to better use than a work crew, but she's never been willing to take the leap and commit to trying. She certainly hasn't gone looking for an off-plane pen pal.

And now her mother is looking at her like she's been hiding something, and she doesn't know what to do about it. This isn't something she can cast a shield against. The silence in the kitchen grows cold and heavy until she turns her attention back to her father.

"What is it?" she blurts, desperate for anything to break the silence.

"It's an invitation," he replies.

"To what?"

"To a school," says her mother. "A place called Strixhaven, on a plane called Arcavios. They teach wizards there."

Eula's heart leaps in her chest, choking her with hope and wanting, wanting so pure it's like sunlight in her veins, like sipping Halo at a year's turning party and knowing the whole world is at your fingertips. She forces it down, not quite letting herself embrace it, and asks, "Oh?"

"Yes," says her father. "I don't know how they heard about you ..." He pauses meaningfully, giving her the opportunity to confess to sending in an application, to inviting their attention. She doesn't say anything. She didn't do it, and protesting her innocence will only make her look guilty. "... but they did, and they'd like to offer you a place in their incoming class. Tuition and supplies fully covered, although we can't afford to pay the extra fee for a private room. They included a ticket through the omenpath network to Arcavios, in case you want to accept the place."

"I do," she says without thinking, taking a half step forward, already reaching for the letter. Her father twitches it away.

"I don't know that we want to let you go to school off-plane," he says. "How will you learn to be a proper Capennan law mage if you're learning another world's laws?"

"If I'm a fully trained shield mage, you know the Brokers will teach me the law," she says. "They still have the people for that, even if we've lost the wizard's college. I can do it."

"So you still want to be a Broker?" There's a hard edge in his voice, one she understands better than she wants to.

Eula swallows. "Yes, sir," she lies. It's all he's ever wanted for her; she can learn to want it for herself the way he needs her to, even if she knows she would be happier among the Obscura. Even if she wants to sit at Raffine's feet and listen to everything the ancient seer has to teach her. She can put her own desires aside. For the sake of the family.

But her father isn't thinking about the Obscura at all, or Eula's oft-derided ambitions. "You haven't decided you'd rather be a Riveteer workhand for the rest of your life?" he asks.

Eula recoils. "No, sir! I'm only working cleanup for the money to help this family, not because I want to. They'll get by just fine without me, and if I go to this school, I ... I'll get to learn. That's all I've ever wanted."

Fear strikes then, sharp and biting: maybe he's asking all these questions because they can't get by without the money she's been bringing in. Maybe he's not going to let her go.

"This school, it's not something we have any information about. It's not something I've ever heard of before. And things being what they are, it's entirely possible the Brokers don't have any information about it, either."

"Yes, sir," she says, automatically.

Her father nods, frowning to himself. "So any information you could gather would be something new. Something valuable."

"Sir?"

"You'll go to this school, if they're so eager to pay your way. You'll learn everything they have to teach you, and everything they don't intend to teach you, and you'll bring it all back here, to New Capenna. To your family. To the Family."

It's the same word. The way he stresses it the second time he says it turns it into something else entirely. Eula swallows.

She wants to belong to a Family, even if she doesn't agree with her father about which would be the best fit for her. Joining one of the five Families and having access to their resources and protection is what every citizen of New Capenna dreams of. It's what she's been working toward since the first time she managed to summon a weak shield, barely strong enough to stop a soap bubble.

It's what she thought she lost when Park Heights fell, and now that it's possible again, all she can think is, I'm going to school. I'm going to go through an omenpath to a different world, and I'm going to go to a real school, where they'll teach me all the magic I want to know. I'm going to school.

She feels like she's walking on air as she follows her mother out of the kitchen and through the small apartment to her room.

"You leave tomorrow," her mother says, voice clearer now that they're alone. She always sounds more sure of herself when her husband isn't in the room. "We have to pack."

"Yes, Mama," says Eula, and she smiles as her mother gets the carpetbag from the closet. They begin packing her scant belongings, and the work crew has never been further away. She's leaving. She's on her way into the future.

She's going to school.

Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos releases on April 7, 2026, and is available for preorder now from your local bookseller and wherever books are sold. For more information on the plane of Arcavios and Strixhaven University, check out the Planeswalker's Guide to Secrets of Strixhaven, which details the world and history of Magic's most academic setting.

About the Author

Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Campbell award-winning author Seanan McGuire lives and works in Washington State, where she shares her somewhat idiosyncratic home with her collections of books, creepy dolls, and enormous cats. When not writing or playing too much Magic: The Gathering—which is fairly rare—she enjoys travel and can regularly be found any place where there are cornfields, carnivals, or frogs. Her first book was Rosemary and Rue in 2009, beginning the October Daye series, with more than a hundred books following since. Seanan McGuire doesn't sleep much.