Wake of the Fallen is a card I designed with an illustration that accompanied my Lighbox 2026 announcement. It features a key moment from my in-progress Saga (Darkway), a story that follows 15 years after my video game, Murder of King Mere.
I recently began playing Magic: The Gathering with friends again. One afternoon, when the Seattle sun was briefly shining through spring showers, my friends and I implausibly holed up in Mox (a board game store/cafe). Under dank lighting in a furtive back corner of the store, as light spilled in from far windows, we gnarled at the foil sheaths hiding cards inside: we were drafting.
We were specifically drafting Bloomburrow, an animal series I found myself particularly fond of given Darkway’s focus on animal species. Near the end of the draft, after assembling our decks and borrowing an untold amount of lands from Mox, we played one another.
It was incredible, my Black-Green deck dominated. I summoned powerful creatures that, if felled, could be summoned back from the dead. But towards the end, when my opponent-friend has but one health, and my flying bat was ready to claim victory, he played some horrible sorcery that wiped all but one of my cards off the board, a flightless 1/1 token.
In this moment of desperation, I no longer had an graveyard-summoning cards to use, and my one creature that could have won the game was trapped in the graveyard…
And so was birthed Wake of the Fallen, a card that, if in my hand, I might have won the game.
