Years of the High Throne

Due to its great antiquity and the calamity that surrounded its closing days, the Years of the High Throne are an approximation made by Imperial scholars, counting back from the founding of the Armant Empire.  The epochs before the modern age featured at least a dozen different known calendar systems in use throughout different time periods and in various cultures, so exhaustive attempts were made to reconcile all of them with the Imperial calendar, then back-date momentous events as well as the fragmented, often-contradictory remaining records would allow.  It is likely that the absolute truth will remain unknown to all but the most ancient beings.

Year 10,000 of the High Throne: The High Gods emerge from the Clouded Ether, with their left hand forging the Planes and with their right hand forging the Prime. Despite always being referred to in the plural, they are described as a singular being cloaked in light. Among their good works were crafting the Six Convictions (the world's six moons), forming the constellations in the night's sky, and filling the world with life where there was only Desolation before.

Year 5,000 of the High Throne: The High Gods departed, leaving the Kingdom of the Children to rule the world. Little is truly known of this time, though it is said "the Children numbered as the sands of the beach and the grass of the fields, fruitful and at peace."

Year 2,000 of the High Throne: Era of the Last King. The Kingdom of the Children fractures as the last of the Sage-Kings fades into the night, bequeathing to his subjects all the knowledge of life.

Year 1,000 of the High Throne: Age of Dark Stirrings. After millennia of peace and prosperity, the stars begin to dim and the winters grow cold. Want, privation, and jealousy begin to creep into the hearts of mortal man, fostering a doubt not only of their neighbors but of the central tenants of their society. Even the truth of the High Gods is challenged, at first in private, but more and more openly.

Year 500 of the High Throne: The Fourth Conviction dies in a night of fire and fear, and it is known that the Dark One has been born upon the face of the world. Monsters begin to emerge from the shadowed places of the world, emboldened by their master's birth. At first slowly, but with greater speed and ferocity, villages and towns begin to fall to the darkness.

Year 100 of the High Throne: By this age, the world is a series of massive, walled cities connected by roads of light. Magic is responsible for sustaining the overlarge populations, but it is known that disaster is only a single mistake away. Every few decades, another city is lost, either to a moment of carelessness by its defenders or because its population grows too great for the magic that sustains it. Strangers are to be distrusted, change feared, and everything that is different is purged in the zealous fear of the imprisoned masses. Then word comes that a black fear has risen in the south and begun its inexorable march across the world.

Year 10 of the High Throne: The Dark One's War. Fewer than a hundred Nation-Cities remain now, hardened bastions where resolve has replaced hope and men are born within the ringed walls of their world, dying to defend them and passing, unremarked, into their afterlife. From the south, the Dark One raised up His army, eating the light of the sun and devouring the hope of the people. The long fingers of his evil found men's hearts, withering them and driving away all the good dreams of their past.

But in the blackness of this time, the High Gods returned, cloaked in light and wielding a spear all of iron. It fought the Dark One, binding Him in golden chains and cast Him down, down into the Throat of the World, where all his evil could be swallowed up by the earth. But there was much devastation in this time and the High Gods were wounded mortally, their great spear falling to the earth and growing into a mighty tree. The sky was broken and the planes were broken and even the earth was broken, the walls of the Nation-Cities splitting open and spilling out the inhabitants into a world that no longer loved them.