Timeline

The timeline, also known as the mythological history (a phrase that was most popular in 2018), was the narrative backbone that explained how the worlds depicted in Glastieven mythology's different cycles had evolved into one another. In a sense, the timeline was the history of the world where the mythology took place. The first two millennia of the timeline focused on the Kingdom of Maisraln. The focus then widened to the Kelara, Maisraln's home planet, and then to space exploration. The final era of the timeline centred on an interplanetary network of civilisations descended from humanity, the species-nations.

The concept of the timeline was created in July 2017 when Kerry and Robert had the idea that Maisraln and BHH might have taken place in the ancient past and distant future of the same extended universe, which became Glastieven mythology. Almost all of the lore on the timeline was developed by Kerry and Tom through deliberate worldbuilding and from June 2018 the "standard" timeline was defined by the planning for their unfinished novel Maiestas. Though Robert, Cat and the other roleplayers were not as interested in developing the timeline, they accepted most of Kerry and Tom's worldbuilding as canon and were vocal on the occasions when they did not.

The timeline in this article is based on the consensus in late 2019.

Beginning of the timeline

Cosmogony

In theory, the timeline started with a creation myth, but no-one ever managed to create one before March 2020 that was considered canon. In summer and autumn 2017, it was canonical that before civilisation had emerged there was a time called "The Before". The Before was an anarchy, often described with ocean imagery, where magical warlords had held sway.

The Genesis Cycle was established in November 2019 to encourage creation myths, though as things patterned out it never had time to flourish before the end of Glastieven history. The idea was that the key characters of this cycle would have been angels or gods and the roleplays would have created narratives like the stories of the gods in Greek mythology. One 2020 story, intended to be part of the Genesis Cycle, depicted a single god creating a multiverse ruled over by angels.

Cosmology

The planet where humanity originated was called the Kelara (also known as Aubos). Some older Maisraln stories mention that it had two moons and Tom designed a lunar calendar in 2017 that was based on the month changing when the faster moon overtook the slower one. On the other hand, the wording of the few Mission Cycle stories that mention the moon suggest there was only one. Either interpretation is valid.

The Universe in which the Kelara existed involved two distinct worlds called Oburron and Jenner, connected by a portal. This portal was called the Jenner Gate.

Oburron was traditionally the main setting of Glastieven mythology and Jenner was a parallel world with a separate history.

Some stories in 2018 and 2019 challenged that tradition. As the two parallel worlds had only been referred to by name in science fiction stories, it had technically only been established that BHH was set in Oburron, not the other cycles. This interpretation argued that whilst Jenner might well have been a parallel world from BHH's perspective, the Kelara was actually in Jenner, and humanity had only crossed into Oburron when exploring space.

Maisralnian history

Origins of the kingdom

The accepted timeline started with the emergence of the Five Empires of Maisraln. These were really five small, fairly primitive kingdoms (or even tribal proto-kingdoms) in the north-east of the continent of Novaria, but in Maisraln, they became the subject of elaborate legend. Later writers in Maisraln believed that the Five Empires had been civilised and advanced when they were led by the first Five Emperors, but had fallen into discord and competition after the initial emperors had died.

Tom and Kerry disagreed on the geography of these five kingdoms (the kingdoms that were romantically remembered as the Five Empires). Tom said they spanned most of what would later constitute Maisraln, with one in the centre, and one for each compass point. Kerry said they were all clustered in the south-east of Maisraln around the Oppula Forest.

In legend, the Five Empires were united bloodlessly by the good Queen Maya. In reality, though Maya was a real figure who succeeded in established a Kingdom of Maisraln, its continuity with the preceding kingdoms was dubious and her efforts were only relatively bloodless. As before, Kerry and Tom disagree on how quickly the kingdom reached its later territorial extent. Tom says Queen Maya's territory was bounded by the coastlines in the north and east, with the island communities of Víthurkenning and Lonaoiisil made tributary states. Kerry says that the kingdom only slowly extended its reach up the Helltuna River and towards the east coast. In his version, Maya only controlled a strip of core territory running from the western Oppula Forest to the fertile east coast, with the Red Marshes marking the northern and western boundary of her control; Lonaoiisil and southern Ardalbrük might have been client states, but the northern mainland would have been beyond her control.

Seventy years after the Kingdom of Maisraln was established (70 Kingdom Years or 70 KY), dragons in the region — sapient creatures with human intelligence and their own magical abilities — established a Council of Dragons. At this early stage, humans and dragons lived in relative harmony with one another, and there were no organised attacks by one side on the other.

Culture and philosophy flourished in early 200s Maisraln. A monotheistic religion, Renmei, spread rapidly. A philosopher called Ying Verem established a school near Lake Huzei, founding the tradition of Veremei, which called for rigid adherence to social mores, education in high culture and magic, and emotional repression, which it taught made people sophisticated and refined. Veremei became the dominant philosophy of the court at Maisraln. A state church, the Katoliquarian Renmei Congregation, was established in 283, teaching Renmei theology and Veremei social values.

In Kerry’s telling, across the Eastern Sea, a comparable state to Maisraln was founded, the Empire of Palaratos. Whereas Maisraln was a Veremei state that emphasised magical and cultural sophistication, Palaratos was dominated by a rationalist philosophy, spurned magic, and quickly developed superior technology and non-magical military strength relative to Maisraln. Tom feels that Maisraln would not have interacted with a civilisation across the Eastern Sea until c. 1000.

Maisraln struggled in the 400s; tensions broke out between dragons and humans, and in Kerry’s telling, Maisraln faced competition from Palaratos. These tensions culminated in King Jonathan I declaring war on the Council of Dragons in 506, establishing the Order of Dragonslayers. The resulting War of Dragons and Humans (which Kerry preferred to call the Anthropo-Dragon War) lasted until 535. It was a pyrrhic victory for the humans and the dragons were forced to retreat into the mountains, abandoning lowland and coastal Maisraln.

Golden Age

By the 560s, a new generation of idealistic scholars were attempting to explain Maisraln’s decline and propose ways to check it. Jonathan I’s son, Jonathan II, was a young idealist himself and was willing to experiment with these scholars’ ideas. In 571, he issued the Great Magical Charter. The Charter appointed four figures to the royal service as the Four Great Mages. Kanja Reiki, a famous mage who had been raised by dragons, became the Ramolace Heru, who had charge over magical creatures and liaised with the Council of Dragons to prevent war. Kensaki Zihau, one of the idealistic young Veremei scholar-bureaucrats, became the Bynmidelle, who protected the kingdom. Ainas Tacar, an outlaw warrior-mage, became the Hermadiúir, responsible for advancing the art and science of magic and protecting magic itself from threats. Erin Xiangmay, the royal spymaster, became the Helundtu, whose charge related to alchemy, potions and healing.

The exploits of the first Four Great Mages were, after November 2017, the focus of the Suijing Cycle. Before November 2017, an earlier version of the same cycle had been set much further along the timeline, at a point where space travel existed and magic was in decline. When the mythology was an active project, it was important to distinguish between old lore and current lore, so to make the distinction clearer, at the time the old version kept the name “Suijing Cycle” and the post-November 2017 one was known as the “Unbounded Cycle” instead. The name “Unbounded” is no longer used, as the two are now considered different versions of the same cycle.

The Great Magical Charter of 571 also established (or ordered the Four Great Mages to establish) the preceptive field. The perceptive field was a network of magically-charged waystones with which mages could connect to perform predetermined spells. As any magical act must be equally creative (light magic) and destructive (dark magic), performing magic tends to slowly corrupt users of light magic as they absorb the dark magic rebound. The preceptive field removed this problem as the stones absorbed the waste dark or light magic from each spell cast through it. It also helped the kingdom to control magic, as only set spells could be performed — though they could be layered, bent and experimented with in complex ways. Magic performed through the field was called preceptive magic, and magic not performed through the field was called unbounded. Unbounded magic soon became illegal and was greatly stigmatised as “corrupted” and “unclean”.

The next four hundred years were the largely static Golden Age of Maisraln.

Decline

Following real-life European history, Maisraln transitioned from a medieval state to an early modern one, with a shift away from traditional Veremei values and towards merchants and the gentry. This happened in the 1100s. The traditional capital in the south, called either Vexsol or Tengyang, gave way to a new mercantile hub on the eastern coast, called either Sarnau or Vexsol (the most common arrangement of these names was that Tengyang in the south gave way to Vexsol on the coast). This was the end of the Golden Age, and as global trade become more important to Maisralnian prestige, the kingdom was once again in competition with Palaratos. In response, the court became increasingly conservative, and the Congregation increased in wealth and political influence despite challenges to religious uniformity. The king and council were convinced that Maisraln, known all across the world as the Magical Kingdom, would succeed by the state clinging to its control over magic, as this gave it a monopoly on force — no rebellion with swords could defeat mages.

This conservative strategy failed with the invention of the matchlock pistol, the first hand-held firearm, in 1484. The king and court did not realise quickly enough that this invention now meant that, for the first time, a rebel army with just one or two unbounded mages could seriously challenge a magical royal army. The central government failed to suppress uprisings up and down the kingdom and the aristocracy retreated to their provinces, with the royal court being filled up by experts and scholars of low social rank, appointed by merit in 1485 in what proved to be the king’s last, desperate attempt to cling on to power.

With royal power already broken, the throne was finally toppled in 1487 by the grandly-named Matchlock Revolution, which was actually just a palace coup led by one Kira Arimoto, a radical rationalist ideologue who had been one of the meritocratic court appointees of 1485. Wanting to turn Maisraln into a rigid rational-magical empire that could challenge Palaratos on its own terms, she had persuaded the army to install her as Empress of Maisraln so she could crush the rebellions in the provinces by force, but at the last minute, the army had turned against her on the advice of the aristocracy, and Kira had fled to Rellaken. The royal army declared the throne empty and placed themselves at the command of the royal court.

Twelve States

No new king came forwards, no regency was established, and the royal court failed to take the initiative and form a republican government. However, local lords were able to regain control of the provinces, and whilst they now each regarded themselves as sovereign, they also regarded themselves as still being part of a wider “Maisraln” that was separate from, and superior to, outlanders. This began the era of the Twelve States of Maisraln (1489–1670s). The Maisralnian economy began to contract, and some fifty years after the Revolution, things got bad enough that unrest started again, beginning the Down Times (1550s–1780s). Throughout this period, Palaratos remained stable, and by the 1560s they had the ascendancy over a world that had been dominated by Maisraln just one hundred years before.

The Four Great Mages continued to exist along with the royal court in the Twelve States era and they managed to protect the preceptive field. Without a state to govern magic, it became very dangerous, and the kingdom descended into a misty anarchy. In his telling, Kerry (contentiously; being challenged by Tom) went as far as arguing that Maisraln forgot what was beyond the western mountains.

The last Four Great Mages, coming into their offices in about 1620, were Lyra Felise, the Helundtu; Elvar Murchaidh, the Hermadiúir; Gawyn Harowcal, the Ramolce Heru; and the Ashen Darkside, the Bynmidelle. They replaced the offices with the Council of Mages, which they hoped would have global jurisdiction, in 1675. In some stories, mostly older ones, they also replaced the preceptive field with crystals. The exploits of the last Four Great Mages were the focus of the Maisraln Cycle. The cycle was focused only on their work defending the former kingdom and its people from magical threats; neither the creation of the council nor the destruction of the preceptive field was ever actually depicted in a Maisraln Cycle story.

Magic declines on the Kelara

From November 2020 to March 2021, there was theoretically a divide in the timeline, where there were two alternative versions of events between about 1680 KY and a thousand or so years into the next calendar era, equivalent to around 3070 KY. The two branches then merged back together and any story taking place after that in the timeline could have had either in its past. There was a cycle on each branch, the Mission Cycle and the Serpentine Cycle, and the Serpentine branch was supposed to have been based on the setting of the old Suijing Cycle as it had been before November 2017, with space travel emerging and magic in slow decline. However, this idea was never developed and the division in the timeline never really mattered because the Serpentine branch was just ignored, so it is omitted here.

Magic forgotten but not eradicated

After 1675, an organisation called the Solas appeared. The Solas was either created by or controlled the world’s governments and acted as a covert operations agency with legal impunity. In some stories, it was explicitly from Palaratos, and rooted in its rationalist tradition. In others, it came from outside the Kelara’s structures of power, and was supported by the Ravensgate, a rogue god-like force which played a greater role in later cycles. The Solas was devoted to suppressing magic. They persuaded the governments of the world to set the year zero to 1487 KY, which would be 0 Terrestrial Era (TE), weakening the legacy of the Kingdom of Maisraln.

The Council of Mages and the Council of Dragons became the focus of resistance against the Solas. The Solas recreated the Order of Dragonslayers, an ancient Maisralnian order that had been dissolved in 535 KY with the end of the War of Dragons and Humans, and the second creation of the Order had successfully committed genocide against dragonkind by 200 TE.

The Solas was able to push the Council of Mages underground by 250 TE and was initially happy to leave them extant as an arcane tradition. Instead, the Solas focused on destroying all historical records of magic (and dragons), reducing its status to myth. Two generations later, by around 330, few people believed that magic actually existed. Certainly, another two generations later, people in Maisraln in 400 TE believed in magic about as much as people did in England in AD 2017.

In 453, there was a global financial crisis triggered by drug lord Eithne Lunadelle taking over the city of Sancastravos and threatening (fairly credibly) to destroy the government of Palaratos and much of its financial elite by revealing that they had been frequenting venues of loose morals controlled by her cartel and releasing conversations that had been recorded at those venues. The situation was defused by the Ravensgate — in most stories, specifically by the Society for the Preservation of Peace, a low-ranking, autonomous entity attached to the Ravensgate led by one Macil Rava — who recruited Eithne, removing her from the timeline. In the wake of the crisis, Palaratos became a republic, and the Maisralnian province of Otsenka (presumably among others) became an independent state, the Otsenkan Republic.

Solas suppress the Magical Resistance

Meanwhile, through the 400s, the dusty, largely peaceful Council of Mages declined in power and influence among the underground magical community as increasing hostility from the Solas radicalised it. A new organisation called the Magical Resistance was created, nominally loyal to the council but exercising a significant degree of autonomy. The Resistance soon fractured; by 480 it was at least three organisations and by 520 each cell was almost totally independent of any central command. Meanwhile, as the Solas attacked and killed unarmed mages, by the mid-500s the various factions of the Resistance and the protected areas under their control represented the entire extent of the remaining magical community.

Kerry proposed that there might have been a native tradition of magical dissent in Palaratos, predating the jurisdiction of the originally-Maisralnian Council of Mages there, that merged into the Resistance. Whereas most of the Resistance was culturally Maisralncentric and conservative, romanticising the old kingdom as an ancient motherland and looking to Maisraln for inspiration, the inborn Palaratan resistance was socialist and viewed magic as a science that was compatible with rationalism rather than as a mystical tradition being destroyed by it. In 583, humanity first landed on the Moon of the Kelara and the year was set to 0 Celestial Era in recognition of this achievement.

The Resistance launched a major terrorist attack in 49 CE and the Solas declared open war on it. They now intended to completely wipe out all mages. Meanwhile, the Resistance were no longer interested in protecting an underground current of magic; they wanted to overthrow the Solas and re-establish an openly magical society. The intense irregular war between the two factions triggered an increased awareness of magic, perceived as something like an occult revival or the 1960s wave of ufology.

The Mission Cycle was set in this era and its protagonists were the Vorsnoir, a cell of the Magical Resistance who fought against the Solas and other magical factions.

The Solas won the war. In 115 CE, the Council of Mages was dissolved and the last remaining mages were instructed to flee and seek shelter in obscure places. The Solas successfully managed to track down and kill the last remaining mages over the next decades, and it was dissolved in 230. Magic had now been totally eradicated on the Kelara and would not be known by ordinary humans again for millennia.

Celestial exploration

Great Human Commonwealth

Meanwhile, space travel outwards from the Kelara continued. At some point much later, all human nations merged, creating the Great Human Commonwealth. It was never decided how long the gap was between the end of the irregular war between the Solas and the mages in around 115 CE and the creation of the Great Human Commonwealth. Some stories loosely suggested it was around one thousand years, putting the start of the Great Human Commonwealth in around 1000 CE.

Humanity did not have access to wormholes or faster-than-light travel, so society in this era was defined by the fact that it took anywhere from seven to twenty years to travel between adjacent solar systems. The great distances between settlements profoundly changed culture and attitudes. In many places, there was little centralised government; life was similar to the American frontier. Human genetics also began to change. Life spans increased from around 80 to around 110. Artificially accelerated allopatric speciation began on a small scale as regional genetic variation increased, and though any two humans from any two planets could still produce fertile offspring, the differentiation started to become planet-specific enough that the term “species” became popular to describe these genetic groups. At the margins of human expansion — known as the celestial frontier — groups of people with similar political or philosophical views established “planned utopias” on their own planets.

Early After-Human Era

Political conflict at the centre, exacerbated by these pressures, caused the Great Human Commonwealth to fracture into so-called “celestial empires” at some point. The length of time for which the Great Human Commonwealth existed was also not ever decided, but at its dissolution a new year zero was set, 0 After-Human Era.

In the early After-Human Era, the direction for humanity was unclear. The political concept of the “planned utopia” became confused with the pseudo-genetic concept of the “species”, creating species-nations, where genetically similar humans with the same political and social views would create their own societies. Idealistic voices called for humanity to reunite, often under a pseudo-anarchist, decentralised style of government inspired by the frontier. Meanwhile, though the celestial empires seemed like arbitrary divisions compared to species-nations or human unity, the immediate status quo was supported by the central elite, and the empires were capable of wielding significant economic and military power to defend themselves. The tensions and confusion in this era led to a string of wars and widespread violence and crime.

In older stories, one of the celestial empires was called the Scriven, and they issued “genetic updates” to their people, with lettered “types” specialised for different purposes. The E-type Scriven declared independence and became a species-nation, the Evon State. In most newer stories, this account was superseded by one where they declared independence from a generic species-nation, the Jastraxi Empire. The Evon War of Independence against the Jastrax lasted from 100 to 150 AHE. Under the command of Macil Rava, the Jastrax were winning the war, but the Ravensgate intervened to recruit Macil and ensure the Evon State won its independence.

Frontier stories, part of the wider Starlight Cycle, were set around this time, focusing on a group of vagabonds on the celestial frontier far away from central politics.

Largely in the Starlight Cycle, there were mentions of the star courtiers (or Dómarí nei Rellataí), a mysterious god-like race who were already present in the outer reaches of space before the Commonwealth-descended humans reached them, or whose civilisation died out long ago. Other than the star courtiers, who were always humanoid and are generally implied to have once been humans, most stories treat the universe as lacking in extraterrestrial life. Some, however, do describe aliens; Tom often spoke about wanting to include star whales in the Starlight Cycle.

Species-nations

Mid After-Human Era

Centralised species-nations controlling a planet or a solar system each soon became ascendant, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified humanity more distant. As the wars of the early After-Human Era died down, by 300 AHE, the remaining celestial empires now only controlled a few planets each and were relatively ideologically homogeneous, rendering them effectively indistinguishable from other species-nations. The species-nations edited their DNA to add heritable genetic markers that identified the children of parents from different species as wholly one or the other, and some added physical characteristics to match, e.g. all Evon had golden eyes (and in some stories, particularly from 2017, they all had blue hair as well). Life spans also continued to increase, reaching around 170 by the year 1000, considered about double the normal lifespan in the real world.

A new political order emerged, dominated by two species-nations, the Helltunans and the Olympans. Helltuna had hard power — unrivalled military supremacy; Olympa had soft power — cultural, economic and legal influence. Helltuna ostensibly valued dignity, discipline, bravery, loyalty and strength (and, in some tellings, creativity) but were widely considered cruel, arrogant and imperial. Olympa valued honesty, to the point where its economy, which was central to its power, was built around trust credits, where more trustworthy people were richer. Over time, it became less idealistic and more corrupt, turning from bluntly-honest lawyers into dusty senators who valued reputation and cunning. It used a political system called Alethianism, based on the stock market, where each person could invest in political entities, being able to invest more if they were more broadly trusted; political parties, structured like investment banks, competed for controlling stakes in local government.

Many details of 0–1000 AHE were inherited and adapted from Kerry’s Oburron and Jenner paracosm, which includes a significant amount of additional content that was not ultimately inherited by the consensus timeline. This included a war between the Olympans and Helltunans; the existence of a “magical region”, Magitown, which included the Dylon, Unlon, Telephonion and Evon, the last of whom had no magic and so developed technology to compensate; the Royal Front, a group who served what they believed was the most powerful person in the universe; two wars between the Evon and Helltunans; and the discovery of new solar systems, the Postgate Lands, after an obstructive portal to Jenner was moved out of the way.

New astropolitical system

In 400, the Evon scientist Inioluae Ridztire Uara discovered Ellis-Uara wormholes. These were vast, permanent gateways between different parts of the universe through which large spaceships could easily travel. In most stories, they were pre-existing features of the universe (possibly connected with the Ravensgate) that Uara simply stumbled across whilst doing maths, and no more could be made.

As the architects of such a significant discovery, and as wormholes allowed quick dissemination of technological updates, the Evon became powerful because they were the most scientifically advanced and could create the best technology, a type of power known as “sharp power”. Joining the Helltunans with their hard power and the Olympans with their soft power, the Evon with their sharp power became a new great power, and the three together were described as the Three Great Powers.

Ellis-Uara wormholes necessitated a new “astropolitical system” that could cope with greatly increased contact between species-nations. The Euphorbia protocol, defined by Tawnylean statesman Aodhán Euphorbia, became accepted despite Olympan resistance. It required that in cases of the Morganite anomaly, where a child of species A was born to parents both of species B or of species B and C, the child must be taken away and transferred to the species A adoption system, regardless of the family’s wishes. The Breatnais, Tawnylea and their allies established the Monaloe Congress (known in older stories as the New Celtic Congress).

New, cosmopolitan spaces that revived the species-mixing of the old celestial frontier emerged, like the Dál Ráta and the marketplaces of Astranci. This had two consequences. Firstly, the boundaries between smaller species-nations weakened, and with the Euphorbia protocol making intersecting but distinct diasporas possible, the old idea that every species-nation should have its own planet and government broke down. In its place rose the Central Galactic Congress, which most smaller species-nations joined. CGC species gave up their governments and instead elected representatives to a great central congress. Many children and teenagers from CGC species grew up on their own planets, learning a job appropriate to their species, and went forth into Oburron to ply that trade as adults. A typical CGC species were the Häftiägen, who were celebrities and comedians for other species, and who grew up on their own planet where they trained as performers and entertainers.

Finally, Ellis-Uara wormholes led to the emergence of “the Underworld”, a collective name for all spaces beyond the CGC-governed markets where different species interacted, and for the traders, profiteers and researchers who inhabited them. Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of piracy and organised crime in the Underworld, and co-operation between exiled Evon and Olympans led to the emergence of dark corporations who presented themselves as “respectable gangsters”, governors of the Underworld and dispensers of justice. They called their activities derareti, Evonian for “agency”, and established the First and Second Derareti Congresses. What slowly emerged was an influential elite of skilled vigilantes, assassins, professional criminals and fixers, known as the Dark Network, which effectively controlled the Underworld and wielded significant influence in the “legitimate” politics of the galaxy. Breatnais organised crime groups initially held the ascendancy in the Dark Network.

In some stories, mostly either from before 2017 or from 2020, a group of Evon broke off in around 450 to become the Water Evon, a mysterious, monkish race who elected to live semi-underwater lives on a crystalline ocean planet, focusing on building intuitive understanding and harmony with the Universe, often through searching for patterns and underlying analogies. The Water Evon believed that the mainstream Evon had lost their way since the early Evon State, abandoning their idealistic devotion to the pure pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

In those rare stories that featured extraterrestrials, around the emergence of the new political order after 400, they were given reservation planets (often burnt-out former resource planets) where humans were not supposed to go and stopped interacting with most species. In these stories, the Water Evon, and sometimes the Monaloe Congress, were the only ones with whom aliens would engage.

Late After-Human Era

Dating after c. 400 is contentious. The issues centre on where to place the BHH Cycle and its backstory, which takes place some time after 400, and they derive from the fact that not all the historical elements of its backstory (of which most details have been omitted here) integrated perfectly with the newer timelines, which meant that their inclusion or non-inclusion changed how much ‘clearance’ the cycle needed to keep the timeline consistent. Some stories put BHH as far forwards as 5000 “New Era”, without specifying what year 0 NE was in AHE. Others are as conservative as 500 AHE, treating the BHH heroes as the children of the generation that shaped the new world order in the 400s, e.g. making Raven Olympia’s mother, Mavis Olympia, leader of the Olympan opposition to the Euphorbia protocol.

One generation before BHH, Evon scientist Dalin Yei Inuta invented touch-and-go wormholes (also called, particularly in Tom’s telling, Inuta wormholes, and particularly in Cat’s, Gru wormholes). These wormholes could be as small as you liked; matter did not fall into them, i.e. they did not “suck things in”; and they collapsed immediately after anything traversed them. Their invention revolutionised information technology, as for the first time since all humans were on the same planet, information could be sent virtually instantly, i.e. by opening an Inuta wormhole and shooting a laser signal through it. This allowed an interplanetary internet to develop.

It was an established fact in the lore, though admittedly one that was commonly mentioned in older stories but only very rarely mentioned in newer ones, that Rasunians could create touch-and-go wormholes from thin air. It was not clear how this interacted with Inuta having invented them — particularly as the Rasunian ability and Inuta’s discovery were important to the backstories of two different characters.

In most stories, an Evon exile called Mala Dzumach Kavanah took over the Dark Network about ten years before the main BHH Cycle (a few stories prefer to treat Mala as a more shadowy, low-key figure who was not well known even in the Dark Network, and so omit her rise to power). After killing her mother, cheating on the Evonian adulthood test, and fleeing Evonia, she started off as a cutthroat criminal, but once she was an established figure, she deliberately backed off, hoping that the existing elite would interpret this as a lack of ambition and forget her previous reputation. She needed to become part of the Breatnais-dominated elite, which she achieved by manipulating a young kingpin, Elva ar Siora, into establishing a Third Derareti Congress. An organised political structure like this would be a ladder to power for Mala as she could be backed for chair by the masses of the non-elite; having been elevated by the non-elite to the elite to serve as their representative, the elite had a vested interest in appeasing her. After being elected chair, she soon dissolved the Third Derareti Congress once she had enough blackmail on the existing elite to continue her rise to power by backroom machinations alone. In stories where Mala did rise to power, she then replaced the Breatnais elite with an Evon and Helltunan one. In some stories, she created the Underground Ministry, an organised covert government that made the Dark Network her private army. In others, she established the Flying Gang, a select group of the most notorious and cunning deratas of the time who worked with her to influence Oburron’s politics.

At the onset of the BHH Cycle, the Helltunan Emperor Imperium Adshek had just been assassinated by army general Rosaline Elluna on Mala’s orders. Meanwhile, the Evonian government had just been handed over to Sabriel Lundelle Redena, whose radical co-chair and fixer Ciarraí Teagwyn Kavanah, who had orchestrated their rise to power, had stepped down to focus on derareti. Ciarraí then ended up working with Rasunian agent Gru Rasu to protect Ro from Helltunan retribution. A subsequent conflict in the Dark Network involving Ciarraí, Ro, Gru, Mala and Sabriel had almost led to the interstellar political order collapsing into a messy war, only prevented by the Ravensgate — specifically agent Raven Olympia — intervening. The BHH Cycle focused on the exploits of a group of vigilantes in the Dark Network in this volatile era. In contrast to the Maisraln Cycle, the BHH Cycle often did explore timeline-relevant events in detail, and it was usually the initial backdrop for stories that went on to become time travel stories, final battles or Glastieven charter myths.

Ending

After BHH, either the Ravensgate brought all the characters from the different cycles together via time travel, a final ending that was particularly popular in 2018, or Mala declares herself queen of the Universe (or equivalent; a particularly enduring title of hers in this context was Her Ethereal Majesty, the Director of Reality) and establishes a single state (sometimes called the New Cascade) where the species-nations are replaced by “factions” (with traditional names for these factions including Ferox, Ultrix, Callidus and Principia). The Ravensgate bringing everyone together variants of the ending are Eluctari stories; the Mala-led dictatorship variants are Ultrix stories.

The traditional ultimate ending of the timeline is a messy final battle, known as Finale, followed by the characters somehow influencing the creation of Glastieve in the real world. Most commonly, this meant Gawyn Harowcal or Raven Olympia crossing from Oburron into our world (known in this context as Terra) and teaching the mythology to the Glastievens. One story describes the characters influencing the Big Bang in a butterfly effect way, so it becomes an inevitable part of our world’s history that Glastieve is created. Another claims that the mythology characters came through to Terra in prehistoric times and built stone circles on Dartmoor, which was the claimed territory of the Republic of Glastieve at that point in time.