July 2023
***OUTDATED***
Early on in the construction of Broken Dimensions, Menace established a rule that the project would not break time down into "BC" and "AD"/"BCE." This is largely because Broken Dimensions has about 10 major eras, not two! In this post we will see a brief synopsis of those 10 eras and what makes them significant, discuss relevant events in each, and math out roughly how old the Broken Dimensions universe is.
Basic Breakdown
Era 1 - the creation era; lasted around 1300 years. Ends with Crisis 1, the gods' war for balance.
Era 2 - closest in aesthetic and technology to our time in the real world, 2020s CE. Lasts approximately 2050 years. Ends with Crisis 2 when the god Maikoa attempts to undo the result of the war for balance.
Era 3 - lasts about 2100 years before Crisis 3 occurs and the origin world, [ x ] is cleaved from its subdivision, Svarenheil ("Adreoni" at this point).
Era 4 - lasts 1,713 years to the day and comes to an end when Tartarus is created as a prison dimension for seven cruelly immortal mages (Crisis 4).
Era 5 - lasts around 2205 years, ends with an interdimensional war as Adreoni and [ x ] achieve interdimensional travel and discover each other.
Era 6 - lasts 300 years exactly and is brought to end end with a ceasfire that ends the Three Hundred-Year War (still called "Crisis" 6 despite there being no real "crisis" event... unless you were funding the war).
Era 7 - lasts 1032 years and ends when the tenative peace between Tartarus, Aetheria, and Adreoni is broken and they devolve into war again. Crisis 7 is when Aetheria immedately and surprisingly stands down, then closes off an entire quadrant of voidspace around their dimension, effectively claiming several satellites and the majority of Adreoni and Tartarus's invasion forces.
Era 8 - lasts 3037 years, ends abruptly when an incursion between the Old Aetherian Empire and outside attackers is stopped by an unexpected demigod and Aetheria's archipelago is revealed to be a magic field-generator of sorts. Calls the wayward gods back to set reality to rights after millennia of their absence. Involves time stopping for approximately three hours (Crisis 8).
Era 9 - an era of time anomalies after the effort of healing reality in Crisis 8 leads to the death of the god of time. Everything is normal for several hundred years, but after Xellarian dies, things get weird for an odd perceived 5-7,500 years. In reality, the stretched era timeframe lasted a whopping 10,602 years in total (unbeknownst to everyone who actually lived through it). Ended when a crazy experiment destroyed the Adreoni dimension quadrant (Crisis 9).
Era 10 - the current era, lasted about 2050 as of "Book 2," an untitled novel-length project that follows "Coalition Collection."
The Math
When the above is added up, Broken Dimensions universe comes out to be roughly 26,400 years old! Depending on what you believe, that is either several billion years younger than our perceived universe OR roughly seven times as old!
This number is almost entirely irrelevant to everyone in-universe though... except for the gods and Nathan Shasear, who lives through some odd 24,000 of those years.
Having a basic knowledge of the Eras in general is, however, invaluable to readers when trying to figure out dating systems and where things take place in the timeline.
Expanded Notes
(It may be beneficial to keep a tab open with the post about the gods while reading this section.)
Eras 1 and 2 are the least developed story-wise, but are the most fundamental epochs the understand when it comes to the first chronological story of the project: Prophecy Lost.
Era 1 is nicknamed "the creation era" because it is the era in which Solorana and The Eternal Darkness (Andareis) created the inhabitable mortal universe as well as the first-generation gods, the first two sentient mortal races, and some of the second-generation gods. It was during this era that [ x ] was created, originally a single inhabitable solar system with thriving flora, exuberant and varying fauna, and two dominating sentient races: humanity and the magoni (note: these are not the same magoni that inhabit Tartarus afer Crisis 4).
It is during Era one that the multiverse is the most at peace. The only gods who exist are Solorana, TED, Xellarian, Virri, Morsanna, Cor, and Litero—that is, the gods of light and darkness, life and death, knowledge and creativity, and time. Humans and magoni get along as well as they can, and magic and knowledge are traded between gods and both mortal races liberally. The second generation gods begin to be created, including Ialu, Meyaa, Waulfend, Kiridia, Viabolt, Hekata, and Maikoa, and new layers of culture, social status, and specialization come into existence.
However, the end of Era 1 also sees the start and end of the War for Balance, a cataclysmic event that pits the gods against each other in a deadly battle for whose image the rest of the cosmos will be created in: Solorana's or Andareis's. Some of the lesser gods side with Solorana, others with Andareis, and only three remain neutral: Ialu, Meyaa and Xellarian. The mortals were also drawn into the fight, and the stability of the entire world hung in the balance.
Gods who side with Solorana: Virri, Cor, and Waulfend
Gods who side with Andareis: Morsanna, Litero, Maikoa.
"Balance" gods (aka double agents who worked both sides as they pleased): Kirida, Viabolt, Hekata
Neutral gods: Ialu, Meyaa, Xellarian
The fallout is so severe that two of the first-generation gods, Cor and Litero, former lovers who felt so strongly about the war's divisons that they split up, died from the cataclysmic defeat of TED (and, as many believe, from a raw, emotional psychotic break that led to a fight to the death. The stories vary). Their split generates 4 gods: Arric and Jacinthe, Iya and Lio, both sets of twins.
Universal age at the end of the era: ~1300 years
Era 2 is commonly known as the "Dark Era" or the era of desolation. After the War for Balance, which culminates in Andareis becoming The Eternal Darkness, aka The Void (Sentient), and dispersed across the physical planes of reality and put into a deep, eternal slumber. The rest of the multiverse began its creation phase under Solorana's watchful eye, which took many of them away from [ x ] and left it without guidance or godly supervision.
Without the gods there to hold the hands of humans and magoni, settling their disputes and teaching them new things, different groups began to hoard knowledge and privatize certain practices, excluding each other more and more over the generations. Eventually, there was such a sharp and vast divide between most human and magoni leaders (each with their own rabid followings behind them) that when the gods did return, they had to separate the two groups to prevent them from going to war themselves and destroying one another. Because the magoni were largely nocturnal, a separate world was created for them: Svarenheil, the underworld, isolated from humanity. Humanity was then isolated to the overworld, which was wiped clean of all magic and knowledge of magic because they had developed dangerous methods of not just physical destruction, but mental and metaphysically destruction as well. Knowledge of those magicks was also wiped from the magoni.
Some two hundred years after that, Maikoa, the god of trickery, came in contact with a well that tapped into The Eternal Darkness's conscience. They were corrupted and banished from the overworld, imprisoned in a secluded mountain in the underworld lest they spread their forbidden knowledge
Altogether, the gods lived in peace with mortals for a thousand years (Era 1), and humans and magoni lived together in peace for 1520 years before they were separated (beginning of Era 1 thru ~520 E-2).
Universal age at the end of the era: ~3350 years
The Dark Age continued through first half of Era 3, technically ending in the 1340s during which Hekata, Kirida, Waulfend, and Viabolt returned to the mortal world to check on them and assess their knowledge. It was discovered that, without the gods, human society had degraded into a different kind of dark age in which magic was banned and striken from record, the gods were no longer known or revered, and infighting and bigotry had divided them all.
Meyaa and Morsanna found much of the same in Svarenheil and made an executive decision to help—something that almost earned them their own banishements. After Solorana, Ialu, and Xellarian vetoed any further action, the crew who had decided to check up on the humans was put on probation and allowed only limited time in the overworld. Meanwhile, the underworld began to unify and develop their own sense of self post-isolation.
It wasn't until the last century of the Era that thing began to look up. When modern human technology had advanced rapidly during an industrial revolution in the 1800s, they had also begun to stir up the ancient magicks which they had forgotten. Around this same time, the magoni (now called the Svarenics) in Svarenheil were uniting and uncovering their own ancient texts—and discovering the rituals and warding put around the god Maikoa's isolation chamber. The Svarenics reached their ignition event first: they discovered Maikoa and freed them, and Maikoa, woken from a slumber during which their mind melded with TED's, ran to the home of the gods to find it deserted. Thus begins Maikoa's Quest.
Maikoa leaves the befuddled Svarenics peoples behind for Meyaa and Morsanna to deal with and goes off in search of the remaining gods. Their ultimate goal is to find Solorana and alert her to the things they learned from TED (Solorana and TED were very close and had a deep, enriching sibling bond. Banishing and nearly obliterating TED nearly destroyed Solorana emotionally). They gather the rest of the gods on the way, as well as a host of rabid, quick-to-assume Svarenic followers back home. The quest takes over a decade, and when they finally reach Solorana at the far edges of material reality, they return and take everyone back to [ x ].
The final century of Era 3 (approx. 2033 to 2100) is characterized by the Great Revival, in which the gods return to [ x ], set up shop, and start fixing all the issues their absence caused by education mortals, reigniting the study and practice of magic, and setting up systems to compensate for if and when they leave again. They also break open the portals to and from the overworld and Svarenheil, which causes its own host of problems due to Maikoa's overeager, premature opening of said portals. This is the period in which Prophecy Lost takes place.
The very end of Era 3 sees the event of Crisis 3, in which a dangerous rivalry and not-so-friendly competition between the leaders of Svarenheil and the overworld leads to the two worlds splitting apart, creating the first two separate dimensions: [ x ] and to-be-named Adreoni. The diminished population of Svarenheil vanishes and no mortal can access the world at all. This is how it is revealed that Svarenheil is not, in fact, a world beneath the crust of the earth, but a world just off of [ x ]'s reality plane.
Universal age at the end of the era: ~5450 years
Stay tuned for part 2!
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