History

The deep history of Ahren stretches back to incalculably ancient events. Through myth and legend, a vague sequence of those events can be determined. It is best noted that in the reckoning of most mortal races, if these years or the factual nature of these events are to be believed in at all, they are almost always idiosyncratic to those who believe in those events. There are none who can remember the beginning of the passage of time and indeed it is commonly believed that time and all the other long forces of Cosmology were in motion long before Ahren existed.

Emptiness Birthing Fullness

The one and only point of agreement on the passage of time among the races of Ahren is that at some point, it began to pass. A world presently exists and at some point, it did not, so it must have been created.

Ars Magica proposes that the creation of the plane of Ahren was caused by an event known as the Vergence, and refers to the period before this transpired as the Void Age of the Great Wheel. This Vergence is a planetological event where the influence of the Eight Essential Planes is "focused" through the Bardo, a plane of existence that is in close mirror to a promordial vision of Ahren, and which some believe existed before.

This believe is not directly shared by the other schools of magic and the cultures that birthed them, which feel that the universe arose in other ways. Under the Way of the Elements, it is believed that the eight planes alone birthed Ahren and that it was only the later appearance of sapient creatures on the plane that caused the "shadow" of the Bardo to be cast. To the Orcs and their orcish shamanism, Bardo is the ash left behind after the Fire-Keeper sparked the first fire in Ahren, and both the Carcolie and the Confederacy of Sages teach that the Bardo and Ahren have infact mutually shaped one another.

What is agreed is that no one god or set of gods had a free hand in the creation of Ahren; in spite of many religions claiming to know the origin of their adherents, most agree that the world itself is a more complex phenomenon than any one god could attribute. Only the church of Anghara in Baghar claims any different, but this is an isolated sect of belief largely unknown outside of the city and its immediate holdings.

Primordial Myth

Thus begins an age of primordial myth, so named for this is believed to be the time when primordial dieties first enter Ahren from their planes of origin. These myths vary greatly, and this period refers to an unreckonable ur-time where it is almost certain linear time flowed but nearly none existed to accurately guage its advance.

Foundation of the City of Baghar

Some rebellious scholars studying the Pre-Baghar Culture suggest that the city (and the few other artifacts of the culture that survive) date at least as far back as the Primordial Myth. Depending on who you ask, the construction of the city may be ascribed to one or more gods, to the Pre-Baghar Culture itself (which somehow existed alongside the earliest and smallest subset of the gods worshiped in Wisteria), or even to having existed before the Vergence - a logical impossibility. It is included here as having been established during the Age of Primordial Myth as even the histories of the Age of Mysteries tend to refer to the city as though it already existed for some time.

Age of Mysteries

Within the Age of Mysteries, time has become more concrete, and it's possible that this age was less a concrete epoch of universal time than a convenient catchment for all those portions of history which definitely happened, but cannot be conveniently anchored in time, because the people to which they happened did not practice the recording of history at that time. Often the events ascribed to the Age of Mysteries take place in far-off lands and only incidentally include Wisteria, and as the different races began their different counts in different places temporally, what time was in the Age of Mysteries for some may be concrete in others.

The Infinite Delusion of the Fae

It is best to describe the Fae as first coming to existence in the Age of Mysteries, because to do so otherwise would be to suggest they were primordial, which can't be so. Even the Great Fae, nearly gods in their own realms at their own rights, rely on the believe and acknowledgement of mortal races for their continued existence, or at least their ability to influence events outside of their courts in the Etheral Plane in any way. What's more, there's a suggestion that the primordial dieties predate Vergence. This cannot be the case for the Fae, whose realms are in a convergent plane that arguably did not exist at the time of the Vergence. Scholars are advised not to look too hard or too long at the contradiction that the Bardo is asserted to have predated the world it reflects while the same is said to be impossible of the Etheral Plane, lest an Ars Magica metaphysicist subject you to a mathematics lecture again.

Ages of Reckoning

Tracking the passage of time is generally considered to the mark of civilization, whether that's the abstract long counts of the Carcolie, Confederacy of Sages, and the Orcish Nation, or the obsessive accounting of cultures like the Clans of Magnus and the Atarlie Empire.

Reckoning of the Dwarves

The dwarves mark their time according to the timekeeping of the Whurorician Calendar, which begins its years on the Festival of the Turning Wheel (as the Celestial Workbell and has a similar structure to the Rophalin Calendar, but markedly different epochs. The count of this calendar is considered most accurate during the Age of Stewardship.

Age of Tutelage

The Age of Tutelage is a dwarven epoch running through the Primordial Myths and the Age of Mysteries, accounted to the dwarves as a period of 10,000 years, which conflicts with other accountings of the length of the same period. Among the dwarves, this calendar is viewed as any other calendar and considered reliable. Scholarship from outside the Clans of Magnus may consider these accountings mythological or apocryphal in nature; accepting it whole-cloth would mean recognizing the dwarves as the oldest sentient race on Ahren with the obvious exception of the Pre-Baghar Culture.

The Age of Tutelage is characterized as being an Age of the Gods. It begins with neither the creation of Ahren or Khaz Urheim or the birth of their god Magnus Allfather, but with the creation of the dwarves in that city by that god and their release into the Atlas Mountains. The age takes its name from having been a period of divine tutelage, when most of the Dwarven Pantheon routinely walked among its people, founded the great clans and their clanholds, and generally set into motion the machine of dwarvish culture. The age involves the "death" of at least two of these gods and the eventual departure of the rest to [[Khaz Urdheim] at the turning of the year between 1000 Age of Tutelage and 1 Age of Stewardship.

Age of Stewardship

All the rest of Dwarven History, according to the Chronology of Dwarvenkind, falls into the Age of Stewardship. This long age is highly useful to the detached historian as the isolationist dwarves none the less make reference to events that appear in other histories, and by the time of the Age of Stewardship, their chronicallers are generally agreed by most observers to have been using literal days, weeks, months, and years in their records rather than some of the more figurative accounts believed to have been used in the Age of Tutelage.

Dwarves account the "contemporary" age as part of the Age of Stewardship, and the age will only end when the gods return.

Reckoning of the Atarlie Empire

Like the dwarves, the Elves have a rich, semi-mythological historical record that they believe has been kept inviolate since the beginning of meaningful time. It begins with a period known as the Springtime of the Gods, during which some of the history overlaps with the Primordial Myth and involves the birthing of the various non-primordial Elven gods.

Springtime of the Gods

The beginning of Elvish History, which concerns such mythologies as the first exodus of the elf-like beings that were the lesser children of Pyria Valeptor from Elysium, and the alike appearahnce of Shalaevar Shamaris. Amunhoptra is founded by the first elves to settle Wysteria.

In the 500th year of this age, Feno Ilirel takes a subset of the elves and sends them on an exodus from the Atlas Mountains, breaking them off into the unique Carcolie culture. She charges this new culture of the elves with defense of the magic of nature and fostering a connection to the land, but explains none of the logic of this commandment to any of her fellow gods, and discourages even worship of herself directly by the Carcolie.

This period lasts for exactly 1111 years, ending with the Festival of the Turning Wheel headed into Age of Gods 1112, with a ceremony in which Rophalin Imperitor, God-Emperor of the Atarlie Empire, hands over his power to the Atarlie Senate and instructs them to appoint the first mortal emperor. Thereafter, the chronicallers record the years as those of the Age of Elvish Springtime.

Age of Elvish Springtime

The Age of Elvish Springtime is short, and marked with expansionism, lasting only 128 years. It runs from the foundation of the first mortal empire to the consolidation of Elvish control over the Province of the Sun and Moon and the Southern Province, which were not previously part of the empire. The War of Elves and Dwarves and subsequient Great Restoration of Civility are in this time period, and the latter is responsible for the political mood that lead to the Treaty of Hall Hill, converting the Hearthlands to a protectorate, in the summer of AES 128. The year that followed was recorded as Year 1, Age of the Summer of Mortals.

Attitudes of the elves at this time mark a rapid shift, where they were forced to reckon with the fact that they were not the only sentient, or even Divine-Sparked race on Wisteria, much less Ahren. While Atarlie Chauvinism remained a deep-seated problem, by the end of the age the elves at least recognized that the other races were other peoples and not just unusually clever beasts.

Age of the Summer of Mortals

The Age of the Summer of Mortals has run long. The Great Collapse era of the Republic of Petrenea is contemporary to the year 1586 of the Age of the Summer of Mortals, though in the years to follow, some chronicallers have suggested that the Age had turned and have proposed names for the new age such as the Age of Wisterian Autumn, though officially the age is still that of the summer of mortals.

Unsurprisingly then, for the elves and those who trade with them, most of history is that of the Age of the Summer Of Mortals. Much of the first millenium of the age is considered "stable history", and most conflicts to be reported were entirely internal to the empire or minor diplomatic issues with the Dwarves or the Hearthland Protectorate.

Of note is the beginning of what is known as the Southern Campaign of the Atarlie, which began in 1279 of this age, and marked the expansion of the empire into the south. Fundamentally, this involved episodic wars between the Imperial Legion, the city-state of Xarthekei (at the time part of the Great Republic of Petrenea), and the dwarves of Khaz Elarnzak. The general tide of the war was slowly in the direction of an elvish capture of Xarthekei, save for the disruption caused to the forces of the invading forces by the Great Collapse. The war ended in a treaty in 1588, which saw Xarthekei give up territory north of its position (now defining the southern edge of the Atarlie Frontier), and the empire pay the dwarves a grudge-price for not sharing the spoils of this victory.

Reckoning of the Principalities of Man

Moreso than any of the other races that call Wisteria home, and befitting both their nature and their recorded origins, humanity is the most fractured species on Ahren, and even they themselves admit it. Humankinds origins were poor, and did not lend themselves to self-documentation. Therefore, the early history of humanity had to be largely reconstructed from their own collective recollections.

Bastonian Recknoning

The Annals of Bastonia record two principal ages of history - an Age of Bitter Darkness and the current Age, the Age of the Bastion, and further subdivides the first into the Age of Bitter Darkness proper and a much shorter Age of Rebellion. Both of these periods are reckoned as the years "Before the Walls", a calendar that counts the years down toward the founding of the city of Whiterock in full betrayal of its reconstructed nature. This history is deeply tied to the Bastonian state religion, the Church of the Almighty, and its theology, which explains in some part why the Bastonians are unique among almost all the races of the world (save the city of Baghar) for expecting universal compliance to their religious edicts, especially in their own lands.

Age of Bitter Darkness

The Age of Bitter Darkness is largely considered mythological. It is full of largely empty periods of time and with the accounting of figures that may or may not have existed, including accounts of humans who lived well beyond what is considered to be normal human lifetimes.

The Age begins somewhere in the Primordial Myth with the creation of The Enemy (or his pre-existence) and the arrival of The Enemy in the plane of Ahren, which he explored for a period of time usually accounted as a full milenium, before abducting a hitherto-undocumented race of great apes from across the Eastern Sea into what is now the Shimmering Shore and recreated them "of his service", birthing the earliest of Mankind.

What follows is a long empire (sometimes figured as as much as 4000 years, but this is believed to be inaccurate) under the direct rulership of The Enemy, and throughout which humanity expanded across the Shimmering Shore and up the lands west of the Atlas Mountains. This northward expansion is recorded by the Orcs as being the impetus for the event known as the Kindling.

Age of Rebellion

When the empire of the Enemy was at the enith of its power, at a year long agreed to be counted as 170 Before the Walls, Lukas the Rebellious was born a slave in the city of Baghar, which the Enemy was said to have conquered. This is broadly considered to have been the start of the Age of Rebellion.

Fifty years later, coinciding with the start of The Age of Elvish Springtime, Lukas was leading a rebellion after having served one year in a mine in the area now known as The Bleak. This rebellion began with his slaying of a pit lord named Balgharond, and leading a company of liberated slaves into the wilderness.

In 100 BW (twenty years after the start of his active rebellion), Lukas the Rebellious and his followers have made camp at the site that would become the city of Whiterock, and believe that both distance and the presence of the Orcish Nation between themselves and the Enemy will protect them. At his direction, Heather of High Toor begins construction of the earliest keep at Whiterock. Lukas also experiences his first vision of the Almighty at this time.

A series of calamaties (mostly involving the taking, retaking, and sack of Baghar) then befalls the Enemy, and buys time for the completion of the city of Whiterock. The city is not attacked until the very turning of the age, leading to a long seige and an event known as the Battle of the First Wall, which has extreme religious and political significance. The breaking of the seige on the day of the summer solstice culminated in the apotheosis of several of the gods of the pantheon, the breaking of the Enemy as a political force and his banishment to Hell, and the signal to change the age to the Age of Bastion.

Age of Bastion

The first century of the Age of Bastion is home to two key eras. The first is the rule of San Lukas and San Heather as the first king and queen of the Kingdom of Bastonia, overseeing a period of great expansion and the establishment of many of the settlements in the region. In 67 AB, seeing his imminent death and transference to Heaven, San Lukas bestowed the crown upon his son, King Bastion I. This lead to the start of a 22 year military campaign known as the Southern Expurgation, which saw the destruction of the final factions loyal to the Enemy and lead to the Lordless Lands obtaining that name. During this war, he also oversaw the construction of the Bastion Line.

In AB 89, the Enemy imbued an Archwhale with significant power in an attempt to destroy the city of Coldwater. The beast is defeated by San Marino.

In AB 98, the wizard known as Sylvester the Blue saves the City of Oversea from destruction with the collapse of the cliffs below the Oversea Bastion. This involved a work of Grand Theurgy that lead to his diefication and started his history with the creation of Ars Magica.

Thus begins a period of long stasis marked with internal conflict and generational wars of succession, preventing the Bastonians from having a major impact on international affairs until the start of their Southern Expansion in AB 1643. This conflict largely involved the Orcish Nation, who stood opposed to being pushed off their lands by the xenophobic human colonizers.

Petrenean Reckoning

Being mostly humans (at least at their foundation), the Petrenean peoples of the Shimmering Shore have a shared history with the Bastonians, but a very different interpretation of it. They mark the beginning period of their history as the mythological Age of Infinite Delusion, and place far less importance on the liberational themes of their northron cousins, as they place far less importance on the Enemy.

Age of Infinite Delusion

The Age of Infinite Delusion begins in the ancient and unnumbered past with the first humans being "breathed aware" by the Deciever, a representation of the Enemy, who is granted no more mythological significance than any other devil of Hell, the plane from which he resides. During this age, the "dreams of humanity" were pulled from the Bardo and breathed into life and wakefullness by the Deciever and other powerful devils who wished to abuse them for labour, for at that time Ahren was a new land and unsullied, and Hell is timeless (and therefore desolate).

This situation is presented as much the same as the story of San Lukas, but Lukas himself never comes up, except in some footnotes usually considered to be esoterica. This is in part because the story of how Humanity became free agents in the universe instead of the slaves of powerful entities does not hinge on the interventions of the Almighty in the Petrenean narrative.

It is instead said that when the enemy first lost his city of Baghar, a prince of the city of Petrenea was practicing a form of meditation throughout the Festival of the Turning Wheel, and seeing the astrological signs of the moment in the sky, he came to a fundamental understanding that lead to an event known as Awakening. This event marks the start of the long count of the Age of Enlightenment.

Age of Awakening

With the teachings of the Awakened One to guide them, Petrenea remained free of the influence of the Deciever forever more, and in the years to follow eventually all the shimmering Shore was liberated. Though considered the chief god of the Petrenean Pantheon by outside writers, the Awakened One is rarely attributed as having described himself as divine, though his teachings did lead directly to the rise of two other gods - a patrenean war god named Xia Leng and an orcish hero-god named Xuthagug Three-Eyes.

This forward count continues until at least the Awakened Year 1696 and the Great Collapse precipitated by the opening of the Great Rift. As could be expected with a loss of republican governance there is now some confusion about whether or not a new age is necessary. Those that feel that this is the end of an epoch in the same way that the liberation of mankind was often account the modern year forward from 1696 as the year "post-collapse".

Reckoning of the Lordless Lands

There are at least two nations in the Lordless Lands (a slightly ambiguous frontier land), and the third related nation which share a commonality in that they have their own robust and largely congruent calendars, with the only major point of difference being the timing of annual holidays and disagreement on what year it is. Conveniently, these nations do not place a strong level of importance on the accuracy of the count of the year.

Stellunar Wheel of the Carcolie

While not physically located in the Lordless Lands, the Carcolie and the Confederacy of Sages both share the Secrets of Nature magical school and both have a largely similar map based on the motion of the moons and the Ahrenic Zodiac. It's principal difference is that the festival of the burning wheel is 16 days long instead of 3, leaving the months at 27 days, and that same festival is referred to as the "Festival of Alignment".

Carcolie history begins with the tale of Feno Ilirel (who in their interpretation was a very ancient elf, albeit just an elf) guiding them into the wilderness, and in a sense the mythic age extends up into even living memory for the Carcolie. Their storytelling considers it far more important to remember the broad strokes of what happened than the fact that it happened specifically on the 7th of the 8th of some specific year, and historical events are thereby often moved to "the time of some other figure" around the time of "the nearest relevant festival".

Star-Stations of the Confederacy of Sages

The motions of the stars and planets are everything to the Confederacy of Sages, whose loose theocracy is headed by their most elite druidic circle, the Star-Counters. Confederacy historical records and date-keeping rely heavily on complicated star charts and passive understanding of the stellar ephemera, which has lead to two major impacts.

The first is that, much like the Carcolie, the average person in the Confederacy culture does not have a strong understanding of date-keeping, and that popular history is more akin to storytelling than chronicling as a result. For most purposes it is sufficient to know when a temporally-near event happened relative to the present day.

The second is that the sagely cohort of the society actually has very precise chronicals available to them, albiet as part of an oral history, and that these records are tied very precisely in time to descriptions of relevant stellar phenomena. This has the mixed blessing of making Confederate dates almost impossible to convert to other calendar systems, confounding foreign scholarship. This is a source of endless amusement to the Confederates, who consider such conversions meaningless anyway.

Long Count of the Orcs

Much like the humans of Bastonia and the Shimmering Shore, the orcs acknowledge a period in their history where they were not quite fully orcs, having originally been created during the primordial or mythic ages as the Princes of Beasts, being orcish in form but bestial in intellect. It would not be until the Firekeeper imbued full sentience into the orcs (an even known as the Kindling of the Orcs) in response to the arrival of mankind in their territory that true orcish history begins.

The Princes of Beasts

The orcs occasionally tell tales of events that transpired when they were still the princes of beasts, and the Princes of Beasts appear in historical tales shared by the Confederacy of Sages, though the sages cannot account for a precise date of the transition into the Orcish Long Count. Human histories agree that the change took place during the Age of Bitter Darkness or Age of Infinite Delusion, and the dwarves themselves agree the transition occurred some time in the Age of Tutelage.

These stories are often figurative and highly metaphorical, including such tales as the orc theft of writing from the dwarves (modern linguists argue that other than this assertion there is no similarity between the writing systems of the two languages worthy of mentioning) and a story about the orcs losing their hair by having fed most of it to their god Kodo the Devourer to trick it into going away.

The Long Tales

The Long Tales of the Orcs are their recorded history after kindling, though the record in question takes the form of memories historical stories and tales and is therefore somewhat loosely translatable into the concrete dates and times used by some other annals. This is not to take away from the fact that it is a relatively complete history and reasonably reliable in terms of the events that actually transpired.

These tales include such tales as the Gul Spellspeaker's Conquest of Baghar, Buggug Angel-Slayer's Defeat at Baghar, the Purge of High Toor, the Decay of the Bleak and a host of others. By most accounts the orcs are a proud and ancient nation with a history as rich as any other on Wisteria, though they have been on the back foot now for nearly two millennia. Most orc communities have several story-keepers who memorize these tales and tell them back to the others at frequent intervals, meaning that by all accounts your average Orc is likely more familiar with the history of her people than a peasant-class Bastonian or even a working-class Dwarf.

Ages Past Reckoning

The future never comes. Sages in Wisteria argue over the meaning of the Vergence and whether a Divergence or Second Vergence might occur. In the far depths of time, will the world be unmade? And if it is, will it be made anew?

Visions of an Infinite Future

Perhaps because of the comfort the idea brings to those with long lives, many elves in both the Atarlie Empire and among the Carcolie believe in a steady-state universe. The sun will always shine, the moons will always rise, the tide will do as the tide does and the universe will keep ticking along forever. This view is shared by the dwarves, who much like the elves consider themselves the "children" of their creator gods, blessed with an infinite universe. All three cultures have a view that they are in a position of stewardship for that infinite world, though rarely do the three come close to any kind of agreement on what that actually entails.

Since in the Carcolie case this position came to inform that of the Secrets of Nature, it is a not-uncommon belief among some peoples in the Confederacy of Sages, though the Cervitaur heads of the Star-Counters have a longer view still.

Visions of the End of Time

By contrast, at least one culture on Ahren forsees an upcoming end of time, with argument raging about when that end of time will come. The Church of the Almighty in Bastonia urges that there is a Battle of the Last Wall that matches the Battle of the First Wall, and represents a final historical conflict where the Almighty and the Enemy will each rally a force to their side and attempt to destroy the other, tearing the world asunder in the process.

Visions of the Wheel of Time

Though something of a minority view in their respective cultures, it has become an orthodox interpretation of cosmology among the practitioners of Ars Magica to think of the world as inherently cyclic. After all, they founded the discipline as it is usually understood and worked out the concept of a Vergence, and who's to say if such a thing could happen again or not. The split within the school over this topic is actually fairly clearly defined. Bastonian practitioners tend to argue that instead of a repeated vergence the implication is actually a divergence, or arcane destruction of the world, which suits the religious orthodoxy of their homeland. In contrast many Atarlie practitioners of the same school argue that the Divergence is just semantics, and that new universes are probably being "verged" regularly.

Cyclical periods of the creation and recreation of the universe are also common in the south of Wisteria. Most of the regions of the Shimmering Shore approached magic through the Way of the Elements and the teachings of the Awakened One, both disciplines of which stress impermanence-even-of-nothingness. It logically follows that the universe would HAVE to be destroyed, but fear not, since it also logically follows that it could not help but be re-created.

This view is constantly being argued into the Secrets of Nature school by the Star-Counters as well, and a cyclic view of nature is shared by Orcish Shamanism practitioners, who have direct access to the Bardo and the purported experiences, memories, and accounts given by spirits inhabiting that realm.