Timeline

Though a good deal is too strange to be believe,

nothing is too strange to have happened.

-Thomas Hardy

Stone Age (~45,000 BC to ~11,000 BC)

The Age Before Ages, the First Age,

• Behaviourally modern humans emerge in what we now know as Africa, living mostly as nomads with little technology. These early peoples begin spreading across the world through land bridges exposed by the Ice Age.
• The emerging culture of these early humans interacts with the dark matter surrounding the Earth, creating a noosphere of human thought, understanding, faith and belief. This noosphere would be called the Astral Plane by later scholars.
• Dragons and giants emerge from the interaction of magic and the natural world.
• The supernal realms--Faerie, Shadow, Chaos, the Underworld, and the Spirit World--emerge from the Astral. This also sees the emergence of the first supernals: the ancient spirits, elementals, psychopomps, fairies and nightmares.
• The first vampires are created. Their exact origin is disputed, but it can be traced to the earliest city-states of the Middle East, in the Land of Nod.
• The World Tree grows its first branches.
• The War in Heaven ends with the one-third of the angels cast out of the Atziluth and imprisoned in the depths of the Abyss, in the prison known as Hell. The loyalist angels build a garrison in the Astral to defend against the outcasts: the Silver City.
• A great sundering strikes the world, establishing the Great Divide that splits the physical world from the supernal ones.
• The civilizations of the age are consumed in a great conflagration, and most traces of them scoured from the face of the Earth. Other than giants and dragons, most non-human races are rendered extinct in the blaze.

Mythic Age (~11,000 BC to ~6,000 BC)

The Age of Glory, the Golden Age, the Second Age

• Dragons and giants take humans under their tutelage and begin teaching them magic and technology. Many are worshipped as gods.
• With the cycle of ages, control of Faerie moves from Spring to Summer.
• The first human nations emerge. Over the following centuries, these become great empires such as Xia, Irem, Aztlan, Hawaiki, Kumari Kandam, Midgard, Amazonia, Akhet, and Shambhala. Greatest of these nations was Atlantis, the Island Kingdom.
• The fey and the jinn found their own nations in the mortal realm, including Tir Na nOg, Arcadia, and Jinnistan.
• Dragons and giants come to war, using mortal realms as proxies. Over the course of the war, the giants were almost completely wiped out, and the surviving titans hid behind the great menhirs of Jotunheim on the continent of Hyperboria.
• The human nations reach incredible heights of magic, creating incredible artifacts and reshaping the Earth itself, compressing thousands of years of tectonic activity into the span of decades.
• The age ends in the Flood, which washes away the great empires. Numerous regions of the world vanish beneath the waves, most notably the entirety of Atlantis.

Magical Age (~6,000 BC to 821 AD)

The Dark Age, the Age of Gods and Kings, the Third Age

• The supernal races flee the mortal realm after the Flood, never to establish nations or permanent settlements in the realm again.
• As a result of the Flood, the high magic of the Mythic Age is no longer easily accessible, and so society rebuilds utilizing more technology.
• With the shifting of the ages, control of Faerie falls from Summer to Winter.
• Remnants of Akhet establish the first settlements and farms in the Nile Valley. Soon after, civilizations emerge in Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, and along the Yellow River.
• Supernaturals such as vampires, werewolves, and human mages begin to influence human society, ruling over them directly as kings and emperors, or hiding behind the throne.
• The surviving magisters of Atlantis gather a number of talented seers, shamans and folk mages in Babylon. There, at the Tower, they found the Orders of Atlantis, dedicated to preserving the lore of the Island Kingdom.
• The versipellis packs of Latium unite together and found the city of Rome, and declare it the capital of a new Lycan Kingdom.
• Risen mummies from the Old Kingdom of Egypt band together and from an alliance known as the Seekers of Thoth. Over the ages, the Seekers would come to dominate Egypt's occult underworld.
• Feuds between various supernatural factions lead to numerous wars between human nations.
• Merlin is born, becomes a powerful druid, and helps Julius Caesar drive the werewolves from the Roman Republic. The werewolves would regroup in Odins Ve, and form the modern Lycan Nation.
• The Bogeyman drives the Winter Court out of the Netherworld and establishes the Kingdom Over Shadows.
• The War of Veils breaks out in 816. On one side are the angels of the Empyrean, the ifrit, the gnomes, the horrors, and the fey of Summer; on the other stand Middle Eastern mages and werebeasts, several covens of vampires, the Winter and Autumn Courts of Faerie, the Orders of Atlantis, the Seekers of Thoth, the sea-kingdoms of the Marid, a dozen dragons, and at least one demon prince.
• The War of Veils ends in 820 with a decisive victory for the pro-Veil faction.

The Modern Age (821 AD-Present)

The Age of Man, the Age of Science, the Veiled Age, the Fourth Age

• In 821 AD, the Veil Treaty is signed, separating the mundane and supernatural worlds. Tapping into the magic of the Tower of Babel and the ley lines that were gathered there in the Age Before, a great spell is woven, spreading the Veil across the world.
• Humanity, now largely cut off from magic, turns to science. Over the next 1200 years, this will result in the development of advanced mathematics, medicine, astronomy, cartography, engineering and architecture. Humans will build gleaming towers that rake sky, fly around the world, split the atom, walk on the Moon, and develop a means to talk with anyone, anywhere in the world, through electronic signals. All without the need for anything supernatural. Technology begins to match, or in certain areas surpass, the magic of the Mythic Age.
• With the shifting of the ages, control of Faerie falls from Winter to Summer.
• The Bogeyman vanishes in the aftermath of the Veil War. In his absence, governance of the Kingdom Over Shadows is reformed, and power falls to the Parliament of Shadows.
• Secret societies emerge, dedicated to preserving occult knowledge and taking control of the hidden world of magic. These include the Assassins (1081, Isfahan), the Knights Templar (1119, Jerusalem), the Green Dragon Society (1285, Nêdong), the White Lotus (1337, Anhui), the Freemasons (1352, York), the Sons of the Dragon (1487, Cluj-Napoca), the Invisible College (1644, London), the Committee of 300 (1712, Westminster), the Illuminati (1776, Ingolstadt), the Thule Society (1918, Munich), MI18 (1939, London), Majestic-12 (1947, Arlington), the Bilderberg Group (1954, Oosterbeek), the Priory of Sion (1952, Annemasse), the Network (1982, Anaheim) and the Byfrost Group (1997, San Francisco).
• The Sacking of Baghdad by the Mongol Hordes nearly starts the Second Veil War, wherein the Mongols and their allies attempt to destroy the Veil Treaty and return magic to the world. The Assassins, the Seekers of Thoth, the Green Dragons and the Parliament of Shadows allied to foment a civil war among the Mongol forces and prevented an alliance between the Mongols, Louis IX of France, and Pope Urban IV. In the aftermath of this conflict, these factions help form the first special task forces designed to help enforce the Veil: the Black Cloaks, or, as they would later be known, the Men in Black.
• As a result of the Sacking of Baghdad, the Veil Treaty relocates its operations to Cairo, then to Fez in the 1200s, In the 1600s, sensing the shifting of power from the Middle East towards Europe, the Treaty moved again to London in the 1600s, and it has been headquartered there since.
• German forces make use of magic during the Second World War, ending over a millennium where warfare was conducted almost entirely through by mundane means. As a response, the United Kingdom and the United States form occult security teams to handle threats the Veil Treaty can't. Other nations soon follow.
• In 1947, an alien craft crashes at Roswell, New Mexico, alerting several secret societies to the existence of extraterrestrial life.
• The internet is invented, technomancy comes about, and the astral domain of Cyberspace comes into being.
• In 2012, a Dark Tide begins to rise again, signalling that the Wheel of Ages has begun to turn once again.
• You were born, grew up, and somehow came to be reading this.