The Age of Unity—The Age of Wealth—The Age of the Sea-Goat

Some sages say the “Age of Capricorn,” as the Elves foretell it, will be a continuation of the peace and prosperity of the previous age, and make little differentiation between the two. Others of a more pessimistic bent see a hidden danger in the promise of this age. Some predict that the Age of the Sea-Goat will be a time that Urthe’s past comes back to haunt us, and people may have to take responsibility for the deeds of their ancestors. As learned sages puzzle over the mysterious Sea-Goat omen, half beast of the land, half creature of the deep, they fear that the unity and wealth it promises may not be equally promised to all: an age that raises every nation together may just as easily be one that finally calls every old debt due.

4300 CE: The Slow Drift Begins

Sages studying the deep record of Urthe’s geology note, in these early years, that the continents, sundered since the Catastrophe of the Third Age, have measurably begun drifting back toward one another, a motion far too slow for any single lifetime to witness, but unmistakable across generations of careful survey. Whether this is the beginning of the reunification some prophecy foretells, or simple, meaningless geology continuing exactly as it always has, no sage now living can honestly say.

4600 CE: The Regentium Standard

As trade between Urthe’s worlds and colonies matures beyond anything the Eighth Age achieved, the merchant concerns of a dozen nations, human, dwarven, elven, and beyond, quietly settle on Regentium, “imperial gold,” as the reserve standard against which lesser currencies are measured. Already the rarest and most jealously hoarded of the numismatic metals, Regentium’s scarcity, rather than its beauty, makes it the substance every serious ledger is now reckoned against.

4950 CE: The Deep Seed Stirs

Sailors and sea-elves working the deepest trade routes report, with growing frequency, disturbances in waters long thought stable, vast shapes glimpsed only at a distance, currents disturbed by something no chart accounts for. Sages of a more severe temperament connect these reports to the old, half-forgotten speculation of an early Seed of Baramin, planted quietly by some unnamed Power in the earliest ages, that has spent every age since slow-growing into a leviathan whose true size and hunger remain, mercifully, still unmeasured.

5200 CE: The Enslavement of the Sun

Urthe’s artificers, no longer merely reaching toward the Powers the way Hyperion’s forges did in the age prior, achieve what sages have taken to calling true Type II technology: the mastering, through means few outside the innermost circles of the great engineering concerns claim to fully understand, of the very Power of the Sun itself. Whether this mastery is achieved through willing accord or genuine enslavement of some solar deity, as the more troubled sages whisper, is a question the age’s own celebrants show little interest in asking.

5350 CE: The Unification Begins

With the continents’ drift now closing the last true oceans between them, and with power drawn directly from the sun itself now feeding every forge and every Hopper’s core alike, the scattered nations of Urthe begin, for the first time since before the Catastrophe, to speak seriously of formal union rather than mere alliance. Historians of later ages will dispute for centuries whether this union was sought freely or imposed by whichever power proved strongest at the negotiating table.

5600 CE: The Crowning

A single sovereign, Powerful beyond any king or queen the age has yet produced, is raised to rule over the newly unified nations of Urthe. Whether this figure is remembered by later sages as a tyrant or a shepherd depends entirely, it seems, on which nation’s own chroniclers are consulted, a disagreement that itself becomes one of the defining arguments of the age.

6000 CE: The First Reckonings

As the new unified order settles into its second century, old grievances long deferred begin, one by one, to be raised again, formally and publicly, before the throne. Debts owed since the Sixth Age’s Holy Wars, since the Fifth Age’s rise and fall of empires, even since the Fourth Age’s earliest trade disputes between Elf and Dwarf, are argued before courts that did not exist a mere two centuries before. Some hail this as justice finally made possible by unity. Others call it exactly the old debt the Sea-Goat’s omen always threatened to call due.

6400 CE: The Signs Multiply

As the age draws to its close, sages of every discipline, astrological, alchemical, and theological alike, report an unusual convergence of ill omens: the leviathan’s disturbances growing more frequent, the solar Power’s borrowed strength behaving in ways its keepers no longer fully predict, and old grievances settling into new resentments rather than true resolution. Whether the Tenth Age’s own foretold strife is already, quietly, beginning, no sage now living claims to know for certain, though fewer and fewer are willing to say it isn’t.

A•OM looked on…