The Age of Flight—The Age of Travel—The Age of the Archer

The Age of Sagittarius, some sages believe, will be another age of strife, as the symbol of the archer cannot help but bring weapons and war to mind. Whatever peace the Ninth Age’s promised unity brought, few sages expect it to survive intact into an age whose very omen is drawn taut and aimed.

6450 CE: The Bow Draws

In the opening years of the age, the reckonings begun in the Ninth Age’s final centuries harden from grievance into open demand. Some hold that this war will be the long-delayed reckoning already glimpsed at the Sea-Goat’s turning: if some solar Power was truly bent to mortal service in the age prior, an age symbolized by the archer’s bow may simply be the moment that debt is finally loosed back upon whoever claimed to have mastered it.

6600 CE: The Unified Throne Cracks

The single sovereign raised at the Ninth Age’s crowning, or that throne’s rightful successor, finds the unified order fracturing along exactly the old lines it was meant to have dissolved, nation answering nation as though the past two centuries of unity had settled nothing at all.

6800 CE: The Solar Reckoning

Whatever bound the sun’s own Power to mortal service in the Ninth Age begins, in this century, to visibly strain. Sages who once celebrated Type II mastery as the age’s crowning achievement now speak more carefully, and more privately, of the cost such mastery was always going to demand.

7000 CE: The First True Flight Beyond

Where Hyperion’s Hoppers once carried the fortunate few between worlds on Corazonium and hardened Refractinium alone, artificers achieve a further leap: ships and even single travelers borne aloft on nothing but properly bound Eludium, that stranger substance already trusted to open a bag or a hole onto some other space entirely, now trusted, for the first time, to open a door beneath one’s own feet and simply not come down.

7200 CE: The Exodus Begins

It is thought that some will escape the growing turmoil, although to where they will flee, no sage alive can be sure. The Age of Flight is not named lightly, and in these years the first travelers, in numbers rather than as isolated experiments, begin using Eludium’s strange new capacity to leave, not outward across the Solus system, but inward, upward, or sideways, into corners of the cosmos no ordinary flight has ever reached. Whether such a means of leaving would actually outrun whatever comes hunting for that stolen solar debt, or merely delay the reckoning for those who reach it first, is a question sages already argue bitterly amongst themselves.

7500 CE: The Serpent Bringer

Mad prophets scream the name Ophiuchus in these years, and dream of the Rise of the Serpent Bringer. Most sages dismiss this as the ranting of minds broken by too close a study of the Astral Plane’s own timeless dark, but a stubborn minority take it seriously for a reason that has nothing to do with madness: the ecliptic path the sun and moon trace against the fixed stars does, in fact, pass briefly through a thirteenth constellation between the Archer and the Scorpion, one no Age has ever been named for, and one the old astrological reckoning has always quietly stepped around rather than acknowledged outright. If the twelve Ages truly are bound to the same slow wheel that gave the First Age its name of Virgo, then Ophiuchus’s silence in that reckoning is either meaningless, an artifact of an old system never meant to be taken as literally as sages have taken it, or it is the one gap in an otherwise unbroken pattern, a possible name still waiting to be given to some Age not yet reckoned, sitting between two that already are.

8100 CE: The War Widens

Whatever remains of the unified order breaks entirely in these final centuries, the archer’s own strife no longer confined to old grievances but spreading to whatever colonies, ships, and Eludium-touched refuges the age’s exiles have managed to carve out for themselves.

8500 CE: The Last Sages Fall Silent

Some say that in these final years of the age, no sages remain to foretell or document the ages to come, the archer’s own aim, perhaps, finding the very institution of prophecy itself. If true, this age would mark the point where the great chain of recorded Ages, unbroken since Satgoth Janath first compiled the Book of Janath at the dawn of the First, finally falls silent, not because Urthe itself ends, but because no one is left, or willing, to keep writing it down. Some hold this a mercy. Others call it the cruelest omen of all: a future so terrible that even those who see it choose to leave it unwritten.

Whether that thirteenth sign is a warning, a promise, or nothing at all, is the very last thing any sage of this age claims to know for certain.