The Age of Ending—The Age of Balance—The Age of the Scales

Of this final age, most say that all that was done will be undone, and all will return to the state of things before the First Age. Few sages disagree on this point, though fewer still claim to understand what it truly means, since no living mind has ever stood on the far side of a First Age to say what “before” it actually looked like.

The Wheel Completes Itself

Virgo opened the reckoning of Ages; Libra closes it. Sages who have followed the slow backward turning of the zodiacal wheel across all twelve Ages, Virgo to Leo, Leo to Cancer, down through Gemini and Taurus and Aries, through Pisces and Aquarius and Capricorn, through Sagittarius and Scorpio, note that the Scales are the one sign remaining before the wheel returns to Virgo once more, and a wheel that returns to its own starting point has, by definition, stopped being a line and revealed itself, at last, as a circle. Whatever the Eleventh Age’s Godsfall left standing, this age is foretold to hold it to account, weighing every debt from the Sea-Goat’s reckoning, every ruin from the Scorpion’s sting, until the scales read true and nothing remains unbalanced.

Sages who have measured the wheel’s own turning more precisely than most note that twelve Ages of twenty-one hundred fifty years each sum to twenty-five thousand eight hundred years exactly, the very length the oldest astrologers of Urthe have always claimed for one full turning of the heavens themselves, before the slow wheel of stars begins its circuit anew. Whether the Ages were reckoned from that older astronomical measure, or the measure was drawn down from the Ages, no sage now living claims to know which came first.

The Return to the Point

The oldest and most unsettling reading of this age draws not from the zodiac but from the Conception itself. A•OM’s own split, the POINT dividing the VOID, Zero splitting itself into eleven dimensions all at once, was never described as one-directional. Every one of those eleven dimensions, pushed to either of its two poles, arrives back at the same identity it began from; twenty-two directions, one destination, the same convergence traced out across the plane radii, the Existential axis, the mirrored shape of Elemental and Spiritual alike. If that convergence holds at the scale of a single dimension, sages of a more severe temperament ask why it should not hold at the scale of the whole cosmos. Some hold that the Twelfth Age is nothing less than the reverse of the Conception: not Zero splitting itself outward into difference, but difference itself, exhausted at last, folding back into Zero. Eleven dimensions collapsing toward one point. A sphere, having reached its furthest possible extension in the ages prior, finally closing.

The Unmaking of Opposites

Those who study the Horology closely note that every pair the calendar names as opposites, Savitas and Angor, Vita and Mortem, Spero and Despero, Eleutheria and Terminus, Veritas and Mendacium, Gloria and Opprobrium, was always understood to sit at maximum distance from some shared centre. An Age of the Scales, the one sign whose entire meaning is the perfect balancing of two opposed weights, is read by many as the age in which every one of those pairs is finally drawn back together rather than held apart: truth and lie no longer opposed but indistinguishable, life and death no longer sequential but simultaneous, hope and despair no longer alternating but resolved. Whether this resolution is a mercy or the final and total erasure of meaning itself is a question sages of every surviving school answer differently, and none answer with confidence.

What the Elements Remember

Alchemists point out that the periodic table itself already anticipates an ending shaped exactly like this one. A hundred and twenty elements, closing at Phlogiston on the same Hermetic note they opened with at Helion, was never a coincidence of naming, sages now say, but the same law working at the smallest scale that the Twelfth Age works at the largest: matter itself was always going to end where it began, long before anyone thought to ask what would become of gods, dragons, or peoples. If the elements already return to their own beginning as a matter of settled fact, few alchemists find it strange that the whole cosmos those elements compose should be expected to do the same.

The Last Question

No sage claims to know whether the Twelfth Age ends in silence, in a second Conception, in a mercy indistinguishable from oblivion, or in something no Age before it has had cause to imagine. Some hold that a new First Age must follow, the wheel turning back to Virgo as it always has, the eleven dimensions splitting outward once more from the same single point they finally returned to. Others hold that a wheel need only complete itself once, and that completion itself is the only ending there ever needed to be. A•OM, Alpha and Omega both, is said by the oldest surviving fragment of the Book of Janath to have looked on at the very beginning of all this. Whether A•OM looks on still, at the very end of it, or whether ending and looking-on turn out, in the final Age, to be the very same act, is the last question the sages of Urthe have left to ask, and the first one none of them expect to answer.