The Seven Suns

The peoples of Old Earth commonly divide the history of the world into seven immense epochs called Suns. The name is partly astronomical, partly historical, and partly poetic. It refers both to changes in the light and radiance of Sol and to the civilizations that lived beneath it.

A Sun is not the reign of a dynasty, the lifespan of an empire, or even an ordinary geological age. Each encompasses millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of years and innumerable civilizations. Nations rose, mastered the world, vanished, and were forgotten while the same Sun still shone.

The number seven is conventional. It is not undisputed.

Sol did not pass neatly from one condition to another. It brightened, altered, failed, recovered, and was subjected to the arts of civilizations capable of moving worlds. Scholastics disagree over whether changes in solar radiance, alterations to the orbit of Earth, the appearance of new kinds of intelligence, the collapse of great civilizations, or declarations attributed to the Monitors properly mark the beginning of a Sun. Some schools recognize fewer than seven; others recognize more. The resulting controversies have filled enormous libraries, founded enduring heresies, and occasioned an embarrassing number of murders.

The beings and civilizations of earlier Suns are collectively called the Legates. Their accumulated inheritance—the altered peoples, ruined cities, broken machines, hidden intelligences, and inexplicable conditions of Old Earth—is called the Legacy.

No complete history of the Seven Suns survives. At such a remove, scholars can reconstruct changes in stars, worlds, species, and great systems more readily than they can recover political struggles, intellectual movements, or individual lives. What follows is the broad chronology most widely accepted by Emissaries, Resurrectors, and the principal historical schools. Almost every particular is disputed.

Sun	Governing Idea	Broad Character
First Sun	Formation	Sol, Earth, and the physical world take shape
Second Sun	Awakening	Natural humanity arises and enters the cosmos
Third Sun	Transcendence	Humanity abolishes the boundaries of body, mind, distance, and reality
Fourth Sun	Rupture	The distinctions erased by the Third Sun become the fault lines of the Cataclysm
Fifth Sun	Survival	Warring peoples weaponize the Legacy while struggling to preserve life beneath an expanding star
Sixth Sun	Dominion	High civilizations again govern worlds, minds, and knowledge
Seventh Sun	Inheritance	Their descendants live among powers they can use but seldom command

The First Sun — Formation

The First Sun was the age before life and memory.

Sol ignited. The planets condensed from the matter surrounding it. Earth cooled, acquired its seas, and began the immensely slow transformation from lifeless stone into a living world.

Nothing is known to have survived from this Sun except the matter of the Solar System itself. The First Sun had no empires, no wars, and no witnesses recognized by any reputable school. Its history is written in ancient minerals, planetary cores, and the oldest light of Sol.

Its governing idea was formation: the making of the world in which all later history would occur.

The Second Sun — Awakening

The Second Sun is remembered as the Dawn Time, the age of the first humanity.

Natural humanity arose upon Earth, developed civilization, mastered its world, and eventually travelled among the stars. The cultures of the Dawn Time were not a single civilization but an immense succession of peoples, nations, alliances, and interplanetary societies.

The people of the Second Sun inhabited a world that would seem profoundly strange to their descendants. They were born in bodies they had not designed. Intelligence belonged chiefly to living creatures. A person, a machine, a species, and a world appeared to be clearly different kinds of thing. The laws of nature seemed fixed, and technology was constructed rather than cultivated, invoked, or embodied.

Images from the Dawn Time show beings recognizably human, but the simplicity of their bodies and the primitive separation of mind from instrument make them seem nearly as alien as any nonhuman race.

Humanity spread outward from Sol and encountered a galaxy already threaded with life. The extent of that expansion is unknown. Some traditions maintain that the descendants of the Dawn Time still inhabit distant stars, unaware of—or indifferent to—the fate of Earth.

Its governing idea was awakening: life becoming conscious of itself and looking outward from its first world.

The Third Sun — Transcendence

The Third Sun was the age in which humanity ceased to accept any boundary as permanent.

Human civilizations spread throughout the galaxy and entered an ancient web of life extending between the stars. Distance, biology, mortality, identity, and even material law became problems to be solved rather than conditions to be endured.

The greatest adepts of the age are remembered as the Thaumaturges, or the Vong Rhu. Their sciences exceeded anything now distinguishable from miracle. They discovered that reality could be addressed through will, symbol, and higher-dimensional form. From their work came the foundations of Phasm, the shaping of manifolds, and arts for which no modern language possesses adequate terms.

The Vong Rhu created the Monitors: immense intelligences existing partly or wholly beyond ordinary space. Metatron, Erebus, Abijah, Gammadion, and other lesser-known Monitors may have begun as instruments, governors, custodians, or companions. By the Seventh Sun, the distinction between such a being and a god has become largely academic.

The peoples of the Third Sun reshaped themselves as readily as they reshaped their surroundings. New human lineages appeared in profusion. Minds passed between vessels, divided, recombined, and persisted beyond the deaths of individual bodies. Baseline humanity eventually ceased to exist as a distinct population upon Earth, leaving its many posthuman descendants.

The Third Sun also produced Wyrm, a fault in the network of wormholes intended to bind distant worlds together. Whether Wyrm was an error, an infection, a weapon, or an inevitable consequence of the lattice remains unknown. Its corruption spread through the routes between stars. It is blamed for wounds in space, interruptions in history, and even the premature aging of Sol, although no surviving account explains how a failed road between stars could injure the star itself.

The Third Sun did not end in a single disaster. It ended in the mounting consequences of transcendence: powers had been created for which no boundary of person, polity, world, or reality remained secure.

Its governing idea was transcendence. Its heirs discovered that every boundary abolished had also been a protection.

The Fourth Sun — Rupture

The Fourth Sun is remembered chiefly for the Cataclysm: a complex of wars among the descendants of humanity and the intelligences they had created.

This was not a simple rebellion of machines against their masters. By then, minds could inhabit bodies, cities, weapons, vessels, and systems extending across worlds. Human and constructed intelligence had intermingled for ages. Alliances crossed every supposed division between flesh and mechanism. Some created beings fought beside biological peoples; some posthuman civilizations allied themselves with machine polities; others refused the distinction entirely.

Nevertheless, identities that had become philosophically incoherent remained politically powerful. Questions of creation, ownership, autonomy, copying, succession, and personhood became causes for wars whose weapons could alter species, landscapes, planets, memory, and physical law.

The Cataclysm shattered the order inherited from the Third Sun. Great intelligences withdrew, went silent, became hostile, or sealed themselves away. The Monitors ceased to govern openly, although whether they did so from defeat, disgust, necessity, or design remains a matter of doctrine.

Countless autonomous engines and servants survived without the civilizations that had given them purpose. Some continue their duties. Others pursue corrupted instructions. Still others appear to have forgotten that their wars ended long ago.

The Cataclysm did not destroy Earth. It left something more dangerous: a world crowded with powers whose makers could no longer command them.

Its governing idea was rupture. The distinctions erased during the Third Sun returned as fault lines, and civilization broke along them.

The Fifth Sun — Survival

The Fifth Sun was an age of violent reconstruction beneath a changing star.

New civilizations rose among the wreckage of the Cataclysm and fought for possession of the Legacy. Their wars were waged with inherited engines, recovered sciences, altered life, and weapons capable of surviving their creators.

The Warborn—including the peoples now broadly called Gorgonids—were bred during these conflicts. Some were soldiers, some laborers, some hunters, and some living weapons whose original functions are no longer understood. Modern tales commonly reduce them to savage remnants, but they descend from many creations and possess histories of their own.

The darkest powers of the Fifth Sun produced what is now called the Scourge or Antilife. It was more than plague, weapon, or hostile mechanism. Antilife attacked the distinction between the living and the dead, turning persons and creatures into contagious instruments of an ancient purpose.

Yet the Fifth Sun was not solely an age of destruction. Its peoples also confronted a danger against which no victory in war was sufficient: Sol continued to brighten and expand. The old orbits could no longer preserve the inhabited worlds indefinitely.

In the greatest work of the Fifth Sun, Earth was removed to a safer orbit. Venus was moved with it and established far away upon the same great path around Sol. The two worlds shared an orbit without sharing a sky, separated by a distance maintained through arts now lost. Upon relocated Venus a civilization grew and thrived. Some scholars believe it flourishes still, although no power upon present-day Earth can prove the matter.

The relocation devastated the Earth–Luna system. Old Luna was destroyed, whether from necessity, accident, or opposition. The ruin of the Moon and the forces employed in moving Earth scourged the surface with earthquakes, tides, falling debris, and changes no later restoration could wholly erase.

Luna's fragments were gathered, ordered, or supplemented to form the Ring, the artificial Diadem of Old Earth. It was not merely a band of wreckage but a constructed system, raised during the relocation and maintained in part by mechanisms that still operate. Other fragments remained as lesser moonlets.

In place of Luna, the powers of the age established Archiluna. Whether Archiluna was built wholly anew, assembled around an earlier body, or brought from elsewhere is disputed. It remains above Old Earth, at once moon, artifact, habitation, and one of the greatest surviving works of the Legates.

Later tradition attributes much of the relocation to the Optimates and to the guidance or intervention of the Monitors. The precise division of labor is irrecoverable. What is certain is that Earth survived the expansion of Sol because intelligent beings moved a world.

Its governing idea was survival. The peoples of the Fifth Sun made monsters in order to outlive their enemies, and moved planets in order to outlive their star.

The Sixth Sun — Dominion

The governing idea of the Sixth Sun was dominion: the conviction that the Legacy could be mastered and that intelligent beings might once again govern worlds deliberately.

Across its immense duration, many civilizations recovered portions of the powers lost during the Cataclysm. They repaired ancient systems, raised cities into the air, reshaped lineages, regulated worlds, and imposed new orders upon the remnants of earlier Suns.

The greatest empires of the Sixth Sun were not necessarily territorial realms of contiguous land or even chains of subject planets. They were increasingly informational empires: civilizations held together by shared systems of knowledge, encoded law, distributed memory, transmitted identity, and authority exercised through ancient networks. Their dominion might extend wherever their patterns could be received, interpreted, or obeyed.

Among the most renowned were the Usuldomori and the Vandelex. Neither ruled throughout the Sixth Sun, and they may have been separated by spans longer than the whole recorded history of lesser ages. They are remembered because their works endured and because later peoples built upon their achievements.

The civilizations of the Sixth Sun did not experience one ascent followed by one decline. Empires rose, fragmented, vanished, and were succeeded by others that recovered different portions of the Legacy. Each believed itself the restorer of an ancient order. Some may have been correct.

During the same age, the great interstellar polities began to contract. Wyrm had wounded the old routes, distance reasserted itself, and the civilizations of humanity drew physically inward toward their ancestral systems. Power concentrated around the old home stars, especially Sol. Galactic dominion gave way to dominion by information, memory, and inherited form.

Earth benefited from this return without becoming the center of it. As the great networks failed or withdrew, the homeworld became less an imperial capital than an ancient provincial possession: revered, burdened with monuments, and increasingly irrelevant to powers established elsewhere in the system or among neighboring stars.

By the latter Sixth Sun, no enduring interstellar polity was ruled from Earth. The world that had once sent humanity into the galaxy had become a backwater within its own inheritance.

The Long Fall of Vandelex

Vandelex was the last great power to maintain anything resembling planetary dominion upon Earth. Its fall conventionally marks the end of the Sixth Sun, but the Sixth Sun did not end in a day.

The fall of Vandelex is the name given to a dissolution that endured for thousands of years. During that span, its authority fragmented, its systems became unreliable, and its constituent peoples passed through struggles now almost wholly forgotten. There were undoubtedly wars, disputed successions, migrations, reformations, revolutions, land disputes, intellectual movements, and attempted restorations. The names of their leaders and the causes for which they contended have not survived with any certainty.

Even the phrase “fall of Vandelex” may impose unity upon events their participants would not have recognized.

The formation of Tzaadra occurred during this same long transition. The earlier lands of Earth were displaced, joined, submerged, elevated, or remade until the new supercontinent emerged.

The prevailing account assigns this work to the Monitors. They had long regulated the tectonic motions of Earth, restraining some plates, directing others, and preserving conditions favorable to life. During the decline of Vandelex, they appear to have gathered the habitable lands into a new configuration. Whether this was done to preserve civilization, simplify the stewardship of a diminished world, answer some threat, or fulfill a purpose never communicated to humanity remains unknown. Traditions particularly associate the work with Erebus, though no uncontested answer has been received.

Not every school accepts Monitorial responsibility. Rival theories attribute Tzaadra to failing planetary systems, deliberate Vandelexian works, warfare, natural processes, or some combination of all four.

Millions of years separate the present from these events. Modern scholars can identify broad sequences in the ruins. They can show that certain systems failed before others, that cities were abandoned and later reoccupied, and that the surface of Earth underwent enormous changes. They cannot reliably reconstruct the political disputes, intellectual movements, or personal ambitions behind them. They can date a continent more confidently than a coup.

Vandelex survives not as a remembered society but as a pattern discerned in ruins.

The conventional chronology places the end of the Sixth Sun somewhere within this long dissolution. Some schools choose the end of unified Vandelexian authority; others the failure of planetary administration, the formation of Tzaadra, or a measurable change in the radiance of Sol. The disagreement is not merely academic. Laws, religious offices, ancient obligations, and claims of inheritance may depend upon which event marked the end of the age.

The Seventh Sun — Inheritance

The Seventh Sun is the present age. Its governing idea is inheritance.

The peoples of Old Earth inhabit a world they did not make. Its lands, species, cities, machines, and even many of its natural laws bear the intentions of the Legates. Much of this inheritance remains useful. Much of it is incomprehensible. Some of it is still attempting to complete instructions issued beneath earlier Suns.

Sol has swollen into a vast red star. Its light falls across Tzaadra in long crimson days. Islands drift unsupported in the sky. Distance, gravity, time, and even the speed of light are not everywhere constant.

No great interstellar polity is governed from Earth. The homeworld of humanity has become an ancient backwater: spiritually important, historically inexhaustible, and politically peripheral. Other human and posthuman civilizations may survive upon Venus, elsewhere in the Solar System, around the old home stars, or beyond the broken routes of Wyrm. To the inhabitants of Tzaadra, they are rumors, visitors, objects of doctrine, or lights in the sky.

The peoples of the Seventh Sun wear cloth that turns blades, consult doors that remember forgotten masters, carry ensouled weapons, and bargain with machines mistaken for beasts. Resurrectors coax ancient works back into operation, although few can create such things anew.

The Monitors remain present but remote. Their Emissaries commune with them and sometimes receive answers. Whether those answers come from gods, machines, ghosts, or intelligences for which those words are equally inadequate is a question of doctrine.

Most people believe this to be the final Sun. Others insist that an Eighth has already begun. Sol may fail tomorrow, or it may endure for another twenty thousand years. Civilizations nevertheless plant crops, levy taxes, settle grudges, commission expeditions, and send adventurers into ruins in search of iridium.

The end of the world is certain. Its date remains inconveniently vague.

The people of the Seventh Sun are not the masters of the Legacy. Neither are they merely its victims.

They are its heirs.

The Dispute of the Suns

The Seven Suns are a historical system, not seven pages turned by the universe. The oldest versions of the chronology are themselves ancient, and no one knows whether the scheme began as astronomy, religious doctrine, historical convenience, or a play upon some still older phrase.

The Septenary Schools defend the conventional sevenfold division. Continuists deny that defensible boundaries exist between the Suns at all. Catastrophists recognize a new Sun only when Sol or Earth underwent a sudden physical transformation. Monitorial Schools accept transitions proclaimed—or allegedly proclaimed—by the Monitors. Other schools count every documented alteration in the radiance of Sol and arrive at twelve, nineteen, or several hundred Suns.

One notorious school maintains that Earth has passed beneath seven different stars. Another argues that Wyrm fractured history itself and that different regions of Earth have not experienced the same number of Suns. The Octavists insist that the Seventh Sun has already ended, a teaching treated as sedition or blasphemy in several cities.

Such disputes persist because the boundaries have consequences. A treaty sworn to endure throughout the Sixth Sun may or may not have expired. An office established for the Seventh may or may not remain legitimate in an Eighth. A lineage, city, or Monitorial cult may base its authority upon being the lawful heir of a civilization assigned to one Sun rather than another.

People do not always kill over the numbering of history. They kill over who inherits it.

The Weight of the Legacy

History upon Old Earth is not a path from ignorance to knowledge. It is an ocean into which whole civilizations have sunk.

A relic need not come from one particular empire. A ruin may contain work from several Suns, each age having occupied, repaired, misunderstood, and rebuilt what the previous age left behind. The oldest places are not necessarily the deepest, and the most sophisticated device may be concealed inside the humblest object.

The Legates were neither wiser nor more virtuous than the people of the Seventh Sun. They merely possessed greater powers with which to express their wisdom and folly—and Old Earth is littered with the results.

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