Editing SeventhSun:Seven Suns (section)

== 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.