The Seven Suns

The peoples of Old Earth divide the history of the world into seven vast epochs called Suns.

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, conquered the world, vanished, and were forgotten while the same Sun still shone.

The names are therefore poetic rather than astronomical. Sol has always been Sol, although it has changed greatly during the long life of the Earth. To say that a people lived beneath another Sun is to say that they inhabited a world almost inconceivably different from the present one.

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. What follows is the broad chronology accepted by scholars, Emissaries, and Resurrectors. Almost every particular is disputed.

The First Sun — The Making of the World

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 Earth itself. Even this statement has its dissenters. There are objects buried too deeply, and structures whose materials appear too old, for every scholar to accept that the First Sun passed entirely without witnesses.

If the First Sun possessed inhabitants, their names and purposes have been erased more thoroughly than those of any later age.

The Second Sun — The Dawn Time

The Second Sun was the age of the first humanity.

During this epoch, 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 a succession of peoples, nations, alliances, and interplanetary societies extending across an almost unimaginable span of history.

The people of the present age know very little about them. Images from the Dawn Time show beings recognizably human, but the simplicity of their bodies and the primitive separation of person from machine make them seem nearly as strange as any alien race.

Later ages remembered the people of the Second Sun as the first ancestors of all humanity. Whether every present lineage truly descends from them is another matter.

The Third Sun — The Age of the Thaumaturges

During the Third Sun, humanity spread throughout the galaxy and encountered an ancient web of life already extending between the stars.

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

The Thaumaturges also 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, or guardians. 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. Baseline humanity dwindled and eventually became extinct upon Earth, leaving only its posthuman descendants.

The Third Sun also produced Wyrm, a fault in a system of wormholes intended to bind distant worlds together. Whether Wyrm was an error, an infection, or an inevitable consequence of the system remains unknown. Its corruption spread through the lattice, and some scholars blame it for the unnatural aging of Sol itself.

The Third Sun ended not through a single disaster but through the mounting consequences of powers too extensive to control.

The Fourth Sun — The Cataclysm

The Fourth Sun is remembered chiefly for the Cataclysm: an age of wars between 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.

The wars shattered civilizations and destroyed much of the order inherited from the Third Sun. Weapons altered species, landscapes, planets, and physical law. Great intelligences withdrew, went silent, became hostile, or sealed themselves away. The Monitors retreated from ordinary affairs, although whether they did so from defeat, disgust, necessity, or design is unknown.

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 the Earth. It left something more dangerous: an Earth crowded with powers whose makers could no longer command them.

The Fifth Sun — The Age of Wars

The Fifth Sun was an age of violent reconstruction.

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 are descendants of many different 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.

Entire cultures disappeared beneath the wars of the Fifth Sun. Others endured, evolved, or escaped the Earth altogether. Their fortresses and engines remain among the most dangerous ruins of the present world.

The Sixth Sun — The Age of High Empires

The Sixth Sun saw the last great flowering of civilization upon Old Earth.

Across its immense duration, many advanced societies recovered portions of the Legacy and built new orders upon it. Among these were the Usuldomori and the Vandelex, now remembered as the greatest of the High Empires. They were not the only civilizations of the Sixth Sun, nor did either rule for the whole of it. They are merely two whose works and names have survived more clearly than most.

The powers of this age repaired worlds, reshaped lineages, raised cities into the air, and attempted to restore systems broken since the Cataclysm. Earth itself was moved. Luna was shattered, and Archiluna was established in its place. The Monitors again assumed some stewardship of the world, though never with the intimacy or constancy attributed to them in earlier times.

The Sixth Sun may have endured longer than all recorded history before it. Its civilizations rose and passed away until even their ruins were buried beneath later ruins.

Its end was not a single fall. Knowledge narrowed. Networks failed. The great cities became isolated from one another. Devices continued to operate after their principles had been forgotten. Restoration replaced invention, and precedent replaced understanding.

By the end of the Sixth Sun, the peoples of Earth lived inside machinery they could use but could no longer reproduce.

The Seventh Sun — The Last Age

The Seventh Sun is the present age.

Sol has swollen into a vast red star. Its light falls across Tzaadra and the other lands of Old Earth in long crimson days. The laws governing the world have become uncertain. Islands drift unsupported in the sky. Distance, gravity, time, and even the speed of light are not everywhere constant.

The peoples of the Seventh Sun inhabit the accumulated wreckage of every age before them. They wear cloth that turns blades, consult doors that remember forgotten masters, carry ensouled weapons, and bargain with machines mistaken for beasts. Resurrectors coax ancient devices 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. 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 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, folly, ambition, and error.

Earth is littered with all four.

Seventh Sun Codex
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