The Timeline
Every stated date and elapsed span in the saga, in order, with the chapter that states it. Check new writing against this file before writing "centuries".
Why this file exists
The saga has two long jumps and one short one, and they are easy to swap.
- Acts 1 to 3 are long, roughly three centuries.
- Acts 9 to 11 are long, exactly four hundred and seventeen years.
- Acts 4 to 6 are short. It is inside one human lifetime.
The middle one is the one that gets misremembered, because Act 6 opens in a hall full of statues of Acts 4 and 5's cast and reads like an age has passed. It has not. Nilah is still alive in it.
The spine
| When | What | Stated in |
|---|---|---|
| before the world | the battle against The End | ch. 1 to 2 |
| year 3X | the coming of Vazroth | ch. 3 to 5 |
| years 31X to 34X | the Ascension of the Thirteen, closing on day one of the New Era | ch. 20 to 22 |
| New Era + about 300 years | essence-users' nightmares have pooled long enough for Akumu to condense out of them | ch. 23 |
| + 20 years of cultivated fear | the First Human-Monster War opens | ch. 24 |
| + 3 months | forty-five percent of Earth's population is dead | ch. 24 |
| the war ends | Acts 4 and 5 | ch. 92 to 98 |
| + 6 months | the Council of Souls creates the Order of Knighthood | ch. 99 |
| one generation on | Act 6 opens, the Festival of Heroes | ch. 102 |
| + 40 years from the Knights | Act 7, and Nilah dies | ch. 136, 143, 145, 146 |
| Act 8 | the possession of Johann ends | ch. 190 |
| weeks to months | Acts 9 and 10, the five survivors apart | ch. 191 to 237 |
| + about 217 years | Valdrun falls, and its ruler becomes the Ruined God | ch. 243 |
| + 417 years | Arthur is born, Act 11 | ch. 238 |
| Arthur at 15 | Acts 12 to 14, Solmere | author's notes |
| centuries after Arthur | the barrier, Frisk, far future | author's notes |
The proof that Act 6 is one generation, not four centuries
Four independent pieces of text, none of them ambiguous.
1. Blook says seasons. He narrates the opening of Act 6 himself:
I have drifted through many seasons since last I lingered here. The valley has changed, though the stone remembers. (ch. 102)
2. Astra's parents were there. She is sixteen in ch. 103 and measures the Hall's official verses against a first-hand account she got at home:
Her parents' stories had never sounded this clean, this sanitized.
3. Nilah walks in alive. She is a young woman in ch. 25, during the war. She is elderly in ch. 119, and the chapter is exact about the gap:
Nilah. His master. The woman who'd trained both him and Johann in this very clearing [...] Who'd disappeared three years ago without explanation.
4. She raised Alexander. Ch. 173: "Nilah found me three days after the funeral", when he was eight. Ch. 177: she taught him Ragnarök "in our final training sessions, back when she knew time was running out".
One woman's single lifetime covers Acts 2 through 7. That closes the question.
Act 7 is forty years after Acts 4 and 5
Four chapters agree on the figure, and none of them is doing arithmetic. It is simply how the characters talk about the gap.
| ch. | the line |
|---|---|
| 136 | "when the bill comes due for forty years of postponed consequences" |
| 143 | Nilah looks up at "the statues of Knights who'd faced similar declarations forty years ago" |
| 145 | "in forty years our descendants face the same choice" |
| 146 | the antagonist: "I'll simply return to the spaces between, wait another forty years, and collect the debt with interest" |
Ch. 143 is the load-bearing one. Nilah is standing in front of statues of her own generation, and the chapter dates them at forty years back while she is alive to look at them.
That fixes Acts 4 to 7 inside one human lifetime, which is the same result the Alexander and Johann evidence gives from the other direction. See below.
Ch. 146 also makes forty years a mechanism rather than an interval. Whatever is collecting waits that long deliberately.
What the four hundred years actually belongs to
One sentence, one chapter, one jump:
Four hundred and seventeen years. That was the distance [...] between the day the world last remembered the names Astra, Lisa, Alexander, Noel, and Ivy, and the day this story actually begins. (ch. 238)
Acts 9 to 11. Nothing else in 329 chapters gives a four-century figure.
The strings four hundred, four centuries, and 400 years appear nowhere
else in the corpus.
Long-lived characters, and why they are not a problem
The saga has people who outlast the jumps, and each has a stated reason.
| Who | Span | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Blook | all of it | not mortal, half of Zero |
| Illia | Acts 2 to 10 | half of Zero, and dead by ch. 134, so her appearances in Acts 9 and 10 come down from the heavens |
| Vazroth | Act 1 to 6 | bound into narration, not into a body |
| Seraphine of Wysteria | Act 7 to 9 | butterfly-monster hybrid, ancient by human standards, in the author's notes |
| Nilah | Acts 2 to 7 | one long human life, and it ends |
Nilah is the one to watch. She is the only fully human character who spans volumes, and she spans them the ordinary way, by getting old.
Corrections this file has already caught
- and opened with "four hundred years after the Knights". Unsupported. Corrected.
- carried
when: "about four centuries after the first war". Unsupported. Corrected. - gave her
last_seen: ch. 190. She dies in ch. 148. Corrected.
Open questions
- Ch. 233 puts Illia in "a generation of knights alongside Nilah", which fits, but she is also active in ch. 38 during the war and immortal in Acts 9 and 10. Her personal chronology is the least pinned of any recurring character.
- Ch. 212 opens "Returning from a long two years", about Alexander coming back to the mountain. Acts 9 and 10 runs weeks to months after ch. 190. Either the two years counts from an earlier departure, or the figure is loose.
- Nothing dates Acts 11 to 14 beyond Arthur reaching fifteen.
- Valdrun's fall is dated only as "some two centuries back" from ch. 243, spoken by a village schoolteacher relaying stories. It is the only anchor inside the four hundred and seventeen year gap, and it is a soft one.