All dates are approximate, contested, or both. The corporate calendar counts AF, After Founding. The clans count winters since the Scattering. Neither recognizes the other.
The Fall. The old world ends. The freeze arrives inside a single season. What opened at the site now called ground zero is the subject of Book X, not this page.
The Scattering. The exodus. The engines rise to the Drifts with humanity’s chosen. The queue on the ground watches its own breath. The clans’ Count begins here.
The Silence. Roughly two centuries. The species endures in orbit. On the ground, the ancestors of the clans learn the country the hard way and survive it.
The Return. Dynamic Evolution’s drop-ships come down. Why then, and why here, is the subject of a restricted record.
The Founding. Silas Vance finds the vent field. First Fire, the Grid’s ignition. The Bastion rises. Year one, AF.
The Winnowing. The first rationed winter. Selection at the gates. The term appears in no charter and the ground was never built over.
The Grid Wars. The corpos fight over the heat. The city nearly dies of the argument.
The Concord. The armistice that ended the Wars, built the Civil Authority, and defined Synthetic personhood. Still in force.
Now. Four centuries past the end. The rent is due Monday.
[SEQUENCE ENDS. THE COUNT CONTINUES.]