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

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. 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.

This paragraph used to end with a claim that has since gone wrong, and it is kept here corrected rather than quietly deleted. It said no other chapter gives a four-century figure, and that the strings four hundred, four centuries and 400 years appear nowhere else in the corpus.

The first half was true at 329 chapters and ch. 339 broke it: the Sea of Serenity "has been open for four hundred years through two famines and the border wars". That is a second four-century figure and it belongs to a sea, not to a jump between acts.

The second half was never true. Ch. 27 has four hundred miles and ch. 325 has four hundred people. A string is not a span.

The lesson generalises. Several entries in this directory assert something about "all 329 chapters" and the archive now holds 343. A count written into prose is true on the day it is typed.

What year is it

The saga never dates its own present. Not once in the 107 chapters from ch. 238 to ch. 344. Every date in Maeris is relative, and the two dating systems that do exist are both in Act 1 and both incomplete.

The six years the saga names

A year is written down exactly six times, all in Act 1, all in Blook's own narration, and all with the last digit struck out.

That is the whole of it. A search of all 343 chapters for a number followed by a capital X returns those six and nothing else.

The redaction is deliberate and the narrator says so. Ch. 3: "In what living beings would later call year 3X - a name that makes me smile because it tries to measure endless time". A being who predates the world is amused that anybody numbers it. The missing digit is a joke about counting, not a gap in the record.

Which epoch the numbers count from

Ch. 159 has a history book covering "political alliances in the third century after creation". Year 24X falls in the third century, so the numbered years are years after creation. That is the only clause that ties the two together, and no chapter puts them side by side, so the identification is the archive's and not the saga's.

A second epoch is declared and then never used. Ch. 22 closes the Ascension on "what the calendars would later mark as the first day of a New Era", and ch. 23 dates itself "Three centuries after the Great Awakening". Whether the count restarts there or simply gains a name is never said. Ch. 159 still says "after creation" from roughly 360 years inside the New Era, which suggests the older count survived, and does not prove it.

The chain, and what it gives

Adding the stated spans from the last stated year:

About year 1,145 after creation, and realistically anywhere in 1,100 to 1,190. The width comes from four places: three struck-out digits at ten years each, "three centuries" and "forty years" being round, and the unmeasured gap between ch. 3 and ch. 4.

If the calendar does restart at the Great Awakening, the same chain gives about year 795 of the New Era instead. The saga does not choose, so neither does this file.

What the archive will say when asked. The present is undated and sits about eleven centuries after creation. Everything past that is arithmetic on round numbers, and it should be written as arithmetic rather than as a date.

Where the present is

Ch. 342 is the first half of July, in the summer recess after Arthur's first year. The month is pinned four ways, and they agree:

• Arthur "had spent ten months in it and would spend two more years in it" (ch. 335).
• Hobbes: "Ten months ago I put a letter in a bag on a cart" (ch. 340).
• Arthur: "I went up that road last September" (ch. 340).
• Nami was "born the second week of October. Three weeks after you went" (ch. 338).

September and ten months is July. The day follows from ch. 334, where the order is dated the third and the academy posts it on the tenth, and from ch. 337, where a letter says "one boy was coming home about the fifteenth".

And that dates Arthur's birthday. Ch. 339 puts him "sixteen days from his sixteenth birthday" on the first evening home, so he turns sixteen at the end of July. See Arthur Lyerm for the chapter that contradicts it and the correction that settles it.

Long-lived characters, and why they are not a problem

The saga has people who outlast the jumps, and each has a stated reason.

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.