The Ages of Caeldon

Caeldon’s history is long, layered, and concurrent. This page divides it into nine broad ages so a reader can see where any event belongs and what else was happening at the same time.

The ages are periods, not categories. They overlap where history did, and no age belongs to a single people. Each lists its main events in rough order, with their date ranges; the event pages carry the detail. Why the ages lead where they do is traced in The Threads of Caeldon History. The rules for how events are layered and paced are kept separately in Timeline Layering and Parallelism Framework.

Dates use BR and CR, and are deliberately rough.

Rough date range: c. 35,000,000,000 BR-c. 500,000 BR.

Stable reality forms, the planes separate, the Material Plane settles, and Caeldon is made and differentiated into its first regions and living lineages. Nothing in this age is yet a people in the later sense. Its detail lives in Overview: Cosmic and Planetary.

Rough date range: c. 500,000-c. 380,000 BR.

The first peoples become recognizably themselves at roughly the same depth of time: Elves in the Elderweald, Dwarves in the Ironspine, and the threshold peoples in the broken ground between. Each finds its first heartland answer, and the first frictions between those answers begin.

Rough date range: c. 380,000-c. 300,000 BR.

Older peoples harden and divide. Failed Mending becomes heritable among Trolls, Dwarven continuity deepens into Stonewake, and catastrophe in the Roothollows produces the Dark Elves and the long deep-world conflict whose memory shapes Elven and Dwarven politics ever after.

Rough date range: c. 300,000-c. 120,000 BR.

The crowded age. Humans emerge in the basins. Three elder civilizations rise and end: the Upland Colossal world withdraws, the Ash-Furnace world burns itself out, and the Archive-Law world closes its registers. Around and beneath them, nearly every later people finds its first durable order, often by serving, surviving, or inheriting from an elder world.

The Dwarves and Elves are nearly absent from outside record in this age. After the Deep Ruptures, the Dwarven holds consolidate inward and keep what they record in hold archives other peoples do not see, and the Elven courts likewise turn to their own recovery. Their histories continue; they are simply not shared.

Rough date range: c. 160,000-c. 98,000 BR.

This age overlaps the end of the last on purpose. On the far side, young orders of Orcs, Halflings, Gnomes, Thaluren, and Kavari work out how to share water, passage, and sanctuary through a long chain of disputes and precedents. The precedents they set become the standing law of the far side for the rest of its history, which is why later far-side records refer back to them rather than adding to them.

The full far-side chain is listed in Overview: Mature Contact Systems.

Rough date range: c. 120,000-c. 40,000 BR.

The quietest stretch of Caeldon’s history, and quiet for a reason. When the archive-law world closed its registers in The Witness Custody, the age of written public record ended with it. For the next eighty thousand years almost nothing was recorded in a form later peoples can read: what survives is house memory, oral law, Reedfolk witness-practice, Dwarven and Elven archives kept to themselves, and ruins.

It was not empty. Peoples everywhere lived in long, stable local orders: far-side compacts keeping their settled precedents, Floodkeeper houses keeping their channels, threshold camps and warrens keeping their roads and seams, and Human bands slowly gathering across the Confluence basins and settling the Headwater foothills. Little of it is what later chroniclers count as history, and much of it is simply lost.

What happened in the Unrecorded Age is one of the open questions of medieval scholarship. Sealed archive-cities, Dwarven hold records, Floodkeeper house-memory, and old ruins each hold fragments, and each people that keeps one has reasons to share it or not.

Rough date range: c. 40,000-c. 2,000 BR.

Human powers become historically decisive. The Confluence Marches form, the Headwater roads bind Humans and Dwarves, and the Serathic corridor turns river towns into a league. The same growth absorbs Reedfolk authority, holds Ogre camps by debt, carries Dwarven frames out into the wider world, and meets Elven courts as rivals.

Rough date range: c. 2,000 BR-c. 500 CR.

The institutions the medieval era takes for granted settle into place across the cradle-web, the far-side corridors, the water-worlds, and the ruin belts. The youngest people of Caeldon appears: predecessor-frames awaken as the Wrought, and their first recognition fight is still within living memory when the medieval era begins.

Rough date range: c. 500-c. 1500 CR.

The Version 1 era. Every people above is present at once, carrying its history as living pressure: old roads and oaths, inherited legal categories, half-remembered elder obligations, and standing that some peoples hold and others are still contesting. The era itself is described in Medieval Era Overview.