Post-Leandran Era

The is an era of cosmic history that began with the Second Leandran Revelation and Leandran War of . Whereas the previous centuries of the Modern Era witnessed the steady forward progress of technology and statecraft, the post-Leandran era is characterized more by dissolution and decline, brought about largely by bizarre new paradigms in occult technology.
== Background ==
== History ==
== Description ==
In the decades following the Leandran War, trade on the etheric lanes was thinned by the fear of roving Unnamed-corrupted automata, and by the draconian measures that the great powers took by unspoken consensus to contain outbreaks of madness and impossibility and by sworn and open agreement to protect their desperate new bargain with the gods. The diminishing economic life of the cosmos was punctuated by the occasional salvo of horror from the Leandran Dominions, or the violent eruption of social disorder in answer to a million impossible questions from a world gone mad.
=== Religion ===
To live, in the post-Leandran era, was to participate in a desperate mutual insistence that something remained better than nothing, that oblivion and madness would still not be preferable to lucidity. Gods, born naturally and unnaturally, and some imagined into the shape of religion from the indifferent Elder Pantheon, redoubled their usual trade in comfort and promises of protection, for never had so many billions known such terror with such immediacy. Nor had the prizes been so great for those divinities able to claim them, for this was a cosmos awakened to desperation but still empowered by technology in excess of any heretofore imagined golden age.
=== Society ===
The fear-mad masses who tasted of religion and found it wanting could distract themselves with cloned cosmetics or more fundamental changes to their body, genes, souls; others found escape with virtual reality realer-than-real; or at least, they could know that such things might be theirs and delight in that promise, for all had seen others wear such baubles or known people who had disappeared into the delights of post-reality. For the rest, there was a carnival of imitations to approximate these prizes as best their means would allow. Some could even find hope that the great advances in the occult, now at the core of every other science, had defeated mortality altogether, and promised them lives as long as reality itself (or at least civilization as it is now known).
=== Politics ===
Uneasy bedfellows were made in times of cosmic peril, but such fellowships were quick to unravel. The mutual mistrust of the "legacy powers" was held in check by the terrors of the Unnamed and of Leandra, as much by the threat of a Partition-rending divine intervention against her as in her own right if mortal-kind could not check her. Taking a throne vacated by others, the Fialta were the most animated and committed leadership available to the cosmos, prepared to spend blood and treasure for the glory of policing the cosmos. The Thannasids and the Pentacle were perhaps most directly at odds, but even among Thannasids there was hardly a unified front: while they built an occult industrial empire beyond the achievement of any previous Thannasid god-king, the Enzyrites of Alusia seemed all too willing to close the door behind them on more disruptive Thannasid elements that crowded into an epoch ripe for their talents. Aeldrum gazed inward and spent its vast resources on rolling space about itself like a protective blanket, so that the horror of burning Spires would not come again, but there were plenty of Aeldmen whose mistrustful eye turned outward and who kept a hand in the great cosmic game their ancestors once ruled. In Sermaye, it seemed that the principle function of flesh was to make more computer banks to incubate the virtual paradises from which artificial minds dominated the country's politics, stretching out their tendrils in android bodies only to keep an eye on increasingly obsolete meat. Celestial Space retained a quaint interest for practitioners of the old style of geopolitics, with princes and states subsumed to a thicket of nested secret societies so vastly complex as to forget their own true allegiances, but this too seemed fleeting as the Pax Fialta instilled a contact high with the technologies of Imperial space.
Category:Historical Eras