Timeline

## The Sweltering (1000BU-1BU)

The Sweltering was a millennium-long period where the world was subjected to scalding heat, ecological destruction, mass famine and disease, and unending floods and storms. It was the result of the unrestrained progress-fueled exploitation of the natural world by the peoples of The Beforetimes such as the fabled Usonians. Although the signs of the earth's declining health over a century, especially towards the last decades leading up to the Sweltering, it was not until the event known as the Great Tipping that humanity was put through its most arduous trial. The Great Tipping started when one major ecological disaster triggered another, and so on; and eventually mankind's toll on the earth plunged it into a downward spiral of climatic and natural destruction that could no longer be reversed.

Nearly all of The Sweltering's history is shadowy and full of legend and myth, having been lost to the sands of time. This was due to the near-complete death of literacy that defined the Age. Despite this, there is some scant knowledge of what happened during the Sweltering, but very little at that. The early decades of the apocalypse were defined by social unrest, the collapse of nations, and the mass migration and death of countless people. Eventually, the world's crops failed and the great famines set in, causing by far the most deaths across the world. Billions starved, and billions more died of diseases caused by rampant insects as well as the sun's own unrefined and poisonous rays which beat down upon the world endlessly. By its peak in the middle centuries of The Sweltering, the world had been reduced to little more than dead scorching wastelands and humid storm-ridden swampland. Those few dozen million who still held on to their lives lived in tiny bands of scavengers and cannibals who spent much of their time hidden from the surface in caves or the massive decaying ruins of the Past Age, emerging only to seek out what little food and water sources remained.

## The Salvage Age (1AU-4000AU)

### Rejuvenation Era (1AU-1000AU)

After the final cessation of the horrific and millennium-long Sweltering nature showed its unyielding resilience, as it once again consumed the world and reintroduced life to a world long ravaged by horrific droughts, scalding temperatures, and titanic storms. Dehydrated Wastelands were transformed into verdant forests and plains, the weather stabilized for the first time within recollection, and the rising seas had finally ceased to consume any more land as the reshaped coastlines of the world were now firmly established. The one percent of humanity that had survived the Sweltering finally emerged from the caves, ruined cities, and dugouts they had used for shelter, and went on to repopulate the reborn Earth.

But perhaps the most unique and important people who emerged from refuge following the Sweltering were the Arkivists. Following their millennium wait inside their underground city of Ark Mount, the Arkivists finally emerged and realized that they were the only remaining known speakers of the ancient Anglic Language. Whereas other peoples now spoke new regional languages which had mutated and splintered off from their ancient mother tongues, the Arkivist still spoke, wrote, and read in the language of the ancient Usonians. After their Reemergence the Arkivists quickly conquered the sparsely populated land of the Kohlratia, displacing its inhabitants, but retaining the lands new name. In this mountainous land they established what they viewed as a bastion of the past which would one day lead the world to the future, a place where the direct descendants of the ancients themselves could shine as a light of rationality against the shroud of ignorance that now lay over the peoples of the world.

With the climate now gradually restoring itself, agriculture was reborn and began to spread in isolated pockets of the Far West and Mexihco. As the Era came to a close new tribal kingdoms and city-states began to emerge in these fertile regions and population levels began to gently climb for the first time since the onset of the Sweltering. But not all peoples of Omeriga adopted this new sedentary existence, with many tribes refusing to give up their nomadic ways of life. In fact, throughout this era and beyond, the majority of the continent still lived in small, disorganized bands of hunter-gatherers and herders.

### Expansion Era (1000AU-2000AU)

The rise of these new agricultural societies and city-states