Timeline of the Hearth¶
The chronicle behind the Five Sagas: dated, argued over, and kept by too many hands to agree. The narrative page tells the story; this page is the ledger — foundings, wars, collapses, and the living-memory events your character would plausibly have heard about.
How dating works¶
The north counts years from the Sunreturn — the morning the First Rooster crowed the sun back and the Long Winter broke. Year 1 SR is the first year the sun kept its appointments. Everything before is b.S. (before the Sunreturn), estimated backward and honestly vague.
The present year is 1214 SR.
Sources, in descending order of trustworthiness: dwarven stone-records (exact, sparse, and only about dwarves), the Lanternkeeper annals (thorough since 660 SR, patchy before), elven memory (vivid, vast, and serenely indifferent to numbers), and the Wyrmwatch tally-knots (which date everything relative to "the year she circled four times," and are right more often than is comfortable). Entries marked ‡ are disputed.
Before the count¶
Myth-time. The elves say these dates are wrong; they decline to say in which direction.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| — | The First Burning. The Phoenix dies well; the Long Dark recoils; the stars catch; the world cools out of the ash. The Kindled wake and take up their offices. Saga I. |
| — | The brood hatches. From hoard-wise sparks come the dragons — living treasuries of the world's warmth, the eldest Kindled's masterwork. |
| ~2200 b.S. ‡ | Hollowfire turns. The eldest Kindled begins recalling his brood's hoards — to have, not to spend. The first failed summer follows within a decade. |
| ~2000–1900 b.S. | The War of Wings. The Kindled against the First Wyrm across the roof of the world. Whole ranges are spent as ammunition; the elves' one comment on the era is that the sky was "crowded." |
| 1900 b.S. | Ashwing's Gift and the Chaining. The Wyrm's first-hatched opens her own hoard to Kordran's forges. The chains hold; the Frostspine is raised as rampart and prison-roof; the surviving brood passes out of the world. The swallowed warmth is never recovered — the freeze begins. Saga II ends. |
The Long Winter — ~1900 b.S. to 0¶
Nineteen centuries of it. Saga III. Every people alive carries a scar-story from this span; these are the ones the whole north agrees on.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| ~1500 b.S. | The sea closes. The last warm currents fail; the floes lock from horizon to horizon. The Drowned King's court freezes beneath them — lit, perfect, waiting. Morvach keeps his posting. |
| ~1480 b.S. | Hammerdeep seals its gates. The dwarven mother-hold under the western spurs closes against the cold with thirty generations of stores. Its stone-records resume on the far side of the winter with the driest sentence in historiography: "Reopened. Losses within tolerance." |
| ~900 b.S. | The Gathering of Nine Fires. Starving peoples who had never shared a language crowd the hot-spring valleys and codify hearth-law: the fire is for everyone or it is for no one. Every town sanctuary descends from this. |
| ~730 b.S. | The Long Song. The elves complete the labor of singing the shelter-valleys' orchards through the cold — one tree at a time, in shifts, for centuries. They still remember the trees individually. |
| ~250 b.S. | The deep dark. The worst span: the sun rising late, then barely, then — |
| 0 | THE SUNRETURN. Three days without dawn. A red rooster climbs the highest cairn and crows until his heart cracks, and the sun turns back to answer him. Solvane kindles him anew. The winter breaks — slowly, southward first — and the count begins. |
The Saga of Roads — 1 to 893 SR¶
Thaw, roads, money, and the first great heresy. Saga IV.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 63 SR | The cairn-roads reach the Emberrun. The Cairnfather's stones go up along the river; the first barges follow within the decade. |
| 141 SR | Runmede founded — the grain-and-orchard town on the middle Emberrun, oldest standing settlement in the region. Halfling kitchens, human fields, and the north's bread ever since. |
| 214 SR | The Widow's Chime. At a roadside chapel, a widow lays her husband's boots on the altar and rings the bell so the Flame will count what he gave. The clergy formalize the gesture within a generation: the deed rite, still rung word-for-word at shrines today. |
| ~350 SR | Graven founded — a high, cold, brilliant city on the northern trade, rich in silver, stone, and certainty. |
| 428–441 SR | The War of the Wains. Thawlands river-lords against the mountain carters over Emberrun tolls — thirteen years of burned barges, salted fords, and weaponized ledgers. Ends with the Ford Compact (441): tolls fixed, scales inspected, and a joint toll-fort raised at the great ford — the stones Emberford stands on. The Tallyman's clergy call it his finest hour; in the final three years, embarrassment did more work than steel. |
| 509 SR ‡ | The Stonewriting begins. Graven's god watches his people age and decides fire's law is a defect. The city starts carving itself — names, faces, selves — into permanent stone. The Kindled's warnings are recorded, and recorded as ignored. |
| 612 SR | THE FALL OF GRAVEN. What refusing-to-end becomes, becomes it all at once. The city dies in a winter's night; the survivors' own priests chisel the god's name off every stone on their way out. Old Graven has kept a dead god's door ever since. |
| 612–651 SR | The Graven War (the Long Vigil). Four decades of putting down what would not stay down in the ruin and its road-shadow. The Quiet Order's permanent posting is established 651 — the longest unfinished assignment in the north. |
| 660 SR | The Walk of Asking. The first ashari pilgrimage arrives from the far sunward east to stand on the world's oldest wound and ask it questions. The Lanternkeeper annals begin in earnest the same year — the two events shame each other into rigor. |
| 733–737 SR | The White Cough. Plague years along the river; one household in five. The Hearthwardens' finest hour — guest-law held, the pot stretched, and the Bonesetter's people worked themselves into the songs. |
| 748–789 SR | The Reaver Tides. Skorl fleets off the floes raid the coast and the river-mouth for a generation. Broken not by battle but by winter commerce: the Salt Peace (790) is sworn on the ice itself at Brinemoot, the shore-market that grows up around the oath. The first half-skorl households settle the coast within ten years. |
| 803 SR | Emberford chartered. The old toll-fort at the ford, fat on post-Peace trade, takes a town charter and its modern name. Bustling ever since; the palisade line still follows the fort's original ditch. |
| 861–893 SR | The Sundering of the Roads. A decade of killing frosts, three failed harvests, Graven-shadow fear, and the silver trade's collapse empty the high north in a single generation. Sunstead Abbey — the Daykeepers' proud ridge-house — is abandoned mid-meal in 889 (the tables, travellers report, are still set). The north passes out of common memory. Saga IV gutters out. |
The Quiet Centuries — 893 to 1102 SR¶
Two hundred years the annals mostly skip: the south comfortable, the mountains a rumor, the roads unstacked cairn by cairn. The faiths later argue whether this was peace or neglect; the argument remains unresolved.
The Saga of Embers — 1102 SR to now¶
The range wakes; the north is resettled; the game begins. Saga V. Everything below is living memory for someone in town.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1088 SR | The Arrival of Moths. The mothkin cross a tear in the Veil, following the Moth-Queen's lanterns out of a homeland going out. They settle high and quiet. The Lanternkeepers will note, fourteen years later and in a shaken hand, that the Veil trembled first. |
| 1102 SR | The Wyrmlight anomalies begin. The aurora dances on nights the old records say it shouldn't; Ashwing's flights lengthen. The annals open a new ledger and title it, with uncharacteristic drama, The Waking. |
| 1129 SR | The Council of Embers. Joint clergy convened at Emberford weigh the evidence and formally name the Fifth Saga — the Saga of Embers — over the recorded objection of the elven delegate, who observes that Sagas are only visible from the ashes. She signs anyway. |
| 1141 SR ‡ | The Graven vein rumors. Prospectors' reports of silver-lead in the high north finally outweigh five centuries of the ruin's reputation. |
| 1149 SR | The Delvings struck. Rich silver-lead at the treeline. The rush is immediate. |
| 1152 SR | COLDHOLLOW CHARTERED — the mine's supply town, raised in the sheltered hollow around a wayfarers' fire that (the founding writ itself notes) "has not gone out in any man's memory, and shall not now." The chapel keeps that hearth today. |
| 1154 SR | Lanternwatch raised — the palisaded waystation at the treeline, last warm light on the ore road north. |
| 1187 SR | The winze is sealed. The Delvings' deep gallery breaks into something the Forgefellowship's report covers in one sentence: "It was warm, and it should not have been." The mine closes; Coldhollow half-empties within five years — the collapsed shed yards on the town's north edge date from this exodus. |
| 1189 SR | The Lanternkeepers take Lanternwatch. The order buys the dying waystation for the price of its debts, on the reasoning that the best place to study the wound is standing on it. The lantern, famously, has never gone out. |
| 1198 SR | The Iron Gate found. A Lanternkeeper survey pushing past the dead mine-country finds the pass above the Frozen Gallery closed by an iron gate no living smith admits to — sealed, on close inspection, from the inside. The survey's leader files her report, resigns, and takes up gardening in Runmede. |
| 1206 SR | The Reedmarsh Heart stirs. Emberford's marsh-folk report the deep fen breathing wrong; the bog lurker takes the first of several hunting parties that go to check. |
| 1209 SR | The Ore Road reopened. Lanternwatch begins posting bounty writs for the road north; Old Graven's skirts see lanterns again for the first time in living memory. |
| 1211 SR | The hearthsprings flare. The recovery nodes strengthen measurably — warmth welling up, range-wide, for the first time in the annals. The faiths split on what it means. No faction disputes that it is real. |
| 1212 SR | The Drowned Isle stands up. Within a season of the flare, a peak of the Drowned King's warm-sea country rises off the floes east of Brinemoot — green, warm at the heart, trailing kelp and history. Wreckers reach it first, as wreckers do, tithe it, and raise the Shingle on its strand out of what the tide owed. The harbor glows at night. The village declines, formally and permanently, to watch it do so. |
| 1213 SR | The Kittiwake takes the tide. The half-skorl packet begins working the leads from Brinemoot's Ice-Quay to the isle — the first standing open-sea run since the Salt Peace was sworn, and the first anywhere the crew's silences are listed on the fare-board as a service. Marsh-folk near Emberford note, in the same season, that the old strand-stone behind the Sunken Cairn has begun to feel warm in the rain. Nobody connects the two entries for a while. |
| 1214 SR | Now. Four sanctuaries — three on the range and old Runmede in the grain-lands below — one waking range, and the embers gathering. Your character stands within this entry. |
Wars of record¶
| Conflict | Dates | Parties | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| The War of Wings | ~2000–1900 b.S. | The Kindled vs. the First Wyrm and loyal brood | Ashwing's Gift; the Chaining; the freeze |
| The War of the Wains | 428–441 SR | Thawlands river-lords vs. mountain carters | The Ford Compact; the toll-fort that became Emberford |
| The Graven War (the Long Vigil) | 612–651 SR | The Quiet Order & allied crowns vs. what Graven became | Contained, not concluded; the posting stands |
| The Reaver Tides | 748–789 SR | Skorl fleets vs. the coast and river-mouth | The Salt Peace, sworn on the ice at Brinemoot |
| The Sundering (collapse, not war — argued) | 861–893 SR | The north vs. a decade of killing frost | The north lost; the Quiet Centuries follow |
Settlements of record¶
Every settlement the chronicle names, in one place — including the ones the game hasn't built yet. Standing settlements without pages are deliberate expansion room; each carries its history above and a suggested shape below.
| Settlement | Founded | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldhollow | 1152 SR | Standing — in game | Mine town that outlived its mine; the never-out hearth; the chapel and the sanctuary |
| Emberford | fort 441 · chartered 803 SR | Standing — in game | The ford, the palisade on the old fort ditch, the river trade |
| Lanternwatch | 1154 · Lanternkeepers 1189 SR | Standing — in game | Waystation turned study-house; the lantern never out |
| Old Graven | ~350 · fell 612 SR | Ruin — in game | The Stonewriting; a dead god's door; the Quiet Order's unfinished posting |
| Runmede | 141 SR | Standing — in game | Grain-and-orchard town on the middle Emberrun, a day south of Emberford. Oldest living town; halfling kitchens; where retired surveyors garden — and the realm's gentlest hunting, levels 1–4 |
| Brinemoot | ~790 SR | Standing (seasonal) — in game | The Salt Peace shore-market on the floes' edge; half-skorl holds; the wrack-coast and the Skorl Floes hunting east of it |
| Hammerdeep | pre-winter (sealed ~1480 b.S.) | West Hall in game — behind the still-sealed postern | The dwarven mother-hold under the western spurs. The hold heard Sunstead's bell and unsealed its inner wicket; the West Postern itself waits on its key. Behind it: the West Hall (the eighth haven) and the Underways (levels 25–30), where the Sundered Kin keep the grudges and the Deep Road Gate keeps everything else. |
| Sunstead Abbey | ~300s · lost 889 SR | Ruin — in game | The Daykeepers' ridge-house, abandoned mid-meal in the Sundering; the tables still set — travellers may now confirm this personally. The patient ghost is at the head of the table. The mystery is in the undercroft, and armed. |
| The Shingle (Kingsholm) | 1212 SR | Standing — in game | Wrecker port on the Drowned Isle, built entirely of what the tide owed. Reached by the packet Kittiwake out of Brinemoot; the uplands hunt at 18–24, and below the sea-doors the Drowned Court keeps the king's calendar at 25–30. The court predates every other entry in this table and is not, technically, abandoned. |
| The Larchmoot | immemorial | Moving — unbuilt | Not a place: the wood elf bands' seasonal meeting, wherever the larches say. Finding it is the content. Shape: wandering encounter-site; Piper business. |
See also: The Five Sagas (the story) · The Wider World (the map) · Faiths & Orders (who keeps which records)