Timeline of An'kor

This timeline is a working historical spine for An'kor. The oldest periods are approximate because records were lost, rewritten, destroyed in war, or consumed with the Aquarian archives. The closer history approaches the present, the more reliable it becomes.

Dates are given as approximate years before the present. Ancient dates should be treated as historical estimates rather than precise calendar facts.

The Deep Past: Humanity and the First Adaptations

More than 5,000 years before present

The oldest surviving traditions describe An'kor as a world inhabited by humans and ordinary animals. Human settlements spread across coasts, plains, forests, mountains, river valleys, islands, deserts, and eventually beneath the sea.

These populations did not remain physically identical. Over many generations, isolation, environment, diet, labor, magic, disease, and ordinary selection changed them.

The process was slow enough that no generation woke up and discovered that it had become a new people. The names came later.

Roughly 4,500-3,500 years before present

Mountain populations living in deep settlements gradually developed bodies suited to cramped tunnels, climbing, heavy labor, cold stone, and darkness. They became shorter and more powerfully built than their distant ancestors. Better low-light vision became common, eventually developing into the darkvision now associated with dwarven bloodlines.

These were the ancestors of the people later known as the dwarves of the Thundering Heights.

Coastal and island populations adapted in a different direction. Communities that depended increasingly on the ocean spent longer periods swimming, diving, fishing, and eventually living in magically supported underwater settlements. Over many generations they developed gills, fins, webbing, pressure tolerance, greater cold resistance, and bodies increasingly suited to permanent aquatic life.

These were the ancestors of the Aquarians. Some bloodlines retained legs, while others developed the long aquatic lower bodies associated with merfolk.

Other human populations changed less dramatically. The ancestors of the Prosperiticers remained physically close to the old human form. The ancestors of the Genevolvers also remained recognizably human, though their culture would eventually become far more interested in changing biology deliberately than allowing environment and time to do it.

The Age of Divergence

Roughly 3,500-2,500 years before present

Distinct peoples, languages, settlements, and regional identities became increasingly recognizable. Differences that had once been variations between distant human populations hardened into ancestry, culture, law, and eventually politics.

The first great Aquarian cities expanded beneath the oceans. Their isolation from surface conflict encouraged scholarship, magical study, and the preservation of records.

The mountain peoples of the Thundering Heights dug deeper and became increasingly defined by mining, stonework, physical endurance, and subterranean engineering.

Prosperiticer civilization emerged already surrounded by extraordinary abundance. Their oldest surviving records describe wealth as something ancient even then. No reliable account explains where that wealth originally came from.

Genevolver predecessors developed increasingly sophisticated medicine, alchemy, anatomy, breeding, and biological study. At this stage they were not yet the civilization of deliberate forced evolution they would later become.

Difference Becomes Division

Roughly 2,500-1,500 years before present

Physical and cultural difference increasingly became a basis for prejudice.

People who had once shared distant human ancestry now treated one another as fundamentally separate. Height, body shape, aquatic traits, skin, wealth, diet, magical practice, geography, and custom became excuses for hierarchy, mockery, exclusion, and violence.

Not every conflict was racial. Land, trade, inheritance, mines, coastlines, religion, resources, dynastic ambition, revenge, and ordinary political greed mattered just as much.

But ancestry made existing conflicts easier to justify.

Surface kingdoms raided one another. Dwarven miners pushed into contested deposits. Aquarians defended coastal interests and occasionally seized useful reefs, islands, or harbors. Prosperiticers fortified their wealth against neighbors who knew exactly how much they possessed.

By the end of this era, nobody in An'kor seriously thought of the world as one human civilization that had simply adapted into different forms.

The Long War

At least 1,300 years before present

The conflicts between An'kor's nations hardened into what later historians call the Long War.

It was never one uninterrupted battle and probably never had one original cause. Wars began, ended, restarted, changed names, merged with other wars, and were inherited by descendants who knew their enemies better than they knew the reasons for hating them.

One generation fought over a mine. The next fought because of what happened during that war. A third fought for a border created by the second. Later generations fought for honor, wealth, revenge, prestige, territory, tradition, or because peace had become stranger than war.

By the final centuries, every nation preserved a different explanation for how the Long War began. None can be proven.

The Rise of the Demians

Roughly 1,100-900 years before present

Human and near-human communities continued to keep ordinary animals as property, labor, companions, status symbols, and entertainment. In some of those communities, humans sexually abused animals in their care.

The children born from those acts were the first Demians.

They were visibly human and animal at once and were blamed for the circumstances of their own birth. Many were abandoned, hidden, sold, beaten, killed, or driven into slums and forgotten districts.

Surviving Demians formed families and communities of their own. Their mixed traits became heritable, producing the many Demian lineages now found across An'kor.

Their emergence added another target for the prejudices already feeding the Long War.

The Curse of Sevrin Veyr

Roughly 850 years before present

Sevrin Veyr became obsessed with a woman named Mara, who rejected him, married another man, and built a family.

Unable to accept her choice, Sevrin turned to dark powers and transformed himself into the first vampire. He entered Mara's home, bit her, abducted her, and imprisoned her beneath his mansion.

After years of captivity, Mara died.

Sevrin's grief and madness became a violent rampage. He created other vampires, then killed himself. Every vampire created through his curse died with him.

Exactly eleven weeks later, Sevrin returned from death.

So did the others.

So did Mara.

The first Zompires had appeared.

The centuries that followed saw Zompire communities, territories, laws, military traditions, philosophies, and repeated attempts to understand or escape the eleven-week resurrection curse. Sevrin and Mara remain alive in the present day.

The First Great Aquarian Archives

Roughly 800-700 years before present

Aquarian preservation efforts expanded into the first repositories later remembered collectively as the Great Archives.

Aquarian scholars copied histories, treaties, maps, magical theories, religious writings, genealogies, scientific observations, and records from civilizations across An'kor. Because underwater cities were difficult for surface armies to reach, these archives preserved material repeatedly destroyed elsewhere during the Long War.

Over the centuries, the Great Archives became the closest thing An'kor possessed to a shared memory.

Dieselbeard and the Age of Diesel

Roughly 600 years before present

A dwarven scientist remembered as Dieselbeard discovered a method of refining minerals from the Thundering Heights into an extraordinarily energetic fuel.

He named it Diesel.

The first engines pumped flooded mines, powered lifts, drove drills, and made previously impossible excavations practical. The resulting feedback loop transformed dwarven civilization: more Diesel allowed more mining, which produced more fuel, which powered larger machines, which opened deeper mines.

Over the following centuries, the Thundering Heights industrialized rapidly.

Generations of dwarves lived among Diesel fumes, skin exposure, contaminated food, refinery waste, and eventually deliberate consumption. Their bodies changed again. Modern Diesel Dwarves tolerate Diesel, crave it, and can become physically dependent on it.

Dieselbeard did not live to see the full biological or environmental consequences of his discovery.

The Great Dwarven Expansion

Roughly 500-300 years before present

The Thundering Heights could no longer supply every demand created by Diesel civilization.

Dwarven prospectors spread across An'kor seeking new deposits. Mines became outposts. Outposts became settlements. Rail lines, roads, refineries, and industrial regions followed.

This expansion intensified old conflicts over land and resources and created recurring hostility with Aquarian magical ecologists and nations whose territory contained valuable minerals.

The Genevolver Ascendancy

Roughly 450-300 years before present

Genevolver medicine and biological science became increasingly aggressive.

Researchers moved from observing heredity and treating disease toward intentionally forcing mutation, splicing traits, cultivating organs, altering anatomy, and accelerating biological change.

Animals became common experimental subjects.

The philosophy behind modern Genevolver civilization took recognizable form: evolution did not need to be waited for. It could be directed.

Professor Alvas and the First Uplift

Roughly 360 years before present

Professor Alvas, a Genevolver researcher studying artificial neural enhancement, implanted a microchip into the brain of a hamster.

The hamster spoke.

It solved simple mathematics.

Alvas continued the experiments. Uplifted animals learned language, tools, mathematics, abstract reasoning, and eventually the technology responsible for their own intelligence.

He treated them as assistants and property.

The Technobeast Revolution

Roughly 340 years before present

Alvas's uplifted animals learned how to implant and reproduce the neural technology themselves.

The knowledge spread from cage to cage, laboratory to laboratory, and species to species.

The uplifted animals realized that they were intelligent beings being kept as possessions. They revolted and killed Professor Alvas.

The liberated animals became the first Technobeasts.

Unlike every other major people of modern An'kor, Technobeasts are not descended from humanity. Their ancestors were ordinary animals uplifted through Genevolver technology.

The Network Age

Roughly 300 years before present to the present

Technobeast civilization expanded rapidly through shared knowledge.

Cybernetics, electronics, robotics, communication systems, artificial organs, neural interfaces, prosthetics, automated machinery, and data storage advanced across generations.

Their historical belief that freedom had begun when knowledge escaped one owner became a cultural commitment to distributing information.

The first regional networks eventually grew into a continent-spanning infrastructure of relays, data systems, machine communication, and settlements connected across national borders.

The Age of the Mutamons

Roughly 300 years before present to the present

After generations of animal experimentation, Genevolvers increasingly turned their methods toward humans and other human-descended peoples.

Many experiments failed catastrophically.

The surviving results became known as Mutamons.

Some were enhanced. Many were crippled, unstable, dependent on medicine, disfigured, or abandoned. Genevolvers gained prestige from the same research whose living subjects were frequently treated as property or monsters.

Escaped Mutamons became an increasingly visible part of An'kor's poor districts, mercenary companies, criminal networks, wilderness communities, and hidden refuges.

The Last Centuries of the Long War

Roughly 250-17 years before present

The Long War became more destructive as technology, magic, biological science, industry, and military organization improved.

Diesel engines moved heavier weapons and larger armies. Technobeast communication accelerated intelligence and coordination. Genevolver medicine kept soldiers alive and produced altered fighters. Aquarian magic became increasingly sophisticated. Prosperiticer logistics made campaigns harder to disrupt.

An'kor became better at war without becoming better at remembering why it was fighting.

By the final generations, nations fought for money, honor, pride, inherited grievance, strategic advantage, and sometimes simply because war had become the normal condition of international life.

Seventeen Years Before Present: The Vision

A Demian child received a vision of the arrival of Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder.

The Demians sent messengers across An'kor asking nations that had fought for more than a thousand years to accept an armistice and prepare for extinction.

Some refused.

Some accused the Demians of manipulation or madness.

Eventually enough believed the warning.

For the first time in living memory, preparations began for a threat that belonged to everyone.

Seventeen to Fifteen Years Before Present: The Corian Project

The nations began constructing a new shared nation near the center of An'kor: Corian.

No existing capital could be trusted to belong equally to everyone, so a new one was built.

Diesel Dwarves excavated immense chambers beneath the city.

Aquarians provided magical theory and power.

Demians called upon the forces of the living world.

Genevolvers scientifically enhanced and stabilized those forces.

Technobeasts built the control, monitoring, communication, and regulation systems required to make incompatible disciplines function together.

Prosperiticer elites organized protection and eventually became the Core's foremost guardians.

The result was an enormous sphere of concentrated energy beneath Corian.

It became known as the Core.

Its shield spread across An'kor.

Fifteen Years Before Present: Xanaras Arrives

Two years after the Demian vision, an enormous object struck An'kor carrying the first known manifestation of Xanaras.

The object was not the total body of Xanaras. What exactly arrived remains unknown.

Xanaras expanded across the world.

Feeders appeared.

Cities, armies, ecosystems, roads, oceans, archives, and populations were destroyed or consumed. Roughly two thirds of An'kor's population died during the invasion and the collapse that followed.

The Core's shield could not initially hold the entire world.

As territory was lost, the protected area contracted. The remaining shield became smaller, denser, and stronger until Xanaras could no longer continue its expansion directly through it.

The Long War ended because there were no longer enough separate wars left to matter.

Fourteen Years Before Present to the Present: The Interrupted Digestion

The war against Xanaras became a cold war.

The surviving peoples rebuilt inside the contracted shield while Xanaras remained across most of the lost world.

Further contractions, local failures, evacuation waves, and frontier scares reshaped society. Refugees moved inward. Wealth and political power increasingly concentrated toward Corian and the Core. Poorer and more temporary districts accumulated nearer the shieldline.

Aquarians lost most of their Great Archives and began reconstructing history from fragments.

Technobeasts rebuilt a smaller but denser network.

Diesel Dwarves lost access to major mines and began facing the possibility that their civilization might exhaust accessible Diesel resources.

Prosperiticers discovered that wealth could not buy more safe land.

Demians remained targets of old prejudice despite having provided the warning that saved civilization.

Mutamons continued struggling for autonomy while Genevolver factions argued over the ethics of the science that created them.

Zompire death cults increasingly interpreted Xanaras as a possible final release from resurrection.

The Core became the center of politics, defense, faith, class, engineering, and survival.

The Present Day

An'kor survives behind the shield.

The old nations still exist, but all depend on the same machine beneath Corian.

The Long War is over, yet many of its hatreds remain.

The world outside is not merely occupied. It is becoming part of Xanaras.

Shieldwardens patrol the frontier. Retrieval Companies enter dangerous territory. Reclaimers demand that the lost world eventually be taken back. The Recovery Concord searches for destroyed knowledge. The Unmade tries to free Mutamons from Genevolver control. The Core Compact keeps the shield alive.

And in the northeast, within the Zompire realms, rumors persist of a small fracture in the shield large enough for some Feeders to pass through.

How Certain Is the Timeline?

Modern events are well established because living witnesses remember them.

The middle eras are reconstructed from surviving national histories, Aquarian fragments, Technobeast records, Prosperiticer collections, Zompire witnesses, archaeological evidence, and contradictory traditions.

The oldest dates are estimates.

This uncertainty is intentional.

An'kor had thousands of years of history before Xanaras, more than a thousand years of war, and then lost enormous portions of its archives in a single catastrophe. History in the present day is something people recover, argue over, weaponize, misremember, and occasionally rediscover.

There are still centuries with more questions than answers.