Timeline of the Prescience Wars
Its been a few months since, in a fit of reactionary anger, I decided I would write my own Horus Heresy, and it would have literally no satire!
The Prescience Wars were intended to be the mythic foundational conflict of the Eclipse Knights Paracosm. Their Siege of Troy of Mahabharata. Something that existed deep in the borders between history and myth, and the ending of which set the scene for the more historical dramas, and fundamental nature of their ‘modern world’.
Its proven more difficult than I expected and, largely, has had trouble reaching the promise of its pretty good first post ‘This Plague of Seers’. Still, some interesting things have come up.
Chronology
Since the last part of the Prescience Wars involved a total reality breakdown along with the use of memetic and ontological weapons, working out exactly when things happened is a bit difficult.
There’s pretty clear synergy between very cubist epistolary storytelling and fictional worlds in which reality breakdown, madness and deliberate editing and obscuring of the record take place. Since these elements exist in the world being described, as well as they naturally would in the texts describing that world, you get the unreliable-narrator describing and equally unreliable reality.
Interesting effects can be created, and in a more prosaic sense, you can fudge a lot of stuff while you are working things out.
So, partly because its unfinished and partly for weird time reasons, the chronology if the early wars is arranged in-sequence rather than by date, with estimations of what happened in years-since-this etc.
This Plague of Seers – Before the Wars
This plague of Fairytale-like prognostication which seems to dissolve all social and moral bonds. How bad was it and how long did it go on? So far the only real description we have on it is from the unknown writer of ‘This Plague of Seers’. Can we assume they have a Pathist bent?
It was certainly strong enough to trigger the massive and sustained backlash of the Iron Path.
What on one level reads like a Fairytale fantasy world turning into a Low Fantasy world, its closest parallels are something like the Reformation or some equally huge mass-consciousness change that people can argue about for ever afterwards.
The deep question of how and how much knowledge of the future should affect the present is built on an eternal human paradox, one that can never really be absolutely resolved in a general sense. Ends or means? What is free will? How much do we have and how do we use it?
The Early Prescience Wars
The Canticle of the Iron Path
Scratched on a Temple Door in Albarneth, began the Iron Path and arguably, the Prescience Wars.
Pretty obviously this is ripped off from Martin Luther. Even the technology level is similar. The world of the Prescience Wars might be a little ahead in this case, numerous printers in Albraneth are ready to roll and take the word of the Iron Path out before the initial Pogrom even begins.
The ‘Iron Path’ develops a pretty logically-sound and practically probably impossible methodology of no-prescience-ever. Ignorance in this case, truly is freedom, or at least meaning.
The flood of Prescient’s who leave Albraneth just before the Pogrom is a fun touch, but it immediately brought up a question which I am still exploring and have found no bottom to; if you are a Prescient, and you know a giant war against Prescience is about to begin, what do you do?
The Amber Court is one answer to this question
The Water-Horse Wars – beginning with the Canticle running to 10 or 20 years after
Wars which got their name from later historians based on the three battles, which later proved to be decisive towards their end, all of which where strange situations in which cavalry forces assaulted naval forces. A rare event in history.
These are almost completely unexplored so far. There must be quite a lot that could be done with them though, Reformation/Civil War armies marching about a post-Fairytale fantasyland? Cromwell vs Disney Sorceresses?
While this is just the start of the modern-seeming Prescience Wars, it would also be the end of whatever culture or world-paradigm came before them.
The three battles which end, or come close to the end, ofthe Water-Horse wars are all suitably bloody and horrible. They all have fragments stolen from real history too and the climax with the ‘Miracle of Hoogst’ – intended to be the rebirth of High Sorcery in the world.
The theme of Magic vs Prescience emerges here for the first time. Fate vs Power, with each of them accelerating the other until reality itself breaks down.
There are mythic references, or at least, references to myths in histories written directly upon these wars which infer a high likelihood of previous ‘Great Workings’, deep in the mythic past even for those writing at the time. The idea of historians of an ancient empire discovering an ancient museum, of time-squared if you will, discovering your legendary ancients also had their own legendary ancients, has always been tantalising to me, and its recursiveness and reference-within-reference seems to fit neatly into the pattern of the Prescience Wars.
The Time of Great Workings – begins 20 to 30 years after the Canticle
A time of ‘High Magic’. The first being the ‘Miracle of Hoogst’ which ended the Water-Horse Wars.
Actually the period immediately after Hoogst was meant to be pretty chill. After all there needs to be a reach of time stable enough for people to write history books so that my monk-scribe can find them in libraries in the far future after the Rise of the Black Sun and put them together in the ‘History of the Prescience Wars’.
There also aren’t meant to actually be many, or maybe any, ‘Great Workings’, until the Amber Court kicks off in a few years time, opening a new phase of the wars and re-starting that arms race of magic and fate again.
The ‘Early Period’ really dribbles to an end during this decade or so.
The Middle Prescience Wars
What happens when you ban prescients and start killing them off? They band together, secretly at first, then openly. Much worse for the Pathists; they organise and they have a philosophy, a unified direction and military forces to back it up.
If the era of the ‘Plague of Seers’ was about the corrosive effect of unregulated prescience as a general disorganised cultural phenomena, directly randomly, or at least chaotically, differing each time depending on the combination of seeker and seer, the Amber Court is that force curdled into something new, a paradigm the Pathists feared from the beginning and which they adherently helped to create; a Prescient Empire dedicated to guiding the whole of humanity down a particular path.
Who, or what, is influencing the creation of the Amber Court is considered in ‘Sumthing Lyk a Mowse’.
The Wars of the Amber Court
Begin perhaps 15 to 20 years after the Miracle of Hoogst, so 30 to 40 years after the Canticle of the Iron Path at Albraneth, and continuing all through the Time of Great Workings into the Red-Shift Wars and the Last Settlement of Xap.
(Depending on which chronology we accept this may mean a conflict, or series of conflicts of anything between 60 to 2,000 years.)
I actually know relatively little about these wars. I know they start with the Amber Court surrounded and outnumbered. It then wins successively, through some chancy battles, and eventually comes close to forming global empire, before the counter-reaction against that in turn leads to world revolution and the unleashing of utterly destructive magics.
Its WWI, WWII and WWIII all rolled into one, with ontological and reality-effecting weapons taking the place of technology.
The Five-Hundred Son of the Moon from “All They Murderare Forgotten” operate towards the middle to end of this period. Elements from the same pseudo South-American kingdoms as the Battle of the Metero Falls’, now very much changed and making some kind of deal with spirits for possession or joining in order to create a cadre of soldiers who, when they kill, kill even the memory of their targets.
The record, always somewhat unreliable, becomes utterly deranged, (from the point of view of our Scholar, the Monk in the Eclipsed Kingdom in the One-Thousand, Six Hundreth Year of the Sleep), mind-plague, the ‘Vermin Tales’ and general ‘Cursethought’ hover round every element.
Its easy to see how, in battling an enemy who can literally see the future, the Neo-Pathists reached for weapons that would make that self-same power irrelevant, or at least hard to use. Weapons which alter memory, reality, cause and effect, etc..
Even the name of the King of the Amber Court cannot be spoken or recalled.
As we can gather from ‘A Glossary of the Amber Court’, the Court itself becomes more and more decadent over time, developing factions and weird philosophies.
The Fall of the Amber Court
Unknown date. The writer of the letter in ‘In theMemories of Stars’ claims to have had a vision of this.
Whatever happened to finally bring about the last collapse of the Amber Court, it must have been intense and strange enough to effectively break reality and causality.
Beyond this point and for an unknown, and perhaps unknowable reach of time, there can be no true recorded history as time itself is warped and altered.
The Later Prescience Wars - the ‘Red Shift’
The Red Shift was a period, or area, or modality, in which not only can no date even be estimated for events of the Prescience Wars, but even the sequence of the events cannot be discerned, causality itself having broken down.
Little can be known in full but according to the writer of ‘In the Memories of Stars’ this period contained; “horror, vague and terrible as if from scripture or nightmare. I read of shapeless legions, of lands I knew yet "turned from any Path and Broken", of rains of corpses, of generations cursed by dark foreknowledge, of lands where the babes were born dead, yet sentient and grieving themselves, of cities tipped into the "Fabric" and make alike unto curses, or worms or dragons of myth;”
Within the “Red Shift”, the skies are said to have turned red and peoples, persons and places are claimed to have been encountered before, during and after it was possible for each agent to have done so as our understanding of causality would claim.
“Reality Dreamed” of, more prosaically, “Reality was drunk”
(Imagine a Beksynski-paraverse come to live and flooding across reality).
Whatever records or indications exist of this era, they must be both deeply sought but obsessively feared and controlled by the Monks of the Eclipsed Kingdom. Since they relate to Unreality itself, and describe a period, or place, or era in which mindplague and vermin tales, and who knows what else, roamed freely and likely bread with and interacted with each other, dream and reality blurring into one in a timeless eternity, even the relation of the period ‘later’ might be both incredibly dangerous, but also powerful…
The Restoration
During or towards the ‘end’ of the Red Shift, He who would become the Sleeping King of the Eclipsed Kingdom is born.
Now we enter what the Eclipsed Kingdom would consider to be ‘History’, as opposed to myth.
The King rises and rides through Reality, knitting together what was broken, restoring order, causality and meaning, separating dream from real.
Many heroic events too numerous to mention; the Binding of Setebos, Conquest of the Otherworld, the Defeat of Summer etc etc
How exactly this relates to the Coming of Azathoth, I suspect the religious thinkers of the Eclipsed Kingdom have doctrine on. By their telling, the Sleeping King was always the Prophet of Azathoth and all his power flowed from service to that Black God.
Rise of the Black Sun
God him, her and itself arrives. This is Year Zero for the Eclipsed Kingdom.
The Sleeping King takes the thirteen poisoned daggers in his back and enters the eternal waiting sleep in which he still remains.
God stays in His heaven. The Black Church of the Eclipsed Kingdom says that God is waiting for its Prophet, the Sleeping King, to complete his dream. Which to God, is little more than a moments wait, before it enfolds the world and reduces it to pure chaos.
Years of the Sleep 672 YS – alleged recovery of ‘In The Memories of Stars’
Said to have been uncovered from the ruins of lost Samaris in the lands once called ‘Frost’
732 YS – First Block-Printing of ‘In the Memories of Stars’
1600 YS - The ‘Present Day’
One-thousand and sixth-hundredth Year of the Sleep
Date of the writing of the article titled ‘Who Shall Rid Us of These Seers’, presumably 1600 years after the coming of Azathoth and the Sleep of the King.
Somewhere in a tower of the Eclipsed Kingdom, a monk begins to set down ‘A History of the Prescience Wars’, the mythic pre-apocalyptic era which forms the deep history of the Eclipsed Kingdom.
Whether, in gathering records and resources of such an infectiousand in a way, still pulsating era, is a wise thing to do, we shall see. The Order of St Korbin no doubt would do hard work with their iron staves if they knew someone was writing such a thing.
Some Questions of the Prescience Wars
How would a prescience-guided army actually fight? Would its enemies just give up in despair, no matter how superior they were? Can numbers overwhelm Prescience? Is there some calculation or equation that gives you a rough estimate of the “combat power” of Prescient guidance in terms of troops and materiel? So to attack a fortified position I think the traditional guide is you need at least three, and hopefully five times as many as the defenders. Can you even calculate the effectiveness of Prescience? Presumably its somewhat logarithmic base on depth and accuracy.
Have I thrown in too much jargon and lore for even me to keep straight? Honestly I can’t remember all of the technical terms from the Glossary of the Amber Court
Why can’t I do character? My ability to create personality is basically zero.
Deeper questions – is the argument over prescience and its relationship to moral action, which has been a big theme in a lot of mainstream genre stuff in the last decade, feeding into or off some particular strand of something in the cultural gestalt?
Can I actually say anything sane and useful, or at least interesting, about the possible interactions between the Iron and Amber paths?
