Timeline of Eslura
This is a timeline of Eslura in the only form the books support: a relative order. Nothing in the three published works gives a year, an era, a calendar or a date. Events are placed against one another, against the War of Shadows, and against the moons, and where the order runs out this article says so rather than guessing.
The one numeric interval the books do supply, the fourteen years between Amelia Lunala's choosing and Beatrice Tidal's, is contradicted by a prophecy stated in the same chapter. That contradiction is set out below and is not resolved here.
How Eslura reckons time
Eslurians count in moons. Demise reckons a stolen soul as another thirty-two moons added to his life, Reslyn Keiser tells Aero Ellisvat he has not come to the Avonbourn in two years and three moons, and a thing long past happened many moons ago.[1][2][3] A moon is plainly shorter than a year, since the two are counted separately, but nothing says how many make one.
Fixed points in the calendar are the new moon, by which people keep appointments, and the High Moon Festival, which falls when the two moons eclipse and which Galecrest holds each year.[4][5] There is also a high moon season, which is dangerous to cross the mountains in and is otherwise unexplained.[6]
No character in any book counts years from a founding, a creation or a reign. There is no year one.
The dating problem
Two statements made in the same conversation cannot both be true.
- Alistair Archibald says that Amelia Lunala foretold, before her passing, that a hundred years would pass before a new Sacred Head was chosen by Eslura, and that a hundred years would pass and Obellius Kalaar would rise again with the power of the Book of Fire.[7]
- In the next breath he says that the golden flash he saw in the sky that day was the same one that preceded Amelia's own choosing fourteen years ago.[7]
Bea is chosen fourteen years after Amelia, not a hundred. Neither novel remarks on the gap, and Alistair treats the rest of the prophecy as proven regardless.[7]
Two other statements sit at roughly the same distance and are consistent with each other. Barnaby Britto counts the sentence that sent the Olphins into the depths of Morgaedion as falling nearly fourteen years before, and Alpin Loomin says the Shadow Reapers have been gone for nearly fourteen years.[5][7] Both of those follow from the end of the War of Shadows, so the war and Amelia's choosing land in the same stretch. Which came first is never stated, and no book says how long Amelia had held the title when she fought Obellius.
Everything before that stretch can only be ordered, not dated.
The age of the gods
In the beginning of time there were two gods, Aezaros, god of light and life, and Nelazgus, god of darkness. A stone was given to them out of the sky and named the Eyearke Stone. Aezaros, being the taller, reached it first as it fell and so held it first.[8]
With it she made a settlement of five people as a test of what the stone could do. Those five are remembered as Eslura's first inhabitants and, in the account carved on the wall at Veskadoth, as its very first Rulers and Head. Elsewhere in the same book Aezaros herself is called Eslura's first Head; the two accounts stand side by side.[8][9][10]
Nelazgus, jealous of her, stole the stone while she slept and made a settlement of his own under a single all-powerful king. Those are the Nelazgians.[8][11]
The founding of the kingdoms
Many moons ago, after Aezaros retrieved the stone from the heavens, she gave the power of the elements to the Sacred Rulers. Bellbour Polindrad received water and raised Ovallia apart from the mainland so that the Book of Water would be safe inside the lighthouse walls.[3] The first settlers of Blighburrow worshipped the great tree Gewa and the plants around it more even than they worshipped Aezaros, and held a naming ceremony each time a new bud sprouted.[12]
Nothing dates any of this, and nothing says whether the first Rulers of the four Books were the five people Aezaros made or a later generation.
The long middle
Almost nothing survives of the stretch between the founding and the war.
- A long line of Sacred Heads lived in one room of the castle at the Sacred City, Amelia Lunala last among them, and handed The Sacred Cloak down from one to the next. None of the others is named.[13]
- The academy at the Sacred City was reckoned the best in the world before it was destroyed.[14]
- Zybersia under Elmryn held a festival of its own called First Flames, at which Eslurians came from across the land to watch him turn the pyres into dragons. Aero Ellisvat saw it as a child, when his parents were alive and his sister Ferra was a baby.[15]
- Obellius Kalaar of Veskadoth struck a deal with Nelazgus, as others of Veskadoth had before him, and so obtained the power to control the Olphin race through a stone.[16]
The War of Shadows
Obellius Kalaar made war on the Sacred Rulers and the Sacred Head. The Nelazgians fought for him, the Olphins fought for him under the compulsion of the stone, and Shifters and Shadow Reapers fought for him as well.[16][17][18] Amelia Lunala fought him and failed to cast him into oblivion, which is what Eslura chiefly remembers her for.[7]
He lost. What the books record of the outcome is this, in no stated order: Obellius was imprisoned in Morgaedion; the whole Olphin race was sentenced there with him and Treenode emptied; the stone that controlled them was broken; the Shifters were hunted and believed exterminated; most of the Shadow Reapers were killed; and the academy at the Sacred City was destroyed.[5][17][16][19][18][14]
The war has no date, no stated length, no campaign and no named battle anywhere in the three books. It is also called the War of the Shadows and simply the first war.[20][18]
After the war
What follows sits between the end of the war and the opening of Sacred: Eslura's Calling, a stretch Barnaby's count puts at nearly fourteen years. The books give no order within it beyond what is noted.
- The Olphins remained in the depths of Morgaedion. Barnaby Britto, an infant, was spared by Pemadee, who fought for his freedom and raised him in Ovallia.[5][3] Tabitha Glowdish stayed out of the sentence by hiding in the alleys of Varaar.[21]
- Obellius stayed in Morgaedion, and how long he was held is never counted.[17]
- Elmryn led The Sarakyan in search of the Eyearke Stone. Tab, already hiding in Varaar by then, found a family in it, and Aero Ellisvat joined it as a nobody with nowhere else to go.[22][21]
- Obellius had Elmryn murdered. The Sarakyan broke apart, Tab and Aero broke with each other, and the seat at Zybersia stood empty.[22][19]
- A new academy was built at the Sacred City in place of the destroyed one.[14]
One event in Elmryn's part of this cannot be fixed to the stretch at all. He put the Eyearke Stone beyond Obellius's reach by hanging it around the neck of his infant daughter Reagan Hideaway on Earth, and no book says when he did it or how he reached Earth to do it.[17][23]
A Sacred Tale Collection
The back matter of A Sacred Tale Collection names Sacred: Eslura's Calling as the next in line chronologically after both of its stories, which places them in this same stretch.[24]
The Heart of the Kella can be placed exactly against the first novel. Aero recovers the necklace and Noran Daharshi dies the same night, and when Aero next walks into the Avonbourn in Sacred: Eslura's Calling Reslyn Keiser tells him he has not been there since she passed, two years and three moons.[25][2]
The Way Shadows Live is placed only loosely. The war is still spoken of as recent, the Olphin sentence is in force, and Tab is living rough outside Varaar.[20] When she returns to the burnt-out Hollowed Shadow in Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened, Fawn asks how she could walk back in after all these years, and Hybie, a young teenager in the novella, has grown out of her youth.[26] Which of the two novellas comes first is never stated; the volume prints The Heart of the Kella first.[25]
Sacred: Eslura's Calling
The first novel opens with the seat at Zybersia already empty and Elmryn already dead. Demise takes Morgaedion and frees Obellius Kalaar; the Heart is torn out of the Book of Fire; Beatrice Tidal and Reagan Hideaway come through the cave portal from Earth; a golden flash marks Bea as the new Sacred Head; and the book closes on the Nelazgian attack on Galecrest during the High Moon Festival.[1][7][27][28]
The Festival gives the book its only internal clock. Millennium Loftwind and the other Rulers are due at the eclipse, the violet moon closes on the golden night by night through the middle of the book, and the two align on the night of the attack.[7][2][29]
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
The second novel follows on with no interval stated. Obellius holds the Sacred City and its throne; Lumikki Otsby and her brother are taken to a cell beneath Veskadoth, where they sit with a woman later identified as Amelia Lunala; Reagan is chosen by the Book of Fire in her father's Sacred Chamber; and Bea learns that her missing mother has been in Eslura all along.[19][30][31][32]
Two statements about the Sacred City in this book do not agree. It is an abandoned ruin when Bea walks through it, and it has a working academy with students and a Primarch when Nindra describes her life there.[13][14]
What cannot be placed
- Any absolute date for anything. There is no calendar and no era.
- The War of Shadows: its year, its length, its battles and its campaigns.
- Whether Amelia Lunala's choosing came before or after the war.
- The reign of Bellbour Polindrad, and the founding of any of the four kingdoms.
- Every Sacred Head between Aezaros and Amelia Lunala.
- How long Obellius Kalaar was held in Morgaedion.
- When the Sarakyan was formed, when Elmryn placed the Eyearke Stone on Earth, and when he was killed.
- The order of the two stories in A Sacred Tale Collection relative to each other.
- How time on Earth runs against time in Eslura.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Book 1, Ch. 1.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Book 1, Ch. 19.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Book 1, Ch. 11.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 5.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Book 1, Ch. 3.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 6.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Book 1, Ch. 8.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Book 2, Ch. 24.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 16.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 19.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 25.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 22.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Book 2, Ch. 9.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 Book 2, Ch. 17.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 20.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Book 1, Ch. 17.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 Book 1, Ch. 10.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Book 2, Ch. 7.
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Book 2, Ch. 1.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Collection, Volume Two.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 Book 1, Ch. 23.
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 Book 1, Ch. 18.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 25.
- ↑ Collection, back matter.
- ↑ 25.0 25.1 Collection, Volume One.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 10.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 4.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 26.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 24.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 12.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 23.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 28.