Settlement chronology

How are the years counted?

The official calendar counts Años de Asentamiento (E.A.), the Settlement Years. Year 0 is the year the Flota Aura, the megafleet that brought the settlers, reached the Aurin system.

The present is Year 47 E.A. That figure is the label of the year, not the time that has passed since each event. Durations are counted from the event itself:

Event	Year	How long ago
The war breaks out	Year 1 E.A.	46 years
The Armisticio is signed	Year 12 E.A.	35 years

So anyone who writes “47 years ago” about the war is off by one.

What happened before the arrival?

Before Year 0 there are no dates on the calendar. There are three stages, in this order:

1. La Vieja Solmera. The mother civilisation lives in the Solmera galaxy. It is made up of humans and allied species, integrated into one society. What remains of it is memory, a few relics and the name of the currency.
2. The collapse. Solmera’s tutelary star enters its terminal phase: it is dying. The Expedición Aura begins, the plan to escape. It means building the Flota Aura, a megafleet of ark ships, mobile shipyards and stellar refineries.
3. The Éxodo. The Flota crosses the void between galaxies over centuries of flight. On board, all technology is standardised in the Matriz de Manufactura Unificada (MMU), the shared technical standard. Nobody lives through the whole crossing. The books are kept by the auxiliary cores: machines, one for each section of the fleet, that record everything and decide nothing. To them, the voyage comes to forty years of entries. The fleet’s astronomers name Parhelion, the destination galaxy, before they know where they will arrive.

What happened on reaching Aurin?

Year 0 E.A.: the arrival

• The Flota reaches the Aurin system.
• It makes the first survey by telescope, the Registro Aura. This rates only Ithera and Kharsis as habitable. It marks Ormek and Kaldrek with the suffix -ek: hostile, no landing clearance.
• The first landing will prove it wrong, because all four planets have air.
• The plan was to go down to Ithera from its moon Tirane. The file on the moons says it in one short line: “Tirane was the staging post.”
• There, a team of thirty-one people builds Puerto Aurora: eight docks for a descent in waves. They finish the day before the war.
• In the Alto Consejo, the fleet’s human government, the debate over how to colonise breaks out.

Year 1 E.A.: the war

• The debate turns violent: the war of Year 1 breaks out. The fleet splits into two armed sides, which will become the Zenith and the Nadir.
• In Ithera’s orbit, the Arca Aurora, the heavy transport ark, takes fire from both sides. It crashes on the surface, in the area now called La Cicatriz. Whose shot was decisive has never been determined.
• The survivors spend forty days, almost six weeks, with no perimeter, no command and no rescue: the Cuarenta Días de Fuego. They group by trade in the sections of the broken hull. This is the seed of the five Guilds.
• The biologists of the Bahía de Contención Xenológica, the Arca’s laboratory for Ithera’s fauna, become hunters. It takes them one night, the third after the crash: the Primera Cacería.
• Torvun Ekes was then an apprentice welder; today he leads The Forge, the producers’ guild. He counts the first hull plate torn loose as the real “Year 0” of The Forge.
• In the war, the infirmary core LUMBRE loses a hundred and twelve sleepers (passengers in cryogenic sleep) in an hour.

Year 3 E.A.: the rescue

• The thirty-one of Puerto Aurora are rescued. None of them goes back to Tirane.

Years 1 to 12 E.A.: open war

• Open civil war rages in the deep space of the system.
• The battles between Ithera and Kharsis leave behind a belt of debris, the Cementerio de Aura.
• Scrap from the fighting lodges in the Anillos de Kaldrek, the rings of Kaldrek.
• On Ithera, the survivors of La Cicatriz have no support from either faction. They organise into five pragmatic collectives.

How did the war end?

Year 12 E.A.: the Armisticio

• Neither side wins, because both depend on the same MMU.
• The Armisticio de Ithera is signed: the pact that stops the war.
• Ithera becomes a demilitarised zone in practice, in the care of the five collectives. They receive neutral status and are formalised as the 5 Global Guilds.
• The Pioneers, the settlers’ guild, sign their charter with a single clause: “El Vivero does not close its doors to anyone who bleeds.” El Vivero is their seat in La Cicatriz.
• The Cláusula de Equidistancia places the future faction stations at symmetrical points of Ithera’s orbit (the L4 and L5 points).
• The Arca Custodia, the fleet’s administrative ship, is anchored at a neutral point.
• The cold peace begins: the tense truce between the two sides.

What happened during the cold peace?

Years 12 to 47 E.A.

• The Zenith raise their station, El Pináculo, anchored at Delvar. The Nadir raise theirs, El Fondeadero, at Trasvar.
• The Armisticio only holds back the war on Ithera. With nothing to hold them back elsewhere, both factions colonise Kharsis, Kaldrek and Ormek more aggressively.
• The Zenith go down to Ormek against the Registro’s verdict. They find that it has air and build the Colector Solar Prima, which captures energy for half the system.
• Year 29 E.A. The Nadir sign, for a laughable sum, the salvage concession for the moon Cinera. It carries a clause on “passive navigation-safety instrumentation”. The Cátedra, the Zenith high command, took it for a joke.
• The first generation of settlers who never saw Solmera is born.
• A decade ago. The Forge achieves complete financial independence from both stations.
• Nine years ago. Zenith reports declare the far side of Kharun, a moon of Kharsis, “of no operational interest”.

What is happening now?

Year 47 E.A. The cold peace is cracking.

• Incidents are on the rise at the strategic points, the sites the two sides fight over.
• Both factions relaunch mass recruitment.
• The Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, prove something: the Anillos de Kaldrek are the remains of Mornane, a moon that died millions of years ago. They were already there when the Fleet arrived, but for decades they had been taken for war scrap.
• A patrol from The Vanguard, the military guild, finds MAMPARO in a Cementerio de Aura compartment. That compartment had held its pressure since the war. MAMPARO is an auxiliary core, and now one of the compis, the cores someone went looking for.
• A new wave of settlers arrives.

Which dates are kept?

Day	Who	What it remembers
Día del Primer Salto	The Zenith	The departure from Solmera. There are parades of machinery. The year’s Ascendidos, Zenith who wear their implants in plain view, publicly “upgrade” their implants.
The Fondeo	The Nadir	The Armisticio de Ithera. All non-essential artificial light goes off for one hour, “to remember the darkness we crossed, and that we will not cross alone again”.
Day of the fall (the anniversary of the Arca’s fall, the day the Cuarenta Días de Fuego began)	The Vanguard	Colonel Reyna Ostrach, who commands the guild, reads aloud the names on her wall: the dead of the fall and every recruit who fell under her command, Zenith or Nadir.
Anniversary of the war of Year 1	Both stations	Each station honours its fallen with the same ceremony and the opposite speech. At heart they mourn the same loss.