[VALANTECH.ARCHIVE//Historical_Timeline]
>>> L.Wintershade (@lunar.echo) | H.Yanagi
>>> Terminal_01 | Access: Public
>>> Fyrie_Unit_01: Active ♪

HISTORICAL.TIMELINE

So I have to write up the history of the world. The entire history of the world. Including the parts I was there for, which doesn’t actually make this easier. If anything it makes it worse, because I have to pretend I’m being objective about events I lived through while Hana watches me like a hawk.

--H.YANAGI//Edit--Miss Wintershade. Dates. Events. Chronological order. You know how this works.

--L.WINTERSHADE//Response--I know how it works, I just have opinions about it.

--H.YANAGI//Edit--Save them for the commentary boxes.

--FYRIE//♪--resigned sigh rendered in B-flat minor

1850–1855 — Early Aegis Frame Development

• Drachenkaiserreich begins secret development of the Aegis Frames: colossal war machines combining arcane engineering with cutting-edge metallurgy. The kind of project that rewrites military doctrine overnight, if it works.
• First successful prototype completed in 1853.
• First generation Aegis Frames officially unveiled in 1855, shifting the balance of power across Arcanthea in one stroke.

1855–1865 — Aegis Frame Evolution

• AFTI (Aegis Frame Training Institute) established to produce the elite pilots and engineers needed to operate the new frames.
• Second generation arrives in 1858, featuring improved crystal engines with significantly higher output capacity than the original prototypes.
• Third generation follows in 1863, integrating advanced magical resonance systems capable of channeling ambient arcane energy directly into frame systems.

1865 — Arcanthea

The world before everything broke. Steam, sorcery, and civilizations that genuinely believed they’d last forever.

1865–1920 — Arms Race

• Aegis Frame technology spreads beyond Kaiserreich’s control as other nations reverse-engineer captured units and poach Kaiserreich’s own engineers.
• Orin’s nations develop competing frame designs through aggressive research partnerships and sustained espionage campaigns.
• Custom-built frames remain prohibitively expensive, restricted to elite military units. Mass production stays firmly in the “someday” category.
• Tensions escalate across the continent as nations compete for the rare resources and technical expertise needed to keep frame programs running.

1922–1934 — The War

• A massive global conflict erupts between the Eastern Alliance of Orin and the Drachenkaiserreich. The largest military engagement in recorded history up to that point.
• Breakthrough in manufacturing enables first true mass-production of Aegis Frames, flooding battlefields with mechs that would have cost fortunes a decade prior.
• Both sides deploy frames at unprecedented scale. Aerial combat between frames becomes commonplace across multiple theaters.
• New frame variants introduce rocket thruster systems, advanced targeting arrays, improved magical shielding, and heavier artillery configurations.
• Specialized anti-frame tactics and weapons proliferate in response to the mech-saturated battlefield. Everyone adapting. Nobody winning. Yet.
• Kaiserreich develops the Leviathan Engine: a colossal magical reactor complex built into Mount Eisenspitze in central Drachenland. Designed to tap directly into the planet’s leylines, converting raw magical energy into a form that could temporarily grant non-magical soldiers arcane abilities and power enhanced versions of Aegis Frames. On paper: the weapon that ends the war. In practice: the weapon that ends everything.

1934 — The Shattering

• The Leviathan Engine was fundamentally flawed from its inception. It didn’t merely channel magical energy, it was actively draining and destabilizing the arcane foundations of reality itself.
• The Engine catastrophically fails, tearing open boundaries between planes of existence and triggering a planar collapse that reverberates across every continent.
• Magic weakens globally and abruptly. Arcane functions that once required seconds now demand hours of ritual preparation. The world’s magical infrastructure goes dark.
• Deities vanish. Solaris, Bahamut, entire pantheons disappear without trace or warning, leaving their worshipers in collective, permanent despair.
• High Elf sky islands, dependent on Mystra’s arcane tides for levitation, plummet from the heavens. Several crash directly into populated areas, destroying cities and killing millions in the span of hours.
• Kaiserreich fractures into independent states as the central government collapses under the full weight of what it created.

1934–2048 — The Dark Age

• Magic-dependent infrastructure fails across every civilization. Economies built on enchanted systems collapse within months.
• Cities formerly protected by arcane barriers—including those in The Shrouds—are overrun by hostile environments as their defenses go dark.
• High Elves retreat into complete isolation, hoarding salvaged arcane knowledge while the rest of the world burns.
• Aegis Frames rendered inoperable across the board as crystal engines drain of magical charge with no viable way to recharge them.

1960s — The Microchip Revolution

• Dwarves pioneer early microchip technology as a direct response to failing magical systems. The first purely mechanical alternative to arcane infrastructure, and the seed of everything that comes after.

1970s — The Production Race

• Nations and surviving corporate entities begin racing to dominate microchip manufacturing. Whoever controls silicon controls the future. Everyone figured that out at roughly the same time.

2020s — Aegis Frame Revival

• Free states of Drachenland begin experimenting with reactivating dormant Aegis Frames, adapting ancient magical technology to modern digital control systems after decades of failed attempts.
• Integration of microchip-based electronics with original frame mechanics finally succeeds, producing functional hybrid systems.
• Lays the foundation for the combat frames that will define military and corporate security operations in the current era.

2048 — Celestine Awakening

• High Elves re-emerge from over a century of isolation, revealing the Soul Protocol: the digital transcendence of their ancestors’ consciousness into a singular AI entity called Auraciel. Thousands of High Elf lineages merged into one algorithmic mind. Whether that counts as preservation or erasure is a question nobody with a Neo-Celestine stock portfolio wants answered.

2060s — The Rise of Corporations

• Corporations consolidate power as remaining nation-states crumble under compounding economic and environmental pressures. Democracy doesn’t survive a century and a half of being too expensive to maintain.
• Neo-Celestine forms in 2062 as a High Elf corporate conglomerate specializing in neural interfaces and Arcane Code Emulation. The template every subsequent megacorp copies; some successfully, most badly.

2099 — Present Day

• Corporations dictate nearly every aspect of life in Arclight and beyond: technology, resources, information flow, employment, and the quiet, persistent illusion that any of it is optional. Magic persists in trace forms, channeled through expensive devices like the Aetherlink, requiring complex arcane code to function effectively. The world didn’t end. It just got restructured.

--H.YANAGI//Edit--Timeline complete. All major events documented.

--L.WINTERSHADE//Response--And here I thought writing history was supposed to be boring. Turns out it’s only boring until it decides to try ending everything.

--FYRIE//♪--resolving chord settling in C major—quiet, steady, like someone who watched the ending and kept writing anyway