The World History Chronicle
The Continental Separation - Part Two: The Intervention and Catastrophe
Date: 998 AC (26th day, 12th month - 30th day, 12th month)
Location: The Great River Border / Global
Civilization: Eastern Empire (Regalia) and Western Kingdom (Serestia)
Event Type: Magical/Natural/Catastrophic
Story Arc: The Age of Paranoia - Part Eight (Conclusion)
⬅️ Previous: The Continental Separation - Part One: The Battle and the Breaking
➡️ Next: [Coming Soon (27.11.2025) - Subscribe for Updates]
📚 Series Hub: Complete chapter list and series info
Previously in Part One: After a month of devastating warfare, the Empire’s six-hundred-thousand-strong invasion force had been reduced to approximately 385,000 effective troops through casualties and exhaustion. Despite suffering losses at a three-to-one ratio, the Imperial offensive continued through desperation and imperial delusion. On Comet Day—the 26th day of the twelfth month, marking 999 years since the comet impact—General Severus launched what he called the “final offensive,” a desperate all-out assault against Kingdom defensive lines. Princess Lyra, having refused to employ her catastrophic magical power for direct combat throughout the month-long war, watched as Imperial forces suffered another 115,000 casualties over four days of brutal fighting. By the afternoon of Comet Day, with the Imperial offensive clearly failing but the fighting continuing, Princess Lyra made a fateful decision: she would personally intervene to separate the armies and end the war without further bloodshed. Her plan was to use earth magic to relocate both armies back to their respective sides of the Great River—the original border—then create an impassable water barrier that would make continued combat physically impossible.
The Princess’s Intervention
Princess Lyra departed her tower at mid-afternoon on the twenty-sixth day of the twelfth month, using magical transportation to travel instantly to a point several miles behind Kingdom defensive lines where she could observe the entire battlefield. The Scepter of Controlled Resonance hummed in her hand as she surveyed the scene of carnage: thousands of dead and wounded scattered across contested terrain, Imperial troops still advancing into devastating defensive fire, Kingdom forces holding their positions but visibly fatigued from continuous combat.
The Princess had spent five centuries learning to control power that had once caused accidental catastrophes. She had triggered earthquakes with sneezes, generated tsunamis through emotional distress, created continent-spanning storms during practice sessions. The Scepter of Controlled Resonance allowed her to channel that devastating power with precision, but it required immense concentration and careful calibration to avoid unintended consequences.
Her plan was ambitious in scope but clear in purpose. The Great River, frozen solid one hundred and fifty miles east of the current battlefield, marked the original border between Kingdom and Empire. That was where the separation should occur—at the proper boundary, not in the midst of Kingdom territory. To achieve this, Princess Lyra would execute a two-stage intervention. First, she would use earth magic to physically push both armies back to their respective sides of the Great River—moving the Imperial forces eastward across the one hundred fifty miles they had advanced, and withdrawing Kingdom forces westward to ensure safe distance. Second, once the armies were properly positioned, she would create an impassable water barrier along the entire length of the Great River itself. The barrier would be too wide to cross, too deep to ford, flowing too swiftly to swim. It would end the war without mass slaughter by making continued combat physically impossible.
The spell was enormously complex and would require more power than she had ever channeled in a single working. She would need to move hundreds of thousands of soldiers across vast distances using earth itself as her instrument, then redirect underground aquifers and create a new river channel two hundred miles long. But it would preserve lives on both sides and establish a clear, defensible boundary that even Emperor Augustus could not ignore.
The Princess began her spell at approximately the fourteenth hour of the twenty-sixth day (mid-afternoon). She drove the Scepter into the ground and began channeling power through it, drawing on ambient magical energy and her own vast reserves. She focused first on the earth movement—the foundation of her plan.
Earth mages supporting the Princess felt the ground begin to vibrate differently than any earthquake they had experienced. This was controlled, directional, building like a wave. Water shapers sensed massive movements of underground water repositioning itself in preparation for the coming changes. Air weavers detected unusual magical currents building around the Princess’s location, swirling with unprecedented intensity.
Kingdom forces received urgent orders to brace themselves and fall back from forward positions. Imperial forces, receiving no such warning, could only watch in confusion as the ground beneath their feet began to shift.
The Earth Wave
What Princess Lyra did not fully understand—what no being in Novus’s history had fully understood—was the depth of connection between magical power and the planet’s fundamental geological structure. The cosmic crystals that had transformed the Kingdom’s population nine hundred and ninety-nine years earlier had been fragments of an object that was part magic and part matter, originating from somewhere beyond the planet. When those crystals had impacted, they had fundamentally altered the relationship between magical energy and physical reality in the affected areas.
Princess Lyra, who had absorbed a cosmic crystal as a five-year-old child, represented an unprecedented concentration of this reality-altering power. The Scepter of Controlled Resonance helped her channel that power safely for most applications, but what she was attempting now—moving earth itself across hundreds of miles to physically relocate entire armies—pushed far beyond any previous use of her abilities.
As the Princess released her spell at approximately the fifteenth hour (mid-afternoon), the ground began to move in ways that defied normal understanding of geology. The earth did not simply shake as in an earthquake—it rippled. Starting from Princess Lyra’s position and spreading eastward toward the Great River and beyond, a wave of earth began rolling across the landscape like water across a pond.
The earth wave was not violent in the sense of tearing structures apart immediately, but it was utterly irresistible. The ground itself rose several feet and rolled forward, carrying everything upon it. Trees, rocks, debris, military equipment, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were pushed eastward by the moving earth beneath them. The wave traveled at approximately fifty miles per hour—fast enough to be inexorable and dramatic, slow enough that soldiers could maintain their footing and move with it rather than being violently thrown about.
Imperial soldiers experienced the phenomenon with terror and confusion. The ground beneath their feet simply began moving eastward, carrying them with it whether they wished to go or not. Those who tried to fight the movement found themselves stumbling and falling, then being carried along by the earth itself. Those who accepted the inevitable and moved with the wave fared better, though the experience remained deeply unnerving. Officers shouted orders that became meaningless—how do you command soldiers to hold position when the position itself is moving?
Kingdom forces, having received advance warning, withdrew westward ahead of the wave. They watched in awe as the earth rippled past them, pushing the Imperial army back toward the border. Princess Lyra had warned them this would happen, but witnessing it proved far more impressive than any description could convey. The ground itself was being reshaped, not violently but inexorably, by magical power channeled through their Princess.
The earth wave continued for approximately three hours, rolling eastward across the one hundred and fifty miles separating the battlefield from the Great River. It pushed the Imperial forces back across every mile they had gained, past abandoned Kingdom defensive positions, through contested territory, across land they had taken at such terrible cost. The wave carried supply wagons, siege equipment, wounded soldiers, and all the detritus of war back toward the original border.
By the time the earth wave reached the Great River and finally subsided—at approximately the eighteenth hour (early evening)—the Imperial army found itself on the eastern bank of the frozen river, precisely where it had started its invasion more than a month earlier. Approximately three hundred and fifty thousand exhausted, confused Imperial soldiers stood on Empire territory, having been physically relocated by magical power beyond anything in their experience. Casualties from the relocation itself were surprisingly light—perhaps two thousand soldiers killed or seriously injured from falls or being caught in the few structural collapses caused by the moving earth. It was, given the scale of the magical working, almost miraculously gentle.
Kingdom forces, having withdrawn westward before the earth wave, found themselves comfortably positioned on the western bank of the Great River. The armies were now separated by the proper border, exactly as Princess Lyra had intended.
The Unintended Consequence
Princess Lyra, maintaining her connection to the spell through the Scepter, felt the earth wave complete its work. Stage one of her plan had succeeded. The armies were positioned correctly. Now she would create the water barrier that would make the separation permanent and end the war.
She redirected her channeling, drawing on the underground aquifers and preparing to raise water along the entire two-hundred-mile length of the Great River. The spell began to take effect—water levels in the river began rising, fed by underground sources responding to her magical command. This was meant to be the simple part, the straightforward application of power she had used in smaller forms hundreds of times before.
But the earth had been fundamentally destabilized by what she had just done. Moving a wave of earth across one hundred and fifty miles—carrying the mass of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and all their equipment—had done more than simply relocate surface features. It had transmitted enormous force deep into the planetary crust, along the same ancient fault line that followed the Great River.
The fault line had been under stress for millennia—a consequence of the comet impact that had redistributed planetary mass and created new geological instabilities. That stress had been gradually accumulating, held in check by the friction of tectonic plates. Princess Lyra’s earth wave had just applied hundreds of millions of tons of horizontal force directly along that fault line. It was, from a geological perspective, like striking a piece of stressed glass with a hammer.
At approximately the nineteenth hour (evening) on the twenty-sixth day of the twelfth month, 998 AC, Princess Lyra felt something change beneath her. The spell she was channeling to raise water suddenly encountered resistance, then feedback, then catastrophic release of forces she had not intended to tap. Deep underground, the fault line was fracturing.
The Princess’s first instinct was to contain it, to seize control of the tectonic forces and force them back into stability. She poured more power through the Scepter, trying to suppress the fracture, to hold the continent together through sheer magical force. But the cosmic crystal power she wielded did not work like conventional magic. It did not simply push against physical forces—it altered the fundamental relationship between energy and matter.
What she intended as containment became amplification. The power she channeled, seeking to stop the tectonic movement, instead fed into it. The fault line did not slow—it accelerated. The fracture propagated faster, deeper, more violently than any natural tectonic event in the planet’s history. Princess Lyra felt the feedback through the Scepter and realized with horror what was happening: she was not stopping the separation, she was making it catastrophically worse.
The continent of Novus split in two along a line that followed roughly the course of the Great River and extended southward for thousands of miles. But unlike any natural continental drift, which would occur over millions of years, this separation happened with terrifying speed. The eastern portion—containing the Empire and approximately forty percent of the continent’s landmass—began accelerating away from the western portion containing the Kingdom.
The Princess immediately changed her approach. She could not stop the separation—her attempt to do so had only made it worse. But she could prevent it from becoming an extinction-level event. She redirected all her power toward damage control.
The Separation
The separation of the continent was experienced differently depending on location. Along the immediate fault line where the split occurred—following the course of the Great River—the experience was catastrophic. The ground simply tore apart, creating a rapidly widening chasm that quickly filled with seawater rushing in from the ocean to the south. The frozen river, which had served as the invasion route just weeks earlier, was torn in half as the landmasses separated. Settlements within five miles of the fault line—mostly military camps and forward bases established during the war—were destroyed by the tectonic violence.
Both armies, positioned directly along the banks of the Great River when the split began, experienced the separation as a series of increasingly violent earthquakes. Imperial soldiers on the eastern bank and Kingdom soldiers on the western bank found themselves at the very edge of a continental fracture. The ground shook with intensity that made standing impossible. Soldiers thrown to the ground could only watch in terror as the earth itself broke apart along the river they had just been separated by.
The water Princess Lyra had been beginning to raise in the river immediately drained into the widening chasm as the continent split open. The frozen surface of the river shattered into massive ice floes that tumbled into the growing gap. Ocean water from the south began rushing northward to fill the void, creating a new sea where a river had been. Within minutes, the armies found themselves not facing each other across a frozen river, but standing on the edges of a rapidly widening ocean channel.
The first two hours—from the nineteenth to the twenty-first hour—were the most violent. Magma welled up from the mantle along the entire length of the fault line. Volcanic eruptions began at multiple points, sending columns of ash and fire into the sky. The accelerated tectonic movement generated earthquakes that rippled across both continents. Buildings collapsed in cities hundreds of miles from the fault line. Coastal regions experienced tsunamis as the rapid continental movement displaced massive volumes of ocean water.
Princess Lyra, channeling power at a scale she had never attempted before, worked desperately to prevent complete catastrophe. She could not stop the separation, but she could contain its worst effects. She prevented the volcanic eruptions from becoming super-eruptions that would fill the atmosphere with enough ash to block sunlight for years. She dampened the most violent seismic waves before they could level major population centers. She regulated the ocean’s movement to prevent mega-tsunamis that would devastate coastlines on both continents.
The Scepter of Controlled Resonance blazed white-hot in her hands. Her own body struggled to channel the massive energies flowing through it. She could feel herself approaching limits that even her transformed physiology might not survive exceeding. But she could not stop. Every moment she channeled meant thousands of lives saved.
Farther from the immediate fault line, populations throughout both civilizations experienced devastating but not immediately deadly earthquakes and volcanic activity. Buildings collapsed. Infrastructure failed. Volcanic ash began falling in regions near the fault line. But Princess Lyra’s containment efforts meant that people had warning and time to reach safety. The death toll was measured in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
The two landmasses separated with remarkable speed. Within the first hour, a channel several miles wide had opened. Within three hours, the gap was fifty miles wide. Within six hours, the continents were hundreds of miles apart. The eastern landmass—containing the Empire—accelerated eastward, pushed by the same tectonic forces Princess Lyra had accidentally amplified. The western landmass—containing the Kingdom—moved more slowly westward, being the larger and more stable of the two sections.
By the seventh hour—at approximately the second hour of the twenty-seventh day (2:00 AM)—the continents were a thousand miles apart and continuing to drift. The most violent tectonic activity had subsided, but the accelerated drift continued. Princess Lyra maintained her channeling, preventing secondary disasters as the planet adjusted to the radical restructuring of its landmasses.
The separation continued through the night and into the next day. By the twelfth hour—at approximately the seventh hour of the twenty-seventh day (7:00 AM)—the two continents had reached positions on opposite sides of the planet. The eastern continent, carrying the Empire, was now on the far side of the world from the western continent and its Kingdom. The distance between them was not merely hundreds of miles but thousands—nearly half the planet’s circumference.
The tectonic forces finally began to stabilize. The accelerated drift slowed, then stopped. The continents had found new equilibrium positions in the planet’s tectonic system. The violent earthquakes ceased. The volcanic eruptions died down to manageable levels. The planet, fundamentally reshaped, began to settle into its new configuration.
The Immediate Aftermath
At the seventh hour of the twenty-seventh day (7:00 AM), as the continents finally settled into their new positions on opposite sides of the planet, Princess Lyra stood at the epicenter of the greatest magical working in history. She had been channeling power continuously for twelve hours. Her body was pushed beyond all reasonable limits. The Scepter of Controlled Resonance, which had blazed white-hot throughout the night, had cooled to a dull red glow. Her hands, wrapped around it, showed burns that would have killed any normal person.
She should have collapsed. Every fiber of her being screamed for rest. But she could not stop—not yet. The immediate tectonic crisis had stabilized, but secondary disasters still threatened both continents. Aftershocks rippled across the planet. Volcanic activity continued at reduced but still dangerous levels. Ocean currents, disrupted by the radical continental repositioning, threatened to generate new tsunamis. Weather patterns were already beginning to destabilize as atmospheric circulation adjusted to the new geography.
Lord Regent Aldrich and Lady Regent Cordelia, who had been coordinating the Kingdom’s crisis response throughout the night, reached Princess Lyra’s position shortly after dawn. What they found horrified them. The Princess stood upright only through sheer force of will. Her skin was pale as death. Blood trickled from her nose and ears—signs of catastrophic internal strain. Her eyes, usually bright with life, had taken on a distant, glassy quality that suggested she was operating beyond conscious thought.
“Your Highness,” Aldrich said carefully, approaching as one might approach a wounded animal. “You must rest. You’ve saved us. You can stop now.”
The Princess’s response was barely a whisper, but utterly firm: “Not yet. Both continents. Must stabilize both.”
The Regents realized with horror that Princess Lyra was maintaining simultaneous magical interventions across the entire planet—dampening aftershocks on the eastern continent thousands of miles away, regulating volcanic activity on both landmasses, stabilizing ocean currents between them. The scope of what she was attempting would have been impossible for any being. That she was succeeding was a testament to power that transcended mortal understanding.
Master Observer Helena, arriving with the Kingdom’s most skilled healers and mages, immediately took charge. “Support her,” she commanded. “Every mage who can channel, link to her now. She’s running on empty—we need to provide power, or she’ll burn herself out completely.”
Over the next hour, a network of supporting magic was established. Fifty of the Kingdom’s most powerful mages formed a circle around the Princess, channeling their own power through carefully controlled links. It was not enough to match what she was spending, but it helped. Healers worked to stabilize her physical condition, treating burns, stopping internal bleeding, providing nutrients and hydration through magical means since she could not break her concentration to eat or drink.
The Princess, receiving this support, managed to speak more clearly: “Empire side... worse damage. Focus there.”
It was a measure of her moral character that even in her extremity, she prioritized the Empire—the civilization that had just invaded her Kingdom—because their smaller landmass and position had resulted in more severe tectonic damage. Master Observer Helena quietly wept as she helped channel power to support this decision.
The Imperial forces, having been relocated back to the eastern bank of the Great River by Princess Lyra’s earth wave, found themselves on the Empire side of the continental split—exactly where they were supposed to be according to the original border. However, they still faced immediate crisis. General Severus had positioned his headquarters approximately thirty miles west of the Great River, and when the earth wave pushed the army back eastward, his command post had been carried along with them. The General’s headquarters ended up precariously positioned less than a mile from the newly forming ocean, and when the ground began to fracture violently during the continental split, his command center collapsed into the widening chasm. General Severus was killed in the collapse.
Approximately three hundred and fifty thousand Imperial soldiers—exhausted from the earth wave relocation and terrified by the continental fracture—found themselves scattered along the eastern edge of what was rapidly becoming a new ocean. While they were technically on Empire territory, they were still separated from their main bases and supply depots by the chaos of a continent in the process of splitting. The frozen river that had been their supply route was now a churning mass of ice, water, and tectonic violence. Command of Imperial forces devolved to regional commanders who had no communication with each other or with the Emperor.
The Four Days of Stabilization
What followed was perhaps the most extraordinary display of dedication and self-sacrifice in recorded history. For four days—from the twenty-seventh through the thirtieth days of the twelfth month—Princess Lyra worked continuously to stabilize the planet. She did not sleep. She barely spoke. She existed in a state of continuous magical channeling that would have killed any other being within hours.
The twenty-seventh day was spent managing the most critical threats. Aftershocks powerful enough to level cities were dampened before they could reach population centers. A super-volcano on the eastern continent, destabilized by the tectonic violence, was prevented from erupting through careful magical regulation of magma flows. Tsunamis were guided away from coastlines on both continents. The Princess’s supporting circle of mages rotated in shifts—no single mage could maintain the connection for more than four hours without collapsing—but she never stopped.
On the twenty-eighth day, the focus shifted to preventing secondary disasters. Ocean currents, thrown into chaos by the continental repositioning, threatened to create permanent dead zones where marine life would die. Princess Lyra worked to establish new stable circulation patterns. Weather systems, disrupted by the radical changes in land-sea distribution, threatened to create catastrophic storms. She helped guide atmospheric currents into new equilibrium patterns. Volcanic ash in the atmosphere threatened to create a planetary cooling event. She worked with air mages to settle the ash more quickly than natural processes would allow.
Those who witnessed Princess Lyra during these days reported that she seemed to be operating on a level beyond normal consciousness. Her responses to questions were coherent but minimal. She would indicate areas of concern with precise instructions, then return to her channeling. The burns on her hands healed through the constant healing magic being applied, only to reappear as the Scepter burned her again. She accepted nutrients and water when offered, but only just enough to sustain her body.
Master Observer Helena maintained detailed records of the Princess’s interventions. The scope of what she accomplished was staggering. She prevented an estimated fifty major aftershocks from devastating populated areas. She stabilized fourteen volcanoes that would otherwise have erupted. She guided ocean currents to establish new patterns that would support marine ecosystems. She helped atmospheric systems find new equilibrium states that would prevent catastrophic climate disruption. She did all of this simultaneously across both continents, maintaining awareness of conditions on opposite sides of the planet.
By the twenty-ninth day, the most acute threats had been addressed. The planet was no longer in immediate danger of cascading catastrophes. But the work was not complete. Fine-tuning was needed—small adjustments to tectonic stability, corrections to ocean current patterns, tweaks to atmospheric circulation. The Princess continued her vigil, though by now she was clearly approaching absolute limits. Her skin had taken on an almost translucent quality. Her breathing was shallow and irregular. The supporting mages reported that the power flowing through her was visibly diminishing—not because she was channeling less, but because she had so little left to give.
On the evening of the twenty-ninth day, Lord Regent Aldrich made one final attempt to convince the Princess to rest: “Your Highness, you’ve done more than anyone could ask. The planet will survive. Please, you must stop before you destroy yourself.”
The Princess’s response was barely audible: “Tomorrow. One more day. Make sure... both continents... stable.”
The thirtieth day of the twelfth month was the final act. Princess Lyra worked through the morning and afternoon, making last adjustments to planetary systems. She ensured that aftershock patterns were declining naturally. She confirmed that volcanic activity was returning to sustainable levels. She verified that ocean currents would maintain stable patterns. She checked that atmospheric systems were finding new equilibrium.
By the evening of the thirtieth day, approximately one hundred hours after she had begun the earth wave that triggered the catastrophe, Princess Lyra made her final assessment. Both continents were stable. The immediate threat of extinction-level disasters had passed. Secondary effects would continue for months or years, but they would be survivable. The planet would heal.
She turned to the assembled Regents, healers, and mages who had supported her through the crisis. Her voice was barely a whisper, but it carried absolute finality: “It’s done. Both continents safe. Stable.”
Then, and only then, did she release her grip on the Scepter of Controlled Resonance. The artifact fell from her burned hands. Princess Lyra collapsed into the arms of Master Observer Helena, unconscious before she hit the ground.
The casualty count from the separation and its immediate aftermath was staggering but could have been far worse. Approximately fifteen thousand deaths had occurred along both sides of the fault line—mostly military personnel from both armies, plus civilian casualties in the few settlements near the fault. Tens of thousands more were injured. Infrastructure damage was catastrophic across both civilizations, with particular devastation in regions near the fault line.
The war itself had ended, not through victory or defeat but through literal separation of the combatants. The Imperial forces, having been magically relocated back to Empire territory before the split, were technically on their own side of the new ocean. However, the continental fracture had created such chaos in the border regions that effective military operations were impossible. The armies that had been locked in desperate combat just hours earlier now had far more immediate concerns than continuing their war. The Empire itself, on the eastern landmass, faced internal crisis as news of both the military failure and the continental catastrophe reached the capital.
Princess Lyra, having prevented planetary catastrophe at enormous personal cost, finally allowed herself to rest on the evening of the thirtieth day of the twelfth month. She had worked continuously for over one hundred hours, maintaining planetary-scale magical interventions to prevent secondary disasters. Her body, even transformed and immensely powerful, had limits. She had exceeded those limits to save the world.
That evening, surrounded by healers and with the Regents maintaining vigil, Crown Princess Lyra fell into a deep restorative sleep that would last a hundred years. The being who had accidentally sent two continents to opposite sides of the planet now rested, her last conscious thought a fervent hope that she would awaken to find a world that had forgiven her unintended catastrophe.
Historical Note: The Continental Separation of 998 AC represents one of the most catastrophic events in recorded history, comparable in scale only to the original comet impact of 1 BC. Yet what could have been an extinction-level disaster was mitigated to a survivable catastrophe through Princess Lyra’s multi-day intervention to stabilize planetary systems. Modern geological analysis confirms that without her containment efforts, the accelerated continental drift would have triggered volcanic super-eruptions creating a planetary winter lasting decades, mega-tsunamis that would have devastated all coastlines, and cascading tectonic events that could have rendered the planet uninhabitable. The death toll could easily have reached millions or resulted in complete extinction rather than the fifteen thousand deaths that occurred.
The separation occurred due to a tragic confluence of factors: accumulated tectonic stress from the original comet impact, Princess Lyra’s unprecedented magical intervention moving mass on a continental scale, and insufficient understanding of how cosmic crystal power interacted with planetary geology. The Princess’s intent was to relocate the armies back to their proper territories and then create a water barrier along the original border. Her earth wave successfully moved the Imperial army back across one hundred fifty miles to Empire territory, but the immense force transmitted along the ancient fault line destabilized the continental plate beyond recovery. When she began to raise water for the barrier and the fault fractured, her instinctive attempt to contain the fracture through magical force instead amplified the tectonic movement catastrophically. What should have been a slow geological process occurring over millions of years was accelerated to twelve hours, sending the two continents to opposite sides of the planet.
The result was permanent geographic separation. The eastern continent carrying the Empire and the western continent carrying the Kingdom ended up on opposite sides of the world, separated by thousands of miles of ocean. Visual contact became impossible. Over the following centuries, as the immediate trauma faded and new generations arose, the two civilizations would gradually lose direct knowledge of each other. The Separation would pass into legend, with each side developing different interpretations of what had occurred. Only when maritime technology advanced sufficiently for trans-oceanic voyages would the two civilizations rediscover each other, confronting the question of whether ancient wounds had healed or merely been forgotten.
The war that had seemed so important just hours before the separation became instantly irrelevant. Emperor Augustus XVII’s delusions about ancient Kingdom crimes seemed absurd in light of a catastrophe that had literally reshaped the planet. General Severus’s ambitious invasion plans meant nothing when the armies themselves had been separated by an ocean rather than a river. The entire conflict that had consumed nearly a decade of political deterioration and a month of actual combat was rendered moot by fifteen minutes of tectonic violence.
Princess Lyra’s decision to continue her stabilization efforts despite her own collapse demonstrated the moral character that would define her millennia-long reign. She had accidentally caused the catastrophe, and she would not rest until she had done everything possible to minimize its consequences. The cost of that dedication was a century-long sleep, but the benefit was a world that survived with its civilizations intact.
The separation marked the end of the Age of Paranoia and the beginning of what historians would later call the Age of Rebuilding. Both civilizations would spend the next century recovering from the combined effects of war and tectonic catastrophe. The calendar itself would be reset, with Year 1 marking the beginning of a new era.
📡 End of Historical Transmission
Oliver here - Fascinating period in this world’s development! Our historical frequency archives are picking up significant resonance from these events. The ripple effects of what you just read will influence countless future chronicles. What aspects of this era do you find most intriguing? Fellow dimensional historians in the comments are already debating the implications...