(World Building) Timeline: From the Coming of the Azure Flames Foreward

This is a rough timeline, the purpose of which is to stake out temporal territory for certain stories.

The Coming of the Azure Flames is an event that destroyed the Old World (our world) and its civilization, so we're starting from a ruined state and initial stories set in this period are about survival and adaptation as the last of the Old World disappears and the new age completely supersedes it. This is when Ken's post-cataclysm stories occur, after his transformation into the father of the nation of men that bear his name. This is when The Necromancer arises and he becomes a recurring antagonist to Ken and others, and his rise and fall mark this era.

Overlapping this is the rise of various rivals to The Necromancer. The Archmage of Solador, coming to dominate Cascadia, is one of them. The Founder of The Hidden City, which is able to operate world-wide due to enduring Old World architecture that his people go on to rebuild and expand, is another. These folks go on to be the players in The Wars of the Damned, ending with the rise of the Empire of Man (which throws down The Necromancer).

The Empire of Man goes on a crusade to purge the world of all that is unnatural and inhuman, creating a one-world state and religion that runs a wholly authoritarian and totalitarian police state. Yes, even in the undersea and orbital reaches, as the aim of the Empire is to fully subjugate the Earth before taking the crusade into space. Stories here mark the transition from the false hope of a false prophet through to the creation of a resistance that persists in persecution until a successful contact with sympathetic external allies brings forth a true savior that makes real the dream of freedom upon which the Empire's religion feeds.

Overlapping this is the Diaspora of Man. The Hidden City leads an exodus once it becomes clear that the Empire will win on Earth. Using what they recovered from ages before the Old World, they establish extra-planetary colonies elsewhere in the solar system starting with Mars and Venus, and spread out from there. It is during this period that they come into contact with the allies that would later break the Empire on Earth, but not before their own nation undergoes its own period of unrest and transformation.

The timeline from there I have yet to set down. The trend, however, is meant to echo real collapses and recoveries with some exaggerations for effect. The span for this period is about 500 years on the outside; once I'm satisfied with how specifics shake out, I'll revise this timeline with something more specific in terms of dates. For now, I have just a start point--a point of divergence--and I will work forward from there.