World History
It is tempting to presume that someone might be able to compile an account of Siren's history from now all the way back to the first year 0 (... that we know of). We can go back further, of course, to the pre-settlement era, and talk about palaeontology, but this is not my area of expertise (I am an anthropologist first and foremost). But I can provide some information on the various historical eras of Siren.
1. First, a note on year counts
Elsewhere on this web-site I have referred to the first few years post-settlement with a numbering scheme starting at 0, when the settlers landed. This is logical, though it it is not what the settlers did; they had a year count which numbered in the thousands, and their own technology records the date of their arrival as being within their 23rd century.
However on further examination of the (poorly preserved) historical records from Earth, I can now say with some confidence that this was not their true 23rd century. They began measuring their years from some unspecified period 23 centuries prior, with all years before that being referred to as such: "[year] BC". Thus it seems that their year count has reset at least once in the past. As a historian myself I find this frustrating, but those precursors were far from alone in this practice.
The method of counting years used by Sirenians has also changed over time. Another frustration which makes it annoyingly difficult to even determine how long AGO the settlers landed. Therefore distinctions must be made between different year counts.
1.1 Settler years (FS)
These were coined by the first Sirenians as a means to measure how long Humans had been living on Siren. They are written as such: "[year] FS", the FS meaning "From Settlement". When I speak of the past (and of this, my specific area of study) 'FS' is implied.
This count starts at 0 and appears to have ended at some unspecified point after the development of society on Siren progressed to such an extent that individual population groups had begun to develop separate cultures and practices. This includes different methods of measuring the date. The latest dated artifact I know of from this era records a date year of '206'.
1.2 'Earth' centuries (CE)
It was the year 2378 CE when settlers first landed on the Western continent of Siren. I cannot find any sources at to what 'CE' means, but it is written in their logs and records, so I will reproduce it here. We cannot know how many years have passed since then though I would hazard a guess that we are now well into the thirtieth century CE. But it would be just our luck that even Precursors on Earth now use some other means of counting years, just to make my life even harder.
As this is a defunct counting system, it is not used today, but it crops up in the displays of navigational visors, though it seems that the counting ability of these visors has decayed over the years as their internal clocks seem to have diverged wildly from one another.
1.3 Dominion Decades (DD) [controversial]
These have been in use by the phocid royal dominion in the Eastern continent since their foundation. Although these are highly regional, they do appear to be the oldest date system we currently still have in use today. Every ten years is counted a new decade, and we are currently in "79 DD", indicating that the dominion has held power for seven centuries. Given the long lifespan of phocids, this is to be expected.
Use of DD counts is not entirely acceptable outside of the dominion given our current political climate, and even less so in the Spire. Use at your own peril.
1.4 Elder Year (EY)
As mentioned above, the visors of longwing harpies, most of which are stored in the Western continent, use an antiquated date format, though not all appear to agree with one another. As such, one single visor was chosen by the elder at the Hall of Faces which had reset its year count to 0 as the new standard by which all peoples in the Western continent measure time. As this is a computerised method of measuring time, unique in the planet, it is supposedly very precise. It even measures milliseconds. But as someone familiar with such artifacts, I cannot help but imagine that it would be prone to drifting over the years, like all of its fellow visors.
Today, we are currently in 778 EY.
1.7 Additional counts
As far as I am aware, the Ii!wal cultures in the south and the citizens of Odr's Sleep in the north use their own counts. There are yet more, often measured by moon cycle, in other small and more insular cultures. Each has the tendency to use a different moon, however, bringing no clarification or mutual intelligibility to the matter.
1.6 University Time
When the University at the Spire was founded, it was determined that the disparate and often extremely regional methods of measuring the date were inadequate in this new era of learning. A single new standard had to be made to settle the disagreements, to unify all methods of measuring time and bring about a new age of global date keeping, with one true year count.
These are:
Since Founding of University (FU)
This begins its count at the moment Janir-vay-or, the founder of the University at the Spire, declared it so roughly six centuries ago.
Since Universtiy Founded (UF)
This standard begins its count several years after FU, from the first moment of construction of the Spire by Helma-vay, the master architect who wanted to hold lessons indoors for once.
Since the University Truly Began (UB)
This standard begins its count several years after UF, from the moment Eroa-vay, the master of teaching, chose to accept new students from outside the scholarly craftclan.
These three standards were in use concurrently, as were all the others, until ultimately Helma-vay won a sword-debate on the matter against the other two and 'UF' became our single standard. It is not, however, universally adopted worldwide.
So, finally, I can tell you that the true current year, as most people understand it, is 616 UF.
2. The Historical 'Eras' of Siren
Now that we have gotten the matter of the present year out of the way, we may talk about the Eras of Siren. My University perspective may inherently bias my understanding of these Eras and if you hail from elsewhere you might disagree, but I believe we are past the point of attempting to formulate one single universal standard of measuring time.
2.1 The Era of Settlement: 0 to 92 FS
I think it is safe to consider this era 'over' when the very last person who had still been alive at the time of settling, Ishmael himself, died. This was a very tumultuous time in Siren and notable historical events are measured by the day rather than by the year. Perhaps some day I will produce a more detailed account of this incredible Era.
| Year | Notable Event |
| 0 FS | An obvious one - the birth of Ishmael, and six months prior, the landing of The Lonely Sailor space-farer on Siren. |
| 2 FS | First beta-generation Sirenian born |
| 10 FS | Death of Ambla, the first Sirenian to die |
| 19 FS | The death of Parrish, a beta Sirenian |
| 25 FS |
The death of Ieya, a beta Sirenian, resulting in the declaration of rebellion by the beta generation |
| 31 FS | The High Tide, Atom orders the settlers to evacuate |
| 34 FS | The death of Callum Loris; evacuation routes are destroyed |
| 36 FS | Trapped forever on Siren, remaining settlers surrender or admit defeat |
| 38 FS | Davide, a beta Sirenian, declared the temporary leader of a new governing council located in (modern day) Ii!wal Spiral |
| 41 FS | Moons are named |
| 50 FS | The first new village in the Western continent suffers an upset of the peace and several splinter groups are formed; more villages are founded elsewhere |
| 53 FS | Davide steps down as leader |
| 55 FS | Ishmael is officially barred from being on the council due to his insistence that zetas all be killed |
| 62 FS | The two final Precursors born on Earth die |
| 68 FS | Davide's death by assassination |
| 72 FS | Hafinvar, a beta Sirenian, dies at the hands of unaltered human descendants of settlers. They are killed in retaliation in the same year, thus leaving the unaltered human population without reproductive capacity |
| 82 FS | Cherta's death. Ishmael vanishes from all records between now and his death |
| 89 FS | The final unaltered human dies |
| 92 FS | Ishmael's body is found |
.
Thanks to my work, we now have a relatively clear understanding of these years. I can attribute this understanding to my luck in finding the computerised data banks at the first settlement, where this was all recorded in great detail. The relatively small population at the time, with nearly every settler and Sirenian known by name, was a dream come true for a researcher like myself, more used to extremely unclear records and massive knowledge gaps (not to say gaps are not present here, either).
2.2 The Era of Dispersion
The same cannot be said for this era. The year count is unclear, the population is growing and spreading rapidly and without any real method of keeping good records. In this era, Sirenians have begun to explore their world, unconstrained by the old laws of the settlement or the first Sirenian council. Villages were being formed, including the very first truly pelagic villages in the world. In the process of seeking new land to live upon, Sirenians found the Eastern continent, which was newly uncovered by the High Tide in the year 31 FS. Such an event had drowned most of the western continent, but laid bare the lands we now know as the Dry Bowl and Dry Breaks.
This appears to have been a difficult but functional time for our ancestors, given the evidence of a sizeable population boom. What the people did at their new homes is more the purview of archaeological study and a lot of educated guesswork. We have artifacts from this era scattered all over the Eastern continent; resins and metals produced by or imported into the first settlement, resources which were not naturally available in these locations that were brought from the West by the early Sirenians.
These resources, however, were finite, and these Sirenians were living on a cliff's edge, resulting in...
2.3 The Era of Decay
Those resources - including non-visor computers, weapons, the printers which produced resins for clothing and construction, medicine, written and recorded knowledge, anything built by Precursors - had run out. This is thought to have occurred roughly two centuries following 91 FS, and it plunged the planet of Siren into its more challenging era yet. The people were forced to adapt to a new world truly, without any tools or knowledge to tide them over brought from some other world. Those who could not adapt did not survive. There are abundant ruins and archaeological sites, preserved particularly well in the ice caps, which show just this: villages, homes, and farms which simply did not survive longer than the lifespan of a single generation. There was evidence of widespread disease and plague, likely due to the Sirenians' loss of advanced medicine and the resources with which to perform safe surgery or screen for medical conditions.
This era lasted longer than any other, and we historians do not agree on how long exactly it lasted. Estimates are in the realm of several centuries on the low end, to several millennia. When the fibre 'paper' at the first settlement finally ran out, written language was lost. Sirenians were already not a well-educated population base, unlike the unaltered humans, and few could read or write to start with. This lead to an extinction of knowledge from which we still struggle to recover; we have not, after all, figured out how to create space-faring vehicles. The knowledge base on which a civilisation thrives had to be built again from scratch, and the events of the Era of Settlement passed rapidly into myth, misremembered by countless tiny cultures dying in their infancy.
I do not condemn the early Sirenians for prioritising survival over the preservation of knowledge. It is difficult to imagine what they were forced to endure; after all, I sleep every night in my silk bower, reading the journals of accumulated knowledge from centuries of scholars that came before me. Even my food, refined reed starch that must be boiled by trained chefs at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, is a resource built upon the backs of countless generations worth of trial and error. The fact of the matter is that they were, all in a rather short space of time, forced to live lives of subsistence farming or hunter-gathering.
There was a startling population decline at the start of this era and recovery was not swift. In fact it seems that the population remained at a relatively low but stable level for the duration of this era, until aruptly starting to rise again at the beginning of the next age.
2.4 The Era of Trade: -6 to 17 DD
We can start to measure this Era using Dominion Decades as the dominion itself was a strong force here. With the population stable and starting to rise, priorities turned outwards from simple survival and population replacement. The resources of the land had begun to be refined and crafted in such a way that others saw them as valuable enough to form a rudimentary trade economy. This was marked by the first 'royal' phocids of the dominion choosing to import building materials from the Western continent, which they used to construct their palaces and consolidate their political power and hold over the local population.
This was an era of artistic exploration and reconnection; populations which had not been in contact with one another for what must have been centuries were encountering one another with increased frequency due to the trade networks which had established themselves across the globe. Longwing harpies were of course strong drivers of this as they began to refine their visor rituals starting with the year 0 EY. These rituals include travel to the precursor masts which are scattered across the planet.
My own home village in the Breaks was founded at this point, at the site of one of these masts. It was originally a simple re-watering station for weary longwing travellers, staffed by shortwings and inland selkies, but with increasing traffic, it became a permanent structure and a site to make deliveries and do trade.
With the increased flow of information, our ancestors were able to establish some common knowledge of their world, and it even occurred to them to start to record some of it, thus leading to the founding of the University at the Spire.
2.5 The Era of Knowledge: -12 to 612 UF
The founding of the University by Janir-vay-or was controversial, to say the least, though that can be expanded upon elsewhere. Janir-vay-or chose a site around one of the Precursor masts and built upon it, turning an already-popular trading outpost into a place of learning, 12 years before the 'true' founding of the Spire. The craftclans system was already in practice, so he simply founded a new craftclan of learning. It operated similarly to the other clans, with membership by invitation only once the established members could judge the merit of a potential initiate.
As mentioned above, the Spire University truly became 'itself' when this initiate system was abolished by Eroa-vay and anybody was permitted to join this clan of learning. What was closed became open, and any Sirenian with a love of learning and research could find a home there.
That was the intention, however, though it was still several centuries until non-shortwings were permitted to become masters with a -vay suffix. Even still, the stated purpose of recording knowledge was an admirable one, and our knowledge of the natural world expanded greatly during this time. Medicine in particular saw some vast advancements, thus aiding in population growth and the elimination of several diseases.
This is where I begin straying from the path of 'established' truth, as many of my fellow scholars will tell you that we are still within this particular Era. I do not believe it to be the case, as the publication of my thesis has challenged the knowledge base upon which the Spire was built, and our understanding of ourselves as natives to this planet.
2.6 The Era of Enlightenment: 612 UF onwards
My thesis has proven two facts uncontroversially
- We are all aliens to this planet, and ultimately even the smallest shortwing and the largest phocid belong to the same species and are thus equal in all ways
- Knowledge which challenges the biases of the University masters will be suppressed
As such I propose that we are entering a new Era, starting from the first moment I arrived in the first settlement with the aim of recovering information about the first Sirenians.
We have knowledge. That has been established - we have abundant information about the world, about how it works, and how to survive (though we are still playing catch-up to the Precursors). It is what we do with this information now that defines us. How we think of ourselves and our origins, our shared histories, and our similarities.
We must think carefully about this means for us, and how we can use this information to change our world for the better.