Category:Golden Age

The Golden Age, also known as the High First Age or the Second Deliberative Era, is seen by some, the greatest time Creation had ever known. The Solar Exalted stood astride the world and did not war against each other, supported by the other Exalted. The Yozi strained at their unbreakable prison but their touch upon the world had never been lighter, the borders of Creation had been pushed outward to open vast new lands for the mortal populace, which grew by leaps and bounds. Massive ocean vessels, imperishable-highway caravans, and soaring skyships carried passengers and cargoes from one end of Creation to the other. Great edifices were raised to touch the vault of the Heavens and delve the deepest seas.

Magitech was developed on an industrial scale, allowing mortal armies to be equipped with artifice and mortal homes to be stocked with technomagical amenities, as well as leading to advanced systems of communication and record-keeping such as the Creation-spanning I AM network (whose initial activation is viewed by many as the event which opened the Golden Age itself), and to new approaches to art and craft such as the culinary style of Motonic Gastronomy. At the same time, the related field of Microtheurgy reached its greatest heights, allowing ever more powerful and capable artifacts to be forged even by those who did not embrace the methods of motonic engineering. The lubricated flow of information and the development of vast educational institutions saw knowledge of Thaumaturgy spread to the mortal populace as well, so that the infrastructure of Creation might be maintained, kinetropic formulae replacing the prayer and religious ritual of past eras.

And yet this systematization and prosperity did not come without cost. Where the social structures willed by the Solar Deliberative came into contact with those of local residents, there was no gentle merging of the two, for the Age saw one path as superior and one as inferior: village witches were forced to attend thaumaturgic colleges in order to acquire their licenses, codes of health, safety, and tax blocked local producers and craftspeople from markets they had once enjoyed while larger conglomerates with connections in Meru were protected by law and subsidy. The rulers in Meru strode the halls of Yu-shan and used their influence to reward their allies with prayer while pushing their favourites into dominant political positions… Lytek, Vanileth, Agralzo, Lumen of the Fattened Duck, all rose to the greatest heights of their influence in this period, with vast cults and strong positions to destroy or suppress their rivals. The Exalted themselves stood atop cults of their own, and most notable of all, the Solar Exalted rewrote the prayers and rituals of the great cult of the Unconquered Sun, so that it was his Exalted who were credited for all that he did, and who received the power delivered through his worship and the bloody sacrifices made upon his altars.

Even amongst Exalts, the Age saw loss as well as gain. While none can discount the Exalted, no matter the source of their power, the Solar Exalted dominated this Age. The influence of their Lunar mates, their Sidereal advisors, their Celestial friends, faded in the face of their vast power. Charged with defending Creation’s edges, the Lunars found those edges vast, but secured, their time spent moving along roads not battling enemies, the visceral struggle of past Ages rarely to be found. The Sidereals were not at the border but in the center, the Loom of Fate growing less and less predictable, more vulnerable to gnarls and knots, as Solars spent ever more massive amounts of essence, while mortals wielding essence technologies sucked motes from the air and spent them, each tiny change rippling with a million fellows through the Tapestry... and one hundred Chosen of the Maidens charged with untangling every one. The Dragonblooded, Exalts too, were no longer a great host of heroes joining the champions of Creation, for this Age saw them as little more than cogs in the machine, more powerful versions of godbloods and thaumaturges. Amongst sorcerers, the flourishing of schools and philosophies that had been seen in ages past was supplanted by the dominance of the Devonian School, linked as it was to ever-present magitech. The Silurian School’s growth is linked to this homogenized world of sorcery, the language of symbols able to describe spells of differing schools with ease in part because they were not now so different, while the Salinan School and its popularity can in some ways be seen as a reaction to this process, an attempt to open the doors of sorcery to a thousand different schools of thought. The Lunar Exalted ventured into the depths of the Underworld and brought back with them the secrets of Necromancy, a far different beast than sorcery and yet somehow its dark mirror… and while the original Necromantic spells were in many ways akin to the raw and varied sorcery of bygone ages, the necromantic technologies of many Deathlords today show how universal Devon’s principles and those of magitech were applied, used to define even new and alien sources of power.

And, astride the world as its undisputed rulers, the Solar Exalted were freed of consequence. Power corrupts, and with such power as they had their thinking, their vision, began to leave their humanity behind. Even without the Great Curse, the Solars would have been awesome and terrible rulers… but they were not without the Great Curse. When the Sidereals warned that their great works of essence threatened the Loom of Fate some did not adopt restraint but rather wondered at what work could be done to see it broken. When they sought beautiful music some wove instruments from living bodies whose screams might sound the notes unerring. When they looked upon themselves, some could not comprehend how they could not be loved, and reached out with Charm and sorcery to correct all who inexplicably felt differently. Some visited torturous abuses, some ceased to perceive their lessers as And when they looked upon the Shinma and the underlying structures that kept Creation in existence, some did not see the foundations to be protected as had the Exalts of past Ages, as had Sol Invictus and the Incarnae, as had even the overthrown Primordials... they saw a new frontier of possibility. The Salinan Working saw the Solar Exalted change Creation by singing new truths directly into the Shinma, though many gods and Exalts alike screamed that the consequences of such meddling were unknown. And seeing this change take hold, many began to imagine other changes to fundamental reality, to realize their visions of a better world. And others had much smaller visions: when the Five Metal Shrike was built, not a great working to change the rules of existence but simply a potent weapon, its programming too was sung into the fundamental nature of reality, for here it would be protected, eternally secure.

It is unknown which of these sins caused the Unconquered Sun to turn from Creation and his Chosen during the Golden Age, perhaps it was all of them together, perhaps some entirely different motive (the Solar Deliberative’s private accounts asserted he was too gripped by addiction to the Games of Divinity to attend his duties, leaving the Solar Exalted legitimate heirs to his now-defunct authority). Regardless, the Golden Age continued on without his attention, until it was finally ended with the overthrow of the Solar Exalted by the Dragonblooded in the Usurpation.