Era VI · 350–0 BC

Meridian Age

The era when the record order turned into an intercontinental power with the planned rise of Ordan, the unification of Asteron and the Nareth expeditions.

The first landings began in 96 BC; The Broken Tower, the High Crown, and the White Hearth fell by campaigns; Halvek was conquered in 57 BC. The Kingdom of Qam collapsed between 31–18 BC. At the end of this period of oppression and isolation, the Fifth Kingdom remained on the verge of Drift.

The Fey thread

Ordan’s record order again classified root thresholds as “dangerous passages” and “unregistered oaths.” But the Root Closure prevented the empire from rebuilding Damar’s old control: a tower or seal cannot replace a living threshold and words recognized on the Fey side. Every official claim to a gate is therefore a political dispute for local keepers and court witnesses.

Population record of the age

People, places, and the cost of survival

Record qualityHigh / uneven

378 millionestimated settled population at the end of the age

Damar and Ordan records are exact near roads and administrative centres, then increasingly blind toward coerced labour, deep settlements, and unregistered borders.

World scale

The long population curve

The curve measures sustainable settlement networks at each age’s end, not a one-day imperial headcount.

Regional composition

Where the world is held

III

VII

NarethAsteronOdrakaIlyr-KhazHollow CountriesSeas

Asteron’s share expands through road concentration; the Hollow Countries and seas remain populous but structurally harder to count.

People networks

Who grew, who endured, who vanished from record

The Veyran series deliberately begins only in IV: before the Seven Lines Refuge, Veyrans did not yet exist as a people. An absent line means not yet formed, not an uncounted population.

The Meridian Age reaches the highest total. Ordan’s road and record do not create births alone; they lower death by holding grain, birthing houses, school medicine, clean water, and emergency movement in one network. It is also the empire’s power to count people while forcing them to move.

Veyrans reach about 69 million and become Asteron’s largest institutional people network. This is not evidence of ancestry superiority, but the result of centuries of central water, care, and record systems. Conquest displaces human and forest networks, pushes some out of record, and causes regional loss; growth on a graph does not mean improvement everywhere.

Cross-references

References to this page

The Seven Lines Refuge