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The prognosticators in the great World Engine have started murmuring about a fifth oncoming cataclysm. Very little is known what this cataclysm will bring. Of course, there is much concern among the cosmic royalty that these cataclysms are coming more frequently.

Many earth-like timelines exhibit a steady march of progress from stone age technology up to civilizations with time and dimensional travel. Earthworld itself takes this journey twice. Not long after the establishment of the Artificial Wormhole Network which connected all the various colonies of the solar system, some great disaster, probably the magnetic wave from a nearby pulsar, knocked the entire network offline, and stranded all of the colonies from each other.

The traditional way that travelers have distinguished the different segments of the Earthworld timeline has had to do with technology, particularly with transportation -- the Foot Age, the Horse Age, the Ship Age, the Train Age, the Jet Age, the Sub-light Age, the Warp Age, the Time Age and the Dimensional Age. But, many Martian theorists prefer to distinguish just Five Eras on the timeline, having to do with who dominates Earth's history in that period -- the Pre-human Age, the Proto-human Age, the Human Age, the Neo-human Age and the Post-human Age.

The Divine Accords were a series of treaties which many of the surviving gods entered into at the end of the Godswars in the First Age. The first of these Accords are considered to be the conclusion of the First Age, ushering in an age of peace among the deities, if not among mortals.

Less like a real organization, and more like a loose alliance of people with similar goals, the Time Lords claim to be the only ones who can be trusted to police the cosmoverse. The Time Lords are people who have been erased from their home time stream, and now have no "home" world, no one who knows them, no place to go back to. Most Time Lords stumble into it through chance, they travel back in time and make some change in the stream that "erases" them. Some few peculiar individuals do this on purpose precisely to become Time Lords.

A tremendous aberration in the cosmology of the timelines, and a great consternation to any aspiring cosmographers, the Grand Ex are a pair of time-space planes with one intersecting line. Each of these time-space planes has dozens if not hundreds of alternate timelines, which are difficult enough to map. And one of these alternate timelines, but only one, is an alternate for both worlds. This would be a convenient short cut for any travelers wanting to travel from one world to the other, but unfortunately travel between the two worlds is strictly watched and monitored.

The Grand Empress has said, on occasion, that she rules over a billion worlds. This humble scholar cannot believe that number is even remotely true, as it begins to violate the Rule of Universal Finity. If there were anywhere close to that number of worlds, then many of them would possess some level of traveler science, and we'd be overrun with travelers. As it is, dimensional travel is fairly rare, only common in certain corners of the cosmoverse. That being said, we have no way of really knowing how many worlds the Grand Empress does, in fact, reign over.

It's said that certain parts of the Void have taken on a life of their own. Or, some say, that there are creatures than live in the Void, and find any existence in spacetime to be anathema. Regardless of the cause, it's definitely the case that the Void has been taken to swallowing up entire timelines one by one.

Although not the most expansive world, and with very little traffic in or out, the Great Clockwork is perhaps the greatest culture of magic in the cosmoverse. Created at the dawn of its timeline by the Titans, it has since devolved into wars between various pantheons of gods, angels and demons. The clock operates with two great gears, on one which rests the Cosmic Mountain, and on the other which rests the World Tree. Between the motion of these two gears winds the Great Dragon, with a chain handing from it's tale like a pendulum.

I spoke a few days ago about how the Void occurs differently near to different timelines. Around the Great Clockwork in particular, the Void is a nasty business which disintegrates almost anything that tries to enter it -- including unwary travelers. It's mainly because of this that few travelers come from or travel to the Great Clockwork.