Deep time
An ocean world
A northern continent, open seas in the south and islands in both hemispheres. No glass.
9,000 years ago
The glass appears
Something starts at the south pole. Glass spreads north over sea and islands, faster than any known volcanism. The southern sky turns red and stays red for a generation.
6,000 years ago
The front slows
The spread slows to a crawl near 18° south. It never stops: the front creeps north a few centimetres a year from then on, and the beaches of the southern islands turn black.
Oral record
The Vatanek
The islanders who escaped north kept a record in verse. The Vatanek runs to 400 verses about the winter the south burned, passed from keeper to keeper ever since. It is the only account from anyone who was there.
Year 0 SC
The Stone Compact
The kingdoms on either bank of the Whaleroad have fought over the strait for three thousand years, most of all over the Stone, the rock in its middle. Their royal houses marry there. Vadra will toll every ship going north on the warm current, Isholm every ship going south on the cold one, and both navies enforce both. The Commonwealth begins, and so does its calendar.
641 to 1051 SC
The Charter Company
Commonwealth ships take the Cays for their harbours, their salt pans and the glass sand for lenses. The Company gives every island a new name on its charts. When it leaves four centuries later, it leaves sixty small republics behind.
861 to 868 SC
The Toll War
A northern ship trading south pays twice, once each way. In winter the Ice Run freezes and there is no way around the strait by sea, only the Long Road, which takes a year. The northern kingdoms go to war to break the tolls. They lose, and join the Commonwealth on southern terms.
1094 to 1101 SC
The Great War
The North rises again, this time with factories and aircraft. The fighting reaches every coast and most of the Cays, and about nine million people die. It ends when the South drops the first atomic bomb on Ushkel, the northern city building a bomb of its own.
1104 to 1160 SC
The tests
The Commonwealth occupies the North and moves its physicists south. Its bomb tests go to Ninefathom Atoll in the Cays: 41 detonations in 56 years. The islanders who were moved away have not been allowed back.
1130 SC
The Survey report
Everyone in the southern Cays knows the glass creeps north. After three centuries of measurements the Geological Survey adds what nobody wanted to hear: it is speeding up, faster every decade. Part of the report was never published.
1186 SC
The Hollow
The first radar satellite, launched to map the glass that no aircraft can cross, finds a built structure under the north polar ice instead. Hollin Station confirms it from the ground. An expedition goes down in spring.