Introduction to The Continent Chronicles
Unlike most works of fiction, The Continent Chronicles is not a book. Instead, it's an online encyclopedia.
This page was created in order to help new readers orient themselves in this unusual medium. It will provide you with enough basic information about the Continent, its inhabitants and the Chronicles so that you can begin exploring on your own.
Enjoy!
The Continent
Currently, the Earth has many continents. But as tectonic plates move, eventually the configuration of the continents will change and they will eventually bump into each other and form what is known in geology as a supercontinent. Then the movement of tectonic plates will separate them once more, in a different configuration.
The world that the Chronicles explore is a supercontinent.
There are a couple of things you need to know about the Continent:
- Its climate tends to be dryer in the center. This tends to be true for most supercontinents. In fact, the very center of the Continent is occupied by the desert Ouna, which is almost uninhabitable, with the average summer temperatures shooting over 45 degrees Celsius and average winter temperatures falling below -25 C. And there's very little precipitation.
- The natural thing would be to assume that the equator divides the Continent horizontally. But, in fact, the equator is vertical. This means that its colder in the far east and far west, while central parts of northern and southern Continent are warm. This might be a little disorienting at first, but you do get used to it very quickly.
The dantrian calendar
You'll sometimes see mentions of revolutions: first revolution, second revolution. But these are not political upheavals. Instead, this is a reference to the most commonly used calendar on the Continent: the dantrian calendar.
If you look at the image, you'll see that it has a spiral in the center. This is because the dantrian calendar conceptualizes history as "revolutions" of the spiral. So, revolutions refer to periods of time.
Every revolution is 2000 years. Present date on the Continent is 11th century of the third revolution. So, say, 1603 FR would refer to the middle of the first revolution - which would be 4000 years ago. Whole recorded history of the Continent is 51 centuries.
