Sawaiki

Eschaton Cycle

It starts with a whisper, a haunting intimation of a World askew. That we are, in the end, caught in a death spiral, time nearly played out, whilst entropy tugs ever harder upon the Wheel of Fate. Looking now, into the dying embers, we at last apprehend Truth, and in it the revelation that the vaunted tales of old were not what we thought … A neither, in fact, were we.

The Eschaton Cycle retells myths and folklore through the lens of dark fantasy. As the name implies, the universe undergoes cyclical apocalypses roughly every 5200 years, ushering in a new Era. Every Era intermeshes with the others in a kind of tapestry, meaning in whatever order your read them, each adds to the picture of the whole. The numerous series dividing the universe thus form a single narrative.

The Eschaton Cycle is ultimately an examination of themes of Fate and free will, given gravitas by further themes of family and relationships.

Each individual Era derives its flavor from one or more mythologies, but they are united by a single cosmology crafted from a synthesis of Manichaeism, Gnosticism, and Buddhism, with some secondary Greek and Norse influences.

The World of the Eschaton Cycle is a prior iteration of our world, and the source of our folklore, preserved in the collective unconscious. Historical and mythological figures and traditions play out and may repeat in self-similar patterns, but not necessarily exactly as we have preserved them. The Eschaton Cycle is gritty, dark fantasy (called grimdark), and contains profanity, sex, violence, and moral ambiguity. Be ye warned.