The Dawn of Earth

A young world enters an ancient cosmos

Earth is young. The cosmos is ancient.

By the time the Solar System forms, the planes, cosmic laws, magic, outsider civilisations and inhabited worlds of earlier eons already possess histories of their own. Earth is not the first world, and its formation does not begin creation anew.

About 4.54 billion years ago, material surrounding the young Sun accretes into Earth. Collision, compression and radioactive decay heat the growing planet. Dense material sinks towards the core while lighter silicate material differentiates into mantle and, eventually, crust.

In the leading scientific model, an enormous early collision profoundly remakes the young Earth. Debris thrown into orbit ultimately forms the Moon while much of the planet is melted and reworked.

Earth continues changing through natural processes. Ancient zircons preserve evidence consistent with crust and liquid water by about 4.4 billion years ago. Over immense spans of time, atmosphere, oceans, rainfall, tides, hydrothermal environments and increasingly complex chemistry become enduring parts of the planet.

Magic does not replace that history.

Gravity still gathers worlds. Heat moves through stone. Water condenses, flows and erodes. Minerals react. Chemistry produces consequence. Once life exists, inheritance, mutation and natural selection shape its descendants.

What magic changes is what persistent natural systems can become.

A volcanic province can acquire awareness without inventing heat. An ocean can remember currents without having created water. A storm can become an intelligence without causing the atmosphere to exist. Stone can remember pressure without having written the laws of geology.

These terrestrial elemental intelligences are native to Earth. They are distinct from the far older elementals, Primal Elementals and other powers of the Elemental Planes , which already existed before the planet formed.

As Earth’s systems become stable and persistent, they also create powerful correspondences through which those older beings can manifest, intrude or anchor themselves to the new world.

Life later adds an entirely different source of monsters.

Native microorganisms spread through the ancient seas. Some terrestrial lineages acquire supernatural properties of their own. Elder Things arrive during the Archean on an already living Earth and establish its first known enduring extraterrestrial scientific civilisation. Their experiments with native organisms gradually become practical biotechnology, eventually producing proto-Shoggoths and, in the late Precambrian, the first fully recognisable Shoggoths .

Other outsiders touch Earth for other reasons. Some arrive briefly and vanish. Some become trapped. Some establish refuges or colonies. Others corrupt what is already here.

Across almost four billion years, Earth changes from a violently forming planet into a world of oceans, living ecosystems, ancient alien settlements and monsters whose origins may be natural, supernatural, extraplanar, extraterrestrial or deliberately engineered.

Before fang, claw or bone, Earth knew monsters of storm, stone, flame and water. When life came, new monsters followed — and an ancient cosmos began to notice the young world.

c. 4.54–4.0 billion years ago · The Age of Elementals

The furnace becomes a world

There are no forests, reefs, animals or cities. There is not yet a biosphere capable of dominating the supernatural history of the planet. Earth begins as heat, impact, pressure, molten stone and relentless transformation.

The oldest terrestrial supernatural intelligences are therefore not beasts. They arise within the great physical systems of the young planet: magma, pressure, atmosphere, water, storm, crust and tide.

They are also not the first elementals in creation. The Elemental Planes already existed before Earth formed, and ancient elementals and Primal Elementals already inhabited them. What awakens here is something different: terrestrial elemental intelligence, born from persistent systems belonging specifically to Earth.

Older still in the elemental history of creation are the great Primal Titans Flame, Tide, Stone and Gale. These ancient cosmic powers predate Earth and do not originate within its magma, oceans, crust or atmosphere. The young planet creates new terrestrial expressions of the same elemental principles; it does not create Flame, Tide, Stone or Gale themselves.

As Earth’s own systems become stable and persistent, they create powerful correspondences with the older Elemental Planes. Through those correspondences, extraplanar elemental beings can manifest, enter or anchor themselves to the new world.

The world before a surface

The earliest Earth is not a finished globe covered in volcanoes. Accretion repeatedly adds energy and material as dense metals descend towards the developing core and lighter silicates remain above them. Radioactive decay, compression and enormous impacts add further heat, and for periods of this earliest history vast portions of the outer planet are molten.

These immense, persistent physical systems provide the first great terrestrial environments capable of supernatural awareness.

Fire before flame

Hadean Fire is not primarily the flame of wood, oil or living fuel; none of those things yet exist. It is heat, incandescence, melting and transformation.

A terrestrial fire intelligence may inhabit an immense magma current, the thermal structure of an impact basin or a volcanic system whose individual vents repeatedly appear and disappear. Its body might stretch for hundreds of kilometres without possessing a face or recognisable anatomy, and a change of direction might take centuries.

What later peoples would call a monster may initially be indistinguishable from geology.

Earth before mountains

The first terrestrial Earth intelligences are equally strange. Mountains and familiar landscapes are not yet their natural scale. Their memories are compression, density, fracture, sinking metal, rising mantle and the repeated formation and destruction of early crust.

Some exist throughout enormous volumes of material rather than possessing a recognisable body. Others become aware only when pressure changes. Such a being can sleep for a million years because, from its perspective, nothing significant has happened.

The first memory of Earth

As the planet develops continuity, the Living Weave begins preserving relationships that belong specifically to this world. Heat repeatedly circulates through the same planetary body; material falls towards the same centre of gravity; mantle, crust, atmosphere and later ocean interact again and again.

Earth begins to acquire supernatural memory.

This is not yet a named god, goddess or humanoid planetary mind. It is the earliest growth of something far larger and less comprehensible: the possibility that the planet itself may eventually possess an enduring world-spirit identity. Local elemental intelligences arise much sooner. The world as a whole is slower to awaken.

The world is broken and made again

Early in the Hadean, a giant natural collision profoundly remakes Earth. A planetary body strikes the young world, melting and vaporising enormous quantities of material. Debris thrown into orbit ultimately gathers into the Moon.

The collision is a natural astronomical event rather than an act of divine or elemental warfare. Its supernatural consequences are nevertheless immense.

Terrestrial intelligences that had begun to establish themselves in magma, pressure systems and early crust are destroyed, fragmented or radically changed. Some are dispersed into the mantle; some lose the physical systems that sustained their identity; others survive only as patterns buried deep within the re-forming planet.

A few ancient elemental minds may therefore possess memories divided into two almost incomprehensible periods: before the Moon and after the Moon.

The magma ocean

After the Moon-forming catastrophe, widespread melting again dominates the surface. Fire and Earth reach their strongest early terrestrial expression, and the distinction between them is often difficult to draw: molten silicate is both stone and heat, while crust forms, founders, melts and reforms.

These conditions create exceptional correspondence with the older Elemental Plane of Fire and Elemental Plane of Earth . Extraplanar elementals can manifest through these vast systems, but they remain distinct from the intelligences arising within Earth itself.

A Primal Fire Elemental entering such an environment might encounter an entire volcanic province behaving like another intelligence. Neither created the other.

The first crust

Cooling gradually allows portions of the surface to remain solid for longer periods, and that simple change transforms supernatural ecology. A magma intelligence may exist only as long as its molten system persists, but stone can endure.

Persistent crust allows terrestrial Earth intelligences to acquire longer and increasingly continuous memories. Fractures become boundaries, mineral provinces become territories, and old impact structures become scars capable of retaining supernatural significance long after the heat that formed them has vanished.

Some of Earth’s oldest surviving supernatural places begin here. They are older than life.

The first sky

The Hadean atmosphere bears little resemblance to the breathable sky of later ages. Volcanic outgassing, impact-delivered volatiles and planetary chemistry contribute gases and water vapour to an atmosphere without the later abundance of free oxygen.

Pressure becomes persistent as gases circulate through the young atmosphere. Heat drives convection, while cloud, steam, storm and lightning become recurring planetary systems. Terrestrial Air intelligences begin to emerge within those processes.

They are not spirits of breath in the later biological sense, but beings of pressure, movement, thunder, vapour and storm. Some exist only while a particular atmospheric system survives; others recur whenever the same circulation pattern returns, making their identity episodic rather than continuous.

Older Air elementals belong to the Elemental Plane of Air and can enter or manifest through these systems without being their creators.

When the rains stay

As Earth cools, water vapour can condense and remain liquid at the surface. Evidence from ancient zircons is consistent with crust and liquid water existing astonishingly early in Earth’s history.

The supernatural consequences are enormous. Rain becomes part of a persistent hydrological world rather than a fleeting stage between atmosphere and steam. Water gathers into enduring basins and oceans, while drainage systems become increasingly stable.

The young world’s elemental balance changes. Fire no longer dominates every surface environment; Water becomes a planetary-scale power and pushes much of Earth’s most intense heat beneath the surface.

The first oceanic intelligences

A persistent ocean can remember. Currents return, depth creates pressure, minerals dissolve and precipitate, and water circulates between atmosphere, crust and deep planetary systems.

From those repeated relationships emerge vast Water intelligences unlike later river or sea spirits. Some inhabit currents, some entire basins, and others awaken only at particular depths, temperatures or chemical boundaries.

They do not create the oceans. They arise because oceans exist.

Older Water elementals belong to the Elemental Plane of Water .

The tide world

The newly formed Moon is much closer to Earth than it will be in later geological ages, while Earth itself rotates more rapidly. The relationship between planet, satellite and ocean becomes one of the world’s great repeating systems.

Tides rise and fall as two worlds and their gravity continually act upon the oceans. Repeated strongly enough and long enough, even a relationship can acquire supernatural identity.

The first tidal powers are therefore neither simply Water Elementals nor lunar spirits. They exist in the rhythm between world, Moon, ocean and rotation. Some are continuously aware; others exist only during the recurring phase that sustains them, awakening and disappearing without experiencing the intervening time as absence.

The border powers

Hadean Earth is defined as much by elemental intersections as by the four familiar elements.

These boundaries can develop supernatural inhabitants of their own without requiring a separate species for every combination. A hydrothermal complex may behave as one vast intelligence while containing lesser Earth, Fire and Water manifestations within it.

Other beings are extraordinarily short-lived. A volcanic plume can awaken for hours and then die, while an impact-generated storm may possess intelligence only while the atmosphere retains the disturbance that created it. The Hadean supernatural world therefore contains beings whose lifespans range from hours to geological ages.

The black forges

Where seawater penetrates fractured crust, becomes heated and chemically altered, and rises again through the ocean floor, hydrothermal environments create some of Earth’s richest early chemical boundaries.

Later peoples might call them black forges, though no one built them. They are natural systems in which stone, heat, water, mineral chemistry and the Living Weave continually interact.

Some become powerful mixed-element territories; others remain entirely mundane but chemically complex. Both foreshadow the next great change in Earth’s history: chemistry is becoming capable of producing increasingly intricate structures.

The impact ages

The Moon-forming collision is not the last great impact. Asteroids and other bodies continue striking Earth throughout the Hadean, although the exact pattern and intensity of that bombardment remain uncertain rather than forming one securely defined global episode.

Great impacts can erase landscapes, vaporise water locally, melt crust and disturb the atmosphere. Some also create temporary supernatural intelligences: a crater may remember the instant of its creation, a plume of vaporised rock may become aware for hours, and an impact melt sheet may sustain an intelligence for millions of years.

Most disappear when the physical systems sustaining them cease to exist. A handful survive as ancient scars within Earth.

Cthugha notices Earth

Earth does not pass entirely unnoticed. Long before the planet exists, older powers already inhabit the wider cosmos. Among them is Cthugha , an intelligence of living stellar fire.

The young Earth is extraordinary: a newly forming material world undergoing immense thermal and magical transformation. Cthugha becomes aware of it.

Cthugha’s attention does not make it the creator or owner of terrestrial fire. Earth’s heat belongs to the natural development of the planet, while Cthugha’s conception of flame is older, alien and cosmic.

For a time, these two forms of fire touch. The contact may leave disturbances within exceptionally hot regions or scars where stellar and terrestrial flame briefly overlap.

Fire Vampires do not yet establish a lasting terrestrial presence. Their hunger for living heat and vital essence is better suited to the living Earth of later ages. Cthugha notices the world first; its hungry servants will have stronger reasons to come later.

Earth casts its first reflections

Earth’s formation also changes realities that already border or reflect the Material Plane. The Fey World , Shadow Plane and Ethereal Plane all predate the planet, but Earth now gives them something new to reflect, border and distort.

The earliest Earth-associated reflections contain no forests, castles or roads because none yet exist. Instead they contain impossible magma seas, exaggerated storms, crystal landscapes, black oceans and vast impact scars.

In Shadow, the young Earth may appear colder, darker and emptier than the original. Within the Fey reflection, its raw elemental processes may become impossibly vivid and excessive. As Earth’s geography becomes more persistent, its corresponding Border Ethereal also becomes increasingly coherent.

These ancient reflections continue changing as Earth itself changes.

Chemistry learns complexity

The most important development near the end of the Hadean is not a monster. It is chemistry.

Liquid water, mineral surfaces, atmospheric reactions, hydrothermal systems, impacts and multiple energy sources create environments in which organic compounds and increasingly complex chemical systems can form.

No single birthplace of terrestrial life can be identified. Hydrothermal vents, mineral surfaces, tidal environments, warm pools and impact-altered regions may all have contributed to the long transition from chemistry towards biology.

The Hadean is therefore the age in which the conditions required for biological complexity accumulate. Whether the earliest true terrestrial life begins near the end of this eon or soon afterwards remains uncertain.

By the Archean, that uncertainty is gone. Earth is alive.

The furnace becomes a world

By the end of the Hadean, Earth is no longer merely a forming planetary body. It possesses enduring crust, persistent liquid oceans and a circulating atmosphere. Rain falls, tides repeat, and hydrothermal systems exchange heat and chemicals between ocean and crust.

Elemental correspondences connect the planet to older Inner Planes, while native terrestrial intelligences inhabit some of its greatest physical systems. The young Moon has begun accumulating supernatural memory of its own, and Earth’s presence is now reflected within neighbouring realities.

Complex chemistry operates across countless environments, yet there are still no terrestrial kingdoms, no mortal peoples raising temples, no forests covering the land and no animal pursuing another animal.

The stage on which those histories can occur now exists.

The age when Earth’s greatest monsters were storm, stone, pressure and fire is ending. The next age belongs increasingly to something new: life.

Before Earth learned hunger, it learned pressure, current, heat and storm. Before life remembered itself, the planet had already begun to remember.

c. 4.0–2.5 billion years ago · Life, Elder Colonies and the First Aberrant Incursions

A living planet receives its first enduring extraterrestrial civilisation

Earth’s biosphere is already developing when the Elder Things establish themselves on the planet during the Archean, before roughly 3.5 billion years ago.

For most of the Archean, terrestrial life is microscopic.

Microbial communities occupy shallows, sediments, rock pores, geothermal systems and chemical boundaries.

They reproduce, compete and transform their surroundings without extraterrestrial direction.

Earthly life needs no alien creator.

The first Elder Thing colonies

The Elder Things come from an older inhabited cosmos.

Their earliest known terrestrial settlements are primarily scientific colonies established beneath the oceans, where pressure, mineral chemistry, hydrothermal systems and living microbial communities provide extraordinary opportunities for study.

They do not arrive to manufacture a biosphere from nothing.

They find a biosphere already changing on its own.

Their earliest biological work is primarily experimental.

They cultivate, separate, combine and alter terrestrial microorganisms to understand how native life responds to heat, pressure, toxins, mineral environments, magical currents and deliberate changes in its surroundings.

The discovery that Earthly organisms are astonishingly adaptable gradually changes the purpose of the programme.

What begins as investigation becomes biotechnology.

From experiment to practical biotechnology

Over immense spans of time the Elder Things turn biological knowledge towards practical needs.

Engineered organisms provide food, process waste, modify local chemistry, maintain inhabited environments and perform specialised tasks within the growing colonies.

There is no single moment at which this programme suddenly becomes the technology of a mature civilisation.

Its development stretches across enormous parts of the Precambrian.

The first aberrant incursions

Elder Things are not the only outsiders to reach Archean Earth.

The Far Realm has touched ordered reality since long before the planet forms.

Temporary wounds around hydrothermal fractures, damaged crust and unstable magical currents allow impossible organisms to cross into the terrestrial seas.

Creatures without a terrestrial body plan

These extraplanar organisms do not follow the anatomy later familiar among terrestrial vertebrates.

Their forms can be radial, asymmetrical, colonial, modular, suspended or amoeboid.

Some float as many-eyed orbs.

Others consist largely of exposed neural tissue carried by tentacles, pseudolimbs or supernatural buoyancy.

Still others form unstable masses of mouths, eyes and shifting tissue comparable to Gibbering Mouthers .

These similarities do not require every later aberrant species to have lived in the Archean.

They reveal recurring alien body plans whose ancestry lies outside ordinary terrestrial evolution.

The incursions fail to own Earth

Most Far Realm crossings collapse.

Some visitors die when the conditions sustaining them disappear.

Others retreat.

A few survive in trenches, volcanic caverns and sealed fractures.

Their legacy is persistence rather than planetary conquest.

The Elder Things are different.

Their colonies endure.

They become a permanent part of Earth’s deep history.

c. 2.5–1.6 billion years ago · The Age of Slime

Shapeless life becomes monstrous in more than one way

The age begins with microbial mats and magical colonial forms. Recognisably amoeboid monsters arise later as complex cellular life becomes established.

The native slime world

Microbial mats continue spreading across wet stone and shallow sediment.

Biofilms, mucous colonies and stromatolite communities dominate enormous coastal regions.

Where the Living Weave concentrates strongly, entire microbial communities can behave as one supernatural organism.

Such proto-oozes creep, contract, envelop nutrients or retreat from hostile chemistry.

They are not yet gigantic modern amoebas.

They are collective living mats behaving with an impossible unity.

The Breath of Ruin

The greatest transformation of the early Age of Slime is caused not by a demon lord, Elder Thing or alien conqueror, but by microscopic terrestrial life.

Oxygen-producing photosynthesis gradually changes the oceans.

At first much of the released oxygen reacts with dissolved iron and other materials.

Around 2.4 billion years ago atmospheric oxygen begins a lasting rise during the Great Oxidation Event.

For many organisms adapted to an oxygen-poor world, oxygen is poison.

Communities collapse or retreat into sediments, deep waters and anoxic refuges.

The slime gives the world breath, and the breath turns against the slime.

The true amoeboid monsters

Cellular life becomes increasingly complex during the Proterozoic.

Recognisable eukaryotic organisms are established deep within this interval.

Only later does magical enlargement produce creatures resembling the Giant Amoeba : huge shapeless predators sensing chemistry, movement and vibration without bone or fixed anatomy.

Mineral-feeding branches become corrosive and difficult to distinguish from wet stone, anticipating creatures such as the Gray Ooze .

Juiblex discovers Earth

The abundance of shapeless supernatural life eventually attracts Juiblex , the Faceless Lord.

Juiblex is already an Abyssal power when its influence reaches Earth.

It does not originate as a terrestrial microorganism.

Affected ooze colonies become more corrosive, acquire unnatural hungers or gather around seepage from the Abyss .

Other terrestrial lineages remain independent.

The Elder Thing programme continues

Beneath and apart from the native slime world, Elder Thing laboratories continue manipulating life for increasingly practical purposes.

Biological tools become specialised.

Some regulate water chemistry or cultivated environments.

Others process food, remove waste, repair living structures or perform repetitive work that would otherwise require Elder Thing labour.

This is the long technological road towards the Shoggoths, but no single creature or date marks their creation.

c. 1.6 billion–635 million years ago · Complex Cells, Hidden Monsters and Global Ice

Ancient monsters sink below while Elder Thing biotechnology grows stranger

The apparent quiet of this interval is an illusion created by its immense duration.

Eukaryotic cells diversify.

Multicellular organisation arises independently in several lineages.

Continents assemble, separate and collide.

Ancient native oozes increasingly survive in sediments, underground waters, caves and oxygen-poor basins.

Elemental beings also become more place-bound.

Ancient Earth intelligences merge with continental roots while water intelligences occupy trenches and buried hydrothermal systems.

The first proto-Shoggoths

By this long middle span of the Precambrian, the Elder Things’ biological programme has moved far beyond the manipulation of microbial cultures.

They require organisms capable of changing shape, surviving radically different environments and performing heavy work without a fixed anatomy.

Experimental labour-biotechnology becomes increasingly flexible, self-repairing and adaptable.

Primitive proto-Shoggoths emerge from this programme.

They are not simply oversized native oozes.

Their history belongs to an artificial lineage deliberately cultivated by Elder Thing science.

Nor is there one clean moment at which every earlier labour organism becomes a Shoggoth.

The transition takes place across generations of engineered forms and repeated redesign.

The things that wait below

• Dormant primordial oozes.
• Ancient water intelligences.
• Elemental intelligences within continental roots.
• Far Realm remnants trapped inside old fractures.
• Abyssal slime colonies isolated from Juiblex.
• Sealed Elder Thing laboratories.
• Experimental biological tools abandoned after colonies move elsewhere.
• Early proto-Shoggoth labour organisms preserved in dormant facilities.

The Frozen Retreat

Between roughly 720 and 635 million years ago, severe Cryogenian glaciations transform the planet.

Ice reaches low latitudes and radically changes the oceans.

Life survives within refuges: open water, meltwater environments, sediments, brine systems and geothermal regions.

The supernatural world retreats with it.

Water and frost manifestations inhabit glacier margins and pressure ridges.

Ancient oozes gather around geothermal warmth or enter deep dormancy.

Elder Thing settlements survive through engineering, relocation and retreat into protected marine and subterranean installations.

Biological systems built to withstand harsh environments become more valuable, accelerating the demand for adaptable labour organisms.

The ice does not erase Earth’s earlier monster ages.

It preserves them.

c. 635–538.8 million years ago · The Late Precambrian

Shoggoths take form while the oceans learn a language of light

Earth emerges from the great ice into a period of increasingly diverse multicellular life.

Soft-bodied organisms spread through the seas, while two very different alien histories reach important turning points.

The Shoggoths take recognisable form

Elder Thing biotechnology has now been developing on Earth for billions of years.

In the late Precambrian, its adaptable labour organisms finally produce the fully developed forms recognisable in later history as Shoggoths .

These organisms can reshape themselves for different tasks, generate temporary organs where required and endure environments that would destroy less adaptable biological servants.

Their appearance is not a sudden act of creation.

It is the culmination of a very long technological lineage stretching back through earlier proto-Shoggoth forms and still older Elder Thing biological experiments.

They remain tools and labour-biotechnology of Elder Thing civilisation during this age.

The great Shoggoth rebellion lies hundreds of millions of years in the future.

The Age of Love and Pulsing Light

At the same time, compassionate alien exiles establish one of Earth’s earliest known great pacifistic nonhuman cultures.

The Flumphs arrive as outcasts from the Far Realm.

Their exile comes from rejecting the predatory madness around them.

Where other aberrations exploit thought and fear, Flumphs seek harmony.

They settle in protected late Precambrian seas, submarine caverns, twilight waters and deep basins.

Their communities form choirs rather than kingdoms.

Individuals communicate through colour, telepathy and rhythmic pulses of internal light.

When vast linked choirs answer one another, the sea itself becomes the medium.

Multicoloured waves carry memory, warning, celebration and shared thought across immense distances.

At the greatest gatherings, local choirs join into networks containing billions of Flumphs. Their combined bioluminescent and psionic communication produces a vast, non-aggressive radiance visible across whole marine regions and, at its greatest extent, from high above the world. This radiance is an emergent property of the linked choirs, not a new individual Flumph ability.

The old minds withdraw

Aboleths are already established in Earth’s waters before the Flumph choirs arrive. Their early predatory enclaves exploit deep and twilight seas, but the immense collective psychic radiance of the luminous age makes many upper-water regions increasingly hostile to Aboleth manipulation.

Aboleth activity withdraws into deeper water, submarine caverns, drowned basins and lightless trenches. This is retreat, not extinction and not the fall of a global empire: Aboleths never rule Earth as a whole. Their deep refuges become the basis of the survival pattern encountered in later ages.

A peaceful culture that does not stop evolution

Flumphs do not redesign the biosphere into permanent harmony.

Feeding, competition, mutation and natural selection continue.

Late Precambrian seas support increasingly diverse soft-bodied organisms, many with body plans unlike familiar later animals.

As movement, burrowing, sensory ability and predation intensify, the upper seas become harder to protect.

Many Flumph choirs withdraw into deep waters, cavern systems and hidden psionic refuges.

For a time, one of Earth’s oldest great pacifistic alien cultures answered hunger with light — and madness with mercy.

c. 538.8 million years ago · The End of the Drifting World

The seas begin to hunt

Life no longer merely spreads, filters, drifts or endures.

It increasingly pursues.

Burrowing disrupts ancient microbial surfaces.

Directional movement becomes increasingly important.

Senses improve.

Defensive structures spread.

Predation creates evolutionary pressure for speed, armour, escape and counterattack.

Primordial oozes now encounter prey capable of escaping.

Flumph light can attract predators as easily as it communicates with allies.

Elder Thing civilisation does not vanish at the boundary.

Its colonies, laboratories and Shoggoth labour systems continue into later Earth history, changing as new ecosystems and rival powers appear.

Trilobites, Opabinia, Anomalocaris, Hallucigenia and the great expansion of Cambrian animal ecosystems belong to The Age of Awakening .

Born here, awakened here, engineered here or arrived from elsewhere

The Dawn of Earth in order

The first monster ages never entirely disappear

Adventures from before bones

The deep time beneath the monsters

The supernatural chronicle sits upon established planetary, geological and biological history. The fantastic events above add inhabitants, interventions and survivals without replacing Earth’s natural chronology.

• U.S. Geological Survey — Geologic Time
  Powell Expedition — Geologic Time: Then and Now
  Background on Earth’s approximately 4.54-billion-year age and the development of geological dating.
• NASA Science — Early Earth
  Ancient Crystals Suggest Earlier Ocean
  Evidence from ancient zircons relevant to very early crust and liquid water.
• NASA Science — Moon Formation
  Moon Formation
  The leading giant-impact model and the early evolution of the Earth–Moon system.
• Smithsonian Ocean
  Ocean Through Time
  Evidence and context for Earth’s ancient oceans.
• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
  History of Life on Earth
  Early microbial life, oxygenation and the long transition towards animal ecosystems.
• PubMed — Early Eukaryotes
  Reassessing the first appearance of eukaryotes and cyanobacteria
  Research relevant to the evidence for early complex cellular life.
• International Commission on Stratigraphy
  International Chronostratigraphic Chart
  The current geological timescale, including the Cambrian boundary at approximately 538.8 million years ago.

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