History of Glass
Millennia ago
The Blooming cut the prior Age short & filled the world with jungle & ruin. The old kings of the world, the Sleepers, hid their servants along with themselves in great underground vaults … along with many lost secrets. It was the work of the immortal Kain who led the people to freedom out of the Undergarden 1,820 years ago to the day.
The Long Golden Age
Kain ruled for nearly two millennia — unstable, enigmatic, never forthcoming with information even when it would prevent national crises. Even still, his reign was the bedrock of Glassian civilization. He was the Second Phoenix, the God-Emperor, and the island was held together by his presence alone.
The Abdication
Kain massacred the entirety of Glass’s court in the City of Leaves — the Autumn Massacre — & subsequently walked away from the throne into the Oropolis, where he has remained cloistered for 20 years.
Everything went to hell the instant Kain abdicated. The system he left behind was never designed to function without him.
The “Peace”
There were five years of nominal peace between the Autumn Massacre and everything after. They were years fraught with confusion, accusations of illegitimacy, murder, the rapid imposition of tyranny, defection & decay. No one had the strength to hold what Kain had left behind, only the ambition to grasp at it.
Then the Coraler invasion flooded the shores with hordes of vicious cephalo-people, pillaging trade & slaughtering soldiers, armed with windguns stolen from the Venetians in a foreign war few on Glass had context for. The resultant economic chaos threw an already unstable aristocracy off its feet. Coastal lords suffered much greater losses. Some turned to borrowing from foreign powers.
Domestic production had withered during decades of reliance on tributary states. The old wonders broke. Famines raged. Bandits flooded the lands in the wake of the Coralers’ disruption of trade.
The Breaking
Somewhere in all the chaos, something had gone quite wrong with the crowned Mother-Empress.
At a rapidly escalating verbal shouting match about her recent suspicious widowing during a major play in the City of Leaves, the Mother-Empress was declared possessed by a seer lord. She responded by exiling the entirety of the visiting aristocracy from the City & imprisoning the already disputed Heir Son — six-year-old Prince Sūn — in the palace. War erupted immediately.
Now the Three Houses & a Populist Uprising kill each other over inheritance while enemies loot the realm.
The Haunting
“Twenty years ago” is the cruellest timespan. It means the good times are in living memory. Everyone old enough to walk remembers when Glass was ruled by an angel. Every adult remembers what it felt like to be immortal, because Glassians were, or at least believed they were.
Now the festivals are dying out. The spirits are rioting. The demands of a war more furious than any prior conflict in the history of the island are eating the world alive. The ranks of the indentured servants are swelling with formerly free men. Everyone’s a slave, broken, fleeing, or joining General Ram. And at the heart of it all, Kain watches from his chair atop the Oropolis, a god who could fix everything with a word & hasn’t spoken in twenty years.