A hidden history we simply never noticed. Real events stay fixed to their true dates — the Reformation is still 1517, the Great War still begins in 1914 — while the Guardians' own clock runs alongside, counted from the night of the transformation.
The formula: covenant year = actual year − 1375. Year 0 is 1375, the moment the twenty-eight transform. A Guardian's age at any point is simply their birth year subtracted from the actual year.
Eight books, each holding roughly one coherent historical era. Spans widen or tighten to match how much history a period carries — more calendar years where the world moved slowly, fewer where it moved fast.
Human Foundation · 26 years. The twenty-eight are born at the peak of the Black Death and grow up across four hidden settlements — their foundation as humans, before they become anything else.
Guardian Foundation · ~25 years. The mirror of Book One: twenty-eight people discover they are immortal predators and must build a moral code from nothing — first blood, the covenant formalised into law, and the Sanctum Order revealed as the permanent enemy. It builds toward a climax two decades in the making, centred on the two children the network has watched grow up inside it from birth.
The Renaissance · 100 years. With their foundation set, the Guardians go global — secretly. A century of the world cracking open: new printing, new continents, new reach.
Reformation & Religious Wars · 150 years. Faith fractures across Europe, and the Sanctum Order's zealotry finds fertile ground in an age already tearing itself apart over belief.
Reason & Revolution · 150 years. Science begins to explain the world, and a rational, educated public is far harder to hide from than a superstitious one — the Guardians must evolve from hiding behind myth to hiding behind method. Most of the original twenty-eight are gone by this point, choosing mortality over the centuries.
Industrial & Empire · 114 years. Steam, railways, exploding cities — and then the invention that most threatens a people who never age: the photograph. Permanent images make the Guardians' unchanging faces a lethal liability.
World Wars & the Atomic Age · 36 years — the shortest span, deliberately, because it carries more story per year than any other. Guardians as helpless witnesses to industrial-scale death, the moral inverse of their own carefully ethical feeding.
The Digital Veil & Present · 75 years. Cold War, surveillance, the internet, DNA, a camera in every pocket. Hiding — the thing the Guardians have done for six centuries — becomes nearly impossible. Helena and Agnes, now ~650 years old, are the last living links to the founding.
The historical events that keep the series locked to a hidden history rather than a purely invented one. Find the nearest anchor, and the covenant year follows.
| Actual Year | Covenant Year | Event | Book |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1349 | — | Black Death peak; the 28 born | 1 |
| 1375 | Yr 0 | The transformation | 1→2 |
| ~1398 | Yr 23 | The Harbingers come of age | 2 |
| 1440 | Yr 65 | Printing press | 3 |
| 1453 | Yr 78 | Fall of Constantinople | 3 |
| 1492 | Yr 117 | Columbus reaches the Americas | 3 |
| 1517 | Yr 142 | Reformation begins (Luther) | 4 |
| 1648 | Yr 273 | Thirty Years' War ends | 4 |
| 1776 | Yr 401 | American Revolution | 5 |
| 1789 | Yr 414 | French Revolution | 5 |
| ~1839 | Yr 464 | Photography (threat to the Veil) | 6 |
| 1914 | Yr 539 | First World War begins | 6→7 |
| 1945 | Yr 570 | Second World War ends; atomic age | 7 |
| 2025 | Yr 650 | Present day | 8 |
Beyond Book 8, a future volume (2025+, covenant Yr 650+) remains open — the story's frontier, where the hidden world meets a fully recorded one.