Before reading:
In general this is a TL that explores an alternate British Isles and their context in a different world. The most important thing to understand is that this TL, regretfully, is not my first priority, nor the second, nor third... Nor fourth. It’s more of a thing made to release steam from my creativity and stress from my other projects and things going on in my life. Expect sporadic and non-regular updates in terms of both time and form. I will be testing new things with this project, so please take that into account too.
I have almost no stuff prepared beforehand and it’s likely that it will remain this way through this TL. I would apologise for that, but I already kind of did and real life does not allow me more than this.
Of Pixel Art: I love pixel art! It’s relaxing and it creates wonderful results; it’s mainly the first characteristic that pushed me to actually re-revive this project from the previous dead reboot that never saw the light of the day except for between my eyes and some friends’. Please understand that while I do know how to work in vectors and such… With extreme regret and even some anger towards myself, I must say that I do not enjoy making vector stuff. Or at least not for alternate history and for all the purposes of this timeline, I will likely not be using vector-based things, like logos and maps.
I apologise for that, but, once again, this is for me to release steam from the projects I use to release steam from RL. It’s no different for me than knitting is for some people: a semi-automatic labour of love.
Of Surrealism: What is surrealism is something that many have fought about for a long while in the arts. I will not be getting into that. At all. This time, I am making my own rules so, for this specific project and this specific instance, I define surrealism in a simple way: semi-reconvergence.
There’s a point of divergence, yes and maybe it is even defined; nonetheless, neither you will find it easily nor I will refer to it ever again from this point onwards. The important thing is that said untold point of divergence has its negative too, there are parts in which this timeline reconverges into an event or a series of them that are similar in nature to some part of our history. Neither of those points of divergence or of reconvergence are absolute, some could be called points of “Semi-Divergence” or “Semi-Reconvergence”. If you want to call them that, I have no problem.
An example? Well, imagine that a certain battle defined that certain country A won supremacy for some piece of land X over certain country B. Now, that battle may still happen even after a few hundred years from the hidden point of divergence, and a might still win, but A is more akin to Ä or to Æ than to a simple A as we knew it. And B might have a king in place of not having one or might be supported by C… But the battle’s general outcome and consequences are similar in the end even if some parts of the stories and histories are different.
Having clarified that, the timeline as a whole will be diverging further and further as time goes by and you will see less and less points of semi-reconvergence.
I.- An Empire’s Embers:
A mere century later than the Roman embassy arrived at the court of the Tang Dynasty, the Imperium Sine Fine was facing its greatest crisis and the one that would eventually topple it. However, since the throne of the Roman Empire was sitting so high on marble columns, the fall was not only prolonged due to distance to the ground, but also as catastrophic as a fall at terminal velocity could be. As the IX century dawned, humanity faced the worst population collapse in recorded history yet, at least in terms of numbers: between 40% and 55% of the population in the basin of the Mediterranean died. While in other parts of the Roman Empire the population collapse was not as severe, in no place except the very periphery the population was reduced by 20% to 25% at the very least.
Records of this period are extremely scarce due to the number of disasters, both anthropogenic and natural, which befell the empire, therefore, most of the sources are based on the Tang accounts of the collapse instead of accounts by the Romans themselves. It is in this manner that the Roman Empire’s immediate successor states are known by colour according to the ones assigned to the cardinal points in Tang traditional associations. On the other hand, all of the successors, known as the “Empire’s Embers”, claimed each to be the true and only continuation of the Roman Empire.
Of these eight states, four have been assigned to a main cardinal point and three, to a secondary one, while the last one was given to the centre. For ease of reading, the list is the following:
| Cardinal Point | Colour | Core Territory |
| North | Black | Germania Magna |
| Northwest | Grey | Gallia Magna and Britannia Magna |
| West | White | Hispania and Morocco |
| Southwest | Pink | North Africa |
| South | Red | Egypt and the Levant |
| Southeast | Brown | Persia and Mesopotamia |
| East | Green | Greece and Anatolia |
| Centre | Golden | Italy and the Balkans |