"You ever try to remember something so hard your soul cramps?" – Saint Grave
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If this was really the Trench Crusade timeline...
Then everything should already be happening, or about to happen—exactly as he remembered it.
The invasions.
The betrayals.
The miracles, blasphemies, prophecies that twist back on themselves like snakes eating doctrine.
But how could he be sure?
Maybe his arrival had already shifted something.
Even the smallest change, one word out of place in one old sermon, could unravel centuries.
Aaron dragged a hand through his ash-caked hair and muttered, "Okay... okay, I need a baseline."
He turned to Aleric, seated cross-legged beside him, still polishing his Codex with grim precision.
"Hey. Can you do me a favor?"
Aleric glanced up. "If it involves pain, sermons, or relic-gathering, I might need to lie about it."
Aaron grunted. "Nah. Just... give me a rundown. The timeline. From the start."
Aleric raised an eyebrow. "You want all four hundred years?"
"The highlights. Starting at the very start. Right after Jerusalem."
Aleric sighed and tucked his Codex into the crook of one arm.
"You Saints really do like your history sermons, huh?"
Aaron smirked. "Indulge me."
Aleric stretched, cracked his neck, then began.
1099 — Year Zero. (0 A.A.C.)
The First Crusade breaches the walls of Jerusalem. Not with mercy. Not with honor. With flame and iron and secrets not meant to be spoken aloud.
The Templars, in desperation, pride, or madness, descend into the crypt beneath Golgotha and perform the Act of Ultimate Heresy.
No records survive. No witnesses live.
Only the result:
The Gate of Hell tears open at the heart of the city.
Not a metaphor. Not a symbol.
A hole in the world itself.
The sky above Jerusalem peels away like burnt parchment. Angels scream. Language dies.
In an instant, the holy city becomes a caldera of bleeding light and inverted relics.
Jerusalem is annihilated.
The oceans recoil. The Earth forgets how to spin properly.
Faith becomes fire.
The age of myth ends.
The Trench Age begins.
Aaron felt a chill crawl down his spine.
He remembered this part from obscure side-lore.
Most players skimmed it, too biblical, too vague.
But hearing it said aloud in this world, from a soldier's mouth, made it real.
1101 — The Year of Three Battles. (2 A.A.C.)
The Third Circle of Hell sends legions of flame-stitched horror into the breach, not armies in the human sense, but blasphemous mechanisms of skin and scripture.
One army marches on roads made from nailed-down angels.
Another arrives through a storm of teeth, led by something wearing the skull of a bishop as a crown.
The Levant falls.
Entire rivers turn to plague.
Choirs are inverted, made to sing inside-out.
The sky becomes a theater of blood and thunder.
Civilization fractures along spiritual lines.
The world map turns red.
Aaron remembered a chart, black-and-white, fan-made, posted on an old lore thread.
It had tried to diagram the "moral collapse" by faction.
He had laughed at the time.
Now, the word collapse felt like a mercy.
1102 — The Defense of Antioch. (3 A.A.C.)
What remains of the old world gathers around a crumbling city.
Ancient walls. Dusty faith.
The bones of saints stacked like sandbags.
The city is renamed New Antioch, not in arrogance, but desperation.
Theophan, Canon-Militant of the Burning Choir, walks the trenchlines barefoot, anointing the mud with oil and ash.
The first Relic Paladins are born.
Not knights. Not templars.
Just soldiers too angry to die.
The trench becomes sacred.
The war becomes endless.
Aaron leaned forward slightly, unthinking.
He remembered New Antioch as a game setting, the last fortress.
But this version... this birth of a citadel through grief... it wasn't just lore anymore.
It was sacred blood in the mud.
1106 — The Rise of Cobar. (7 A.A.C.)
A heretic crowned in a cathedral built from flayed saints.
Cobar speaks in riddles and sings in un-language.
His coronation speech is recorded in the Book of Spite — a black codex that bleeds when opened.
He declares the foundation of the Sixty-Six Thrones, a hellbound council of tyrants, each a prophet of pain.
Their banner: a cracked mirror held by a skeleton with too many arms.
Their creed:
"Burn salvation.
Boil the promise.
Unwrite the scripture line by line."
Heresy is no longer insurgency.
It becomes civilization.
Aaron whispered, "Jesus Christ....."
Aleric arched an eyebrow. "Not one of ours."
1109 — The Iron Sultanate. (10 A.A.C.)
Deep in the east, an ancient wall rises from the sands like a sleeping god.
Built by Iskandar, reforged in prophecy, the Great Iron Wall of the Two Horns That Pierce the Sky activates again — its inner engines burning with thousand-year-old flame.
The Sultanate unites fractured factions through the Code of the Horns, a fusion of scriptural science, industrial prayer, and gunpowder mysticism.
Pilgrims and technicians both kneel to the same shrine.
The Iron Horn holds.
Even now, after centuries—no daemon has crossed it.
Aaron blinked. "Wait. They still call it the Great Iron Wall of the Two Horns That Pierce the Sky?"
Aleric nodded. "Bit long for trench-talk. Most just say 'Iron Horn.' Or 'The Line That Doesn't Break.'"
Aaron let out a slow, relieved breath. "Canon. Good."
1117 — The Seventeen Martyrs. (18 A.A.C.)
They go willingly.
Seventeen souls, faithful, brilliant, arrogant, descend into the Earthly Domains of Hell.
They wear the robes of mercy. Carry no weapons. Only doctrine.
They hope to convert. To prove the Word still holds power.
Hell laughs.
They are captured, stripped, and placed inside white-hot Brazen Bulls, metallic ovens forged from the bones of murdered saints.
They do not die.
They scream. Forever.
Their voices echo through the fault-lines of the world.
Sometimes in sleep. Sometimes in war.
They are canonized, but no one is allowed to speak their names.
Only numbers. Only wails.
Aaron looked down.
Even knowing it was lore, even expecting it, hearing it described by someone who prayed to them, who served them, was different.
His skin felt cold.
"They're still down there?" he asked quietly.
Aleric nodded. "Some say their screams bend the shape of Hell itself."
1165 — The Fortress of Alamut. (66 A.A.C.)
A mountaintop surrounded by death.
Fortified by fire monks and shadow-thieves.
At the top: the Old Man in the Mountain, leader of the Hashashins.
Assassin-priests bound by silence and sanctified poison.
Alamut is attacked every decade.
Siege towers collapse in the shadow of its walls.
Demons dissolve in the approach winds.
Its doors have never broken.
Its prayer-fires have never gone out.
Alamut endures.
Always.
Aaron was still, absorbing it all.
The early era, the pre-industrial, flame-scripted centuries of blood theology, were horrifying, yes.
But also... beautiful.
In their own way.
This wasn't clean fantasy or post-apocalyptic survival.
It was myth nailed to steel.
A church built from artillery and martyrdom.
But when Aleric reached the Wars of Triclavianism, the tone shifted.
Aleric didn't speed through it.
He slowed.
1215 to 1306 — The Wars of Triclavianism. (116–207 A.A.C.)
"The Church split. Not along faith, but structure. Three popes. Three crowns. Three flames at the center of the world... and each one claimed to be holy."
The Creed of the Triclavists declared that only those who bore the threefold scars of Faith, Fire, and Flesh were true inheritors of divine grace.
Some orders split themselves with relic razors to 'earn' the marks. Others flayed enemies and branded them to mock it.
Brother fought brother. Paladins dueled in mud-slick chapels. Holy cities turned into furnaces of betrayal.
"For nearly a hundred years," Aleric said quietly, "no prayer ended without a scream."
Aaron winced, and it wasn't dramatic.
He remembered reading about it. Back when Trench Crusade lore was something to read with a cup of coffee, not something he was bleeding in.
He remembered a codex fan article that had described the conflict as "Papal Rage, but with napalm."
"We still find mass graves," Aleric added after a beat. "Some are so old the bones pray when you open the lid."
Aaron didn't reply. There wasn't much to say to that.
Aleric continued, and the horror only deepened.
1346 to 1353 — The Black Grail Plague. (247–254 A.A.C.)
"Beelzebub awakened the Grail of Flies. Not metaphorically. An actual artifact, a rot-slick cup carved from the rib of a fallen archbishop and filled with inverted blood psalms."
One sip brought hunger.
Two brought song.
Three brought transformation.
The infected became walking reliquaries of disease. Corpse-saints with tongues of mold and fingernails grown into runes. They sang backward hymns that made flesh forget how to stay solid.
The Corpse Wars ignited. Thirteen million dead in a single year.
Holy water turned black in the bottle. Some saints caught it. Some spread it.
Aaron pressed his fingers to his eyes.
He remembered the wiki pages. The cursed .pdf spreads of forbidden relic diseases. The banned homebrew rulesets for "plague-blessed" units that were too grim even for campaign play.
He'd always thought the Black Grail was exaggerated—a bit of marketing flair.
But no.
It was real.
It had happened.
Beelzebub had poisoned the continent with prayer-plague and turned the corpses of martyrs into flesh churches.
"I read once," Aaron muttered, "that the Black Grail made saints sing in their sleep, even after death."
Aleric nodded. "We still burn their tombs. Twice."
1429 — Jeanne d'Arc the Living Flame. (330 A.A.C.)
"She wasn't born a Saint," Aleric said, voice reverent now, soft with something close to faith. "She became one with every footstep she took into hellfire."
The battlefield of Theragny burned for six days. She walked into it on day two. Alone. Carrying a relic banner made of relic bones and oilcloth.
She vanished in the smoke, and seven months later, she re-emerged from the Dead Zone carrying a flag that hadn't been there before."
"It's still waving," Aleric added. "Right now. Over the Tomb of Fire."
Aaron tried to picture it, and couldn't.
It was one thing to see that kind of heroism in lore threads or codex blurbs. Another to know she'd literally walked into Beelzebub's wake and came back.
He whispered, "Did she ever speak again?"
"No," Aleric said. "But when her body glows, the air sings."
1477 — The City of Argos is Taken by God. (378 A.A.C.)
"No warning. No flame. No siege," Aleric said. "Just... gone."
"The city didn't burn. It vanished."
No sounds. No last messages. Just one moment, there was a city. The next? White space. Not empty land. Just—nothing."
Maps showed the absence. Choirs stopped mid-note.
Anyone who tried to talk about it began bleeding from the ears.
Aaron frowned. "And no one knows what happened?"
"They say to remember Argos is to forget something else. And something important."
Aleric pulled something from his pouch, a sealed prayer ribbon. "This was recovered near the border. It just says 'I asked too much.'"
Aaron swallowed.
There was always a strange kind of horror in subtracted miracles.
Then came the last milestone before the present.
1503 — The Prophet Angelos and the Forge of Orichalcum. (404 A.A.C.)
"The Forge was discovered buried under three layers of sacred salt and forgotten scripture."
"Angelos was led there by visions of a golden wheel and the bleeding hands of Saint Elegius."
"He forged the first Orichalcum blade, it burst into flame when brought near a demon."
"The cost?" Aleric chuckled darkly. "The souls of three entire prayer battalions."
"We still use it. But each blade is named and buried like a Saint when it breaks."
Aaron nodded slowly, rubbing his arms. "And now?"
Aleric looked up.
"Current year: 1540. (441 A.A.C.)
The Four-Hundred-Forty-First Year of the Ascension Compact.
The Trench Pilgrimages are at their bloodiest.
Half the world is mud and sacred gas.
The skies have no color.
The relic-banners fade every hour."
Then he smiled grimly.
"And you... well. You happened."
Aaron sat in silence.
He let the names wash over him again.
Jeanne. The Seventeen Martyrs. The Black Grail.
Each one a myth made real.
He stared down at his hands, his pale skin still threaded with soft gold glints, not divine, not earned.
Just... present.
He looked back at Aleric. "So far... nothing's changed."
He exhaled slow. Shoulders loose. Brain burning.
"I thought maybe my presence altered something. But it's all still there. Still horrifying."
Even the ridiculous stuff, the city that disappeared, the Hashashins still holding a mountain for centuries, the angels boiled alive in relic jars, all of it had happened.
Nothing was broken.
Nothing had shifted.
Yet.
Aaron's eyes drifted to the horizon.
Somewhere out there, past the smoke and bone towers, was New Antioch.
And he knew.
In five years—it would fall.
Everything would fall.
And this world that had fought tooth and nail for every miracle would face its greatest loss.
Unless he changed something.
Unless he cracked the wheel.
Unless Saint Grave became more than an accident.
Aaron sat back against the trench wall, his hands buried beneath the trauma blanket.
The Codex was closed. The sky was purple again.
He had history now.
He had time.
He had five years.
And even the gods would hear him scream before that bastion burned.