After Mithras

After Mithras is the book’s principal chronological system, a dating convention that turns scattered adventures, revelations, and historical catastrophes into a legible sequence. Rather than functioning as a neutral backdrop, it repeatedly places intimate episodes beside civilizational events: the death of an adventurer, the rise of a dragon administration, the discovery of hidden worlds, and the emergence of a figure remembered as the Great Calamity of the Age all become points within the same post-Mithras timeline.

Definition and Chronological Function

The calendar measures years from Mithras, whose heavenly realm appears explicitly in a date heading. One major entry is marked “1291 After Mithras,” locating Kia’s experience after death in Mithras’ heavenly realm and establishing that the dating system applies across earthly and divine settings rather than only to ordinary political history. The notation therefore gives the narrative a shared temporal vocabulary even when its scenes move between mortal life, religious cosmology, and supernatural domains.

The system also supports precise relative dating. A later heading identifies “1301 After Mithras” as occurring three days after Emperor Vainqueur’s self-coronation. That small interval gives the coronation an immediate political aftermath: the event is not merely a legendary milestone but a recent transformation whose consequences are still unfolding when Kia wakes with a headache after drinking wine the previous night.

Historical Scale and Retrospection

The most dramatic use of After Mithras comes in the retrospective material concerning Vainqueur Knightsbane. A bonus historical section places its account at “1198 After Mithras,” one hundred years before Victor Dalton’s ill-attempted robbery. The date makes the temporal distance explicit, converting Vainqueur’s awakening amid ruins, fire, and devastation in Colognenburg into an event from a prior century rather than another episode in the present adventure.

That same date identifies the day on which Vainqueur Knightsbane became known as the Red Terror of Midgard. The calendar thus links personal identity to public memory: the dragon’s name is not simply attached to a character entering the story, but to a historical turning point whose consequences have outlasted the century separating it from Victor Dalton’s arrival. The dating system gives the title its weight by showing how far the reputation has traveled through time.

Dates Within Social and Political Change

After Mithras also measures the expansion of Vainqueur’s authority from a private encounter into an organized political order. In the present chronology, Victor Dalton is incorporated into that order as the dragon’s chief of staff and living signature after Charlene registers Vainqueur and Victor as a new adventurer company. The guild’s paperwork, requests, rewards, and signatures become administrative instruments, showing how a calendar associated with religious history is used alongside mundane institutions such as the Gardemagne Adventurer Guild.

The same chronology follows the consequences of that institutionalization. Because of Victor’s role in the new dragon overlord’s administration, local inhabitants give him a large mansion overlooking Murmurin. The residence, formerly associated with a dark wizard’s experiments, marks the shift from Victor’s homeless adventurer life toward a settled position within Vainqueur’s regime. In temporal terms, After Mithras records not only battles and coronations but the gradual conversion of extraordinary power into offices, property, and routine administration.

Systemic and Historical Time

The calendar’s historical scale is contrasted with the novel’s game-like system of levels, classes, and ceilings. Vainqueur gains a level in the Noble class through his ego and dragon bloodline; Victor gains the Monster Squire class after becoming the chief enforcer of a mighty dragon; and later Victor earns seven Monster Squire levels for leading monsters against superior opponents. These notifications turn achievement into immediate numerical progression, whereas After Mithras places such changes within a broader history that cannot be advanced merely by accumulating experience.

The distinction becomes explicit when Victor reaches the level 30 class ceiling. At that point, further levels require a Crest, experience gains fall to zero, and only special deeds can still produce perks. The calendar provides the historical continuum that the leveling system interrupts: characters may continue living, ruling, dying, and changing after mechanical progression has stopped. This tension between measurable advancement and irreversible historical time is one of the dating system’s most important narrative effects.

Narrative Significance

After Mithras makes the novel’s chronology simultaneously authoritative and unstable in tone. Exact years create the appearance of a grand historical record, yet the events being dated include absurd bureaucratic negotiations, divine misunderstandings, system notifications, and Vainqueur’s self-coronation. The result is a chronology broad enough to contain sacred realms and century-spanning calamities, but flexible enough to register a mansion, a guild registration, or a dragon demanding payment for corpse transportation.

Its most consequential function is to preserve contrast. Vainqueur’s reputation as the Red Terror of Midgard belongs to a date a century before Victor Dalton’s attempted robbery; Kia’s heavenly experience belongs to 1291; and the immediate post-coronation world belongs to 1301. Across those markers, the narrative presents history not as a single solemn march but as layers of memory, administration, myth, and ongoing consequence. After Mithras is the device that allows those layers to coexist while remaining distinguishable.