Time

The Aesir reckon time in spans that mortal minds were not built to hold. They have ruled for ages; they have shepherded Midgard across tens of thousands of years; and they measure their own history not forward from a beginning but backward from an ending they have already foreseen.

The Three Ages

• The First Age (Primordial) — before the Aesir, when only the primordial realms of Niflheim and Muspelheim existed, fire and ice grinding against the dark.
• The Rise of the Aesir — the building of Asgard, the taming of the sun, the Aesir–Vanir War, and the binding of the Nine Realms to the branches of Yggdrasil.
• The Long Watch (Now) — the present age of empire and unease, as the gods hold their conquests, tend their gardens, and count down to the end.

The Cultivation of Midgard

For tens of thousands of years, Odin has guided human evolution on Midgard. Earth's own prehistory is, from the Aesir's vantage, a single long project measured in ice ages and migrations.

TODO: the engineered milestones, the eras of open contact (remembered by humans as the Age of Myth), and the present silence.

Ragnarök

The end is not a belief. It is a forecast — computed by the Norns, foreseen by Frigg, and prepared against by all of Asgard.

TODO: the prophesied sequence, the signs already gathering, and the open question of whether fate can be cheated.