“Time itself shattered alongside the world.”

Anno Meteorum (A.M.) is the standard calendar system used throughout the world of Apocalyptica Arcanum. It measures the passage of years beginning from the catastrophic meteor event on January 18th, 1886, the singular event that marked the end of the old world and the dawn of a new, magic-infused reality. One year after the Meteor, surviving civilizations formally abandoned previous methods of timekeeping and adopted Anno Meteorum, literally meaning “In the Year of the Meteor.”

The Anno Meteorum calendar retains the basic structure of the old Gregorian system: twelve months comprising approximately 365 days. What changed was not the measurement of time, but its meaning.

The first day of the first year, 1 A.M., is observed not as a celebration, but as a solemn marker of survival. It represents the moment humanity collectively acknowledged that the world they had known was irretrievably lost.

Dates are recorded using the A.M. designation to distinguish them from pre-Meteor records. For example, the year formerly known as 1887 is now recorded as 1 A.M.

The adoption of Anno Meteorum reflects more than a practical need for a unified calendar; it signifies a profound philosophical shift. Survivors did not merely rebuild civilization—they accepted that they now lived in a fundamentally altered reality.

Time itself, like the Earth’s geography, had been reshaped. History is commonly divided into two epochs: the world before the Meteor, and the age that followed.

Religious institutions, arcane academies, and national governments universally employ A.M. dating in official records, legal documents, and ritual calendars. The passage of time is widely regarded as intertwined with magic, transformation, and the ongoing struggle for survival.

Anno Meteorum stands as a constant reminder that the world mortalkind inhabits is not the world they were given, but the world they inherited—and reshaped—through catastrophe and adaptation.

Even more than two millennia after the Meteor, every contract, law, and scripture bears the indelible mark of the event that ended an age.

Some scholars speculate that should another catastrophe of comparable magnitude ever occur, a new reckoning of time would once again be required. Until then, the calendar of the Meteor remains a shared testament to endurance, loss, and transformation across all civilizations of the world.