The Ecumene's reckoning: every year counted from Maethrillian's construction, the founding of the Capital. Today is Year 25,490 of the Capital — the 41st year of the Burn War. Dates carry the suffix YC (Years of the Capital); the Burn War and the Human-Forerunner War are tracked as eras within this count. Forerunners count long spans in Tributes, but the Capital year is the universal reference.

The GM cockpit for the Burn War: time, place, cast, and the Burn's advance visible at a glance.

The canonical vocabulary of the Burn War: Forerunner rate-speech, the front-line cant of the Perimeter, the Flood's terrible names, and the old human words of the Ember Remnant.

A record of how a place remembers what happened there.

A concrete demonstration package: it improves Endurance, adds a Grit pool, and grants example capabilities without changing the Character schema.

An emotionally meaningful memory held by an NPC.

A record of how a subject is viewed by a specific audience.

A pair-based relationship profile tracking how two characters currently view each other.

Persistent setup state for the Creator Startup Wizard, migration workflow, cleanup queue, and QueenOfHeavens creator-credit behavior.

The current in-world clock and weather record for the Burn War — Year 25,490 of the Capital (the 41st year of the Burn War), at the edge of the quarantine around Aegis-518g.

The stat, resource, condition, advancement, and scale baseline for HALO: Galactic Infestation — nine attributes tuned to surviving the Burn, the Flood, and Forerunner technology.

Year 41 of the Burn War. The Ecumene has not failed to notice the Flood; it has failed to believe in it. The Council recategorizes the apocalypse as a problem within its world — parasite, quarantine, border, budget — and conducts it through projects, perimeter arithmetic, and appropriate sacrifice. The rear believes this is the Test of the Mantle, an exam the Ecumene is certain it will pass; the front lines know the Burn is not a border but a wound, and that no war ends like every war has ended when the enemy is the end of the world. The quarantine around Aegis-518g holds barely, the Domain's failure is blamed on Halo logistics, and hidden survivors remain a rumor the Council refuses to confirm.