The five years between the red sun and the executions, reconstructed by the GM from the encrypted interrogation notes, public knowledge in the West, and Madeline Foussard’s testimony. Madeline’s name is in the papers — this is what her file sits inside.
Source and status
Provided out of session by the GM (2026-07-27) and explicitly partial. And mostly second-hand: the GM has since clarified that “those being questioned in the notes are not direct witnesses to most of the events reported” — so the interrogation-derived portions are Owl institutional memory relayed under questioning, not testimony. See the caveat on The Recovered Documents. Raw original:
Sources/GM Timeline - Fall of the Order of the Owl (2026-07-27).md— that file is verbatim, including the GM’s own spellings; this page applies the wiki’s canonical names. Everything below is fact for wiki purposes and cited(GM); the readings underneath are not. Where the party’s own earlier estimates disagree with these dates, the dates win — see Corrections to Earlier Estimates.
The Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Spring 1731 | The red sun rises. Owl knights discover a Sanctum in northern Averoigne — sanctum #2 of the three. |
| Spring/Summer 1731 | Owl knights are sent to Morrschatten to assess its unstable politics; there are hints of conflict among the three princes. There they encounter Constanza Bethlen, a charge of Matthias Melnich, Prince of Strelitz. She appeals to them for aid, and they help her leave Morrschatten for Vyones. |
| Summer 1731 | Matthias Melnich sends his personal priest and several Phoenix Knights to Vyones to accuse Constanza of witchcraft. Madeline Foussard — knight-confessor of the Phoenix, and tutor to Marie-Celeste de la Courcel — takes charge of the proceedings and declines to execute her immediately. Constanza is imprisoned under conditions designed to prevent sorcery. |
| Summer 1731 | Skirmishes break out between the Princes of Morrschatten: the War of the Three Princes begins. |
| Summer 1731 | Etienne de la Courcel, King of Averoigne, lacking a legitimate heir, on his deathbed names his illegitimate daughter Marie-Celeste his sole heir, witnessed by close supporters — among them Marc Abayante, head of the Order of the Owl, whom he names Regent and Lord Protector until she comes of age. Marc summons the owl knights for the coronation. |
| Summer 1731, two weeks later | The night in the royal castle. A large and well-equipped band of assassins breaks into the castle at Vyones and kills Marie-Celeste, Marc Abayante, and numerous owl knights. The Order of the Owl — always small — loses a fifth of its members in one night. Among the other events of that night: Constanza escapes prison, and the four Phoenix knights guarding her are slain. |
| Summer 1731 | Duc Michel d’Envers, husband to the late king’s sister Estoile, claims the throne by right of his wife’s blood. Guillaume de Fausseflammes, Knight Commander of the Order of the Swan and nephew to the late king, also claims it — and publicly accuses d’Envers of the assassinations. |
| Late Summer 1731 | d’Envers takes Vyones unopposed and plans a quick coronation. The nobility begins choosing sides. Louis d’Allissy, Archprelate of Vyones and key advisor to the former king, backs the d’Envers claim and performs the coronation. |
| Late Summer 1731 | Acting as king, d’Envers nominates Jehanne d’Allais — a nobleman of a minor but notably wealthy house — as the new head of the Order of the Owl. |
| Fall 1731 | Owl knights researching the sanctums arrive at the University of Krenau. The city is besieged by Prince Udo, falls unexpectedly quickly, and a sack begins. A fire starts at the university. |
| Fall 1731 | d’Allais is confirmed by the Most Holy (Boniface III) as knight commander of the Order of the Owl. |
| Winter 1731 | d’Allais pours personal resources into the Order, and is still met with suspicion by the ranks, who see him as a creature of d’Envers. |
| Spring 1732 | Rangers based out of The Holy City begin noticing increased activity among the Corrupted. |
| ~Spring 1732 | Madeline Foussard is captured at Kraus’s Folly, above Halwa, having tracked Constanza out of Vyones in under a year. Her imprisonment and the blood ritual begin. (GM, answering a direct question — not in the original timeline text.) |
| Summer 1732 | Plague first appears in Weissbaden. |
| Summer 1732 | d’Envers and Fausseflammes forces clash in several significant engagements. |
| Fall 1732 | Owl Knights slay an unformed demon in southern Morrschatten — a being of warped white radiance. It was summoned using a found tome, On the Summoning of Guardian Spirits, which purports to teach the summoning of Celestials. The signed author is Benedicto Malipiero. |
| Fall 1732 | Guillaume de Fausseflammes is slain in battle. His wife, the Comtesse de Touraine in her own right, refuses to give up the fight. |
| Fall 1732 | The War of the Three Princes settles into vicious stalemate; small-scale raids from all sides devastate the common people. Cardacci mercenary companies become particularly noted for their savagery in the princes’ service. |
| Spring 1733 | Fausseflammes forces retreat to Touraine and are put under siege. |
| Summer 1733 | Owl Knights investigate the Monastery of the Dawn near Halwa and find a Sanctum there — sanctum #1, the Sanctum of Sethariel. |
| Fall 1733 | Michel d’Envers falls suddenly ill and dies. He is succeeded by his eldest son Rincon, whose poor reputation derails negotiations for the surrender of Touraine and the end of the civil war. |
| Winter 1733 | Most Holy Boniface III dies of old age. A convocation is set for spring to choose his successor. |
| Spring 1734 | Matthias Melnich is murdered by unknown persons, widely presumed assassins sent by a rival Prince. He is succeeded by his son Gunter. |
| Summer 1734 | Baldessare Malipiero, Archprelate of La Serenissima, is elected Most Holy, taking the name Pious III. |
| Fall 1734 | A group of Owl Knights clashes with Eagle Knights in Halwa, causing significant damage and numerous local casualties. |
| Summer 1735 | A “snake demon” is found possessing a noblewoman in the free city of Stoccarda. Revealed at a party, it kills a number of nobles before being slain by members of the Order of the Gull and visiting Owl Knights. |
| Summer/Fall 1735 | Owl Knights find a third Sanctum in the lands of the Corrupted south of Cardacci. |
| Winter 1735 | (Later revealed) the Comtesse de Touraine’s daughters escape the siege. |
| Spring 1736 | The Order of the Phoenix accuses the Order of the Owl of having fallen to the Deceiver. The Order is dissolved, and its members questioned and executed. |
| Summer 1736 | Touraine falls. The Comtesse kills herself rather than be captured. Her daughters are revealed to have escaped the previous winter and are now guests of the Doge in Cardacci. The civil war in Averoigne is technically over. |
What the Survivors Add (S6)
Two Owl knights are alive at the Citadel of Gazra: Visenne de Tarrand and Isabel d’Allais. Their testimony is the first the party has from inside the order, and it changes three entries above.
Fall 1734 was not an investigation — it was an extraction. The Owl party that fought the Eagle in Halwa was escorting Isabel d’Allais, the knight commander’s daughter, into Hazad, because her gift of beasts is considered heretical in the West — though not by the Eastern Church, which Sister Alia has since confirmed (GM). Dalet chose the escort personally, and Marin was a squire, not a knight — three knights and a squire. Jean-Marie (the commander’s closest confidante), Marin of Clan Aggadum and Elysant Peppin died; Visenne and Isabel were taken. Every knight on that escort was a woman (Aaron) — see Order of the Owl. Neither survivor knew anything of the Summer 1733 sanctum expedition.
Summer 1731 was anticipated. Marc Abayante gathered the order at Vyones “in anticipation of potential issues” — not merely for a coronation. He expected an attempt two weeks before it came. Visenne rates him “a powerful and wise Knight Commander.” See The Night in the Royal Castle.
Madeline Foussard was closer to the centre than she has said. Visenne: she was rumored to be Marc Abayante’s paramour, and she tutored Marie-Celeste “when she was legitimized.” The tutoring is now corroborated in-world, not just from the GM.
Clan Aggadum touches the 1732 demon kill. Marin, the squire killed at Halwa, was the younger cousin of another Aggadum dwarf who was among the group that dispatched the demon in southern Morrschatten in Fall 1732 — the kill that recovered On the Summoning of Guardian Spirits. (GM, via Visenne) That cousin is the first person connected to that party who was not necessarily executed in the 1736 purge.
Constanza Bethlen is corroborated in-world too: appealed to Owl knights, taken from Morrschatten to Averoigne, charged with witchcraft, taken by the Phoenix.
On d’Allais, privately: Visenne respected him and what he did to restore the order — but thought hiding his daughter from the Church was itself somewhat heretical. Isabel insists her father was no heretic.
Speculation
There is a second indictment available, and it has nothing to do with sanctums. An order that used its own knights to smuggle a heretically-gifted child out of the West’s jurisdiction into the schismatic East, under a commander installed by an accused regicide, is prosecutable on its own terms. Whether the Phoenix knew about Isabel is unestablished — but if they did, the sanctum charge may have been the cover story rather than the case.
What This Establishes
The three sanctums are dated, and they bracket the whole story. Northern Averoigne (Spring 1731, the same season as the red sun), the Monastery of the Dawn near Halwa (Summer 1733), and the lands of the Corrupted south of Cardacci (Summer/Fall 1735). All three are the Owl’s, all three appear in The Recovered Documents — which means those interrogations postdate Fall 1735, and are almost certainly the record of the Spring 1736 purge itself. That is consistent with what the party already worked out in S4: the Owl knights captured at Halwa in 1734 are not the ones in the notes.
The Owl’s collapse was political before it was doctrinal. In a single night in Summer 1731 the order lost its commander, the regency of Averoigne, and a fifth of its strength. Within weeks a new commander was installed by the man Fausseflammes publicly accused of the killings — a rich nobody from a minor house, distrusted by his own knights as d’Envers’s creature, and confirmed by the Most Holy inside a season. The order that was destroyed in 1736 had been under new management for five years.
The Owl were demon-hunters to the end. Fall 1732 in southern Morrschatten; Summer 1735 in Stoccarda alongside the Gull. Whatever “fallen to the Deceiver” meant in the Phoenix’s indictment, the public record of the Owl’s last four years is of an order that kept killing the Deceiver’s things.
Somebody is manufacturing false angels. The 1732 demon was unformed, of warped white radiance, summoned from a book that promises Celestials. Compare The Abbot: “I touched the divinity and it broke me.” Compare The Six Voices — angels who followed the Deceiver. The Owl were holding physical evidence, signed, that someone was calling up counterfeit divinity. See On the Summoning of Guardian Spirits.
The lord of Kraus’s Folly was there before the Owl was. Madeline was captured at the Folly in ~Spring 1732 (GM); the Owl expedition Mamud guided to the Sanctum of Sethariel was Summer 1733. A tall Averoigne swordsman with a Celestial-runed warp circle and a garrison’s provisions was established above Halwa — the city nearest sanctum #1 — fifteen months before the Owl got there, and within a year of Averoigne changing hands. That kills the old “he inherited the Owl’s work” theory and raises a worse one.
And the Malipiero thread is no longer circumstantial (S6). Benedicto Malipiero, the signed author of On the Summoning of Guardian Spirits, is the younger brother of Baldessare Malipiero, Pious III — convicted of heresy for dealing with the infernal around 1710 and condemned by his own family. So the Owl held, from Fall 1732, a signed demonological manual by the Most Holy’s disgraced brother; and in Spring 1736 the Most Holy’s own order dissolved them and executed them. That is a complete second motive standing beside the sanctums, and the party’s evidence file is the record of the executions.
Krenau burned while Owl knights were in it researching sanctums — in the city held by House Bethlen, at the university whose dean was Gandolfini, the man who carried the sanctum documents into Hazad eight years later. See Krenau.
Corrections to Earlier Estimates
| Wiki previously said | Actually |
|---|---|
| Owl/Eagle fight in Halwa “~4 years ago” (~1735), from S4 hearsay | Fall 1734 |
| Owl sanctum expedition to the Dawn site “5–10 years ago” / “~1733” | Summer 1733 — the party’s estimate was right |
| Madeline captured “~1733”, extrapolated from her own “about six years” | ~Spring 1732 (GM) — closer to seven years. She undercounted, and the Folly’s lord was in business fifteen months before the Owl reached the Dawn sanctum |
| Order of the Owl dissolved “~1736” | Spring 1736 |
| Averoigne’s succession collapsed “since the Fifth Crusade (1715)“ | The Crown Prince died in 1715, but the crisis broke in Summer 1731 when Etienne died |
| A demon “attacked a Cardacci noble court” during the Troubles | Probably the Stoccarda snake demon (Summer 1735) — Stoccarda is a free city, not Cardacci, but the Gull answered it. Unconfirmed identification. |
Contradictions & Oddities
The prince Constanza was to marry.Not a contradiction — the wiki invented it. (GM, 2026-08-01) Madeline said Constanza was raised to be the bride of one of the princes, and that that prince was killed in the civil war. She never said Constanza fled afterward; the wiki added the “afterward” and then treated the resulting clash with the dates as a mystery. Remove it and the record is consistent: she fled Spring/Summer 1731, the war began that summer, the groom died later. See Constanza Bethlen.- Why accuse your own ward of witchcraft? Melnich did not send soldiers to retrieve Constanza; he sent a priest and Phoenix knights to have her burned, across a border, in another kingdom’s capital. That is not the behaviour of a guardian who lost a valuable bride.
- The prison held against sorcery — and she still got out, on the one night in five years when the castle was full of assassins, leaving four Phoenix knights dead.
- Vyones fell to d’Envers “unopposed” with the Swan’s Knight Commander openly calling him a regicide.
- Krenau “falls unexpectedly quickly.”
- Michel d’Envers “falls suddenly ill and passes” at exactly the moment the war was going his way.
- Jehanne d’Allais’s fate is not recorded. He is the head of an order that was dissolved and whose members were executed. Nothing in the timeline says he shared it.
Speculation — The Owl was killed for what it knew, not what it did
Read the sequence as a single operation: an order whose commander was two weeks from ruling Averoigne is decapitated; a purchased placeman is installed over it and confirmed within a season; five years later the order is dissolved wholesale and its members executed rather than dispersed, penanced, or absorbed. Orders Militant have been disgraced before without their members being killed. Execution is what you do to witnesses. The question is whether the witnesses were witnesses to the sanctums, to the assassination night, or to the book.
Speculation — The Malipiero problem
In Fall 1732 the Owl recovered a demonological tome signed Benedicto Malipiero. In Summer 1734 Baldessare Malipiero became Most Holy. In Spring 1736 the Order of the Phoenix — the order sworn to protect the person of the Most Holy — destroyed the Owl. The party has no evidence the two Malipieros are related beyond the name, and La Serenissima presumably has more than one such family. But if the Owl’s file on that book ever reached the Holy City, the order was carrying an accusation against the Most Holy’s own name for two years before it was wiped out.
Speculation — Who voted
The Most Holy is elected by the seventeen-member Divine Council, which includes the heads of the Orders Militant (Western Church). At the Spring 1734 convocation, the Owl’s vote belonged to Jehanne d’Allais — d’Envers’s appointee — and the Swan’s commander Guillaume de Fausseflammes had been dead for eighteen months. Averoigne’s civil war may have decided who wears the Grand Prelate’s ring.
Speculation — It all starts with the red sun
Every thread on this page begins in Spring 1731: the red sun rises, and in the same season the Owl finds its first sanctum. Within eighteen months: a king dead without an heir, an heir murdered, two civil wars, a plague, a rise in Corrupted activity, and a summoned false angel. Either 1731 was a very bad year, or The Red Star marks a window and something walked through it. Note that the Malconti Calendar itself was devised in 1731 — the West started counting again the year the sky changed.