“Realms! Worlds without end, separated not by space, but by vibration ... History has unravelled, time taken the wrong path...”
This thread aims to serve as a personal guide to Kek-W & John Burns' sprawling century-spanning multi-generation inter-dimensional opera
The Order.
With
Land of the Free we're on Series 5 of
The Order, the first run going all the way back to 2015 (
Prog 1912), running alongside
Dark Justice, Orlok and Ulysses Sweet. Yes,
that long ago. So a respectable-by-today's-standards pace of over a dozen episodes a year, and a
lot has happened in those 400-odd pages. After a highpoint in Series 3
Wyrm War, momentum seemed to flag a wee bit in the rather transitional Series 4
Brave New World, but the current run is just fantastic with Burns doing his best work since
Nikolai Dante, even if it does ask for a level of inter-series recall that our ageing thrill-worn brains may not always be up to.
I'll try to summarise the current setup in this post, for now ignoring the bits that aren't centre-stage at the moment, and then later I'll cover the current characters and their motivations and relationships, and then maybe even a chronological breakdown of the overall story so far.
At the start of
Land of the Free, there are four main factions in play:
Faction no. 1 is the titular
Order of Ouroboros, a cross-time organisation dedicated to preserving the structure of history. Led since 1210 AD by the now-600-year-old Anna Kohl, the Order was apparently founded in a far future of conflict ('the Black Epoch') and propagated back through time with the help of a series of technological 'seeds' and genetic 'seedlines' which create exceptional long-lived individuals, and an artificial intelligence generally known as Ritterstahl, housed in various retro-robot and biological forms.
One iteration of the Ritterstahl A.I. is Anna's great love, but was lost and presumed destroyed in another dimension in 1641: Anna is still searching for him 150 years later, despite there being at least 3 other incarnations currently on the go. Initially the Order's task consisted of opposing...
Faction no. 2,
the Wyrms, an extra-dimensional collective lifeform with multiple configurations based around groups of wormlike creatures at different scales, which can function like sub-elements of an organic computer capable of learning and mimicking other lifeforms. In impersonating humans, some wyrms have discovered the joys of individuality and other people-virtues. Luckily this was before Twitter, so they turned out okay.
Wyrms cross over into 'our' reality at certain points when the dimensions are in harmony. Initially these crossover locii were known to the Order and could be opposed, thus preserving our dimension's timeline. However, at some point the wyrms constructed an organic superstring whose harmonics could control where dimensional conjunctions took place, fracturing the structure of time and space in unpredictable ways, and worse, unleashing...
Faction no. 3,
the Shadowthings. A formless liquid-goo intelligence existing in a timeless lightless dimension, until exposed to the conventional four-dimensional multiverse by the wyrms' meddling, whereupon the Shadowthings set about infiltrating and conquering the Wyrmrealm. Wyrm refugees fleeing this invasion escaped to our dimension (it's unclear (to me) whether this has been the driving force of the wyrm invasions since the start, or whether this is a recent development), where they live in relative harmony with humans in enclaves across the north American continent.
By at least 1777 AD the Shadowthings had entered 'our' dimension and seized control of the nascent United States by infecting its main players, which in 1794 are represented by President George Washington and General Benedict Arnold, and creating what its opponents call the Shadow Republic. The Order and its wyrm allies now work to oppose the Shadowthings, who have disrupted history with their takeover of the US. Their Shadow Republic is aided and supported technologically by...
Faction no. 4,
La Société aka
the Franco-Prussian Republic. Led by scientific savant
Francis Bacon, a former leading member of the 1580 incarnation of the Order, now driven mad by a regime of life-extending treatments and self-designed cyborg parts which he employed to keep pace with the long-lived Atlantean (a fifth faction, don't ask, not so-far relevant to the current series) Queen
Iztaccihuatl, with whom he has an entirely one-sided obsession.
La Société was formed in an acrimonious split from the 1641 incarnation of the Order, which had been based in Versailles. Its members have included
Clarick 'Milady' de Winter (currently Bacon's right-hand woman) and her lover
Athos (now dead), both of
Three Musketeers fame, and the aeronaut
Mongolfier. Disguising himself as 'Citizen
Tussaud', Bacon has used the salvaged head of one incarnation of Ritterstahl to assist his creation of a precipitous industrial revolution in France, and now controls an army of automatons and anachronistic war machines with which he has conquered most of Europe. Apparently driven by hatred of the Order and jealousy of Daniel Calhoun in particular (Queen Izta's former husband and father of her children), Bacon supplies the Shadow Republic with mechanised legions.
Recent events...As
Land of the Free began, the current members of the Order and their human and wyrm allies (including the Edgewalker himself,
Armoured Gideon), have based their resistance in the extra-dimensional refuge of Philae, a sort of fortified ghost-city based on an amalgam of the
Ptolemaic temple complex flooded by the building of the Aswan dam, and the US city of Philadelphia circa 1777 as it was remembered by the first wyrm member of the 1641 version of the Order, Donna Catalina, late mother of current half-wyrm member Antoine Berg.
The series kicked off in 1794 with a scheme to rescue a de-aged version of
Benjamin Franklin from the Shadow Republic, and bring him into the Order to provide a scientific counter to Francis Bacon, but things quickly fall apart as Bacon tracks Berg to the Edge and Philae and his blitzkrieg overwhelms the city. The Order are forced to flee onboard the ironclad
La Victoire, which may be more than it seems...
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