WHY THIS ARTICLE IS A WEEK LATE...
This article was always going to end with a call for criticism. Figuring out a framework for the post-Mending timeline is a bit of a challenge as we don't have an official timeline to use as a base like we did before. Instead you have to piece it all together from in-story references, meaning everything is contingent on everything else. I'd hate to have to redo the entire thing in a few months or even years after I've already used it to place a whole lot of stories, so I was going to invite you all to comment on any mistakes I had made or important sources I had missed.
Then on the day I was going to post this, I was made aware of a Tumblr post made two months ago by Vorthos extraordinair and writer of the "Magic: a Visual History" books Jay Annelli, in which he gives an overview of the entire timeline I'm covering here. And guess what? On first glance, it didn't seem to line up with mine.
What to do with that information? Since Jay is a published Magic author these days I was tempted to chuck all my work in the bin and just declare his Tumblr post official canon, but it only covers in which years blocks happen, and the post-Mending timeline is so compressed that in order to place individual stories you have to work with references to months and sometimes even weeks. The timeline I came up with does go into that much detail, and re-reading it for the third time since finding that Tumblr post, I did still think my logic was sound. So I decided that the article was going to have to be delayed for a while so I could figure out how I could harmonize my timeline with Jay's.
It took a week for me to find a quiet moment to do so, but in the end all it came down to was some tricky conversion between ZC and AR dates. In fact, using Jay's timeline and one or two assumptions I could make my timeline even more detailed! So below you'll find the article I had intended to post last week, and then a short addendum where I put my results next to Jay's for an even more specificity.
All that said, the call for criticism still stands. I haven't re-read all the post-Mending sources for this article (I mean, obviously, the whole point of this was to create a framework for the future re-reading I'll do for the blog), so if you think I'm missing a crucial bit of information, please do share it with me so I can see how it fits with my conclusions thus far.
