: I'm still here and I still play periodically.
Hurray!
: I wonder whether or not Soulblighter being around in the
: first 60 years of the Age of light (post Balor's fall)
: would be an indication that the cycle had been broken?
Well, if my latest theory (from a few posts back in this thread) is accurate, then the end of TFL is the nadir of this latest cycle (if indeed it is still a cycle). We're beginning an upward trend, which means we're down in the pits right now, and it's not surprising that things are still pretty bad.
It also occurs to me that the 60 year time span between TFL and SB fits easily within the kind of age-lengths in the design docs. Those specific named ages clearly don't match up with the canon use of those names anymore, but maybe Bungie had a similar idea in mind still; that each capital-"A" Age (of Light or Dark) broke down further into four smaller, less formal ages. Those four ages listed for the 500 years prior to TFL were 203, 117, 122, and 58 years long, respectively. If the four nice-sounding names are supposed to divide up the 500 years prior to that, then the Age of Gold preceding the Axe Age was also 219 years long (since the Axe Age began in year 219 of the Golden Age). Maybe the 60 years between TFL and SB are merely the first age of the new Age of Light, if there is such a thing. SB's attack marks the next one. In a hundred something years maybe there will be another age-setting event. And then another a hundred something years after than, and then the turn of the cycle another hundred or two years after that. Growing lighter and lighter all along, until at that last epoch the Leveller returns, and things begin to get slowly worse and worse again until another Great War comes 1000 years post-TFL.
If the cycle's not broken after all, that is.
I think it's interesting that if those age-lengths are accurate, then it seems like ages are shorter around the nadir of the cycle and longer near its apex, which would make sense as things would be more stable in light eras. The last light age of the Age of Light was 219 years long, then the dark ages of the Wold Age went 203, 117, 122, 58, and the first light age of the new Age is 60 years long. I'd wager that the first light age of the Age of Light was also around 60ish years long, and the last age of the new Age will also be around 200ish years long.
