The Dawn Era is the earliest historical era recognized in the Calendar of Kor Sirok. It encompasses the rise, long dominance, and eventual destruction of the Qhalleess Empire, whose surviving works provide much of the earliest chronology that can still be reconstructed with confidence. Dawn Era dates are commonly expressed use DE.
No single surviving event defines the formal beginning of the Dawn Era. Qhalleessean records extend farther into the past than most later historical traditions, but the earliest portions are fragmentary and difficult to correlate with modern chronology. Historians therefore use the Dawn Era primarily as a broad designation for the period in which Qhalleess emerged as the dominant civilization of its age and established institutions whose influence survived long after the empire itself disappeared.
Among those inheritances is the basic structure of the Calendar of Kor Sirok. Modern month names and religious associations have changed over thousands of years, but the calendar retains its Qhalleessean astronomical foundation. Ruins, artifacts, surviving texts, and the descendants of peoples shaped by the empire likewise make the Dawn Era unusually important to modern archaeology and historical study.
The era ended with the Twilight War. Experiments conducted under the authority of Vhar Qharath established a catastrophic relationship with the Nascent Expanse, bringing the Qhalleess into a war they ultimately could not survive. Tarrasha ended the immediate threat by sacrificing herself to banish Yoshithlulb and create the Twilight Veil, but by then the empire had already collapsed.
The world that emerged afterward inherited Qhalleessean ruins and fragments of its knowledge without retaining the civilization capable of sustaining them. Historians identify that transition as the beginning of the Mythic Era.
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