User:Scrooge MacDuck/Sandbox Beta

The Book of the War was the first novel in the Faction Paradox series.

Edited by Lawrence Miles and written collaboratively by more than ten authors, The Book of the War was formatted like an encyclopedia, with a number of stories spread across multiple alphabetically-sorted entries. In each entry, some words were emphasised in bold to point to other entries with that name, enabling the reader to jump around the book and read related entries.

Publisher's summary
The Great Houses: Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy: Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox: Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage… assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War: A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past…

Alt text
The War so far (in highlights); the location of the exact centre of history; the lo-tech way to break into the Eleven-Day Empire; the truth about gravity spiders; the dangers of investigating Violent Unknown Events; the art of breeding your own timeship; a short history of the various ends of humanity; the fate of the Grandfather's Arm; the secrets of removing yourself from history while still leaving yourself free to interfere; a brief interruption from the future; where to meet every human being who ever lived; how to bring your world to the attention of the Spiral Politic using 23,000 corpses; why the War-time powers never recruit celebrities; the problems of running a time-active brothel; on telling the difference between the afterlife and the trailer; banality as a weapon of War; the Faction Paradox guide to Hollywood; and how the Sixth Wave revealed the truth about the enemy without even trying.

Causalities of War
A War which "at this stage (…) remains the War, not yet having enough of its mass in a single region or era to be given a more specific title" has been raging across space and time for 50 subjective years. A book is published to serve as a guide to this War, and opens with a list of the main participants.

The Great Houses, an ancient, voyeuristic civilisation of demigods who remain the "central power" of this "War Era universe", think themselves to be "parts of the historical process much more than a people". Though they fought another war at the very beginning of history, they still consider the idea of having a military ridiculous when the enemy revealed themselves "mere decades" before the start of the new War, they had become complacent. One of the Houses' errors is failing to truly understand the enemy, viewing them as a species or faction when they are really "a kind of all-consuming process", so the book elects to not mention the enemy's name, even if it does have one, because its anonymous authors believes the name would be a distraction from the essence of the enemy.

Despite their misapprehension, the Houses do adapt, and establish a House Military whose cohorts are bred for war. The House Military has begun to operate at "a safe distance" from the "old academicians". Also responding to the changes is Faction Paradox, a rogue House leaves the Homeworld in the years leading up to the War because they foresee the "vulgarity" to which their kind will soon descend and decide to get a head start. They start recruiting humans into their ranks and operating underground as a sort of criminal or terrorist organisation, seemingly hoping that the bigger sides of the War will wipe each other out and leave them to pick over the leftovers. To build themselves an army, they pervert a human offshoot into the fetishistic Remote, "the barbarians of the Spiral Politic", but they soon become so unpredictable that they fallen out of the Faction's control.

The Celestis also leave the Homeworld before the War, though they were not so much a House as an "elite cadre" of interventionists. Fearing that the Great Houses' defeat could mean their erasure from history, they preemptively excise themselves from the material world, becoming little more than ghosts. They manifest themselves as gods to "those individuals who've been tricked into worshipping them" but wield little real power and are considered demonic traitors by the rest of the War-mongers.

The Great Houses label all species not connected to themselves or the Enemy's power-bases as "lesser species". This includes humanity, but the volume is also, "for obvious reasons", concerned with them. However, although the War has intersected with Earth's history as early as 1752, they are important to the major powers not in their own right but because of the time-active capabilities of humanity's descendants, the posthuman sects, and of the mysterious City of the Saved, "a region of dubious origin which exists beyond the end of causality, and which seems to act as a “backup file” for the entire human species".

In any case, it is often observed that the War is slowly "turning every culture into a War culture", which the possible implication that "one day every individual in recordable time will become either a child of the Houses or a child of the enemy".

The Spiral Politic
The Spiral Politic is described. The most common way of describing the structure of the War Era universe, it is not a physical map of the universe or causality, but a symbolic map of the ways in which different planets' histories do or do not interact with each other. The Spiral Politic as it is known in the current version of reality was created by the Great Houses with them at the centre through the event known as the anchoring of the thread; the more closely related a world's history is to that of the Homeworld, the closer to the centre of a 2D map of the Spiral Politic it appears, and the more stable it normally is, while worlds on the outer fringes, far from the Houses' control, are constantly shifting in their relative positions as their histories are altered by shifting War-time alliances with one side or another.

On the whole, the Houses rather wish everything on the map stayed as still as possible, but this is an increasingly thin hope as the fifty years of War cause the map to shift more and more. Much terminology exists describing the different "types" of worlds on the map, based on the ways in which they do or do not "move", including shooting star worlds, Time-Front Worlds, Scarred Worlds, Remote Worlds, Posthuman Worlds, Frontier Worlds, and the confusingly-named Non-Worlds (which do not physically exist in the universe but are still causally connected to the Spiral). It is also rumoured that certain areas in the Houses' maps of the Spiral Politic describe time-active individuals with an outsized influence on history rather than actual planets.

Other universes exist, in the form of "separate bubbles of matter and energy cut off from the Spiral Politic by immeasurable stretches of un-space". However, it is widely believed that crossing these distances is basically impossible, with only the Yssgaroth having ever managed to intrude on the Spiral Politic from the "outside".

The Great Houses
The Great Houses' recorded history begins with the anchoring of the thread. This event would later come to be understood as "merely" the point when the Homeworlders built their timeships and sealed their world in a bubble of enclosed time. However, it actually represents the point when they ascended to become "something 'other', something too fundamental to exist merely within the confines of the newly-created Spiral Politic" — gods, in a sense, although the word "suggests something primal, potent and ambitious" while individual members of the Houses became ontologically sterile and shrivelled and static as a result of making themselves anchors of static history. Indeed, they become biologically sterile, "not necessarily by design", around the time of the anchoring, forcing them to develop breeding engines that artificially weave together "base matter and biodata" to create new individuals. They also learn how to make themselves immortal, "at least in theory".

Deprived of organic evolution or the "spur" of mortality, the Houses remain stuck in a form of cultural stasis for the following ten million years during which they wield absolute power. They have little interest in high art (which they find incomprehensible), history (since everything in their being trends towards the status-quo), physical pleasure (their continued organic existence bothers them slightly, though not enough to discard their bodies, as that would be too radical). They occupy themselves with little more than "humanitarian" interventions to prevent lesser time-active parties from damaging causality, which is really born of self-interest too, being that history is an extension of them.

Eventually, the status quo begins to crumble with the Imperator Presidency, the rise of House Paradox, and of course the War itself. Now, fifty years in, life for the Houses on their own world remains as stuffy as ever, but their influence on the wider universe is much more immediate, with the War King and his agents steering the history of many worlds directly; moreover, allegiances are now split, with some Newblood bloodlines allying themselves with the House Military over the traditional Ruling Houses. In short, if the Great Houses are gods, then the War is a new War in Heaven.

The House Military
For most of its history, the Homeworld had no real army; symbolic constabularies were ordered around by various Houses to "keep the peace" but had little to do, as there was very little crime. When armed intervention was needed in the outside universe, constructs known as casts were employed. However, in the decades before the War, in addition to small flashes of the War to come, the Homeworld becomes more familiar to the outside universe and various doomed armies try to invade the Homeworld physically. Although they are unsuccessful, they make plain the constabularies' near-total uselessness.

This leads some of the more restless Houses, Oldblood and Newblood alike, to band together into a more effective House Military. Although they remain officially part of the same political entity as the other Houses, there is a clear ideological schism between their interpretation of the Protocols and the traditionalist Houses', which everybody in the field recognises. Indeed, many of the "time-front troops" spend their whole lives in the outside universe, which warps their understanding of reality far beyond the minds that a lifetime safe within the Homeworld's bubble of history could ever mould.

The early Waves of House Military soldiers are still humanoid, but even before the War, select field agents had been the subject of experiments with forms of regeneration refined for military purpose so that each new incarnation was "stronger, faster, and better-equipped", drifting gradually from the classic human form. As early as the Third Wave, forced regen missions have become a reality. At first the changes merely create more resistant or telepathic humanoids, but it soon becomes clear to the soldiers themselves that the form of regeneration with which they've been primed is designed to eventually turn them into totally inhuman war machines. House authorities reply to complaints from Second Wave veterans by pointing out that if they really wish to avoid this fate, all they need to do is fight so well that they avoid getting killed.

This development naturally widens the schism between the House Military and the ruling Houses: the force-regenerated soldiers simultaneously resent their fate, and come to view the Oldbloods as puny, weak, different, "and ultimately untrustworthy". It is forecast that if left unchecked for a few more centuries, the schism could result in House Military and regular Great Houses coming to be seen as two different species altogether, with a civil war between the two offshoots becoming inevitable.

The Celestis
Another group which appears in the centuries leading up to the War are a movement of interventionists who pursue personal ambition and flout the non-interference policy, committing multiple retro-genocides on lesser species without the approval of the Ruling Houses. They manipulate the politics of the other Great Houses and the Presidency, even sometimes going as far as to carry out assassinations, because they believe the Houses should act more like imperious Gods, actively reshaping the universe to their needs at their whim.

When War predictions notify them of the existence of a foe "just as 'divine'", they are thrown into existential despair by the idea of not only being killed, but being erased from history altogether, if the Homeworld were to lose the war. In a move that baffles the rest of the universe, they decide to dodge out of being erased from history by erasing themselves from history. Specifically, they use an engineer forced-paradox state to erase their physical forms from history while living on as disembodied minds and ideas, having banked on the fact that god-like beings like themselves never really needed physical bodies to hold court. They found a new base of operations called Mictlan on the "outer skin" of the universe and begin to call themselves the Celestial House.

However, they are widely reviled by the other Houses and the universe at large as traitors who abandoned their homeworld in its hour of need. Moreso than the bored gods they hoped to become and continue to believe themselves to be, they are viewed as demons, a state of affairs not helped by their habit of manifesting in monstrous physical forms to mortals, or theirconstant need to strike "Faustian bargains" with members of the lesser species to sustain their own existence: as living ideas, the Celestis can only survive as long as they are believed in. Having retained power over life and death, they lure these victims with promises of immortality and make them take their Mark of Indenture, which allows the Celestis to trap their minds in Mictlan forever after the destruction of their original physical bodies.

Insisting that they are above the Spiral Politic rather than parasites dependent on it, the Celestis have a limited impact on the War. However, some of them do get involved, claiming that they view it only as a game. Though they sometimes help their old compatriots of the Homeworld, they also sell conceptual entities to the enemy, for which reason they are not accepted as allies by the House Military, many units of which are ordered to destroy on sight the entities which the "proper" Homeworlders refer to as "the spineless monstrosities". However, they rarely enter the fray themselves in any case, preferring to act through their Investigators.

Faction Paradox
Headed by an epigraph by Cousin Eliza of the Faction Paradox Military Wing, the entry on Faction Paradox starts with a disclaimer that common encapsulations of the Faction as either a cult or a crime syndicate, while not inaccurate, miss the mark on the true essence of the organisation, which is more of an unending carnival existing in parody of the universe: the Faction does not act to acquire power, nor out of any "inherent sense of sadism", but simply to make a point and out of a sense that "the universe would be lacking if nobody did it".

The history of what would become Faction Paradox starts on the Homeworld, five centuries before the War. The Homeworld is experiencing a sense of unease and more changes than in the million years prior. The Ruling Houses are naturally outraged when a member of an old, eccentric bloodline comes before them to announce he is founding a new Great House, something which had remained enshrined in law but which had not been done in long ages. Compounding the shock is his declaration of the new family's name — "House Paradox", with him becoming "Grandfather Paradox" — is, according to legend, his attire, includes the the first Faction Paradox skull mask. This fashion choice is of particular significance on the Homeworld because the rejection of organics there at this time was so great that many of the witnesses to the declaration had very probably never seen a skull before, and likely did not realise what the Grandfather was even wearing.

As the Grandfather anticipated, the Ruling Houses are too stunned and appalled by what he presents that they "let the matter slip noisily by" rather than thinking to veto his decision while there's still time. However, the nascent House Paradox wastes no time in beginning to experiment with alternative time-dynamics, in obvious breach of the Homeworld's laws on how history should work. This provide grounds for their exile from the Homeworld, adopting the name of Faction Paradox and becoming the first cuckoo-House, recruiting members of the lesser species into its rank instead of relying on breeding engines.

However, on the cusp of the War, the Grandfather deletes himself from existence. Leader-less, the Faction is made more practical by the necessities of War and becomes a political-criminal organisation spanning the entire Spiral Politic, with cabals in hundreds of locations, agents on hundreds of worlds, and a predilection for "stirring up even more trouble" between the other Houses and the enemy. They try to build themselves an army in the form of the Remote so as to boost themselves up to the status of a major power with a chance against the big two, but these crude attempts at power-base-building are decimated by the Second Wave, and they retreat to a more patient, calculating demeanour, waiting to pick over what will be left once the two main sides have annihilated each other.

Now, fifty years into the War, the Faction are beginning to recover from the Second Wave, with links being reestablished between the Eleven-Day Empire and the diaspora of Faction cabals. They hope that the Houses' now-total commitment to fighting the Enemy means that they can live in relative peace from now on and focus on their work — "whatever that work may turn out to be".

The Faction Paradox Family
Inset in the Book 's entry on the Faction is an overview of the ranks used by the Faction and their significance, icluding, in order, Little Siblings, Cousins, Parents, and Godparents. The Grandfather himself is also listed, in an entry which reveals that he "never actually existed — and has now never actually existed for over two hundred years", having purposefully erased himself from time. He left behind a few relics, such as the knife purportedly used in the Act of Severance, and his name is rarely invoked in vain by members of the Faction because they believe that too much invocation might summon him back into existence, and that this would only irritate him.

The Remote
Shortly before the War, while operating as a criminal syndicate and trying to build proper power-bases on various planets, the Faction become fascinated by planets in humanity's expansionist era where the colonists become so completely driven by the "signals" of their media that they become more important in understanding these humans than physical geography or indeed any other factor. The Faction, unfamiliar with the concept of mass media (which don't exist on the Homeworld), are entranced and begin to think of these media signals as a different form of the loa they themselves worship: non-physical cultural constructs regulating their respective societies without being in the power of any individual or group within them.

At first the Faction's experiments take the form of introducing new concepts — new spirits-in-the-making — to the media of preexisting colonies and watching them grow and reshape the society around them. However, after the Great Houses take notice and begin wiping out "infected" societies, the Faction make up for lost time by putting their new knowledge to use creating "true" Remote societies ex nihilo. These absolutist Remote colonies no longer had conventional media, but instead a single mass transmission system at their core, with every inhabitant picking them up directly through ear implants. The Faction hope to use these Remote as an army, although early experiments such as "the entirely ludicrous assault on Simia-KK98" prove less than encouraging.

Before long, the master-plan begins to fall apart due to the Second Wave's coordinated genocide of all groups and colonies connected to the Faction. Desperate, the Faction turn to "evacuating, crypto-forming, and sometimes even hiding" entire planets. Becoming restless due to the saturation of War-related propaganda in their signals, many of the Remote blaze their own trails across the Spiral Politic without any actual orders from the Faction, with only two of the original Remote colonies staying put. As they come into contact with the media of other worlds they invade, their Faction programming becomes ever more garbled, until the Remote become complete anarchists whose only stable directive is to make war on "the ruling powers of the Spiral Politic" — whoever they might happen to be.

Lesser Species
Before the War, the term of "lesser species" was used by the Great Houses for all species other than themselves. However, in the new state of affairs, Newblood Houses have taken to using it to refer to non-time-active species, granting that other time-travelling races count as higher species. The Book acknowledges that this makes some sense, insofar as there is, per the Protocols of the Great Houses, a deep and important difference between the biodata of time-travellers and non-time-travellers.

In the War era, posthumanity soon becomes one of the so-called "lesser species" with the most insistent claim to being equals of the great War-time powers, because much of their "territory" is inaccessible to the Great Houses' observation, and is therefore of key strategic significance to them as they fear the enemy may hide out there. Indeed, some posthumans, including the posthuman "War Goddess" known as the Immaculata Formosii, form actual alliances with the enemy and come to think of themselves as "full-time War participants".

In contrast, some posthuman castes remain proud of their status as non-time-active being, due to a belief that time-travellers forsake their "true identity" and their destiny as part of altering their biodata to travel in time: whatever the Great Houses say of their "Homeworld", they fundamentally do not belong anywhere, being little more than "friend-of-a-friend stories who happen to be wearing badly-fitting bodies". This logic is not taken very seriously by the authors of the Book, who seem to gently chide humanity's belief that it has a truly special, rather than coincidental, role in the War.

Yssgaroth
When the Great Houses carry out the anchoring of the thread, constructing history as it's now known, they make it in such a way that its meta-structure is held together by various node points spread throughout the Spiral Politic. Due to the tension they are under, these are also "weak points" in the fabric of the universe, where, in a very real sense, the "foam-structures of the continuume" are weakened by the strain.

This proves devastating when something crosses over from outside the universe into the newly-founded Spiral Politic through the Caldera. Although perceived as a specific individual from the alter-dimensional species, later thinkers would go on to speculate that the Yssgaroth may be a huge, gestalt entity capable of splitting itself into smaller drones, or even that the Yssgaroth may be more of a phenomenon than a species, an antibody system of the foreign universe trying to defend itself against contact with the Great Houses' universe, appearing as a haze of ghastly monsters due to the Great Houses projecting their own deepest fears onto the "areas of hostile anti-structure".

Whatever the Yssgaroth's true nature, the crossing over of the "true" Yssgaroth at the Caldera allows weaker creatures of a similar ilk, referred to as "servants of the Yssgaroth" by the Houses, to begins warming all across history, entering via rifts that form at the node points. An unimaginably terrible war ensues, with whole worlds being lost to the cruelty of the Yssgaroth so thoroughly that the Great Houses have no other choice but to put them out of their misery via retro-genocide. The war ultimately ends in a victory for the Great Houses, who successfully seal all the breaches, covering them up with forced-matter shells to disguise them as planets.

However, because it is in Yssgaroth biomass's nature to "hybridise and corrupt", traces of the Yssgaroth corruption remain throughout history. On Earth, Arabic and Middle Eastern traditions term humans turned "malformed and predatory" by the Yssgaroth taint as "the Mal'akh". The Yssgaroth war having occurred in the infancy of the structure of history itself also means that all cultures in the universe create legends about vampires and similar monsters, even if they never had any actual contact with the Yssgaroth.

When the War in Heaven starts, proving wrong the commonly-accepted notion that the Yssgaroth was a "war to end all wars", some of the older Houses suggest that the only way a hostile force might exist within ordered history is if it was placed there by outside influence, meaning the enemy must have been propped up by the Yssgaroth. However, this is considered unlikely by most, as the enemy is at least "civilised, cultured, and intelligent enough to ahve an agenda beyond pure destruction".

The Anchoring of the Thread
The early universe is a "structureless" place where time has yet to coalesce into the linear structure of history as it would become known. However, sensing that it will eventually harden into something more solid, the Great Houses come to fear how other intelligences might influence the shape of the future, with "early deep-time explorations" performed by the Houses' pioneers confirming the existence, somewhere in the possible future, of things too powerful for the Houses to destroy. After a few clumsy attempts to avert the individual existence of such creatures, the Houses devise a grander solution: to enact the calcification of history themselves and stitch themselves, "or at least their culture", into that very culture, creating a structure that would allow creatures like them to monitor and manipulate time in the rest of the universe. One of the perks of this "bonding" would be "virtual indestructibility" as a species, at the cost of infertility and cultural stagnancy.

Committing to this plan, the Great Houses begin to embed some of their proto-timeships at various strategic points in the "formative future", while building the machine-heart on the Homeworld itself. Later lore also speaks of a single, enormous device, although the Book 's narrative voice is skeptical of those accounts. Eventually, after all is made ready, a ceremony is held in the centre of the machine-heart as the "elite representatives" gather, standing in for their respective Houses, while field agents take their places in their timeships at the other ends of each of the "threads".

This day is also the first day of the first War in Heaven as things "far, far worse" than the possible future species the Houses hoped to erase enter the continuum at the site of the machine-heart, their first, "primal manifestation" destroying the machinery and creating the caldera at the centre of the newborn structure of history. After the end of this war against the Yssgaroth, the caldera became a cornerstone of the Houses' culture, and the only trace of the Yssgaroth's existence the Houses deigned acknowledge, House Paradox's armour notwithstanding. In the era of the second War, it would also become of great strategic importance, being a "prime target" for the enemy.

Faction Paradox Armour
Their intricate bone armour, "part weapon and part carnival costume" is the most infamous "fetish" of Faction Paradox, raising endless questions about whether it was designed for battle, for ritual, or simply to irritate the Great Houses. However, the origin of the bones of the default armour is poorly understood.

They appear to be the skeletons of two-metre-tall humanoids with bloated, bat-like skulls, and the Faction's claim is that they are the skulls of Homeworlders from an alternate timeline where the Houses lost their war against the Yssgaroth. The Houses vigorously deny this, in line with their denial of there being any such thing as alternate timelines, and even some Faction researchers believe that this simple story is incomplete at best.

Indeed, it is known that all the bones used to create the classic suits of armour were sourced from the same place: an "abomination's graveyard" discovered by the Grandfather's four Godfather-lieutenants, likely by stepping through the caldera. The first set of Faction armour was worn by the Grandfather at the Audience of the Ruling Houses, and later lore depicts it as an extremely stylised example of the form, its huge helmet completely covering the Grandfather's head, with each of the Godfather-lieutenants having a similar but subtly different suit of armour.

At any rate, the modern Faction is no stranger to alterations to the basic design. Many lesser Cousins are never issued a full armour, but simply a ceremonial mask. Less radically, Cousins of the Military Wing stationed in the Eleven-Day Empire typically wear a lighter, more combat-ready variant of the armour, which leaves their face exposed and seems to be made from smaller Mal'akh creatures. Some experiment further, with Belial notoriously using the skull of a mammoth for his mask.

Audience of the Ruling Houses
Of the few Audiences of the Ruling Houses held before the War, two involved the Grandfather.

The first is a formality which sees him formally declaring that he is about to found a new House and that new House-Foundations will accordingly be "rooted into the Homeworld's reproductive matrix". The second, on the other hand, four hundred years before the War, was a disciplinary hearing where the Grandfather was called to accounts to answer allegations that House Paradox was carrying out illegal experiments with alter-time structures. Even though he is wearing full Yssgaroth bone armour, "at best a message of defiance, at worst a thinly-veiled threat", he is allowed to walk free. Despite later mythologised accounts suggesting this was because he made some brilliant, mesmerising speech, the Book speculates that he didn't have to say a word: the sheer fact was that no member of the Houses had ever engaged in something so starkly counter-cultural as death-fetishism, and, bereft of any law or precedent to fall back on, the House representatives flatly did not know how to even begin to react, sitting in appalled silence until the Grandfather walked away. As the Book pithily remarks, "House Paradox wouldn't be brought to 'justice' for many years, and by that time the Homeworld would be a very different place".

The Caldera
The caldera, being the site where history "literally began" and the exact centre of the meta-structure of history, is the point where all threads of history converge. During the War, various parties begin to realise that this fact could be exploited. Because the Great Houses are connected to every one of the "threads", it would be possible for anyone with control over the caldera to alter their very identity, down to their history and their language. This drives the Houses to become increasingly paranoid about the possibility of an enemy incursion on the Homeworld, the driving force behind the Nine Homeworlds project.

However, the caldera's strategic position also has its uses. There is at least "one abortive attempt" to introduce "foreign matter" into the caldera to make the Houses stronger. Furthermore, they begin to make increased use of the way that, "at least in theory," machinery connected to the caldera could be used to draw out information from any part of space-time and predict how any given alteration to causality would pan out. It is even theorised that it could be used as an ad hoc communication network, although this is somewhat dubious given that the message would warp history on its way down a "thread".

The Book 's entry on the caldera ends on speculation of what would happen if the War were to take an unexpected turn involving the Homeworld being "removed" from physical reality along with the caldera: it theorises that only non-worlds like the Eleven-Day Empire or Mictlan would be likely to remain unscathed.

The Eleven-Day Empire
James Thomson III visits a location where he has a vision of a London whose sky burns red even though none of it is actually burning. Thomson sees the black silhouettes of buildings such as the Abbey of Westminster and the throne of Parliament, but, when he runs into one of them for shelter, finds that they are insubstantial and realises that they are "the ghosts of buildings each had burnt".

Thomson's summary of these events in his Journals, published in 1905, prefaces the Book's entry on the location itself: the Faction's stronghold known as the Eleven-Day Empire. Its story begins in 1752, a year when Britain is "the most significant nation on the face of the Earth", being, if not necessarily the most powerful country on Earth, at least wildly successful economically, and a model state by the canons of the Age of Reason. Its cultural shift involves industrialisation (one particular pocket watch manufactured in 1752 will one day go on to be used by the Great Houses during the babel project for symbolic reasons), but also the growing conceptualisation of time by the population.

The overall cultural shift ends up calling for an update from the old Julian calendar to the modern Gregorian calendar. Catching up means the country will skip directly from the night of 2 September to the morning 14 September. This causes riots among those in the population who believe that eleven days are genuinely being taken from their lifetime — but despite widespread ridicule, these people have a point. The days do in fact go somewhere: namely, they are ceremonially purchased by Grandfather Paradox from King George II as part of the Gregorian Compact. Although this provides the Faction with a spare bolthole, it is also an experiment to prove that the Grandfather can circumvent the Great Houses' version of seeing time and use the same technique, albeit on a smaller scale, to bring other perspectives on time into reality. Naturally, although he has yet to officially rebel at this point, the Grandfather does not tell the Ruling Houses quite how he achieved this, let alone how to access the Empire.

The resulting alter-space is dubbed, "not without irony", the Eleven-Day Empire. To be able to use it, as they have done by the time of the Book's writing, for "over four hundred years", the Faction "burn" space-time from beyond the borders of London to extend the survival of London itself. The city proves more than sufficient, however, as most of the Faction's field agents never visit the Empire itself, remaining in cabals spread across the Spiral Politic: by and large, only the Mothers and Fathers and their "personal students and attendants" reside in the Empire on a perennial basis, even after the House Military's Second Wave forces more of the elite to take refuge in the Empire than before. Interestingly, the Empire's buildings do not necessarily mimic the buildings of 1752; the Parliament buildings are the post-1832, rebuilt ones, which is, accoridng to Morlock, because the modern buildings "cast longer shadows".

With no means of accessing it known to anyone external to the Faction (the existence of such sites as Fashion Paradox in the real London being widely understood as more of a case of subconscious influence than of literal portals between the two Londons), the Empire remains extremely secure. As of the Book's writing, the only attempt to invade the Empire was the "ill-fated" 1834 Clockwork Ouroboros affair, and the Military Wing's deployment of "armed flyers" to guard the city is widely thought to be a pointless gesture.

Fashion Paradox, London
From its earliest recorded history, the London parish of St. Giles-in-the-Field seems designed to appeal to Faction Paradox sensibilities: first a carnival venue and, later, home to the gallows of St. Giles' Circus and their symbolic Resurrection Gate, it is also where the first victims of the plague are found in 1664. A century later, it is where the Gregorian Compact was signed by agents of House Paradox and agents of George II, bringing the Eleven-Day Empire into existence. It continues to be a site of carnivalesque death thereafter, becoming the location of he "fatal beer-flood of 1818". By the 21st century, the exact location where the Compact was sealed, now located on New Oxford Street between a fantasy bookshop and a marijuana café, an "unlikely memorial" to Faction Paradox, of uncertain origin, has emerged: a "goth, retro and fetishist clothing store" named Fashion Paradox, seemingly by pure coincidence. Its shop window is adorned with "mannequins of indeterminate sex" who are, every Halloween, decorated with skull masks.

Characters

 * Beast of the Hours
 * Belial
 * Devonire
 * Eliza
 * Formosii
 * George II
 * Grandfather Paradox
 * Yssgaroth at the Caldera
 * Godfather Morlock
 * Lord Smoking Mirror
 * Sophocles
 * James Thomson III
 * Lords Twin Leopard
 * The War King
 * Yssgaroth

Who wrote what?
Simon Bucher-Jones, Daniel O'Mahony, Ian McIntire, Mags L. Halliday, Helen Fayle, Philip Purser-Hallard, Kelly Hale, Jonathan Dennis, Mark Clapham, and Lars Pearson all contributed material to the book. Each contributors mostly worked on their stories independently, only discovering Lawrence Miles's added intersections with other stories once the book was released. It was deliberately kept unclear as to which authors contributed which entries, but later releases provided some clues.
 * As editor, Lawrence Miles was responsible not only for writing many entries but also for rewriting and interweaving the other writers' contributions. The "Faction Paradox Family" section was credited to him in the book's notes, and it had been previously released on the Faction Paradox website.
 * Simon Bucher-Jones contributed slightly more than any other writer besides Lawrence Miles. The final edition of The Book of the War included at least one entry by Bucher-Jones for every letter of the alphabet, including "Lords Celestial", which was interrupted by the Shift. Perhaps relatedly, the "Design Specs for Advanced Users" included a "The A-Z of the War" section which featured entries for many concepts also explored in Bucher-Jones' novels The Taking of Planet 5 and The Brakespeare Voyage, such as the Leviathans and Robert Scarratt, who was credited to Bucher-Jones in the acknowledgments of Weapons Grade Snake Oil. The Order of the White Peacock also appeared in The Book of the Enemy and early drafts of The Brakespeare Voyage.
 * Daniel O'Mahony came narrowly in third place for words contributed to the book. He wrote far more for The Book of the War than ended up in the final draft, and Bucher-Jones only overtook him in the final edit. He drew heavily from his rejected BBC Books novel proposals, saying "the entire plot of one outline is embedded in there somewhere, while a lot of the background for another became a major part of the Faction universe." The planet Lethe, mentioned in the entry for the Lethean Campaign, previously appeared in O'Mahony's Doctor Who short story The Parliament of Rats, itself a scene from a BBC Books novel proposal. He would later use babels, Thessalia, and the Order of the Weal in his novel Newtons Sleep. He stated that he had no involvement in Michael Brookhaven's filmography.
 * Ian McIntire introduced Carmen Yeh in his unlicensed short story Schrödinger's Botanist for the 1998 charity anthology Perfect Timing. The related entries were co-written with Mad Norwegian Press CEO Lars Pearson. He also contributed to the entry for the War King, including the detail of the unfolded hypercube on his desk, which was intended as a link to one of his other, ultimately-rejected entries.
 * Mags L. Halliday wrote about Anastasia and the Thirteen-Day Republic. She later used Cousin Octavia in Warring States.
 * Helen Fayle wrote the material about the Mal'akh, the Shelley Cabal, and the Star Chamber. Her fan award-winning The Book of Taliesin fanfiction series was inspired by Alien Bodies and depicted Simon Bucher-Jones' "version of what the 'Enemy' might have been".
 * Philip Purser-Hallard wrote the articles concerning the City of the Saved, which he had originally developed for his ultimately-unproduced Iris Wildthyme novel Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved. He later revisited the City in his novel Of the City of the Saved… and in Obverse Books' City of the Saved anthology series. He also wrote the entry for House Mirraflex, although Miles thoroughly rewrote it in editing. Purser-Hallard commented that he had not written the articles on Wallachia, Michael Brookhaven, Grigori Rasputin, or the Spiral Politic.
 * Kelly Hale, who herself is part Native American, wrote the entries concerning Cousin Belial and the Faction's Remote experiments on Native American warrior tribes. She later returned to Native America and Wounded Knee in Project Thunderbird.
 * Jonathan Dennis, who had previously written the story The Hollywood Life for the 1999 charity anthology Perfect Timing 2, created Faction Hollywood for The Book of the War. However, those entries also included major contributions from at least three other writers, including Lawrence Miles and Simon Bucher-Jones. Dennis also contributed one other full plotline and several miscellaneous entries. He later revisited Faction Hollywood in his stories Remake/Remodel and Hyponormalisation, and he co-write The Brakespeare Voyage with Bucher-Jones.
 * Mark Clapham and Bucher-Jones had previously explored the Celestis in their cowritten Eighth Doctor novel The Taking of Planet 5.

Unincluded entries
The book credits Lance Parkin, David A. McIntee, and Eddie Robson as writers who "wanted to play but whose material didn't quite fit anywhere". Additionally, Simon Bucher-Jones wrote two extra entries, "Protective Neotony" and "Instant Animals", for the proposed CD-ROM expansion of the book; after the cancellation of that project, he published the entries on his blog. Bucher-Jones returned to the concepts from "Protective Neotony" in his 2018 Faction Paradox short story The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale as the "Hausanthropic equations".
 * Parkin's contribution included an entry about his character Mister Saldaamir, who had previously briefly appeared in his novels Beige Planet Mars, The Infinity Doctors, and Father Time. Although it was excluded by Miles because "it wasn't very good", it was later published in the 2003 fanzine Myth Makers 13 and in 2021 as a standalone short story. It mentioned Last Contact, a concept mentioned in several of Parkin's stories connected to the War, including several charity anthology short stories, the unproduced novel pitch Enemy of the Daleks, and his book The Gallifrey Chronicles.
 * McIntee spoke with Lars Pearson about contributing but never actually submitted any material.
 * Robson's five submitted entries were published online by Niki Haringsma in 2017; they told a story about Faction Paradox's Father Katzmary, his "Minimediras Project", and his daughter Tanya Glassman. They also further explored the concept of the Nine Gallifreys and the character of Mother Festen. Robson would later reuse some elements of these ideas in his Bernice Summerfield audios Beyond the Sea and Resurrecting the Past, both of which involved the planet Maximediras.

Continuity

 * A broken generation of renegades was produced some time before the War, attributed to "impurities" in the breeding engines. One of its members, the founder of Faction Paradox, was a member of an old bloodline that was widely considered "eccentric" even before his emergence. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, Crimes Against History)
 * Shortly before the War, failed invasions of the Homeworld by members of the lesser species showed that the ceremonial constabularies were useless against any real threats. (TV: The Invasion of Time, AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element)
 * Forced-matter shells were created around node points in the meta-structure of time that could serve as portals into the Spiral Yssgaroth. (PROSE: Interference)
 * It is claimed that prior to the anchoring of the thread, the Doctor, "early deep-time explorations performed by the Houses' pioneers had shown that there were things at work in the formative future, things which simply couldn't be classified or even monitored by the Houses' own technology". The Doctor described ancient Gallifreyan Patience's husband as "a pioneer and leader among [the Doctor's] people, one of the first Gallifreyans to enter the Time Vortex after it was discovered", who "led an expedition into deep time", returning with "travellers' tales of monsters and lost civilisations". (PROSE: Cold Fusion) In fact, the First Doctor himself claimed in similar terms to have once been a "pioneer" among "[his] own people", a long time prior to his involvement in the Thal-Dalek battle. (TV: The Daleks)
 * The entry on the anchoring of the thread acknowledges that "without doubt", it involved an actual "ceremony, (…) one great symbolic moment when the mechanisms locked into place and all the fragments of history were connected", with "elite representatives" gathered in the centre of the machine-heart. COMIC: The Final Chapter depicted such an event, with Rassilon ceremonially activating the Eye of Harmony using the Great Key of Rassilon as a small grouping of other early Time Lords stood in line around him.
 * Multiple Homeworlds were constructed during the War. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, The Taking of Planet 5, The Shadows of Avalon)
 * Connected to the caldera is a well-defended "null-zone" filled with machinery for drawing out data from across time and space. Because it is also the only place where timeships can be constructed, this area is often referred to as a "kind of 'womb'": the Matrix. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)
 * The Shift was a liquid life-form before it was transformed into a shift; it then received the Mark of Indenture and was enslaved to the Celestis. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)
 * An interventionist member of the Great Houses was believed to have died as the fighting began on Dronid. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)
 * Homeworld weapons like babels and casts were used on the planet Lethe. (PROSE: The Parliament of Rats)
 * Dronid was the chosen homeworld of the renegade Presidency. (TV: Shada, PROSE: Alien Bodies)
 * The Homeworld was plunged into crisis by the rise to power of a great Imperator, Morbius. (TV: The Brain of Morbius)
 * Chris Cwej was recruited as an agent of the Great Houses. (PROSE: Dead Romance)
 * A Homeworld colony was located on Simia KK98. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, Dead Romance)
 * Several groups of Gallifreyans left Gallifrey during or following Rassilon's rise to power. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Interference)
 * The Faction Paradox created the Remote on Ordifica. They reproduce through Remembrance Tanks. (PROSE: Interference)
 * Grandfather Paradox was imprisoned in the Great Houses' prison. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet, Interference)
 * House Mirraflex was an illustrious Great House. (AUDIO: The Conscript)
 * Investigator One was the Celestis' head field agent. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5)
 * The Homeworld was ruled by six ruling Houses. (TV: The Deadly Assassin, PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
 * Compassion was the first and only 102-form timeship. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)
 * The Homeworld is ruled by Great Houses. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)
 * House Lolita is an up-and-coming force in the War. (PROSE: Toy Story)
 * The Babewyn are connected to humanity's noosphere. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
 * The frontier in time exists beyond the edge of the Great Houses' noosphere in the posthuman era. (PROSE: Frontios)
 * An Arcadian faction of self-named "guardians" was mainly composed of survivors from Earth who established a new home on the nearest Earth-like world. (TV: The Ark)
 * The leader of the Homeworld during the War used the title War King. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)
 * The Star Chamber ran secret operations in Great Britain and around the world. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
 * The House of Dvora was one of Gallifrey's Great Houses. (AUDIO: Panacea)
 * The Yssgaroth fought a war with the Great Houses at the beginning of history. (PROSE: The Pit, TV: State of Decay)
 * Stendec wanted to put a menagerie in the Eleven-Day Empire's version of the building on the Strand which housed a zoo in the 18th century and famously had an elephant winched to one of its higher stories. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)