| “ | Cry, Brethren, for the Betrayer is Come. Your Hands will be Crippled, and you will Perish as the Wretched Outcast in the Bleak Unwritten. And you will know the face of the Destroyer. | ” |
| — The Prophecitus[1] | ||
The Dark Age refers to three periods of great dread, leading up to the dissolution of all Glyph magic at the conclusion of Thief: Deadly Shadows.
The Dark Ages[]
The First Dark Age was described as a time when The Trickster would return and tip the balance of the civilization back towards savagery as charted in Thief: The Dark Project.
The Second was when the Mechanists, an offshoot from the Order of the Hammer, stood in full force behind the mad prophet Karras and shifted balance again. This was charted in Thief II: The Metal Age.
The third had the Keeper's themselves who lose balance and ended up with the Glyph's destruction as charted in Thief: Deadly Shadows.
The Unwritten Times[]
Because the prophesies do not extend past this point, the Keepers refer to everything that follows as the Unwritten Times.[2][3]
Notes[]
- Each time, the 'True Keeper' was the one that helped overcome the dark age.[4][5]