Dear god what have I done this time...
Ladies, gentlemen, and those beyond the binary, welcome to what I hope will be a tie-together for everything in The Only Option by @corruptapostasy. This will be a veritable āTheory of Everythingā as far as TOO is concerned, so fair warning, this post will be a very, very long one.
Brief terminology section: The Wyrm (The Pale Kingās previous incarnation)=TW; The Pale King=TPK/PK; The White Lady=TWL/WL; The Nightmare King=NK; The Shade Lord=SL; a specific incarnation of the Nightmare King=NK#x
Now letās get to it, starting with a timeline, numbered and justified later. For the sake of simplicity, letās mark the events of TOO as time 0. m. = months n = an unknown number of something; default to years; any repeats of n will be called n1, n2, n3,ā¦
1. -2,000,000++ years : The Fundament and The Radiance meet The Wyrm.
2. -2,000,000+ years : The Fundament makes a deal with The Shade Lord and begins the Ritual Cycle
3. -2,000,000+ to -2,000+ years : The Nightmare Kingās reincarnations live and die; many end up fighting The Radiance. NK#137 is in some way scarred, traumatized, or otherwise harmed by The Radianceās mind manipulation. NK#452 wages wars and desecrates corpses.
4. -2,000+ years : Enkay convinces The Wyrm to reincarnate as The Pale King
5. -2,000+ to -1,000+ years : Enkay dies, The Radiance dies, Lurien gets his scars, Grimm starts his rampage, and Hallownest is created
6. 0 : The Infection appears in Hallownest
7. ? days : PK summons Grimm
8. +2m. : The Teacherās Archives flood; The Grimm Troupe is spotted by Lurien and visited by PK, WL, and others;
9. +n years : Ghost completes The Ritual (and, assumably, defeats The Radiance in some manner)
Justification:
1. The Fundament says he met the Wyrm in 8; if The Fundament existed, it was before that deal with SL; The Radiance says that the two promised to stick together (and theyāre siblings), so itās safe to assume they met the Wyrm together and were close with him.
2. The Fundament made a deal with SL; he says it himself in 8; the word āmillionsā is used, so it is plural
3. Stated by The Fundament in the same conversation
4. PK is older than Grimm, and Grimm is said to be āonly a few thousand years oldā, so PK must be multiple thousands of years old
5. PK and WL say that the City of tears was built a thousand years ago, which had to have been after Hallownestās creation; therefore, since the last event we have is PKās birth, all of those other events must have happened
6, 7, 8. Thatās a fact
9. Here we goā¦ Grimmās tapestry in Chapter 7 is described with three circles; the first has SLās face, the second has a āstrange, horned faceā, and the third has āthe image of the Grimmchild wreathed in flames, eyes filled in with red.ā Now, based on the fact that the āstrange, horned faceā is next to the Grimmchildās, it can be inferred that the individual has some close relation to the Ritual, specifically the Grimmchild. In addition, PK describes the face as āstrangeā, implying that he hasnāt seen it before. So, it is someone close to the Ritual, specifically the Grimmchild, more specifically the Grimmchild with red eyes and red flames around them, but PK doesnāt know them. Ghost would make complete sense; any other potential candidates are either known by PK, unrelated to the Ritual, or lack horns. Not to mention the red eyes and flames of the Grimmchild correlate with actions in-game.
