The world most people know is only part of the truth. Behind ordinary history runs a hidden conflict — a struggle that has lasted for centuries between those who protect the balance of the world and those who would seize ancient powers for domination. It is fought not with open armies in every generation, but in forgotten places, through quiet alliances, and across the long memory of the land itself. The survival of old knowledge, the protection of the Veil between the mortal world and the realms of the sithichean, and the fate of those connected to the old powers all hang in the balance.

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     If the forces that keep the balance fail, history itself can be rewritten, ancient evils can return, and the connection between humanity and the natural world can be permanently altered.

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The Chronology of the War

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The Deep Roots

     Long before written records, the land itself held memory. Arch-Druids such as Brandubh tended the sacred groves and the living balance between worlds. The sithichean were already ancient then — demanding, volatile, and bound by bargains older than kingdoms. The first great workings sought neither conquest nor peace, but simply to keep the Veil intact. Those early guardians understood a truth later generations would have to relearn: every imbalance feeds the slow unravelling that would one day be called the Hollowing.

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The Pictish Age and the Making of a Druid

     In the year 1056, a boy named Nechtan was born at Dunnichen. Under Brandubh’s teaching, he learned the discipline of earth-binding, the true cost of every working, and the hard lesson that power without restraint destroys the very thing it claims to protect. The seeds of both his strength and his greatest enemy were already present in those years.

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The Dunnichen Confrontation

     The long personal war properly begins in the thirteenth century. Diarmad Mag Uidhir, ambitious and brilliant, attempted a ritual at the Dunnichen ground meant to bind the sithichean as his eternal army and tear open the Veil for dominion. The woman he intended as his queen chose Nechtan instead. In the conflict that followed, Nechtan thwarted the working and Mag Uidhir fell into shadow, nursing a hatred that would span eight centuries. From that night, the Hollowing ceased to be a distant threat and became a deliberate campaign.

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The Shadow Centuries

     While ordinary history marched on, Mag Uidhir rebuilt in the dark. He learned to thin the Veil by inches, to unwrite the weak and the unlucky, and to gather broken or power-hungry allies. Nechtan endured, protected by the living Philosopher’s Stone fused into his skin and bone, watching the world change while the same enemy circled him across generations. The war remained largely invisible to the mortal world — fought in quiet disappearances, cream envelopes, and the slow erosion of the barrier between realms.

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An Earlier Thread

     In the centuries that followed, other Druids and other circles found themselves drawn into the same long struggle. One such strand is remembered as the Enchanted Echoes — an earlier campaign of Highland trial, ancient bargains, and the same underlying war against those who would rather dominate the Veil than defend it. These stories do not centre on Nechtan, yet they belong to the same hidden history.

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The Modern Circle Forms

     By the early twenty-first century Nechtan Cameron had settled into a quiet existence in Edinburgh, operating what looked like a small detective agency from the stone building at 1 Milton St. Around the scarred oak table a new circle gathered: a fierce Irish woman carrying dormant power, a young apprentice still learning both magick and humour, a tech-minded outsider who would discover that science has limits, and others who chose family over safety. For a time the war stayed at the edges. Then the Hollowing began to accelerate.

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The Present War

     What readers encounter in Cage of the Pawn and the books that follow is the latest and most open phase of the ancient conflict. The Hollowing is no longer a slow erosion; it is an active campaign. The circle is tested by sacrifice, betrayal, and the full weight of Mag Uidhir’s centuries-old grudge. The final confrontations of this phase decide whether the Veil will hold or whether the long war will finally break into the open world.

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     The stones remember every name. The wind carries every oath. And the circle, smaller and scarred though it may become, still answers the same quiet command that has outlasted kings and centuries: Keep going.