postmodum

Postmodum is post plus modo hardened into a single adverb: afterwards, presently, later on. Postmodo is the same word with the older ending, and both spellings turn up in the same manuscripts, sometimes on the same page. It governs nothing and nothing governs it.

It is late and prosaic. Livy uses it, Cicero does not, and chronicle Latin leans on it constantly to move a narrative forward a step without committing to how far. Compare its neighbours: postea is the neutral "afterwards", mox promises that the next thing comes soon, and deinde puts events in a queue. Postmodum sits between them, vaguer than mox and a shade more formal than postea, which is exactly why a chronicler with an unreliable chronology reaches for it.