Inspired by the article below, John Salquist and I created a beautiful calendar which is available in PDF format from the Free League Workshop.
In any space-travel setting, there are going to be local calendars based on local orbits. A 24 hour day means little if your world spins around in nine hours, or 37.74 hours. We know as well that in the Long Night, when the third horizon cultures rejected portal travel and turned in on themselves, local calendars would have become even more entrenched. We are not entirely sure how long the Long Night lasted, and that’s partly because for some systems it may have been one hundred years, for others it might have felt like 300, or even, for one to two, something like one long year.
But with the coming of the Zenith, and the Consortium’s design to rebuild communication and trade across the Horizon, a shared standard was required. That standard would, of course, have been based on the movement of the planet that the Zenithians decided was their new home. On page 232 of the core book, we are told that the Coriolis Cycle is based on the time taken for the planet Kua to orbit it’s star, and on page 248, we discover that is 336 days, so Kua’s year is slightly short than ours on old Al-Ardha. But remarkably Kua’s day is exactly the same length as ours, 24 hours!* We are also told that each year or Coriolis Cycle (CC), is divided into nine months or Segments as they are called, each one named for one of the icons. Each segment is 37 days long. So that accounts for 333 days. The three remaining days are annual holidays: The Founding; the Cyclade and the Pilgrimaria.
So we know the length of the year, and the length of the months, we know the hours of the day, but not the days of the week. 37 is a prime number, which means that its only divisible by itself and one. So it does not quickly suggest how long a week might be… but if we go with the 37th day being an “extended rest” which the core book mentions, then 36 is divisible, not by seven, but by six and nine.
So this calendar works on a nine day week, or Novena. The word Novena comes from the latin, not middle eastern tradition, but it means “nine days of devotion” so it feels like a good fit for the theme. Nine days of course reflect the nine icons. But rather than name the days, as well as the segments, after the Icons I was inspired by the four transformations mentioned in Mercy of the Icons. The four transformations are represented by four things that are important to many Firstcome cultures, which I am sure the Zenithians would adopt without necessarily realising what they mean. So rather than name the days, in this calendar the weeks are named – the Novena of Grain, the Novena of Water, the Novena of Light and the Novena of Incense and they days numbered, so you might say “the second day of water, segment of the Deckhand”, or write “2 water Deckhand” or abbreviate it “2wDec.” In notation the Segments are capitalised because they are Icons and the novenas are often written in lower case because they are mundane.
Given that our day of rest on old Al-Ardha is actually a day of worship in a monotheistic culture, I don’t think the idea of an “extended rest” quite works. Instead the extra day in every segment “the day of settlement” or “the day of accounting”, when ship loan payments are made, and other bills are paid, no matter when during the segment they they were incurred. Maybe it is a day when no trade takes place and no work (other than accounting) is done, because people are rushing around paying what’s owed. Maybe its also a day when darker debts are repaid. Perhaps its a day when those who have crossed powerful people hide in fear – a day for assassinations.
For the calendar we created, I also wrote nine short parables, and attributed them to the mysterious Storyteller of Dabaran:
No one really knows if Fadma al Kamath, the Storyteller of Dabaran ever really existed. The collection of parables and homilies which is attributed to her, may not even have been written by one person. They are it seems, somewhat impolite about every system’s culture other than that of Dabaran which is held always in high praise. This alone suggests that the stories come from one place, if not one writer. There are versions the parables in pre-Zenithian literature, but the translations included in this calendar appear to be more modern as some of them refer to Zenithian institutions.
*There is some discrepancy on this detail. It is clear that the day on Coriolis lasts 24 hours (four six hour shifts), but according to planetary data, Kua’s day is 26 hours. Perhaps this is why most business is conducted in “shifts” rather than hours.
fictionsuit.org 