A CORIOLIS CALENDAR
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 because for some systems it may have been one hundred orbits, for others it might have felt like 300, or even, for one or two planets, something like just one long orbit.
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. And 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 its star, and on page 248, we discover that is 336 days, so Kua’s year is slightly shorter than ours on old Al-Ardha. But by remarkable coincidence, 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.
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 it is only divisible by itself and one. So it does not quickly suggest how long a week might be, but if one of those 37 days is an “extended rest” which the core book mentions (but as explained below this may be a mistranslation from Zeni), then 36 is divisible, not by seven, but by three, six or nine.
For this calendar we have chosen 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, this calendar is inspired by the four transformations (Emissary Lost: Mercy of the Icons p46). The four transformations are represented by four things that were important to many Firstcome cultures, which the Zenithians adopted without necessarily realising their full meaning. 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 the 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, the idea of an “extended rest” does not quite sit true in the Third Horizon. Instead the extra day in every segment is “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 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 it’s also a day when darker debts are repaid. Perhaps it’s a day when those who have crossed powerful people hide in fear - a day for assassinations.
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