Calendar System

Abrecis used a solar year-based calendar that incorporated lunar cycles as a method of naming years.

Years

The year on Abrecis was 510 days long.

Seasonal changes

Seasons worked differently depending on the part of the world and the environmental era. However, Abrecis did not experience as much axial tilt as earth, so seasons were not that different from each other, even far from the equator.

Reckoning

2 different calendars were primarily used on Abrecis. Before the anabatic era, years were tracked relative the prophesied year, or 0 PY. This was a count-down to Caer's Mistake, which was prophesied to occur in 23,000 years. Positive numbers were further in the past, and after 0 PY the year numbers were negative, though they were often written as positive if the context made it clear that the year was after Caer's Mistake. Later, years were tracked relative to Obsidis' apotheosis, which occurred in 0 OA. OA originally referred to Obsidian Anabasis, but was commonly thought to be an acronym for Obsidian Age.

Lunar Cycles

The 2 moons, Nyvol and Shaj, had predictable precessions in sync with Abrecis' orbit around the sun. Nyvol completed a precession every 7 years, and Shaj completed a precession every 3 years, causing them both to sync up every 21 years. This 21-year cycle was called a moonage (with -age pronounced like wreckage, not like age).

The 7 years of Nyvol's cycle were each a micro-parable from Abrecian mythology. Each of these would usually involve 3 characters, and Shaj's current place in its cycle would indicate which one is the one the year is "focused" on, giving each year in a moonage a unique name.

  1. A husband (1) and wife (2) try to conceive children, but they are unsuccessful. They seek the help of a physician (3), who tells them they must sail to a new land in order to bear children, but the wife must go first with 8 other women, then the man must follow 3 years later with 8 other men. These 16 build a new community.
  2. A traveler (1) encounters a tortoise (2) on its back. The tortoise cries for help, asking to be flipped over. The traveler helps the tortoise, but a bandit (3) hiding in a hollow beneath the tortoise leaps out and kills the traveler.
  3. A mother (1) and daughter (2) live together, both practitioners of magic. The mother instructs her daughter to only use magic in small amounts at a time, but the daughter decides to cast larger and larger spells. Desiring a lover (3), she creates one with magic. The cost of creating a sapient being, however, is great, and leaves the soil barren for miles and miles around where they live. The mother weeps, and the daughter asks who she is, and why she is crying.
  4. A mage (1) views Kwajey through a telescope. He wishes to travel there, and informs his partner (2) that he wishes to travel there, but is met with the response that Abrecis is the extent of the domain of mortals. He constructs a spell to teleport there anyway, and never returns. An investigator (3) attempting to decipher the mage's research disappears while doing so.
  5. A sailor (1) retires to the countryside with her wife (2), but believes she can hear the ocean calling her back. One night, she is visited in her dreams by a spirit of the sea (3), beseeching her to return. Her wife wakes up alone, the bed soaked in saltwater.
  6. An elder mage (1) forbids his students from wearing or carrying anything metal, especially while casting spells. One student (2) disobeys, wearing a bronze medallion inscribed with a holy symbol on a necklace. After doing so for several years, she wakes in the middle of the night to find that the medallion is burning hot, and has branded her chest with the holy symbol. She rips it off, then buries it outside. Months later, while gardening, another student (3) finds the disturbed soil and digs up the medallion. When he touches it, it burns him.
  7. A great evil seeped into the world. Understanding it only as power, a kind mage (1) used it to perform good deeds, and a cruel mage (2) used it for ill. They both desired the same man (3) as a partner, and rather than let him make a choice, they agreed to kill him.

Thus, the 21-year cycle looks like this:

  1. Loyal Husband
  2. Deceitful Tortoise
  3. Synthetic Lover
  4. Doomed Mage
  5. Sailor's Widow
  6. Burned Gardener
  7. Corrupted Benevolence
  8. Leading Wife
  9. Hidden Killer
  10. Forgotten Mother
  11. Abandoned Partner
  12. Saltwater Spirit
  13. Elder Mage
  14. Empowered Cruelty
  15. Foresighted Physician
  16. Betrayed Traveler
  17. Defiant Daughter
  18. Lost Investigator
  19. Haunted Sailor
  20. Branded Student
  21. Doomed Lover

Every year of the doomed lover, Shaj fully eclipsed Nyvol mid-year. Every 19 moonages, Shaj fully eclipsed both Nyvol and the sun over the peak of creation, in the mountains of Lothia.