Player-submitted events organized by era. Each event is outlined in the color of the player who submitted it.
Every world keeps the same year. Three hundred and sixty-five days of twenty-four hours, the same everywhere, and it is not a claim about the sky. Yalos goes round the Fragment in exactly that time, and every other world’s calendar is Yalos’s calendar carried outward by traffic, which is why a Mournite is five years old for every one lap their world makes.
The count is a physical object. The Grand Guilds Confederation keeps it in the Day-Book at Yalos: one line a day, the day’s number and the hand that wrote it, and the figure goes out on the packet ships with the price lists. A volume lasts about forty years. The current one is the twenty-second. The eighth is the earliest the hall can put on a table, and the count is older than the first. Ask a clerk what became of the volumes before the eighth and you are told, without embarrassment, that the number is the record and the book is only where it is written down.
The year divides thirteen ways. Thirteen months of twenty-eight days, four weeks to each, none of them longer or shorter than another. The Concord numbers its months and does not name them: First Month through Thirteenth. Worlds with their own names keep them alongside the numbers rather than instead, so a Fadali temple month is the Concord’s Sixth with a god’s name on it, and a Peth factor writing to a Yalos house writes the number. A bill dated in the Sowing is a bill the Guild courts have nothing to say about.
| Month | Days of the year | Quarter opening |
|---|---|---|
| First Month | 1–28 | Quarter I opens on the 1st |
| Second Month | 29–56 | · |
| Third Month | 57–84 | · |
| Fourth Month | 85–112 | Quarter II opens on the 8th |
| Fifth Month | 113–140 | · |
| Sixth Month | 141–168 | · |
| Seventh Month | 169–196 | Quarter III opens on the 15th |
| Eighth Month | 197–224 | · |
| Ninth Month | 225–252 | · |
| Tenth Month | 253–280 | Quarter IV opens on the 22nd |
| Eleventh Month | 281–308 | · |
| Twelfth Month | 309–336 | · |
| Thirteenth Month | 337–364 | · |
| Stillday | 365 | Outside every month, week and quarter |
Seven days to a week, fifty-two weeks to the year, and a date’s day of the week never moves. The first of any month is a first-day. The seventh is Settling in Yalos usage: accounts close, the assay houses stamp nothing, and a debt not called by dusk waits a week. Settling falls on the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th of every month and on no other date, which is how a merchant dates a bill four months out and knows what day of the week it lands on.
The quarter is where the arithmetic stops being obliging. A quarter is ninety-one days, which is thirteen weeks exactly and three and a quarter months. The Confederation audits by the quarter. The temples observe by the month. The two agree on the first day of the year and on nothing after it, because the quarters open on the 1st of the First Month, the 8th of the Fourth, the 15th of the Seventh and the 22nd of the Tenth. Eight hundred years of correspondence on the subject is shelved at the hall on Yalos. The Confederation has not moved, on the stated grounds that thirteen weeks is thirteen weeks.
Thirteen months of twenty-eight leave one day over. It is the last day of the year, it belongs to no month and no week, and it is called Stillday.
Nothing is dated to it. A contract signed on Stillday is unenforceable at Yalos. A birth on Stillday is registered to the first of the following year. A Guild court asked to hear a matter that happened on Stillday hears it as having happened the day before or the day after, whichever the claimant argues for first. That is the use of it. The one day the count does not spend is the day the count cannot drift, and so the calendar has never needed a correction, an astronomer, or an argument about where to put one.
Hulls do not observe it. A ship’s log has no room for a day that is not there, so void crews number Stillday and work it, and a voyage that crosses the turn of the year comes into Yalos one day longer than the port will admit a voyage can be. The Confederation has been asked to reconcile the two records twice. It has minuted both requests.
The site stores a day number. This is what a character says out loud.
Every date on this page is written Era, Year, Day (E9 Y1 D164) because that is what the timeline stores and what store pricing reads. To say it in world:
You can date an event to any day from 1 to 365. If you date one to 365, the banner above reads Stillday, and in the fiction no Guild instrument signed that day is worth the paper.