The Lunar Eclipse

Every fifty-six years*, the moon Alfhen passes in front of the moon Svarhen and causes a total eclipse. This is the most significant cultural event and the highest holy day of jinn society across the world.

History

At the end of the Great Cataclysm, with the tidal disaster rocking Aerit and destroying Leamia, the gods Alfhen and Svarhen took what was left of their corporal powers and created two moons in orbit around Aerit. These moons stabilized the tides and prevented worldwide catastrophe, but their creation was the end of the power Alfhen and Svarhen had already begun to pass on to their progeny. With this act, they gave up their being to the universe and became infinite and void. The first eclipse occurred about twenty years after the moons first appeared. At that time, Zakhara and her people were only just preparing to flee Leamia, and they marked the occasion as a final portent that they should migrate. It was not much cause of celebration. In the decades following, however, after establishing a new home and slowly growing stronger once again, Zakhara held a celebration under the third such eclipse, shortly before her death. It was a time of tentative elation, but one that codified the event as a religious holiday for the jinn and the svartali who were with Zakhara. Though Zakhara died after the third eclipse, the scholars of the svartali and the jinn quickly determined the cycle by which the moons returned to their eclipse positions. With this in mind, some of the religious leaders re-codified their worship of Alfhen into a new church called "Luminism," which began to revere the moon as Alfhen's aspect. Neither jinn nor even svartali understood fully what Alfhen and Svarhen had done, so the truth became obscured in myth rather faster than usual. Traditions around the holiday began to form that revered both the gods and Zakhara herself. Over the millennia, while jinn and svartali drifted from the original understandings of this holiday and the celestial realities that framed it, the Eclipse remained the most significant holy day to both races. Humans, who only ever experienced one in their lifetimes,

Primary Related Location

Zakhara

Important Locations

Related Organizations