Timekeeping in Magicians' End
Prior to the events of the Iceholt Betrayal the realm of Magicians' End was traditionally called Trinity Moon, reflecting the astronomically distinct features of the system. This older name still perists in the name of the ancient calendar for the realm, which is called "Trinity Moon Standard". The calendar, which has been used now for almost twenty thousand years with no significant alterations, was constructed by the mystical mathematical and astronomical cult known as the Way of Trinity Moon.
Each day on Magicians' End is divided into twenty eight time periods known as "bells". The first bell begins at midnight and in cities and other places were public timekeeping is required, it is marked by the stroke of a single bell. The signifier for each subsequent bell adds another stroke until midday, when clocks reset to a count of one again. Audible cues from clocks are therefore a marker of the start of the named "bell" and it is simply expected that fourteen is added to the afternoon series. In writing and in spoken language, times are always refered to by their absolute number e.g. the 21st bell, which is marked by clocks striking seven times (21 minus 14) to indicate the start of a bell in late afternoon/early evening.
Bells are divided into sixty "bars", each of which is divided into sixty "beats". These three timekeeping units are therefore analogous to the hour, minute and second as used on Earth Zero. However a bell is a little shorter than an hour on Earth Zero, by about five minutes, making the correponding subdivisions of bars and beats also shorter than minutes and seconds. From this, we can also see that the full day of 28 bells is a little less than 26 hours.
There are two hundred and twenty four days in a year, which means that the total duration is close to two thirds of the length of a year on Earth Zero.
The world is a little smaller than Earth Zero with lower gravity and it orbits somewhat closer to a slightly smaller star with the result that temperature and climatic features are in a broadly similar range.
Magicians' End is not a moon itself but it has three significant moons which orbit around it (hence the old name of Trinity Moon). The moons are co-planar in Laplace Resonance, and are called Lumina, Celestria and Triquetra with respective orbital periods of twenty one days, forty two days and eighty four days.
Lumina is the largest and closest of the satellites and is quite close to the Roche Limit. It can look spectacularly large in the sky, even by the standards of Earth Zero or The World Of The Long Sleep, two other realms known to have impressive moons. Celestria is smaller and with a dark reddish hue, whilst Triquetra being the smallest and furthest away is still large enough to show as a distinct disc with a faintly pale lilac shade.
About every one hundred years or so, the moons align with the sun, with one another and with the other major planets in the system in such a way as to produce a Super Conjunction, an eclipse event which generates spectacular ocean tides.
Magicians' End uses a seven day week, with the names of the weekdays deriving from the sun, shortened versions of the names of the three planetry moons, the two brightest and closest neighbouring planets and the brightest star. The year is divided into ten months, which take the names of gods and goddesses from the pantheon of the Old Gods. Eight of these months have twenty one days but the fifth and sixth months, Glim and Tivith, have an extra week to make twenty eight. Minor adjustments in the form of leap days are added to the last day of the year to keep the solar year aligned with the months but these are only required once in a century.
In the modern world, all years are counted relative to the time of the Planar Conformation, which had such a dramatic effect on Magicians' End. Thus a year is refered to by contemporary historians as some given number BPC (before the planar conformation) or APC (after the planar conformation). In all the writing recorded here, this standard has been used for the convenience of the reader and because it has become nearly universal now. Obviously, however, in the ages before the planar conformation and indeed in some places and for some later times, there were differing ways of denoting the count of the years, whether that was from the foundation of the Old Pale Empire, the moment of the Sundering, the formation of the Kingdom of Myruth, or some other even earlier scheme. There is no need to trouble with any such date conversions in these accounts.
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