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In the Shadow of the Dragons
The Dragon Lords
Time -- Calendar
Small Scale
On the very small scale, time is measured like we do, with days broken up into hours. The Children of Daela do not have many mechanical devices, so the position of the sun or moon, read directly or through a sundial, provides the most accurate time information they have for most purposes. A day is divided into twenty-four hours. I try to be careful not to refer to minutes or seconds in the books since the accuracy of such notions is questionable without the rare mechanical device. If I slip, one can assume I mean them in the usual sense.
Medium Scale
The mid-scale time is where most of the unusual terms and descriptions come from. This is mostly due to differences in Astronomy. This story is not taking place on Earth, so there is not one moon, but three. The closest, and apparently the largest, is Kallia. The second moon is Aleris, larger in reality, but further away so it appears smaller in the sky. The third is Ledh, which is quite small. It takes Kallia 26 days to make one rotation and go through a complete cycle of phases, and so this is the length of a kalliad. A year is the standard 365 days, giving fourteen kalliads per year, with one extra day, called the Festival. The Festival occurs between the ninth and tenth kalliads. The Children of Daela are competent observational astronomers, and so they recognize the problem that the solar calendar does not divide up into whole numbered days. When days are added, they extend the length of the Festival. It is usually up to the Dnalla to make recommendations for adjustments to the calendar to the Council.
Because a kalliad is only 26 days, each phase of Kallia is only 6-1/2 days, giving rise to the equivalent term for a "week", which is merely 'phase'. A single phase may refer accurately to either six or seven days, but two phases refer to precisely thirteen days, rather like the British fortnight. There are exactly four phases in each kalliad. While technically a 'phase' might refer also to any of the other moons as well, which have differing phase lengths, this is typically only done for reasons of secrecy.
Large Scale
The first of the regular large-scale time features is the hundred-year festival. This is especially important for the Children of Daela, and it's celebrated in Gift. This is a celestial alignment of all three of the moons being full moons at the same time. This occurs precisely once every one hundred years. It has been doing so for some time, but as Dagnan observes in Gift, the moons are slowly drifting out of this pattern. We do not know if they will simply all come to full at longer periods, or if it will cease altogether.
There is also the matter of the calendar. The Children of Daela, by this time, use a calendar whose years are abbreviated S.Rh. This stands for 'year of the exile', or in High Daela, sagda rhallaen, the abbreviation is pronounced "Seth Rhal", using the letters from the High Daelan alphabet. See Brief History of Taera for more information on how this calendar was begun.
In addition to this, there is another dating system in use connected to the Children of Daela which will be encountered in later books, and probably at some point in the backstory here. This is the y'Daela imn calendar. This calendar goes back to the founding of the Children of Daela's original homeland. It has been running 3743 years longer, however. Other basic features mentioned above remain the same. Any events which occurred prior to the creation of this calendar remain undated, and are mostly lost in the mists of myth.
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Last updated: 2005 August 23