Calendar
A year on Anarand’aris follows a perpetual cycle that has remained unchanged since the creation of the world. It comprises 384 days spread over 24 months, with each month including exactly 16 days. The months are grouped into 8 seasons according to the weather they carry with them. The year begins on the first day of the month of Kanitat and is called Year’s Break.
Kanitat
The first month of the year, Kanitat, is almost halfway between the two Rainy Seasons. Storms have lessened in frequency and strength, but the weather continues to be wet, cool, and very unpleasant for both travel and outdoor work.
Anarand’aris is a world with two suns—Niatema, a white giant, and Kalis, a small red dwarf. Besides them, there are also two large moons—the twins Ria and Tot. Ria is also called the bright moon because it emits its own cold, albeit very faint, light. Unlike her sister, Tot is also called the dark moon, as she has the unusual ability to absorb all natural light from the world.
In Anarand’aris, there is no true sunrise and sunset of the celestial bodies, as they are not physical moving objects, but natural phenomena specific to the Blossom. Instead, they appear and disappear from the sky in accordance with certain natural laws. In fact, in the cycle of a year, Kalis is the only one of the Anarand’aris celestial bodies that changes its apparent position relative to the world. During the two Sunny Seasons, the little red sun nearly doubles in brightness, and during these periods its disk visibly enlarges. Then the temperatures in Anarand’aris rise noticeably. The opposite effect is seen during the significantly shorter Icy Season, when Kalis’s reduced brightness turns it into a small red star in the sky, and for a short time Niatema remains the only sun on this otherwise warm world.
Day & Night Cycle
On Anarand’aris, the day has sixteen partitions, equally split between day and night. One partition is equal to a little more than one Terran hour and comprises eight segments. Each segment comprises sixteen minutes, which are just over half the length of the Terran ones. The minute is the smallest unit of time used in modern Anarand.
Niatema
Niatema is the great white sun of Anarand'aris, primary source of heat and light.
The day in Anarand’aris begins with the first and ends with the eighth partition, but in reality Niatema begins to appear approximately one segment later and begins to disappear just as early. Kalis, by contrast, is in heaven for more than ten partitions, appearing sometime between the middle of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth partition, depending on the season, and disappearing somewhere between the end of the ninth and the middle of the tenth partition. Nevertheless, its light is so weak in itself that the period from the ninth to the sixteenth partition inclusive is considered night time.
Ria is in the sky throughout the night, but like the white sun, it appears one segment later and disappears one segment earlier. This is the cause of a peculiar natural phenomenon at the boundary between day and night, called Bloody Dusk and Bloody Dawn. For two full segments, the only visible celestial body is Kalis, and Anarand’aris is plunged into a crimson twilight caused by its dim red light.
Tot, in turn, appears in the sky during the twelfth and thirteenth partitions of the night, and then the world is plunged into pitch darkness. This period is called the Dark, and until Tot is gone, the inhabitants of Anarand usually avoid doing anything in the open, because even artificial light seems many times weaker.