It’s Sometimes Darkest Before The Dawn

For the most part, it doesn’t matter when you travel to see any of these by either the galactic or the local calendar. The Twin Worlds, the Shells of Thalíär, and the rest offer their spectacle to the curious eye at any time. Eliéra is the exception that proves this rule. You should visit Eliéra during its summer months, and preferably as close to midsummer as can be arranged, because that is when the Eliéran sunset is at its most spectacular.

The binary sunset of the Lumenna-Súnáris system is not in itself particularly spectacular; after all, binary – or higher-order – star systems are common in the inhabited galaxy, and indeed, many colonies are themselves located upon planets of binary systems. Everyone’s seen a binary sunset.

Eliéra’s, however, is unique, due to the combination of the unique parameters of its system, the width of the flat world, and the system its Precursor builders set up to provide it with its day-night cycle. During the months of high summer, the suns rise and fall in antiphase. As Lumenna (the system primary) sets, the full glory of the star-lit dusk appears for a matter of minutes, only, before distant Súnáris rises pale and wan, ushering in a faintly red-tinted twilight in which the stars fade, but do not vanish – until the morning, when Súnáris sets again, giving a dawn, too, of darkness and stars before the full light of day once more. This dual “star-flash” cannot be seen anywhere else in the known galaxy, a minor wonder of a greater work.

– The Twelve Wonders of the Galaxy, Ademone Kirvin-ith-Kirvin

 

And Yet They Move

That there is Order within the Celestial Vault, and Law that governs their Motions, cannot be denied by any Natural Philosopher.  We of the Celestial Circle have long used and imitated the orderly motions of this most Perfect of Clocks in the tracking of the march of the Cycles and the Seasons, of the turning of the Years, of the coming of Deep Winter, and the accurate recording of Time.

But while we can watch the skies and map the motions of the Wandering Stars, as yet we understand little of their true nature; as within our own order the dispute between those who favor the Centrism of Ilani Corrével, who argues for Eliéra’s place at the Center of the Celestial Vault, since the new lenses of Recent Years have shown us the ever-changing-and-repeating, yet always-circular faces of the Wandering Stars that show these to be Spheres, yet we know Eliéra Herself to be Flat, as the Shadow-watcher showed in the Age of Wood; and the Solarism of Arventel Kalyn, who observes the Companions of the Sun, and their never-departing from His side, as the Faint Wanderers that accompany some of the Wandering Stars, and argues that their Rotation could be as that of the Far Wanderers, were the Fixed Realm to instead Rotate between them and the other Wandering Stars; now thrown into new Confusion by Calria Lirendocius’s discovery of new Companions which accompany the Shining One and accompany Him as the Companions of the Sun do the Light-Giver, in Accordance with Neither.

And yet this day I may add only More Confusion to our understanding of the Skies, for since Observations began at the Starspike, it has been recorded that when the Shining One is square to the Light-Giver, red Alqerach shall be seen centered in Taran’s Loop by a Watcher stationed at the Eye.  Colleagues, be it known that over the centuries of our Watching, Alqerach is there No Longer; and others of the Fixed Stars too show this Drift, but in ways that Differ, and so cannot be Explained by the movement of Our World, or by the Fixed Stars as a Single Vault or Sphere.  I enclose Copies of our Observations at the Starspike for your Attention.

Colleagues, the Fixed Stars move!

– ancient records recently recovered at the Starspike