A record of the fixed points in the year, what they were made to mark, and what has been forgotten in the marking.
Compiled by Sable Dunmore — with contributions by Thessaly Vorn, Dorn Calder, Breck Ironhallow, Mara Ashbone, and Vorrath.
A festival is a compressed story. Something happened, once, and the people who survived it decided to remember it every year at this point in the calendar. They did this by doing something specific — keeping a fire burning, reading aloud, going to the water, staying still. The doing kept the remembering alive when the remembering alone would have faded. The problem with festivals is that they outlast the people who knew why.— S. Dunmore, Keeper of Records, Ashfen
Listed in the Common Reckoning's official calendar and observed, in some form, across most of Valdenmoor. Regional variations exist for all of them.
The midwinter festival. Fires kept burning through the night of the 15th, from sundown to first light. In cities, public bonfires burn in the market squares. In households, the hearth is kept alight. The oldest fixed practice in the Common Reckoning — and the only one the calendar notes is an echo of something much older, without specifying what.
The fire is kept. Around it, practices vary by region. In most of imperial Valdenmoor it is a social festival — the longest night is the occasion for gathering. In northern settlements, the fire-keeping is taken more seriously. Specific watches are assigned. In the oldest hill communities, certain phrases are spoken over the fire at each watch-change. Most of these phrases have been shortened or lost entirely over the past two hundred years. The watches continue. The words are gone.
The Long Dark is the oldest thing the Common Reckoning observes. Old enough that no one can tell you with certainty what it was originally against. I have asked, in a great many places, on a great many 15ths of Coldrest. The most complete answer I have received was from a hill farmer north of Merrath who said, without hesitation: the dark. We keep the fire against the dark. I did not have the heart to point out that this is not an answer. Or perhaps it is the only answer that has survived intact.— S. Dunmore, Keeper of Records, Ashfen
I remember the Long Dark from before it had that name. What it was for, I will not say here. The fire is the right gesture. It has always been the right gesture. That it is now made without knowing why it is right does not make it wrong — it makes it something that has outlasted its explanation, which is a different kind of survival. I find I am glad the fire is still lit.— Vorrath
I wrote the question that prompted that annotation at the end of a long day on the road north of Merrath. I had asked Vorrath what the Long Dark had originally been. I did not know I was asking him something significant. I know now. I have added this note because the conversation felt like it should be in the record.— S. Dunmore
Celebrates the first permanent human settlements. The empire calls it the beginning of civilisation. Elves and dwarves observe it politely. The Wrenfolk note that the Wrenvale Isles were settled approximately three hundred years before the date the empire celebrates, but have not pressed the point publicly.
I have a simple rule about festivals whose meaning depends on whose founding you are counting. I record them as claims rather than facts. Founding Day is accurate if you define 'beginning' as 'when the empire started counting.' That is a definition, not a fact.— S. Dunmore
The dwarves send a formal representative to Founding Day in cities with significant dwarven trade presence. The representative attends, records the attendance, and departs. The hall-records from Kharanor note Founding Day appearances going back six hundred years. The notes are identical each year: 'Represented. Attended. Departed.' This is the entire record.— B. Ironhallow, Kharanor
On the 1st of Thornmere, the Imperial Treasury formally opens the autumn assessment period. Tax records are submitted. Merchants submit their ledgers. Harvest Counting is, from the empire's perspective, an administrative practice that has been given a festive name because calendars need festival names.
The same date is called First-Rest. A quiet domestic holiday — no connection to taxation, no submission of records, no formal gathering. Households rest. Work that can wait does wait. Meals are shared within the extended family. By the 1st of Thornmere, the harvest is in and the boats are up. First-Rest is the first day in months when there is genuinely nothing that needs doing urgently.
I grew up with First-Rest and did not know it had any equivalent outside the Isles until I left. The idea that the same date is a tax deadline in the empire struck me as an exact illustration of what the empire and the Isles disagree about. The date exists. One tradition uses it to demand something. The other uses it to rest.— S. Dunmore
A celebration of the current ruling dynasty. The date changes with each succession — the current dynasty's Empire Day falls on the 7th of Brightmere. Previous dynasties celebrated on different dates; the old dates are now ordinary days with no particular significance. Empire Day is celebrated with considerable ceremony in the capital and diminishing ceremony as one moves away from it.
I have a simple rule about festivals whose dates change based on who is in power: those are not festivals. They are announcements. I record them as such.— S. Dunmore
Market fairs in most cities. The longest day. If the Long Dark is the fire kept through the night, the Long Light is the trade conducted through the day. The Wrenfolk Maritime Circuit peaks in Highsun, and most major cities hold their largest market fair of the year around this date. The Long Light is also the elvish new year — the Long Memory — though humans observing it are generally unaware of the overlap. Two traditions occupy the same date without acknowledging each other.
The Long Light market fair in Veld is the largest commercial event between Aldenmere and the northern borders. The convergence of imperial merchants, northern traders, Wrenfolk couriers, and occasional dwarven commercial representatives on the same square, across three days — either a demonstration of how different cultures can share a calendar, or evidence that no one looks up at the same sky and sees the same thing. Possibly both.— D. Ashwick, Road-Broker, Valdenmoor
The elvish new year. Scholars from the Grand Linguistic Archive read aloud from the oldest accessible sections of the collection to confirm continuity. What is still present and legible is marked as verified. Gaps are recorded. The elvish new year begins not with celebration but with audit — the day on which continuity is asserted by the act of speaking it aloud.
The reading has been getting shorter. Not because the archive is being condensed, but because sections that were read in previous years cannot now be read — they have become illegible, or the scholars who could read them are no longer available, or the documents are no longer fully present in ways that curators find difficult to describe to their colleagues.
I participated in twelve Long Memory readings at Vel Tharun. By the twelfth, we had stopped reading two full sections that had been standard when I arrived. I asked why. I was told the documents required specialist handling and that arrangements were being made. The arrangements were never completed while I was there. I do not know whether they have been completed since. I do not know whether anyone has noticed the silence where those sections were.— Thessaly Vorn, formerly of Vel Tharun
Elvish cartographers formally update their maps. The only survey tradition that consistently produces maps agreeing with the actual landscape — noted by Breck Ironhallow, who has used more maps than most. The Quiet Survey is a working observance: nothing is celebrated. Records are corrected. The world is noted as it is.
The beginning of the dwarven deep-season. Outer gates sealed. Interior halls fully lit. A day of counting and record-setting — the hall record is updated, the generation count is reviewed, and the hall's population and holdings are formally noted. Not a celebration. A confirmation. The hall is what it is. Stone-Day is the day of saying so.
Stone-Day in Kharanor takes three days. I know the official observance is one day. What I mean is that Stone-Day in Kharanor takes three days. The counting is thorough. I have not been there for Stone-Day in sixty years. I know it will be the same.— B. Ironhallow, Kharanor
The Stillness. One day per year, the Drevari go completely motionless in memory of the kel-iss — those hollowed by vel-iss and left unable to withdraw with intention. Nothing is dated from this day. It has no number. The calendar flows around it without touching it, which is part of what the observance means: the kel-iss are outside the count. The Vel-Sath acknowledges that some losses cannot be numbered.
I was not aware the Vel-Sath was occurring the first time it happened in my presence. Vorrath simply became still. Not resting. Still in a way that had a specific quality — a presence that was absolute and completely interior. It lasted a full day. I did not interrupt it. Afterward, he did not reference it. I asked, eventually. He told me what it was. He told me the number of kel-iss he was holding still for. I have not recorded that number here. Some things belong to the observance and not to the record.— S. Dunmore
In the First Age, a day of formal speech between Drevari and the younger races — a day when what needed to be said between them was said, in the presence of all parties, without the usual restraint of ongoing relations. No mortal calendar preserves any memory of it. The date 1st Vel-Drak no longer exists in any calendar currently in use.
When they came again later and wanted speech again, there was no day set aside for it. There was simply Vorrath, in the Karath Range, alone. I have not held First Speaking in three thousand years. I am telling you this because you asked. This is, in its way, a kind of First Speaking. I do not know what to make of that.— Vorrath
The Wrenfolk do not name their calendar after months or seasons. They count tides. Thirteen cycles of twenty-eight days, plus occasional correction days called quiet days — not counted, not named, simply rested through. Each tide-cycle has a character: the salt-tides, the dark-tides, the long tides of summer. The names are practical rather than ceremonial. The Wrenfolk relationship to the calendar is the same as their relationship to the sea: close, respectful, and unbothered by the fact that it does not always do what you expect.
The calendar has gaps. Not in the counting — the counting is still accurate. In what the days were for. Thessaly has identified at least four dates in the Common Reckoning that carry older names whose Vel-Drath roots suggest they were once observances: days that were made to do something. They are now blank.
Unknown. No surviving record of what was observed.
Unknown. The name's roots suggest something to do with depth or descent.
Unknown. Ash-vel-mer in Vel-Drath roots. Origin-clearing. What was cleared, or acknowledged, is gone.
First Speaking. Now nothing. The date no longer exists in any calendar currently in use.
I do not know what was observed on the 22nd of Hollowfall. I do not know what the 7th of Deepcold was made for. I have found no reference to either in any accessible record. They are in the calendar's bones — in the way the month names carry old roots, in a word here and a date pattern there — but the practice is gone, and the knowing-it-was-there is the only trace.
I have marked these dates in my own calendar. I do not know what to do on them. But I know they were once for something, and I mark them because the marking is at least accurate, even if it is empty.
This document will not recover what was lost. I knew that when I started it. It is nevertheless a record of where the gaps are. That seems worth doing.
— S. Dunmore, Keeper of Records, Ashfen