The Fourth Epoch
Aropria

History & Cultures · History

Dating and Records

Year
400 days — ten months of five eight-day weeks
Year's End
A further six days belonging to no year at all
Day
24 hours
Reckoning
AI before the fall of the Empire of Iron, AF after it. 2025AI is 0AF
Oldest Surviving Document
761 years old, and nothing predates it
Current Year
903AF

The Fourth Epoch is the age. Aropria is the continent it is happening on. The two are easy to confuse and worth keeping apart.

Aropria counts a year of 400 days, and then counts six more that belong to no year at all. Those six sit between the end of one year and the start of the next, and they are the Six Day Festival.

The calendar

A week is eight days, named by their number — first day, second day, and so on to the eighth.

A month is five weeks, or forty days. There are ten of them, and each is named for a material:

  1. The Month of Stone
  2. The Month of Quartz
  3. The Gold Month
  4. The Iron Month
  5. The Silver Month
  6. The Month of Obsidian
  7. The Month of Jade
  8. The Steel Month
  9. The Month of Amethyst
  10. The Core Month

A day is twenty-four hours.

Dates are spoken by week rather than by the day's number in the month. "On the third day of four, in the Month of Jade" means the third day of the fourth week — the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month, though nobody says it that way.

Seasons

Solstices fall on fixed days of the calendar. Because the six days of the Year's End sit outside the count, that fixed date shifts against the seasons by the same six days each year, and the calendar and the weather drift steadily apart.

In practice this troubles almost nobody, because seasons are marked regionally and by what the weather is actually doing rather than by what the calendar says it should be. A farmer in Caliharah and a fisher in the Lonely Fjords will not agree on when spring began, and neither will consult a calendar to settle it. Communities that keep a solstice — the followers of Eos among them — hold the gathering when the day arrives.

The Six Day Festival

The six days between one year and the next belong to nobody, which is exactly why everyone keeps them. It is the one observance the whole continent shares, and the only thing shared about it is the timing: what the six days are for varies entirely by where you spend them. Revelry in some places, rest and reflection in others.

It is generally held to be a carry-over from the Empire of Iron. Older stories attach the festival to a Divinity credited with bringing civilisation through the age before the Empire, and the name has not survived — which has never stopped anyone using the Divinity as a reason to celebrate.

Reckoning

Years are counted in two directions from the fall of the Empire of Iron, which is the single fixed point everything else hangs from. The year of the fall is 2025AI, and it is also 0AF. Reckoning forward from it is the ordinary way of giving a date.

Not everything is dated that way. A good deal of what is known about the past survives only as a distance — so many years ago — and nobody has fixed those against the year count.

How the count survived

There is an obvious problem with all of this, and it is worth stating rather than stepping around. The Great Literary Purge destroyed every written record on the continent, and the oldest document that survives it is 761 years old. The fall of the Empire is considerably older than that. Nobody should know what year it happened in.

The count came through because it did not depend on paper. It came through in one person's memory.

Kalweldin was a Synthoid, and Synthoids live around a thousand years and occasionally half as long again. Kalweldin was already awake when the Empire of Iron fell, lived through the Purge that burned every record of it, and then ruled Rowlem for several hundred years — the reign that country still remembers as its golden age.

Every year in the count is a number Kalweldin gave. Not corroborated by another witness, not recovered from a surviving document: told, once, by the only person left who had been there. The continent has been counting from it ever since.

Kalweldin was executed in the coup that installed the Faith, and no one has been able to check the figure since.

What Rowlem says about it

Nothing, as far as it can manage.

The reckoning's origin is not a secret — scholars outside Rowlem discuss it freely and Nashriam's academies teach it — but it is intensely awkward for a state built on the doctrine that humans are the only true species. Rowlem suppresses the connection wherever it has the reach to: it is not taught, not written, and not comfortably said aloud within the Northern Climb or the Southern Post.

The result is a country that dates its own founding coup in years a synthoid counted, while calling anyone who says so a synthoid sympathiser.

Why the record is so short

Archaeology puts people on this continent for many thousands of years. Not one document survives from more than 761 years ago, on any part of it.

That is not decay and it is not chance — it is the Great Literary Purge, which has its own article. Everything claiming to be a record of the time before it has, so far, turned out to be a forgery.

  1. 2025AI / 0AF

    The Empire of Iron falls. The Congruence Stormchasers date their own founding to the same year

  2. 748AF

    The Ion'cavar's Council of Three Masters attempts a coup against Rowlem, coordinated with a Curathan invasion. It fails badly, and the guild has been careful ever since

  3. 761 years ago

    The oldest reliably dated manuscript anywhere on Aropria. Its contents are unremarkable, and nothing written before it survives at all

  4. 714 years ago

    An anthropologist records an elderly farmer's account of the Great Literary Purge — one of the few near-contemporary sources anyone has found