In this series, I’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour around the Feyrlands, looking at life and civilisation, seeing how the peoples of the world live, and how society looks compared to what we are familiar with.
In this first post, we’ll take a look at timekeeping.
Tick-tock goes the clock… or does it?
Let’s start with the basics. In the Feyrlands, there are a regular 24 hours to a day, but only 6 days to a week (Soulesday, Pixenday, Wizenday, Ebbensday, Bannocksday, Aylesday.) There are 60 weeks in a year, and 12 months—each containing 5 weeks, give or take a day. Children learn the rhymes the same as we did when we were young.
What about more accurate time-keeping? Well, as in our world, use is made of the sun and stars to keep time, sundials common place, but clocks exist too. However, they are not as we know them. Long before the need arose for such accurate timekeeping, scientists had already perfected it using Faze energy and quartz crystals to drive a clock mechanism, rather than a pendulum or spring. Hence, it is uncommon for a time teller in the Feyrlands to emit a tick-tock, although a whirr is commonplace.
Quartz crystal is paired with a timing stone, usually diamond, to regulate the speed. Mechanisms are powered through induction, the timing stone-regulated Faze energy driving a receiving mechanism (a metal drive-cog laced with a matched quartz) at the correct speed. Commonly, time tellers have two metallic-looking orbs on the top of the device, impregnated with quartz, which drive the mechanism. Power can only be produced when two or more orbs ‘orbit’ each other.
Overtellers
The use of quartz and Faze to measure time was the forebear to the Overteller—a device said to exhibit so-called magical properties. It was found that certain clocks had unexpected side effects, affecting the world around them in unusual ways, like influencing mood, enhancing Talents, or even creating ‘zones’ of chance or luck around them. An inexact science, Overtellers are usually developed through trial and error, although the best Bindcrafters can design a host of interesting features into them and replicate trusted designs.
Clocks are rare and prized possessions, given the intricacy required to make them, so for most, the sun does just fine.
And that is how time works.
