The Reach measures time from the Reckoning — the year, by every working calendar in current use, that the world had to start over. The current year, by this measure, is 412 AU: the four hundred twelfth year After Unmaking. The notation is AU, written after the year-number, and is universal across reach-clusters. Wren Academy texts use the same convention. Temple records use the same convention. The Copper Ring’s brasswright ledgers use the same convention; the oldest Ledger volumes contain dated entries in pre-Reckoning notations no one currently in the trade can fully read.
The Reckoning is not a single day. It is a year — Year One — and the working academic position is that it covers the twelve months following whatever event the Reach now calls the Unmaking. Year One was a year of survival, of finding what had floated, of counting the dead, of the first households putting down enough roots to last into a Year Two. The temples of the Seven count their first canonical festivals from Year One; the Reach’s first crossing-by- aetherstone, in working folk-tale, occurred late in Year One; the oldest reach-records of any kind that the Wren Academy can date with confidence belong to Year Two or Three, and look back to Year One as something already understood and already named.
The calendar year rotates, by long temple-tradition, around Velisar’s Morning — the first dawn of Brightmonth, the year’s first festival (see The Living Calendar). Velisar’s Morning is both the day-to-day new year and the symbolic anniversary of the Reckoning’s beginning. Most reach-folk do not consciously think of Velisar’s Morning as a Reckoning-day; the layered meaning is absorbed without naming. A traveller who asks a reach-priest whether Velisar’s Morning is a Reckoning-day will receive, in most temples, the answer: every Velisar’s Morning is a Reckoning-day, by the working sense of it. We have just had four hundred and twelve.
What the Unmaking was
The honest answer is that the Reach does not know. The Wren Academy has, over four centuries, produced perhaps two dozen serious published proposals — geological, theological, magical, naturalistic — and has reached consensus on none of them. The temple of the Seven has, in its working teaching, no formal position; priests will say, when pressed, that the Unmaking was a breaking of the world and that the gods (the seven living, the seventh-seat-kept, the two who fell) have not made the matter clearer than that.
What the working folk-tradition holds, across reach-clusters, is broadly this:
- The world before the Unmaking was whole — one ground, not many isles. This is folk-myth (see Tales They Tell of the Old World), and is taken seriously by most reach-folk and seriously qualified by most scholars
- The Unmaking was abrupt, not slow — though the surviving records do not specify whether it took an hour, a day, or a season. Folk-stories favour an hour; scholars favour a season
- The Unmaking did not destroy everything. The aetherstones survived; the Mistsea formed (or revealed itself, depending on the account); the surviving people gathered on what remained; the six living gods still answered prayers, by the temple’s working testimony, and continued to. Nymira’s fall, in most folk- versions, was before the Unmaking — though the scholars dispute the precise timing, and the temple does not commit. Mara’s loss is in living memory and is not in question
- The Reach has survived the Unmaking by approximately four centuries. This is the only firm fact
Why we count from there
A reach-traveller, particularly an outsider, will sometimes ask why the calendar is dated from a disaster rather than from a triumph or a founding. The reach-answer, in most clusters, is roughly: because the disaster is what we still measure from. The Reckoning is not remembered as a glorious year. It is remembered as a year after which counting was possible again. The first thing the survivors did, in the working folk-tradition, was count — count the living, count the saved, count the days. The counting became the year. The year became the calendar. The calendar holds.
There is no festival of the Reckoning itself. There is no monument that records its event. There is, however, the Velisar’s Morning ritual every year — the bells, the new shoes for children, the first flame kindled by the household — and a reach-folk standing in the temple at first dawn knows, even without naming, what they are also doing.
“The first volume of the brasswright Ledger, kept in the lower archive at Brassmarket, is dated Year Two in pre-Reckoning notation we no longer parse, and Year Two After in the modern hand. The first entries record cargo lifted from the wreckage of what had been a town. The cargo is described in plain words. The town is not named. The clerk who entered the records did not include their own name. Whoever they were, they began the system we still use. We owe them, in the working judgement of the trade, our calendar.”
— from The Brasswright Ledger: A Long Custody, an unpublished Wren Academy manuscript, 410 AU