#owltxtual

Translator's Note on Time

The world of Colchis is of a magnitude larger than Holy Terra, and consequently even approximations of time by the accepted nomenclature of 'Terran standard' are unsuccessful in conveying the very different diurnal and nocturnal cycle of its inhabitants. Before we begin, the reader should familiarize themselves with the following information.

The orbit of Colchis around its star takes nearly five years - four point eight to be more precise. Therefore if a Colchisian refers to being six years old, they are in fact twenty-eight or twenty-nine Terran years old.

A Colchisian solar day, that is, one complete planetary rotation, is seven point one terran days, or one hundred and seventy point four Terran hours. Clearly even humans, as adaptable as they are, cannot survive with a ninety-hour day/night cycle, and so Colchisian culture developed a system for intermediary sleep and waking periods.

These periods are often referred to as 'days' in many volumes but this can be confusing and portray an erroneous image of events. In this text I have endeavored to achieve a more literal translation of the Colchisian terminology, which is derived from the language of the ancient desert settlers.

'Day', in the following manuscript, refers to a complete orbital turn of the planet, from sunrise to sunrise. This day is further divided into the following times of approximately twenty-four hours each (the exact length depends further upon seasons and locality, and chronometry on Colchis is a dedicated and difficult scientific discipline in its own right): Dawnaway, Mornday, Long Noon, Post-noon, Duskeve, Coldfall, High Night.

These sub-days are then broken down into three further periods, two of wakefulness and one of sleep, approximating eight hours each. These three periods are called wake-rise, wake-main and rest-eve, with the last being the sleep period (although frequently inhabitants may sleep less than eight hours during Mornday, Long-Noon, and Post-Noon, and slightly longer during the darkness of the remaining time).