Highland: Time Passage

Watches of the Night

Highlanders measure time in hours, however East and West Highland have different forms of hours. In West Highland, there are twelve hours in every day. The first hour begins at sunrise, the sixth hour ends at high noon, and the twelfth hour ends at sunset.

Nighttime is divided into four relatively even watches. The first watch begins at the end of evening twilight (often about half an hour after sunset) and the fourth watch ends at the beginning of twilight in the morning (often about half an hour before sunrise).

The length of hours, and the length of watches, changes depending on the time of year: no matter how long or short the day is, there are always twelve hours in it.

West Highlanders will also speak in terms of “half hours” and “quarter hours”, even during the night watches.

Sundials are the most common form of timepiece in West Highland beyond relying on a simple “general feeling”.

Clocks began to come into common use in East Highland in the mid 1600s. Some early clocks attempted to continue the tradition of exactly twelve hours in the day, while jettisoning “watches” and replacing them with a similar number of hours in the night. The great golden clock at lost Kristagna is rumored to have such a clock, where six o’clock in the morning always matches sunrise, and six o’clock in the evening always matches sunset.

It was easier to make clocks with even hours, however. Today in East Highland, and among scholars in West Highland, timepieces break the day into twenty-four even hours, with twelve o’clock at both noon and midnight. The day traditionally begins at midnight, which means that the morning and the evening hours paradoxically start at 12. Twelve midnight through eleven in the morning are marked with “AM” and twelve noon through eleven in the evening are marked with “PM”.

The Calendar

Highlanders measure time using a Julian-style calendar of one leap year every four years. The current year is 1991 AD, more commonly written as 991, the number of years since the Cataclysm of Earth in 1000 AD.