Chromagaia

Chromagaia's time moves forward with ours! Today's date is:
Solsday, Serelakkan 2, 1133 LE

Chromagaia, known by its residents simply as The Universe or Creation, is all that can be known or experienced. Roughly 1.3 light years across, the universe of Chromagaia is enclosed within the Great Firmament Soul that separates the fundamental emptiness of space from the true conceptual nothing beyond it. Within are a plethora of uninhabitable, empty, and desolate worlds, with a couple scattered in that have a bounty of biodiversity and magic.

The Four-Part Universe

Nothing will make sense on a cosmological scale without the knowledge of the quadrality of creation. The universe is made up of four fundamental states of being, divided along the matter/energy distinction and the spiritual/physical distinction. These became distinct before and at the beginning of time itself, and now dictate how the universe interacts with itself.

Spiritual Energy, Odhir

Odhir [ˈoʊ.ðɪɹ] (also sometimes Osir [ˈoʊ.zɪɹ]), a modernization from the Eudraconic word Óðr, is spiritual energy and the prime state of being from which all others were derived. It is best described as a vibration mode of a pure ideal, similar to light. In its natural raw state, created by the micro-scale ripples of the universe's emptiness, it has an even spread of all these ideals and is comparable to white light. Separating out a specific "color" of odhir is a process known as refining it. As a form of energy, odhir can be formed into a self-sustaining pattern that can additionally gain awareness. Odhir's self-sustaining patterns are vortices and the minds that emerge from them are known as gods. Gods no longer play a part in the universe, but the literally endless odhir of their color that they could call forth gives a good idea of what they would be capable of.

Physical Energy, Vyraf

Physical energy, usually just colloquialized as energy, is the most difficult state of being to define in isolation. Energy in this form, sometimes named vyraf for distinction, can be thought of as the potential for measuring and altering the universe without adjusting its spiritual ideals. Physical energy takes on many forms, from light to heat to sound and gravitational potential. Electricity, one of the forms of this energy, can be arranged into self-sustaining patterns as well, from which minds may emerge. However, physical energy requires something to measure and change to house it, a body of physical matter. From these bodies of matter, a mind may control it in a being known as a mortal, called as such for the inevitability of their cessation.

Spiritual Matter, Súla

Súla, sometimes written as sula or suula for certain scripts, is spiritual matter and the prime material of containment. Although it is matter, it is also massless. Crafted by the primeval emptiness of the universe to section itself off from the Nothing, súla is a perfect container for odhir. While it is only semi-permeable from the outside, bodies of súla slowly accumulate spiritual energy as they move through any collection of it. In practice, this means that any spiritual body moving through the ever-present medium of it in the universe will accumulate some. At a certain point, this odhir build up enough pressure that the spiritual matter will not collect any more. Súla is all bound irreversibly to physical matter, and while they remain separate states of being, the movement of all matter now corresponds to the collection of odhir. The súla component of the now-combined matter is usually referred to as its soul. In its pure state, though, Súla is infinitely divisible, made of corpuscles of identical stuff rather than discrete packets of molecules. The study of the structure of one's soul is called spectrology.

Physical matter, Creas

Physical matter, usually colloquialized as matter (though nitpicking cosmologists like to call it creas) is the final state of matter and the one that bears the arrow of time itself. The existence of physical matter was initiated by Mananakus, god of bonds, who bound the physicality of physical energy and the materiality of súla together. It can be thought of as the matter that reflects and measures by its existence, containing properties such as mass and gravitational charge, which then require space and time to operate. The creation of physical matter initiated the arrow of time and directed all of creation from an eternal and instantaneous timeless state into the sequential path it is on now. Physical matter comes in discrete packets known as particles, which bond together and link up to form structures with an extreme variety of emergent properties. All physical matter is bonded to all súla, and so as it moves according to its laws of physics, it forces odhir to accumulate in its attached soul.

Soul Component

As previously stated, there is always some overlap between an object’s physical matter and its súla. Think of everything as a venn diagram with one circle representing its soul and the other its physical body. The quantity of overlap is known as the soul component, and is defined as the percentage of total venn diagram “area” that contains the overlap. Inanimate matter usually has a soul component of around 1-3%. This overlap is the irreversible bond inflicted on all matter by Mananakus. While the soul component of the same matter can change as it changes form, it cannot be fully merged or completely separated. Sunstuff and starstuff, which the suns and stars are respectively made of,

Soul component defines how much the soul can affect and influence the physical body, and vice versa. For inanimate matter, this means nothing. For living beings, however, it means that they can draw on more of their soul to change the form of their physical body. High soul-component beings have access to limited forms of shapeshifting, granted they have the mind to understand and use it. The overlap area, the Fount, is the only proportion of the physical body that a god can alter, and likewise the only part of the spiritual body that a mortal can draw from. This is distributed evenly across every particle and corpuscle of the mass.

The Silent Song

The universe itself seems to be somewhat alive, a macroorganism of pure conceptual emptiness and potential that itself contrasts against the sterile Nothing of the external void. Think of it as laying black ink down on a transparent background. When stationary, at least as a whole, it seems to have the qualities of a perfectly empty space. However, agitations in its form lead to vibrations that form concepts. Its original writhings are likely what caused enough odhir to form to create the gods. Now, it stays almost still, humming with an extremely faint neutral odhir that forms the background for many fundamental parts of the universe. The light of the stars, the transmutation of matter, and all magic rely on this background.

Structure

There is a border to the universe, the Oversoul that keeps everything in and the Nothing out. It is roughly 1.3 light years across. Within this universe are thousands of small stars, which radiate their bound energy out in a cold form of light. The seventeen suns throw these stars around gravitationally, but remain stationary themselves. They are various colors, a representation of their concept. They were originally gods, but whatever they have whittled down to now is very unlikely to be sentient. Suns are the only things that can support planetary life. Each Sun inflicts a concept on the space around it, distorting its planetary system in some way.

Intersolar space is quiet, but permeated by a thin medium of dust and gases. This medium circles around the sun closest to the universe’s center, Pereptia, as it stirs the matter around it relentlessly. This creates a disk of thicker and somewhat brighter matter roughly in the center of the universe, known as Galaxios.

Celestial Objects

Suns

What is left of the seventeen survivors of the Genesis Hyperwar. Their true consciousnesses lie within the spiritual bodies of these gigantic objects, locked away by the eternally raging sunfire on their surfaces. While not dead like the other gods, the ones residing in the suns cannot exactly be called alive either. Their forms are spherical (save for Yahasain), titanic in size and unmatched by any other object in the universe. Even the largest planets are dwarfed by the suns. Suns emit a radiation of heat from the fire burning on their surfaces (which itself may be the final victim of the gods' slaughter) and a spiritual radiation that alters the state of reality slightly within their local system. Each solar system is uniquely affected by the properties of its sun.

The suns are stationary, quite possibly the only stationary objects in the universe relative to the Great Firmament. Whether the Firmament itself moves is an impossible debate and should honestly be disregarded by the so-called academics still squabbling over it. No reference points exist beyond the Firmament, nor can they, and so it itself is used as the reference for all other things.

Stars

The corpses of the Genesis Hyperwar´s casualties, more or less. The former bodies that gods used to fight one another, belonging to the ones unfortunate enough to be killed. While they are the size of a small planet, they are luminous both physically and spiritually. Starstuff, which the stars are made of, absorbs and then emits odhir and physical energy in a cold white light. As they accumulate this energy faster the more they move through the universe, quicker-moving stars are brighter. Stars are not usually within solar systems, but can be occasionally captured like in the case of Glayryuz's Ember Belt and the astramoons of the rogue planet Kyaloa. They tend to be thrown around the universe by the immense gravity of the suns.

Planets/Moons

Planets and moons are the spoils of extra matter that was created at some point after creation settled down and the suns contracted into their current forms. Most of this matter is a thin medium between the suns and in the thicker disk Galaxios, but what coalesces into enough mass to form a large sphere becomes planets or moons. Moons are really defined as something (usually spherical, but some exceptions exist) orbiting a planet or star rather than one of the seventeen suns. Planets are made of lower grade materials than the god-crafted suns and stars, but the variety of matter allows for the existence of life itself. Some planets are rogue, orbiting between the suns in the manner of stars. These ones are usually too cold to support life, but there is one exception in Kyaloa.

Timekeeping

As most living things in Chromagaia hail from Keppel, third planet from the Sun Haerox, the timekeeping for this universe is standardized in-article held to the Keppelian Calendar. The current year is 1133 LE (Luminia Ennuli) The year 1 was marked by the retreat of the infernal dragons and the end of the Vermillion Wars. Legend states that a young human woman by the name Lumin deceived Black-Sun Dymuniras into making his fateful wish and saved the world, though no records of anybody by that name predate 160 LE. The years before 1 LE are denoted with AT (Annula Tyndur) and count down to the year 1.

Keppel groups its days into 8-day periods known as ochts [ɔːkʰt]. Four of these ochts roughly coincide with two orbits of Jadethrone, which forms a 32-day lythryd [ˈlɪθ.ɹɪd]. Ochts and lythryds are the sub-annual measurements of time.

Keppel’s orbital period is 389.2541840041 days, which is rounded off to 389 most years. After 12 lythryds, there are still 5 days left over. A 5-day intercalary period between the end of one year and the start of the next is customary, but a few isolated cultures add those days to the lythryds of their year.

Leap years have two cycles to them. The first is a 4-year period, where every fourth year (beginning each century on year XX02), a sixth intercalary day is added to the ending time. Every 239 years, a separate leap day must be added as well. The last time one of these long-cycle leap years happened was 1021 LE. Every 956 years, these two overlap and a seven-day intercalary is observed. This last happened in 782 LE.

The days of the Ocht are named for celestial objects, mostly within Haerox’s system. They repeat, starting with Astresday.

Days of the Ocht
#	Name	Named for	Abbreviation
1	Astresday	The stars	A
2	Solsday	The suns	S
3	Embresday	Embrewulf	E
4	Jadesday	Jadethrone	J
5	Ryvysday	Glaumryvr	R
6	Tyrrhsday	Tyrrheni	T
7	Lysisday	Liseria	L
8	Octresday	Octerine	O

Given this, and the fact that the regular lengths of the lythryds make them all start on Astresday, any given lythryd can be represented on the page of a calendar as such:

Example Lythryd
A	S	E	J	R	T	L	O
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32

The 12 lythryds of the year are slightly irregular due to language drift, but all come from similar roots. The year begins at the vernal equinox in the north, and the autumnal in the south. Lythryds always start on Astresday. The lythryds are ordered as such:

Lythryds of the Year
#	Name	IPA	Season (North)
1	Liliyogh	[ˌlɪ.li.ˈjɔɣ] or [ˌlɪ.li.ˈjɔg]	Mid-Spring
2	Avonslau	[ˈæ.vən.ˌsla͡ɪ]	Late Spring
3	Bovvilag	[ˈbo͡ʊ.vi.lɑg]	Early Summer
4	Haelaidhe	[ˈha͡ɪ.la͡ɪð]	Mid-Summer
5	Gildorne	[ˈgɪl.doɹn]	Late Summer
6	Auvhlaus	[ˈa͡ʊv.la͡ʊs]	Early Autumn
7	Ludervinn	[ˈluː.dɛr.vɪn]	Mid-Autumn
8	Glausonn	[ˈgla͡ʊ.sən]	Late Autumn
9	Yahataidh	[ˈjaː.hə.ta͡ɪð]	Early Winter
10	Serelakkan	[sɛ.ɾɛ.ˈlakː.an]	Mid-Winter
11	Frosma	[ˈfɾɔs.mə]	Late Winter
12	Tegeirukk	[tə.ˈge͡ɪː.rœk] or [tə.ˈge͡ɪː.rʊk]	Early Spring
X	Intercalary		Just before Mid-Spring