Duskaran Daybook
Content for Duskaran Daybook

Introduction

Overview
This book is about the ordinary day on the Living Edge: what a person sees, hears, smells and touches between one bell and the next, what the hands do without thought, and what people feel about it. The Compendium describes how Duskara works, and the Gazetteer says where things are. Neither says what a kitchen sounds like when a pipe drips.
Most of the habits here follow from two facts: the wind always comes from one side, and the light always comes from the other. So the door is on the dayward wall, the sweet jar stands against the nightward one, and nobody is lost in the open in ordinary weather.

Sources and Status
A statement that repeats canon carries the mark of its source.
Mark
Source
(C03)
Compendium, with the number of the chapter
(G)
Duskaran Gazetteer
(H)
Duskaran Language Handbook
(W)
Weatherworking Guilds, in worldbuilding/
(N)
The Weight of Wind: chapters 1 to 3 and the setting file
A statement with no mark is new in this document. Most new statements are small and follow from canon: the wind always comes from one side, so the door is on the other. The author confirmed all of them, and they are canon. The chapter Decisions lists the ones that bind other texts.
A detail marked (N) was written for one town, Liko-Luŋga, and one guild house. This document uses such details as examples of the heartland.

The Ordinary Town
Unless a section says otherwise, what follows is true of a town of the heartland, in the nightward half of the Central band: cool, windy and grey, with enough water. Other places differ in degree more than in kind. The Four Lands and the Two Edges gives the differences, and Under the Night gives the caves.

The Reference Place
Unless a section says otherwise, the Daybook describes a town of the heartland, in the nightward half of the Central band: cool, windy and grey, with enough water. The chapter The Four Lands and the Two Edges gives the differences. The chapter Under the Night gives the caves.

The Grain of the World

Overview
On the surface of Duskara everything has a direction, and the direction does not change.
What
Comes from
Goes to
Light
The day side
Heat
The day side
Wind at the ground
The night side
The day side
Water
The ice of the night side
The salt flats of the Dayward Edge
The ground
High under the ice
Low toward the day side
The dead
They live in the wind
Light and heat come from one side. Wind, water and the ancestors come from the other. People live on the strip where the two cross.
Nobody is lost in ordinary weather. A person who faces the light has the wind at the back. Grain, grass and smoke all lean the same way. To be lost is a thing of storms, mist, caves and closed rooms, and it frightens a Duskaran more than it would frighten a person of Earth.
Nightward is the hard way. It is uphill, upwind and upstream, into the cold and the dark. Water comes from there. Dayward is downhill, downwind and downstream: the easy way, and the place where water ends.
The word for what is right is sawa, balanced. The Central band is Daŋa-Sawa, the balanced edge. The blessing is Heri hanga zi ja sawa, "may your wind be balanced". Too much of the day and too much of the night are equal faults.
Directions serve at every size. Creole has no east or west. It uses the four directions of the belt for small things too: the nightward shelf, the dayward stair, the nightward tower, the up-belt end of a table. Left and right are for the two hands and for nothing else.

Figures of Speech
People talk in the grain of the world.
Saying
Meaning
It went dayward
It is lost or wasted and will not come back. Water that reaches the salt does not return.
To go nightward for it
To take the hard way; to go to the source of a matter.
Upwind of it
Before it; not yet touched by it.
Downwind of them
Living with the results of what other people do.
To give someone your lee (toa kinga)
To put yourself between a person and what is hard for them.
To sweep nightward
To do useless work.
Side-on
Not fighting a thing and not giving way to it.

What People Compare Things To
A Duskaran compares things to what they know: water in a channel (slack, current, set, weir); loads (to carry, to bear, to give way); the wind (lee, lean, line, side-on); counting (short, over, a tally that does not close); cloth, knots and cord; the grain (to head, to lie over, a slow row); stone and slate.
Some figures of Earth do not work here.
The sea. The Bahari is the only sea. It has short waves and no tide, so nobody speaks of a tide that turns or of surf.
Light and dark. Light is not good and dark is not bad. The day side burns and the night side gives water.
Return. The sun does not move, and no part of the Cycle comes back in the weather. "After the rain, the sun" means nothing on the belt: the sun was there all along.
The striking hour. A clock does not strike. The bell does, and the bell is people.

The Exception of the Rift
In the rift of the heartland the river and the cold current of the floor run along the belt, not across it. Heartlanders are the only Duskarans who see water go sideways for a long distance. A person from another region who comes to the Bahari stands and looks at the river for some time.

Light