Overview

On the surface of Duskara everything has a direction, and the direction does not change.

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.