Hellsborough Exposed — hellsborough-calendar

Gloaming is the good part of the day, and it does not run to the same length all year. During the Windstrom it is over before you have registered it started, but around the vernal equinox it stretches out, holding the murklight for many moments before murknight shuts it down, and everything that lives in that margin comes out to make use of the extra time. Stand still in it and you will get the screetch-chatter of a pied corvid, a scrufftail laughing its way through a nest of ashpeeps, the hoot of a flatface, the yelp of barkers somewhere down the valley. This is also when the natural strength of The Dark Peak is reckoned to be at its greatest, and the old advice is that now is the time to be practising your spells and your mysticism, which would be of considerably more use to me if I knew any. What I do have are copies of the milting semagrams, including a fair number whose function I have never established, and it occurs to me at exactly this point every year that I ought to try reciting them, and every year I find a reason not to.

Squall-Longleg is one of the named years in the Dark Peak calendar: squall for the thin, lazy rain that goes straight through you rather than around, and longleg for a creature long associated with witchcraft and miltings. You can greet someone with "Happy Squall-Longleg" and it is considered a proper salutation. Whether it improves anything is less clear.

Every decade the Dark Peak calendar's weather stem resets to zero, and the pairing that opens the count is treated as an omen for the years ahead. 79.drizzle-flufftail.0.0 — 'drizzle' and flufftail' — provoked genuine jubilation in Hellsborough, and jubilation in Hellsborough always makes me nervous.

Eighteen months to the Dark Peak year, twenty days each, five at the end with no names and no souls — feasting days, obviously. Years run on a sixty-year wheel of weather and beast. Right now: spit-hoverwing, year 43 of the 79th cycle. Consult the calendar.