The World and Its Skies
Elshore is a living world of dense air, deep oceans, and restless crust, circling its twin suns at about one astronomical unit. Its sky also holds the great gas giant Tharuun, the Traveller, whose distant presence steadies the world's moons and buffers it from wandering bodies. Beneath that sky lies a hot, oxygen-rich biosphere of fern-fields, clubmoss Natural History Clubmoss The Clubmoss rises no taller than a child's hand, but with stubborn grace, its needle-like leaves spraying outward in even whorls from a central root to form starbursts of green... mats, and great beasts.
Key traits
- Elshore orbits its binary suns Cosmology The Binary Suns Two stars share the sky of Elshore: Uhiel, the warmer and steadier light, and Namii, the smaller and more ominous companion. at a semi-major axis of about 1 AU, well outside the limit where its orbit would be unstable.
- An Elshore day runs 16 Earth hours; the orbit takes 704 solar days, and the civil year counts 1,056 days.
- Axial tilt is about 24.6 degrees, giving distinct seasons across the latitudes.
- Tharuun, the Traveller, is a gas giant of about a third of Jupiter's mass, near a 3:2 resonance with Elshore, lending orbital stability to its moons.
- Surface pressure is about 1.12 atmospheres; the air is rich in oxygen at roughly 34 percent.
- About 67 percent of the surface is water, with long rivers draining a great supercontinent into the ocean basins.
- The biosphere is an analogue of Carboniferous Earth: high oxygen, frequent wildfire, megafauna, fern-fields and clubmoss mats rather than grasses.
Elshore circles its two suns at about one astronomical unit, far enough out that its path is stable despite the pull of the binary pair. Its day is short by Earth's measure, only sixteen hours from dawn to dawn, so the world turns quickly under its skies. An orbit takes seven hundred and four of these solar days, while the civil reckoning, the Order of Sixty-Four Cosmology The Order of Sixty-Four The civil calendar of Elshore is the Order of Sixty-Four, an arithmetic system built to be stable, auditable, and free of drift., counts a year of one thousand and fifty-six days; the calendar is the arithmetic frame laid over the true motion of the world. A tilt of about twenty-five degrees gives Elshore its seasons, sharp at the poles and gentle near the equator.
Sharing that sky is Tharuun, the Traveller, a gas giant of roughly a third of Jupiter's mass riding closer to the suns than Elshore itself. It is no small thing to the world below: held near a three-to-two resonance with Elshore, Tharuun lends stability to the orbits of the moons Liir Cosmology The Two Moons Two moons attend Elshore: Liir, the near and swift one, and Ressor, the far and slow one. and Ressor and acts as a shield, drawing off and deflecting wandering bodies that might otherwise strike. The faiths take Tharuun for a wanderer and a power, and the calendar keeps a Month of the Traveler in its honor. (In the older theology the name Tharuun is also given to entropy, the force of unmaking; the planet and that force are not the same thing, and the peoples hold the two apart.)
The world itself is heavy with air and life. Surface pressure stands a little above Earth's, and the air is unusually rich in oxygen, near a third of the whole, which makes for vigorous beasts and frequent fire. Two-thirds of Elshore is water, threaded by rivers thousands of kilometers long that drain a single great supercontinent into the ocean basins, where strong Liir tides keep the shallows mixed and fertile. The crust is restless, broken into mobile plates that grind and subduct and rift, raising volcano chains and shaking the ground often. Across this hot and humid stage spreads a biosphere like Earth's deep Carboniferous past: no grasses or flowers but vast fern-fields and clubmoss mats, peat-choked floodplains, and great beasts moving through the oxygen-heavy air.