The Binary Suns
Two stars share the sky of Elshore: Uhiel, the warmer and steadier light, and Namii, the smaller and more ominous companion. They circle one another closely, and Elshore turns about them both. Their twinned light shapes the seasons and is woven through the faiths of the Maan People Maan The most numerous people of Elshore and the baseline cultural reference of the age. and the older lore of the Iru People Iru The progenitors, and the only naturally evolved people of Elshore..
Key traits
- Uhiel: the larger primary star, a K-type sun of roughly 0.69 solar masses.
- Namii: the smaller secondary, a red M-dwarf of roughly 0.20 solar masses.
- Combined system luminosity is only about 0.15 that of Earth's sun, so true daylight is gentler and ruddier.
- The two stars orbit one another at a separation of about 0.224 AU, with a period near 41 days and a noticeable eccentricity.
- Namii is a flare-prone M-dwarf, its sudden brightenings read in folklore as omens.
- Namii lends her name to a month of the calendar, Namii's Month, anchoring the late-season arc.
- The system lies some 200 light-years from Earth, off in the constellation marked by its galactic coordinates.
Elshore is a circumbinary world, lit by two suns rather than one. The brighter of the pair is Uhiel, a steady K-type star of about 0.69 solar masses, whose warm and slightly reddened light carries most of the day. Beside him moves Namii, a small red M-dwarf of roughly a fifth of a solar mass, dimmer and cooler, and far more temperamental. Together the two stars give the system a luminosity only about a sixth of what Earth receives, so the daylight of Elshore is softer and more amber than the white glare of a single sun.
The two stars are bound closely to one another, separated by about 0.224 AU and completing a mutual orbit in a little over forty days. That orbit is not perfectly round; its modest eccentricity means the spacing of the suns in the sky shifts across the cycle, and the pair are sometimes seen near together and sometimes well apart. Elshore itself orbits the common center of both, well outside the zone where a circumbinary world would be torn loose, so the doubled light is a permanent feature of every horizon.
Where Uhiel is the warm and dependable light, Namii is the ominous one. As an M-dwarf she is prone to flares, sudden brightenings that the watching peoples have long read as portents. This division runs through the theology of the world. In the faiths the two stars stand as paired powers, Uhiel and Namii set against one another as warmth and warning, and the Iru remembered them in the older order before the Maan inherited the sky. Namii is honored in the calendar itself, lending her name to Namii's Month, one of the two celestial anchors that 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. binds into the run of the seasons.