Visitation of Yaru



The visitation of Yaru refers to Yaru's visitation to elsewhere and, more importantly, his subsequent discovery of rolako.

The Visitation
At age 13, for some unknown reason, Yaru wandered off from his home in Losako upriver into the hukatuyu mountains. At one of the peaks in the southern hukatuyu foothills, he was attacked, or so he thought, by a snow leopard. As both he and the animal rolled through the ground, he noticed the snow was no longer there. He stood up and found himself to be in another place altogher. We now know that it was a seperate realm, one that we now call elsewhere.

Yaru spent about two weeks in elsewhere, learning the secrets of rolako from the spirits that occupy it. He later stated that the spirits of elsewhere were difficult to see. "you can see them in your peripheral vision" he said in his fourth choronical of the studies of rolako, "but once you look at them head on, they are invisible." He then goes on to say that the spirits communicated with him telepathically, and that they revealed more secrets to him than would ever be appropriate to share with people in everywhere.

The realm that Yaru visited later came to be known as elsewhere due to a comment made by Yaru that it seemed to be "an entirely different reality altogether, simply... elsewhere." Yaru is one of only nine people who have ever been able to pass through into elsewhere, and the only person ever to pass through twice.

Dating System
The visitation of Yaru is considered an important enough date to be the center of our modern calendar system.

History
About 400 years after the visitation, rolavu (king) Cesaro of Ngyala decided to reform the current calendar system. Under the previous system, there were two calendar years—a lunar-based year and a solar-based year. These years would overlap on a 52 (solar) year cycle. Each of these cycles was called a lunar-solar cycle. The old calender system denoted each year by calling it the year within the cycle followed by the number of cycles since the supposed creation (about 9000 lunar-solar cycles previously). This system was widely considered too confusing and outdated, so Cesaro, who controlled the majority of the known world, decided to redefine the system.

Under the new (and currently used) system, the solar year is the only one used for official and day-to-day purposes (Although the lunar year is still widely used in the west kiti for religuos purpouses). The years are numbered around the visitation of Yaru, with dates after the visitation being labeled AV for after visitation, and dates before the visitation being labeled BV. For example, the current year (1228 AV) is 1,228 years after the visitation of Yaru.