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Description
Part of The Composition, the larger universe in which Spell Merchant takes place.

There is a system not too far from Ajjamah, in the constellation Caprafellantor (chupacabra), known to many of the local inhabitants as [screeching noise like a pig being vivisected by bears], which translates roughly as "the World of Nine Gods" (Śiṇṭuhiryah in Salvian). Veering in and out of the habitable zone over a period of twenty-one Earth days is a gas giant known in local parlance as the Storm God, 7.5 times the mass of Jupiter–but one Jupiter radius. Orbiting around it once every five hours or so (but rotating very slowly, taking eight orbits to complete nine full rotations) at a distance of around a million kilometres is Labyrinth (also known as the Harvesting God), the only native-inhabited world in this solar system.
Labyrinth is decent enough in terms of habitability–with a mixture of water, iron, and silicates making it almost a water-world–but it gets rather extreme weather conditions because of the orbit of the Red God. In the "summer" when the Storm God passes closest to the sun, the ice melts across the planet, filling up the oceans and drowning valleys with a rise of fifty metres in some areas. In the "winter", meanwhile, the two polar oceans freeze up completely, lowering the sea level and cooling the climate. Winds are more scattered, less strong, with seven cells per hemisphere. Gravity is lighter than the Homeworld or Ajjamah, only 7.4m/sˆ2, and the plant life has absolutely taken advantage of this. Giant treelike structures clutter the surface, with the largest weighing over two and a half million kilograms and standing 110 metres tall.
There is intelligent life here–but it's still quite primitive. The slender, gazelle-like inhabitants, called the palmacorns (their "antlers" are closer to elephant's trunks with brachiation and a tough exterior, along with cloven hooves with a decent grip for reaching up trees; they're actually quite dextrous), have powers related to the Dream, largely in the form of granting life to inanimate objects (like, on a big enough scale, moons or planets). They've only just discovered copper smelting, and it'll be a while before they get to writing, let alone mass media (and thus hysteria). For this reason–and because of the Moondance–the planet has been hosting visitors from several alien species for the past few thousand years. It's a particular favourite of the Nadders, serpentine creatures with opposable mouth-tentacles, whose ribbon-like movements through the air may have influenced a fair few mythologies of the locals…
Labyrinth has a companion, known as the Crafting God, with whom it shares a co-orbital cycle. The Craft God is larger than Labyrinth, and moves either slightly inside or slightly outside its semi-major axis. Every six Earth years or so (104 Labyrinthine years), Labyrinth and the Crafting God get so close to one another in the sky that they actually swap orbits, Labyrinth moving further in or out depending. The Moondance, as it's called, is a time of great celebration for many cultures on Labyrinth, the palmacorns telling stories of how the Craft God's fiery volcanoes are the signs of its forge, where a people not unlike spiders live in service of the master of all making, mining for plants and animals that grow underground and creating weapons and totems of such immense beauty as to make one weep. Here we see a period where the Harvesting and Crafting Gods have come together again for the first time in over a century. The moon gets larger and larger, until every flaming explosion on the surface can be made out by the naked eye–and then it retreats again, further and further away, until another one hundred and four years pass and the Crafting God comes to bless them once again with power and beauty.
For all we know, given the power of the palmacorns, those spider-people might just be there…

Description
Part of The Composition, the larger universe in which Spell Merchant takes place.

There is a system not too far from Ajjamah, in the constellation Caprafellantor (chupacabra), known to many of the local inhabitants as [screeching noise like a pig being vivisected by bears], which translates roughly as "the World of Nine Gods" (Śiṇṭuhiryah in Salvian). Veering in and out of the habitable zone over a period of twenty-one Earth days is a gas giant known in local parlance as the Storm God, 7.5 times the mass of Jupiter–but one Jupiter radius. Orbiting around it once every five hours or so (but rotating very slowly, taking eight orbits to complete nine full rotations) at a distance of around a million kilometres is Labyrinth (also known as the Harvesting God), the only native-inhabited world in this solar system.
Labyrinth is decent enough in terms of habitability–with a mixture of water, iron, and silicates making it almost a water-world–but it gets rather extreme weather conditions because of the orbit of the Red God. In the "summer" when the Storm God passes closest to the sun, the ice melts across the planet, filling up the oceans and drowning valleys with a rise of fifty metres in some areas. In the "winter", meanwhile, the two polar oceans freeze up completely, lowering the sea level and cooling the climate. Winds are more scattered, less strong, with seven cells per hemisphere. Gravity is lighter than the Homeworld or Ajjamah, only 7.4m/sˆ2, and the plant life has absolutely taken advantage of this. Giant treelike structures clutter the surface, with the largest weighing over two and a half million kilograms and standing 110 metres tall.
There is intelligent life here–but it's still quite primitive. The slender, gazelle-like inhabitants, called the palmacorns (their "antlers" are closer to elephant's trunks with brachiation and a tough exterior, along with cloven hooves with a decent grip for reaching up trees; they're actually quite dextrous), have powers related to the Dream, largely in the form of granting life to inanimate objects (like, on a big enough scale, moons or planets). They've only just discovered copper smelting, and it'll be a while before they get to writing, let alone mass media (and thus hysteria). For this reason–and because of the Moondance–the planet has been hosting visitors from several alien species for the past few thousand years. It's a particular favourite of the Nadders, serpentine creatures with opposable mouth-tentacles, whose ribbon-like movements through the air may have influenced a fair few mythologies of the locals…
Labyrinth has a companion, known as the Crafting God, with whom it shares a co-orbital cycle. The Craft God is larger than Labyrinth, and moves either slightly inside or slightly outside its semi-major axis. Every six Earth years or so (104 Labyrinthine years), Labyrinth and the Crafting God get so close to one another in the sky that they actually swap orbits, Labyrinth moving further in or out depending. The Moondance, as it's called, is a time of great celebration for many cultures on Labyrinth, the palmacorns telling stories of how the Craft God's fiery volcanoes are the signs of its forge, where a people not unlike spiders live in service of the master of all making, mining for plants and animals that grow underground and creating weapons and totems of such immense beauty as to make one weep. Here we see a period where the Harvesting and Crafting Gods have come together again for the first time in over a century. The moon gets larger and larger, until every flaming explosion on the surface can be made out by the naked eye–and then it retreats again, further and further away, until another one hundred and four years pass and the Crafting God comes to bless them once again with power and beauty.
For all we know, given the power of the palmacorns, those spider-people might just be there…