>I need to know the Malkioni names for the three fixed positions in the
>Sky Dome - Pole Star, Red Moon, and Zenith. I can fake other stars and
>constellations as necessary, but given that three fixed points are
>going to be an *amazing* boon to any navigator I wanted to hew as
>close to the platonic Glorantha as possible.
Zenith is zenith (or vertex or whatever). It's a Dwarven forward observation post used to fire the ropes to haul the Sun back on its path after the Sunstop. I don't think it's fixed - rather it's a hot air balloon that drifts back and forth due to the vagarities of the currents of the Higher Air. Your navigators could believe it to be fixed only to have it drift on them at the worst possible moment.
The Malkioni don't have much mythology on the Red Moon. They are likely to call it such names as the Red Sun of Evil or the Bloody Orb of Chaos. It's false, unnatural and should not be there at all. Using it for navigation is likely to be considered foolish as its height changes visibly while the distance to it cannot be ascertained with rational certainty. Who's to say that the direction doesn't vary widely?
The Malkioni name of Pole Star is getting into unknown territory. The Jonstown Compendium has said that Malkion and other heroes have their own star while Arkat has a constellation. A later Greg sez has said that the sky world has been taken over by theistic entities which strikes me as most unsatisfactory in conceding the sky world to alien mythologies.
In my opinion, the Malkioni might consider the stars to be a map of the spell nodes, a manifest sign of the Invisible God writ large across the heavens. The Stars would be grouped according to Runes (love, war etc). In the centre then would be the Law Rune which encompasses the Pole Star, Dayzatar's Eye and Ourania. For nomenclature, I would follow modern astronomy to give it a "western" feel (although there probably are other Malkioni classifications).
Dayzatar's Eye being the brightest would then become Legis Primus, or Alpha Legis. The Pole Star because it does not move would be Legis Constantus rather than Gamma Legis or Legis Tertius.
--Peter Metcalfe
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