Named years

Year of Anguish

• May 28th - All the wasps in Echo Harbor came together and built a single nest over the town hall. It was five stories tall and made of chewed paper. Several prominent citizens attempted to knock it down with a hose and were taken to the hospital with severe allergic reactions to stings. After a week of careful negotiations with the Wasp Queen, the leaders of Echo Harbor announced that a settlement had been reached. The wasps left in the night. Janitors charged with dismantling the nest reported enormous letters inside the nest, written in wax, reading “WE WILL RETURN FOR THE SACRIFICE.”

Year of Baking Earth

• February 26th - All the weathervanes in the town of Echo Harbor vanished. They were replaced by effigies of the Laughing God, wrought in obsidian and black iron. These weathervanes were removed, as their shocking visages proved detrimental to bird migration, and several years would pass before weathervanes were again common in Echo Harbor.

Year of the Black Egg

• May 12th - The entire population of the village of Echo Harbor lost the power of speech. This phenomenon lasted for almost a week, during which the sale of whiteboards and dry erase markers soared and more had to be brought in from the city. Visitors were still able to talk, unless they spent the night in Echo Harbor, whereupon they too woke unable to speak. Several prominent citizens attempt to communicate with the press, but could only sing like birds. After six days, voices returned. One citizen described it as “oddly restful, actually.”

Year of the Blind Owl

• September 27th - Hrolgar Hrolfsson set sail across the Wine-Dark Sea in a ship built of dead men's nails. Unfortunately the ship sank within minutes because dead men's nails are not waterproof.

Year of Blindness

• July 11th - It was on this day that the coastal town of Echo Harbor ceased to exist for nearly five hours. Roads leading into Echo Harbor instead diverted to a nearby town called Gant, which hastily put up barricades. Several prominent citizens of Gant said, "You know what those Echo Harbor people are like, with the weirdness and the chanting and the bees." Delivery trucks and a few brave tourists were baffled, but the city blinked back into existence slightly before sunset. Echo Harbor officials would only say that they knew where they were the whole time.

Year of the Blunt Ox

• October 2nd - The last reported case of the strangling ritual was carried out in the town of Echo Harbor. The victims of the strangling ritual were three graduate students who had traveled to Echo Harbor specifically to research the ritual.

Year of Boiling Earth

• January 17th - The ice broke in Echo Harbor, shattering upward as if struck from beneath by the tail of some enormous beast. Ice-fishing houses were destroyed and several prominent citizens were lost in the freezing water. “Bit early this year,” one fisherman observed. “It don’t usually do that until some time in March.”

Year of Broken Ghosts

• February 28th -The town of Echo Harbor found itself briefly landlocked. Instead of a harbor, it had a jungle. Strange scented breezes blew into town and wild animals could be heard roaring from the depths. Several prominent citizens vanished in an attempt to explore the jungle, which vanished as suddenly as it had come three days later.

Year of Broken Plows

• January 29th - A shirtless man wandered into Echo Harbor. Despite the extreme cold, he showed no signs of hypothermia, but walked to the center of town and began screaming at a pile of bricks for several minutes. Then he left. The pile of bricks was later burned, just in case, at the order of several prominent citizens.

Year of Broken Sunsets

• April 23rd - A violin began to play by itself in an attic in Echo Harbor. It played many popular songs of fifty years before, for nearly three days, before several prominent citizens pelted it with requests and it stopped in a huff. The total destruction of the building by a freak piano-fall the next day was almost certainly coincidence.

Year of the Burnt Harvest

• October 7th - Eleven preserved bodies were pulled from a bog near the town of Echo Harbor. They were extraordinarily preserved and appeared to have been ritual sacrifices. Ten were dated to over four thousand years ago, and the eleventh was wearing a wrist-watch.

Year of Chained Tigers

• May 14th - A mysterious idol was pulled up in a fisherman’s net in the town of Echo Harbor. The fisherman looked at its terrible carvings, its suggestion of fangs, at the tiny humanoid figure crudely rendered worshiping at its feet, and threw it back overboard. When asked as to why he didn’t bring it back to the town where his family lived, he said “What are you, stupid?”

Year of the Dripping Moon

• September 23rd - seven hundred and fifty men, women, and children were burned alive in a giant Wicker Man in the town of Echo Harbour. Investigations were immediately launched and the Echo Harbour fire department fined several prominent citizens for burning without a permit.

Year of the Driven Stain

• November 29th - A man appeared in Echo Harbor. Several prominent citizens reported that he didn’t do anything, exactly, but there was something deeply weird about him nonetheless. He asked several unusual questions — “Does everyone here have bones?” and “The chairs, are they attached?” — then cried “The name of the game is objects that float!” and ran off toward the sea.

Year of the Dying Bees

• December 9th - It rained fish for three days in the town of Echo Harbor. Somewhat unusually for this type of weather, the Piscean precipitation was localized over the police station, the theatre, and the homes of several prominent citizens. Dead fish piled up in the gutters, attracting a great many raccoons. The fish were later identified as neon tetras.

Year of Frost

• October 18th - The town of Echo Harbor was placed under strict quarantine. For eleven days, no living thing larger than a seagull was allowed in or out. Several prominent citizens were shot attempting to approach the barricade. When asked for an explanation, the Prime Minister said only “They know what they did.” After eleven days, the quarantine was lifted, and the details of the incident placed under seal in the Royal Archives.

Year of the Frozen Star

• October 21st - Everyone had that nightmare where your teeth fall out and you can't get to a dentist.

Year of Ink

• April 4th - Every manhole cover in the town of Echo Harbor went missing. The open shafts appeared to overlook an unknown desert, where it was broad daylight. Sandstorms raged for several weeks, coating the streets with sand, and then the manhole covers reappeared as suddenly as they had gone.

Year of the Moaning Stair

• February 3rd - the ghosts of a thousand skeletal whales drifted through the skies of Echo Harbor. Onlookers described more than a dozen species, from orcas to blue whales. The whale ghosts floated a few dozen feet off the ground and passed through the upper stories of several buildings. Several prominent citizens described this experience as “Unsettling and rather sad, but what are you going to do?” The whales vanished by the next morning.

Year of Scars

• October 30th - Every seagull in the coastal town of Echo Harbor suddenly went insane. Most of them simply rocked back and forth and moaned to themselves, but a few became violent and had to be dispatched by authorities. Several prominent citizens reported that the seagulls had been feeding on some peculiar thing that had washed up on shore some days earlier.

Year of Shattered Glass

• March 5th - An office worker in Echo Harbor opened a file on her computer, only to find herself gazing into the terrible face of the God of Machines. The God attempted to reach through her eyes into the wet synapses of her brain, clearly intending to reprogram her to serve the God’s unknowable needs. Through a superhuman effort of will, she managed to close the file. The office IT department told her to file a bug report, but were unable to reproduce the experience.

Year of Sober Thoughts

• April 14th - The town of Echo Harbor found its rain gutters filled with enormous gray moths. They were over five inches wide and perched throughout the city, fanning their wings. Several prominent citizens said that the sound of their wings resembled someone whispering “Hush…” over and over again. It was somewhat unsettling, and the town kept very quiet for the rest of the day, just in case.

Year of Striking

• March 14th - The Starheart Brewing Company of Echo Harbor introduced its Unspeakable Beer. This brew had a one-in-nineteen fatality rate, but was described by several prominent citizens as “robust” and “not too hoppy.” Later incarnations decreased the lethality, but at the expense of flavor, and New Unspeakable Beer was never as popular as its predecessor.

Year of Veins

• January 22nd - The people of Echo Harbor were troubled by dreams of a black elk with antlers of blue lightning. Peculiar hoofprints were found in the snow outside the homes of the afflicted. The dreams proceeded intermittently for nearly a week, then stopped. No one died or was even particularly traumatized by this, which several prominent citizens described as “unusually benign,” and “weak sauce.”