Coralee Phantom Calendar

Coralee has too much town hall for the town it was.  Built up around a quarry and a deep, green quarry lake, Coralee's town hall is built from the basalt quarried there, with a big, square clock tower out front and room enough inside to house the whole of the town's population at its highest.  The main hall is framed and floored and paneled with red cedar, and in the center of roof, there is a great, round, stained glass skylight.  It's protected on the outside by wire mesh, because the thing sports a fortune of red and blue glass.  That its survived half a decade of the region getting picked over by adventurers and explorers is remarkable.

There is a carving, a set of carvings along the floor, and while the window itself is an abstract design, and each day-corresponding iteration of the carvings on the floor is suggestive, when the sunlight shines through the window on the floor, the carving fills in the rest.  What is depicted on the ground is the unmistakable figure of a red-robed phantom.

No one it sure if the town hall, its skylight and its carving represent merely a calendar or also a map, since the characters inscribed into each line of the carving are a cypher and reading the calendar requires not only decryption of the cypher, but also contextual knowledge of the placement in the carving of the passage being deciphered.  The cypher itself is challenging, but it has been cracked.  The contextual knowledge to decode and use the calendar has not been discovered.

The people of the lands in and surrounding Big Charry have had an uneasy relationship with the occult.  It's true that occult practitioners were the earliest and most dogged enemies of those underground, but they also tend to be wicked folk and murderers besides.   The practice of taking up the red phantom's robes is a thing that even avowed occultists would never admit to doing, outside of their own suicide notes or torture-extracted confessions.  People feared those underground and their agents a lot less, and hated them at least moderately less than the random murders committed with relative impunity by saturnine and effulgent red figures for a quick fix of power.

Scholars of both the occult bent and the occult hating bent have vested interests in decoding the calendar, as the most common explanation for what it might do is predict where an occultist using the technique will manifest as a red phantom, which would allow its practitioners to better target their power-gathering rampages and everyone else to determine effective countermeasures against same.

No one is certain why the main public building in a town that was ostensibly loyal to those underground would contain this feature.  Perhaps an explanation is encoded within.