paradoxcase ([personal profile] paradoxcase) wrote in [community profile] rainbowfic2024-11-20 02:46 pm

Nacarat #4 [The Fulcrum]

Name: Waiting for Yeimicha
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Nacarat #4: Iktsuarpok (Inuit): The frustration of waiting for someone to turn up.
Supplies and Styles: Photography, Panorama, Silhouette, Life Drawing
Word Count: 2772
Rating: T (SFW mentions of sex)
Warnings: (Fantasy) religious persecution, Snapewives
Characters: Setsiana
In-Universe Date: 1647.6.2.1
Notes: A little more worldbuilding before the plot gets going.


Setsiana followed the children as they ran along the corridor and out into the afternoon sun, free from school for a couple months until the new term. Outside, a cool autumn breeze tossed her ginger braid around and stirred some already-fallen leaves. It would be properly cold now on the southern coast, but here in the north the weather was still mild. The play had not taken the full half hour allocated for the class, so as the last of the children scattered back to their homes, she was left alone before the entrance to the temple. She had some time before her next commitment.

She bought an apple from a fruit vendor on the other side of the street and sat under a tree to eat it. From here she could see the archway of the temple entrance, the qoire garden, and a few of the temple outbuildings: the dining hall, the auditorium, the pharmacy, and peeking out from behind the main temple itself, the dormitories. The auditorium was where her upcoming class would be held, a QuCheanya conversation class. All of the juniors were required to take one every year, regardless of skill level; the priestesses believed that conversing in QuCheanya regularly with juniors from other time periods and timelines would help prevent any drift from occurring in the language over the centuries that would cause confusion and misunderstanding among the priesthood.

Her eyes strayed to the temple arch. It was covered in words. In five different languages using three different writing systems was written “Taleinyo”, the name of the temple, and the phrase: “And She breathed life into a dead world, giving Time to the stillness.” It was a line from a popular song about Sapfita, recounting the usual tale about how the Creator had created a still and unmoving world without Time, and how Sapfita had imbued it with life and motion.

Across the top of the arch, just underneath the temple’s name, the sentence was written in QuCheanya, the characters etched into the stone and stained red and black, intentionally designed to be unchanging and permanent. The other languages were painted on, and would periodically be scrubbed clean and repainted as the vernacular shifted and changes needed to be made. Under the QuCheanya text was the Vrelian written in the standard Cheanya syllabary, and it was quite antiquated and in need of an update - Setsiana had heard some of the full priestesses talking about repainting it soon, in fact. Under this was a smaller rendition of the sentence in the Capital Dialect, which was there only because the Emperor mandated that all public signs must be in that language; most people in Vrel spoke the Capital Dialect to at least some degree, but practically no one spoke it as their only or primary language.

Under the Capital Dialect phrase, the sentence was rendered into Naychren. This was a language spoken mainly in states along the northern coast, but Vrel had a boarder with one such state and Naychren-speakers frequently crossed south to Vrel, some of whom had poor knowledge of the Capital Dialect and most with little knowledge of Vrelian, so it was often added to signs. Setsiana herself only knew a few words and phrases for sure, but she could sometimes identify words by their roots; in this text she could recognize the words for time and world and life, but the rest of it was a mystery.

The last language was Dlestan, written in the T’arsi script vertically down the sides of the arch. Dlesta was a neighboring country within the League of Meandhshen, well, neighboring the sense of being on the other side of the channel to the east - NoraCheanya shared its island with no other countries. Periodically, plagues would come to Meandhshen and people would flee to NoraCheanya where the priestesses were known (or at least rumored) to have cures, or T’arse would wage war in Meandhshen countries north of Dlesta and people would leave, to escape the League’s draft, or the rationing, or because their family members had been killed and they perceived NoraCheanya as the better, or safer, place to rebuild. Sometimes they went back after the crisis was over, but often they stayed, and most Vrelians had some Dlestan blood in them. One of Setsiana’s own grandfathers had been born in Dlesta, though he had been raised almost entirely in Vrel. She wasn’t strictly convinced of the necessity of the Dlestan text; some of her students had told her that their Dlestan-born parents could not read their own language. For sure they had printing presses there, but from what she had heard, in most of Meandhshen books seemed to be a luxury item for the rich and those of noble birth. She herself could read the T’arsi letters well enough, as a few years of T’arsi was mandated in schools by the Emperor in 1056 after he was embarrassed by his courtiers being unable to speak with a dignitary, and in addition to having learned it herself, she now taught it to her 10-year-olds. However, she didn’t know much more of Dlestan than she did of Naychren. She had thought that might have been an issue for her as a teacher, but so far all of the children who Setsiana had taught in the past four years had at least a decent grasp of Vrelian for their age; it was only their parents who sometimes did not.

The phrase on the temple arch was a fine sentiment for the lay people, and lent a familiar feeling to the temple by reminding them of the folksong, but there was a good deal of debate among the priestesses of the past, present, and future about its precise accuracy. Some believed it to be true, others argued that some primitive type of Time had always existed even before Sapfita, and that it had either melded with, or evolved into Sapfita. A very few held the opinion that the Creator had also created Sapfita to manage Time, in addition to the world itself. A few discredited radicals claimed that Sapfita had killed the Creator and acquired Her dominion over Time in this way, but most held that He had died or been killed for some other reason.

Setsiana had asked Sapfita about it once. Sapfita had said only that things didn’t work quite the same way for Her and that it was senseless to talk about events as if they had happened in a particular order where She and the Creator were concerned, and not to worry about it. Setsiana very much wanted to worry about it; just now she was in the middle of researching all of these theories and she wanted to know the answer.

None of the other priestesses involved in this debate had consulted Sapfita on this topic, because they couldn’t. One wasn’t supposed to be able to have regular back-and-forth conversations with Her, as Setsiana had learned when she was finally able to join the junior priestess preparation track six years late. Plenty had dreams of Sapfita, just as Setsiana did, but instead of being clear and lucid dreams involving a direct conversation, they were vague impressions of words or images from Sapfita, which had to be recorded using a dreamreader and played back later for several skilled priestesses who had taken qoire under the tongue and could interpret the message the dreamer been given. Everyone who’d had such a dream agreed that Sapfita appeared in the dream as a shifting cloud of glowing blue and silver, and not as a person with a regular human body the way Setsiana perceived Her in her own dreams. Others’ dreams were relatively rare and there was much debate about the best strategy for getting one - if it helped to hook up the dreamreader before bed, or go to sleep while slightly or significantly under the influence of qoire, or whether none of it mattered and Sapfita simply gave dreams where She pleased and humans had no control over Her decisions. Setsiana’s dreams had happened on most nights since she was about six or seven. When she had asked about it, Sapfita had told her that Setsiana was the only person could receive this kind of dream from Her, but had never given her a reason why.

There were those who thought they’d had dreams like Setsiana’s, of course, but they were heretics. Six years ago, two years after joining the junior priestess track and learning that her dreams would be considered heretical, she had discovered that a temple of the Personalist heresy was in Syarhrít, operating out of a building that most people thought was an out-of-business ceramics shop. In spite of what Sapfita had told her about her being the only one, she’d snuck out when she wouldn’t be missed, and talked to the people who gathered there, men and women both, about their dreams. Unlike the priestesses, none of them agreed on what they saw. Some saw Sapfita has an exotically pale western Shayansee princess, with hair the color of corn and eyes the color of the sky, others saw Her as an equally exotically dark T’arsi noble with a surfeit of intricate T’arsi hair braiding artistry. They all described Her as surpassingly beautiful beyond human comprehension and most seemed to imply that they’d had sexual encounters with Her, though they declined to share the details with an 18-year-old. It was this that made Setsiana question the Personalists the most; even if Sapfita hadn’t told her that it was impossible for them to receive such dreams, she was very sure, somehow, that Sapfita would not be interested in that kind of thing with anyone, of any gender. If Setsiana were to just use her imagination to picture Sapfita in the same way, she’d have gone for something much different: a skin tone of middling brown, eyes of the common green or grey, and dark ruddy hair, but she knew that was just her desire to see Sapfita as a person like herself, a familiar Cheanya-looking person and not someone of royal heritage from a distant land. What she actually saw in her dreams was a woman with long, loose hair with Her torso framed as a silhouette against some bright but nebulous light. The coloring of Her skin, hair, and eyes, and any surpassing beauty or ugliness She might have possessed was not discernible. Setsiana thought She must have a lower body, because sometimes they sat together, but she had only ever held Her hands or exchanged a hug. One day, she had arrived at the ceramics shop to find that the priesthood had routed the heretical temple and driven them out of the town. In the years since, the shop had reopened as a Dlestan bakery.

The gate to the qoire garden opened, and a priestess exited carrying a basket full of leaves hooked over her shoulder and broom in her hands, which she was using to drive two ghlídrow out of the garden. The stone walls of the garden were quite high, and the priestesses made sure to remove any trees that grew near them, but somehow the ghlídrow always found a way in anyway. The smaller of the two, a red one about the size of a small rabbit, bounded across the road and up into a tree. The larger, white one stopped just outside the garden, sat back on its haunches with its long tail wrapped around its feet and retrieved a pilfered leaf from its mouth, which it devoured in record time. It watched the priestess return to the temple with its ears pricked in her direction for a time, until it was startled by a cart making its way down the road and it, too scampered off into the trees.

Setsiana looked towards the temple clock. It was a long vertical dial that went up 42 feet to the top floor of the temple, a grand water clock that drained slowly into reservoir at the bottom, with a bobber visible through a thin window, which floated on top of the water and marked the current time by its alignment with the 18 hour marks that were painted along the length of the clock: six red at the top for the working, or morning, hours, six blue in the middle for the leisure, or afternoon, hours, and six black at the bottom for the night-time hours. At dawn every day, the clock would be refilled by a servant from a full reservoir kept at the top of the clock, while others had the job of unhooking the reservoir at the bottom, replacing it with an empty one, and then hoisting the full one to the top of the clock for the next day, using a lift, a series of pulleys, and a counterweight. All this trouble was very necessary. Sundials were not sufficient for the temple’s timekeeping needs, since with the sundial the length of the hour varied based on the time of year, and the priestesses also often needed to keep time while the sun was down. In Nwórza, the temples had fancier, and more accurate, mechanical clocks powered by descending weights, but they could not afford for such things to be built here. Further south, the temples had to afford it, as the winter would often freeze the clock otherwise, but here in the milder climate that only happened a few times a year at most and they could get away with water.

Currently, the bobber was nearing half past one in the afternoon. When it hit a few minutes before the half hour mark and triggered the chime, the last of the classes would let out and many young people and some teachers would stream out of the temple. She was hoping Yeimicha would be among them. Yeimicha was due to attend the same conversation class Setsiana was at that time, so she ought to be able to catch her then.

Things had been going well with Yeimicha, or at least so she thought. They had not spent much time together during the junior priestess prep track, where Yeimicha was the star student and Setsiana was struggling to catch up with the others. It was not so much that she was struggling with the material, which she found easy to come up to speed on, but the other girls all had a sense of friendship and community with each other and their teachers that Setsiana had missed out on during the six years she’d spent in the regular track instead. It often felt like her work was judged more harshly or with a more critical eye than the others, but she couldn’t quite be sure if that was really happening, or if that feeling was only rooted in her social estrangement from the rest of the class. But, after Setsiana and Yeimicha had graduated the junior priestess prep track and become actual junior priestesses, they had wound up in many of the same classes together, and had been focusing on some of the same research topics, and they shared a love of teaching. Setsiana had found herself having avid conversations with Yeimicha about their shared subject, the nature of Sapfita and the nature of Time, sharing references, and sometimes she even helped Yeimicha out and was helped out in return. Yeimicha, at the top of the class, couldn’t see why the full priestesses were so critical of Setsiana’s work, and started putting in good words for her with the ones she was closest with. When Yeimicha finally kissed her after a late night of studying, it felt so right, so perfect, a thing that was so destined to be that there couldn’t possibly be any timelines without it. They’d spent last night together, Setsiana’s first time with anyone, for her part. But unfortunately, Yeimicha had had to leave first thing in the morning for an early class before the start of the school shift. Setsiana had misremembered that class as meeting the following day; there had been things she wanted to say that morning, and she hadn’t seen Yeimicha all day long.

The clock triggered the chime, and Setsiana stood, carefully watching as students and teachers left the temple. For some minutes she stayed there. The rush of people trickled to a stop, with one final group of junior priestess teachers talking and laughing among themselves. Yeimicha was not one of them. Setsiana watched the temple entrance for a few more moments, and then reluctantly went off in the direction of the auditorium. Maybe she could catch Yeimicha after the class.
silvercat17: moderator hat (moderator hat)

[personal profile] silvercat17 2024-12-07 10:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Tags added
theseatheseatheopensea: A person reading, with a cat on their lap. (Reader and cat.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2024-11-24 10:10 pm (UTC)(link)
I love the idea of the dreamreader!
thisbluespirit: (writing)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2024-11-26 09:16 pm (UTC)(link)
The world building here continues to be fascinating!
bookblather: A picture of Yomiko Readman looking at books with the text "bookgasm." (Default)

[personal profile] bookblather 2025-03-31 02:42 am (UTC)(link)
Oh dear, why do I feel that Setsiana is in for a bad time soon?

Setsiana very much wanted to worry about it; just now she was in the middle of researching all of these theories and she wanted to know the answer.

Also this entire paragraph is so relatable.