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rainbowfic2025-01-15 08:54 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-01-15 08:54 pm
Entry tags:
Ecru #15 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #15: Lie
Styles and Supplies: None
Word Count: 4063
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Chuanyoa, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1647.6.2.2
Summary: Setsiana meets someone unexpected.
Notes: This is what I consider the "real" beginning of the story. The notes for the whole ~18k words up to and through the end of this part was at one point designated as "Chapter One". LMAO
As Setsiana left the office, she sighed. There had been new criticisms, yes, and the continued feedback about the lack of dream theory, but Priestess Fyäccheira had seemed most unhappy about the missing citation to Toacea. She went back mentally through all the events that had led to it being missed. If she had taken the time to go back to the library and get the book… if she had remembered to write out the clean copy the night before… if she hadn’t felt so bad the night before… if she hadn’t caught up with Yeimicha yesterday and heard what she had had to say… if only she hadn’t done whatever had caused Yeimicha to say that. And Yeimicha wouldn’t help her with Priestess Fyäccheira anymore, either. She could make the changes that the priestess had suggested, but would the paper ever really be good enough for her? Would she ever get her second braid, or would she eventually be forced to drop out and learn to help her mother with her work?
Lost in thought, she walked back towards the door to the west wing of the temple. When she was almost there, a small noise caught her attention and broke her out of her thoughts. She turned her head to look; through a barely open door to one of the meeting rooms near the entrance, she saw that Priestess Chuanyoa had pulled a chair up to the table. Making a small noise of pain, she massaged her back.
On the table in front of the old priestess was a Mirror. It wasn’t covered by a hood, or obstructed in any way, although from this angle Setsiana could not see the surface clearly. Priestess Chuanyoa touched it carefully and intentionally with her fingertips in three separate places, very focused on her task.
Setsiana made a decision, then. She did genuinely love researching Sapfita, at least when Priestess Fyäccheira wasn’t criticizing her, but more than anything she really did want to see how the Mirror actually worked, to see time travel happening in action, and she was starting to think she might never actually get to the point where she would be allowed to have that experience. She still had the duty of giving the list of girls in her class that merited placement in the junior priestess prep track to the head priestess, who was notoriously hard to find at the best of times. If Priestess Chuanyoa caught her observing, she could just say she was looking for the head priestess for that reason. Priestess Chuanyoa was nice to a fault, and always gave everyone the benefit of the doubt.
As she inched forward towards the open door, trying to see the surface of the Mirror and what Priestess Chuanyoa’s fingers were doing, someone whispered “Setsiana?” very close to her ear.
Setsiana almost jumped out of her skin and quickly backed away from the door, back into the hallway. Facing her was a young priestess with jet black hair. Behind her, the door to the temple’s west wing stood open. She guessed she wasn’t the only one to not lock it behind her today.
Setsiana reached for her prepared excuse. “I was just looking for the head priestess, Priestess—” Setsiana realized she’d forgotten the woman’s name. “I’m sorry,” she said, a bit embarrassed. “What is your name?” But then she realized again — the woman she was looking at could not be more than 30 years old, so she must have gotten her third braid at some point during the eight years that Setsiana had been with the temple, likely during the last four when she had been a junior priestess. Setsiana would have therefore been in attendance at that ceremony, but she could clearly remember all the ones she’d been to, and none of them had been for this woman. She tried to remember if she had ever seen her around the temple, but came up blank. The woman’s skin was of a paler tone that normally signified a visitor from the Capital, or elsewhere on the west coast. Setsiana couldn’t put her finger on it, but something seemed off about her nurefye, and she seemed unwilling to meet Setsiana’s eyes straight on. Setsiana’s gaze drifted back to the open door to the west wing.
“You can call me Priestess Qhoroali,” said the woman, still in a stage whisper, and that was definitely not a name that Setsiana had ever heard before. It was not a name based on a Vrelian one, either — almost all Vrelian names ended with consonants, so when junior priestesses modified them into QuCheanya ones, they pretty much always wound up with the neutral vowel a added to the end: Setsríhan became Setsiana, Hyeymich became Yeimicha, Vyáccheyr became Fyäccheira. She couldn’t think what name “Qhoroali” would have come from. Hróhalí-something, cut short? Some people with H-names did keep the H, unlike Yeimicha. But that wasn’t a Vrelian name, or anything like one that she knew of.
“I’m not from this temple,” Priestess Qhoroali explained, confirming Setsiana’s suspicions. “I came here from the future — from 2307.”
Setsiana shook her head. “The Mirror doesn’t work there — people sent there can’t return. It’s the end of the world.” She was starting to think that by not locking the door she had let an impostor into the temple. An impostor who somehow knew things she’d expect only the temple residents knew, like when the world ended. “You’re not from here and I’ve never met you before. How do you know my name?” They were still talking in whispers; Priestess Chuanyoa was a little deaf and didn’t seem to have heard. Setsiana did not want to be caught snooping and especially did not want to be caught having let this stranger into the west wing through carelessness. She moved forward, trying to push Priestess Qhoroali back towards the door, and the other woman took a few steps back.
“It’s not the end of the world,” said Priestess Qhoroali, unruffled. “It’s true, the Mirrors stop working, but some of us have other methods. The government got tired of— well, they figured out how block all Mirrors from working, in or out, across every timeline, and then after they did that, they raided the temples and threw everyone in the priesthood in jail. A coup. Only a few of us escaped. But there are some timelines where we still have hope… because of you. I came back here to get you so that that can happen. How do you think I know your name?”
This was not a convincing story; it was actually more likely that Priestess Qhoroali had somehow asked someone at the temple for Setsiana’s name, as unlikely as that was. “If you can come back, why come back for me?” Setsiana asked. “There are so many other full priestesses you could come back for, who would all love to hear about what happens in 2307, and even if you wanted me specifically, you could have come for me when I was a full priestess instead of right now,” she added, desperately clinging to the hope that that future still existed. “Why are we whispering in the hallway instead of telling everyone about this, if it’s really true?”
“Look,” said Priestess Qhoroali, becoming somewhat frustrated. “It’s a bit complicated, and I don’t have time to explain everything. I need you to come with me so we can get back to 2307.” Setsiana saw then what was wrong with the nurefye: where the bodice should closely conform to the bust, Priestess Qhoroali’s was loose in a number of places. A junior priestess might have a badly-fit nurefye that had been made for someone else while she was waiting for her own to be tailored, but a full priestess would never have that problem. It wasn’t loose in the places she would have expected for a bodice that had simply been made for a bigger bust, either; it almost seemed like seams had been intentionally let out.
“It’s time travel,” said Setsiana, feeling like she was teaching the first year of the junior priestess prep track. “It doesn’t matter how much time we spend here talking, we’ll still be traveling to the same point in time regardless. We have all the time in the next 700 years to discuss this.”
Priestess Qhoroali’s mouth twisted. “The method I used to get here is… sensitive,” she said. “It behaves differently at different times of day.”
Setsiana closed her eyes and took a deep breath, willing hopelessly that Priestess Qhoroali would not still be there when she opened them again. There was no point in arguing with this nonsense. She was not going to be able to convince this woman to go away. She had to either forcibly remove her from the temple herself, or call for Priestess Chuanyoa and hope she didn’t think Setsiana had had something to do with the unlocked door. Between what Yeimicha had said yesterday, her strange interaction with Sapfita the night before, and her meeting with Priestess Fyäccheira, things were just not going her way lately.
Sapfita… a horrible feeling started to come over her. Sapfita had told her she needed her to make a dumb decision today, and this definitely seemed like the only obviously dumb decision that had been presented to her all day long and probably the only one that was likely to be. Was this what Sapfita had been talking about? Did she want Setsiana to go with this woman, wherever she was trying to take her? Sapfita had said that if she didn’t make this decision, she would never appear to Setsiana in a dream ever again, and Setsiana had to believe that Sapfita wouldn’t lie to her about that. She’d only just lost Yeimicha yesterday… if she lost Sapfita too, she didn’t know how she’d go on with life at this point.
She felt that she was at the edge of a vast abyss, staring into the eyes of a dark terror she’d always shied away from. She’d always believed implicitly that her dreams of Sapfita were real, but what if they weren’t? What if they were no more real than the fantasies of the Personalists, after all? What if she made a terrible decision here based only on a dream that was just a dream?
If her dreams weren’t real, she was already alone in the world. Yeimicha didn’t want her. The priestesses didn’t seem to want her. She’d burned her bridges with her family when she chose the priesthood over them. But there was a chance that her dreams were real and she had one real friend left, and she’d been given specific instructions on how to keep that one friend. There wasn’t really a choice.
She opened her eyes, and looked straight into Priestess Qhoroali’s. The other woman’s slate grey eyes skittered off to the left like a mouse running to hide under the furniture. “All right,” she said, “I will come with you.” She put out her hand.
“You will?” Priestess Qhoroali seemed uncertain, suddenly, her eyes searching Setsiana for something. After a few moments, she shrugged, and said, “Great. Follow me,” and took Setsiana’s offered hand.
Priestess Qhoroali led her out the open door back into the main corridor (for the second time today, she didn’t stop to lock it behind her), out through the main arch of the temple, and across the road into the trees on the other side. As they walked, a new perversion of Priestess Qhoroali’s nurefye became apparent: the “skirt” that had looked exactly like the skirt of any other nurefye back in the temple was revealed to instead be a pair of extremely wide-legged men’s trousers, but although men’s clothing tended towards the looser side, this style was unheard of. When she had stood still, the fabric had fallen around her like a skirt, and even the pattern of the silver timeline tree had matched up correctly in the front, but when she walked now, it became apparent that it was split in the middle. Setsiana didn’t understand; the other irregularities might just be evidence of a badly-fitted garment, but this seemed like a significant, intentional, and skilled modification, that required more fabric than a traditional skirt.
They stopped at a clearing just past the first line of trees; the tall temple clock was just visible through them, but Setsiana thought they would not be noticed from the road. Priestess Qhoroali removed a small pack from her back and hunted through it for a moment, retrieving a bottle of qoire. A small flicker of hope returned to Setsiana; if Priestess Qhoroali actually had qoire, then perhaps she was a priestess of some sort. Maybe in spite of the priesthood’s best efforts, the style of the nurefye had changed. Maybe the improbable story was somehow true.
“OK,” said Priestess Qhoroali. Now at full volume, her voice was quite low, and more than a little caustic sounding. “This is how this works: we can’t use the Mirror, so we have to walk along the timelines manually, instead of tunneling. It is possible to walk along the timelines, if you can see them, and this is how we see them.” She raised the bottle. “Only, it requires significantly more than you’re probably used to. With just the three drops, you actually can see the immediate timeline branches from here, and can walk along them with sufficient strength of will, but you won’t be able to see the full tree, which we’ll need to do in order to figure out where we’re going and not get hopelessly lost. And you obviously don’t know where on the tree we’re going, anyway. So I’ll drink a bit more, until I can see the whole tree. With that much, it becomes a bit hard to walk, so you’ll have to support me, while I guide you and tell you which timeline to walk down. Do you understand?”
Setsiana’s eyes narrowed. “If you need a second person in order to time travel in this way, how did you get here in the first place? Who helped you?”
“There is a happy medium of intoxication where you can see the whole tree and still walk, mostly,” said Priestess Qhoroali. “I can do it if I have to, but it’s tricky to achieve, so I do bring a second person if one’s available. I couldn’t, this time.”
“And how is this method sensitive to the time of day?” Setsiana asked.
“It just is,” said Priestess Qhoroali, irritated. “Are you coming, or not?”
Well, she had made her decision back in the temple, and nothing had really changed since then except that she now knew that Priestess Qhoroali really did have qoire, or something that appeared to be qoire. “I’m coming,” she said softly. Even if the drug wasn’t actually qoire, she reasoned, it sounded like Qhoroali would be getting a lot more high that she would be, so it should be easy to run away if she had to.
Priestess Qhoroali handed her the bottle. “Three drops.”
The bottle was designed like any of the ones at the temple, and Setsiana was familiar with it; the main body of the bottle was a small bulb, and came together at a thin neck that was not perfectly circular, which then widened out to a round opening. There were two stoppers: one at the neck, which, due to the shape of the glass, would allow a single drop at a time past even when closed, and a larger stopper at the top of the opening that sealed it completely. For dispensing three drops of liquid, as was normally required for use of the Mirror, one opened only the outer stopper, and the inner stopper was only opened to refill an empty bottle.
Old Priestess Chuanyoa had never seemed seriously affected by the three drops of qoire necessary to operate the Mirror, so Setsiana removed the outer stopper of the bottle and let the prescribed three drops out of it, under the tongue. It had a sharp, cold taste to it, like mint. Immediately, she felt a fog descend over her vision, but it was a temporary effect, seemingly, and cleared just as quickly… leaving her seeing the clearing where they stood repeated many times over, the duplicate images layered over each other and the real clearing in a confusing way. She blinked and shook her head, but the double vision persisted. A feeling of unreality fell over her, like she was in a dream - not one of her dreams of Sapfita, which always felt just as real as life, but one of the regular kind. She looked for the visible timelines that Priestess Qhoroali had said she’d see, but couldn’t see anything that looked like the silver patterns on her dress. She handed the bottle back to Priestess Qhoroali.
Priestess Qhoroali came over to her and put her arm around Setsiana’s shoulders, removed the inner stopper of the bottle, and gamely swallowed a whole mouthful of it. Setsiana watched her over her right shoulder; she had been more than halfway convinced that Priestess Qhoroali wasn’t actually going to do that. The priestesses always claimed that qoire was potent stuff and that too much of it was bad for you, but they had never quantified what “too much” was, or what the effects of drinking too much could do, and only insisted that three drops was all you needed for anything, so there was no reason to ever take any more. Priestess Qhoroali blinked a few times, narrowed her eyes, and then drank a tiny bit more. She seemed to lose her balance, and swayed, leaning heavily onto the arm that she had put around Setsiana.
“Right,” she said. “Now we go. Do you see them?”
“I’m not sure,” Setsiana hedged.
“Horseshoe,” said Priestess Qhoroali, and Setsiana wondered if she was babbling nonsense now because of the drug, “Radish, knot. Horseshoe, radish, knot, do you see it?”
Setsiana opened her mouth to ask what on Celyira she meant, and then suddenly realized with a jolt that horseshoe radish knot did somehow indicate one of the repeated visions of the clearing to her, which at the mention of those words now stood out sharply against all of the others. She felt again as if she was in a dream and the words had taken on some additional meaning that only made sense in the world of dream logic.
Priestess Qhoroali pointed with her right arm, and somehow she wasn’t pointing in the direction of anything real, but in the unreal, unfathomable direction that lead to the horseshoe radish knot hallucination. “There,” she said. “We’re going that way.”
It was like they were standing in front of a painting of a road, and Priestess Qhoroali had asked her to walk down the road in the painting. “We can’t go that way,” said Setsiana. “It’s not real, it’s not a way.” Priestess Qhoroali was probably just pointing at something she was seeing that Setsiana wasn’t, anyway.
“It’s real,” said Priestess Qhoroali. “Crap, I forgot how hard it is to accept this on only three drops, it’s been ages since I let someone else Guide for me. Try this. Pretend this is a dream. You can go places you can’t normally go in a dream, right? You can fly. You can travel across the whole world instantly. Once I turned into a bird and flew through the ground to center of Celyira and out the other side again in the Northern Kingdoms. So pretend it’s a dream and that we can go that way. I promise it’s possible.”
Setsiana already felt halfway in a dream as it was. She tried to imagine she was a being that could go anywhere, maybe Sapfita Herself, or a soulwright from ancient times, or even just a magical bird, and was surprised at how easy it had become. The sense of unreality had grown since the three drops; she told herself she could go in the horseshoe radish knot direction, and then took a cautious step that wasn’t in any direction she was familiar with, and Priestess Qhoroali stumbled awkwardly after her.
The trees around her blurred, and she felt a cold gust of air on her arms. She stopped moving, but the chill did not recede. She was still standing in exactly same place in the clearing, as if she had not moved at all, but it was suddenly the middle of the night and not the middle of the afternoon. And the trees were bare, she realized, the leaves were not in the process of falling, but were now long gone. It was quite cold, almost to the point where it might snow, and the grass under her feet was crunchy with frost.
“Keep going,” said Priestess Qhoroali mildly.
Setsiana did not keep going. Undeniably some time travel had happened, without a Mirror, unless the drug had made her hallucinate everything, but she did not feel that impaired. Some of what Priestess Qhoroali had told her was somehow true. How true was the rest of it? She couldn’t be far from where she’d started - they’d traveled a few months, maybe. She could still leave now and return to the temple - she’d have been missing for a few months, school had probably started without her, and her flowers would be dead, but not much else would have changed in that time. She did not think Priestess Qhoroali could stop her from doing that currently. The choice was in her hands.
Was this all that Sapfita had wanted from her? To trust this woman enough to see that time travel was possible without a Mirror? That didn’t feel right. The priestesses might be interested to hear it, and maybe she could study it, write up her findings, and actually get published. But somehow she had a strong feeling that that was not what Sapfita had intended to happen. Sapfita wanted her to see whatever this was through to the end, and would abandon her if she did not. Setsiana took a breath, tried her best to focus on the strange horseshoe radish knot direction, and continued walking.
She did not know how long she walked for. The number of steps she actually took would probably have taken only one or two minutes ordinarily, but now it felt like she walked for an eternity, and at the rate the years were passing them by, that probably wasn’t far off. The scenery continued to blur around her. Seemingly every few moments, Priestess Qhoroali updated her with a new fantastical direction to take that was somehow identified with another series of seemingly random words, and each time it became slightly easier to convince her mind that it was possible to go that way. The winters blew past her like tiny gusts of chill wind and she quickly lost count of how many there had been. 100? 200? 300? The years went by alarmingly quickly.
“Stop,” said Priestess Qhoroali abruptly, and Setsiana did. She had felt a lot of winters go by, but had there truly been 700 of them?
It was winter again by the feel of it, but still early winter, and in bright daylight. Before she had much of a chance to look around her, two people ran up to her and took her arms. So Priestess Qhoroali had had others with her, so why had she come alone if it was more difficult that way? But before she could finish her thought, she saw that the others were not priestesses, and one of them was a man. A shiver of fear went through her that had nothing to do with the weather.
“You actually believed me,” Priestess Qhoroali was saying in her ear, as Setsiana stood stock still. “I don’t know how. I thought you were a weird zealot, I thought I was going to have to argue some theology with you, but what you told me to say somehow worked. I don’t understand. You told me you loved her. The main branch doesn’t usually go in for that. Who are you, really?”
Before Setsiana could even try to process this, the woman who had taken Qhoroali’s place on her right side put a strong-smelling cloth over her nose and mouth, and she knew no more.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #15: Lie
Styles and Supplies: None
Word Count: 4063
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Chuanyoa, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1647.6.2.2
Summary: Setsiana meets someone unexpected.
Notes: This is what I consider the "real" beginning of the story. The notes for the whole ~18k words up to and through the end of this part was at one point designated as "Chapter One". LMAO
As Setsiana left the office, she sighed. There had been new criticisms, yes, and the continued feedback about the lack of dream theory, but Priestess Fyäccheira had seemed most unhappy about the missing citation to Toacea. She went back mentally through all the events that had led to it being missed. If she had taken the time to go back to the library and get the book… if she had remembered to write out the clean copy the night before… if she hadn’t felt so bad the night before… if she hadn’t caught up with Yeimicha yesterday and heard what she had had to say… if only she hadn’t done whatever had caused Yeimicha to say that. And Yeimicha wouldn’t help her with Priestess Fyäccheira anymore, either. She could make the changes that the priestess had suggested, but would the paper ever really be good enough for her? Would she ever get her second braid, or would she eventually be forced to drop out and learn to help her mother with her work?
Lost in thought, she walked back towards the door to the west wing of the temple. When she was almost there, a small noise caught her attention and broke her out of her thoughts. She turned her head to look; through a barely open door to one of the meeting rooms near the entrance, she saw that Priestess Chuanyoa had pulled a chair up to the table. Making a small noise of pain, she massaged her back.
On the table in front of the old priestess was a Mirror. It wasn’t covered by a hood, or obstructed in any way, although from this angle Setsiana could not see the surface clearly. Priestess Chuanyoa touched it carefully and intentionally with her fingertips in three separate places, very focused on her task.
Setsiana made a decision, then. She did genuinely love researching Sapfita, at least when Priestess Fyäccheira wasn’t criticizing her, but more than anything she really did want to see how the Mirror actually worked, to see time travel happening in action, and she was starting to think she might never actually get to the point where she would be allowed to have that experience. She still had the duty of giving the list of girls in her class that merited placement in the junior priestess prep track to the head priestess, who was notoriously hard to find at the best of times. If Priestess Chuanyoa caught her observing, she could just say she was looking for the head priestess for that reason. Priestess Chuanyoa was nice to a fault, and always gave everyone the benefit of the doubt.
As she inched forward towards the open door, trying to see the surface of the Mirror and what Priestess Chuanyoa’s fingers were doing, someone whispered “Setsiana?” very close to her ear.
Setsiana almost jumped out of her skin and quickly backed away from the door, back into the hallway. Facing her was a young priestess with jet black hair. Behind her, the door to the temple’s west wing stood open. She guessed she wasn’t the only one to not lock it behind her today.
Setsiana reached for her prepared excuse. “I was just looking for the head priestess, Priestess—” Setsiana realized she’d forgotten the woman’s name. “I’m sorry,” she said, a bit embarrassed. “What is your name?” But then she realized again — the woman she was looking at could not be more than 30 years old, so she must have gotten her third braid at some point during the eight years that Setsiana had been with the temple, likely during the last four when she had been a junior priestess. Setsiana would have therefore been in attendance at that ceremony, but she could clearly remember all the ones she’d been to, and none of them had been for this woman. She tried to remember if she had ever seen her around the temple, but came up blank. The woman’s skin was of a paler tone that normally signified a visitor from the Capital, or elsewhere on the west coast. Setsiana couldn’t put her finger on it, but something seemed off about her nurefye, and she seemed unwilling to meet Setsiana’s eyes straight on. Setsiana’s gaze drifted back to the open door to the west wing.
“You can call me Priestess Qhoroali,” said the woman, still in a stage whisper, and that was definitely not a name that Setsiana had ever heard before. It was not a name based on a Vrelian one, either — almost all Vrelian names ended with consonants, so when junior priestesses modified them into QuCheanya ones, they pretty much always wound up with the neutral vowel a added to the end: Setsríhan became Setsiana, Hyeymich became Yeimicha, Vyáccheyr became Fyäccheira. She couldn’t think what name “Qhoroali” would have come from. Hróhalí-something, cut short? Some people with H-names did keep the H, unlike Yeimicha. But that wasn’t a Vrelian name, or anything like one that she knew of.
“I’m not from this temple,” Priestess Qhoroali explained, confirming Setsiana’s suspicions. “I came here from the future — from 2307.”
Setsiana shook her head. “The Mirror doesn’t work there — people sent there can’t return. It’s the end of the world.” She was starting to think that by not locking the door she had let an impostor into the temple. An impostor who somehow knew things she’d expect only the temple residents knew, like when the world ended. “You’re not from here and I’ve never met you before. How do you know my name?” They were still talking in whispers; Priestess Chuanyoa was a little deaf and didn’t seem to have heard. Setsiana did not want to be caught snooping and especially did not want to be caught having let this stranger into the west wing through carelessness. She moved forward, trying to push Priestess Qhoroali back towards the door, and the other woman took a few steps back.
“It’s not the end of the world,” said Priestess Qhoroali, unruffled. “It’s true, the Mirrors stop working, but some of us have other methods. The government got tired of— well, they figured out how block all Mirrors from working, in or out, across every timeline, and then after they did that, they raided the temples and threw everyone in the priesthood in jail. A coup. Only a few of us escaped. But there are some timelines where we still have hope… because of you. I came back here to get you so that that can happen. How do you think I know your name?”
This was not a convincing story; it was actually more likely that Priestess Qhoroali had somehow asked someone at the temple for Setsiana’s name, as unlikely as that was. “If you can come back, why come back for me?” Setsiana asked. “There are so many other full priestesses you could come back for, who would all love to hear about what happens in 2307, and even if you wanted me specifically, you could have come for me when I was a full priestess instead of right now,” she added, desperately clinging to the hope that that future still existed. “Why are we whispering in the hallway instead of telling everyone about this, if it’s really true?”
“Look,” said Priestess Qhoroali, becoming somewhat frustrated. “It’s a bit complicated, and I don’t have time to explain everything. I need you to come with me so we can get back to 2307.” Setsiana saw then what was wrong with the nurefye: where the bodice should closely conform to the bust, Priestess Qhoroali’s was loose in a number of places. A junior priestess might have a badly-fit nurefye that had been made for someone else while she was waiting for her own to be tailored, but a full priestess would never have that problem. It wasn’t loose in the places she would have expected for a bodice that had simply been made for a bigger bust, either; it almost seemed like seams had been intentionally let out.
“It’s time travel,” said Setsiana, feeling like she was teaching the first year of the junior priestess prep track. “It doesn’t matter how much time we spend here talking, we’ll still be traveling to the same point in time regardless. We have all the time in the next 700 years to discuss this.”
Priestess Qhoroali’s mouth twisted. “The method I used to get here is… sensitive,” she said. “It behaves differently at different times of day.”
Setsiana closed her eyes and took a deep breath, willing hopelessly that Priestess Qhoroali would not still be there when she opened them again. There was no point in arguing with this nonsense. She was not going to be able to convince this woman to go away. She had to either forcibly remove her from the temple herself, or call for Priestess Chuanyoa and hope she didn’t think Setsiana had had something to do with the unlocked door. Between what Yeimicha had said yesterday, her strange interaction with Sapfita the night before, and her meeting with Priestess Fyäccheira, things were just not going her way lately.
Sapfita… a horrible feeling started to come over her. Sapfita had told her she needed her to make a dumb decision today, and this definitely seemed like the only obviously dumb decision that had been presented to her all day long and probably the only one that was likely to be. Was this what Sapfita had been talking about? Did she want Setsiana to go with this woman, wherever she was trying to take her? Sapfita had said that if she didn’t make this decision, she would never appear to Setsiana in a dream ever again, and Setsiana had to believe that Sapfita wouldn’t lie to her about that. She’d only just lost Yeimicha yesterday… if she lost Sapfita too, she didn’t know how she’d go on with life at this point.
She felt that she was at the edge of a vast abyss, staring into the eyes of a dark terror she’d always shied away from. She’d always believed implicitly that her dreams of Sapfita were real, but what if they weren’t? What if they were no more real than the fantasies of the Personalists, after all? What if she made a terrible decision here based only on a dream that was just a dream?
If her dreams weren’t real, she was already alone in the world. Yeimicha didn’t want her. The priestesses didn’t seem to want her. She’d burned her bridges with her family when she chose the priesthood over them. But there was a chance that her dreams were real and she had one real friend left, and she’d been given specific instructions on how to keep that one friend. There wasn’t really a choice.
She opened her eyes, and looked straight into Priestess Qhoroali’s. The other woman’s slate grey eyes skittered off to the left like a mouse running to hide under the furniture. “All right,” she said, “I will come with you.” She put out her hand.
“You will?” Priestess Qhoroali seemed uncertain, suddenly, her eyes searching Setsiana for something. After a few moments, she shrugged, and said, “Great. Follow me,” and took Setsiana’s offered hand.
Priestess Qhoroali led her out the open door back into the main corridor (for the second time today, she didn’t stop to lock it behind her), out through the main arch of the temple, and across the road into the trees on the other side. As they walked, a new perversion of Priestess Qhoroali’s nurefye became apparent: the “skirt” that had looked exactly like the skirt of any other nurefye back in the temple was revealed to instead be a pair of extremely wide-legged men’s trousers, but although men’s clothing tended towards the looser side, this style was unheard of. When she had stood still, the fabric had fallen around her like a skirt, and even the pattern of the silver timeline tree had matched up correctly in the front, but when she walked now, it became apparent that it was split in the middle. Setsiana didn’t understand; the other irregularities might just be evidence of a badly-fitted garment, but this seemed like a significant, intentional, and skilled modification, that required more fabric than a traditional skirt.
They stopped at a clearing just past the first line of trees; the tall temple clock was just visible through them, but Setsiana thought they would not be noticed from the road. Priestess Qhoroali removed a small pack from her back and hunted through it for a moment, retrieving a bottle of qoire. A small flicker of hope returned to Setsiana; if Priestess Qhoroali actually had qoire, then perhaps she was a priestess of some sort. Maybe in spite of the priesthood’s best efforts, the style of the nurefye had changed. Maybe the improbable story was somehow true.
“OK,” said Priestess Qhoroali. Now at full volume, her voice was quite low, and more than a little caustic sounding. “This is how this works: we can’t use the Mirror, so we have to walk along the timelines manually, instead of tunneling. It is possible to walk along the timelines, if you can see them, and this is how we see them.” She raised the bottle. “Only, it requires significantly more than you’re probably used to. With just the three drops, you actually can see the immediate timeline branches from here, and can walk along them with sufficient strength of will, but you won’t be able to see the full tree, which we’ll need to do in order to figure out where we’re going and not get hopelessly lost. And you obviously don’t know where on the tree we’re going, anyway. So I’ll drink a bit more, until I can see the whole tree. With that much, it becomes a bit hard to walk, so you’ll have to support me, while I guide you and tell you which timeline to walk down. Do you understand?”
Setsiana’s eyes narrowed. “If you need a second person in order to time travel in this way, how did you get here in the first place? Who helped you?”
“There is a happy medium of intoxication where you can see the whole tree and still walk, mostly,” said Priestess Qhoroali. “I can do it if I have to, but it’s tricky to achieve, so I do bring a second person if one’s available. I couldn’t, this time.”
“And how is this method sensitive to the time of day?” Setsiana asked.
“It just is,” said Priestess Qhoroali, irritated. “Are you coming, or not?”
Well, she had made her decision back in the temple, and nothing had really changed since then except that she now knew that Priestess Qhoroali really did have qoire, or something that appeared to be qoire. “I’m coming,” she said softly. Even if the drug wasn’t actually qoire, she reasoned, it sounded like Qhoroali would be getting a lot more high that she would be, so it should be easy to run away if she had to.
Priestess Qhoroali handed her the bottle. “Three drops.”
The bottle was designed like any of the ones at the temple, and Setsiana was familiar with it; the main body of the bottle was a small bulb, and came together at a thin neck that was not perfectly circular, which then widened out to a round opening. There were two stoppers: one at the neck, which, due to the shape of the glass, would allow a single drop at a time past even when closed, and a larger stopper at the top of the opening that sealed it completely. For dispensing three drops of liquid, as was normally required for use of the Mirror, one opened only the outer stopper, and the inner stopper was only opened to refill an empty bottle.
Old Priestess Chuanyoa had never seemed seriously affected by the three drops of qoire necessary to operate the Mirror, so Setsiana removed the outer stopper of the bottle and let the prescribed three drops out of it, under the tongue. It had a sharp, cold taste to it, like mint. Immediately, she felt a fog descend over her vision, but it was a temporary effect, seemingly, and cleared just as quickly… leaving her seeing the clearing where they stood repeated many times over, the duplicate images layered over each other and the real clearing in a confusing way. She blinked and shook her head, but the double vision persisted. A feeling of unreality fell over her, like she was in a dream - not one of her dreams of Sapfita, which always felt just as real as life, but one of the regular kind. She looked for the visible timelines that Priestess Qhoroali had said she’d see, but couldn’t see anything that looked like the silver patterns on her dress. She handed the bottle back to Priestess Qhoroali.
Priestess Qhoroali came over to her and put her arm around Setsiana’s shoulders, removed the inner stopper of the bottle, and gamely swallowed a whole mouthful of it. Setsiana watched her over her right shoulder; she had been more than halfway convinced that Priestess Qhoroali wasn’t actually going to do that. The priestesses always claimed that qoire was potent stuff and that too much of it was bad for you, but they had never quantified what “too much” was, or what the effects of drinking too much could do, and only insisted that three drops was all you needed for anything, so there was no reason to ever take any more. Priestess Qhoroali blinked a few times, narrowed her eyes, and then drank a tiny bit more. She seemed to lose her balance, and swayed, leaning heavily onto the arm that she had put around Setsiana.
“Right,” she said. “Now we go. Do you see them?”
“I’m not sure,” Setsiana hedged.
“Horseshoe,” said Priestess Qhoroali, and Setsiana wondered if she was babbling nonsense now because of the drug, “Radish, knot. Horseshoe, radish, knot, do you see it?”
Setsiana opened her mouth to ask what on Celyira she meant, and then suddenly realized with a jolt that horseshoe radish knot did somehow indicate one of the repeated visions of the clearing to her, which at the mention of those words now stood out sharply against all of the others. She felt again as if she was in a dream and the words had taken on some additional meaning that only made sense in the world of dream logic.
Priestess Qhoroali pointed with her right arm, and somehow she wasn’t pointing in the direction of anything real, but in the unreal, unfathomable direction that lead to the horseshoe radish knot hallucination. “There,” she said. “We’re going that way.”
It was like they were standing in front of a painting of a road, and Priestess Qhoroali had asked her to walk down the road in the painting. “We can’t go that way,” said Setsiana. “It’s not real, it’s not a way.” Priestess Qhoroali was probably just pointing at something she was seeing that Setsiana wasn’t, anyway.
“It’s real,” said Priestess Qhoroali. “Crap, I forgot how hard it is to accept this on only three drops, it’s been ages since I let someone else Guide for me. Try this. Pretend this is a dream. You can go places you can’t normally go in a dream, right? You can fly. You can travel across the whole world instantly. Once I turned into a bird and flew through the ground to center of Celyira and out the other side again in the Northern Kingdoms. So pretend it’s a dream and that we can go that way. I promise it’s possible.”
Setsiana already felt halfway in a dream as it was. She tried to imagine she was a being that could go anywhere, maybe Sapfita Herself, or a soulwright from ancient times, or even just a magical bird, and was surprised at how easy it had become. The sense of unreality had grown since the three drops; she told herself she could go in the horseshoe radish knot direction, and then took a cautious step that wasn’t in any direction she was familiar with, and Priestess Qhoroali stumbled awkwardly after her.
The trees around her blurred, and she felt a cold gust of air on her arms. She stopped moving, but the chill did not recede. She was still standing in exactly same place in the clearing, as if she had not moved at all, but it was suddenly the middle of the night and not the middle of the afternoon. And the trees were bare, she realized, the leaves were not in the process of falling, but were now long gone. It was quite cold, almost to the point where it might snow, and the grass under her feet was crunchy with frost.
“Keep going,” said Priestess Qhoroali mildly.
Setsiana did not keep going. Undeniably some time travel had happened, without a Mirror, unless the drug had made her hallucinate everything, but she did not feel that impaired. Some of what Priestess Qhoroali had told her was somehow true. How true was the rest of it? She couldn’t be far from where she’d started - they’d traveled a few months, maybe. She could still leave now and return to the temple - she’d have been missing for a few months, school had probably started without her, and her flowers would be dead, but not much else would have changed in that time. She did not think Priestess Qhoroali could stop her from doing that currently. The choice was in her hands.
Was this all that Sapfita had wanted from her? To trust this woman enough to see that time travel was possible without a Mirror? That didn’t feel right. The priestesses might be interested to hear it, and maybe she could study it, write up her findings, and actually get published. But somehow she had a strong feeling that that was not what Sapfita had intended to happen. Sapfita wanted her to see whatever this was through to the end, and would abandon her if she did not. Setsiana took a breath, tried her best to focus on the strange horseshoe radish knot direction, and continued walking.
She did not know how long she walked for. The number of steps she actually took would probably have taken only one or two minutes ordinarily, but now it felt like she walked for an eternity, and at the rate the years were passing them by, that probably wasn’t far off. The scenery continued to blur around her. Seemingly every few moments, Priestess Qhoroali updated her with a new fantastical direction to take that was somehow identified with another series of seemingly random words, and each time it became slightly easier to convince her mind that it was possible to go that way. The winters blew past her like tiny gusts of chill wind and she quickly lost count of how many there had been. 100? 200? 300? The years went by alarmingly quickly.
“Stop,” said Priestess Qhoroali abruptly, and Setsiana did. She had felt a lot of winters go by, but had there truly been 700 of them?
It was winter again by the feel of it, but still early winter, and in bright daylight. Before she had much of a chance to look around her, two people ran up to her and took her arms. So Priestess Qhoroali had had others with her, so why had she come alone if it was more difficult that way? But before she could finish her thought, she saw that the others were not priestesses, and one of them was a man. A shiver of fear went through her that had nothing to do with the weather.
“You actually believed me,” Priestess Qhoroali was saying in her ear, as Setsiana stood stock still. “I don’t know how. I thought you were a weird zealot, I thought I was going to have to argue some theology with you, but what you told me to say somehow worked. I don’t understand. You told me you loved her. The main branch doesn’t usually go in for that. Who are you, really?”
Before Setsiana could even try to process this, the woman who had taken Qhoroali’s place on her right side put a strong-smelling cloth over her nose and mouth, and she knew no more.
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When I was figuring out how the time travel was going to work, I thought, you know, time machines are kind of boring. I think time travel should actually be awkward, inconvenient, and difficult to understand. And I had written some drug stuff when writing Gamzee-related Homestuck fanfic (don't kill me, I know everyone hates Gamzee now) where I wasn't content with writing it as just "alien weed", and a lot of those ideas carried over into this.
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This is really great!
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Thank you!
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Thank you! Vrelian is just a naming language (at least so far), but I do have separate 1647 and 1911 versions of it and some sound changes linking them. There's some discussion of those sound changes in, I think, two posts ahead of where you are currently, and much later on in Part 2 there will be some discussion of how some specific words and names changed (and we will eventually learn what Qhoroali's birth name is). There is also some more information about the horseshoe radish knot thing coming.