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rainbowfic2025-01-19 03:38 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-01-19 03:38 pm
Entry tags:
Ecru #16 [The Fulcrum]
Name: An Unknown Future
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #16: Omit
Styles and Supplies: Panorama
Word Count: 2745
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Characters: Setsiana, Sapfita
In-Universe Date: ????.7/8?.?.?
Summary: Setsiana awakens in an unfamiliar time and place.
Setsiana awoke from a dreamless sleep, groggy and unrested, with her head pounding, and stared up at the wooden ceiling of a lighted room. She was in a bed, a fairly nice bed at that, better than she’d had in the temple dorms for the past four years. Her memories returned; she’d been abducted. A strange woman had showed her how to time travel without a Mirror, had taken her an unknown number of years into the future, and kidnapped her.
She threw off the blankets, rolled out of the quite nice bed, and looked around the room. It was fairly small, but not cramped. The bed was positioned in one corner; further down the wall that the side of the bed stood against was a closed door, and there was another door on the wall opposite the bed’s head. Near the bed was a chest of drawers, and along the far wall, across from the first door, was table and chair, with a window above them, which currently had its wooden shutter latched shut. On the table was a small oil lamp, a bowl of food, a spoon, and a glass of water.
Setsiana went across to the table and drank water until she felt the headache start to recede. She looked at the plate of food, which was a quite ordinary-looking tlichrún - a common style of food in NoraCheanya made by cooking meat or fish and vegetables with a large quantity of spicy tlichrún sauce, served over rice. Huge numbers of regional and personal variations existed and it could potentially be made very cheaply, which meant it was a common staple at the temple dining hall. It must have been some time since she was drugged, and she was fairly hungry, but she’d also been drugged twice recently by the people who had brought her here, and drinking the water had probably already been risky. She pushed the bowl back towards the wall and stood.
She turned her attention to the window, and cautiously unlatched it, but the breeze she was expecting didn’t enter; she tried to put her hand out the window, but it bumped into a sheet of clear glass. There were six small sections of glass, separated by metal cross beams; even if she broke the glass, she wouldn’t be able to just climb out, and she also appeared to be on the second story. Outside, it was night, with only street lamps revealing small pockets of wherever she was now. Where was she? It surely couldn’t have been more than a day since she was abducted, but it was also hundreds of years in the future, at least. The class from 2307 had said they could travel to the Capital in an hour - surely, if that was possible, there was nowhere on Celyira that couldn’t be reached in a day. The tlichrún indicated that she might still be in NoraCheanya, but maybe she’d only been given that to make her think she was still there; it was well-known enough in neighboring countries, and “Priestess” Qhoroali had also known QuCheanya. Realistically she could be anywhere in the world.
She squinted through the bars at the light from the street lamps, trying to see if she could make out any words on buildings, anything that could be writing. She would be able to recognize the syllabary used for Vrelian, the Capital Dialect, Naychren, and a number of Shayansee languages, and the vertical swooping T’arsi alphabet, used in T’arse and most of Meandhshen, and she could probably at least recognize the general styles of the less common scripts used in those regions. She wasn’t sure if the Northern Kingdoms used the T’arsi alphabet or not, but if she saw something unfamiliar it was probably from there somewhere. She thought she saw writing on one of the buildings, but on a second look, it appeared to be an outline of a horse. Nothing else stood out to her in the dark.
A few people were out walking, even at night, which at least spoke to a higher population area than Syarhrít, if nothing else. As they passed in front of the lamps, she tried to see if she could make out anything; clothing, hair styles, complexion; were they wearing the deep blues and purples common in T’arsi dress, or more muted colors? Extravagant Shayanseen headwear? Did they have colorful handkerchiefs hiding the hair as they did in Dlesta, or artistic T’arsi braids? She couldn’t make out many details, and realized that her knowledge of fashions might well be irrelevant in this future time. The way the light shifted and grew and dimmed as the lamps flickered made it hard to determine colors, or even if any of the people’s skin was dark enough for this to be T’arse, or light enough for it to be Shayansee. Eventually she gave up, and latched the window shut again.
She tried the doors next. The one on the wall with the bed was, unsurprisingly, locked. The other one opened into a small bathing room. Experimentally, Setsiana tried the spigot on the tub, and it did indeed produce a stream of actually-warm water. She followed the pipe up to where it exited through the ceiling; there must be a rainwater cistern on the roof, she guessed, with a hearth to warm the water, and some servants to tend to the hearth. It must not reach freezing temperatures here too often, then. She idly wondered how large the cistern was, how much rain they got here at this time of year, and how many times she could fill and drain the bath before it emptied. Could she convince them that she was too much of a pain in the ass to keep confined? Would they actually let her leave, or just move her to a new room without an accessible bath? Why had they given her access to a bath in the first place? Or a nice bed? There was too much she just didn’t know. She did note that the bathing room could be latched from the inside.
She exited the bathing room and returned to the bedroom. The only remaining thing to examine was the chest of drawers. In the top drawer she found a fairly nondescript nightdress and some underthings, but in the second drawer were three entire daytime outfits. She pulled one out and lay the blouse and the skirt out on the bed to get a better look. It was of exactly the style and coloration that would be common for women her age to wear in her own time, and that she would have chosen to wear if she had been allowed to wear anything other than a nurefye. The blouse was close-fitted and even appeared to be the right size, the skirt was a full skirt down to the ankles with the right number of layers and the right material, with deep pockets on each side. Surely this hadn’t stayed in style for hundreds of years. Had it been purchased in 1647? She looked at the seams, and they did not seem quite regular and even enough to be the work of a professional tailor, like the ones the priestesses hired to make nurefyes, but more of a skilled amateur, only slightly better than something she would have been able to make herself. Someone had made these for her, in the style she was accustomed to, and there were three whole outfits! And the cloth seemed new; even if they hadn’t been purchased pre-made, that much cloth would have been expensive. She glanced back at the uneaten tlichrún; if they wanted to kill her, they surely wouldn’t have gone to this expense, or spent the time to make the outfits. Then again, maybe the outfits, like the food, were simply designed to appear familiar and make her let her guard down - she couldn’t trust them. And maybe there was nothing in the food to kill her, but it might just knock her out again, and she wanted a real dream tonight. She needed to know if Sapfita was still with her.
She certainly felt tired enough to sleep. She put the clothing back in the dresser, and pulled out the nightdress. She hesitated, then; one thing that was clear to her from the presence of the outfits was that when she took off her nurefye tonight, she would probably never get it back again. She’d never felt a personal connection to the nurefyes that the temple had had made for her, as it wasn’t like it had been her own choice what she wore there, and she could probably get a replacement if she got back to Taleinyo. However, it was her one link back to where she had come from, and if she ever escaped here and somehow made it back to a temple of Sapfita in this time period, it would be useful in getting help from the priestesses to get back to 1647. It was simply too valuable to her now to let someone take it from her.
She looked at the bed again. It had a fairly substantial mattress on a wooden frame with a light sheet and some heavier blankets. She carefully removed her nurefye, and folded it neatly on the bed, and then pressed it as flat as she could manage given the fitted bodice. Then she lifted the mattress up from the frame and carefully slid the nurefye between them, pushing it far back towards the wall. She let the mattress back down and checked that no hint of black fabric stuck out, ran her hands over the top and felt no telltale lump or irregularity. She sat back and surveyed the bed again, and could not see any obvious difference in appearance. It was as hidden as she could make it, given the circumstances. They might find it anyway, since this was the only place she could have put it, but she’d done her best, at least.
She put on the nightdress and shook out her braid, blew out the lamp, climbed back into the bed, and prayed for dreams.
To her intense relief, she found herself in a dream with Sapfita again, sitting on a piece of the blackness as if on the side of the bed she had fallen asleep in, with Sapfita standing by her side. There were so many things she wanted answers to now: where am I?, and who are these people? and maybe how did that time travel work? but what she actually asked was: “Is this what you wanted to happen?” More than anything, she needed Sapfita’s motives clarified.
“Technically, no,” said Sapfita. “I would have preferred for this adventure to start in a different way. But I don’t have the power to change that anymore, so it has to happen this way, instead. You do come around to it eventually, although I’m sure it doesn’t help to hear that now.”
“It doesn’t,” Setsiana confirmed.
Sapfita continued, without acknowledging her interjection. “If you meant, was that what I intended for you to do the last time we talked, then yes, it was. This has to happen; if it doesn’t happen in any timeline, I think even I get written out of existence, and after the rippling effects from that, who knows what your world, and mine will look like? But it’s all right; because this did happen, reality is still stable and internally consistent, and I can still speak to you in this way.” She sighed. “I lose you in every other timeline here, it really is such a tight bottleneck. Are you all right, in spite of everything?”
“You mean, in spite of being kidnapped to an unknown time and place, and being drugged, and not having any idea what’s going on?” Setsiana inhaled through her nose. “I guess it technically could be worse. At least you’re still here. Can you tell me where I am, or when I am, or anything else?” Something about what Sapfita had just said to her struck her, then. “What did you mean by ‘I lose you’? What happens in the other timelines?”
“Oh, nothing terribly dramatic. In some of them you just don’t leave with Qhoroali. In others you never even meet her in the first place. But in all of them, you never speak to me like this again.”
“Why?” Even though Sapfita had told her to do an obviously incoherent thing, Setsiana couldn’t imagine refusing to speak to her again over that, and she suspected that even if she didn’t want to speak to Sapfita, she would probably find herself in another one of these dreams against her will eventually.
“It’s not my choice, nor yours. What makes this possible for us is an event that’s currently in your future… well, one of your possible futures. Since that event concerns me, its effects are to a certain extent not chronologically rooted in the timeline, and have linked us since your birth. But since you are in fact chronologically rooted in the timeline, that only applies to you while that event is still somewhere in your possible futures, or somewhere in your past. As soon as that future becomes impossible for you, we are disconnected.”
“And that’s why this had to happen?”
“Oh, no. There are far more important things that happen as a result of this. Our connection is just useful to have… well, and I like talking to you. I can’t go into your world freely anymore, and the last time I was there, I was in exile on an island full of people who feared me, with no way to leave, and that wasn’t fun. And the others out here don’t like me all that much - truth be told, I’ve made some enemies. Same as it’s always been, I guess. There was a version of me that craved solitude once, but now I have infinite solitude and only an ultimately finite amount of time to spend with you, and the others are too far away for me to reach.”
It was the most that Sapfita had ever said about Herself; in all of Setsiana’s time with Her, they had talked about Setsiana’s life, her dreams and passions, her difficulties and worries, or the things she was learning. She’d always been reluctant to talk about Her own experiences, and had usually said something to the effect that Setsiana wasn’t in a position to understand them. Something seemed different, now.
“You need to eat the food they give you,” Sapfita said, before Setsiana could ask any questions about what She’d just said. “You need to stay healthy, and take care of yourself. It’s not poisoned, it’s not drugged. They are not trying to harm you.”
“What are they trying to do with me?”
“You’ll be told everything tomorrow, don’t worry. Well, most of everything. At least some things. All of the things that are immediately relevant to you, anyway. Oh, this is still so early.” Her hand passed in front of Her face, maybe scrubbing at Her eyes, or simply covering them. “Look, things are going to be ok, I promise. I need you to trust me. I won’t say ‘have faith’ like a Dlestan priest, I know you want something verifiable, that’s how the priesthood trained you to be. But knowledge is power, and I have the power to destroy critical things by giving you the wrong piece of knowledge at the wrong point in the timeline. So for now, you have to trust.”
“Trust,” said Setsiana, “And do whatever you say to do, so that I won’t lose contact with you?”
“No,” said Sapfita. “I promise that will be the last time I tell you to do something specifically. That was a tricky bottleneck that needed some intervention, but that won’t be necessary again. I want you to make your own choices from now on. I can’t promise that we won’t lose contact, of course, but please try not to dwell on that possibility. The important thing is that the choices you make are the ones you truly want to make. Please remember that I love you; I would never treat you like a servant.”
Setsiana opened her mouth to comment on the possibility of being able to make meaningful choices while held captive against her will, but before she could say anything, wakefulness pulled at her and the dream deformed before dissolving entirely.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #16: Omit
Styles and Supplies: Panorama
Word Count: 2745
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Characters: Setsiana, Sapfita
In-Universe Date: ????.7/8?.?.?
Summary: Setsiana awakens in an unfamiliar time and place.
Setsiana awoke from a dreamless sleep, groggy and unrested, with her head pounding, and stared up at the wooden ceiling of a lighted room. She was in a bed, a fairly nice bed at that, better than she’d had in the temple dorms for the past four years. Her memories returned; she’d been abducted. A strange woman had showed her how to time travel without a Mirror, had taken her an unknown number of years into the future, and kidnapped her.
She threw off the blankets, rolled out of the quite nice bed, and looked around the room. It was fairly small, but not cramped. The bed was positioned in one corner; further down the wall that the side of the bed stood against was a closed door, and there was another door on the wall opposite the bed’s head. Near the bed was a chest of drawers, and along the far wall, across from the first door, was table and chair, with a window above them, which currently had its wooden shutter latched shut. On the table was a small oil lamp, a bowl of food, a spoon, and a glass of water.
Setsiana went across to the table and drank water until she felt the headache start to recede. She looked at the plate of food, which was a quite ordinary-looking tlichrún - a common style of food in NoraCheanya made by cooking meat or fish and vegetables with a large quantity of spicy tlichrún sauce, served over rice. Huge numbers of regional and personal variations existed and it could potentially be made very cheaply, which meant it was a common staple at the temple dining hall. It must have been some time since she was drugged, and she was fairly hungry, but she’d also been drugged twice recently by the people who had brought her here, and drinking the water had probably already been risky. She pushed the bowl back towards the wall and stood.
She turned her attention to the window, and cautiously unlatched it, but the breeze she was expecting didn’t enter; she tried to put her hand out the window, but it bumped into a sheet of clear glass. There were six small sections of glass, separated by metal cross beams; even if she broke the glass, she wouldn’t be able to just climb out, and she also appeared to be on the second story. Outside, it was night, with only street lamps revealing small pockets of wherever she was now. Where was she? It surely couldn’t have been more than a day since she was abducted, but it was also hundreds of years in the future, at least. The class from 2307 had said they could travel to the Capital in an hour - surely, if that was possible, there was nowhere on Celyira that couldn’t be reached in a day. The tlichrún indicated that she might still be in NoraCheanya, but maybe she’d only been given that to make her think she was still there; it was well-known enough in neighboring countries, and “Priestess” Qhoroali had also known QuCheanya. Realistically she could be anywhere in the world.
She squinted through the bars at the light from the street lamps, trying to see if she could make out any words on buildings, anything that could be writing. She would be able to recognize the syllabary used for Vrelian, the Capital Dialect, Naychren, and a number of Shayansee languages, and the vertical swooping T’arsi alphabet, used in T’arse and most of Meandhshen, and she could probably at least recognize the general styles of the less common scripts used in those regions. She wasn’t sure if the Northern Kingdoms used the T’arsi alphabet or not, but if she saw something unfamiliar it was probably from there somewhere. She thought she saw writing on one of the buildings, but on a second look, it appeared to be an outline of a horse. Nothing else stood out to her in the dark.
A few people were out walking, even at night, which at least spoke to a higher population area than Syarhrít, if nothing else. As they passed in front of the lamps, she tried to see if she could make out anything; clothing, hair styles, complexion; were they wearing the deep blues and purples common in T’arsi dress, or more muted colors? Extravagant Shayanseen headwear? Did they have colorful handkerchiefs hiding the hair as they did in Dlesta, or artistic T’arsi braids? She couldn’t make out many details, and realized that her knowledge of fashions might well be irrelevant in this future time. The way the light shifted and grew and dimmed as the lamps flickered made it hard to determine colors, or even if any of the people’s skin was dark enough for this to be T’arse, or light enough for it to be Shayansee. Eventually she gave up, and latched the window shut again.
She tried the doors next. The one on the wall with the bed was, unsurprisingly, locked. The other one opened into a small bathing room. Experimentally, Setsiana tried the spigot on the tub, and it did indeed produce a stream of actually-warm water. She followed the pipe up to where it exited through the ceiling; there must be a rainwater cistern on the roof, she guessed, with a hearth to warm the water, and some servants to tend to the hearth. It must not reach freezing temperatures here too often, then. She idly wondered how large the cistern was, how much rain they got here at this time of year, and how many times she could fill and drain the bath before it emptied. Could she convince them that she was too much of a pain in the ass to keep confined? Would they actually let her leave, or just move her to a new room without an accessible bath? Why had they given her access to a bath in the first place? Or a nice bed? There was too much she just didn’t know. She did note that the bathing room could be latched from the inside.
She exited the bathing room and returned to the bedroom. The only remaining thing to examine was the chest of drawers. In the top drawer she found a fairly nondescript nightdress and some underthings, but in the second drawer were three entire daytime outfits. She pulled one out and lay the blouse and the skirt out on the bed to get a better look. It was of exactly the style and coloration that would be common for women her age to wear in her own time, and that she would have chosen to wear if she had been allowed to wear anything other than a nurefye. The blouse was close-fitted and even appeared to be the right size, the skirt was a full skirt down to the ankles with the right number of layers and the right material, with deep pockets on each side. Surely this hadn’t stayed in style for hundreds of years. Had it been purchased in 1647? She looked at the seams, and they did not seem quite regular and even enough to be the work of a professional tailor, like the ones the priestesses hired to make nurefyes, but more of a skilled amateur, only slightly better than something she would have been able to make herself. Someone had made these for her, in the style she was accustomed to, and there were three whole outfits! And the cloth seemed new; even if they hadn’t been purchased pre-made, that much cloth would have been expensive. She glanced back at the uneaten tlichrún; if they wanted to kill her, they surely wouldn’t have gone to this expense, or spent the time to make the outfits. Then again, maybe the outfits, like the food, were simply designed to appear familiar and make her let her guard down - she couldn’t trust them. And maybe there was nothing in the food to kill her, but it might just knock her out again, and she wanted a real dream tonight. She needed to know if Sapfita was still with her.
She certainly felt tired enough to sleep. She put the clothing back in the dresser, and pulled out the nightdress. She hesitated, then; one thing that was clear to her from the presence of the outfits was that when she took off her nurefye tonight, she would probably never get it back again. She’d never felt a personal connection to the nurefyes that the temple had had made for her, as it wasn’t like it had been her own choice what she wore there, and she could probably get a replacement if she got back to Taleinyo. However, it was her one link back to where she had come from, and if she ever escaped here and somehow made it back to a temple of Sapfita in this time period, it would be useful in getting help from the priestesses to get back to 1647. It was simply too valuable to her now to let someone take it from her.
She looked at the bed again. It had a fairly substantial mattress on a wooden frame with a light sheet and some heavier blankets. She carefully removed her nurefye, and folded it neatly on the bed, and then pressed it as flat as she could manage given the fitted bodice. Then she lifted the mattress up from the frame and carefully slid the nurefye between them, pushing it far back towards the wall. She let the mattress back down and checked that no hint of black fabric stuck out, ran her hands over the top and felt no telltale lump or irregularity. She sat back and surveyed the bed again, and could not see any obvious difference in appearance. It was as hidden as she could make it, given the circumstances. They might find it anyway, since this was the only place she could have put it, but she’d done her best, at least.
She put on the nightdress and shook out her braid, blew out the lamp, climbed back into the bed, and prayed for dreams.
To her intense relief, she found herself in a dream with Sapfita again, sitting on a piece of the blackness as if on the side of the bed she had fallen asleep in, with Sapfita standing by her side. There were so many things she wanted answers to now: where am I?, and who are these people? and maybe how did that time travel work? but what she actually asked was: “Is this what you wanted to happen?” More than anything, she needed Sapfita’s motives clarified.
“Technically, no,” said Sapfita. “I would have preferred for this adventure to start in a different way. But I don’t have the power to change that anymore, so it has to happen this way, instead. You do come around to it eventually, although I’m sure it doesn’t help to hear that now.”
“It doesn’t,” Setsiana confirmed.
Sapfita continued, without acknowledging her interjection. “If you meant, was that what I intended for you to do the last time we talked, then yes, it was. This has to happen; if it doesn’t happen in any timeline, I think even I get written out of existence, and after the rippling effects from that, who knows what your world, and mine will look like? But it’s all right; because this did happen, reality is still stable and internally consistent, and I can still speak to you in this way.” She sighed. “I lose you in every other timeline here, it really is such a tight bottleneck. Are you all right, in spite of everything?”
“You mean, in spite of being kidnapped to an unknown time and place, and being drugged, and not having any idea what’s going on?” Setsiana inhaled through her nose. “I guess it technically could be worse. At least you’re still here. Can you tell me where I am, or when I am, or anything else?” Something about what Sapfita had just said to her struck her, then. “What did you mean by ‘I lose you’? What happens in the other timelines?”
“Oh, nothing terribly dramatic. In some of them you just don’t leave with Qhoroali. In others you never even meet her in the first place. But in all of them, you never speak to me like this again.”
“Why?” Even though Sapfita had told her to do an obviously incoherent thing, Setsiana couldn’t imagine refusing to speak to her again over that, and she suspected that even if she didn’t want to speak to Sapfita, she would probably find herself in another one of these dreams against her will eventually.
“It’s not my choice, nor yours. What makes this possible for us is an event that’s currently in your future… well, one of your possible futures. Since that event concerns me, its effects are to a certain extent not chronologically rooted in the timeline, and have linked us since your birth. But since you are in fact chronologically rooted in the timeline, that only applies to you while that event is still somewhere in your possible futures, or somewhere in your past. As soon as that future becomes impossible for you, we are disconnected.”
“And that’s why this had to happen?”
“Oh, no. There are far more important things that happen as a result of this. Our connection is just useful to have… well, and I like talking to you. I can’t go into your world freely anymore, and the last time I was there, I was in exile on an island full of people who feared me, with no way to leave, and that wasn’t fun. And the others out here don’t like me all that much - truth be told, I’ve made some enemies. Same as it’s always been, I guess. There was a version of me that craved solitude once, but now I have infinite solitude and only an ultimately finite amount of time to spend with you, and the others are too far away for me to reach.”
It was the most that Sapfita had ever said about Herself; in all of Setsiana’s time with Her, they had talked about Setsiana’s life, her dreams and passions, her difficulties and worries, or the things she was learning. She’d always been reluctant to talk about Her own experiences, and had usually said something to the effect that Setsiana wasn’t in a position to understand them. Something seemed different, now.
“You need to eat the food they give you,” Sapfita said, before Setsiana could ask any questions about what She’d just said. “You need to stay healthy, and take care of yourself. It’s not poisoned, it’s not drugged. They are not trying to harm you.”
“What are they trying to do with me?”
“You’ll be told everything tomorrow, don’t worry. Well, most of everything. At least some things. All of the things that are immediately relevant to you, anyway. Oh, this is still so early.” Her hand passed in front of Her face, maybe scrubbing at Her eyes, or simply covering them. “Look, things are going to be ok, I promise. I need you to trust me. I won’t say ‘have faith’ like a Dlestan priest, I know you want something verifiable, that’s how the priesthood trained you to be. But knowledge is power, and I have the power to destroy critical things by giving you the wrong piece of knowledge at the wrong point in the timeline. So for now, you have to trust.”
“Trust,” said Setsiana, “And do whatever you say to do, so that I won’t lose contact with you?”
“No,” said Sapfita. “I promise that will be the last time I tell you to do something specifically. That was a tricky bottleneck that needed some intervention, but that won’t be necessary again. I want you to make your own choices from now on. I can’t promise that we won’t lose contact, of course, but please try not to dwell on that possibility. The important thing is that the choices you make are the ones you truly want to make. Please remember that I love you; I would never treat you like a servant.”
Setsiana opened her mouth to comment on the possibility of being able to make meaningful choices while held captive against her will, but before she could say anything, wakefulness pulled at her and the dream deformed before dissolving entirely.
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This is great, nice work!
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Thank you! It's kind of funny, I was including the date on these because it is a piece of data I have for well into the second half of the story, mostly so I can keep track of what the season/weather should be like, but I somehow forgot that there's this whole period where she doesn't know what date it is at all and now I have to write ???? on a couple of these, haha.
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Thank you! This bit was fun way to do a little bit of worldbuilding about what Setsiana knows about other parts of the world, haha.
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Thank you!
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Thank you!