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rainbowfic2025-01-27 11:16 am
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-01-27 11:16 am
Ecru #13, Techelet #2, Color of the Day (Jan 27 2025) [The Fulcrum]
Name: Yesora's Grammar
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #13: Begin, Techelet #2: Tzedakah (Obligation to charity), Color of the Day (Jan. 27 2025): Shilly-shally
Styles and Supplies: Canvas, Panorama, Novelty Beads (January Canvas/Frame challenge), Cartography, Portrait
Word Count: 6348
Rating: T
Warnings: Implied violence, non-detailed description of serious injuries
Characters: Yesora, her family and contemporaries, Tyäqe, and Faiyule
In-Universe Date: Year -36 (before the Gift)
Summary: Priestesses from the future arrive with the Grammar of a new language, disrupting Yesora's religious practice and way of life.
Notes: Not the document on Github, this is a side-story about Yesora's Grammar, and the changes it made to religious practice, why the priesthood is all female, and where a number of the conventions that are present in Setsiana's day came from (as well as the origin of the word that's being translated as "priestess"). I wanted to wait to post this until after introducing the Egalitarian heresy, for I hope obvious reasons.
It was afternoon when the Keepers of the Gift arrived in Gechiya. Māqhenyu Yesora had been out shopping with her daughter Swira when she had heard the news from the old woman who sold her the herbs she used to make medicines, and had rushed home with her purchases in the hopes that she would be able to see the holy pair in the town square or at the temple where the head of the local Māqhenyu directed the worship of the Lady of Time. But it was somewhere else that she encountered them.
When she arrived at her home, she found that the Keepers were waiting for her there, sitting on the stone bench in the front garden where she grew an assortment of simple vegetables and the most frequently needed herbs. They were drinking tea from a pair of teacups while her husband Danilō stood awkwardly to the side with the teapot, his other hand nervously clutching at the fabric of his black Māqhenyu’s robe. “They insisted on waiting for you here,” he said, by way of greeting. “They said that they only wanted a quick word with you, and that they had to be elsewhere afterwards.”
Yesora handed the bag of herbs to Danilō and approached the two on the bench as he took it and Swira back inside. The younger one sat up tall and straight, with perfect poise, while the older one, an old woman in her sixties, slouched a bit and seemed grateful for the bench. Soon, maybe, the older of the two would die and it would fall to the other to choose a new young person to become her apprentice, to carry the secret of the Gift into the next generation. They wore the same black robes that all Māqhenyu pledged to the service of Time wore, but they occupied a unique place among their number. 164 years ago, the Lady of Time had bestowed upon one Māqhenyu the secret knowledge of how to travel through time, in order to save the whole Chēnya people from destruction at the hands of the Twori during a war that would not happen for another 36 years, from Yesora’s current perspective. With that young woman’s help, the people had traveled back in time 200 years, and the first Keeper of the secret, of Time’s Gift, had told the King that she had seen that the Chēnya would be successful the second time around, when it came time to fight the war again 200 years later. Since then, the Gift had been kept as a secret known to only two Māqhenyu at once, always female. Few knew the true names and families of the Keepers of the Gift; they traveled from town to town, a nameless symbol of hope for the end of the violence of the Twori.
“What I help you with, holy Keepers?” asked Yesora.
The younger Keeper stood and set her cup on the bench. “You have been chosen for a great and holy task,” she said. “For the furtherance of time travel in service of the Lady of Time, we require an Eternal and Unchanging Language. The carvings on the Southern Stone have become unreadable due to the ravages of time upon the form of our language, and the records that we are making even now will become even more so as time goes on. We have seen that the Gift will be kept alive for over 2000 years, and we need a reliable way to communicate with those far-future Māqhenyu. Your task is to create this language - the only requirements are that it must be capable of expressing the tasks and concerns of the Māqhenyu, and that it must be eternal and unchanging. We will return for the specification when you have finished it.”
Yesora shook her head. “I am not worthy of this task. I don’t know anything about how a language is made, or why our own Chēnya tongue has changed from what our ancestors wrote on the Southern Stone. How then can I create a language that does not change?”
The elder Keeper spoke now, without rising from her seat. “The Lady of Time will send you aid,” she said. “We have seen it.”
Before Yesora could respond to this or ask any further questions, the old woman set down her teacup as well, rose with some difficulty, and the two of them left the garden.
Yesora gathered the teacups and brought them inside, thinking to herself. The task she had been given seemed impossible. She hoped that Time would somehow send her help, but she had never seen Her direct intervention in the world before - it was said that Time worked in subtle ways and never revealed Her hand in things. She wondered what exactly the Keepers had seen.
She was awoken by by screams in the night, and as she reached for full wakefulness, a hurried knocking on the door. Not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately - it signaled that the Twori had attacked the village again. Danilō also stirred beside her, but she put her hand in his. “I will take care of it,” she whispered. “You stay here and protect Swira.”
She climbed out of bed and donned her black Māqhenyu’s robe and sandals, grabbed the bag of medicines and bandages she kept ready for such events, and let the child who was knocking on her door lead her to the scene of the attack.
It must have been a larger party this time - there were two dead soldiers from the patrol, and one wounded, and two houses had been ransacked. Of the occupants: one old man had been slain before she arrived, a young girl had a grievous head wound that bled profusely, and a collection of others had more minor wounds. A woman with a long cut on her arm attempted to calm a crying baby. The soldiers had killed one of the attacking Twori, and his body lay in the road with his sword discarded nearby. She ignored it; the soldiers would collect it later, and bring it back to the King for an analysis of his arms and armor.
Other Māqhenyu who lived closer by had already arrived, and more trickled in as they worked. Yesora joined a woman named Raidēci in treating the girl, and when they were done, they determined that she would probably live, unless her house was attacked again in the coming weeks. As the others treated the minor wounds and saw to the proper treatment of the Chēnya bodies, the remaining soldiers talked among themselves outside of her range of hearing; no doubt they were planning a retaliation against one of the southern Twori villages. Probably this attack had simply been the Twori’s own retaliation against some previous Chēnya retaliation, but to the soldiers and the King it was unacceptable to not respond to this, and they knew of only one way to do so.
They were not yet in open war with the Twori. Open war was a more honorable thing, where soldiers fought other soldiers in broad daylight and left the old and the young and the defenseless alone. Or so the King claimed. The war would come in 36 years; they had been through it once before, or so the legends went, had fought and lost, and had come back 200 years to prepare to fight it better the second time. The Twori did not seem to notice the difference between the two sets of Chēnya villages, with two different kings, would not know the difference until the second army defeated them after the first had run away, and this would drive them away, far to the north, or maybe even off the island altogether, and the villages would have peace. Or at least, that was the idea.
In theory, the King could have been sending more soldiers to the patrols in the northern villages to better repel these night-time attacks, but he kept the core of his army and generals with him further to the south, safely distant from the Twori settlements, plotting and planning for the war that was to come. When would they begin teaching the arts of war and slaughter to boys from the cradle? When would they begin training a generation of soldiers who would grow up knowing only that they were destined to spill Twori blood? Would it begin in 10 years? Or 15? Surely they would not start much later than that, to meet the 36-year deadline. The King and the soldiers behaved as if there were only a single timeline, one possible sequence of events, and that these had already been set in stone. As much as the Māqhenyu tried to teach the laypeople that there were nearly infinite possible futures, they stubbornly clung to the idea of a singular one. They had even adopted a new standard for counting the years based on the predicted victory, and most now referred to the current year as “-36”.
If Yesora had been allowed to be part of the clandestine conversations happening in the King’s palace, she might have suggested another possible future. But she had not been granted that role in Chēnya society; all she could do was care for the wounded, bury the dead, and try to teach the people the wisdom of the Lady of Time, or what parts of it they would accept.
Dealing with the aftermath of the attack had taken a large portion of the night, and as was common in this situation, Danilō had offered to take on her earliest appointment of the next day in order to allow her some rest. But it seemed that appointment had been much shorter than anticipated; she had barely roused and dressed herself for the day when she heard the front door open and shut again.
She came out to the front room of the house, wiping the sleep from her eyes. “I guess it went well with Qīfaero?”
“Not at all. She refused to hear me. She told me to leave and send a real Māqhenyu to help her.”
“And in what way are you not a ‘real’ Māqhenyu?” She could guess what Qīfaero had meant, of course, but she had not yet had enough tea to be in a good mood and wanted to be indignant about it.
“It’s the same nonsense so many of them have taken up lately. That a man should pledge his service to other men and not to a woman, even though She be the Lady of Time Herself. And that a man can never understand the trials of pregnancy.”
Yesora’s eyes narrowed. “She told me this was not a medical appointment.”
“It’s not.” He sighed, and threw himself back into a sitting chair. “I’m sorry. I think you are going to have to do this one anyway.” He paused, seeming pensive. “It’s true that the majority of Māqhenyu have always been women, but I believe this new trend of losing faith in the men will pass. It is just another negative effect of the coming war, the increased sectioning of people into soldiers and civilians, the feeling that men who did not choose to be soldiers are avoiding doing their part. The Lady of Time has shown me a happier future in my dreams of Her, where husbands and wives are once again able to work together in harmony, teaching Her wisdom, without this discrimination.”
This calmed Yesora’s ire, but she still had not had breakfast and tea and by the time she rectified this it would be time to go to the next appointment. “See if Raidēci is free to handle this one,” she said, crossing into the kitchen. Raidēci was the closest other Māqhenyu to her, and they often traded jobs when it seemed convenient.
“You don’t want Raidēci to take care of this one,” said Danilō.
“Why not?”
“You’ll understand when you speak with Qīfaero.”
By luck, some time was freed up in the afternoon, and she was able to pay her visit to Qīfaero. It was as Danilō had said: once they got to talking, she saw what the issue with handing the job to Raidēci would have been.
“We did everything right,” Qīfaero told her, sniffling softly. “We set out the candles. We carved the sigil into the ground. The ivy trellis had a great year, it made a very thick and verdant soulward. We bought the goat at the market a few days ago, it was plump and vigorous and we had kept it well-fed since then. But my husband could not kill the goat with a single blow - he had to strike it a second time. The soul was released in Anguish… and now our baby will receive an Anguished Soul in return.” Another flood of tears streamed down her face.
The worship of Time among the Chēnya was old, a thousand years old at least, maybe even older than the writing on the Southern Stone. But they still knew of its origin, and told the stories of how the Lady of Time had begun to send the dreams to the Māqhenyu and teach them of the new ways. The laypeople, who did not receive the dreams, had always lagged behind in their understanding of the mysteries of Time, and continued to cling to the concept of the universe that had been taught to them before the arrival of the dreams: that of a host of anonymous craftsmen spirits whose art was the sculpture of human souls. It was said that it was up to these “soulwrights” what soul a baby received, and it was only polite (and expected) to offer up a lesser soul in exchange. The soulwrights had stubbornly continued to exist in the people’s minds alongside their new understanding of Time, much to the frustration of the Māqhenyu.
Some of the ideas from the old soulwright tradition were damaging. All of the Māqhenyu were in agreement that all human souls were equal, as far as quality and potential were concerned - the King and his family did not have Masterwork Souls, those afflicted with troubles of the mind did not have Anguished Souls or Chaotic Souls, and old man Nyoweta, who made his home by the riverside, refused a roof over his head, and had conversations with himself did not have a Damaged Soul created by some unskilled soulwright apprentice. But while the laypeople were happy to listen to the Māqhenyu telling them that the King was not inherently better than them, and many were even tolerant of the idea that they were not inherently better than old man Nyoweta, when it came to their own children, they often regressed into older traditions. Maybe they knew, logically, that sacrificing the goat was not necessary. But what if it was necessary, and they didn’t do it? Could they afford to take that risk?
Many of the Māqhenyu refused to perform soulwright rituals, Yesora among them. But Raidēci was perfectly willing to do so, and often argued vehemently in favor of it. Supposedly, the soulwrights only desired the goat’s soul, and its flesh and blood afterwards became the property of whoever had performed the ritual. A fat goat could feed a lot of poor and hungry people. Yesora knew that old man Nyoweta often got by on the proceeds of Raidēci’s soulwright sacrifices. And, more importantly to the current case, Raidēci also argued that when superstitious people performed the ritual themselves, having no training in the arts of the animal slaughter, this was often the result, and that the resulting emotional pain and upset could harm the baby. If Raidēci heard about this case, Yesora would get an earful.
It wouldn’t help to tell Qīfaero that the soulwrights didn’t exist; even Yesora could see that. Instead, she took the woman’s hands and said, “Do not worry. Our Lady of Time looks after us, and will see that your child is given a beautiful soul. She is above them; She will not take offense over the anguish of a goat.” It was not strictly in line with what was commonly understood among the Māqhenyu - the Lady of Time did not safeguard all timelines for the Chēnya, and only guaranteed a good timeline and a better world as a consequence of better choices. But even though she disagreed with the motivation, Yesora knew that a sacrifice of a goat, however skillfully it was done, was inconsequential and would not provoke Time’s anger. At least the soulwrights had never been depicted as authorities or rulers, so if the people could not be taught that they did not exist, they could at least often be persuaded that Time was their Queen.
“A beautiful soul,” Qīfaero said softly, seeming to perk up a little. “What will please our Lady, Māqhenyu Yesora?”
“Only that we remember Her Wisdom and apply it to our lives. She has seen every corner of Time, every moment of history, in every timeline. She can guide us to the ones that are good and just, where all people live together in harmony. Let us remember the Wisdom, and renew our promise to follow it.”
They recited some of the axioms and aphorisms that had been written by the Māqhenyu about the things that Time valued, focusing on the idea of the equality of souls at birth, of souls as malleable things that would be shaped by the experience of Time and the nature of the timelines, and sang a song about children growing up and coming into their adult selves under the careful guidance of their parents. Yesora made Qīfaero some peppermint tea to sip, and when it was time to go, Qīfaero was smiling again and she felt that she had done her job.
On the way back from Qīfaero’s house, Yesora saw an unusual number of people gathered together in the streets, talking amongst themselves in groups. She caught some words - Māqhenyu, and temple, and future, and priestess, a word that she had never heard outside of folklore. As she looked for someone she could ask to explain, a child ran up to her and pulled at her robe. “They want you at the temple,” she said, hesitating slightly and then saying, “the priestesses.”
Yesora made her way to the temple through gradually thickening crowds of curious townsfolk, and was ushered in by the head Māqhenyu, who then uncharacteristically withdrew to the front patio, leaving Yesora alone in the temple with the aforementioned “priestesses”.
There were two of them: a taller, slender one with dark hair, and a shorter, stockier one with hair of the more common fiery color. They were dressed in black Māqhenyu’s robes - sort of. Instead of the waist being defined by a simple tied drawstring, it was pinched in by some tailor’s art, and a silvery spiderweb of embroidery covered the whole of the much more voluminous bottom half. They introduced themselves - the tall one was Priestess Tyäqe, and the shorter one Priestess Faiyule. They had come, they said, from the future, using the secret of the Gift that here in -36 was known only to the two Keepers.
“You have been given a task to create an unchanging language,” said Priestess Tyäqe. “We have here with us the answer.” She held out a thick book with unfamiliar writing on the cover. “The language is defined completely in here. However, the definition of the language is not the only work that must be done - your responsibility in this is to learn this language, and teach it to the others. From here on, it will be the official language of the priesthood, to be used throughout the millennia and throughout all of the timelines. We will explain what needs to be done in order for it to be unchanging.”
“‘Priesthood?’” asked Yesora. It was not a word she had heard before. A “priestess” was an old concept - an old woman, who, throughout decades of lived experience, had gained such knowledge and wisdom that even though her husband or son might be the true head of her household and have command of the money, she was awarded a position of power and respect within it. There were few people, maybe no people, who met that description these days, but such women often appeared as guides or sources of wisdom in folk and fairy tales. These two “priestesses” seemed to be some sort of Māqhenyu, and the word was not a bad way to refer to them, at least the female ones, but it had no masculine equivalent. A “priesthood” was then, what? A collection of priestesses? But traditionally, and in all the stories, there was only ever one per household.
“The worship of Sapfita - who you simply call Time - is to undergo a number of changes,” said Priestess Faiyule. “It is all laid out in the book. In your language, don’t worry, you do not need to learn the new language just to understand the running text. What you now call Māqhenyu are now to be called “priestesses”, and together we are all the “priesthood”. There is no central governance, no supreme leader, but we are a single body of a thousand million temple heads from every place and time who make decisions and rules in a democratic fashion to which we are all bound. We wear these now, the nurefyes—” she gestured at her embellished robe— “and will provide the patterns and instructions for the embroidery separately.”
“And what are the male Māqhenyu to be called?” asked Yesora.
“There is no need for such a term, for there will be no male priestesses in the new priesthood. We will, of course, grant you and any others who are married to men divorces from your husbands. It would not do for a priestess to be married to a layman.”
Yesora shook her head. “My husband is not a layman. He has studied the same Wisdom. He has performed the same duties. He has dreamed the same dreams. He has had more dreams of our Lady than I have, if you must know.”
“After you accept the Grammar of the new language, he will become a layman, as all men are. We understand it is a big change, but it must be this way - in the new priesthood, we are all of us Keepers of the Gift. We all share the secret. And the men will not be able to safeguard it. Your King desperately wants to know the secret of our power. If a man carried the secret of the Gift, the King would ennoble him in order to claim it in return, and then it would be a secret no longer. If that man were a convicted criminal, the King would ennoble him to learn the secret. If that “man” were but a 12-year-old boy, he would ennoble him. If that man was the man who sleeps in the mud by the bank of the river, the King would ennoble him as well. But because the Keepers are always both women, the King has refused, and will continue to refuse to ennoble them, even to learn the secret. This is why the Keepers have always been female, and why, when we all become Keepers ourselves, we must all be female as well.”
“The Māqhenyu do not care for the regard of the King. We only care for the regard of Time.”
“It is easy to say that when the power of kings is not yours for the taking,” said Priestess Tyäqe.
Yesora remembered her thoughts from the previous night, of how she might advise the King if she had that power, and had no response. At length, she said: “I cannot make a decision of this gravity today. Let me sleep on it, and consult with my husband, and hopefully hear from our Lady in my dreams.”
“Of course,” said Priestess Tyäqe. “There is no rush. The head of your order has provided us with lodgings, and we will wait here until you make your decision.”
Yesora left the temple with a heavy heart, hoping for Wisdom in dreams.
Danilō was at first incredulous. He left, presumably to go to the temple and speak to the priestesses himself, and then returned, seeming sad and defeated. “I do not like it,” he said, “but they are not wrong.” He would not speak of it again that evening; perhaps he, also, hoped for a clarifying dream of Time. Yesora attempted a half-hearted game with Swira, but eventually had to concede when Swira angrily accused her of not paying attention, and they all had an early night.
Fortunately, Time did decide to bless her with a dream. The Lady appeared as She always did: as a shifting cloud of blue run through with loosely woven threads of silver - not unlike the embroidery on the new priestesses’ nurefyes, Yesora noted.
“Is this truly the only way?” Yesora asked. It was probably for naught, but she wanted to vent; the Lady of Time did not respond to specific questions. She showed one what She wanted them to see, and one could not force a particular vision or an answer to a particular question. “What about the dream You gave Danilō? What was the meaning of that, if this is to be our future?”
The blue and silver shifted, and gave way to visions: a woman wearing one of the new nurefye robes, a priestess - but then there was a man beside her, wearing the same. The woman passed the man a book; it was the book the priestesses had shown her, the Grammar. He opened it and they read it together, seeming to have an argument or a disagreement, but they were in good spirits, smiling and laughing.
Yesora shook her head, at a loss. She could not resolve this supposed future with the one that the priestesses had promised her.
The images changed now. It seemed as if she was walking down a path in a dim forest, in the early morning before the dawn. At first the path was but a bare hint of trodden grass, but as it continued it widened and deepened, and in the distance, she could see that it became as wide as a road in the village, with hoofprints and cart ruts to match. For some reason, something caught her eye off to the right: another path, branching from the one she was currently on, but as small and indistinct as the original path had been when she had started on it. Some nameless instinct compelled her to take it.
The new path did not widen, or deepen. It continued on just as indistinctly as it had before. She was aware of the larger path beside her, but the people that now walked along it did not seem to notice her. Eventually Yesora’s path ended at a small clearing. There, sitting on a large rock, was Danilō, dressed in a nurefye like those of the two priestesses of the future. She saw then that she was wearing one of the same. Danilō waved to her and pointed. “Look,” he said. “The sun is rising.” And so it was. They sat on the rock together and watched dawn break over the trees.
Sunrise in the dream gave way to sunrise in reality, the light filtering through the cracks in the window shutters. Yesora awoke to find Danilō already awake and seated on the edge of the bed, leaning back slightly on his hands and looking contemplatively at the first rays of morning. “Did you sleep alright?” Yesora asked.
He smiled a bit, and turned to face her. “I did indeed,” he said. “Time has shown me many things… I am to trust you in this, and you will find the path that we should take.”
“I hope you are right.” Yesora did not feel as certain. But she had to return to the temple that day and tell the new priestesses what she had decided. They may have said that they would wait for her, but she knew that the head Māqhenyu would not.
Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule were just where she had left them the previous day; whether they had slept and eaten and briefly traded their nurefyes for something more comfortable for the sleeping hours, or had simply stood there in the temple for the whole night, Yesora could not say. Or, perhaps they had used the power of the Gift to travel from the previous evening directly into the morning, without having to wait.
She looked at them again, the two of them and the thick book held in Priestess Tyäqe’s hands. “Do I truly have a choice in this?” she asked. “Is this event already written in stone?” Time had always asserted that there was always a choice, that nothing was ever really certain to occur and that there were innumerable timelines, but so much was changing about their worship that maybe this was no longer true - or no longer officially true, according to the new “priesthood”. “If I reject the Grammar, will you simply offer the choice to someone else?”
“You have Free Choice,” said Priestess Faiyule. “And we will not offer the choice to another. You are the one who has been chosen; it is upon your decision alone that the priesthood will come into existence, or remain uncreated. Before you are two paths: one where we live in freedom and equality and light, and prize knowledge and wisdom above wealth and warfare, and another where we live in darkness and follow the myth of the Masterwork Soul into warfare and ruin. You must choose which world you would rather live in. The power of kings must be countered and mediated by the power of Sapfita, and if that power remains in the hands of just two people, we will only create another kind of king. We need a priesthood to share this power, and only those who cannot be corrupted by the power of kings may join.”
Yesora remembered the forking paths of her dream. Was this the choice she was meant to make, the smaller path she was meant to walk, by rejecting the Grammar for Danilō’s sake? But no; in the dream, she and Danilō had both been wearing the new style of robe, this nurefye, with the pinched waist and the impossible embroidery. Without the Grammar, there was no nurefye, that much was clear. Perhaps she had not yet encountered that particular fork in Time.
She hesitated a moment, and then held out both hands and took the sides of the great book in them, preparing to support its weight. “In the name of all of the Māqhenyu of Time, I accept this Grammar.”
“Of Sapfita,” said Priestess Tyäqe, releasing the book and leaving Yesora holding it by herself.
“Of Sapfita,” Yesora repeated.
She learned much from the Grammar. The language first, its sounds and syllables; its six tenses, which were, strangely, marked on the nouns; its topical case, which carried the tense, and which she required much practice to remember to use; its eight different ways to say “that”. Her own name was already present in example sentences in the Grammar, and with her family’s help, she created names for them as well: Taniloa, and Suirä. Regardless of whatever happened after, she would always want a way to speak of her family, in any language that she used. Other names for familiar things were also already present in the Grammar: Cheanya, Tuari. She learned the word for “priestess”, which was neaSapfita - a word that simply meant one whose job was Sapfita, just as a butcher was one whose job was meat, or a baker was one whose job was bread. Like almost all words in the language, it was not gendered - there was no grammatical rule that it could only refer to a woman. It was only in the rules in between the sections on grammar where that was stated.
There were almost as many rules on the functioning of the new priesthood. The temples must be enlarged, because all of the new priestesses were to live in them from then on. Her house and daughter would remain with Danilō, because her new duties as a priestess of Sapfita would not allow her the time to raise a child. The temples must each have a tall clock, visible from the nearby neighborhoods. The temples must provide a consistent supply of food, medicine, monetary help, shelter - whatever the people needed that the King could not or would not provide. There were to be six hours during two days of most weeks dedicated to reflection and prayer, supervised by the temples. The temples would perform all marriages and funerals. The King was to pay for all of this, but the priestesses from the future would handle that negotiation; to the new priestesses, once Māqhenyu, fell only the organization and building.
Yesora learned everything, with occasional clarifications from Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule, and then taught all of it to rotating classes of Māqhenyu, who, once graduated from her program, were fitted for nurefyes and taught to braid their hair in the new prescribed manner. At last all of them had been educated, and Yesora finally took a back seat to the proceedings.
Aside from defining a couple new holidays intended to overshadow traditional days of soulwright worship, the Grammar had not opined on the subject of the soulwright sacrifices, but had only said that opposition to soulwright worship must vary based on the time period, and that the priestesses of the time must make their own determinations on what was appropriate. So, taking the cue from Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule’s talk of democratic rule, the heads of all of the new temples had gathered and had a vote, which had been preceded by a heated debate. In the end, it had been decided that priestesses must not officiate soulwright sacrifices, for any reason, and also that the debate and the vote had been so chaotic that this process should not be used often. Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule admitted that such a vote had never actually been used again to their knowledge in all of the 200 years that separated them from Yesora and her contemporaries.
Part of the town was now gathered in front of the temple, all of the people who would call this temple theirs and go there when they were in need. It was much bigger than it had been before; the last of the offices and dormitories had finally been finished the week prior. They were now gathered to see the new head priestess unveil the great clock.
Yesora stood off to the side, among the other new priestesses. Her eyes swept over the crowd; Swira was up in front, gathered together with the other village children, while Danilō hung back among the laypeople - the other laypeople. He now wore a regular shirt and trousers like the rest of them, no longer permitted to wear a robe. Would she find the alternate path that Time - that Sapfita - had promised her would be the solution? She had been so busy in the past months, perhaps she had missed it.
Raidēci, now officially called Raiteaci in the new language, stood beside her, and followed her gaze. “It is a pity about the divorces,” she said, in a low tone of voice that would not carry. Yesora remembered that she, too, had had to leave a husband behind. Raidēci ran her fingers down the front of her nurefye. “It is a pretty pattern, isn’t it?” she said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “It looks like a silvery tree, but upside down. It has some similarities with the real ones. Look,” she gestured at a nearby real tree, with a brilliantly red bird sitting in its branches. “Look at the beautiful bird in that tree. Eye-catching, isn’t it? You probably did not even notice the brown one.” Now that she had mentioned it, Yesora did notice: a dull-colored bird with brown feathers had almost completely blended in with the branches. “Sometimes blending into the background is the best strategy,” Raidēci continued. “In our time, we opposed soulwright worship - we all disagreed with it strongly. But some still continued to practice the rituals, and the decision that was made will not stop it. It will just become less visible, more camouflaged. And you will find that other rules will be broken, as well. Some of us will become little brown birds hidden in the branches of the great tree of Time. A new, brighter sun is rising, but our old one has not yet set. In its relative dimness, it will be hidden by the new light. Wherever there is a strong light, there are always those hiding in the shadows where it cannot reach.” She cast her eyes back over at Danilō.
Yesora followed her gaze, and saw that Danilō was speaking, in a hushed but avid way with Raidēci’s ex-husband. “There are rules now,” she said, uncertainly, wanting to be sure she understood. “We can’t just— the new priesthood has just begun. Isn’t it too early to be speaking of— of—”
“Of heresy?” asked Raidēci, quite calmly. “Oh, no. All the better to get a head start. Our tradition will be no less august and ancient than the one defined in the Grammar. They will not be able to dismiss us as upstarts, especially when you are one of us.”
“How many of ‘us’ are there?” Yesora asked.
“Only a few, so far. We have been approaching people who we know have lost treasured marriages, discretely. Will you pledge to join us? We will not move until we have sufficient numbers.” She held out hand, palm up.
Yesora saw clearly the new, lesser-trod path that was intended for her by Sapfita. She clasped her hand over Raidēci’s. “I will join you when the time comes.” They smiled at each other. A new sun was rising, indeed, but old traditions need not die with it.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #13: Begin, Techelet #2: Tzedakah (Obligation to charity), Color of the Day (Jan. 27 2025): Shilly-shally
Styles and Supplies: Canvas, Panorama, Novelty Beads (January Canvas/Frame challenge), Cartography, Portrait
Word Count: 6348
Rating: T
Warnings: Implied violence, non-detailed description of serious injuries
Characters: Yesora, her family and contemporaries, Tyäqe, and Faiyule
In-Universe Date: Year -36 (before the Gift)
Summary: Priestesses from the future arrive with the Grammar of a new language, disrupting Yesora's religious practice and way of life.
Notes: Not the document on Github, this is a side-story about Yesora's Grammar, and the changes it made to religious practice, why the priesthood is all female, and where a number of the conventions that are present in Setsiana's day came from (as well as the origin of the word that's being translated as "priestess"). I wanted to wait to post this until after introducing the Egalitarian heresy, for I hope obvious reasons.
It was afternoon when the Keepers of the Gift arrived in Gechiya. Māqhenyu Yesora had been out shopping with her daughter Swira when she had heard the news from the old woman who sold her the herbs she used to make medicines, and had rushed home with her purchases in the hopes that she would be able to see the holy pair in the town square or at the temple where the head of the local Māqhenyu directed the worship of the Lady of Time. But it was somewhere else that she encountered them.
When she arrived at her home, she found that the Keepers were waiting for her there, sitting on the stone bench in the front garden where she grew an assortment of simple vegetables and the most frequently needed herbs. They were drinking tea from a pair of teacups while her husband Danilō stood awkwardly to the side with the teapot, his other hand nervously clutching at the fabric of his black Māqhenyu’s robe. “They insisted on waiting for you here,” he said, by way of greeting. “They said that they only wanted a quick word with you, and that they had to be elsewhere afterwards.”
Yesora handed the bag of herbs to Danilō and approached the two on the bench as he took it and Swira back inside. The younger one sat up tall and straight, with perfect poise, while the older one, an old woman in her sixties, slouched a bit and seemed grateful for the bench. Soon, maybe, the older of the two would die and it would fall to the other to choose a new young person to become her apprentice, to carry the secret of the Gift into the next generation. They wore the same black robes that all Māqhenyu pledged to the service of Time wore, but they occupied a unique place among their number. 164 years ago, the Lady of Time had bestowed upon one Māqhenyu the secret knowledge of how to travel through time, in order to save the whole Chēnya people from destruction at the hands of the Twori during a war that would not happen for another 36 years, from Yesora’s current perspective. With that young woman’s help, the people had traveled back in time 200 years, and the first Keeper of the secret, of Time’s Gift, had told the King that she had seen that the Chēnya would be successful the second time around, when it came time to fight the war again 200 years later. Since then, the Gift had been kept as a secret known to only two Māqhenyu at once, always female. Few knew the true names and families of the Keepers of the Gift; they traveled from town to town, a nameless symbol of hope for the end of the violence of the Twori.
“What I help you with, holy Keepers?” asked Yesora.
The younger Keeper stood and set her cup on the bench. “You have been chosen for a great and holy task,” she said. “For the furtherance of time travel in service of the Lady of Time, we require an Eternal and Unchanging Language. The carvings on the Southern Stone have become unreadable due to the ravages of time upon the form of our language, and the records that we are making even now will become even more so as time goes on. We have seen that the Gift will be kept alive for over 2000 years, and we need a reliable way to communicate with those far-future Māqhenyu. Your task is to create this language - the only requirements are that it must be capable of expressing the tasks and concerns of the Māqhenyu, and that it must be eternal and unchanging. We will return for the specification when you have finished it.”
Yesora shook her head. “I am not worthy of this task. I don’t know anything about how a language is made, or why our own Chēnya tongue has changed from what our ancestors wrote on the Southern Stone. How then can I create a language that does not change?”
The elder Keeper spoke now, without rising from her seat. “The Lady of Time will send you aid,” she said. “We have seen it.”
Before Yesora could respond to this or ask any further questions, the old woman set down her teacup as well, rose with some difficulty, and the two of them left the garden.
Yesora gathered the teacups and brought them inside, thinking to herself. The task she had been given seemed impossible. She hoped that Time would somehow send her help, but she had never seen Her direct intervention in the world before - it was said that Time worked in subtle ways and never revealed Her hand in things. She wondered what exactly the Keepers had seen.
She was awoken by by screams in the night, and as she reached for full wakefulness, a hurried knocking on the door. Not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately - it signaled that the Twori had attacked the village again. Danilō also stirred beside her, but she put her hand in his. “I will take care of it,” she whispered. “You stay here and protect Swira.”
She climbed out of bed and donned her black Māqhenyu’s robe and sandals, grabbed the bag of medicines and bandages she kept ready for such events, and let the child who was knocking on her door lead her to the scene of the attack.
It must have been a larger party this time - there were two dead soldiers from the patrol, and one wounded, and two houses had been ransacked. Of the occupants: one old man had been slain before she arrived, a young girl had a grievous head wound that bled profusely, and a collection of others had more minor wounds. A woman with a long cut on her arm attempted to calm a crying baby. The soldiers had killed one of the attacking Twori, and his body lay in the road with his sword discarded nearby. She ignored it; the soldiers would collect it later, and bring it back to the King for an analysis of his arms and armor.
Other Māqhenyu who lived closer by had already arrived, and more trickled in as they worked. Yesora joined a woman named Raidēci in treating the girl, and when they were done, they determined that she would probably live, unless her house was attacked again in the coming weeks. As the others treated the minor wounds and saw to the proper treatment of the Chēnya bodies, the remaining soldiers talked among themselves outside of her range of hearing; no doubt they were planning a retaliation against one of the southern Twori villages. Probably this attack had simply been the Twori’s own retaliation against some previous Chēnya retaliation, but to the soldiers and the King it was unacceptable to not respond to this, and they knew of only one way to do so.
They were not yet in open war with the Twori. Open war was a more honorable thing, where soldiers fought other soldiers in broad daylight and left the old and the young and the defenseless alone. Or so the King claimed. The war would come in 36 years; they had been through it once before, or so the legends went, had fought and lost, and had come back 200 years to prepare to fight it better the second time. The Twori did not seem to notice the difference between the two sets of Chēnya villages, with two different kings, would not know the difference until the second army defeated them after the first had run away, and this would drive them away, far to the north, or maybe even off the island altogether, and the villages would have peace. Or at least, that was the idea.
In theory, the King could have been sending more soldiers to the patrols in the northern villages to better repel these night-time attacks, but he kept the core of his army and generals with him further to the south, safely distant from the Twori settlements, plotting and planning for the war that was to come. When would they begin teaching the arts of war and slaughter to boys from the cradle? When would they begin training a generation of soldiers who would grow up knowing only that they were destined to spill Twori blood? Would it begin in 10 years? Or 15? Surely they would not start much later than that, to meet the 36-year deadline. The King and the soldiers behaved as if there were only a single timeline, one possible sequence of events, and that these had already been set in stone. As much as the Māqhenyu tried to teach the laypeople that there were nearly infinite possible futures, they stubbornly clung to the idea of a singular one. They had even adopted a new standard for counting the years based on the predicted victory, and most now referred to the current year as “-36”.
If Yesora had been allowed to be part of the clandestine conversations happening in the King’s palace, she might have suggested another possible future. But she had not been granted that role in Chēnya society; all she could do was care for the wounded, bury the dead, and try to teach the people the wisdom of the Lady of Time, or what parts of it they would accept.
Dealing with the aftermath of the attack had taken a large portion of the night, and as was common in this situation, Danilō had offered to take on her earliest appointment of the next day in order to allow her some rest. But it seemed that appointment had been much shorter than anticipated; she had barely roused and dressed herself for the day when she heard the front door open and shut again.
She came out to the front room of the house, wiping the sleep from her eyes. “I guess it went well with Qīfaero?”
“Not at all. She refused to hear me. She told me to leave and send a real Māqhenyu to help her.”
“And in what way are you not a ‘real’ Māqhenyu?” She could guess what Qīfaero had meant, of course, but she had not yet had enough tea to be in a good mood and wanted to be indignant about it.
“It’s the same nonsense so many of them have taken up lately. That a man should pledge his service to other men and not to a woman, even though She be the Lady of Time Herself. And that a man can never understand the trials of pregnancy.”
Yesora’s eyes narrowed. “She told me this was not a medical appointment.”
“It’s not.” He sighed, and threw himself back into a sitting chair. “I’m sorry. I think you are going to have to do this one anyway.” He paused, seeming pensive. “It’s true that the majority of Māqhenyu have always been women, but I believe this new trend of losing faith in the men will pass. It is just another negative effect of the coming war, the increased sectioning of people into soldiers and civilians, the feeling that men who did not choose to be soldiers are avoiding doing their part. The Lady of Time has shown me a happier future in my dreams of Her, where husbands and wives are once again able to work together in harmony, teaching Her wisdom, without this discrimination.”
This calmed Yesora’s ire, but she still had not had breakfast and tea and by the time she rectified this it would be time to go to the next appointment. “See if Raidēci is free to handle this one,” she said, crossing into the kitchen. Raidēci was the closest other Māqhenyu to her, and they often traded jobs when it seemed convenient.
“You don’t want Raidēci to take care of this one,” said Danilō.
“Why not?”
“You’ll understand when you speak with Qīfaero.”
By luck, some time was freed up in the afternoon, and she was able to pay her visit to Qīfaero. It was as Danilō had said: once they got to talking, she saw what the issue with handing the job to Raidēci would have been.
“We did everything right,” Qīfaero told her, sniffling softly. “We set out the candles. We carved the sigil into the ground. The ivy trellis had a great year, it made a very thick and verdant soulward. We bought the goat at the market a few days ago, it was plump and vigorous and we had kept it well-fed since then. But my husband could not kill the goat with a single blow - he had to strike it a second time. The soul was released in Anguish… and now our baby will receive an Anguished Soul in return.” Another flood of tears streamed down her face.
The worship of Time among the Chēnya was old, a thousand years old at least, maybe even older than the writing on the Southern Stone. But they still knew of its origin, and told the stories of how the Lady of Time had begun to send the dreams to the Māqhenyu and teach them of the new ways. The laypeople, who did not receive the dreams, had always lagged behind in their understanding of the mysteries of Time, and continued to cling to the concept of the universe that had been taught to them before the arrival of the dreams: that of a host of anonymous craftsmen spirits whose art was the sculpture of human souls. It was said that it was up to these “soulwrights” what soul a baby received, and it was only polite (and expected) to offer up a lesser soul in exchange. The soulwrights had stubbornly continued to exist in the people’s minds alongside their new understanding of Time, much to the frustration of the Māqhenyu.
Some of the ideas from the old soulwright tradition were damaging. All of the Māqhenyu were in agreement that all human souls were equal, as far as quality and potential were concerned - the King and his family did not have Masterwork Souls, those afflicted with troubles of the mind did not have Anguished Souls or Chaotic Souls, and old man Nyoweta, who made his home by the riverside, refused a roof over his head, and had conversations with himself did not have a Damaged Soul created by some unskilled soulwright apprentice. But while the laypeople were happy to listen to the Māqhenyu telling them that the King was not inherently better than them, and many were even tolerant of the idea that they were not inherently better than old man Nyoweta, when it came to their own children, they often regressed into older traditions. Maybe they knew, logically, that sacrificing the goat was not necessary. But what if it was necessary, and they didn’t do it? Could they afford to take that risk?
Many of the Māqhenyu refused to perform soulwright rituals, Yesora among them. But Raidēci was perfectly willing to do so, and often argued vehemently in favor of it. Supposedly, the soulwrights only desired the goat’s soul, and its flesh and blood afterwards became the property of whoever had performed the ritual. A fat goat could feed a lot of poor and hungry people. Yesora knew that old man Nyoweta often got by on the proceeds of Raidēci’s soulwright sacrifices. And, more importantly to the current case, Raidēci also argued that when superstitious people performed the ritual themselves, having no training in the arts of the animal slaughter, this was often the result, and that the resulting emotional pain and upset could harm the baby. If Raidēci heard about this case, Yesora would get an earful.
It wouldn’t help to tell Qīfaero that the soulwrights didn’t exist; even Yesora could see that. Instead, she took the woman’s hands and said, “Do not worry. Our Lady of Time looks after us, and will see that your child is given a beautiful soul. She is above them; She will not take offense over the anguish of a goat.” It was not strictly in line with what was commonly understood among the Māqhenyu - the Lady of Time did not safeguard all timelines for the Chēnya, and only guaranteed a good timeline and a better world as a consequence of better choices. But even though she disagreed with the motivation, Yesora knew that a sacrifice of a goat, however skillfully it was done, was inconsequential and would not provoke Time’s anger. At least the soulwrights had never been depicted as authorities or rulers, so if the people could not be taught that they did not exist, they could at least often be persuaded that Time was their Queen.
“A beautiful soul,” Qīfaero said softly, seeming to perk up a little. “What will please our Lady, Māqhenyu Yesora?”
“Only that we remember Her Wisdom and apply it to our lives. She has seen every corner of Time, every moment of history, in every timeline. She can guide us to the ones that are good and just, where all people live together in harmony. Let us remember the Wisdom, and renew our promise to follow it.”
They recited some of the axioms and aphorisms that had been written by the Māqhenyu about the things that Time valued, focusing on the idea of the equality of souls at birth, of souls as malleable things that would be shaped by the experience of Time and the nature of the timelines, and sang a song about children growing up and coming into their adult selves under the careful guidance of their parents. Yesora made Qīfaero some peppermint tea to sip, and when it was time to go, Qīfaero was smiling again and she felt that she had done her job.
On the way back from Qīfaero’s house, Yesora saw an unusual number of people gathered together in the streets, talking amongst themselves in groups. She caught some words - Māqhenyu, and temple, and future, and priestess, a word that she had never heard outside of folklore. As she looked for someone she could ask to explain, a child ran up to her and pulled at her robe. “They want you at the temple,” she said, hesitating slightly and then saying, “the priestesses.”
Yesora made her way to the temple through gradually thickening crowds of curious townsfolk, and was ushered in by the head Māqhenyu, who then uncharacteristically withdrew to the front patio, leaving Yesora alone in the temple with the aforementioned “priestesses”.
There were two of them: a taller, slender one with dark hair, and a shorter, stockier one with hair of the more common fiery color. They were dressed in black Māqhenyu’s robes - sort of. Instead of the waist being defined by a simple tied drawstring, it was pinched in by some tailor’s art, and a silvery spiderweb of embroidery covered the whole of the much more voluminous bottom half. They introduced themselves - the tall one was Priestess Tyäqe, and the shorter one Priestess Faiyule. They had come, they said, from the future, using the secret of the Gift that here in -36 was known only to the two Keepers.
“You have been given a task to create an unchanging language,” said Priestess Tyäqe. “We have here with us the answer.” She held out a thick book with unfamiliar writing on the cover. “The language is defined completely in here. However, the definition of the language is not the only work that must be done - your responsibility in this is to learn this language, and teach it to the others. From here on, it will be the official language of the priesthood, to be used throughout the millennia and throughout all of the timelines. We will explain what needs to be done in order for it to be unchanging.”
“‘Priesthood?’” asked Yesora. It was not a word she had heard before. A “priestess” was an old concept - an old woman, who, throughout decades of lived experience, had gained such knowledge and wisdom that even though her husband or son might be the true head of her household and have command of the money, she was awarded a position of power and respect within it. There were few people, maybe no people, who met that description these days, but such women often appeared as guides or sources of wisdom in folk and fairy tales. These two “priestesses” seemed to be some sort of Māqhenyu, and the word was not a bad way to refer to them, at least the female ones, but it had no masculine equivalent. A “priesthood” was then, what? A collection of priestesses? But traditionally, and in all the stories, there was only ever one per household.
“The worship of Sapfita - who you simply call Time - is to undergo a number of changes,” said Priestess Faiyule. “It is all laid out in the book. In your language, don’t worry, you do not need to learn the new language just to understand the running text. What you now call Māqhenyu are now to be called “priestesses”, and together we are all the “priesthood”. There is no central governance, no supreme leader, but we are a single body of a thousand million temple heads from every place and time who make decisions and rules in a democratic fashion to which we are all bound. We wear these now, the nurefyes—” she gestured at her embellished robe— “and will provide the patterns and instructions for the embroidery separately.”
“And what are the male Māqhenyu to be called?” asked Yesora.
“There is no need for such a term, for there will be no male priestesses in the new priesthood. We will, of course, grant you and any others who are married to men divorces from your husbands. It would not do for a priestess to be married to a layman.”
Yesora shook her head. “My husband is not a layman. He has studied the same Wisdom. He has performed the same duties. He has dreamed the same dreams. He has had more dreams of our Lady than I have, if you must know.”
“After you accept the Grammar of the new language, he will become a layman, as all men are. We understand it is a big change, but it must be this way - in the new priesthood, we are all of us Keepers of the Gift. We all share the secret. And the men will not be able to safeguard it. Your King desperately wants to know the secret of our power. If a man carried the secret of the Gift, the King would ennoble him in order to claim it in return, and then it would be a secret no longer. If that man were a convicted criminal, the King would ennoble him to learn the secret. If that “man” were but a 12-year-old boy, he would ennoble him. If that man was the man who sleeps in the mud by the bank of the river, the King would ennoble him as well. But because the Keepers are always both women, the King has refused, and will continue to refuse to ennoble them, even to learn the secret. This is why the Keepers have always been female, and why, when we all become Keepers ourselves, we must all be female as well.”
“The Māqhenyu do not care for the regard of the King. We only care for the regard of Time.”
“It is easy to say that when the power of kings is not yours for the taking,” said Priestess Tyäqe.
Yesora remembered her thoughts from the previous night, of how she might advise the King if she had that power, and had no response. At length, she said: “I cannot make a decision of this gravity today. Let me sleep on it, and consult with my husband, and hopefully hear from our Lady in my dreams.”
“Of course,” said Priestess Tyäqe. “There is no rush. The head of your order has provided us with lodgings, and we will wait here until you make your decision.”
Yesora left the temple with a heavy heart, hoping for Wisdom in dreams.
Danilō was at first incredulous. He left, presumably to go to the temple and speak to the priestesses himself, and then returned, seeming sad and defeated. “I do not like it,” he said, “but they are not wrong.” He would not speak of it again that evening; perhaps he, also, hoped for a clarifying dream of Time. Yesora attempted a half-hearted game with Swira, but eventually had to concede when Swira angrily accused her of not paying attention, and they all had an early night.
Fortunately, Time did decide to bless her with a dream. The Lady appeared as She always did: as a shifting cloud of blue run through with loosely woven threads of silver - not unlike the embroidery on the new priestesses’ nurefyes, Yesora noted.
“Is this truly the only way?” Yesora asked. It was probably for naught, but she wanted to vent; the Lady of Time did not respond to specific questions. She showed one what She wanted them to see, and one could not force a particular vision or an answer to a particular question. “What about the dream You gave Danilō? What was the meaning of that, if this is to be our future?”
The blue and silver shifted, and gave way to visions: a woman wearing one of the new nurefye robes, a priestess - but then there was a man beside her, wearing the same. The woman passed the man a book; it was the book the priestesses had shown her, the Grammar. He opened it and they read it together, seeming to have an argument or a disagreement, but they were in good spirits, smiling and laughing.
Yesora shook her head, at a loss. She could not resolve this supposed future with the one that the priestesses had promised her.
The images changed now. It seemed as if she was walking down a path in a dim forest, in the early morning before the dawn. At first the path was but a bare hint of trodden grass, but as it continued it widened and deepened, and in the distance, she could see that it became as wide as a road in the village, with hoofprints and cart ruts to match. For some reason, something caught her eye off to the right: another path, branching from the one she was currently on, but as small and indistinct as the original path had been when she had started on it. Some nameless instinct compelled her to take it.
The new path did not widen, or deepen. It continued on just as indistinctly as it had before. She was aware of the larger path beside her, but the people that now walked along it did not seem to notice her. Eventually Yesora’s path ended at a small clearing. There, sitting on a large rock, was Danilō, dressed in a nurefye like those of the two priestesses of the future. She saw then that she was wearing one of the same. Danilō waved to her and pointed. “Look,” he said. “The sun is rising.” And so it was. They sat on the rock together and watched dawn break over the trees.
Sunrise in the dream gave way to sunrise in reality, the light filtering through the cracks in the window shutters. Yesora awoke to find Danilō already awake and seated on the edge of the bed, leaning back slightly on his hands and looking contemplatively at the first rays of morning. “Did you sleep alright?” Yesora asked.
He smiled a bit, and turned to face her. “I did indeed,” he said. “Time has shown me many things… I am to trust you in this, and you will find the path that we should take.”
“I hope you are right.” Yesora did not feel as certain. But she had to return to the temple that day and tell the new priestesses what she had decided. They may have said that they would wait for her, but she knew that the head Māqhenyu would not.
Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule were just where she had left them the previous day; whether they had slept and eaten and briefly traded their nurefyes for something more comfortable for the sleeping hours, or had simply stood there in the temple for the whole night, Yesora could not say. Or, perhaps they had used the power of the Gift to travel from the previous evening directly into the morning, without having to wait.
She looked at them again, the two of them and the thick book held in Priestess Tyäqe’s hands. “Do I truly have a choice in this?” she asked. “Is this event already written in stone?” Time had always asserted that there was always a choice, that nothing was ever really certain to occur and that there were innumerable timelines, but so much was changing about their worship that maybe this was no longer true - or no longer officially true, according to the new “priesthood”. “If I reject the Grammar, will you simply offer the choice to someone else?”
“You have Free Choice,” said Priestess Faiyule. “And we will not offer the choice to another. You are the one who has been chosen; it is upon your decision alone that the priesthood will come into existence, or remain uncreated. Before you are two paths: one where we live in freedom and equality and light, and prize knowledge and wisdom above wealth and warfare, and another where we live in darkness and follow the myth of the Masterwork Soul into warfare and ruin. You must choose which world you would rather live in. The power of kings must be countered and mediated by the power of Sapfita, and if that power remains in the hands of just two people, we will only create another kind of king. We need a priesthood to share this power, and only those who cannot be corrupted by the power of kings may join.”
Yesora remembered the forking paths of her dream. Was this the choice she was meant to make, the smaller path she was meant to walk, by rejecting the Grammar for Danilō’s sake? But no; in the dream, she and Danilō had both been wearing the new style of robe, this nurefye, with the pinched waist and the impossible embroidery. Without the Grammar, there was no nurefye, that much was clear. Perhaps she had not yet encountered that particular fork in Time.
She hesitated a moment, and then held out both hands and took the sides of the great book in them, preparing to support its weight. “In the name of all of the Māqhenyu of Time, I accept this Grammar.”
“Of Sapfita,” said Priestess Tyäqe, releasing the book and leaving Yesora holding it by herself.
“Of Sapfita,” Yesora repeated.
She learned much from the Grammar. The language first, its sounds and syllables; its six tenses, which were, strangely, marked on the nouns; its topical case, which carried the tense, and which she required much practice to remember to use; its eight different ways to say “that”. Her own name was already present in example sentences in the Grammar, and with her family’s help, she created names for them as well: Taniloa, and Suirä. Regardless of whatever happened after, she would always want a way to speak of her family, in any language that she used. Other names for familiar things were also already present in the Grammar: Cheanya, Tuari. She learned the word for “priestess”, which was neaSapfita - a word that simply meant one whose job was Sapfita, just as a butcher was one whose job was meat, or a baker was one whose job was bread. Like almost all words in the language, it was not gendered - there was no grammatical rule that it could only refer to a woman. It was only in the rules in between the sections on grammar where that was stated.
There were almost as many rules on the functioning of the new priesthood. The temples must be enlarged, because all of the new priestesses were to live in them from then on. Her house and daughter would remain with Danilō, because her new duties as a priestess of Sapfita would not allow her the time to raise a child. The temples must each have a tall clock, visible from the nearby neighborhoods. The temples must provide a consistent supply of food, medicine, monetary help, shelter - whatever the people needed that the King could not or would not provide. There were to be six hours during two days of most weeks dedicated to reflection and prayer, supervised by the temples. The temples would perform all marriages and funerals. The King was to pay for all of this, but the priestesses from the future would handle that negotiation; to the new priestesses, once Māqhenyu, fell only the organization and building.
Yesora learned everything, with occasional clarifications from Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule, and then taught all of it to rotating classes of Māqhenyu, who, once graduated from her program, were fitted for nurefyes and taught to braid their hair in the new prescribed manner. At last all of them had been educated, and Yesora finally took a back seat to the proceedings.
Aside from defining a couple new holidays intended to overshadow traditional days of soulwright worship, the Grammar had not opined on the subject of the soulwright sacrifices, but had only said that opposition to soulwright worship must vary based on the time period, and that the priestesses of the time must make their own determinations on what was appropriate. So, taking the cue from Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule’s talk of democratic rule, the heads of all of the new temples had gathered and had a vote, which had been preceded by a heated debate. In the end, it had been decided that priestesses must not officiate soulwright sacrifices, for any reason, and also that the debate and the vote had been so chaotic that this process should not be used often. Priestesses Tyäqe and Faiyule admitted that such a vote had never actually been used again to their knowledge in all of the 200 years that separated them from Yesora and her contemporaries.
Part of the town was now gathered in front of the temple, all of the people who would call this temple theirs and go there when they were in need. It was much bigger than it had been before; the last of the offices and dormitories had finally been finished the week prior. They were now gathered to see the new head priestess unveil the great clock.
Yesora stood off to the side, among the other new priestesses. Her eyes swept over the crowd; Swira was up in front, gathered together with the other village children, while Danilō hung back among the laypeople - the other laypeople. He now wore a regular shirt and trousers like the rest of them, no longer permitted to wear a robe. Would she find the alternate path that Time - that Sapfita - had promised her would be the solution? She had been so busy in the past months, perhaps she had missed it.
Raidēci, now officially called Raiteaci in the new language, stood beside her, and followed her gaze. “It is a pity about the divorces,” she said, in a low tone of voice that would not carry. Yesora remembered that she, too, had had to leave a husband behind. Raidēci ran her fingers down the front of her nurefye. “It is a pretty pattern, isn’t it?” she said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “It looks like a silvery tree, but upside down. It has some similarities with the real ones. Look,” she gestured at a nearby real tree, with a brilliantly red bird sitting in its branches. “Look at the beautiful bird in that tree. Eye-catching, isn’t it? You probably did not even notice the brown one.” Now that she had mentioned it, Yesora did notice: a dull-colored bird with brown feathers had almost completely blended in with the branches. “Sometimes blending into the background is the best strategy,” Raidēci continued. “In our time, we opposed soulwright worship - we all disagreed with it strongly. But some still continued to practice the rituals, and the decision that was made will not stop it. It will just become less visible, more camouflaged. And you will find that other rules will be broken, as well. Some of us will become little brown birds hidden in the branches of the great tree of Time. A new, brighter sun is rising, but our old one has not yet set. In its relative dimness, it will be hidden by the new light. Wherever there is a strong light, there are always those hiding in the shadows where it cannot reach.” She cast her eyes back over at Danilō.
Yesora followed her gaze, and saw that Danilō was speaking, in a hushed but avid way with Raidēci’s ex-husband. “There are rules now,” she said, uncertainly, wanting to be sure she understood. “We can’t just— the new priesthood has just begun. Isn’t it too early to be speaking of— of—”
“Of heresy?” asked Raidēci, quite calmly. “Oh, no. All the better to get a head start. Our tradition will be no less august and ancient than the one defined in the Grammar. They will not be able to dismiss us as upstarts, especially when you are one of us.”
“How many of ‘us’ are there?” Yesora asked.
“Only a few, so far. We have been approaching people who we know have lost treasured marriages, discretely. Will you pledge to join us? We will not move until we have sufficient numbers.” She held out hand, palm up.
Yesora saw clearly the new, lesser-trod path that was intended for her by Sapfita. She clasped her hand over Raidēci’s. “I will join you when the time comes.” They smiled at each other. A new sun was rising, indeed, but old traditions need not die with it.
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Thank you! They are a heresy, though - any practice that doesn't fit into the acceptable range of variation within a temple, basically, and who split off and have their own unofficial temples. There's a little more discussion of this in the next part.
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I really like this concept of time.
Very intriguing!
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Thank you! This story was a nice way to develop out some of the more traditional religious views around Sapfita, since none of the characters in the main story are especially traditional, haha.