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rainbowfic2025-02-03 03:03 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-02-03 03:03 pm
Ecru #11 [The Fulcrum]
Name: The Legacy of Setsiana of Taleinyo
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #11: Inspire
Styles and Supplies: Portrait, Panorama, Life Drawing
Word Count: 5133
Rating: PG
Warnings: Swearing, and one line of trascribed (fantasy) dialect (I had to do it this one time for illustrative purposes, but I promise it won't happen again, everything else in this language variant will be in standard English. It's supposed to be barely intelligible, I guess I'll find out if I achieved that or not.)
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Cyaru
In-Universe Date: 1911.7?/8?.?.?
Summary: Some new people, and additional questions, appear.
Setsiana came to a little while later, sitting in a lounge chair on the other side of the room from where she’d stood by the clock earlier, along the wall with the double doors. Directly in front of her knelt a quite beautiful woman, holding the bag of smelling salts, looking at her intensely with deep brown eyes. Her hair was a very dark auburn, just one reddish tinge away from the color of her eyes. It was gathered in a thick ponytail, but some strands had spilled out and cascaded in loose curls over her shoulders. She was wearing an outfit much like the ones Setsiana had seen other women wearing from the window earlier, her blouse a deep violet. “Oh, good,” she said in QuCheanya. “You’re back. I apologize for Rou, that’s kind of my job, if you must know. Are you ok? Did you hit your head on anything?” Setsiana could only mutely shake her head.
Qhoroali was leaning against the front of the desk. “I didn’t say anything bad,” she said. “I didn’t do anything to her. I swear!”
“You just told her that you were planning to kill someone that she told you she loved,” said the beautiful woman. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know, but not that.”
“You could have started by explaining the whole thing, the whole issue, the reasoning, and then explained why she has to be killed,” said the other woman, rising. “You’re not as bad at that as you think you are, you know. You convinced me pretty easily, way back when.”
“Not a chance of that, Liselye,” said Qhoroali. “The soulwrights themselves would pay more attention. She’s part of the priesthood.”
“Nonsense,” said Liselye. “She’s a human being, they all are. Any human being would understand.”
But Qhoroali just shook her head. “You’ve never been part of the priesthood, or any of the heresies. You don’t know how it is.”
As Liselye put a cup of tea and a bowl of tlichrún into Setsiana’s hands (was it lunch time already?), someone outside the room attempted to open the double doors, but was unable to. Belatedly, Setsiana realized she’d not actually tried them herself, but unsurprisingly they appeared to be locked. A knock came from the other side of the doors.
Qhoroali crossed to the doors, pulled a key out of her pocket and unlocked them, and then hurriedly shut and locked them again behind the person who entered. He was a northerner with shoulder-length black curls that reminded her very much of Syeraila’s. He was wearing clothing similar to what she’d seen of the men outside the window, but without a vest or jacket, and with a muted color palette more like what she was familiar with from her own time. At first he said nothing, but turned to look at Setsiana, and frowned. “Who’s she?” he asked. Unlike Qhoroali, whose QuCheanya had the nigh-perfect pronunciation usually found only among priestesses who’d spent 30 years sequestered in the temple, or Liselye, who spoke just like any junior Setsiana had ever heard, his QuCheanya had a strange accent to it that she couldn’t place.
“She’s that priestess Rou keeps talking about,” said Liselye, with more than a hint of exasperation. “She actually went and kidnapped her, in spite of everything I said to her yesterday about it. I still can’t believe you actually did that,” she added in Qhoroali’s direction.
Qhoroali, who had pocketed the key and returned to leaning on the desk, seemed to ignore this. “How did it go?” she asked the newcomer.
The man did not answer. Instead he stared at Setsiana with a new expression, as if he was meeting his arch-enemy in person for the first time and was imagining in detail how he was going to kill them. It was not comfortable in the slightest.
“Cyaru,” said Qhoroali, quite levelly, “how did it go?”
Cyaru turned back to her for a moment, and then came up behind Liselye and put his arms around her waist and his head on her shoulder, and seemed to whisper some things in her ear. They were nearly identical in height. Liselye turned her head slightly to whisper something back, and took his hands in hers where they sat at her waist, stroking them in a comforting way. At length, he drew back, and addressed Qhoroali in Naychren.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Qhoroali. Cyaru continued speaking Naychren. “Alright,” she said, “Fine, we’ll do this your way.”
They continued speaking in Naychren. Cyaru would say something, Qhoroali would interrupt him with questions, he would answer, they would continue. Setsiana did know some Naychren that she’d picked up from childhood friends, and strained for anything she could recognize, but she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Had she really forgotten it all? It seemed that she had. Qhoroali asked a question that was just a repetition of something Cyaru had said; Cyaru said the exact same thing back to her. They went back and forth a couple times, with Qhoroali getting more and more frustrated, until Liselye heaved a huge sigh, flipped over one of the papers on the desk, scribbled something on it with a discarded pencil, and passed it to Qhoroali. She looked at it, and said “Oh.” The conversation continued.
For fuck’s sake. Setsiana suddenly realized that Qhoroali had now said this twice. It wasn’t QuCheanya; QuCheanya didn’t have words like that. If you wanted to swear, you had to do it in your native language. But she’d understood it when Qhoroali had said it… because it was in Vrelian. A strange, slurred kind of Vrelian that her ten-year-olds would be strongly reprimanded for speaking, but it was a Vrelian phrase. The tea was also an eastern tea, she realized - there were more popular varieties in the west that were exported in great quantities to Shayansee, but this was an eastern tea that only people in Vrel cared about. The sándrev she’d eaten that morning was also a specifically Vrelian dish; a friend of her mother’s who’d moved to the Capital had come to visit them once and complained that sándrev couldn’t be had in the west, and that none of the bakers there knew cornmeal from sawdust. And why else would a northerner be here speaking Naychren if they weren’t close to the northern states?
Eventually the Naychren conversation wound down, and Cyaru was let out of the room with the key. Liselye stood looking at the door as Qhoroali locked it again. “He is going to be in a Mood.”
“Sorry,” said Qhoroali.
“Oh, you don’t have to apologize to me,” Liselye said, sounding amused. “It’s not me he’s mad at.”
Setsiana decided to interrupt them. “Are we in Vrel?”
Qhoroali looked at Liselye; Liselye made an exaggerated shrug. Qhoroali seemed to think about it for a moment, then shrugged herself and said “Yeah, we’re in Nwórza, if you must know.”
Nwórza. Nwórza was only a few hours away from Syarhrít. She didn’t know where in the city they were, but she could surely get directions to a temple from anyone, and the priestesses there would be able to quickly verify her as having been at Taleinyo 250 years ago, would send her back to 1647 and might even pay for the carriage back to Syarhrít. All she needed to do was to get that key, or slip out the door when they unlocked it. If Qhoroali was telling the truth, that is. “If we’re still in Vrel, why not just speak Vrelian?” she asked. Until today, she’d never heard QuCheanya spoken outside of a temple.
“Not everyone here speaks Vrelian well,” said Qhoroali vaguely. “Some people are from other times, or… elsewhere. QuCheanya was invented to be an intertemporal auxiliary language, and it works well for that, so that’s what we use. But also… it’s true that you speak a language that you call Vrelian, and we speak a language that we call Vrelian, but here in 1911 we call your language ‘Late Middle Vrelian’ and it’s not really the same thing as ours. I’m sure if you spoke your language, you’d sound like a Mázghwent play, and if we spoke ours, I’m sure you’d be horrified.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Shyeh myehn wyeh soun lie ah bahn ah nay'duway keed huw nayvah wayn tuw schuw tuw yuw,” said Liselye, in Vrelian. Or, a kind of Vrelian. It was comprehensible, just barely, but it was missing a lot of consonants, the lax vowels were tense, and the tense vowels were lengthened and diphthonged. It was a bit like how young teenagers or her ten-year-olds would speak in 1647 - they would drop some consonants, and twist their vowels to the point that some of the older members of the community had trouble understanding them, and they were disciplined for speaking this way in school. But no actual teenager spoke the same way Liselye had - this was as if an adult had done an exaggerated parodic impression of that speech. Liselye laughed at her expression like it was the funniest thing in the world. “I’m so sorry,” she said, returning to QuCheanya, “but you’re going to have to get used to it. That’s how everyone speaks now.”
“Surely not everyone,” said Setsiana. “Teachers? Priestesses at the pharmacy? The Governor?” The Governor sometimes spoke Vrelian to address the populace, and when he did, it was with the artificially perfect pronunciation and grammar of someone from the Capital who had only ever learned Vrelian from a tutor.
“Everyone, even them. You might not even understand what our kids are saying these days.”
Setsiana took a moment of silence for her years of tirelessly correcting grammar and enunciation that clearly had been for naught. She grasped onto something Qhoroali had said before the awful Vrelian had been uttered. “What did you mean about ‘sounding like Mázghwent’?”
“They still mostly perform his plays in Late Middle Vrelian,” said Liselye. “I think it’s dumb, most people don’t even know what all the words he uses mean anymore. How can they enjoy the play if they can’t understand it? Ow,” she said as Qhoroali jabbed her with her elbow.
“I think it’s neat,” said Qhoroali, a bit miffed. “If you look up the words later, you learn something new and interesting, and sometimes get a new perspective on the play. Honestly, I’d love to know how accurate the actors actually are with the pronunciation.”
“Well, this has been fascinating,” said Liselye, “but I have some other things to do today.” She turned to Qhoroali. “I’m going to have to trust that you’re not going to to do any more dumb things today, I can’t come bail you out again.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Alright.” They went to the double doors, but at the last second Liselye turned and put her back against them to address Qhoroali one last time. “I want to impress upon you that this was a terrible idea,” she said. “I have faith in you, so I trust that you will eventually figure that out, and I won’t go against your wishes. I just want to register the complaint.”
“Understood,” said Qhoroali. She let Liselye out of the doors, locked them, returned to the desk, and sat back in the chair again, reaching for another bowl of tlichrún that was nearby. Setsiana wondered where the food had come from. “When I met you before, you told me that you were necessary for me to accomplish my goal,” Qhoroali said contemplatively in Setsiana’s general direction. “So you must have studied something relevant. What’s your focus?”
“The nature of Sapfita,” said Setsiana, shortly.
“That seems promising. Oh!” Qhoroali exclaimed, suddenly. “Late 1640s, Taleinyo… are you that Setsiana?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but instead dug through a pile of papers and produced a moderately thick hand-bound book. “I got all your papers, or rather, I had Li get them for me. Fairly obscure, but someone in the 13th century cited you once and I had to check it out. Then I had to get the rest of your work. Here, look.” She held the book out to Setsiana.
Driven by curiosity, Setsiana stood and walked to the desk to take the book, setting her now empty bowl and cup down in its place. On the front cover, in handwritten single-color QuCheanya, it said:
She flipped it open to the first page, and was presented with the very same paper that she’d given Priestess Fyäccheira to review the day before - well, almost the same. The title was the same, and so was most of the text, but it also contained all of the missing references and corrections that Priestess Fyäccheira had suggested. She flipped through the rest of the paper, but there weren’t many other differences. The date of publication was in 1648. Was she so close to the second braid already? Hope filled her; here was proof that she would succeed. She just needed to get away from these people, but Sapfita had said everything would be ok - that had to mean that she would get back to 1647 and resume her life there, didn’t it?
She went back to sitting in the lounge chair, and leafed through the rest of the book. Paper after paper, on the nature of Sapfita, theories on her origins, or her abilities, or on the nature of Time itself. There were more than twenty different papers, and none of them were simple accounts of dreams - they were all scholarship. She looked for a paper like the one she had thought about writing regarding the use of qoire to aid meditation, but found nothing. Odd.
Qhoroali was watching her with some interest. “Those are yours, right?” she asked.
Setsiana nodded, and then said, “You stole all of these… and made them into a book. Why?”
“They were exactly what I was looking for, and a bit hard to find. For all that the priesthood worships Sapfita, it often seems like they study everything else under the sun except for Her; in later time periods some even start saying that dreamreadings are not a solid enough empirical basis for making factual claims, and most study of Sapfita Herself ends at that point, with the dreamreadings only being cited for questions of religious philosophy. And much of the really early research can be quite sketchy. Honestly, you are one of the most recent, and most reliable sources for the information I’m after, and none of your contemporaries produced the same volume of work on the subject.” She seemed thoughtful for a moment. “You studied Sapfita and Sapfita exclusively for over 50 years in a time period when it wasn’t popular,” she mused. “Maybe I was right about you after all. You must be blindly faithful to Her.”
Setsiana felt a lot of things then: pride that Qhoroali considered her work to be a reliable and important source, but horror that her work was being used to figure out how to kill Sapfita; satisfaction that her first paper was so close to being publishable, but a vast disappointment that she was considered “obscure” by most actual priestesses. And she objected very strongly to Qhoroali’s last sentence and felt the need to defend herself. She’d never followed Sapfita blindly; except for the one time, it had always been a conversation between the two of them, a friend giving advice and not a God or Emperor giving orders, and Sapfita had promised She would never do that again. If Qhoroali considered her an expert on Sapfita, then let her heed this. “She doesn’t give orders, and I don’t follow them,” Setsiana said. “She told me—” she stopped, suddenly, realizing where she was going.
“She told you?” Qhoroali asked, with interest. “That’s not how they usually put it - She speaks, and we listen, and all that. There’s some debate about whether She even chooses who will receive the dreams, or speaks to anyone in particular, and you certainly weren’t the kind of priestess who produced nothing but dreamreadings for years - you referenced others’ dreamreadings frequently, but never recorded any of your own. When did She ‘tell’ you something?”
Setsiana was feeling reckless, and she still wanted to tell Qhoroali what Sapfita was really like. Qhoroali was already a heretic anyway, it wasn’t like any real priestess was ever going to find out what she’d said to her. “I do have dreams of Her,” she said. “Real dreams, where we speak as friends to each other, and She does not give me orders to follow.”
Qhoroali wore a kind of mischievous smile now. “That’s heresy,” she said, wagging her index finger in Setsiana’s direction. “I should know, after all. Not that we never had any dealings with the Personalists, there’s a Personalist temple that my parents are still working with, as far as I’m aware.”
“I’m not one of them,” said Setsiana hotly. “I don’t see her that way. And why were you associated with them? You want men in the priesthood - fine, that’s whatever, it’s an administrative difference of opinion - but the Personalists are just fundamentally, theologically, wrong. You see that, right?”
“You can’t be an ideological purist in our position,” said Qhoroali mildly. “All of the heresies disagree with each other, in addition to the main branch, of course. But when you’ve been designated as a weirdo and you’re trying to get let into the club - or, you know, just not be run out of town repeatedly, we weren’t greedy - you can’t start from the argument of ‘I’m not a weirdo, like those other weirdos, I’m a normal person like you and you have to let me in’ because you’re just one person and you’ll just get ignored. You have to band together with all the other weirdos, who you still definitely see as being weirdos, and instead say ‘we all think the weird people should be let into the club too’. And now there’s a lot of you together, maybe almost as many as the regular club members, and maybe they start to rethink the rules. Or at least, that’s the theory. As far as I can tell, it never actually pans out, at least not in any timeline I’ve ever been to. But there are small wins - you have a support network when you get run out of town, you get help and resources from the other heresies, that kind of thing. You don’t have to agree with them theologically for that.”
“And what happens if they do get let into the ‘club’ along with you? Then they start publishing papers about their dreams…”
“Yeah, they start publishing papers about their dreams. And we regard them skeptically, and ask where the dreamreading is, and of course there isn’t one, and then maybe they write some paper about how dreamreaders are a scam and don’t actually work, and a number of dreamreader experts then write papers thoroughly debunking this and proving dreamreader capabilities beyond a shadow of a doubt, and they either learn how to do real research based on real evidence and assimilate into the community, or they are discredited and moulder away in obscurity. Do you have so little faith in the process? The main branch doesn’t drive out heresies because they think our ideas are dangerous. The danger they see is that the Emperor might start funding the heretical temple instead of the ‘true’ one, which is complete nonsense, but that’s what they’re worried about, it all comes back to the money.” She sighed. “I have to learn to stop saying ‘we’ and ‘us’ when talking about my mother’s temple. It’s been eight years, I’m not one of them anymore.”
“Because you decided you disagreed with Egalitarianism?”
Qhoroali regarded her for a moment. “No.” She turned her attention back to her food, but then put the spoon back down. “I’m curious now - you’re clearly not a Personalist, but you claim to have those kinds of dreams. What makes you think yours are real and theirs are not?”
“She told me I was the only person She could speak to like that,” Setsiana said. She remembered what Sapfita had told her, just the night before. “Something about an event that happens to me. I don’t know what it might be, but I’m sure it’s real and true.”
Qhoroali shook her head. “It’s simply not possible,” she said. “Not based on what we know about how the dreams work. You do know the basics about how the dreams work, right?”
Setsiana shook her head, and she was momentarily mentally transported back to Priestess Fyäccheira’s office the day before, getting criticized for shoddy research. She’d always avoided the subject; she knew that the subject of the regular kind of Sapfita dreams would never be personally relevant to her, that she would never wear a dreamreader, and she had always been afraid that she would learn something that would throw her mind into conflict about her own dreams.
Qhoroali shrugged, as if this were a normal deficit for someone four years into junior priesthood. “She is Time,” she said, “so She exists outside of Time entirely - in dimensions we can’t hope to perceive normally - right?” Setsiana nodded, and she continued. “We can’t possibly understand Her world, or what She has to tell us. But dreams are a special kind of awareness - concepts are subject to free association. You know how sometimes you’ll have a dream and someone in it will be simultaneously your mother but also your ex, or you’ll eat something but it’s somehow also the act of repressing feelings?”
“That sounds very specific,” said Setsiana.
Qhoroali waved her hand dismissively. “You know the kind of thing I’m talking about though, right? One idea or concept can become attached to another, different elements of the dream can simultaneously be multiple things. It’s a mental aid we get to help process the events of our lives. Qoire has a similar effect, except that it’s consistent. Do you remember, when we time traveled earlier, how I told you what direction to go?”
“You said something about radishes,” Setsiana said, uncertainly.
“Right. The timelines are all in slightly different directions, but they’re directions in extra dimensions we can’t conceive of normally. But with qoire you can… sort of. And it attaches the concepts of directions we can’t fathom to ordinary concepts that we can - like radishes. And ‘radish’ always refers to the same direction - I don’t know how it relates to all the other ones, exactly, but I know that if I identify a part of the timeline tree that is in the radish direction from another part of the timeline tree, it’ll always be in that direction from it, every time I drink enough qoire to see the whole tree again. So if I say radish to you, I can know it means the same thing to you under the influence of qoire as it does to me. That’s how it works. Getting pulled into a dream with Sapfita has the same effect on our minds as qoire does, so She can say things without worrying if they are things we can properly understand or not, because the concepts attach to concepts we can understand. That’s why interpreting dreamreadings is done with qoire, because the attachments are always the same. But it’s not completely clear, because now everything has multiple meanings. So, you can see why it doesn’t make sense for Her to be able to sit down and have a regular conversation with you in plain language, right? Either it’s not actually Her, or you’re also some kind of extra-dimensional being, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s probably not the case.”
“But look,” Setsiana said, “If I as a three dimensional person were to try to talk to a two dimensional person - someone living in a completely flat world - I think I could figure out how to only say things to them that they would be able to understand. And I am not a god.”
“It’s not just one extra dimension, though. If there were only one extra dimension - if all of Time was just the fourth dimension - there would only be one timeline. And we know that’s not the case, we know there are a vast number of different timelines. A lot of them are composites, running through multiple dimensions, but just based on the number of extra-dimensional directions I’ve identified, there must be at least 50 or 60 different ones, and those are just the ones I’ve seen. I haven’t explored the whole tree, so there’s probably a ton of others that I’m missing. It’s not even clear to me that there’s a substantial difference between being a god and living in that many dimensions.”
“Of course there’s a difference,” said Setsiana immediately, but even as she said it, doubt crept into her mind. “How do you know the dreams actually work the way you claim? Have you ever had a dream of Her?”
Qhoroali looked momentarily annoyed. “Well, no, but I’ve helped interpret my mom’s dreams. Look, this isn’t just me saying this, this is centuries of research done by full priestesses. In the main branch, even! There isn’t even much disagreement about it, this is all pretty basic.” She hesitated. “I don’t have the papers here, because dreams aren’t really part of my research. But I could have Li steal them for you if you want to read them.”
The idea of someone stealing research from a temple for her was unbearable. “No thank you,” she said curtly. She had to read Lyafeano and Yoache to satisfy Priestess Fyäccheira anyway. She’d get to it when she got back to 1647.
“Suit yourself, then,” said Qhoroali. She moved to return to the tlichrún again, but then hesitated, thoughtfully, her eyes seemingly on a spot on the ceiling above the hearth. “There was that one paper, though… it was Mureiyo, I think, 782, she said that Sapfita could move through dimensions at will, and become greater or lesser as She pleased, and that She had lived on Celyira as a regular person for a time. Nonsense, of course, and everyone else thought so, too, her ideas weren’t popular, and I never even copied that one. But maybe I should get it again for old times’ sake. I’m curious to know what you think of it.”
Setsiana thought about refusing that, too, but she was curious in spite of herself, and asking for that paper back in Taleinyo probably wouldn’t endear her to the priestesses. More than anything, though, she needed to talk to Sapfita about this. When she had woken up today, she had thought it was way too late, but now it felt too early; there were surely hours and hours more before she would feel tired and be able to sleep.
The book with her name on it, the one full of her papers that Qhoroali had painstakingly collected and (supposedly) made copies of, and manually bound and labeled, was still in her lap. She went back to leafing through it. What had Priestess Meqhola said? If she learned the contents of her papers from this book, and then got back to 1647 and reproduced the papers there, then that made her a holy Fulcrum, and her papers would be Sapfita’s work instead. She didn’t want that; she wanted her papers to truly be her own work. Even if she never told anyone she had already seen them, she would know, for herself, that she hadn’t actually written them. She started to close the book… but there was one thing she did want to know about it.
“Is this all that I ever wrote?” she asked, indicating the book.
“As far as we can tell, it is,” Qhoroali said, looking up again. “Or at least, I told Li to find everything she could, and she’s pretty good at finding obscure stuff at this point, and there aren’t any conspicuous gaps between publication dates that would indicate she missed something. Why?”
“I thought— I mean, you didn’t ever find a paper I wrote about the interaction between qoire and meditation?”
“No, nothing like that. Is that something you were planning on writing? It doesn’t really seem related to your other work.”
Why would she have given up on that line of inquiry after finally getting published? Was there truly nothing there worth reporting on? She was so sure there was something about it that would close loops in her understanding, especially after her own recent experience of qoire. It didn’t make sense. She paged through the book again.
Something else occurred to her, then. Of Priestess Fyäccheira’s last set of recommendations, most were papers she recognized - Lyafeano and Yoache, of course, and Toacea was already included, just without the citation, and Chyoise was also quite well-known. But she had no idea whatsoever what Päromä had written about. She’d seen the name pop out at the top of a long paragraph earlier; now she went back to find it in the section on Sapfita’s history in her first paper and read it in full.
In 930, Päromä conducted an extensive survey of dreamreadings and came to the shocking and unpopular conclusion that Sapfita had started Her life as a regular human who had been born on Celyira and had somehow ascended to godhood. She reinterpreted many segments of the dreamreadings as being descriptions of the place where Sapfita was born and had lived Her mortal life. Based on what she claimed was a description of the movement of the shadow of a sundial’s gnomon, she concluded that Sapfita must have been born in the northern hemisphere, and then further concluded that it must have been somewhere in the Northern Kingdoms due to the described climate being incompatible with a location on the northern coast of T’arse. However, in 2279, Qhefyasa conclusively proved this hypothesis wrong by using the extraordinarily detailed and accurate maps available in her time period to show that the geographical features described by Päromä did not exist anywhere in the Northern Kingdoms.
Setsiana stared at this incredulously. What was the point of including this? An obscure fringe theory that had been conclusively proven to be incorrect - why had Priestess Fyäccheira told her to research this? She really was just coming up with completely nonsense things that the paper needed to include in order to be published. No wonder she finally caved in 1648. Setsiana was also not looking forward to having to beg one of the priestesses to bring back an obscure paper from less than 30 years before the End for her to read. Setsiana shut the book and returned it to the desk.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #11: Inspire
Styles and Supplies: Portrait, Panorama, Life Drawing
Word Count: 5133
Rating: PG
Warnings: Swearing, and one line of trascribed (fantasy) dialect (I had to do it this one time for illustrative purposes, but I promise it won't happen again, everything else in this language variant will be in standard English. It's supposed to be barely intelligible, I guess I'll find out if I achieved that or not.)
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Cyaru
In-Universe Date: 1911.7?/8?.?.?
Summary: Some new people, and additional questions, appear.
Setsiana came to a little while later, sitting in a lounge chair on the other side of the room from where she’d stood by the clock earlier, along the wall with the double doors. Directly in front of her knelt a quite beautiful woman, holding the bag of smelling salts, looking at her intensely with deep brown eyes. Her hair was a very dark auburn, just one reddish tinge away from the color of her eyes. It was gathered in a thick ponytail, but some strands had spilled out and cascaded in loose curls over her shoulders. She was wearing an outfit much like the ones Setsiana had seen other women wearing from the window earlier, her blouse a deep violet. “Oh, good,” she said in QuCheanya. “You’re back. I apologize for Rou, that’s kind of my job, if you must know. Are you ok? Did you hit your head on anything?” Setsiana could only mutely shake her head.
Qhoroali was leaning against the front of the desk. “I didn’t say anything bad,” she said. “I didn’t do anything to her. I swear!”
“You just told her that you were planning to kill someone that she told you she loved,” said the beautiful woman. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know, but not that.”
“You could have started by explaining the whole thing, the whole issue, the reasoning, and then explained why she has to be killed,” said the other woman, rising. “You’re not as bad at that as you think you are, you know. You convinced me pretty easily, way back when.”
“Not a chance of that, Liselye,” said Qhoroali. “The soulwrights themselves would pay more attention. She’s part of the priesthood.”
“Nonsense,” said Liselye. “She’s a human being, they all are. Any human being would understand.”
But Qhoroali just shook her head. “You’ve never been part of the priesthood, or any of the heresies. You don’t know how it is.”
As Liselye put a cup of tea and a bowl of tlichrún into Setsiana’s hands (was it lunch time already?), someone outside the room attempted to open the double doors, but was unable to. Belatedly, Setsiana realized she’d not actually tried them herself, but unsurprisingly they appeared to be locked. A knock came from the other side of the doors.
Qhoroali crossed to the doors, pulled a key out of her pocket and unlocked them, and then hurriedly shut and locked them again behind the person who entered. He was a northerner with shoulder-length black curls that reminded her very much of Syeraila’s. He was wearing clothing similar to what she’d seen of the men outside the window, but without a vest or jacket, and with a muted color palette more like what she was familiar with from her own time. At first he said nothing, but turned to look at Setsiana, and frowned. “Who’s she?” he asked. Unlike Qhoroali, whose QuCheanya had the nigh-perfect pronunciation usually found only among priestesses who’d spent 30 years sequestered in the temple, or Liselye, who spoke just like any junior Setsiana had ever heard, his QuCheanya had a strange accent to it that she couldn’t place.
“She’s that priestess Rou keeps talking about,” said Liselye, with more than a hint of exasperation. “She actually went and kidnapped her, in spite of everything I said to her yesterday about it. I still can’t believe you actually did that,” she added in Qhoroali’s direction.
Qhoroali, who had pocketed the key and returned to leaning on the desk, seemed to ignore this. “How did it go?” she asked the newcomer.
The man did not answer. Instead he stared at Setsiana with a new expression, as if he was meeting his arch-enemy in person for the first time and was imagining in detail how he was going to kill them. It was not comfortable in the slightest.
“Cyaru,” said Qhoroali, quite levelly, “how did it go?”
Cyaru turned back to her for a moment, and then came up behind Liselye and put his arms around her waist and his head on her shoulder, and seemed to whisper some things in her ear. They were nearly identical in height. Liselye turned her head slightly to whisper something back, and took his hands in hers where they sat at her waist, stroking them in a comforting way. At length, he drew back, and addressed Qhoroali in Naychren.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Qhoroali. Cyaru continued speaking Naychren. “Alright,” she said, “Fine, we’ll do this your way.”
They continued speaking in Naychren. Cyaru would say something, Qhoroali would interrupt him with questions, he would answer, they would continue. Setsiana did know some Naychren that she’d picked up from childhood friends, and strained for anything she could recognize, but she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Had she really forgotten it all? It seemed that she had. Qhoroali asked a question that was just a repetition of something Cyaru had said; Cyaru said the exact same thing back to her. They went back and forth a couple times, with Qhoroali getting more and more frustrated, until Liselye heaved a huge sigh, flipped over one of the papers on the desk, scribbled something on it with a discarded pencil, and passed it to Qhoroali. She looked at it, and said “Oh.” The conversation continued.
For fuck’s sake. Setsiana suddenly realized that Qhoroali had now said this twice. It wasn’t QuCheanya; QuCheanya didn’t have words like that. If you wanted to swear, you had to do it in your native language. But she’d understood it when Qhoroali had said it… because it was in Vrelian. A strange, slurred kind of Vrelian that her ten-year-olds would be strongly reprimanded for speaking, but it was a Vrelian phrase. The tea was also an eastern tea, she realized - there were more popular varieties in the west that were exported in great quantities to Shayansee, but this was an eastern tea that only people in Vrel cared about. The sándrev she’d eaten that morning was also a specifically Vrelian dish; a friend of her mother’s who’d moved to the Capital had come to visit them once and complained that sándrev couldn’t be had in the west, and that none of the bakers there knew cornmeal from sawdust. And why else would a northerner be here speaking Naychren if they weren’t close to the northern states?
Eventually the Naychren conversation wound down, and Cyaru was let out of the room with the key. Liselye stood looking at the door as Qhoroali locked it again. “He is going to be in a Mood.”
“Sorry,” said Qhoroali.
“Oh, you don’t have to apologize to me,” Liselye said, sounding amused. “It’s not me he’s mad at.”
Setsiana decided to interrupt them. “Are we in Vrel?”
Qhoroali looked at Liselye; Liselye made an exaggerated shrug. Qhoroali seemed to think about it for a moment, then shrugged herself and said “Yeah, we’re in Nwórza, if you must know.”
Nwórza. Nwórza was only a few hours away from Syarhrít. She didn’t know where in the city they were, but she could surely get directions to a temple from anyone, and the priestesses there would be able to quickly verify her as having been at Taleinyo 250 years ago, would send her back to 1647 and might even pay for the carriage back to Syarhrít. All she needed to do was to get that key, or slip out the door when they unlocked it. If Qhoroali was telling the truth, that is. “If we’re still in Vrel, why not just speak Vrelian?” she asked. Until today, she’d never heard QuCheanya spoken outside of a temple.
“Not everyone here speaks Vrelian well,” said Qhoroali vaguely. “Some people are from other times, or… elsewhere. QuCheanya was invented to be an intertemporal auxiliary language, and it works well for that, so that’s what we use. But also… it’s true that you speak a language that you call Vrelian, and we speak a language that we call Vrelian, but here in 1911 we call your language ‘Late Middle Vrelian’ and it’s not really the same thing as ours. I’m sure if you spoke your language, you’d sound like a Mázghwent play, and if we spoke ours, I’m sure you’d be horrified.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Shyeh myehn wyeh soun lie ah bahn ah nay'duway keed huw nayvah wayn tuw schuw tuw yuw,” said Liselye, in Vrelian. Or, a kind of Vrelian. It was comprehensible, just barely, but it was missing a lot of consonants, the lax vowels were tense, and the tense vowels were lengthened and diphthonged. It was a bit like how young teenagers or her ten-year-olds would speak in 1647 - they would drop some consonants, and twist their vowels to the point that some of the older members of the community had trouble understanding them, and they were disciplined for speaking this way in school. But no actual teenager spoke the same way Liselye had - this was as if an adult had done an exaggerated parodic impression of that speech. Liselye laughed at her expression like it was the funniest thing in the world. “I’m so sorry,” she said, returning to QuCheanya, “but you’re going to have to get used to it. That’s how everyone speaks now.”
“Surely not everyone,” said Setsiana. “Teachers? Priestesses at the pharmacy? The Governor?” The Governor sometimes spoke Vrelian to address the populace, and when he did, it was with the artificially perfect pronunciation and grammar of someone from the Capital who had only ever learned Vrelian from a tutor.
“Everyone, even them. You might not even understand what our kids are saying these days.”
Setsiana took a moment of silence for her years of tirelessly correcting grammar and enunciation that clearly had been for naught. She grasped onto something Qhoroali had said before the awful Vrelian had been uttered. “What did you mean about ‘sounding like Mázghwent’?”
“They still mostly perform his plays in Late Middle Vrelian,” said Liselye. “I think it’s dumb, most people don’t even know what all the words he uses mean anymore. How can they enjoy the play if they can’t understand it? Ow,” she said as Qhoroali jabbed her with her elbow.
“I think it’s neat,” said Qhoroali, a bit miffed. “If you look up the words later, you learn something new and interesting, and sometimes get a new perspective on the play. Honestly, I’d love to know how accurate the actors actually are with the pronunciation.”
“Well, this has been fascinating,” said Liselye, “but I have some other things to do today.” She turned to Qhoroali. “I’m going to have to trust that you’re not going to to do any more dumb things today, I can’t come bail you out again.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Alright.” They went to the double doors, but at the last second Liselye turned and put her back against them to address Qhoroali one last time. “I want to impress upon you that this was a terrible idea,” she said. “I have faith in you, so I trust that you will eventually figure that out, and I won’t go against your wishes. I just want to register the complaint.”
“Understood,” said Qhoroali. She let Liselye out of the doors, locked them, returned to the desk, and sat back in the chair again, reaching for another bowl of tlichrún that was nearby. Setsiana wondered where the food had come from. “When I met you before, you told me that you were necessary for me to accomplish my goal,” Qhoroali said contemplatively in Setsiana’s general direction. “So you must have studied something relevant. What’s your focus?”
“The nature of Sapfita,” said Setsiana, shortly.
“That seems promising. Oh!” Qhoroali exclaimed, suddenly. “Late 1640s, Taleinyo… are you that Setsiana?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but instead dug through a pile of papers and produced a moderately thick hand-bound book. “I got all your papers, or rather, I had Li get them for me. Fairly obscure, but someone in the 13th century cited you once and I had to check it out. Then I had to get the rest of your work. Here, look.” She held the book out to Setsiana.
Driven by curiosity, Setsiana stood and walked to the desk to take the book, setting her now empty bowl and cup down in its place. On the front cover, in handwritten single-color QuCheanya, it said:
Taleinyotye Setsiana
1648-1703
1648-1703
She flipped it open to the first page, and was presented with the very same paper that she’d given Priestess Fyäccheira to review the day before - well, almost the same. The title was the same, and so was most of the text, but it also contained all of the missing references and corrections that Priestess Fyäccheira had suggested. She flipped through the rest of the paper, but there weren’t many other differences. The date of publication was in 1648. Was she so close to the second braid already? Hope filled her; here was proof that she would succeed. She just needed to get away from these people, but Sapfita had said everything would be ok - that had to mean that she would get back to 1647 and resume her life there, didn’t it?
She went back to sitting in the lounge chair, and leafed through the rest of the book. Paper after paper, on the nature of Sapfita, theories on her origins, or her abilities, or on the nature of Time itself. There were more than twenty different papers, and none of them were simple accounts of dreams - they were all scholarship. She looked for a paper like the one she had thought about writing regarding the use of qoire to aid meditation, but found nothing. Odd.
Qhoroali was watching her with some interest. “Those are yours, right?” she asked.
Setsiana nodded, and then said, “You stole all of these… and made them into a book. Why?”
“They were exactly what I was looking for, and a bit hard to find. For all that the priesthood worships Sapfita, it often seems like they study everything else under the sun except for Her; in later time periods some even start saying that dreamreadings are not a solid enough empirical basis for making factual claims, and most study of Sapfita Herself ends at that point, with the dreamreadings only being cited for questions of religious philosophy. And much of the really early research can be quite sketchy. Honestly, you are one of the most recent, and most reliable sources for the information I’m after, and none of your contemporaries produced the same volume of work on the subject.” She seemed thoughtful for a moment. “You studied Sapfita and Sapfita exclusively for over 50 years in a time period when it wasn’t popular,” she mused. “Maybe I was right about you after all. You must be blindly faithful to Her.”
Setsiana felt a lot of things then: pride that Qhoroali considered her work to be a reliable and important source, but horror that her work was being used to figure out how to kill Sapfita; satisfaction that her first paper was so close to being publishable, but a vast disappointment that she was considered “obscure” by most actual priestesses. And she objected very strongly to Qhoroali’s last sentence and felt the need to defend herself. She’d never followed Sapfita blindly; except for the one time, it had always been a conversation between the two of them, a friend giving advice and not a God or Emperor giving orders, and Sapfita had promised She would never do that again. If Qhoroali considered her an expert on Sapfita, then let her heed this. “She doesn’t give orders, and I don’t follow them,” Setsiana said. “She told me—” she stopped, suddenly, realizing where she was going.
“She told you?” Qhoroali asked, with interest. “That’s not how they usually put it - She speaks, and we listen, and all that. There’s some debate about whether She even chooses who will receive the dreams, or speaks to anyone in particular, and you certainly weren’t the kind of priestess who produced nothing but dreamreadings for years - you referenced others’ dreamreadings frequently, but never recorded any of your own. When did She ‘tell’ you something?”
Setsiana was feeling reckless, and she still wanted to tell Qhoroali what Sapfita was really like. Qhoroali was already a heretic anyway, it wasn’t like any real priestess was ever going to find out what she’d said to her. “I do have dreams of Her,” she said. “Real dreams, where we speak as friends to each other, and She does not give me orders to follow.”
Qhoroali wore a kind of mischievous smile now. “That’s heresy,” she said, wagging her index finger in Setsiana’s direction. “I should know, after all. Not that we never had any dealings with the Personalists, there’s a Personalist temple that my parents are still working with, as far as I’m aware.”
“I’m not one of them,” said Setsiana hotly. “I don’t see her that way. And why were you associated with them? You want men in the priesthood - fine, that’s whatever, it’s an administrative difference of opinion - but the Personalists are just fundamentally, theologically, wrong. You see that, right?”
“You can’t be an ideological purist in our position,” said Qhoroali mildly. “All of the heresies disagree with each other, in addition to the main branch, of course. But when you’ve been designated as a weirdo and you’re trying to get let into the club - or, you know, just not be run out of town repeatedly, we weren’t greedy - you can’t start from the argument of ‘I’m not a weirdo, like those other weirdos, I’m a normal person like you and you have to let me in’ because you’re just one person and you’ll just get ignored. You have to band together with all the other weirdos, who you still definitely see as being weirdos, and instead say ‘we all think the weird people should be let into the club too’. And now there’s a lot of you together, maybe almost as many as the regular club members, and maybe they start to rethink the rules. Or at least, that’s the theory. As far as I can tell, it never actually pans out, at least not in any timeline I’ve ever been to. But there are small wins - you have a support network when you get run out of town, you get help and resources from the other heresies, that kind of thing. You don’t have to agree with them theologically for that.”
“And what happens if they do get let into the ‘club’ along with you? Then they start publishing papers about their dreams…”
“Yeah, they start publishing papers about their dreams. And we regard them skeptically, and ask where the dreamreading is, and of course there isn’t one, and then maybe they write some paper about how dreamreaders are a scam and don’t actually work, and a number of dreamreader experts then write papers thoroughly debunking this and proving dreamreader capabilities beyond a shadow of a doubt, and they either learn how to do real research based on real evidence and assimilate into the community, or they are discredited and moulder away in obscurity. Do you have so little faith in the process? The main branch doesn’t drive out heresies because they think our ideas are dangerous. The danger they see is that the Emperor might start funding the heretical temple instead of the ‘true’ one, which is complete nonsense, but that’s what they’re worried about, it all comes back to the money.” She sighed. “I have to learn to stop saying ‘we’ and ‘us’ when talking about my mother’s temple. It’s been eight years, I’m not one of them anymore.”
“Because you decided you disagreed with Egalitarianism?”
Qhoroali regarded her for a moment. “No.” She turned her attention back to her food, but then put the spoon back down. “I’m curious now - you’re clearly not a Personalist, but you claim to have those kinds of dreams. What makes you think yours are real and theirs are not?”
“She told me I was the only person She could speak to like that,” Setsiana said. She remembered what Sapfita had told her, just the night before. “Something about an event that happens to me. I don’t know what it might be, but I’m sure it’s real and true.”
Qhoroali shook her head. “It’s simply not possible,” she said. “Not based on what we know about how the dreams work. You do know the basics about how the dreams work, right?”
Setsiana shook her head, and she was momentarily mentally transported back to Priestess Fyäccheira’s office the day before, getting criticized for shoddy research. She’d always avoided the subject; she knew that the subject of the regular kind of Sapfita dreams would never be personally relevant to her, that she would never wear a dreamreader, and she had always been afraid that she would learn something that would throw her mind into conflict about her own dreams.
Qhoroali shrugged, as if this were a normal deficit for someone four years into junior priesthood. “She is Time,” she said, “so She exists outside of Time entirely - in dimensions we can’t hope to perceive normally - right?” Setsiana nodded, and she continued. “We can’t possibly understand Her world, or what She has to tell us. But dreams are a special kind of awareness - concepts are subject to free association. You know how sometimes you’ll have a dream and someone in it will be simultaneously your mother but also your ex, or you’ll eat something but it’s somehow also the act of repressing feelings?”
“That sounds very specific,” said Setsiana.
Qhoroali waved her hand dismissively. “You know the kind of thing I’m talking about though, right? One idea or concept can become attached to another, different elements of the dream can simultaneously be multiple things. It’s a mental aid we get to help process the events of our lives. Qoire has a similar effect, except that it’s consistent. Do you remember, when we time traveled earlier, how I told you what direction to go?”
“You said something about radishes,” Setsiana said, uncertainly.
“Right. The timelines are all in slightly different directions, but they’re directions in extra dimensions we can’t conceive of normally. But with qoire you can… sort of. And it attaches the concepts of directions we can’t fathom to ordinary concepts that we can - like radishes. And ‘radish’ always refers to the same direction - I don’t know how it relates to all the other ones, exactly, but I know that if I identify a part of the timeline tree that is in the radish direction from another part of the timeline tree, it’ll always be in that direction from it, every time I drink enough qoire to see the whole tree again. So if I say radish to you, I can know it means the same thing to you under the influence of qoire as it does to me. That’s how it works. Getting pulled into a dream with Sapfita has the same effect on our minds as qoire does, so She can say things without worrying if they are things we can properly understand or not, because the concepts attach to concepts we can understand. That’s why interpreting dreamreadings is done with qoire, because the attachments are always the same. But it’s not completely clear, because now everything has multiple meanings. So, you can see why it doesn’t make sense for Her to be able to sit down and have a regular conversation with you in plain language, right? Either it’s not actually Her, or you’re also some kind of extra-dimensional being, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s probably not the case.”
“But look,” Setsiana said, “If I as a three dimensional person were to try to talk to a two dimensional person - someone living in a completely flat world - I think I could figure out how to only say things to them that they would be able to understand. And I am not a god.”
“It’s not just one extra dimension, though. If there were only one extra dimension - if all of Time was just the fourth dimension - there would only be one timeline. And we know that’s not the case, we know there are a vast number of different timelines. A lot of them are composites, running through multiple dimensions, but just based on the number of extra-dimensional directions I’ve identified, there must be at least 50 or 60 different ones, and those are just the ones I’ve seen. I haven’t explored the whole tree, so there’s probably a ton of others that I’m missing. It’s not even clear to me that there’s a substantial difference between being a god and living in that many dimensions.”
“Of course there’s a difference,” said Setsiana immediately, but even as she said it, doubt crept into her mind. “How do you know the dreams actually work the way you claim? Have you ever had a dream of Her?”
Qhoroali looked momentarily annoyed. “Well, no, but I’ve helped interpret my mom’s dreams. Look, this isn’t just me saying this, this is centuries of research done by full priestesses. In the main branch, even! There isn’t even much disagreement about it, this is all pretty basic.” She hesitated. “I don’t have the papers here, because dreams aren’t really part of my research. But I could have Li steal them for you if you want to read them.”
The idea of someone stealing research from a temple for her was unbearable. “No thank you,” she said curtly. She had to read Lyafeano and Yoache to satisfy Priestess Fyäccheira anyway. She’d get to it when she got back to 1647.
“Suit yourself, then,” said Qhoroali. She moved to return to the tlichrún again, but then hesitated, thoughtfully, her eyes seemingly on a spot on the ceiling above the hearth. “There was that one paper, though… it was Mureiyo, I think, 782, she said that Sapfita could move through dimensions at will, and become greater or lesser as She pleased, and that She had lived on Celyira as a regular person for a time. Nonsense, of course, and everyone else thought so, too, her ideas weren’t popular, and I never even copied that one. But maybe I should get it again for old times’ sake. I’m curious to know what you think of it.”
Setsiana thought about refusing that, too, but she was curious in spite of herself, and asking for that paper back in Taleinyo probably wouldn’t endear her to the priestesses. More than anything, though, she needed to talk to Sapfita about this. When she had woken up today, she had thought it was way too late, but now it felt too early; there were surely hours and hours more before she would feel tired and be able to sleep.
The book with her name on it, the one full of her papers that Qhoroali had painstakingly collected and (supposedly) made copies of, and manually bound and labeled, was still in her lap. She went back to leafing through it. What had Priestess Meqhola said? If she learned the contents of her papers from this book, and then got back to 1647 and reproduced the papers there, then that made her a holy Fulcrum, and her papers would be Sapfita’s work instead. She didn’t want that; she wanted her papers to truly be her own work. Even if she never told anyone she had already seen them, she would know, for herself, that she hadn’t actually written them. She started to close the book… but there was one thing she did want to know about it.
“Is this all that I ever wrote?” she asked, indicating the book.
“As far as we can tell, it is,” Qhoroali said, looking up again. “Or at least, I told Li to find everything she could, and she’s pretty good at finding obscure stuff at this point, and there aren’t any conspicuous gaps between publication dates that would indicate she missed something. Why?”
“I thought— I mean, you didn’t ever find a paper I wrote about the interaction between qoire and meditation?”
“No, nothing like that. Is that something you were planning on writing? It doesn’t really seem related to your other work.”
Why would she have given up on that line of inquiry after finally getting published? Was there truly nothing there worth reporting on? She was so sure there was something about it that would close loops in her understanding, especially after her own recent experience of qoire. It didn’t make sense. She paged through the book again.
Something else occurred to her, then. Of Priestess Fyäccheira’s last set of recommendations, most were papers she recognized - Lyafeano and Yoache, of course, and Toacea was already included, just without the citation, and Chyoise was also quite well-known. But she had no idea whatsoever what Päromä had written about. She’d seen the name pop out at the top of a long paragraph earlier; now she went back to find it in the section on Sapfita’s history in her first paper and read it in full.
In 930, Päromä conducted an extensive survey of dreamreadings and came to the shocking and unpopular conclusion that Sapfita had started Her life as a regular human who had been born on Celyira and had somehow ascended to godhood. She reinterpreted many segments of the dreamreadings as being descriptions of the place where Sapfita was born and had lived Her mortal life. Based on what she claimed was a description of the movement of the shadow of a sundial’s gnomon, she concluded that Sapfita must have been born in the northern hemisphere, and then further concluded that it must have been somewhere in the Northern Kingdoms due to the described climate being incompatible with a location on the northern coast of T’arse. However, in 2279, Qhefyasa conclusively proved this hypothesis wrong by using the extraordinarily detailed and accurate maps available in her time period to show that the geographical features described by Päromä did not exist anywhere in the Northern Kingdoms.
Setsiana stared at this incredulously. What was the point of including this? An obscure fringe theory that had been conclusively proven to be incorrect - why had Priestess Fyäccheira told her to research this? She really was just coming up with completely nonsense things that the paper needed to include in order to be published. No wonder she finally caved in 1648. Setsiana was also not looking forward to having to beg one of the priestesses to bring back an obscure paper from less than 30 years before the End for her to read. Setsiana shut the book and returned it to the desk.
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Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it! I hope there's not too much linguistics nerd stuff in here, haha, but I always thought it was kind of a waste when there was time travel but everyone still spoke the same language. The series I just got caught up on not too long ago is great, but I think we're meant to believe that people have been speaking modern English for 10,000 years, which is kind of nonsensical.
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Ha, oh dear, yes! XD We can't even manage to speak it for more than about 500-600 years without becoming virtually incomprehensible to each other.
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XD This is true for all languages, haha!
I really like this concept!
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Oh, you mean, you don't learn swear words when learning other languages, so you wind up reverting to your native one? That's true, but most languages do have swear words, even if you don't necessarily always learn them, but no one speaks QuCheanya natively, so none ever developed.
I'm glad the extra-dimensional stuff in here is making sense!
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I want to stamp this on a lot of people's foreheads. Backwards, so they can read it in the mirror.
Also this entire story is giving me flashbacks to academia. Not entirely bad ones, but omfg it's so accurate.
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Thank you! There are some other, I guess, social justice praxis issues in here, but Qhoroali is not always the reasonable one...
And yeah, a lot of the base conception for life in the priesthood and these early parts of the story come from the idea of "what if Fantasy Grad School?" since I wanted the religion to be heavily focused on scholarship and scientific inquiry.
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Yes! That is a big part of the reason for this conception of the priesthood, as well.
At some early point in worldbuilding development, I decided I wanted to borrow Tashlich as a new year's tradition for the religion, just because I really like the idea a lot, and then, sort of by accident, it wound up involving eight candles, also, and I was like, great, now it is Tashlich + Channukah, I should at least try not to make Crystal Dragon Judaism here. But then I thought: why not? Crystal Dragon Jesus is boring old hat that's been done a thousand times already, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone do Crystal Dragon Judaism before, that's still a new idea, right? Fantasy religion is so saturated with ideas from Christianity, I think making a fantasy religion that's based on Judaism instead could actually contribute positively to diversity, here. So at that point I decided to intentionally commit to creating Crystal Dragon Judaism for this story.