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rainbowfic2025-04-03 05:40 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-04-03 05:40 pm
Entry tags:
Nacarat #10 [The Fulcrum]
Name: The Way to the Fair
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Nacarat #10: Ré nao (Mandarin): A place with a fun and entertaining vibe where you just want to be.
Styles and Supplies: Gift Wrap
Word Count: 2950
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy drug (ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Cyaru
In-Universe Date: 1911.8.5.1, Summer 1904
Summary: Qhoroali and her friends go on an outing.
Notes: Gift Wrap for Qhoroali's birthday.
About a week had passed since the acquisition of the knife. Setsiana had modified the other skirts with no issues and now carried the knife with her at all times (she’d even reluctantly modified her nurefye, in optimistic anticipation of being able to escape wearing it), but somehow the moment to use it had not arrived. Qhoroali seemed to leave the apartment seldom, had so far not needed to use the copier again, and spent all her time with her research. The only regular visitor was Liselye, who continued to bring the food, and sometimes stayed to chat with Qhoroali. The others she did not see at all. Qhoroali would still try to engage Setsiana in her research, dropping tidbits of interesting ideas in the hopes that Setsiana would respond again. Sometimes they were very interesting and it was hard not to respond, but Setsiana reminded herself, repeating it like a mantra, that she could always look these papers up herself whenever she got back to Taleinyo.
Dreams of Sapfita had been infrequent. Sapfita continued to reassure her that she would escape, and praised her acquisition of the knife, basically confirming that violence was going to be necessary for her escape. “I didn’t know you had this in you, once,” she’d said. Remembering what Sapfita had said to her in an earlier conversation, Setsiana had asked if by “once” she meant one of her own simultaneously experienced states of knowing less about Setsiana. “Hmm. Not exactly,” had been all that Sapfita had said to that.
One morning, when Liselye had arrived with breakfast, she had also brought a pack with her. “It’s Rou’s 27th birthday,” she explained, “and we’re going to the T’arsi Fair, because just like every year she wants to go back there and browse the clockwork merchant’s stall. She said you might want to come with us.”
“The T’arsi Fair is in the summer, isn’t it?” Setsiana asked, wondering what could have changed in the past 250 years for the Fair to be held during a different time of the year. She had been keeping track of the days, and it had only been about a month since she had been abducted, and it had been early winter then. It must be near the end of the eighth month at this point, at least one whole month before the barest hints of spring would appear after the new year.
Liselye grinned at her. “Oh, we’re not going to a T’arsi Fair now, here in 1911,” she said. “We’re going to the one that happened in the summer of 1904. It’s because that clockwork merchant didn’t come to any of the subsequent ones. I keep telling her it’s probably because he had the experience of selling clockwork to the exact same bizarre woman like ten separate times in the space of a single week and got spooked and never came back, but she never listens to me. Do you want to come? She said you might, because the Governor gives a public speech on the fourth day of the Fair, and she thought you might find it funny, or possibly just appalling, to hear him speak our modern-day Vrelian.”
Suddenly, in spite of everything, Setsiana was dying to see that speech. She still couldn’t really bring herself to believe that the Governor would talk like that, even in this future time. Also, she was going to be allowed to leave the apartment, which would make escape much easier — she couldn’t see any downside to this excursion. “I’ll come,” she said immediately.
“Great. How’s your T’arsi?”
“Probably 250 years out of date.” Back in 1647, Setsiana had been very proud of her knowledge of T’arsi — unlike most people, who learned it in school and then forgot most of it as adults due to almost never needing to use it, Setsiana had needed to maintain her knowledge in order to teach the language to ten-year-olds. When the T’arsi Fair arrived, she would meet up with her old friends from before she had entered the junior priestess track and impress them with her skill in the language and her correct pronunciation of the retroflex consonants, and then they would go to the Fair together and she would haggle for their purchases with the merchants. She had grown distant from them in her years of association with the temple, and suspected that they only valued her for her knowledge of T’arsi now, but for one day a year, at least, she got to be the smartest and most useful person in the room. But now it was 250 years in the future, and Vrelian had changed drastically; she was a little afraid of the what the merchants would think of her T’arsi now.
“Don’t worry, they’ll probably just think you have a weird accent. Do you need money?” Setsiana quickly tried to think of a reason to refuse the money, since she no longer had any functional pockets in which to put it. Fortunately, Liselye didn’t seem to realize that her outfit was supposed to include pockets, and pulled a small shoulder bag out of the pack that looked a bit like the bags she’d seen people carrying outside her window. She accepted this, and put it on.
Liselye looked at her critically. “It’s a funny combination,” she noted, “the old-fashioned clothes and the bag. You look a bit like an actor who’s ducked out for lunch. Are you sure you don’t want something more modern to wear? I have some things that might fit you.”
Setsiana shook her head; she couldn’t care less about what people thought of her clothing and she needed the knife on her if she was going to try to escape. Liselye just shrugged, and closed the pack back up again, and slung it over her shoulder. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
After Liselye left, Setsiana settled in for breakfast and checked the contents of the bag. It held a small pouch with the money in it and nothing else — enough to buy a lunch and a couple other small things. It was less than she would normally take to the Fair, but she usually saved up her stipend in anticipation of the occasion, and it was generous considering she was a prisoner here. It was almost enough to hire a carriage back to Syarhrít. There was not anywhere near enough room in the bag to fold up the nurefye and put it in there — if she did escape during this expedition, she would have to leave it behind.
Qhoroali wandered into the kitchen, awake at a reasonable hour for once. “It’s my birthday today,” she said. “Well, I’ve time traveled enough at this point that it probably actually isn’t anymore, but the date is still special, you know?”
“What date would that be?” Setsiana asked. She wanted some concrete idea of what the date was, and she still had no idea what the date had been when she’d arrived here.
“First day of the fifth week of the eighth month.”
One week until the end of the month. Her reckoning hadn’t been far off. “And Liselye said you were 27,” said Setsiana slowly, remembering something from earlier. “You said you left your temple eight years ago, and that you were a junior priestess. But you couldn’t have been a junior priestess eight years ago, you would have only been 19, and you don’t become a junior until age 20.”
Qhoroali shrugged expansively. “I actually became a junior when I was 18. When your mom is the head of the temple, and is grooming you to take her place, a lot of rules get bent for you.”
That wasn’t actually the first time Qhoroali had talked about her mother being a priestess, but Setsiana had mostly skipped over that detail on the first day, after the shock of learning of Qhoroali’s goal of deicide. Priestesses didn’t normally get to be mothers; due to the harsh restrictions on associating with men borne of the need for secrecy, most never had children, and for the ones that did, there were punishments. There were certainly never children raised in the temple. But Qhoroali was a heretic who accepted male priestesses and sold qoire on the street. “You were raised in your temple?” she asked. “Your father was there too, I guess? There were whole families there?”
“Heretics don’t get the chance to recruit other people’s kids, so they recruit their own. They don’t have a secret to guard the way the main branch does, because they were never allowed to know it in the first place, so the temple isn’t locked up tighter than the royal treasury, like yours probably was.”
They ate in silence after that. Setsiana was lost in thought — she wasn’t quite an outcast at Taleinyo, but she often felt excluded, like someone barely clinging on to the outer fringes of the group, never being let into the center. Qhoroali’s temple had been her home and her family, and she had been favored to become its leader, but for some reason, she had left, and decided to kill her god. Even as a heretic, how could someone just throw that away?
After breakfast, the most exciting moment of the day arrived, and Setsiana was finally allowed to leave the apartment, without having to fight or stab anyone. Qhoroali did take her arm with her surprisingly strong grip, but that was all that stood between her and freedom. She made no move yet though — not when she could be caught and locked back into the apartment again. The double doors exited out to a small hallway; they walked down some stairs and then left through a servant’s door on the side of the building. Here, a small hill filled the open space between this building and the next, with a hedge mostly obscuring the road to the right. This was not the more densely occupied center of Nwórza that Setsiana was familiar with from her few visits there; there were a few other buildings off to her left, but in that direction it was mostly sparse forest. They must be somewhere on the very edge of the city. A thin layer of snow that she’d seen falling from her window the day before blanketed the ground, and the hill, the trees, and the hedge. A roughly circular area had been marked on the ground at the foot of the hill by a series of wooden posts only a couple of inches high.
Liselye and Cyaru were waiting by the hill, just outside the wooden circle, Liselye with her pack from earlier and Cyaru with a smaller bag. Qhoroali carried nothing, but Setsiana noticed her hands disappearing into deep pockets in her trousers occasionally. She wondered if Qhoroali would question why Setsiana had a bag, since she must know that Setsiana’s skirt was supposed to have pockets as well, but it didn’t seem to be something she had noticed.
Qhoroali took a bottle of qoire out of her pocket. “Ready?” she asked.
They arranged themselves in a line; Qhoroali put one arm over Liselye’s shoulder and the other arm over Cyaru’s shoulder, and Liselye took Setsiana’s hand tightly in her own. They passed the bottle around to take three drops under the tongue, and then back to Qhoroali, who drank a mouthful, and then blinked a bit as if to clear her vision. The timelines swam into Setsiana’s view again, endless snow-covered hills in impossible directions. Qhoroali named one of them and they walked, although this time, Setsiana was not so much following Qhoroali’s instruction as being pulled along by Liselye’s hand — it made it easier than it had been the first time to believe that it was a direction she could go in. But they were also moving forward in space, in addition to along the timeline, and she was pulled into the wooden circle by Liselye, and they continued their journey along the timeline from inside it. It was a very short journey, with no change in direction — if they had been moving through space, Setsiana would have said they traveled no more than 8 feet. The seasons whirled around them less than ten times, and then they came to a stop at a quite warm summer day, and she was again pulled by Liselye’s hand out the other side of the circle. The trees had all of their leaves back and the hill was covered in flowers.
“What is the circle for?” asked Setsiana. “Does it help you time travel?”
“It’s just to prevent accidents,” said Liselye. “When you walk along the timeline, you’re still occupying the physical location you’re standing in, at all points on that timeline. If someone else is in the same place at any of those points, you can bump into them. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a pain in the ass. For some reason, you never bump into someone else who’s also walking along the timeline in the same place — Rou has some theories about it. So we just do all of our time travel from here in that circle, and avoid going in there otherwise. That’s why you don’t want to time travel inside a building, or in a densely trafficked area, that’s just asking for trouble.”
They waited a few minutes for Qhoroali to mostly recover; the timelines were still clearly visible to Setsiana as they proceeded to the road via a gap in the hedge, but they grew dimmer and less real as they walked through physical space. Liselye still held her hand tightly — her right hand. She couldn’t get to her knife without reaching across her body and awkwardly grabbing it with her non-dominant left. She would have to contrive to free her right hand at some point.
They walked along the road for a time, and took a number turns headed deeper into the city and further towards the port. As they got closer, Setsiana recognized more and more of the buildings — certainly there were new ones as well, but there were plenty that were familiar to her from her own trips to the Fair. She thought she might be able to find her way to the largest temple based on landmarks alone, and she could probably get directions if she needed them. The amount of people and carts on the road gradually increased as they continued on as well, until they were part of a throng of people all moving towards the mouth of the river. She could probably lose the others easily in such a crowd, but might have trouble making headway against the flow.
She allowed herself to be lead into the wider open space where the Fair was held, a large flat plaza just before the port. The river Hweskár flowed along its north side and out into the sea, with the occasional boat traveling along it. There were more than Setsiana was used to seeing, and she could see that the port in the distance had many more, and much bigger ships docked than there would have been in 1647.
They made their way to a pocket of free space on the south side, opposite the river, and convened in a circle. “I’m going to buy clockwork,” said Qhoroali. “You guys don’t have to come with me, we can meet up afterwards.”
“I want to look at some of the art,” said Cyaru.
“I think there’s a magic show I haven’t actually seen yet,” said Liselye. “I’ll probably be there.”
“Who is taking Setsiana?” asked Qhoroali.
Liselye gave her a look. “You, presumably,” she said. “She’s here because of you, right?”
“She’s here because she wanted to come,” said Qhoroali, stolidly. “Look, I’ll be busy buying things and haggling, you guys are just going to be looking at stuff, you’ll have more attention to spare. Here,” she fished around in one of her pockets and brought out three pencils, breaking one of them in half. “We’ll draw lots, right?” She held her hands behind her back for a moment, and then brought them back out again, one holding all three pencils with the points facing up.
“This is ridiculous, and you are a ridiculous,” said Liselye. “But all right — it is your birthday.” She picked one of the pencils; it was one of the long ones.
Cyaru picked a second pencil, which turned out to be the short one. “Here,” Liselye said, offering him her pencil. “We’ll trade. You won’t have to be around her, Rou can buy clockwork in peace, everyone’s happy.”
Setsiana was starting to feel like she was a small child that no one wanted to mind, but unexpectedly, Cyaru shook his head. “It’s ok,” he said. “I’ve done some thinking about things in the past weeks, and I’m fine with it, actually. I won’t be doing anything too involved, I’ll take her. He reached out and took Setsiana’s left hand.
Liselye cocked her head, a little concerned. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Where shall we meet up afterwards?”
“Setsiana wanted to see the Governor’s speech,” said Qhoroali. “That’s at 1… let’s meet over by the dumpling vendor about an hour before then to get lunch.” She pointed out the clock at the top of the port’s administration building that overlooked the square from the east, which currently showed that it was around 5 in the morning hours, two hours before Qhoroali’s proposed meeting time.
Qhoroali went off decisively to the north. With one last glance at Cyaru, Liselye let go of Setsiana’s right hand and left in a similar direction, leaving Setsiana alone with him.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Nacarat #10: Ré nao (Mandarin): A place with a fun and entertaining vibe where you just want to be.
Styles and Supplies: Gift Wrap
Word Count: 2950
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy drug (ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Cyaru
In-Universe Date: 1911.8.5.1, Summer 1904
Summary: Qhoroali and her friends go on an outing.
Notes: Gift Wrap for Qhoroali's birthday.
About a week had passed since the acquisition of the knife. Setsiana had modified the other skirts with no issues and now carried the knife with her at all times (she’d even reluctantly modified her nurefye, in optimistic anticipation of being able to escape wearing it), but somehow the moment to use it had not arrived. Qhoroali seemed to leave the apartment seldom, had so far not needed to use the copier again, and spent all her time with her research. The only regular visitor was Liselye, who continued to bring the food, and sometimes stayed to chat with Qhoroali. The others she did not see at all. Qhoroali would still try to engage Setsiana in her research, dropping tidbits of interesting ideas in the hopes that Setsiana would respond again. Sometimes they were very interesting and it was hard not to respond, but Setsiana reminded herself, repeating it like a mantra, that she could always look these papers up herself whenever she got back to Taleinyo.
Dreams of Sapfita had been infrequent. Sapfita continued to reassure her that she would escape, and praised her acquisition of the knife, basically confirming that violence was going to be necessary for her escape. “I didn’t know you had this in you, once,” she’d said. Remembering what Sapfita had said to her in an earlier conversation, Setsiana had asked if by “once” she meant one of her own simultaneously experienced states of knowing less about Setsiana. “Hmm. Not exactly,” had been all that Sapfita had said to that.
One morning, when Liselye had arrived with breakfast, she had also brought a pack with her. “It’s Rou’s 27th birthday,” she explained, “and we’re going to the T’arsi Fair, because just like every year she wants to go back there and browse the clockwork merchant’s stall. She said you might want to come with us.”
“The T’arsi Fair is in the summer, isn’t it?” Setsiana asked, wondering what could have changed in the past 250 years for the Fair to be held during a different time of the year. She had been keeping track of the days, and it had only been about a month since she had been abducted, and it had been early winter then. It must be near the end of the eighth month at this point, at least one whole month before the barest hints of spring would appear after the new year.
Liselye grinned at her. “Oh, we’re not going to a T’arsi Fair now, here in 1911,” she said. “We’re going to the one that happened in the summer of 1904. It’s because that clockwork merchant didn’t come to any of the subsequent ones. I keep telling her it’s probably because he had the experience of selling clockwork to the exact same bizarre woman like ten separate times in the space of a single week and got spooked and never came back, but she never listens to me. Do you want to come? She said you might, because the Governor gives a public speech on the fourth day of the Fair, and she thought you might find it funny, or possibly just appalling, to hear him speak our modern-day Vrelian.”
Suddenly, in spite of everything, Setsiana was dying to see that speech. She still couldn’t really bring herself to believe that the Governor would talk like that, even in this future time. Also, she was going to be allowed to leave the apartment, which would make escape much easier — she couldn’t see any downside to this excursion. “I’ll come,” she said immediately.
“Great. How’s your T’arsi?”
“Probably 250 years out of date.” Back in 1647, Setsiana had been very proud of her knowledge of T’arsi — unlike most people, who learned it in school and then forgot most of it as adults due to almost never needing to use it, Setsiana had needed to maintain her knowledge in order to teach the language to ten-year-olds. When the T’arsi Fair arrived, she would meet up with her old friends from before she had entered the junior priestess track and impress them with her skill in the language and her correct pronunciation of the retroflex consonants, and then they would go to the Fair together and she would haggle for their purchases with the merchants. She had grown distant from them in her years of association with the temple, and suspected that they only valued her for her knowledge of T’arsi now, but for one day a year, at least, she got to be the smartest and most useful person in the room. But now it was 250 years in the future, and Vrelian had changed drastically; she was a little afraid of the what the merchants would think of her T’arsi now.
“Don’t worry, they’ll probably just think you have a weird accent. Do you need money?” Setsiana quickly tried to think of a reason to refuse the money, since she no longer had any functional pockets in which to put it. Fortunately, Liselye didn’t seem to realize that her outfit was supposed to include pockets, and pulled a small shoulder bag out of the pack that looked a bit like the bags she’d seen people carrying outside her window. She accepted this, and put it on.
Liselye looked at her critically. “It’s a funny combination,” she noted, “the old-fashioned clothes and the bag. You look a bit like an actor who’s ducked out for lunch. Are you sure you don’t want something more modern to wear? I have some things that might fit you.”
Setsiana shook her head; she couldn’t care less about what people thought of her clothing and she needed the knife on her if she was going to try to escape. Liselye just shrugged, and closed the pack back up again, and slung it over her shoulder. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
After Liselye left, Setsiana settled in for breakfast and checked the contents of the bag. It held a small pouch with the money in it and nothing else — enough to buy a lunch and a couple other small things. It was less than she would normally take to the Fair, but she usually saved up her stipend in anticipation of the occasion, and it was generous considering she was a prisoner here. It was almost enough to hire a carriage back to Syarhrít. There was not anywhere near enough room in the bag to fold up the nurefye and put it in there — if she did escape during this expedition, she would have to leave it behind.
Qhoroali wandered into the kitchen, awake at a reasonable hour for once. “It’s my birthday today,” she said. “Well, I’ve time traveled enough at this point that it probably actually isn’t anymore, but the date is still special, you know?”
“What date would that be?” Setsiana asked. She wanted some concrete idea of what the date was, and she still had no idea what the date had been when she’d arrived here.
“First day of the fifth week of the eighth month.”
One week until the end of the month. Her reckoning hadn’t been far off. “And Liselye said you were 27,” said Setsiana slowly, remembering something from earlier. “You said you left your temple eight years ago, and that you were a junior priestess. But you couldn’t have been a junior priestess eight years ago, you would have only been 19, and you don’t become a junior until age 20.”
Qhoroali shrugged expansively. “I actually became a junior when I was 18. When your mom is the head of the temple, and is grooming you to take her place, a lot of rules get bent for you.”
That wasn’t actually the first time Qhoroali had talked about her mother being a priestess, but Setsiana had mostly skipped over that detail on the first day, after the shock of learning of Qhoroali’s goal of deicide. Priestesses didn’t normally get to be mothers; due to the harsh restrictions on associating with men borne of the need for secrecy, most never had children, and for the ones that did, there were punishments. There were certainly never children raised in the temple. But Qhoroali was a heretic who accepted male priestesses and sold qoire on the street. “You were raised in your temple?” she asked. “Your father was there too, I guess? There were whole families there?”
“Heretics don’t get the chance to recruit other people’s kids, so they recruit their own. They don’t have a secret to guard the way the main branch does, because they were never allowed to know it in the first place, so the temple isn’t locked up tighter than the royal treasury, like yours probably was.”
They ate in silence after that. Setsiana was lost in thought — she wasn’t quite an outcast at Taleinyo, but she often felt excluded, like someone barely clinging on to the outer fringes of the group, never being let into the center. Qhoroali’s temple had been her home and her family, and she had been favored to become its leader, but for some reason, she had left, and decided to kill her god. Even as a heretic, how could someone just throw that away?
After breakfast, the most exciting moment of the day arrived, and Setsiana was finally allowed to leave the apartment, without having to fight or stab anyone. Qhoroali did take her arm with her surprisingly strong grip, but that was all that stood between her and freedom. She made no move yet though — not when she could be caught and locked back into the apartment again. The double doors exited out to a small hallway; they walked down some stairs and then left through a servant’s door on the side of the building. Here, a small hill filled the open space between this building and the next, with a hedge mostly obscuring the road to the right. This was not the more densely occupied center of Nwórza that Setsiana was familiar with from her few visits there; there were a few other buildings off to her left, but in that direction it was mostly sparse forest. They must be somewhere on the very edge of the city. A thin layer of snow that she’d seen falling from her window the day before blanketed the ground, and the hill, the trees, and the hedge. A roughly circular area had been marked on the ground at the foot of the hill by a series of wooden posts only a couple of inches high.
Liselye and Cyaru were waiting by the hill, just outside the wooden circle, Liselye with her pack from earlier and Cyaru with a smaller bag. Qhoroali carried nothing, but Setsiana noticed her hands disappearing into deep pockets in her trousers occasionally. She wondered if Qhoroali would question why Setsiana had a bag, since she must know that Setsiana’s skirt was supposed to have pockets as well, but it didn’t seem to be something she had noticed.
Qhoroali took a bottle of qoire out of her pocket. “Ready?” she asked.
They arranged themselves in a line; Qhoroali put one arm over Liselye’s shoulder and the other arm over Cyaru’s shoulder, and Liselye took Setsiana’s hand tightly in her own. They passed the bottle around to take three drops under the tongue, and then back to Qhoroali, who drank a mouthful, and then blinked a bit as if to clear her vision. The timelines swam into Setsiana’s view again, endless snow-covered hills in impossible directions. Qhoroali named one of them and they walked, although this time, Setsiana was not so much following Qhoroali’s instruction as being pulled along by Liselye’s hand — it made it easier than it had been the first time to believe that it was a direction she could go in. But they were also moving forward in space, in addition to along the timeline, and she was pulled into the wooden circle by Liselye, and they continued their journey along the timeline from inside it. It was a very short journey, with no change in direction — if they had been moving through space, Setsiana would have said they traveled no more than 8 feet. The seasons whirled around them less than ten times, and then they came to a stop at a quite warm summer day, and she was again pulled by Liselye’s hand out the other side of the circle. The trees had all of their leaves back and the hill was covered in flowers.
“What is the circle for?” asked Setsiana. “Does it help you time travel?”
“It’s just to prevent accidents,” said Liselye. “When you walk along the timeline, you’re still occupying the physical location you’re standing in, at all points on that timeline. If someone else is in the same place at any of those points, you can bump into them. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a pain in the ass. For some reason, you never bump into someone else who’s also walking along the timeline in the same place — Rou has some theories about it. So we just do all of our time travel from here in that circle, and avoid going in there otherwise. That’s why you don’t want to time travel inside a building, or in a densely trafficked area, that’s just asking for trouble.”
They waited a few minutes for Qhoroali to mostly recover; the timelines were still clearly visible to Setsiana as they proceeded to the road via a gap in the hedge, but they grew dimmer and less real as they walked through physical space. Liselye still held her hand tightly — her right hand. She couldn’t get to her knife without reaching across her body and awkwardly grabbing it with her non-dominant left. She would have to contrive to free her right hand at some point.
They walked along the road for a time, and took a number turns headed deeper into the city and further towards the port. As they got closer, Setsiana recognized more and more of the buildings — certainly there were new ones as well, but there were plenty that were familiar to her from her own trips to the Fair. She thought she might be able to find her way to the largest temple based on landmarks alone, and she could probably get directions if she needed them. The amount of people and carts on the road gradually increased as they continued on as well, until they were part of a throng of people all moving towards the mouth of the river. She could probably lose the others easily in such a crowd, but might have trouble making headway against the flow.
She allowed herself to be lead into the wider open space where the Fair was held, a large flat plaza just before the port. The river Hweskár flowed along its north side and out into the sea, with the occasional boat traveling along it. There were more than Setsiana was used to seeing, and she could see that the port in the distance had many more, and much bigger ships docked than there would have been in 1647.
They made their way to a pocket of free space on the south side, opposite the river, and convened in a circle. “I’m going to buy clockwork,” said Qhoroali. “You guys don’t have to come with me, we can meet up afterwards.”
“I want to look at some of the art,” said Cyaru.
“I think there’s a magic show I haven’t actually seen yet,” said Liselye. “I’ll probably be there.”
“Who is taking Setsiana?” asked Qhoroali.
Liselye gave her a look. “You, presumably,” she said. “She’s here because of you, right?”
“She’s here because she wanted to come,” said Qhoroali, stolidly. “Look, I’ll be busy buying things and haggling, you guys are just going to be looking at stuff, you’ll have more attention to spare. Here,” she fished around in one of her pockets and brought out three pencils, breaking one of them in half. “We’ll draw lots, right?” She held her hands behind her back for a moment, and then brought them back out again, one holding all three pencils with the points facing up.
“This is ridiculous, and you are a ridiculous,” said Liselye. “But all right — it is your birthday.” She picked one of the pencils; it was one of the long ones.
Cyaru picked a second pencil, which turned out to be the short one. “Here,” Liselye said, offering him her pencil. “We’ll trade. You won’t have to be around her, Rou can buy clockwork in peace, everyone’s happy.”
Setsiana was starting to feel like she was a small child that no one wanted to mind, but unexpectedly, Cyaru shook his head. “It’s ok,” he said. “I’ve done some thinking about things in the past weeks, and I’m fine with it, actually. I won’t be doing anything too involved, I’ll take her. He reached out and took Setsiana’s left hand.
Liselye cocked her head, a little concerned. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Where shall we meet up afterwards?”
“Setsiana wanted to see the Governor’s speech,” said Qhoroali. “That’s at 1… let’s meet over by the dumpling vendor about an hour before then to get lunch.” She pointed out the clock at the top of the port’s administration building that overlooked the square from the east, which currently showed that it was around 5 in the morning hours, two hours before Qhoroali’s proposed meeting time.
Qhoroali went off decisively to the north. With one last glance at Cyaru, Liselye let go of Setsiana’s right hand and left in a similar direction, leaving Setsiana alone with him.
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Thank you! We shall see how far she gets, haha.
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Thank you! And yeah, you would never have a birthday with bad weather ever again.