paradoxcase (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
paradoxcase) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2025-04-20 03:21 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-04-20 03:21 pm
Fresh Thyme #6, Color of the Day April 20 2025 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Escape
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #6: Flash Forward, Color of the Day April 20 2025: Apace
Styles and Supplies: Chiaroscuro, Thread
Word Count: 2611
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye
In-Universe Date: 1911.9.2.1, 1911.9.2.2, Spring of 2050
Summary: Setsiana takes an opportunity.
A couple of weeks went by. Setsiana tried to shut herself in her room and practice with the knife every day, and she was improving, was getting quicker and less hesitant. Sometimes she pretended to be stabbing Cyaru, sometimes Qhoroali; she didn’t bother trying with Liselye, that was probably impossible for her regardless. She resolved that she would just have plan things so that she didn’t have to stab Liselye.
One day Qhoroali emerged from her room and greeted her with “Are you tired of being cooped up here yet?”
Setsiana just answered her with a stony stare, which was all that that deserved.
Qhoroali began talking expressively with her hands. “What I mean is, I have to go visit a friend, and I want you to come. I have something to show you, that I want your opinion on. You might even find it interesting.”
Setsiana had no interest whatsoever in giving Qhoroali her opinion on whatever this was, but it was another opportunity for escape, so she said “Sure.”
“Great!” Qhoroali disappeared back into her room and returned a short while later with an armful of winter coats. “Pick out one of these, I think they should all be warm enough.”
Setsiana looked through the coats. It was winter outside, but the winter in Nwórza was mild. These coats seemed a bit too much for it, but they were not heavy enough for the winter weather in the Capital. “Where are we going?”
“West, to Duqhora. It’s a bit colder during the time period we’re going to.” As Setsiana selected her coat, Qhoroali added, “I don’t know where you’ve put your nurefye, but you’re going to have to wear it when we go tomorrow, so please give it to me so that it can be washed.”
Setsiana looked up at her with narrowed eyes. “Why?” Were they going to going to a temple? Were they going to be impersonating priestesses? Was this “friend” some mole within the priesthood who was secretly helping Qhoroali kill God?
“Relax. It’s just easier to travel if people think you’re a priestess. You get priority in lines, you get a QuCheanya translator usually if you don’t know the local language, although that won’t really be necessary tomorrow. More people are willing to help you, and do you favors. We don’t need Cyaru and we have nurefyes that fit us already, so we might as well use them.”
Left unsaid was that they had them because they were going into temples and impersonating priestesses in order to steal protected research, they just weren’t doing that this time. And Setsiana still rankled at this idea that these people would be exploiting the priesthood’s well-deserved good will for their own gain. But she would have to go with them if she wanted to escape, so she said nothing. Instead she asked, “What guarantee do I have that if I give you the nurefye you won’t steal it?”
Qhoroali looked offended, and a little confused. “Steal it? Why would I do that? Have I stolen anything else from you?”
Just my freedom. But she was forced to admit that she wasn’t missing any of her material possessions, so she responded, “I guess not.”
“I promise, we just want to have it washed. There’d be no point in preventing you from wearing it, it’s actually very convenient that you have one already and I don’t have to make you one. The embroidery is a bitch and a half and there are close to zero professionals who will make one for someone who isn’t actually known to be the head of the nearest temple.”
Setsiana reluctantly returned to her room, got the now terribly creased nurefye from under the mattress, and returned to the hall, hoping the Qhoroali wouldn’t notice what she’d done to the pockets. But she didn’t seem to notice, and simply said, “Great. You can keep that coat, in case you need it again. We’ll leave tomorrow after I get up. Pack your nightdress,” and bundled it into her arms and left the apartment.
Setsiana’s anxieties about the nurefye proved to be unfounded, and it arrived back the next day with Liselye, who was wearing one of her own, washed and ironed and not looking like it had spent weeks under a mattress. She put it on in her room, slipping her knife into the modified pocket, and when she had finished, Qhoroali had emerged wearing her own strangely tailored one.
Rubber bands and hair sticks came out of a desk drawer, and Qhoroali and Liselye took turns braiding each other’s hair. Setsiana did her own; she’d done it enough times for the ten-year-olds over the last four years, but had never put the triple braid in her own hair. She thought glumly that this wasn’t the situation she’d imagined being in the first time she did it.
She was given a pack for her overnight things, into which she put everything she still had with her in her room that she cared about, but as she was packing it, she stopped with a sudden thought. She returned to the main room and asked, “How many days will we be?”
“Two,” said Liselye. “One there, one back.”
Setsiana stared at her. “To Duqhora?” she asked. “That’s not possible.” Duqhora wasn’t much further south than Nwórza, but it was all the way on the western coast, 700 miles away. It should take eight or nine days to reach it at a minimum.
Liselye smiled a little. “Not possible in 1911, that’s correct,” she said. “It would be almost two and a half days each way even on a ship. That’s why we’re going to 2050 first to catch the train. If Rou let us go another hundred years further into the future, we could get there in less than an hour, but she hates that time period.”
“Some places just aren’t worth being in for almost an entire hour,” Qhoroali grumbled darkly, tying her pack closed.
When they left, it was Qhoroali who had a tight hold of Setsiana’s hand. A relatively short time travel within the wooden circle later, and they arrived at a nice day in the early spring, still a little chilly. This time, they walked in the opposite direction from where they had gone to see the Fair — west, towards the more scarcely populated city outskirts.
The outskirts Setsiana had expected never came, though. They walked and walked, but the buildings never seemed to thin out, and the number of people on the road never seemed to decrease. She barely recognized where in the city they were due to the number of new or upgraded buildings, and she was sure that somewhere in their journey they must have passed the point at which the city had ended in her time. The buildings were taller, with more decorative moldings above windows and doors, and more colorful exteriors. She felt like she was a visitor in a foreign country. She caught sight of something she vaguely remembered having seen on the way back from the Fair, but hadn’t been in a state of mind to appreciate — some large construction, like a great bridge, extending towards the mountains west of the city. She raised her free hand to gesture at it. “What’s that?”
Qhoroali squinted up to see what she was asking about. “You mean the aqueduct? It brings in fresh water from the river’s source in the mountains. Look,” she released Setsiana’s hand to point out something that seemed too small to see, “you can see where it terminates, kind of.” She returned to what she’d been talking about with Liselye.
Setsiana wasn’t unfamiliar with aqueducts — she knew there were one or two in the west, but she had never seen them in person and the Emperor had never spared the time nor the funds to build anything like that in east. But her interest in the subject was dulled, for the moment; her hand was free, and she could leave without a fight.
She slowed her pace relative to the other two, and watched the distance grow between them. Would escape really be so simple? No need for the knife, after all. She watched until they were all but lost among the other people on the street, and then she turned and ran. The sudden movement of her shoes on the ground sent a pebble skipping and she had a brief chance to hear Qhoroali’s shout of alarm. But she was already gone, and there was nothing they could do.
If it had been 1647, she would have known where the western temple was in Nwórza, but this city 400 years in the future was a mystery to her, and she suspected they’d long since left the jurisdiction of that older temple. After running down a number of different streets of completely unrecognizable buildings, she realized she would have to ask someone where the nearest one was.
The last street she entered terminated abruptly in the middle with a temporary blockade. Several carts had been moved to block the way, and a man wearing clothing that strongly reminded Setsiana of farmers wearing their one nice outfit to come petition the juniors at Nyoacelya Lyuya was sitting atop the one in the center. As Setsiana slowed and caught her breath, he hopped off of the cart and onto the street to meet her.
He began speaking to her, and she caught one or two familiar-sounding words… a root she recognized… had he said sausage? It was no use, she couldn’t make it out. She shook her head, and said in QuCheanya, “I don’t understand.”
He turned and called out to someone else, and a woman who was seated near the edge of the obstruction came forward. Her blouse had a frill on the front of it that struck Setsiana as ostentatious, but the quality of her clothes did not seem much better than the man’s. She said, in a thickly accented QuCheanya that completely lacked noun tenses, “You be a deceiver. The priestesses look for you. We hold you until they arrive.”
Setsiana shook her head again, vigorously. “They aren’t priestesses,” she said. “They’re the ones pretending. I am a real priestess, they’ve kidnapped me to learn our secrets.” Technically it was only partly true, but it was definitely way more true than the idea of Qhoroali and Liselye being real priestesses. The lay people didn’t know or care much about heresy, so mentioning that Qhoroali was a heretic wouldn’t help her here.
“You want us believe you over them? Show us proof.”
Fortunately, this was an easy ask. “Take me to the temple,” said Setsiana. “Take me to the temple. You know the priestesses there, yes? They give you food, money, help, they conduct your weddings and funerals, they deliver your babies, they teach your children. You trust them, right? They will tell you the truth.” If what Qhoroali had showed her was true, she had many published papers in this era, and Taleinyo frequently shared research with the temples in Nwórza. The priestesses here should be able to verify that she was who she said she was. If they had to go take a trip to Syarhrít to do that verification, she could wait for them to do it in the safety of the temple. The priesthood always had priority jurisdiction when it came to the protection of their secrets.
The woman hesitated, and conferred briefly with the man, and Setsiana wondered for a moment if she hadn’t understood. But at length, they seemed to come to an agreement; the man darted off between two buildings, and the woman took her hand, saying, “You come with me. I take you to the temple.”
They walked back down the street Setsiana had come up, and zigzagged through several streets in a general northwestern direction. Finally, they turned a corner, and Setsiana saw the clock tower and tall arch of the temple - not one that had existed in her time, certainly, and the bricks seemed very new and straight, but a temple nonetheless. There was a priestess in her dark nurefye standing just outside the arch, and the man from earlier was with her. She was thumbing through a book of cardstock, loosely bound with two leather thongs through a series of holes stamped in the cards.
Scenting freedom at last, Setsiana tried to walk faster, but the woman held her to a more sedate pace. The priestess paused on a card; the man was pointing at it, saying something with excitement. The priestess did not seem to react to his emotion, but only looked up at Setsiana… and then down, and then up, and then down again. Then she closed the book, and began slowly walking towards Setsiana and the other woman.
Setsiana felt a hint of worry, a twinge of fear, irrational and from nowhere. It was a bit like when she had first seen the gun at the Fair, and had had a glimmer of the danger even before she knew what it was. But that was silly, wasn’t it? This priestess was going to help her. They were both part of the priesthood. Setsiana hadn’t lied, not really, and she was in the right. They were on the same side. Weren’t they?
The priestess continued advancing, and Setsiana felt herself falter a bit and fall slightly behind the woman leading her, who tugged sharply at her hand and said, “You don’t run now.”
Suddenly, someone slammed into her back and almost knocked her over. It was Qhoroali, who grabbed her free hand and then stood stock still, letting her modified nurefye swish forward and around her legs to form its near-perfect illusion of being a skirt. A few seconds later, Liselye was at her other side, thanking the woman and taking Setsiana’s hand from her. Qhoroali said in QuCheanya, all business, and channeling authority in a way she hadn’t done at Taleinyo in 1647: “Thanks. We’ll take it from here. We were headed to a different temple.” Liselye exchanged a smile and a nod with the priestess, and the other woman retreated back into the temple.
Setsiana was left feeling oddly as if she’d been rescued from some terrible fate, rather than as if she’d had her escape attempt foiled at the last minute. She was momentarily too stunned to think it through. She wondered briefly why the other priestess had not even stopped to get her side of things. She was also dressed as a priestess, after all.
As Qhoroali and Liselye hurried Setsiana back through the streets the way she’d come, they rudely used the extra inches they had on her to have a hushed conversation over her head in their mangled Vrelian.
“Do you think she’s on the list?” asked Qhoroali. Or at least, that was what Setsiana thought she said. In addition to speaking in horrible Vrelian they were also speaking quickly and just above a stage whisper.
“No, why would she be?”
“I have no idea, but that’s what it looked like.”
Liselye screwed her face up into an confused expression that seemed very unlike her. “Something we do in her company, maybe?”
“I don’t know about you, but I know I’m not on the list.” Qhoroali paused, and seemed to realize something. “You can’t be, either. She was literally looking at it right there, she would have recognized you.”
Liselye chewed her lip. “Well, this will make this trip more annoying.”
“I don’t think so. We already have to avoid them, anyway. You’re right, though, I don’t like it, either.”
They continued the journey in silence.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #6: Flash Forward, Color of the Day April 20 2025: Apace
Styles and Supplies: Chiaroscuro, Thread
Word Count: 2611
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye
In-Universe Date: 1911.9.2.1, 1911.9.2.2, Spring of 2050
Summary: Setsiana takes an opportunity.
A couple of weeks went by. Setsiana tried to shut herself in her room and practice with the knife every day, and she was improving, was getting quicker and less hesitant. Sometimes she pretended to be stabbing Cyaru, sometimes Qhoroali; she didn’t bother trying with Liselye, that was probably impossible for her regardless. She resolved that she would just have plan things so that she didn’t have to stab Liselye.
One day Qhoroali emerged from her room and greeted her with “Are you tired of being cooped up here yet?”
Setsiana just answered her with a stony stare, which was all that that deserved.
Qhoroali began talking expressively with her hands. “What I mean is, I have to go visit a friend, and I want you to come. I have something to show you, that I want your opinion on. You might even find it interesting.”
Setsiana had no interest whatsoever in giving Qhoroali her opinion on whatever this was, but it was another opportunity for escape, so she said “Sure.”
“Great!” Qhoroali disappeared back into her room and returned a short while later with an armful of winter coats. “Pick out one of these, I think they should all be warm enough.”
Setsiana looked through the coats. It was winter outside, but the winter in Nwórza was mild. These coats seemed a bit too much for it, but they were not heavy enough for the winter weather in the Capital. “Where are we going?”
“West, to Duqhora. It’s a bit colder during the time period we’re going to.” As Setsiana selected her coat, Qhoroali added, “I don’t know where you’ve put your nurefye, but you’re going to have to wear it when we go tomorrow, so please give it to me so that it can be washed.”
Setsiana looked up at her with narrowed eyes. “Why?” Were they going to going to a temple? Were they going to be impersonating priestesses? Was this “friend” some mole within the priesthood who was secretly helping Qhoroali kill God?
“Relax. It’s just easier to travel if people think you’re a priestess. You get priority in lines, you get a QuCheanya translator usually if you don’t know the local language, although that won’t really be necessary tomorrow. More people are willing to help you, and do you favors. We don’t need Cyaru and we have nurefyes that fit us already, so we might as well use them.”
Left unsaid was that they had them because they were going into temples and impersonating priestesses in order to steal protected research, they just weren’t doing that this time. And Setsiana still rankled at this idea that these people would be exploiting the priesthood’s well-deserved good will for their own gain. But she would have to go with them if she wanted to escape, so she said nothing. Instead she asked, “What guarantee do I have that if I give you the nurefye you won’t steal it?”
Qhoroali looked offended, and a little confused. “Steal it? Why would I do that? Have I stolen anything else from you?”
Just my freedom. But she was forced to admit that she wasn’t missing any of her material possessions, so she responded, “I guess not.”
“I promise, we just want to have it washed. There’d be no point in preventing you from wearing it, it’s actually very convenient that you have one already and I don’t have to make you one. The embroidery is a bitch and a half and there are close to zero professionals who will make one for someone who isn’t actually known to be the head of the nearest temple.”
Setsiana reluctantly returned to her room, got the now terribly creased nurefye from under the mattress, and returned to the hall, hoping the Qhoroali wouldn’t notice what she’d done to the pockets. But she didn’t seem to notice, and simply said, “Great. You can keep that coat, in case you need it again. We’ll leave tomorrow after I get up. Pack your nightdress,” and bundled it into her arms and left the apartment.
Setsiana’s anxieties about the nurefye proved to be unfounded, and it arrived back the next day with Liselye, who was wearing one of her own, washed and ironed and not looking like it had spent weeks under a mattress. She put it on in her room, slipping her knife into the modified pocket, and when she had finished, Qhoroali had emerged wearing her own strangely tailored one.
Rubber bands and hair sticks came out of a desk drawer, and Qhoroali and Liselye took turns braiding each other’s hair. Setsiana did her own; she’d done it enough times for the ten-year-olds over the last four years, but had never put the triple braid in her own hair. She thought glumly that this wasn’t the situation she’d imagined being in the first time she did it.
She was given a pack for her overnight things, into which she put everything she still had with her in her room that she cared about, but as she was packing it, she stopped with a sudden thought. She returned to the main room and asked, “How many days will we be?”
“Two,” said Liselye. “One there, one back.”
Setsiana stared at her. “To Duqhora?” she asked. “That’s not possible.” Duqhora wasn’t much further south than Nwórza, but it was all the way on the western coast, 700 miles away. It should take eight or nine days to reach it at a minimum.
Liselye smiled a little. “Not possible in 1911, that’s correct,” she said. “It would be almost two and a half days each way even on a ship. That’s why we’re going to 2050 first to catch the train. If Rou let us go another hundred years further into the future, we could get there in less than an hour, but she hates that time period.”
“Some places just aren’t worth being in for almost an entire hour,” Qhoroali grumbled darkly, tying her pack closed.
When they left, it was Qhoroali who had a tight hold of Setsiana’s hand. A relatively short time travel within the wooden circle later, and they arrived at a nice day in the early spring, still a little chilly. This time, they walked in the opposite direction from where they had gone to see the Fair — west, towards the more scarcely populated city outskirts.
The outskirts Setsiana had expected never came, though. They walked and walked, but the buildings never seemed to thin out, and the number of people on the road never seemed to decrease. She barely recognized where in the city they were due to the number of new or upgraded buildings, and she was sure that somewhere in their journey they must have passed the point at which the city had ended in her time. The buildings were taller, with more decorative moldings above windows and doors, and more colorful exteriors. She felt like she was a visitor in a foreign country. She caught sight of something she vaguely remembered having seen on the way back from the Fair, but hadn’t been in a state of mind to appreciate — some large construction, like a great bridge, extending towards the mountains west of the city. She raised her free hand to gesture at it. “What’s that?”
Qhoroali squinted up to see what she was asking about. “You mean the aqueduct? It brings in fresh water from the river’s source in the mountains. Look,” she released Setsiana’s hand to point out something that seemed too small to see, “you can see where it terminates, kind of.” She returned to what she’d been talking about with Liselye.
Setsiana wasn’t unfamiliar with aqueducts — she knew there were one or two in the west, but she had never seen them in person and the Emperor had never spared the time nor the funds to build anything like that in east. But her interest in the subject was dulled, for the moment; her hand was free, and she could leave without a fight.
She slowed her pace relative to the other two, and watched the distance grow between them. Would escape really be so simple? No need for the knife, after all. She watched until they were all but lost among the other people on the street, and then she turned and ran. The sudden movement of her shoes on the ground sent a pebble skipping and she had a brief chance to hear Qhoroali’s shout of alarm. But she was already gone, and there was nothing they could do.
If it had been 1647, she would have known where the western temple was in Nwórza, but this city 400 years in the future was a mystery to her, and she suspected they’d long since left the jurisdiction of that older temple. After running down a number of different streets of completely unrecognizable buildings, she realized she would have to ask someone where the nearest one was.
The last street she entered terminated abruptly in the middle with a temporary blockade. Several carts had been moved to block the way, and a man wearing clothing that strongly reminded Setsiana of farmers wearing their one nice outfit to come petition the juniors at Nyoacelya Lyuya was sitting atop the one in the center. As Setsiana slowed and caught her breath, he hopped off of the cart and onto the street to meet her.
He began speaking to her, and she caught one or two familiar-sounding words… a root she recognized… had he said sausage? It was no use, she couldn’t make it out. She shook her head, and said in QuCheanya, “I don’t understand.”
He turned and called out to someone else, and a woman who was seated near the edge of the obstruction came forward. Her blouse had a frill on the front of it that struck Setsiana as ostentatious, but the quality of her clothes did not seem much better than the man’s. She said, in a thickly accented QuCheanya that completely lacked noun tenses, “You be a deceiver. The priestesses look for you. We hold you until they arrive.”
Setsiana shook her head again, vigorously. “They aren’t priestesses,” she said. “They’re the ones pretending. I am a real priestess, they’ve kidnapped me to learn our secrets.” Technically it was only partly true, but it was definitely way more true than the idea of Qhoroali and Liselye being real priestesses. The lay people didn’t know or care much about heresy, so mentioning that Qhoroali was a heretic wouldn’t help her here.
“You want us believe you over them? Show us proof.”
Fortunately, this was an easy ask. “Take me to the temple,” said Setsiana. “Take me to the temple. You know the priestesses there, yes? They give you food, money, help, they conduct your weddings and funerals, they deliver your babies, they teach your children. You trust them, right? They will tell you the truth.” If what Qhoroali had showed her was true, she had many published papers in this era, and Taleinyo frequently shared research with the temples in Nwórza. The priestesses here should be able to verify that she was who she said she was. If they had to go take a trip to Syarhrít to do that verification, she could wait for them to do it in the safety of the temple. The priesthood always had priority jurisdiction when it came to the protection of their secrets.
The woman hesitated, and conferred briefly with the man, and Setsiana wondered for a moment if she hadn’t understood. But at length, they seemed to come to an agreement; the man darted off between two buildings, and the woman took her hand, saying, “You come with me. I take you to the temple.”
They walked back down the street Setsiana had come up, and zigzagged through several streets in a general northwestern direction. Finally, they turned a corner, and Setsiana saw the clock tower and tall arch of the temple - not one that had existed in her time, certainly, and the bricks seemed very new and straight, but a temple nonetheless. There was a priestess in her dark nurefye standing just outside the arch, and the man from earlier was with her. She was thumbing through a book of cardstock, loosely bound with two leather thongs through a series of holes stamped in the cards.
Scenting freedom at last, Setsiana tried to walk faster, but the woman held her to a more sedate pace. The priestess paused on a card; the man was pointing at it, saying something with excitement. The priestess did not seem to react to his emotion, but only looked up at Setsiana… and then down, and then up, and then down again. Then she closed the book, and began slowly walking towards Setsiana and the other woman.
Setsiana felt a hint of worry, a twinge of fear, irrational and from nowhere. It was a bit like when she had first seen the gun at the Fair, and had had a glimmer of the danger even before she knew what it was. But that was silly, wasn’t it? This priestess was going to help her. They were both part of the priesthood. Setsiana hadn’t lied, not really, and she was in the right. They were on the same side. Weren’t they?
The priestess continued advancing, and Setsiana felt herself falter a bit and fall slightly behind the woman leading her, who tugged sharply at her hand and said, “You don’t run now.”
Suddenly, someone slammed into her back and almost knocked her over. It was Qhoroali, who grabbed her free hand and then stood stock still, letting her modified nurefye swish forward and around her legs to form its near-perfect illusion of being a skirt. A few seconds later, Liselye was at her other side, thanking the woman and taking Setsiana’s hand from her. Qhoroali said in QuCheanya, all business, and channeling authority in a way she hadn’t done at Taleinyo in 1647: “Thanks. We’ll take it from here. We were headed to a different temple.” Liselye exchanged a smile and a nod with the priestess, and the other woman retreated back into the temple.
Setsiana was left feeling oddly as if she’d been rescued from some terrible fate, rather than as if she’d had her escape attempt foiled at the last minute. She was momentarily too stunned to think it through. She wondered briefly why the other priestess had not even stopped to get her side of things. She was also dressed as a priestess, after all.
As Qhoroali and Liselye hurried Setsiana back through the streets the way she’d come, they rudely used the extra inches they had on her to have a hushed conversation over her head in their mangled Vrelian.
“Do you think she’s on the list?” asked Qhoroali. Or at least, that was what Setsiana thought she said. In addition to speaking in horrible Vrelian they were also speaking quickly and just above a stage whisper.
“No, why would she be?”
“I have no idea, but that’s what it looked like.”
Liselye screwed her face up into an confused expression that seemed very unlike her. “Something we do in her company, maybe?”
“I don’t know about you, but I know I’m not on the list.” Qhoroali paused, and seemed to realize something. “You can’t be, either. She was literally looking at it right there, she would have recognized you.”
Liselye chewed her lip. “Well, this will make this trip more annoying.”
“I don’t think so. We already have to avoid them, anyway. You’re right, though, I don’t like it, either.”
They continued the journey in silence.