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rainbowfic2025-06-12 03:53 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-06-12 03:53 pm
Ecru #8, Techelet #6 [The Fulcrum]
Name: A Final Return
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #8: Judge, Techelet #6: Olam Haba'a (the world to come)
Styles and Supplies: Panorama, Glue (June 12 2025: "It's a good day to express your thoughts and feelings, Gemini. Whether it's a loved one who'd appreciate affectionate words or a colleague who requires instruction, communication will come more easily than usual. You have a practical nature. Often you say what you think is required and not much else. Yet others may need you to say a lot more. Consider this as you go about your day."), Brushes (June 12 2025: Impute)
Word Count: 2625
Rating: PG
Warnings: Discussion of Slavery
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.1.1.2
Summary: Setsiana talks to Qhoroali while they return to Nwórza.
Notes: This is the last post of Part 1 of the Fulcrum (and the last Ecru prompt, as well). In terms of Rainbowfic posts, this is almost exactly 1/3 of the way through the full story. Thank you guys for reading! There will be a short break where I post two non-Fulcrum-related things, and then I will be back with the beginning of Part 2.
After they had gotten back to 1912 they got into another carriage back to Nwórza. Cyaru and the girl sat near the front and talked in their shared language, and Setsiana and Qhoroali sat in the back row of seats. Qhoroali turned to her. “So, you know now,” she said.
“What do I know?” asked Setsiana. “They kidnapped someone — someone who has something to do with Cyaru. Why?” She remembered something. “Priestess Meqhola said she was ‘the enemy’. What did she mean by that?”
“She meant that they are Tuari — the girls they kidnap and keep as slaves are all from timelines where the Tuari won the ancient war and wiped out all of the Cheanya. Well, more precisely, they are from timelines where Yesora’s Grammar never arrived. I believe there are some timelines like that where the Cheanya still exist, and probably some of the slaves are actually Cheanya. They don’t see a difference — they see any timeline where no one speaks QuCheanya as a ‘Tuari timeline’.
“So Cyaru is also Tuari, then?”
“Well, he’s just as far removed from the people who fought in that ancient war as I am, so that’s a little debatable, honestly, but essentially, yes. His people don’t call themselves ‘Tuari’, though, their word for themselves is actually ‘Sohanke’. Cusäfä thinks it might be related to the word Soanghi that we have in our timeline, and that they might have originally come from that same area and probably speak a language in the same family, but that’s just his personal guess. ‘Tuari’ was just the name of the dynasty of kings that ruled them at the time the ancient war happened, but that dynasty died out a few centuries later due to inbreeding and were replaced with a different one. In Cyaru’s timeline, at least, the word only really stuck around in reference to some persistent genetic disorders that are attributed to those inbred kings.”
“I still don’t really understand. Why are they being taken as slaves? They didn’t do anything, right? They weren’t involved in the old war. This isn’t like it is with Shayanseen war trophy slaves, where they were enemy combatants, and it’s not like it is in the Northern Kingdoms where it’s a punishment for a crime or a resolution of a debt, either, if they are truly strangers from a completely different timeline. Why are they doing it?”
“Well,” said Qhoroali, “if you were to ask that priestess who told you they were the enemy, it’s because of that. Because the Tuari are evil and ruthless and hate us, and because they annihilated us in their timelines, and that’s all the reason that a lot of them need. But that is fiction — propaganda built up over the centuries by the priesthood teaching it to every single child for over a thousand years, and they emphasize that history a lot in the early parts of the junior priestess track as well, I believe, so by the time you get to be a full priestess, you normally don’t question any of it. But that war was 1900 years ago, and it’s been nearly as long since anyone on this island was identified as Tuari, or Sohanke, in this timeline. Without the priesthood’s focus on it, would any of us even look at the ancient kingdom from 1900 years ago and say, yes, that was us, and their enemies were our enemies? The ancient kingdom itself was very different to what we have now, culturally and organizationally, and in truth, both sides of that war were approximately equal with respect to violence and ruthlessness. The ancient world was a completely different place than what we’re used to now, and I think only T’arse actually traces its own history back that far. The construction of the ‘Tuari’ as the enemy of us here in the present is just a fiction that was deliberately crafted to justify the slavery.”
“So what is the real reason, then? Why did they go to all that trouble?”
“Money.” Qhoroali smiled darkly. “It all comes down to money with them. Didn’t I tell you that earlier? Yesora’s Grammar says that the priesthood must get its funding from the government, from the Emperor, but the Emperor doesn’t want to give them anything. So they have to cajole, and extort him. They generally threaten to go back in time and write him and his family out of the timeline if he doesn’t comply. That’s why 2307 happened; the government did liberalize in later time periods, the Emperor ceded power to democratically elected councils, and the councils wanted to do things that would please the people who elected them, but the priesthood made its demands with these kinds of existential threats, and the councils decided that this couldn’t be allowed to continue, and that it was a terrible mistake for anyone to have that kind of power over anyone else. That’s why the coup happened, and why the priesthood was destroyed and everyone jailed. In any case, here in 1912 and throughout the rest of the priesthood’s history, any way that the priesthood can save money is less time they have to spend bickering with the Emperor over it, so they save money by not having to pay their servants, and the easiest place to get slaves from where no one they care about will find out about it is a timeline where no one believes in the existence of time travel.”
“But that’s nonsense,” said Setsiana. “You can’t write someone out of the timeline. You can’t change any timelines at all. No one can.”
“Sure, we know that, and the priesthood knows it. But the majority of people don’t actually know how it works, and don’t think about it much. There’s a reason the priesthood doesn’t teach a lot of time travel theory in the regular public school classes, they need the officials in the government to stay ignorant and believe in ghost stories about priestesses going back in time and changing history.”
Setsiana sat in silence for a minute. “T’arse hates slavery, don’t they?” she asked. “They fight wars over it. And the Emperor is terrified of a war with T’arse. So why not just tell him? Why not bring it to the government? That should end it, right?”
“I also had that thought, and I did in fact do exactly that. And well, first what happened is that they looked me up in the shit-list the priesthood gave them, because if you’re in there, they’re required by law to not listen to anything you have to say and just turn you over to the priesthood immediately. Luckily, I don’t seem to be on that list. I guess the same is not true for you, after today, huh? I thought that might be the case back when you ran off in Nwórza, and I guess now we know why. Anyway, after they ascertained that I was not on the list, they did sit down and listen to me. And at the end of it, one of the guys said ‘Does T’arse know about this now?’ and the other one replied ‘No, they don’t even believe in time travel,’ and the first one said, ‘Alright, let’s keep it that way, then.’ And they explained that it was just infinitely safer for them to not bother the priesthood about this because if they messed with them, they would all get erased from history. I tried to explain that that wasn’t possible, and tell them how it really works, but they wouldn’t believe me. They weren’t willing to bet their lives on me maybe being right. And from their perspective, I can kind of understand that.” She paused for a moment. “You don’t have to take my word for all of this either, you know, in fact I recommend against it — believing things you’re taught without question is how we all got into this situation in the first place. I can take you to the timelines where the slaves come from, and you can hear about it from the mouths of the people there, too, and see what their lives are like and what the priesthood has done to their communities.”
“I want you to know that it’s intensely ironic that after kidnapping me using time travel and keeping me prisoner for two months you are now talking to me about the evils of kidnapping people using time travel and imprisoning them.”
A pained and guilty expression settled on Qhoroali’s face. “Believe me, I know,” she said. “I’ve realized that I’ve been incredibly hypocritical in kidnapping you, and I know now that I was completely in the wrong, there. I know it probably doesn’t help, but it was a stupid decision and I am sorry.”
“And, all of this is why you want to kill Sapfita, I guess,” said Setsiana.
“Precisely. We can do some things — we can free slaves, we can help out the timelines that are being targeted, and we do do those things, but there are so many timelines, and so many priestesses taking so many slaves in so many places and times that we can’t make much of a dent. And we, as mere humans, can’t permanently change or destroy those timelines — only Sapfita can do that. We can’t make Her do anything, of course. Well,” Qhoroali huffed a small laugh, “maybe if you asked really nicely, She would destroy all of the bad timelines, but I kind of doubt it. But events that affect Her, that take place outside of Time, should also be able to destroy or permanently alter timelines. If I find a way to kill Her, She’ll be gone from every time, and every timeline. And Her interference in Time where She gave humans the Mirror technology will no longer exist, and because that event comes from outside of Time, the timeline will be permanently altered, and the priesthood will never be created to safeguard that technology. That should cause a rippling effect that will permanently alter all subsequent timelines from that point forward, and there will never have been a priesthood in any of them, and therefore there will never have been any transtimeline slavery in any of them, either. It’ll be a whole new set of timelines, a whole new world, a whole new universe. I like to call it the World to Come.”
“Won’t that write a huge number of people out of existence?” asked Setsiana. “Is that really any different than just killing them all?” But then she remembered how Qhoroali had said she might have burned a city down, too, if she thought it would further her goal. Maybe Qhoroali didn’t care about things like that.
“I don’t believe most people will be affected. They might live very different lives, but they’d probably be born the same way they were in the original timelines and still be more or less the same people. Maybe Li has to actually learn how to be a tailor. Maybe Cyaru never crosses timelines and thus never meets her, but his timeline should be better off in general without the priesthood existing in any of the other ones. They’ve accepted that that’s a price we have to pay for justice. The only person I know for sure will simply cease to exist in the World to Come is me. If the priesthood never comes into existence, if Yesora’s Grammar never mandates gender segregation, my father never travels across the entire country looking for a heretical temple that will accept him, and thus never even meets my mother. But again, I think this is an acceptable sacrifice. I don’t see it as dying. I’ll just… cease to exist. Once I’ve killed Sapfita, my purpose will be over, and I just won’t be there anymore.”
“Sapfita’s Gift of the Mirror didn’t just give us time travel and the priesthood, though,” Setsiana said, slowly. “It saved us from annihilation at the hands of the Tuari — or Sohanke, I guess. If She doesn’t give us that gift, all those people die, in every timeline, and none of their descendants are ever born.”
“Do you really believe that old fable? The ancient kingdom wasn’t the weak, pacifistic kingdom with no fit soldiers that the priesthood always portrays it as. Archaeological evidence shows that they were very similar to their enemies, and pretty evenly matched. Maybe time travel was used to give them an advantage, but I don’t think it was the only way they could have avoided destruction.”
“You don’t think? Can’t you literally just go back and check, to prove it one way or the other?”
“By all accounts, there was a lot of very frequent violence happening back in those days, that is one thing that is definitely known for sure. I may be willing to sacrifice my existence for justice, but I’m not actually suicidal. I don’t have a Mirror that I can use to just look at what was going on back then — if I want to know, I have to go back there in person, bodily, well, for more than the few minutes I did spend in that time period. I’m not risking that just to prove something that I’m pretty sure is correct anyway.”
Setsiana was silent for a bit. Then she said, “I think there are probably a lot more people than you who will be erased by this. And I don’t think that is actually any different than them dying, or that doing this would be any different than killing them. And there’s no guarantee that this World to Come will actually be better, overall, than then one you want to destroy — some new terrible thing could always happen as a result of what you plan to do. I don’t know what the solution to this is, but I don’t think we should just swap one atrocity for another, for a result that may not even be good.” She remembered something, then. “Sapfita said that if She gets destroyed, it could have catastrophic effects on the universe — something more than just all of those timelines getting rewritten. I can’t believe that this is the answer.”
“Do you still believe that you are really speaking to Her like that, after what I told you about it?” Qhoroali asked. “How about this for a test — why don’t you ask Her what She thinks about the priesthood’s slavery? If She supports them, going against what you seem to know is right, then I’ll believe you that it’s really Her.”
Setsiana had been running mainly on adrenaline ever since she had stabbed Priestess Meqhola, even though she was no longer in immediate danger. But at this, her energy seemed to suddenly deplete, and something broke inside of her. If Sapfita supported the priesthood in this — if She approved of the slavery — if Setsiana was cut off from Her now, because she had acted against it — she didn’t think she could go on. She would curl up and die. It was one thing to learn this about the priestesses, who were only human, after all, and who had not been her personal friends. But Sapfita had been her friend and confidante all of her life. It would be a true betrayal of everything she had loved.
Qhoroali must have seen her crumple in on herself, because she said, “I’m sorry, that was cruel, and I should have known better. You did the right thing back there. There’s no harm in you believing in a thing that isn’t true, or in a god that doesn’t support atrocities. The world might be a better place if we could all believe in such things.”
They spent the rest of the carriage ride in silence.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #8: Judge, Techelet #6: Olam Haba'a (the world to come)
Styles and Supplies: Panorama, Glue (June 12 2025: "It's a good day to express your thoughts and feelings, Gemini. Whether it's a loved one who'd appreciate affectionate words or a colleague who requires instruction, communication will come more easily than usual. You have a practical nature. Often you say what you think is required and not much else. Yet others may need you to say a lot more. Consider this as you go about your day."), Brushes (June 12 2025: Impute)
Word Count: 2625
Rating: PG
Warnings: Discussion of Slavery
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.1.1.2
Summary: Setsiana talks to Qhoroali while they return to Nwórza.
Notes: This is the last post of Part 1 of the Fulcrum (and the last Ecru prompt, as well). In terms of Rainbowfic posts, this is almost exactly 1/3 of the way through the full story. Thank you guys for reading! There will be a short break where I post two non-Fulcrum-related things, and then I will be back with the beginning of Part 2.
After they had gotten back to 1912 they got into another carriage back to Nwórza. Cyaru and the girl sat near the front and talked in their shared language, and Setsiana and Qhoroali sat in the back row of seats. Qhoroali turned to her. “So, you know now,” she said.
“What do I know?” asked Setsiana. “They kidnapped someone — someone who has something to do with Cyaru. Why?” She remembered something. “Priestess Meqhola said she was ‘the enemy’. What did she mean by that?”
“She meant that they are Tuari — the girls they kidnap and keep as slaves are all from timelines where the Tuari won the ancient war and wiped out all of the Cheanya. Well, more precisely, they are from timelines where Yesora’s Grammar never arrived. I believe there are some timelines like that where the Cheanya still exist, and probably some of the slaves are actually Cheanya. They don’t see a difference — they see any timeline where no one speaks QuCheanya as a ‘Tuari timeline’.
“So Cyaru is also Tuari, then?”
“Well, he’s just as far removed from the people who fought in that ancient war as I am, so that’s a little debatable, honestly, but essentially, yes. His people don’t call themselves ‘Tuari’, though, their word for themselves is actually ‘Sohanke’. Cusäfä thinks it might be related to the word Soanghi that we have in our timeline, and that they might have originally come from that same area and probably speak a language in the same family, but that’s just his personal guess. ‘Tuari’ was just the name of the dynasty of kings that ruled them at the time the ancient war happened, but that dynasty died out a few centuries later due to inbreeding and were replaced with a different one. In Cyaru’s timeline, at least, the word only really stuck around in reference to some persistent genetic disorders that are attributed to those inbred kings.”
“I still don’t really understand. Why are they being taken as slaves? They didn’t do anything, right? They weren’t involved in the old war. This isn’t like it is with Shayanseen war trophy slaves, where they were enemy combatants, and it’s not like it is in the Northern Kingdoms where it’s a punishment for a crime or a resolution of a debt, either, if they are truly strangers from a completely different timeline. Why are they doing it?”
“Well,” said Qhoroali, “if you were to ask that priestess who told you they were the enemy, it’s because of that. Because the Tuari are evil and ruthless and hate us, and because they annihilated us in their timelines, and that’s all the reason that a lot of them need. But that is fiction — propaganda built up over the centuries by the priesthood teaching it to every single child for over a thousand years, and they emphasize that history a lot in the early parts of the junior priestess track as well, I believe, so by the time you get to be a full priestess, you normally don’t question any of it. But that war was 1900 years ago, and it’s been nearly as long since anyone on this island was identified as Tuari, or Sohanke, in this timeline. Without the priesthood’s focus on it, would any of us even look at the ancient kingdom from 1900 years ago and say, yes, that was us, and their enemies were our enemies? The ancient kingdom itself was very different to what we have now, culturally and organizationally, and in truth, both sides of that war were approximately equal with respect to violence and ruthlessness. The ancient world was a completely different place than what we’re used to now, and I think only T’arse actually traces its own history back that far. The construction of the ‘Tuari’ as the enemy of us here in the present is just a fiction that was deliberately crafted to justify the slavery.”
“So what is the real reason, then? Why did they go to all that trouble?”
“Money.” Qhoroali smiled darkly. “It all comes down to money with them. Didn’t I tell you that earlier? Yesora’s Grammar says that the priesthood must get its funding from the government, from the Emperor, but the Emperor doesn’t want to give them anything. So they have to cajole, and extort him. They generally threaten to go back in time and write him and his family out of the timeline if he doesn’t comply. That’s why 2307 happened; the government did liberalize in later time periods, the Emperor ceded power to democratically elected councils, and the councils wanted to do things that would please the people who elected them, but the priesthood made its demands with these kinds of existential threats, and the councils decided that this couldn’t be allowed to continue, and that it was a terrible mistake for anyone to have that kind of power over anyone else. That’s why the coup happened, and why the priesthood was destroyed and everyone jailed. In any case, here in 1912 and throughout the rest of the priesthood’s history, any way that the priesthood can save money is less time they have to spend bickering with the Emperor over it, so they save money by not having to pay their servants, and the easiest place to get slaves from where no one they care about will find out about it is a timeline where no one believes in the existence of time travel.”
“But that’s nonsense,” said Setsiana. “You can’t write someone out of the timeline. You can’t change any timelines at all. No one can.”
“Sure, we know that, and the priesthood knows it. But the majority of people don’t actually know how it works, and don’t think about it much. There’s a reason the priesthood doesn’t teach a lot of time travel theory in the regular public school classes, they need the officials in the government to stay ignorant and believe in ghost stories about priestesses going back in time and changing history.”
Setsiana sat in silence for a minute. “T’arse hates slavery, don’t they?” she asked. “They fight wars over it. And the Emperor is terrified of a war with T’arse. So why not just tell him? Why not bring it to the government? That should end it, right?”
“I also had that thought, and I did in fact do exactly that. And well, first what happened is that they looked me up in the shit-list the priesthood gave them, because if you’re in there, they’re required by law to not listen to anything you have to say and just turn you over to the priesthood immediately. Luckily, I don’t seem to be on that list. I guess the same is not true for you, after today, huh? I thought that might be the case back when you ran off in Nwórza, and I guess now we know why. Anyway, after they ascertained that I was not on the list, they did sit down and listen to me. And at the end of it, one of the guys said ‘Does T’arse know about this now?’ and the other one replied ‘No, they don’t even believe in time travel,’ and the first one said, ‘Alright, let’s keep it that way, then.’ And they explained that it was just infinitely safer for them to not bother the priesthood about this because if they messed with them, they would all get erased from history. I tried to explain that that wasn’t possible, and tell them how it really works, but they wouldn’t believe me. They weren’t willing to bet their lives on me maybe being right. And from their perspective, I can kind of understand that.” She paused for a moment. “You don’t have to take my word for all of this either, you know, in fact I recommend against it — believing things you’re taught without question is how we all got into this situation in the first place. I can take you to the timelines where the slaves come from, and you can hear about it from the mouths of the people there, too, and see what their lives are like and what the priesthood has done to their communities.”
“I want you to know that it’s intensely ironic that after kidnapping me using time travel and keeping me prisoner for two months you are now talking to me about the evils of kidnapping people using time travel and imprisoning them.”
A pained and guilty expression settled on Qhoroali’s face. “Believe me, I know,” she said. “I’ve realized that I’ve been incredibly hypocritical in kidnapping you, and I know now that I was completely in the wrong, there. I know it probably doesn’t help, but it was a stupid decision and I am sorry.”
“And, all of this is why you want to kill Sapfita, I guess,” said Setsiana.
“Precisely. We can do some things — we can free slaves, we can help out the timelines that are being targeted, and we do do those things, but there are so many timelines, and so many priestesses taking so many slaves in so many places and times that we can’t make much of a dent. And we, as mere humans, can’t permanently change or destroy those timelines — only Sapfita can do that. We can’t make Her do anything, of course. Well,” Qhoroali huffed a small laugh, “maybe if you asked really nicely, She would destroy all of the bad timelines, but I kind of doubt it. But events that affect Her, that take place outside of Time, should also be able to destroy or permanently alter timelines. If I find a way to kill Her, She’ll be gone from every time, and every timeline. And Her interference in Time where She gave humans the Mirror technology will no longer exist, and because that event comes from outside of Time, the timeline will be permanently altered, and the priesthood will never be created to safeguard that technology. That should cause a rippling effect that will permanently alter all subsequent timelines from that point forward, and there will never have been a priesthood in any of them, and therefore there will never have been any transtimeline slavery in any of them, either. It’ll be a whole new set of timelines, a whole new world, a whole new universe. I like to call it the World to Come.”
“Won’t that write a huge number of people out of existence?” asked Setsiana. “Is that really any different than just killing them all?” But then she remembered how Qhoroali had said she might have burned a city down, too, if she thought it would further her goal. Maybe Qhoroali didn’t care about things like that.
“I don’t believe most people will be affected. They might live very different lives, but they’d probably be born the same way they were in the original timelines and still be more or less the same people. Maybe Li has to actually learn how to be a tailor. Maybe Cyaru never crosses timelines and thus never meets her, but his timeline should be better off in general without the priesthood existing in any of the other ones. They’ve accepted that that’s a price we have to pay for justice. The only person I know for sure will simply cease to exist in the World to Come is me. If the priesthood never comes into existence, if Yesora’s Grammar never mandates gender segregation, my father never travels across the entire country looking for a heretical temple that will accept him, and thus never even meets my mother. But again, I think this is an acceptable sacrifice. I don’t see it as dying. I’ll just… cease to exist. Once I’ve killed Sapfita, my purpose will be over, and I just won’t be there anymore.”
“Sapfita’s Gift of the Mirror didn’t just give us time travel and the priesthood, though,” Setsiana said, slowly. “It saved us from annihilation at the hands of the Tuari — or Sohanke, I guess. If She doesn’t give us that gift, all those people die, in every timeline, and none of their descendants are ever born.”
“Do you really believe that old fable? The ancient kingdom wasn’t the weak, pacifistic kingdom with no fit soldiers that the priesthood always portrays it as. Archaeological evidence shows that they were very similar to their enemies, and pretty evenly matched. Maybe time travel was used to give them an advantage, but I don’t think it was the only way they could have avoided destruction.”
“You don’t think? Can’t you literally just go back and check, to prove it one way or the other?”
“By all accounts, there was a lot of very frequent violence happening back in those days, that is one thing that is definitely known for sure. I may be willing to sacrifice my existence for justice, but I’m not actually suicidal. I don’t have a Mirror that I can use to just look at what was going on back then — if I want to know, I have to go back there in person, bodily, well, for more than the few minutes I did spend in that time period. I’m not risking that just to prove something that I’m pretty sure is correct anyway.”
Setsiana was silent for a bit. Then she said, “I think there are probably a lot more people than you who will be erased by this. And I don’t think that is actually any different than them dying, or that doing this would be any different than killing them. And there’s no guarantee that this World to Come will actually be better, overall, than then one you want to destroy — some new terrible thing could always happen as a result of what you plan to do. I don’t know what the solution to this is, but I don’t think we should just swap one atrocity for another, for a result that may not even be good.” She remembered something, then. “Sapfita said that if She gets destroyed, it could have catastrophic effects on the universe — something more than just all of those timelines getting rewritten. I can’t believe that this is the answer.”
“Do you still believe that you are really speaking to Her like that, after what I told you about it?” Qhoroali asked. “How about this for a test — why don’t you ask Her what She thinks about the priesthood’s slavery? If She supports them, going against what you seem to know is right, then I’ll believe you that it’s really Her.”
Setsiana had been running mainly on adrenaline ever since she had stabbed Priestess Meqhola, even though she was no longer in immediate danger. But at this, her energy seemed to suddenly deplete, and something broke inside of her. If Sapfita supported the priesthood in this — if She approved of the slavery — if Setsiana was cut off from Her now, because she had acted against it — she didn’t think she could go on. She would curl up and die. It was one thing to learn this about the priestesses, who were only human, after all, and who had not been her personal friends. But Sapfita had been her friend and confidante all of her life. It would be a true betrayal of everything she had loved.
Qhoroali must have seen her crumple in on herself, because she said, “I’m sorry, that was cruel, and I should have known better. You did the right thing back there. There’s no harm in you believing in a thing that isn’t true, or in a god that doesn’t support atrocities. The world might be a better place if we could all believe in such things.”
They spent the rest of the carriage ride in silence.