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rainbowfic2025-07-13 03:06 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-07-13 03:06 pm
Nacarat #8, Light Black #4 [The Fulcrum]
Name: An Alternate Timeline
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Nacarat #8: Antsafa (Malagasy): Inquiries about things of which one is fully cognizant beforehand, Light Black #4: Carry
Styles and Supplies: Panorama, Gift Wrap, Cartography, Brushes (July 13 2025: Contrite)
Word Count: 3268
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use, Discussion of slavery
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Cyaru (and an unnamed minor character with significant dialog)
In-Universe Date: 1912.2.1.3
Summary: Qhoroali takes Setsiana to a Sohanke timeline.
Notes: Gift wrap for Nyoacelya Lyuya. At some point I thought this segment might actually make the story pass the gender-reversed Bechdel test, but then the old man never wound up getting a name, and didn't wind up having a real conversation with Cyaru directly.
It was the middle of the first week of the second month, the day before Nyoacelya Lyuya, when Qhoroali said to Setsiana: “I promised you before that I’d show you what is happening in the Sohanke timelines. Would you like to go tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Setsiana asked.
“Yeah. We’re running an errand there anyway, and it’s convenient to do it during the holiday, and it’s all the same on their side, since we’re just going straight to the rendezvous time. Do you want to come?”
“Sure.” She was a little apprehensive, but it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. How would they react to her, knowing that she had been a junior priestess? Would they know? She remembered how Cyaru had regarded her the first time he had met her.
“Great. You’ll need some new clothes, though. It’s trousers, I’m sorry, but no one there wears skirts and if you show up in one they’ll think you’re an invalid. We also need to blend in there. The timeline we’re going to is watched.”
Qhoroali disappeared into her bedroom and came out again with a bundle of clothes, which she laid out on the living room furniture. “I think these will fit you.” As promised, there were trousers, a shirt, a pair of boots, and a long, fur-trimmed cape with a hood. They were all in more muted, earthy colors, but the combined color palette made a nice effect — just very different in style from the eye-popping colors that were common in 1912. “The cape isn’t that typical,” Qhoroali was saying, “but I was thinking you could wrap it around yourself a bit, and maybe feel better about the trousers, and it’s not that out of the ordinary, either. And you’ll need the hood, because you’ll need to hide your hair. We can’t appear to be Cheanya, there.”
“Do they all hate us there?” Setsiana asked, softly.
“The Sohanke? No, the people we’re going to meet with all know we’re Cheanya, they’re familiar with the whole situation and they know that I wouldn’t bring them someone who would do them harm. It’s not them we have to worry about.”
Setsiana tried the clothes on in her room; they were unexpectedly very comfortable, and much easier to move in than she’d been expecting, as well. The cape was more than big enough to wrap all the way around herself, and she found that it did make her feel a little bit better. The boots might take some getting used to, though.
The new clothes went into her dresser, and then back onto her body the next morning. She found that Qhoroali was actually up at a reasonable hour, though she was yawning and not seeming very happy about it, dressed in very similar clothes, albeit without a cape. They left the apartment, and bumped into Liselye in the hall wearing the same, tying up the laces of a boot.
“Don’t bother with that,” Qhoroali said. “I’m going this time. I want to show Setsiana how it is.”
Liselye looked up at her. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come along anyway to help out?”
“It’s fine. I can do it myself, and we’ll already have one more person than they’ll be expecting.”
Outside of the building, there was a cart, and a series of thickset men dressed the same way as she and Qhoroali were filed between the building and the cart carrying large and bulky bundles that clanked when they were deposited in the latter. Aside from them, the streets and shops were all empty; it was the morning of Nyoacelya Lyuya, and most people would be at the temples now, and the ones that weren’t were taking their holiday time off at home. It was so strange to be out on the streets of the city at this time, where in the past she’d normally be busy helping around the temple, even if she wasn’t on duty in the sanctuary that week. It wasn’t technically the first time — she’d accidentally gone out once during the holiday on one of the previous weeks and had briefly wondered where everyone was before remembering. It had been eight years since Nyoacelya Lyuya had been a time of peace and reflection for her, as even the girls in the junior priestess prep track were conscripted to help out.
Cyaru arrived with another man, each of them leading two horses. He frowned at Qhoroali. “It’s you instead of Lise?” he asked. “I mean, I’m not mad or anything. It’s just unexpected.”
“I want Setsiana to come with us this time,” said Qhoroali, “and I want to be the one to show her.”
“Alright,” said Cyaru, “but you should have told me yesterday that you wanted to do this, because now we are short a horse and the guy who rented them to us isn’t there right now to get us another one.”
Qhoroali shrugged. “We can share one,” she said, indicating Setsiana. “We’re not that heavy.”
“Alright, fine.” said Cyaru. The unknown man’s horses were hitched to the cart and he and the other men who’d been carrying the bundles climbed into the cart behind them. Cyaru handed off one of his horses to Qhoroali, and mounted the other one.
“Do you need help?” Qhoroali asked. “Sorry, I forgot to ask, but I just realized you probably don’t ride much. Unless you’d prefer to sit in the cart, that’s fine, too.”
“It’s ok, I can ride,” said Setsiana. “But… I will accept some help.”
Qhoroali boosted her up to mount, and then mounted in front her; the saddle was big enough that they could both fit. “Isn’t this much better than riding side-saddle in a skirt?” asked Qhoroali. “Trousers are really very useful.”
Setsiana had to admit that it was much better, once she got used to the feel of it. They rode with Cyaru ahead of the cart through some of the city streets. Setsiana saw the wisdom of doing this on Nyoacelya Lyuya morning now — they made an odd procession, and probably on any other day a lot of people would be wondering what they were transporting, but today there was no one on the streets to see them.
The left the city using the road leading north, which was not far, since the apartment was already on its very northernmost edge. A sign indicated that they were headed to Clérzyund; Setsiana had heard of it before, but had never been there. However, a few miles down the road, they pulled off of it to the right and continued to the east for a time. The cart bumped over uneven ground and the bundles shifted and clanked together; the men sitting in the back of the cart held onto the sides and steadied the bundles. Eventually they arrived at a familiar sight in an unfamiliar location: a circle of short posts that indicated a place that was frequently used for time travel.
Qhoroali dismounted and helped Setsiana do so as well. “We’re not going all the way to Clérzyund in this timeline,” she said, by way of explanation. “My parents still live there, as far as I know, and bumping into them would probably be awkward.”
Cyaru had also dismounted, and the other men were getting out of the cart carrying the bundles. “We’re not taking the cart with us?” Setsiana asked.
“Nah. I don’t know how much qoire you need to get a horse to walk a timeline, or if that’s even possible, and it sounds very expensive to try to find out. There’s another cart waiting for us in the other timeline, anyway, so they just need to carry things during the actual time travel itself.”
As before, with the circle that had led them to Cusäfä, they waited for themselves to exit the circle coming back, and surrendered the horses and cart to them. Setsiana noticed that the returning group was not carrying any bundles.
It was quite a long line of linked hands this time, but they all just about fit inside the circle. Qhoroali did the Guiding, as always, and they walked for what felt like a little over twenty minutes; halfway through, Setsiana was sure she felt the direction of time reversing, and instead of going backwards, into the past, they were now going forwards again, although the change in directions that Qhoroali gave did not quite feel the same as turning around, to her.
When they exited the circle, it was evening, and there was indeed another cart nearby, surrounded by a group of men wearing they same kinds of clothing they were wearing, some carrying torches against the growing darkness, and another set of horses. The men who had come with Setsiana and Qhoroali hefted the bundles into the new cart, and those who had been waiting for them moved to help.
Setsiana turned around, to the south, to see if she could see the city from here, to see if it looked different in this foreign timeline. But unexpectedly, she saw nothing; no city, and no road either, just the horizon, the forests, and the mountains off to the west.
Qhoroali seemed to understand what she was looking for, because she said, “It’s over there,” and pointed off to the east. Setsiana turned again and saw it — there was a road going east, a little to the north of where they stood, and at the end of it, a few miles away, she could see the outcroppings of a large city, one that actually looked far larger than Nwórza. The lamps were beginning to be lit, the pinpricks of light standing out in the fading daylight. “The river is in a slightly different place in this timeline,” Qhoroali explained. “It turns out that over hundreds of years, rivers move. In our timeline, it actually used to be where it is here — a little farther north, where the coast extends further to the east — but it moved south before Nwórza was established, so Nwórza was built in a different place. That city is much older; it’s been here for thousands of years, and the infrastructure they built up around the river seems to have kept it in its place. I think it’s old enough that it might have existed in our timeline, too, but if it did, it was razed by the ancient kingdom.”
“Is that where we’re going?” asked Setsiana.
“No,” said Qhoroali. “The people I met when I first came here by accident are small-town folk, like us. Their town is actually in almost the exact same place as Clérzyund is, by happy coincidence, which is why I wound up there.”
“If the cities are in such different places, how do the priestesses abduct people using the Mirror? Wouldn’t they come to this timeline and wind up over there?” Setsiana pointed south, to where Nwórza should be, but wasn’t.
“The Mirror seems to have some degree of freedom when it comes to physical location. I don’t know the details of how it works, but I do know from the priesthood’s papers that they can use the Mirror from inside the safety of a temple in Nwórza and send someone to, say, Clérzyund, or to your town, Syarhrít. I don’t know what the range is, although I think they probably can’t go all the way across the country, or anything like that. But in this case, it is true that the people in the town we’re going to are targeted by the priestesses in Nwórza much more frequently than the people in the big city are, due to them being physically closer to Nwórza.”
They mounted the horses again, with the men who had been waiting for them riding their own. They continued north, guided by the light of the torches as the sun set, until they eventually came upon a village. Setsiana could not tell exactly how large it was in the night darkness; some lamps were lit beside the roads and the occasional person passed them, but it was hard to gauge the full extent of the place. Outside a large building they stopped and dismounted. The men who were sitting in the cart got out carrying the bundles, and they went inside.
From inside, Setsiana could see it was a long hall with tables down the middle, and a number of people sat clustered at once of them, intent at some serious conversation. One man at the far end of the table looked up as they entered, and stood, coming over to greet them. The men who were carrying the bundles laid them out on one of the empty tables and began to unwrap them; inside Setsiana saw a large variety of bladed weapons, knives and swords and short swords of different designs. The other people who had been conversing at the table came over to sift and pick through them.
The man who had come to greet them was old enough that most of his hair had gone grey, but he still seemed sturdy and fit, and moved like someone much younger. He exchanged a nod with Qhoroali, and clasped Cyaru in a stiff and impersonal-looking hug, saying something to him in the language that wasn’t Naychren.
Qhoroali said, in QuCheanya: “This is Setsiana. She’s new to our operation, so I’d like you to explain everything to her.”
The old man turned to look at Setsiana, and she experienced some strange, irrational fear that he would somehow see that she had been part of a temple once, even though Qhoroali hadn’t mentioned it. He did not say or do anything hostile, but simply regarded her with his steely eyes. “Very well,” he said. “We have always been plagued by abductions here, always of our girls and young women. For a long time, we did not understand why, but we knew that they should not wander alone. We would see strange women sometimes, in long black skirts, taking them away, but they disappeared into nothingness before we could accost them. The black skirts — you have to understand. We do not wear skirts, here, for the most part. They are only for babies, or for those sick and injured who have trouble with trousers. And we do not wear black; it is the color of death, it is what we dress our deceased in, when it comes time to bury them. And also when we are dressing our deceased, we dress them in skirts, because it is much easier than the trousers. These women wearing black skirts, who appeared out of nothingness, and disappeared just as quickly again, they seemed clearly to be ghosts to us, the souls of the restless dead returned to the land of the living. We have myths about them going back over a thousand years. They were often said to be the ghosts of the ancient Cheanya, because many of them had the firey hair that the Cheanya were known for; in the past, folk used to say that their ghosts had returned to take revenge on us.” He paused here. His QuCheanya was good, for a person from outside of a temple, better than that of the people Setsiana had talked to in Nwórza during her escape attempt, and he used the tenses correctly. “But the kidnappings were real, not a thing of ghosts and superstition. We would send to the city for help, but they would not believe us. They said, ‘you rednecks abuse and kill your girls in your hatred of them, and then you come to us and complain that they have been taken to the underworld by ghosts’. We don’t— there is no hatred, here. We are good people. We take care of each other. If anyone here would abuse his wife or daughter we would turn on him and exact justice — maybe we don’t have the organized police they have in the city, but we have our justice here. But we don’t agree with the city folk about everything, and so they say nasty and untrue things about us, and never extend their resources to help us in times of need.
“Then one day we caught one of the ghosts, who was not able to disappear on command.” He looked at Qhoroali now, and she turned her head slightly, to avoid meeting his eyes. “She explained that they were flesh and blood humans, not ghosts, and that they came not from some ancient time, but from an alternate timeline, through some form of magic. We told her what was happening here, with our girls being kidnapped, and she believed us. She believed us. She claimed not to have known about the kidnappings beforehand, but she understood how they were done. After some debate, we allowed her to show Cyaru how it worked, to prove what she claimed.
“And then Cyaru deserted us,” he continued, and fixed Cyaru with a stern look, which he weathered with what seemed to be a long-practiced tolerance. “We ultimately forgave him, though, because when he returned, he came with a plan for countering these ghosts, these ‘priestesses’. They are not fighters. They come in pairs, always, and they target the defenseless, who are easily overpowered by two against one. All that was needed was to carry a weapon, and that discouraged them. But guns don’t work — if I understand correctly, many of them are from older times, where guns are unknown, and they don’t recognize them as a danger. So now our girls are always armed with blades, with swords and knives, wherever they go. The kidnappings slowed, and then came to a stop entirely. So, this is how it is, now. We take these blades that you bring us, we arm our girls, and we send them to the nearby villages, so that they may do the same. If these ‘priestesses’ show their faces here, we will send them to the underworld in truth, but they don’t, now that we are armed, because they are cowards.” He spat on the ground.
Setsiana was silent for a minute. She thought about what it must be like, to be always afraid of being stolen away by spirits. And it had been this way for over a thousand years, before Qhoroali had ever come here… She had a taste of this now, she realized. When she walked the streets of Nwórza, she was now watchful for priestesses, or for police, who might find her on the priesthood’s list and give her over to priestesses. But she still knew that all of them were regular human beings, limited in the same ways that all human beings were. What if she’d had a reason to fear ghosts, without knowing what they might be capable of?
“It’s truly horrible that our priesthood is doing this to you,” she said, “and I am sorry for whatever part I may have played in it, even unknowing.” She desperately wanted to apologize for the history lessons, but was too afraid to mention them. “If there is anything I can do to help you, beyond what Qhoroali has done for you already, I’ll do my best to do it.”
The old man smiled. “Just keep the weapons coming,” he said. “We have a system now, and it is working.”
Setsiana nodded. She looked around, at all of the gathered people in the hall, and suddenly wanted a breath of fresh air. “I’m taking a walk,” she said to Qhoroali. “I need to think. I’ll be back in a minute.” She turned and left the hall through the door behind them.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Nacarat #8: Antsafa (Malagasy): Inquiries about things of which one is fully cognizant beforehand, Light Black #4: Carry
Styles and Supplies: Panorama, Gift Wrap, Cartography, Brushes (July 13 2025: Contrite)
Word Count: 3268
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use, Discussion of slavery
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Cyaru (and an unnamed minor character with significant dialog)
In-Universe Date: 1912.2.1.3
Summary: Qhoroali takes Setsiana to a Sohanke timeline.
Notes: Gift wrap for Nyoacelya Lyuya. At some point I thought this segment might actually make the story pass the gender-reversed Bechdel test, but then the old man never wound up getting a name, and didn't wind up having a real conversation with Cyaru directly.
It was the middle of the first week of the second month, the day before Nyoacelya Lyuya, when Qhoroali said to Setsiana: “I promised you before that I’d show you what is happening in the Sohanke timelines. Would you like to go tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Setsiana asked.
“Yeah. We’re running an errand there anyway, and it’s convenient to do it during the holiday, and it’s all the same on their side, since we’re just going straight to the rendezvous time. Do you want to come?”
“Sure.” She was a little apprehensive, but it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. How would they react to her, knowing that she had been a junior priestess? Would they know? She remembered how Cyaru had regarded her the first time he had met her.
“Great. You’ll need some new clothes, though. It’s trousers, I’m sorry, but no one there wears skirts and if you show up in one they’ll think you’re an invalid. We also need to blend in there. The timeline we’re going to is watched.”
Qhoroali disappeared into her bedroom and came out again with a bundle of clothes, which she laid out on the living room furniture. “I think these will fit you.” As promised, there were trousers, a shirt, a pair of boots, and a long, fur-trimmed cape with a hood. They were all in more muted, earthy colors, but the combined color palette made a nice effect — just very different in style from the eye-popping colors that were common in 1912. “The cape isn’t that typical,” Qhoroali was saying, “but I was thinking you could wrap it around yourself a bit, and maybe feel better about the trousers, and it’s not that out of the ordinary, either. And you’ll need the hood, because you’ll need to hide your hair. We can’t appear to be Cheanya, there.”
“Do they all hate us there?” Setsiana asked, softly.
“The Sohanke? No, the people we’re going to meet with all know we’re Cheanya, they’re familiar with the whole situation and they know that I wouldn’t bring them someone who would do them harm. It’s not them we have to worry about.”
Setsiana tried the clothes on in her room; they were unexpectedly very comfortable, and much easier to move in than she’d been expecting, as well. The cape was more than big enough to wrap all the way around herself, and she found that it did make her feel a little bit better. The boots might take some getting used to, though.
The new clothes went into her dresser, and then back onto her body the next morning. She found that Qhoroali was actually up at a reasonable hour, though she was yawning and not seeming very happy about it, dressed in very similar clothes, albeit without a cape. They left the apartment, and bumped into Liselye in the hall wearing the same, tying up the laces of a boot.
“Don’t bother with that,” Qhoroali said. “I’m going this time. I want to show Setsiana how it is.”
Liselye looked up at her. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come along anyway to help out?”
“It’s fine. I can do it myself, and we’ll already have one more person than they’ll be expecting.”
Outside of the building, there was a cart, and a series of thickset men dressed the same way as she and Qhoroali were filed between the building and the cart carrying large and bulky bundles that clanked when they were deposited in the latter. Aside from them, the streets and shops were all empty; it was the morning of Nyoacelya Lyuya, and most people would be at the temples now, and the ones that weren’t were taking their holiday time off at home. It was so strange to be out on the streets of the city at this time, where in the past she’d normally be busy helping around the temple, even if she wasn’t on duty in the sanctuary that week. It wasn’t technically the first time — she’d accidentally gone out once during the holiday on one of the previous weeks and had briefly wondered where everyone was before remembering. It had been eight years since Nyoacelya Lyuya had been a time of peace and reflection for her, as even the girls in the junior priestess prep track were conscripted to help out.
Cyaru arrived with another man, each of them leading two horses. He frowned at Qhoroali. “It’s you instead of Lise?” he asked. “I mean, I’m not mad or anything. It’s just unexpected.”
“I want Setsiana to come with us this time,” said Qhoroali, “and I want to be the one to show her.”
“Alright,” said Cyaru, “but you should have told me yesterday that you wanted to do this, because now we are short a horse and the guy who rented them to us isn’t there right now to get us another one.”
Qhoroali shrugged. “We can share one,” she said, indicating Setsiana. “We’re not that heavy.”
“Alright, fine.” said Cyaru. The unknown man’s horses were hitched to the cart and he and the other men who’d been carrying the bundles climbed into the cart behind them. Cyaru handed off one of his horses to Qhoroali, and mounted the other one.
“Do you need help?” Qhoroali asked. “Sorry, I forgot to ask, but I just realized you probably don’t ride much. Unless you’d prefer to sit in the cart, that’s fine, too.”
“It’s ok, I can ride,” said Setsiana. “But… I will accept some help.”
Qhoroali boosted her up to mount, and then mounted in front her; the saddle was big enough that they could both fit. “Isn’t this much better than riding side-saddle in a skirt?” asked Qhoroali. “Trousers are really very useful.”
Setsiana had to admit that it was much better, once she got used to the feel of it. They rode with Cyaru ahead of the cart through some of the city streets. Setsiana saw the wisdom of doing this on Nyoacelya Lyuya morning now — they made an odd procession, and probably on any other day a lot of people would be wondering what they were transporting, but today there was no one on the streets to see them.
The left the city using the road leading north, which was not far, since the apartment was already on its very northernmost edge. A sign indicated that they were headed to Clérzyund; Setsiana had heard of it before, but had never been there. However, a few miles down the road, they pulled off of it to the right and continued to the east for a time. The cart bumped over uneven ground and the bundles shifted and clanked together; the men sitting in the back of the cart held onto the sides and steadied the bundles. Eventually they arrived at a familiar sight in an unfamiliar location: a circle of short posts that indicated a place that was frequently used for time travel.
Qhoroali dismounted and helped Setsiana do so as well. “We’re not going all the way to Clérzyund in this timeline,” she said, by way of explanation. “My parents still live there, as far as I know, and bumping into them would probably be awkward.”
Cyaru had also dismounted, and the other men were getting out of the cart carrying the bundles. “We’re not taking the cart with us?” Setsiana asked.
“Nah. I don’t know how much qoire you need to get a horse to walk a timeline, or if that’s even possible, and it sounds very expensive to try to find out. There’s another cart waiting for us in the other timeline, anyway, so they just need to carry things during the actual time travel itself.”
As before, with the circle that had led them to Cusäfä, they waited for themselves to exit the circle coming back, and surrendered the horses and cart to them. Setsiana noticed that the returning group was not carrying any bundles.
It was quite a long line of linked hands this time, but they all just about fit inside the circle. Qhoroali did the Guiding, as always, and they walked for what felt like a little over twenty minutes; halfway through, Setsiana was sure she felt the direction of time reversing, and instead of going backwards, into the past, they were now going forwards again, although the change in directions that Qhoroali gave did not quite feel the same as turning around, to her.
When they exited the circle, it was evening, and there was indeed another cart nearby, surrounded by a group of men wearing they same kinds of clothing they were wearing, some carrying torches against the growing darkness, and another set of horses. The men who had come with Setsiana and Qhoroali hefted the bundles into the new cart, and those who had been waiting for them moved to help.
Setsiana turned around, to the south, to see if she could see the city from here, to see if it looked different in this foreign timeline. But unexpectedly, she saw nothing; no city, and no road either, just the horizon, the forests, and the mountains off to the west.
Qhoroali seemed to understand what she was looking for, because she said, “It’s over there,” and pointed off to the east. Setsiana turned again and saw it — there was a road going east, a little to the north of where they stood, and at the end of it, a few miles away, she could see the outcroppings of a large city, one that actually looked far larger than Nwórza. The lamps were beginning to be lit, the pinpricks of light standing out in the fading daylight. “The river is in a slightly different place in this timeline,” Qhoroali explained. “It turns out that over hundreds of years, rivers move. In our timeline, it actually used to be where it is here — a little farther north, where the coast extends further to the east — but it moved south before Nwórza was established, so Nwórza was built in a different place. That city is much older; it’s been here for thousands of years, and the infrastructure they built up around the river seems to have kept it in its place. I think it’s old enough that it might have existed in our timeline, too, but if it did, it was razed by the ancient kingdom.”
“Is that where we’re going?” asked Setsiana.
“No,” said Qhoroali. “The people I met when I first came here by accident are small-town folk, like us. Their town is actually in almost the exact same place as Clérzyund is, by happy coincidence, which is why I wound up there.”
“If the cities are in such different places, how do the priestesses abduct people using the Mirror? Wouldn’t they come to this timeline and wind up over there?” Setsiana pointed south, to where Nwórza should be, but wasn’t.
“The Mirror seems to have some degree of freedom when it comes to physical location. I don’t know the details of how it works, but I do know from the priesthood’s papers that they can use the Mirror from inside the safety of a temple in Nwórza and send someone to, say, Clérzyund, or to your town, Syarhrít. I don’t know what the range is, although I think they probably can’t go all the way across the country, or anything like that. But in this case, it is true that the people in the town we’re going to are targeted by the priestesses in Nwórza much more frequently than the people in the big city are, due to them being physically closer to Nwórza.”
They mounted the horses again, with the men who had been waiting for them riding their own. They continued north, guided by the light of the torches as the sun set, until they eventually came upon a village. Setsiana could not tell exactly how large it was in the night darkness; some lamps were lit beside the roads and the occasional person passed them, but it was hard to gauge the full extent of the place. Outside a large building they stopped and dismounted. The men who were sitting in the cart got out carrying the bundles, and they went inside.
From inside, Setsiana could see it was a long hall with tables down the middle, and a number of people sat clustered at once of them, intent at some serious conversation. One man at the far end of the table looked up as they entered, and stood, coming over to greet them. The men who were carrying the bundles laid them out on one of the empty tables and began to unwrap them; inside Setsiana saw a large variety of bladed weapons, knives and swords and short swords of different designs. The other people who had been conversing at the table came over to sift and pick through them.
The man who had come to greet them was old enough that most of his hair had gone grey, but he still seemed sturdy and fit, and moved like someone much younger. He exchanged a nod with Qhoroali, and clasped Cyaru in a stiff and impersonal-looking hug, saying something to him in the language that wasn’t Naychren.
Qhoroali said, in QuCheanya: “This is Setsiana. She’s new to our operation, so I’d like you to explain everything to her.”
The old man turned to look at Setsiana, and she experienced some strange, irrational fear that he would somehow see that she had been part of a temple once, even though Qhoroali hadn’t mentioned it. He did not say or do anything hostile, but simply regarded her with his steely eyes. “Very well,” he said. “We have always been plagued by abductions here, always of our girls and young women. For a long time, we did not understand why, but we knew that they should not wander alone. We would see strange women sometimes, in long black skirts, taking them away, but they disappeared into nothingness before we could accost them. The black skirts — you have to understand. We do not wear skirts, here, for the most part. They are only for babies, or for those sick and injured who have trouble with trousers. And we do not wear black; it is the color of death, it is what we dress our deceased in, when it comes time to bury them. And also when we are dressing our deceased, we dress them in skirts, because it is much easier than the trousers. These women wearing black skirts, who appeared out of nothingness, and disappeared just as quickly again, they seemed clearly to be ghosts to us, the souls of the restless dead returned to the land of the living. We have myths about them going back over a thousand years. They were often said to be the ghosts of the ancient Cheanya, because many of them had the firey hair that the Cheanya were known for; in the past, folk used to say that their ghosts had returned to take revenge on us.” He paused here. His QuCheanya was good, for a person from outside of a temple, better than that of the people Setsiana had talked to in Nwórza during her escape attempt, and he used the tenses correctly. “But the kidnappings were real, not a thing of ghosts and superstition. We would send to the city for help, but they would not believe us. They said, ‘you rednecks abuse and kill your girls in your hatred of them, and then you come to us and complain that they have been taken to the underworld by ghosts’. We don’t— there is no hatred, here. We are good people. We take care of each other. If anyone here would abuse his wife or daughter we would turn on him and exact justice — maybe we don’t have the organized police they have in the city, but we have our justice here. But we don’t agree with the city folk about everything, and so they say nasty and untrue things about us, and never extend their resources to help us in times of need.
“Then one day we caught one of the ghosts, who was not able to disappear on command.” He looked at Qhoroali now, and she turned her head slightly, to avoid meeting his eyes. “She explained that they were flesh and blood humans, not ghosts, and that they came not from some ancient time, but from an alternate timeline, through some form of magic. We told her what was happening here, with our girls being kidnapped, and she believed us. She believed us. She claimed not to have known about the kidnappings beforehand, but she understood how they were done. After some debate, we allowed her to show Cyaru how it worked, to prove what she claimed.
“And then Cyaru deserted us,” he continued, and fixed Cyaru with a stern look, which he weathered with what seemed to be a long-practiced tolerance. “We ultimately forgave him, though, because when he returned, he came with a plan for countering these ghosts, these ‘priestesses’. They are not fighters. They come in pairs, always, and they target the defenseless, who are easily overpowered by two against one. All that was needed was to carry a weapon, and that discouraged them. But guns don’t work — if I understand correctly, many of them are from older times, where guns are unknown, and they don’t recognize them as a danger. So now our girls are always armed with blades, with swords and knives, wherever they go. The kidnappings slowed, and then came to a stop entirely. So, this is how it is, now. We take these blades that you bring us, we arm our girls, and we send them to the nearby villages, so that they may do the same. If these ‘priestesses’ show their faces here, we will send them to the underworld in truth, but they don’t, now that we are armed, because they are cowards.” He spat on the ground.
Setsiana was silent for a minute. She thought about what it must be like, to be always afraid of being stolen away by spirits. And it had been this way for over a thousand years, before Qhoroali had ever come here… She had a taste of this now, she realized. When she walked the streets of Nwórza, she was now watchful for priestesses, or for police, who might find her on the priesthood’s list and give her over to priestesses. But she still knew that all of them were regular human beings, limited in the same ways that all human beings were. What if she’d had a reason to fear ghosts, without knowing what they might be capable of?
“It’s truly horrible that our priesthood is doing this to you,” she said, “and I am sorry for whatever part I may have played in it, even unknowing.” She desperately wanted to apologize for the history lessons, but was too afraid to mention them. “If there is anything I can do to help you, beyond what Qhoroali has done for you already, I’ll do my best to do it.”
The old man smiled. “Just keep the weapons coming,” he said. “We have a system now, and it is working.”
Setsiana nodded. She looked around, at all of the gathered people in the hall, and suddenly wanted a breath of fresh air. “I’m taking a walk,” she said to Qhoroali. “I need to think. I’ll be back in a minute.” She turned and left the hall through the door behind them.
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XD Now I want a story about time travelling horses!
I like the way Setsiana's understanding of things grows via time travelling, it's overwhelming but very effective!
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Thank you! There are time-traveling animals in this story, actually, just not horses.
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Thanks! I had fun playing around with what skirts signified in the different time periods and timelines.
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Thank you! I've enjoyed playing with the social/cultural meaning behind different types of clothing in this story.