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rainbowfic2025-07-28 06:38 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-07-28 06:38 pm
Dogwood Rose #9, Light Black #25 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Ghlídrow Week
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Dogwood Rose #9: lavender: enchantment, Light Black #25: Fly
Styles and Supplies: Panorama
Word Count: 2331
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug Abuse (like, way more than usual)
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.2.2.5; Summer 1431
Summary: Qhoroali begins to teach Setsiana how to Guide.
About a week and a half passed. Setsiana had been thinking about Qhoroali’s earlier promise to teach her how to Guide, and was starting to wonder if she had forgotten. One morning, she waited around until Qhoroali had risen, and broached the subject then. “You said before that you would show me how to Guide. Do you have time for that now?”
“Technically we have time for everything,” said Qhoroali, “We make our own time here. I’m sorry I put this off earlier, I just wasn’t feeling up to it. We can go today, if you like.”
Setsiana agreed to this, and Qhoroali assembled what seemed to her to be a huge number of bottles of qoire. They left the apartment, and ascended the hill that was next to it. At the very top was another circle of posts. “Why do you have a second one up here?” Setsiana asked. “Isn’t the one down there enough?”
“It’s specifically for teaching people to Guide,” said Qhoroali. “We’re going to need the elevation, trust me.”
“What time are we going to?”
“Have you ever heard about the ghlídrow plague of 1404?”
“Vaguely. To be honest, I’m not sure if I believe that actually happened.”
“Oh, it happened. And it happened again about ten more times in the 15th century, possibly more. I think at some point people just started saying, ‘Oh, not this shit again,’ and it stopped being news. But there’s actually a perfectly reasonable explanation for why there were suddenly ghlídrow everywhere and then they all disappeared a week later.”
“I’m guessing you’re going to tell me they can time travel?”
“Yes, actually. They eat qoire leaves, so they are under its effects for their whole lives. They can always see the timelines, and can travel them whenever they want. It’s part of their mating cycle — during the spring, they time travel to one of these specific times in the 15th century, and get to choose between almost every single other ghlídrow that has ever existed in this part of the country, give or take, to be their mate. Then, after they fuck, they go back to their original colony in their original time. If you follow a colony around in the springtime, you can see some of them periodically disappear and reappear. If you drink some qoire first, you can see that they’re time traveling, and what part of the tree they go to, and you can follow them. That’s how I learned to Guide in the first place, so that’s how I teach everyone else.”
Setsiana stared at her. “And we’re going there? To a huge ghlídrow orgy in 1404?”
“Not 1404 specifically, one of the other ones. Since I take everyone I teach to Guide to one of these, and Li made me promise to at least try to avoid running into myself, I try to go to a different day each time.”
“You talked about following a colony around. Can’t we just do that instead?”
“Well, that worked for me, because I can actually still follow them around while being able to see the whole timeline tree, like I told you earlier. But I don’t think that would work for you. We need a vantage point where we can observe them while being stationary, and that’s really only possible during one of these plagues.”
They waited until they saw themselves return out of the circle of posts, and then Qhoroali drank some qoire, and Setsiana took the three drops, and they did a relatively quick time travel. When they stepped outside the circle again, the area was completely transformed. Even though she had been expecting it, Setsiana first interpreted it as the grass around the hill having changed color, to meandering shades of brown and black, with occasional spots of yellow and orange and bright points of white, but she quickly saw that the whole ground was simply covered with animals, ghlídrow moving past and over and under each other in a vast moving carpet. The mass of them had ascended slightly up the bottom of the hill, but the majority it was bare and stood as a lone island of unmolested grass in a sea of furry bodies.
“Where are the buildings?” she asked. There had been a row of them on the other side of the road, but they were gone now, even if the road somehow still existed underneath all of the ghlídrow. For a moment, she wondered if the ghlídrow had destroyed them somehow.
“Nwórza just hasn’t expanded this far north yet,” Qhoroali said. “You can see the northernmost buildings over there.” She pointed off further to the south, and there were some structures that way, Setsiana saw. “Another reason it’s convenient to practice Guiding here at this time — there aren’t really any other people in this exact area right now. Wild, isn’t it? Imagine being alive at this time — you’re doing your regular thing, and one day you wake up to this. No wonder they called it a plague.”
“What brings them all to this time specifically?”
“As near as I can tell, it’s something to do with the comet,” said Qhoroali, and pointed to something in the sky — a smear of white against the blue, starting as a bright dot and then petering off into a long tail. “It comes around periodically during the 15th century, mainly, and every time it does, there’s another ghlídrow plague, or at least, there has been one at every time I know about, anyway. People used to have all kinds of weird superstitions about it, even beyond the ghlídrow plagues. There was a story that went around for a while about a man who found a rip in the fabric of reality during one of its passes, and went through it, and talked to Sapfita. Probably nonsense, but that’s the kind of stuff people were saying.”
Setsiana looked around nervously. “So what are we going to do here?”
Qhoroali grinned. “We’re going to sit on the hill and get high.”
They did sit on the hill, positioned at the very top of the southernmost slope where they could have the best view of the mass of ghlídrow. Qhoroali handed her bottles, and she drank qoire, which would have been a surreal experience even if it had had no effects on her mind — it had seemed similar to mint when she had just been taking the three drops, but drinking it felt like drinking some distilled, concentrated essence of mint, and her whole mouth felt cold from it. The timelines appeared, and then solidified, becoming real and solid pathways that she felt she could really walk down much moreso than she had with just the three drops. But, as Qhoroali had predicted, her limbs became sluggish and unresponsive, so she just lay there, propped up on her arms, feeling a bit like she was floating and disconnected from the world around her. Qhoroali urged her to drink more and more, until she finally stopped seeing more new timelines. Midway through this process, something that wasn’t a timeline took shape before her eyes — a vast translucent curtain that sliced across many timelines, visible wherever she looked, as if it surrounded them in a circle. She’d asked what it was.
“That’s 2307,” said Qhoroali. “That’s what the anomaly that blocks the Mirror looks like, from here. It’s something awful when you actually walk through it while Guiding, too, it fills your whole vision with light and there’s a bit where you can’t really see the timeline tree anymore, so you have to remember directions a little in advance in order to make your way past it. For some reason, you can’t see it at all on just three drops, even if you’re right in the middle of it.”
“Are the timelines supposed to look like a tree?” Setsiana asked. “They don’t look like that at all. They look like someone threw a basket of yarn on the ground, and it all got tangled up.”
“Wouldn’t it be convenient if it actually did look like a tree?” Qhoroali laughed. “But nah, you’re right, that is exactly how it looks. The tree is just an abstract conceptualization. Or who knows, maybe the Mirror actually does show it to the priestesses that way — I’ve never used one, so I’ve got no idea. But at least for us, doing it this way, we see this chaotic yarn pile. Can you see them traveling yet? The ghlídrow.”
Now that Setsiana was thinking about it, she could see them traveling. Every so often, one would break apart from the mass of its fellows and take off sprinting along the timelines, flying through extra dimensions on four feet, and disappear somewhere amongst the snarls of yarn. And at other times, a new ghlídrow would arrive in the same manner. “I can,” she said. “The orange one at the foot of the hill to the right just left, I think.”
“Did you see where it went?”
“I think so.”
“Tell me how to get there, step by step, following the timelines.”
Setsiana recalled the memory of the orange ghlídrow, and reconstructed the path it had taken in her mind. The paths and directions aligned themselves to more familiar concepts, in that same strange kind of synesthesia, and she listed them in order, to the best of her recollection. Qhoroali corrected her on one or two of them, and then said: “Not bad, for the first time. That time, where it went, that’ll be around 876.”
“How do you know what years correspond to which parts of the tree? It just looks like a terrible mess.”
“There are always fewer timelines in the past than in the future, because the past timelines split into a larger number of future timelines. That part of it is tree-like, at least. So you can look at which timelines are splitting in which ways and figure out which directions are the past, and which are the future, and then make approximate guesses at how far in the past, or how far in the future based on the lengths of the timelines, which is actually pretty consistent in that way. Also, each part of the tree is unique, like a fingerprint, and you can learn to recognize specific parts of it and use those parts to orient yourself, like a landmark. For example, your time, the place I got you from, is just a little ways in the future from here — snow, yew, salmon, starlight, moss from here, do you see it? The timeline is shaped like a T’arsi letter n — not the retroflex one, the regular one.”
Setsiana followed the path Qhoroali outlined, and she did see it. “That’s it?” she asked. “That’s 1647?”
“Well, your 1647. There are others, too, along other branches, but that’s the place I got you from.”
“How do you notice and keep track of all of these tiny details?”
“Practice, mainly, but it’s not that hard. You just have to look at things carefully, and be detail-oriented.” Qhoroali laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s easy, when I told Li that, she said, ‘ugh, this is just tailoring all over again, except worse’ and got mad at me. Anyway, that’s all we’re doing today, we’re just practicing looking at the timeline tree very carefully, and maybe you’ll remember some parts of it for yourself for the future. At some point later on, we can practice with you actually Guiding us somewhere. We’ll take turns, and I’ll make sure we don’t get lost.”
Setsiana remembered back to when Cyaru had tried to Guide them to 1647 to return her. “How can you be so accurate to a specific time?” she asked. “There’s so much Time here. How do you know exactly where to stop?”
“Again, it’s mostly practice, you’ll get more accustomed to it when you start actually Guiding us somewhere. After a while, you generally have a much better sense of how quickly you’re moving along the timeline, relative to actual time, and can keep better mental track of when you need to stop, just like you can look at a physical place in real life and intuitively guess about how long it will take you to walk there. I’d love to do a more standardized experiment with that, though — I’d love to be able to measure exactly how many steps it takes to go 100 years, for example, I think that kind of information would really help out people like Cyaru. But the problem is that the only real way to measure that precisely is to have an accurate clock that sits in one place for hundreds or possibly thousands of years and then time travel next to it. The only places where there are clocks in place for that long are temples, but those clocks are only accurate enough for this for a very small part of their lifespans. Spring clocks are reasonably accurate, but you have to keep winding them up. Cusäfä has some frighteningly accurate clocks that last for a lot longer, but even they run out of juice eventually. And I’d like a more precise measure than just me manually counting my steps. It’s a problem I’m still working on.”
They sat there on the hill for hours more, as the day wore away and the comet hung in the sky like a painter’s errant brush stroke. Occasionally they drank more qoire, and Setsiana traced the routes of more and more ghlídrow. Each time Qhoroali offered fewer corrections and more praise, until at last there were zero corrections three times in a row. The sun had begun to set in the west behind the mountain and the light was growing dim, and finally, Qhoroali corked the majority of the bottles and declared them to be finished. They waited for the high to wear off and watched the sun set, and then time traveled back to 1912 as darkness began to descend.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Dogwood Rose #9: lavender: enchantment, Light Black #25: Fly
Styles and Supplies: Panorama
Word Count: 2331
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug Abuse (like, way more than usual)
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.2.2.5; Summer 1431
Summary: Qhoroali begins to teach Setsiana how to Guide.
About a week and a half passed. Setsiana had been thinking about Qhoroali’s earlier promise to teach her how to Guide, and was starting to wonder if she had forgotten. One morning, she waited around until Qhoroali had risen, and broached the subject then. “You said before that you would show me how to Guide. Do you have time for that now?”
“Technically we have time for everything,” said Qhoroali, “We make our own time here. I’m sorry I put this off earlier, I just wasn’t feeling up to it. We can go today, if you like.”
Setsiana agreed to this, and Qhoroali assembled what seemed to her to be a huge number of bottles of qoire. They left the apartment, and ascended the hill that was next to it. At the very top was another circle of posts. “Why do you have a second one up here?” Setsiana asked. “Isn’t the one down there enough?”
“It’s specifically for teaching people to Guide,” said Qhoroali. “We’re going to need the elevation, trust me.”
“What time are we going to?”
“Have you ever heard about the ghlídrow plague of 1404?”
“Vaguely. To be honest, I’m not sure if I believe that actually happened.”
“Oh, it happened. And it happened again about ten more times in the 15th century, possibly more. I think at some point people just started saying, ‘Oh, not this shit again,’ and it stopped being news. But there’s actually a perfectly reasonable explanation for why there were suddenly ghlídrow everywhere and then they all disappeared a week later.”
“I’m guessing you’re going to tell me they can time travel?”
“Yes, actually. They eat qoire leaves, so they are under its effects for their whole lives. They can always see the timelines, and can travel them whenever they want. It’s part of their mating cycle — during the spring, they time travel to one of these specific times in the 15th century, and get to choose between almost every single other ghlídrow that has ever existed in this part of the country, give or take, to be their mate. Then, after they fuck, they go back to their original colony in their original time. If you follow a colony around in the springtime, you can see some of them periodically disappear and reappear. If you drink some qoire first, you can see that they’re time traveling, and what part of the tree they go to, and you can follow them. That’s how I learned to Guide in the first place, so that’s how I teach everyone else.”
Setsiana stared at her. “And we’re going there? To a huge ghlídrow orgy in 1404?”
“Not 1404 specifically, one of the other ones. Since I take everyone I teach to Guide to one of these, and Li made me promise to at least try to avoid running into myself, I try to go to a different day each time.”
“You talked about following a colony around. Can’t we just do that instead?”
“Well, that worked for me, because I can actually still follow them around while being able to see the whole timeline tree, like I told you earlier. But I don’t think that would work for you. We need a vantage point where we can observe them while being stationary, and that’s really only possible during one of these plagues.”
They waited until they saw themselves return out of the circle of posts, and then Qhoroali drank some qoire, and Setsiana took the three drops, and they did a relatively quick time travel. When they stepped outside the circle again, the area was completely transformed. Even though she had been expecting it, Setsiana first interpreted it as the grass around the hill having changed color, to meandering shades of brown and black, with occasional spots of yellow and orange and bright points of white, but she quickly saw that the whole ground was simply covered with animals, ghlídrow moving past and over and under each other in a vast moving carpet. The mass of them had ascended slightly up the bottom of the hill, but the majority it was bare and stood as a lone island of unmolested grass in a sea of furry bodies.
“Where are the buildings?” she asked. There had been a row of them on the other side of the road, but they were gone now, even if the road somehow still existed underneath all of the ghlídrow. For a moment, she wondered if the ghlídrow had destroyed them somehow.
“Nwórza just hasn’t expanded this far north yet,” Qhoroali said. “You can see the northernmost buildings over there.” She pointed off further to the south, and there were some structures that way, Setsiana saw. “Another reason it’s convenient to practice Guiding here at this time — there aren’t really any other people in this exact area right now. Wild, isn’t it? Imagine being alive at this time — you’re doing your regular thing, and one day you wake up to this. No wonder they called it a plague.”
“What brings them all to this time specifically?”
“As near as I can tell, it’s something to do with the comet,” said Qhoroali, and pointed to something in the sky — a smear of white against the blue, starting as a bright dot and then petering off into a long tail. “It comes around periodically during the 15th century, mainly, and every time it does, there’s another ghlídrow plague, or at least, there has been one at every time I know about, anyway. People used to have all kinds of weird superstitions about it, even beyond the ghlídrow plagues. There was a story that went around for a while about a man who found a rip in the fabric of reality during one of its passes, and went through it, and talked to Sapfita. Probably nonsense, but that’s the kind of stuff people were saying.”
Setsiana looked around nervously. “So what are we going to do here?”
Qhoroali grinned. “We’re going to sit on the hill and get high.”
They did sit on the hill, positioned at the very top of the southernmost slope where they could have the best view of the mass of ghlídrow. Qhoroali handed her bottles, and she drank qoire, which would have been a surreal experience even if it had had no effects on her mind — it had seemed similar to mint when she had just been taking the three drops, but drinking it felt like drinking some distilled, concentrated essence of mint, and her whole mouth felt cold from it. The timelines appeared, and then solidified, becoming real and solid pathways that she felt she could really walk down much moreso than she had with just the three drops. But, as Qhoroali had predicted, her limbs became sluggish and unresponsive, so she just lay there, propped up on her arms, feeling a bit like she was floating and disconnected from the world around her. Qhoroali urged her to drink more and more, until she finally stopped seeing more new timelines. Midway through this process, something that wasn’t a timeline took shape before her eyes — a vast translucent curtain that sliced across many timelines, visible wherever she looked, as if it surrounded them in a circle. She’d asked what it was.
“That’s 2307,” said Qhoroali. “That’s what the anomaly that blocks the Mirror looks like, from here. It’s something awful when you actually walk through it while Guiding, too, it fills your whole vision with light and there’s a bit where you can’t really see the timeline tree anymore, so you have to remember directions a little in advance in order to make your way past it. For some reason, you can’t see it at all on just three drops, even if you’re right in the middle of it.”
“Are the timelines supposed to look like a tree?” Setsiana asked. “They don’t look like that at all. They look like someone threw a basket of yarn on the ground, and it all got tangled up.”
“Wouldn’t it be convenient if it actually did look like a tree?” Qhoroali laughed. “But nah, you’re right, that is exactly how it looks. The tree is just an abstract conceptualization. Or who knows, maybe the Mirror actually does show it to the priestesses that way — I’ve never used one, so I’ve got no idea. But at least for us, doing it this way, we see this chaotic yarn pile. Can you see them traveling yet? The ghlídrow.”
Now that Setsiana was thinking about it, she could see them traveling. Every so often, one would break apart from the mass of its fellows and take off sprinting along the timelines, flying through extra dimensions on four feet, and disappear somewhere amongst the snarls of yarn. And at other times, a new ghlídrow would arrive in the same manner. “I can,” she said. “The orange one at the foot of the hill to the right just left, I think.”
“Did you see where it went?”
“I think so.”
“Tell me how to get there, step by step, following the timelines.”
Setsiana recalled the memory of the orange ghlídrow, and reconstructed the path it had taken in her mind. The paths and directions aligned themselves to more familiar concepts, in that same strange kind of synesthesia, and she listed them in order, to the best of her recollection. Qhoroali corrected her on one or two of them, and then said: “Not bad, for the first time. That time, where it went, that’ll be around 876.”
“How do you know what years correspond to which parts of the tree? It just looks like a terrible mess.”
“There are always fewer timelines in the past than in the future, because the past timelines split into a larger number of future timelines. That part of it is tree-like, at least. So you can look at which timelines are splitting in which ways and figure out which directions are the past, and which are the future, and then make approximate guesses at how far in the past, or how far in the future based on the lengths of the timelines, which is actually pretty consistent in that way. Also, each part of the tree is unique, like a fingerprint, and you can learn to recognize specific parts of it and use those parts to orient yourself, like a landmark. For example, your time, the place I got you from, is just a little ways in the future from here — snow, yew, salmon, starlight, moss from here, do you see it? The timeline is shaped like a T’arsi letter n — not the retroflex one, the regular one.”
Setsiana followed the path Qhoroali outlined, and she did see it. “That’s it?” she asked. “That’s 1647?”
“Well, your 1647. There are others, too, along other branches, but that’s the place I got you from.”
“How do you notice and keep track of all of these tiny details?”
“Practice, mainly, but it’s not that hard. You just have to look at things carefully, and be detail-oriented.” Qhoroali laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s easy, when I told Li that, she said, ‘ugh, this is just tailoring all over again, except worse’ and got mad at me. Anyway, that’s all we’re doing today, we’re just practicing looking at the timeline tree very carefully, and maybe you’ll remember some parts of it for yourself for the future. At some point later on, we can practice with you actually Guiding us somewhere. We’ll take turns, and I’ll make sure we don’t get lost.”
Setsiana remembered back to when Cyaru had tried to Guide them to 1647 to return her. “How can you be so accurate to a specific time?” she asked. “There’s so much Time here. How do you know exactly where to stop?”
“Again, it’s mostly practice, you’ll get more accustomed to it when you start actually Guiding us somewhere. After a while, you generally have a much better sense of how quickly you’re moving along the timeline, relative to actual time, and can keep better mental track of when you need to stop, just like you can look at a physical place in real life and intuitively guess about how long it will take you to walk there. I’d love to do a more standardized experiment with that, though — I’d love to be able to measure exactly how many steps it takes to go 100 years, for example, I think that kind of information would really help out people like Cyaru. But the problem is that the only real way to measure that precisely is to have an accurate clock that sits in one place for hundreds or possibly thousands of years and then time travel next to it. The only places where there are clocks in place for that long are temples, but those clocks are only accurate enough for this for a very small part of their lifespans. Spring clocks are reasonably accurate, but you have to keep winding them up. Cusäfä has some frighteningly accurate clocks that last for a lot longer, but even they run out of juice eventually. And I’d like a more precise measure than just me manually counting my steps. It’s a problem I’m still working on.”
They sat there on the hill for hours more, as the day wore away and the comet hung in the sky like a painter’s errant brush stroke. Occasionally they drank more qoire, and Setsiana traced the routes of more and more ghlídrow. Each time Qhoroali offered fewer corrections and more praise, until at last there were zero corrections three times in a row. The sun had begun to set in the west behind the mountain and the light was growing dim, and finally, Qhoroali corked the majority of the bottles and declared them to be finished. They waited for the high to wear off and watched the sun set, and then time traveled back to 1912 as darkness began to descend.
no subject
This is so cool! I love the ghlidrows and the comet and all of this worldbuilding!!
no subject
Thank you! Some of this stuff will be relevant later, as well.
no subject
Plus: Qhoroali grinned. “We’re going to sit on the hill and get high.”
lol!
no subject
Thank you! I really wanted to show time travel being a natural part of the world, in addition to a human technology.
no subject
no subject
Thanks! I think it will get even more funny (or at least ironic) after certain information about her past comes to light.