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rainbowfic2025-08-12 03:05 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-08-12 03:05 pm
Dogwood Rose #2, Techelet #3, Warm Heart #12 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Lost in Time
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Dogwood Rose #2: burgundy: unconscious beauty, Techelet #3: Teshuvah (repentance), Warm Heart #12: Belief
Styles and Supplies: Sihouette, Life Drawing, Chiaroscuro, Charcoal, Tempera (these cards with the spread: Problem / Solution), Modeling Clay (the prompt: discovery), Stain ("Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death." - Harold Wilson), Novelty Bead (this image, given here)
Word Count: 3051
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Qhoroali, Setsiana
In-Universe Date: (approximately) -9500, 1912.3.1.2
Summary: Qhoroali decides to trust.
Qhoroali awoke to bright sunlight. She must be in her secret refuge, she realized; she never kept the windows of her bedroom unshuttered to see such light there. But then she woke up a little more, and her memories came flooding back. She had brought Setsiana here, and had been careless, and everything had gone wrong and they were stuck here, now. She could feel herself start to tense with anxiety.
She couldn’t escape from reality by going back to sleep, not with the sun in her face. She sat up, and crawled out of the bedroll. Setsiana was already awake, because of course she was, and she had lit the fire again and was reheating some of the fish that had been left over from the night before. For lack of anything better to do, Qhoroali trudged over to join her.
Setsiana had been right, at least a little bit, and the fear felt less acute now, here in the morning sunlight. But it still weighed on her mind like a distant throbbing pain, or a stomach ache. She ate some fish mechanically, knowing that she should, but could not force herself to eat a full meal. She pushed her plate away, knowing there was no use; when the aversion triggered, pushing against it never ended well.
Setsiana still seemed calm somehow, and Qhoroali reached for that; maybe she knew something Qhoroali didn’t. Maybe she had a plan.
“Let’s pack up,” said Setsiana. “Put everything back in the pack. Re-bury your plastic. Whatever it is you do when you leave here.”
“Do you have an idea?” asked Qhoroali.
“Maybe.”
Qhoroali directed the cleanup: washing the dishes, putting them all back in the blue bag and the cookware back in the pack, cleaning up the mess she’d made the previous night while searching desperately for more qoire bottles, and burying the blue bag again. It gave her something to focus on, so she wouldn’t kill herself with worry about what Setsiana’s plan could possibly be.
When they had finished packing up, Setsiana said, “It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it? Let’s go back up to the top of the hill.”
It was a beautiful morning, and more the pity, since Qhoroali was not in a mood to enjoy it. Still, she tried to take it in as they ascended the hill: the rolling grasslands, the spots of forest, the brook making its way further to the northeast, the clear skies and the light of the dawn kissing the undisturbed landscape and making it glow. But behind it all was still the lurking sense of dread that they would never be able to go back, that she would never see Li and Cyaru ever again.
Setsiana stopped before they got to the circle at the top of the hill, the one that Qhoroali had made specifically for this time period. The regular one at the base of the hill that they used for most purposes did not exist yet, here. Setsiana sat at another part of the summit, facing south, and gently pulled Qhoroali down to sit across from her. “Let’s take a minute and just meditate,” she suggested.
Qhoroali’s mouth twisted in annoyance. “Is that going to help us?”
“It will make us calmer, so we can think more clearly.”
“I was never any good at meditation,” Qhoroali admitted. At some point she’d given up trying to actually achieve whatever state of mind her mother had seemed to have wanted of her, and had just learned how to pretend, instead.
“That’s ok. Just try your best.” From somewhere, Setsiana produced one of the almost-empty bottles of qoire; she must have put it into a pocket while they were cleaning up. She opened the outer cork, and Qhoroali was about to object, but what did it matter? There wasn’t enough left in the bottle for any kind of time travel anyway. Qhoroali watched her take three drops, and wondered if there was something to that, after all; if qoire actually made meditation easier.
Qhoroali prepared to do her best pretend meditating, but she wasn’t even in a good enough mood for that, seemingly, and after a few moments she opened her eyes again in frustration. Well, maybe she couldn’t meditate, but she did know how to make herself calmer. Qhoroali threaded the fingers of both hands together and traced figure eights on the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right; over and over and over and over. The focus on the repetitive motion and the tactile feel of skin on skin soothed her and pushed her worries away, buried them under the awareness of the simple physicality of the here and now.
In front of her, Setsiana still sat with her eyes closed, a picture of serenity. The light of the rising sun illuminated her hair and made it shine like burnished copper, a thin crown of brightness encircling the top of her head. A light wind had begun to blow, and while it blew Qhoroali’s hair forward over her shoulders and into her face, it caught Setsiana’s and pulled it back, streaming gracefully behind her. With Setsiana’s eyes closed, Qhoroali could study her face without the burning directness of another’s gaze, and here in this time, and this place, this morning, she seemed to be a picture of perfect beauty, like a woman in a painting, or a statue.
That perfect image only lasted a few moments more, and then Setsiana opened her eyes and Qhoroali had to pull her gaze away. But Setsiana looked at her closely, searching her face for something. “I’m going to try something,” she said. “Do you trust me?”
Did she? Did it matter? Setsiana had some idea, some plan. If Qhoroali couldn’t trust her, there was no plan, and she would be trapped here, in this remote time, with someone she didn’t trust. It was true, Setsiana had not forgiven her for what she’d done, yet, but Qhoroali felt that she was probably no longer actively mad about it. With trust came hope, and that was the best thing they could have, right now. Better to gamble on an unknown outcome than to accept certain defeat. “…Yes,” she said, slowly.
“Then follow me,” Setsiana said, and rose, pulling Qhoroali up with her. She handed Qhoroali the qoire bottle, and when Qhoroali looked at it quizzically, Setsiana said, “Three drops.”
Qhoroali pulled the pack onto her back and took the three drops, and the timelines came into view again. Just the beginnings of them, though; she couldn’t see the whole tree, she couldn’t plot the way back to where they’d come from. To follow them now would be to wander blindly, lost and meandering. Did Setsiana plan to do that? They could get even more lost; maybe even further back in time, maybe in a very different, possibly dangerous timeline. A spike of fear went through her, but then she remembered; she had agreed to trust. She had said yes, because the only other option was to be lost forever, anyway. She would follow Setsiana, wherever she led them, and leave this in her hands. For once, the important things would depend on someone other than Qhoroali; it was freeing, in a way, but at the same time more than a little frightening.
Setsiana led her down the other side of the hill, to the west, she seemed to be looking for something, although Qhoroali was not sure what. Was she looking for the place where the little circle of posts would be, thousands of years in their future? She closed her eyes several times, seeming to go back into meditation, and eventually pulled them up to a particular spot that seemed to have caught her fancy. She looked at Qhoroali and said simply: “Ivy, skipping-stone.” She stepped forward and began to walk along the timeline that the words indicated, pulling on Qhoroali’s hand.
Even though she’d already decided that she would follow, Qhoroali resisted at first. There was no way they could find their way back like this. There was no way that Setsiana could know where to go on only three drops. They were veering off into the unknown vastness of the timeline tree, with no true Guide. She felt the panic rising again, but she was seeing the world through the lens of the qoire now, and while she could see her fear, it was as if it were trapped inside a glass cage in the center of her mind, and she was merely observing it as a spectator; she experienced it only dully and indirectly. She had decided to trust. She had decided to trust, because the only other option was to sit on the grass and melt down, and in the space that the qoire had given her to think, past and around the fear, she saw that that was senseless. So she followed.
They walked and walked, following Setsiana’s unGuided directions. It felt like it was slower-going than it was when Qhoroali Guided, because occasionally Setsiana would pause, very briefly, to close her eyes momentarily, and then they would continue. Eventually they came to a full stop, and each took three more drops of the dwindling supply of qoire; Qhoroali wondered how long it would be until it was all gone, and when they would wind up at the end of their supply. Setsiana was back, then, with a new direction, and they continued.
Eventually, Qhoroali realized that she could see buildings around them, and then that they were even ones that she recognized. Then she was pulled forward by Setsiana to come to a stop one final time and somehow, impossibly, in the face of everything she knew to be true, she was looking south across the street to the T’arsi bakery and the tack store, and to her right was Mosetai’s building that she had lived in for eight years. By some incredible luck, they had wound up in a timeline that was at least very similar to the one they had left. But were they truly in the right place? These buildings had been there for many years, they must exist in many different timelines. Surely…
But Setsiana pointed to their left, at the top of the hill beside them. Qhoroali looked that way, and saw another version of herself and Setsiana enter the circle at the top, and then disappear. So it was the right timeline, and exactly the right moment, just before they had left on this adventure. And they had returned. Qhoroali turned around and saw that the other circle, the one at the base of the hill, was indeed just behind them. Setsiana had somehow figured out where it was, in a time eleven thousand years before it had been made.
She stood there, for a minute, stunned. They had made it back, somehow, against all hope, but now something else plagued her mind. “How did you do that?” she asked. The last time Setsiana had tried to Guide them she hadn’t even been good at doing it the usual way, on an amount of qoire that allowed her to see the whole tree. There was must be some fundamental truth here that Qhoroali was missing, some knowledge that would shake the foundations of everything she knew about time travel.
“It was that paper,” Setsiana said, with a little laugh of relief, and joy. “The one I never wrote, in any timeline. The one about the effects of qoire on meditation. I figured out why I never wrote it. The whole reason I wanted to study it in the first place was that I thought it would help me communicate with Sapfita while I was still awake, but just in a meditative state. In those timelines where I did manage to publish something, where I stayed with the priesthood and kept their secrets and was rewarded for it, I lost contact with Sapfita entirely. She told me that’s what would have happened, if I’d made that choice. So there was no longer any reason to write the paper, in those timelines. But I realized that this meant that the absence of the paper didn’t mean there was nothing to the idea, here in this timeline where I can still speak to Her. So I tried it out — three drops in a meditative state; I thought it was just possible that I might be able to talk to Her that way. It was a risk, but it was the only thing left to try. And it worked, didn’t it?”
“Wait,” said Qhoroali. “You’re telling me that you were having a conversation with Her this whole time we were traveling, and She gave you the directions that you gave to me? That She did the Guiding for us?”
“Yes! Exactly. She can see the whole tree at all times, and She knows exactly what every part of the tree is, and where we were trying to go. So it wasn’t hard at all for Her to Guide us like that.”
The implications of this hit Qhoroali all at once, like a sack of bricks, and her legs quivered beneath her and she sank down to the ground, to sit and the foot of the hill, releasing Setsiana’s hand. “The only way that’s possible,” she said, slowly and carefully, “The only way we actually got back to the right place in the tree that way, is if it’s really Her. It means you really do have a direct line to Her somehow, and She can speak to you clearly, in plain language. There is no one else that could have helped you. But that’s impossible. It breaks all of the rules we know about our interactions with Her. How does it work? How is it possible for you to do such a thing?”
Setsiana came down to sit next to her. “I don’t know how it is possible, exactly, to tell you the truth. She told me we are connected in some way, but I don’t know how it would be possible to become personally connected to a god, or why it would happen to me. But I no longer have any doubt that it really is Her that I speak to.”
“You could have just left by yourself,” Qhoroali realized. “You could have come back here on your own, gotten some more qoire, and returned with it to where I was stuck. Why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t going to just abandon you. I wasn’t 100% sure it would work, to be honest, before I actually tried it, and I still had lingering doubts about whether the Sapfita I spoke to was the real one, and could actually give me real directions. If it hadn’t worked… I would have rather been lost in Time with you than without you. Anyway, I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“Didn’t you lie when you told me you were just meditating to calm down?”
“I wasn’t lying about that. I just didn’t mention that it wasn’t the only reason.”
“What would you have done if I hadn’t agreed to trust you?”
“I would have waited until you did. I was sure I could achieve that eventually, and we had the time to wait for that to happen.”
Qhoroali sat there, still processing what had happened. “You really would have preferred to be lost with me, rather than without me? It was my fault that we got stuck in the first place, and it’s my fault that you’re here, instead of back in your own time, and I know you still don’t forgive me for that.”
Setsiana looked at her in a cautious kind of way. “Actually, I think I can forgive you, now,” she said. “I can go to any time I want, now, with Sapfita’s help I can go to any part of the timeline tree at all, on my own. I’m no longer dependent on another person’s good will; I am free. And it happened because you took me to your refuge. Maybe we got a little lost on the way, and maybe this wasn’t your exact intent, but you made the offer out of kindness, expecting nothing in return, and because of it, I am truly free again. I have been made whole now. You are forgiven.”
“What about the loss of your position at your temple?”
Setsiana shook her head. “I don’t want it back. I’ve decided what I want to do now, going forward — I’m feeling much better about some of the things Sapfita told me, now that I know for sure that it’s Her. I want to stay here and help you.”
Qhoroali just blinked at her. “Why?” If there was one position Setsiana had consistently held, it was that she had no interest in helping Qhoroali, even at the times that she seemed inclined to share her opinion on Qhoroali’s research.
“You’re doing what I always wanted to do: studying the nature of Sapfita. And you actually appreciate my work. In some ways, it’s a much better situation than what I had back at the temple.”
“I’m also trying to kill Sapfita.”
“Like I said before, I don’t believe you’ll actually be able to do that. She’s told me that She had already experienced your attempt, and that it doesn’t succeed.”
Qhoroali shrugged. “If it doesn’t work the first time, I’ll just try again, until I get it right. She’s not omniscient, and She must have Her own personal timeline in some higher dimension that She doesn’t know the future of. She can’t know that I’ll never succeed.”
“She is sure that you won’t, and that there’s nothing about Her existence that She doesn’t already know about. I trust Her on that; I trust Her more than I ever have, now. She’s earned it.” Setsiana seemed to be alight with certainty and purpose; it reminded Qhoroali of how she herself felt when she discovered a new lead, or a promising new paper or substance.
“Well,” she said, “I won’t say no to your help. I still don’t think you’re correct, but I would be honored to be able to prove you wrong.”
“Likewise,” said Setsiana, and they smiled at each other beneath the shadow of the hilltop behind them.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Dogwood Rose #2: burgundy: unconscious beauty, Techelet #3: Teshuvah (repentance), Warm Heart #12: Belief
Styles and Supplies: Sihouette, Life Drawing, Chiaroscuro, Charcoal, Tempera (these cards with the spread: Problem / Solution), Modeling Clay (the prompt: discovery), Stain ("Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death." - Harold Wilson), Novelty Bead (this image, given here)
Word Count: 3051
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Qhoroali, Setsiana
In-Universe Date: (approximately) -9500, 1912.3.1.2
Summary: Qhoroali decides to trust.
Qhoroali awoke to bright sunlight. She must be in her secret refuge, she realized; she never kept the windows of her bedroom unshuttered to see such light there. But then she woke up a little more, and her memories came flooding back. She had brought Setsiana here, and had been careless, and everything had gone wrong and they were stuck here, now. She could feel herself start to tense with anxiety.
She couldn’t escape from reality by going back to sleep, not with the sun in her face. She sat up, and crawled out of the bedroll. Setsiana was already awake, because of course she was, and she had lit the fire again and was reheating some of the fish that had been left over from the night before. For lack of anything better to do, Qhoroali trudged over to join her.
Setsiana had been right, at least a little bit, and the fear felt less acute now, here in the morning sunlight. But it still weighed on her mind like a distant throbbing pain, or a stomach ache. She ate some fish mechanically, knowing that she should, but could not force herself to eat a full meal. She pushed her plate away, knowing there was no use; when the aversion triggered, pushing against it never ended well.
Setsiana still seemed calm somehow, and Qhoroali reached for that; maybe she knew something Qhoroali didn’t. Maybe she had a plan.
“Let’s pack up,” said Setsiana. “Put everything back in the pack. Re-bury your plastic. Whatever it is you do when you leave here.”
“Do you have an idea?” asked Qhoroali.
“Maybe.”
Qhoroali directed the cleanup: washing the dishes, putting them all back in the blue bag and the cookware back in the pack, cleaning up the mess she’d made the previous night while searching desperately for more qoire bottles, and burying the blue bag again. It gave her something to focus on, so she wouldn’t kill herself with worry about what Setsiana’s plan could possibly be.
When they had finished packing up, Setsiana said, “It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it? Let’s go back up to the top of the hill.”
It was a beautiful morning, and more the pity, since Qhoroali was not in a mood to enjoy it. Still, she tried to take it in as they ascended the hill: the rolling grasslands, the spots of forest, the brook making its way further to the northeast, the clear skies and the light of the dawn kissing the undisturbed landscape and making it glow. But behind it all was still the lurking sense of dread that they would never be able to go back, that she would never see Li and Cyaru ever again.
Setsiana stopped before they got to the circle at the top of the hill, the one that Qhoroali had made specifically for this time period. The regular one at the base of the hill that they used for most purposes did not exist yet, here. Setsiana sat at another part of the summit, facing south, and gently pulled Qhoroali down to sit across from her. “Let’s take a minute and just meditate,” she suggested.
Qhoroali’s mouth twisted in annoyance. “Is that going to help us?”
“It will make us calmer, so we can think more clearly.”
“I was never any good at meditation,” Qhoroali admitted. At some point she’d given up trying to actually achieve whatever state of mind her mother had seemed to have wanted of her, and had just learned how to pretend, instead.
“That’s ok. Just try your best.” From somewhere, Setsiana produced one of the almost-empty bottles of qoire; she must have put it into a pocket while they were cleaning up. She opened the outer cork, and Qhoroali was about to object, but what did it matter? There wasn’t enough left in the bottle for any kind of time travel anyway. Qhoroali watched her take three drops, and wondered if there was something to that, after all; if qoire actually made meditation easier.
Qhoroali prepared to do her best pretend meditating, but she wasn’t even in a good enough mood for that, seemingly, and after a few moments she opened her eyes again in frustration. Well, maybe she couldn’t meditate, but she did know how to make herself calmer. Qhoroali threaded the fingers of both hands together and traced figure eights on the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right; over and over and over and over. The focus on the repetitive motion and the tactile feel of skin on skin soothed her and pushed her worries away, buried them under the awareness of the simple physicality of the here and now.
In front of her, Setsiana still sat with her eyes closed, a picture of serenity. The light of the rising sun illuminated her hair and made it shine like burnished copper, a thin crown of brightness encircling the top of her head. A light wind had begun to blow, and while it blew Qhoroali’s hair forward over her shoulders and into her face, it caught Setsiana’s and pulled it back, streaming gracefully behind her. With Setsiana’s eyes closed, Qhoroali could study her face without the burning directness of another’s gaze, and here in this time, and this place, this morning, she seemed to be a picture of perfect beauty, like a woman in a painting, or a statue.
That perfect image only lasted a few moments more, and then Setsiana opened her eyes and Qhoroali had to pull her gaze away. But Setsiana looked at her closely, searching her face for something. “I’m going to try something,” she said. “Do you trust me?”
Did she? Did it matter? Setsiana had some idea, some plan. If Qhoroali couldn’t trust her, there was no plan, and she would be trapped here, in this remote time, with someone she didn’t trust. It was true, Setsiana had not forgiven her for what she’d done, yet, but Qhoroali felt that she was probably no longer actively mad about it. With trust came hope, and that was the best thing they could have, right now. Better to gamble on an unknown outcome than to accept certain defeat. “…Yes,” she said, slowly.
“Then follow me,” Setsiana said, and rose, pulling Qhoroali up with her. She handed Qhoroali the qoire bottle, and when Qhoroali looked at it quizzically, Setsiana said, “Three drops.”
Qhoroali pulled the pack onto her back and took the three drops, and the timelines came into view again. Just the beginnings of them, though; she couldn’t see the whole tree, she couldn’t plot the way back to where they’d come from. To follow them now would be to wander blindly, lost and meandering. Did Setsiana plan to do that? They could get even more lost; maybe even further back in time, maybe in a very different, possibly dangerous timeline. A spike of fear went through her, but then she remembered; she had agreed to trust. She had said yes, because the only other option was to be lost forever, anyway. She would follow Setsiana, wherever she led them, and leave this in her hands. For once, the important things would depend on someone other than Qhoroali; it was freeing, in a way, but at the same time more than a little frightening.
Setsiana led her down the other side of the hill, to the west, she seemed to be looking for something, although Qhoroali was not sure what. Was she looking for the place where the little circle of posts would be, thousands of years in their future? She closed her eyes several times, seeming to go back into meditation, and eventually pulled them up to a particular spot that seemed to have caught her fancy. She looked at Qhoroali and said simply: “Ivy, skipping-stone.” She stepped forward and began to walk along the timeline that the words indicated, pulling on Qhoroali’s hand.
Even though she’d already decided that she would follow, Qhoroali resisted at first. There was no way they could find their way back like this. There was no way that Setsiana could know where to go on only three drops. They were veering off into the unknown vastness of the timeline tree, with no true Guide. She felt the panic rising again, but she was seeing the world through the lens of the qoire now, and while she could see her fear, it was as if it were trapped inside a glass cage in the center of her mind, and she was merely observing it as a spectator; she experienced it only dully and indirectly. She had decided to trust. She had decided to trust, because the only other option was to sit on the grass and melt down, and in the space that the qoire had given her to think, past and around the fear, she saw that that was senseless. So she followed.
They walked and walked, following Setsiana’s unGuided directions. It felt like it was slower-going than it was when Qhoroali Guided, because occasionally Setsiana would pause, very briefly, to close her eyes momentarily, and then they would continue. Eventually they came to a full stop, and each took three more drops of the dwindling supply of qoire; Qhoroali wondered how long it would be until it was all gone, and when they would wind up at the end of their supply. Setsiana was back, then, with a new direction, and they continued.
Eventually, Qhoroali realized that she could see buildings around them, and then that they were even ones that she recognized. Then she was pulled forward by Setsiana to come to a stop one final time and somehow, impossibly, in the face of everything she knew to be true, she was looking south across the street to the T’arsi bakery and the tack store, and to her right was Mosetai’s building that she had lived in for eight years. By some incredible luck, they had wound up in a timeline that was at least very similar to the one they had left. But were they truly in the right place? These buildings had been there for many years, they must exist in many different timelines. Surely…
But Setsiana pointed to their left, at the top of the hill beside them. Qhoroali looked that way, and saw another version of herself and Setsiana enter the circle at the top, and then disappear. So it was the right timeline, and exactly the right moment, just before they had left on this adventure. And they had returned. Qhoroali turned around and saw that the other circle, the one at the base of the hill, was indeed just behind them. Setsiana had somehow figured out where it was, in a time eleven thousand years before it had been made.
She stood there, for a minute, stunned. They had made it back, somehow, against all hope, but now something else plagued her mind. “How did you do that?” she asked. The last time Setsiana had tried to Guide them she hadn’t even been good at doing it the usual way, on an amount of qoire that allowed her to see the whole tree. There was must be some fundamental truth here that Qhoroali was missing, some knowledge that would shake the foundations of everything she knew about time travel.
“It was that paper,” Setsiana said, with a little laugh of relief, and joy. “The one I never wrote, in any timeline. The one about the effects of qoire on meditation. I figured out why I never wrote it. The whole reason I wanted to study it in the first place was that I thought it would help me communicate with Sapfita while I was still awake, but just in a meditative state. In those timelines where I did manage to publish something, where I stayed with the priesthood and kept their secrets and was rewarded for it, I lost contact with Sapfita entirely. She told me that’s what would have happened, if I’d made that choice. So there was no longer any reason to write the paper, in those timelines. But I realized that this meant that the absence of the paper didn’t mean there was nothing to the idea, here in this timeline where I can still speak to Her. So I tried it out — three drops in a meditative state; I thought it was just possible that I might be able to talk to Her that way. It was a risk, but it was the only thing left to try. And it worked, didn’t it?”
“Wait,” said Qhoroali. “You’re telling me that you were having a conversation with Her this whole time we were traveling, and She gave you the directions that you gave to me? That She did the Guiding for us?”
“Yes! Exactly. She can see the whole tree at all times, and She knows exactly what every part of the tree is, and where we were trying to go. So it wasn’t hard at all for Her to Guide us like that.”
The implications of this hit Qhoroali all at once, like a sack of bricks, and her legs quivered beneath her and she sank down to the ground, to sit and the foot of the hill, releasing Setsiana’s hand. “The only way that’s possible,” she said, slowly and carefully, “The only way we actually got back to the right place in the tree that way, is if it’s really Her. It means you really do have a direct line to Her somehow, and She can speak to you clearly, in plain language. There is no one else that could have helped you. But that’s impossible. It breaks all of the rules we know about our interactions with Her. How does it work? How is it possible for you to do such a thing?”
Setsiana came down to sit next to her. “I don’t know how it is possible, exactly, to tell you the truth. She told me we are connected in some way, but I don’t know how it would be possible to become personally connected to a god, or why it would happen to me. But I no longer have any doubt that it really is Her that I speak to.”
“You could have just left by yourself,” Qhoroali realized. “You could have come back here on your own, gotten some more qoire, and returned with it to where I was stuck. Why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t going to just abandon you. I wasn’t 100% sure it would work, to be honest, before I actually tried it, and I still had lingering doubts about whether the Sapfita I spoke to was the real one, and could actually give me real directions. If it hadn’t worked… I would have rather been lost in Time with you than without you. Anyway, I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“Didn’t you lie when you told me you were just meditating to calm down?”
“I wasn’t lying about that. I just didn’t mention that it wasn’t the only reason.”
“What would you have done if I hadn’t agreed to trust you?”
“I would have waited until you did. I was sure I could achieve that eventually, and we had the time to wait for that to happen.”
Qhoroali sat there, still processing what had happened. “You really would have preferred to be lost with me, rather than without me? It was my fault that we got stuck in the first place, and it’s my fault that you’re here, instead of back in your own time, and I know you still don’t forgive me for that.”
Setsiana looked at her in a cautious kind of way. “Actually, I think I can forgive you, now,” she said. “I can go to any time I want, now, with Sapfita’s help I can go to any part of the timeline tree at all, on my own. I’m no longer dependent on another person’s good will; I am free. And it happened because you took me to your refuge. Maybe we got a little lost on the way, and maybe this wasn’t your exact intent, but you made the offer out of kindness, expecting nothing in return, and because of it, I am truly free again. I have been made whole now. You are forgiven.”
“What about the loss of your position at your temple?”
Setsiana shook her head. “I don’t want it back. I’ve decided what I want to do now, going forward — I’m feeling much better about some of the things Sapfita told me, now that I know for sure that it’s Her. I want to stay here and help you.”
Qhoroali just blinked at her. “Why?” If there was one position Setsiana had consistently held, it was that she had no interest in helping Qhoroali, even at the times that she seemed inclined to share her opinion on Qhoroali’s research.
“You’re doing what I always wanted to do: studying the nature of Sapfita. And you actually appreciate my work. In some ways, it’s a much better situation than what I had back at the temple.”
“I’m also trying to kill Sapfita.”
“Like I said before, I don’t believe you’ll actually be able to do that. She’s told me that She had already experienced your attempt, and that it doesn’t succeed.”
Qhoroali shrugged. “If it doesn’t work the first time, I’ll just try again, until I get it right. She’s not omniscient, and She must have Her own personal timeline in some higher dimension that She doesn’t know the future of. She can’t know that I’ll never succeed.”
“She is sure that you won’t, and that there’s nothing about Her existence that She doesn’t already know about. I trust Her on that; I trust Her more than I ever have, now. She’s earned it.” Setsiana seemed to be alight with certainty and purpose; it reminded Qhoroali of how she herself felt when she discovered a new lead, or a promising new paper or substance.
“Well,” she said, “I won’t say no to your help. I still don’t think you’re correct, but I would be honored to be able to prove you wrong.”
“Likewise,” said Setsiana, and they smiled at each other beneath the shadow of the hilltop behind them.
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Also: “Well,” she said, “I won’t say no to your help. I still don’t think you’re correct, but I would be honored to be able to prove you wrong.”
“Likewise,” said Setsiana, and they smiled at each other beneath the shadow of the hilltop behind them.
This is great! <3
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Thank you! This was a major turning point.
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Oh, thank you!
Success! It is going to get worse from here.