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rainbowfic2025-09-19 07:08 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-09-19 07:08 pm
Light Black #24 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Nyufeisyälye Ciria
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Light Black #24: Steal
Styles and Supplies: Gift Wrap, Panorama, Pastels (September 19: Scavenge, from this list), Novelty Bead (this image, given here)
Word Count: 3200
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mention of child murder
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.3.3.5
Summary: The double full moon arrives.
The first half of the long third week of the month passed, and all of a sudden, far too soon, it was Yearilye Ciria, the monthly celebration of the full phase of the larger moon. This month, it was also Nyufeisyälye Ciria, the celebration for the smaller moon, the little sister, which achieved fullness only three times a year during three of the large moon’s full phases. She dreaded the evening hours; the streets would be full of drunken revelers, and there would be people setting off fireworks inexpertly in the middle of the road. The night would be full of shouting and loud bangs as she tried to get to sleep, and probably the fireworks would start fires in the city.
By some cruel happenstance, it was also her birthday.
“I guess you probably want to go out and have fun tonight,” Qhoroali said to her, as the afternoon wore on. “I feel bad for having kept you in last time, I know you weren’t having a good time, then.”
“No,” said Setsiana, “I hate this holiday, actually.” After a minute, she added, “I did try to enjoy it a few times, but I can’t stomach enough alcohol to get drunk, and it’s no fun being the only person who isn’t drunk.”
Qhoroali actually seemed pleased to hear her say this. “I hate it, too, to tell you the truth,” she said. “I could probably get drunk, there are lots of ways to make alcohol taste nice. But I can’t stand the noise, and the crowds.”
“The worst part is that it’s my birthday,” said Setsiana, warming to the chance to complain about Nyufeisyälye Ciria to someone who would actually be sympathetic. “My mother even named me Setsríhan and everything.”
“Setsríhan?” Qhoroali asked, seeming confused. She furrowed her brow, and then said, “Today that name would be… Sesrieha, I think.” She grinned. “So, does that mean you’re a Masterwork Soul who is destined for greatness, or a Chaotic Soul destined for insanity?”
“Don’t even joke about that soulwright superstition,” said Setsiana.
“Oh, come on. No one actually believes in any of that anymore. It’s just a special, traditional name — if you have a daughter who’s born on the double full moon, you get to give her a special name for that. That’s all it is.”
“There were still some people worshiping soulwrights in my time,” said Setsiana. “They probably would have called you a ‘Chaotic Soul’. I think my mother picked this name because she wanted to doom any career I might have at the temple before she even knew who I would become.”
“Then so much the better that you’re living in 1912, now, right? Anyway, there’s a priestess here who works at the pharmacy who I think must have had that name — her QuCheanya name is Sesaria. Doesn’t seem to have doomed her career at the temple.” She paused, and fixed Setsiana with a curious look. “What makes you think your mom didn’t want you to become a priestess? Did she have something against the priesthood?”
“Yeah,” said Setsiana. “She was once a junior priestess herself for a short period, and then quit so she could marry my dad instead. She didn’t have any trade skills after that, and had to learn one from him, in her 20s. She was unreasonably angry at the priesthood for this for the rest of her life.”
“Ah,” said Qhoroali. “Forbidden love! A junior priestess choosing to sacrifice her career to be with her lover! I think I have that one on a shelf somewhere around here.”
“It wasn’t romantic,” Setsiana retorted. “It was decades of bitterness, and then six years of fighting with me over it when I got selected for the junior priestess track and she wouldn’t let me go.”
“Oh please,” said Qhoroali, amused. “You were in here getting sappy over a flower last week. Don’t tell me you don’t see the romance in it. What changed her mind after six years? I assume something must have, since you did wind up becoming a junior priestess anyway.”
“I told her I would rather drown myself than marry any man,” said Setsiana. “Eventually, she decided to believe me.”
“Oh, I see,” said Qhoroali. “You just don’t see the romance in this because your dad is a man.”
“Do you see your parents’ marriage as romantic?”
“Yeah, a little, setting aside the fact that my mother is evil and I hate her. He traveled the whole country looking for someone like her who would accept him into a temple. He rode over a thousand miles. That’s something, for sure.” She seemed thoughtful for a moment. “Anyway, you should be glad that your mom gave you a meaningful and unique name. Mine just picked a random pretty flower. She probably spent about five seconds deciding on it.”
Setsiana perked up at this. “What flower?”
Qhoroali gave her a hunted expression. “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You’re a flower person. You’re probably going to tell me that this flower has some kind of deep and insightful meaning that’s going to be relevant to my life story, or something, aren’t you?”
“Well, maybe,” Setsiana admitted. “What flower is it?”
“I don’t know the QuCheanya name. We call it hrouli in Vrelian. It’s the red perennial with the petals like so,” she traced a shape in the air with her fingers. “Some people also call it the Winter Soldier — the bush recedes a bit during the winter, but the flowers are still visible, so people say they are guarding against the cold, and biding time until the return of spring.”
“That’s called hródlich, in 1647,” said Setsiana.
“Yuck. Glad I wasn’t born and named in your time. Well, then. What deep message does this flower communicate about my life?”
“More or less just what you already said,” said Setsiana. “It means conserving strength, biding your time, waiting for the right moment to strike.”
Qhoroali shook her head. “Nothing to do with me, then. I can time travel. If there’s an opportune moment to do something, I can just go to that moment and do it immediately. No waiting, no biding. If I didn’t like the winter, I could just time travel straight from the end of fall to the beginning of spring and skip the whole thing. But then I would miss my birthday, and that’s no fun.”
“I think it makes sense,” said Setsiana, “at least from the perspective of the leader of a heretical temple naming her heir. Don’t you think?”
Qhoroali shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Maybe my mother did have her reasons.” She stood up, and stretched. “I don’t want to join the crowds, and you don’t want to drink, but I don’t want to sit in here feeling sorry for myself while everyone else is having fun, either. And it’s your birthday, so that’s another good reason why we shouldn’t do that.”
“What are you suggesting?” Setsiana asked.
“You said you wanted to help us with the liberations, right?” Qhoroali asked. “Well, there’s a temple not too far from here, and it’s been a while since Li did that one. Why don’t we go see if there are any slaves there to rescue?”
“You can just do that?” Setsiana asked. “I mean… I thought Liselye was in charge of that.”
“Oh, I was doing this with her lots way back when. I know what to do, and we don’t really need her permission. Do you want to come?”
“Of course,” said Setsiana.
They put on nurefyes, braided their hair, and left the apartment. The warm summer air and the light of the two full moons made traveling in the dark much easier. They waited patiently for a loud group of people to pass them by on the road before heading out themselves, traveling in the opposite direction. Qhoroali led them down increasingly less-traveled roads until they came to a temple, one that Setsiana was actually familiar with from her own time. Normally these streets would not be so abandoned, but the bars and entertainment spots that people were drawn to tonight were not located near the temples.
The temple seemed deserted, in the moonlight. Priestesses and juniors were also free to participate in the monthly full moon celebrations. Yesora’s Grammar had explicitly said that religious worship and duties were forbidden on these days, lest that worship come to incorporate the soulwright rituals that had historically been practiced on those days. It was actually quite likely that no one was there.
They strode through the arch and down the main corridor as if they belonged, Setsiana experiencing an odd kind of nostalgia. It was the first time she’d been inside a temple since she had stabbed Priestess Meqhola back in Taleinyo and fled.
At the end of the corridor, just before the locked doors and the sanctuary, there was a small table, upon which a thick book and some spare pens had been left. Qhoroali approached and picked up the book, leafing through it. “It’s a logbook,” she said, after a minute. She showed Setsiana one of the pages; it contained handwritten dated entries in QuCheanya about the administration of the temple. Qhoroali flipped back some more. “They’ve kept this maintained for a very long time. It looks like they had their previous logs printed and added to the beginning of this book. First entry…” she flipped back to the very beginning. “Thirteenth century. Wow. Someone was very interested in preserving the historical record, but all of this stuff is incredibly dry.” She flipped back to the end again. “I wonder what they wrote in here after the last time Li freed all of their slaves?”
As she silently read the entry, Setsiana watched her eyes widen and her eyebrows go up to her hairline. “1912.1.3.4,” she read aloud. “The servants have left us again, gone in the night, as usual. However, we do not believe it was the Liberator, this time. Make a note to put more responsible people in charge of checking the locks.”
“Who is the Liberator?” asked Setsiana.
“I don’t know,” said Qhoroali. “I’ve never heard of this person before. And evidently, it’s not a name they’re using for Li and Cyaru — they seem not to have realized that the slaves were rescued, rather than simply escaping on their own.” She flipped through the book again. “I bet this person is mentioned in other places in here, though,” she said, thoughtfully. “I’m keeping this.” She took the book under her arm, and after a moment’s consideration, also took the stray pens that were on the table and put them into her pockets.
Setsiana didn’t voice any objection; she could well see a book like this that had been carelessly left out getting lost in the shuffle of the regular operation of the temple without anyone suspecting foul play. The priestesses tended to assume that outsiders could not read QuCheanya, anyway.
They approached one of the locked doors by the sanctuary. “The slaves are kept behind this door,” said Qhoroali. “I’ve been here with Li before, I know the layout. Here, take this.” She handed the logbook to Setsiana, and, with her hands freed, removed the hairpin that secured her three braids and began to pick the lock with it. Setsiana watched her clever fingers for a bit, remembering the girl back in Syarhrít who had picked locks on abandoned buildings for an increasing number of spectators when she had been a young teenager. She tried to keep an eye out for any priestesses, as well, but she saw no one.
The lock came open in not much time at all, and Qhoroali replaced her hairpin. They continued into the private areas of the temple. Qhoroali led them confidently through a maze of passageways and small corridors, until they arrived at a hallway with a long line of doors secured with large padlocks. “Here we are,” said Qhoroali. “Keep track of any slaves we find, don’t let them run off on their own. We’ll need to bring them back to Mosetai’s so that Cyaru can interview them later, and take them back to their homes.”
She began picking the padlocks, one by one. Setsiana kept an eye out, looking back and forth down the hallway they were in, waiting to be discovered by a priestess. Once, they heard a thump; maybe the sound of a shoe on the stone, or of a door opening or closing, or maybe just something falling. They both stood frozen for a minute, but after some time with no further sounds, Qhoroali continued with the padlock.
“Do you guys always do this during Ciria?” Setsiana asked. Now that she thought about it, it seemed very sensible.
“Sometimes,” said Qhoroali. “The last time Li was here was during Ciria too, though just a single full moon, and not a double. “But the middle of the night often works just as well, depending on the temple. Li knows more specifics about particular temples.”
The first padlock came open, and Qhoroali opened the door. Two girls huddled in a sparse cell, with two thin sleeping pads and a bucket in the corner. Qhoroali spoke to them softly in what Setsiana recognized as Cyaru’s language, and they seemed to understand, at least a little, enough to leave the cell and follow them to the next padlock, frightened and wide-eyed. Behind the second door was one other girl, and the remaining cells were empty.
“I guess two months wasn’t enough time for them to completely replace the last set,” said Qhoroali. “So much the better. We’ll have to let Li know we cleaned them out again.” She led the way back to the exit, with Setsiana following behind, making sure the girls did not get lost.
They emerged back into the night, the sounds of revelry and the bangs of fireworks drifting in from the far away bars. One of the girls stammered a question, but Qhoroali was walking ahead of them, in the direction of the apartment, and didn’t hear. Setsiana shook her head and said, “I don’t understand” in QuCheanya, before realizing that that might not work here. But the girl did switch to a broken kind of QuCheanya to say: “Why… they gone?”
Setsiana understood what she was trying to ask. She pointed at the sky, at the two full moons. “Special day,” she said. “It is the full moon holiday.”
“You Cheanya,” the girl said. “Orange hair. Right? Not ghost.”
“That’s right,” said Setsiana.
The girls all had a desperate, hushed conversation among themselves for a moment, and then the one who had originally spoken asked again, “They kill babies? This day?”
Setsiana blinked in confusion. Maybe the girl didn’t know what those words meant? “No,” she said. “We don’t kill babies, not today or any other day. We party, on this day.”
The girls looked at each other, and had another whispered conversation, but for some reason seemed confused and worried. Setsiana gently hurried them on after Qhoroali, but the girl’s words stuck in her head like a bad tune. Kill babies?
Back at the apartment, Qhoroali knocked on one of the first floor doors, which was opened by a black-haired woman in a maroon dress, who took one look at the three girls and immediately ushered them into her apartment, closing the door behind her. “That’s Reitsia, Mosetai’s wife” Qhoroali explained. “She lives here with Mosetai, but she doesn’t like Ciria any more than we do, so I figured she’d be around. She’ll find rooms here for those girls to stay the night, and Cyaru will figure out where to take them back to tomorrow morning.”
“One of them asked me something about killing babies,” Setsiana said, as they returned to Qhoroali’s apartment. “Does that… is there some reason they would think we do that? I mean, I guess other than the fact that they know we happily enslave people. But it seems very specific.”
“Oh, yeah, actually,” said Qhoroali. “There’s a long-lived myth in a lot of the Sohanke times and timelines that the Cheanya, who they know there only as an ancient mythological enemy, the same way we see the ‘Tuari’ here, sacrificed babies to their gods.” She shrugged. “We weren’t the only ones to portray an ancient and extinct enemy as barbarians. The myth is still alive and well in Cyaru’s time, and we had to do some convincing to get his village to believe it wasn’t true. Peatäro says that by her time, everyone was well aware that it was nonsense.”
“Do we know that it wasn’t true?” Setsiana asked. “Maybe they had the right of it back then, after all.”
Qhoroali looked at her. “I’ve never personally been back there, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “But the archaeological record only shows livestock being sacrificed to soulwrights, and I would think they’d be able to tell the difference. It’s possible that the ancient Sohanke found out about the animal sacrifices and thought that was already horrific, from their perspective, and the story got exaggerated and embellished until it became baby sacrifices.” She unlocked the door to the apartment, and let them inside. “Don’t worry too much about who was right or wrong back in those ancient times — it’s not relevant to what we’re trying to do here.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Setsiana. “If that conflict hadn’t happened… if we hadn’t wiped each other out in different sets of timelines, if we’d learned to peacefully coexist here, and not make up horrible untruths about each other, the priestesses never would have been able to justify enslaving them. Right?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Qhoroali. “Plenty of countries justify enslaving their own citizens. And the priesthood’s justification for its slavery is fabricated specifically for that purpose. We can’t change what happened back then, not without killing Sapfita. So until I can achieve that… we just keep doing what we can, here.”
“If you kill Sapfita, all of the timelines involving the priesthood will cease to exist, right?” Setsiana asked. “That’s what you think you will happen, anyway. So all of those slaves will be retroactively freed, will never have been taken as slaves in the first place. If that’s your goal, what does it accomplish to do things like what we did tonight, in this timeline? If you think this timeline is just going to stop existing anyway when you kill Sapfita, does it actually matter what we do here?”
“It does,” said Qhoroali. “There some chance — a small chance, but still some chance — that I won’t succeed, and then these timelines will still matter, and it will have helped to free the slaves. And even in the much more likely chance that I do succeed… I don’t feel that it’s right to abandon any timeline to evil just because I think it might disappear. I think it does make a difference, just a little difference, if this timeline is slightly better than it could have been, even if it is ultimately doomed to be written out of existence. Don’t you?”
“I don’t think it is doomed at all,” said Setsiana. “But I’m glad you feel that way.”
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Light Black #24: Steal
Styles and Supplies: Gift Wrap, Panorama, Pastels (September 19: Scavenge, from this list), Novelty Bead (this image, given here)
Word Count: 3200
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mention of child murder
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1912.3.3.5
Summary: The double full moon arrives.
The first half of the long third week of the month passed, and all of a sudden, far too soon, it was Yearilye Ciria, the monthly celebration of the full phase of the larger moon. This month, it was also Nyufeisyälye Ciria, the celebration for the smaller moon, the little sister, which achieved fullness only three times a year during three of the large moon’s full phases. She dreaded the evening hours; the streets would be full of drunken revelers, and there would be people setting off fireworks inexpertly in the middle of the road. The night would be full of shouting and loud bangs as she tried to get to sleep, and probably the fireworks would start fires in the city.
By some cruel happenstance, it was also her birthday.
“I guess you probably want to go out and have fun tonight,” Qhoroali said to her, as the afternoon wore on. “I feel bad for having kept you in last time, I know you weren’t having a good time, then.”
“No,” said Setsiana, “I hate this holiday, actually.” After a minute, she added, “I did try to enjoy it a few times, but I can’t stomach enough alcohol to get drunk, and it’s no fun being the only person who isn’t drunk.”
Qhoroali actually seemed pleased to hear her say this. “I hate it, too, to tell you the truth,” she said. “I could probably get drunk, there are lots of ways to make alcohol taste nice. But I can’t stand the noise, and the crowds.”
“The worst part is that it’s my birthday,” said Setsiana, warming to the chance to complain about Nyufeisyälye Ciria to someone who would actually be sympathetic. “My mother even named me Setsríhan and everything.”
“Setsríhan?” Qhoroali asked, seeming confused. She furrowed her brow, and then said, “Today that name would be… Sesrieha, I think.” She grinned. “So, does that mean you’re a Masterwork Soul who is destined for greatness, or a Chaotic Soul destined for insanity?”
“Don’t even joke about that soulwright superstition,” said Setsiana.
“Oh, come on. No one actually believes in any of that anymore. It’s just a special, traditional name — if you have a daughter who’s born on the double full moon, you get to give her a special name for that. That’s all it is.”
“There were still some people worshiping soulwrights in my time,” said Setsiana. “They probably would have called you a ‘Chaotic Soul’. I think my mother picked this name because she wanted to doom any career I might have at the temple before she even knew who I would become.”
“Then so much the better that you’re living in 1912, now, right? Anyway, there’s a priestess here who works at the pharmacy who I think must have had that name — her QuCheanya name is Sesaria. Doesn’t seem to have doomed her career at the temple.” She paused, and fixed Setsiana with a curious look. “What makes you think your mom didn’t want you to become a priestess? Did she have something against the priesthood?”
“Yeah,” said Setsiana. “She was once a junior priestess herself for a short period, and then quit so she could marry my dad instead. She didn’t have any trade skills after that, and had to learn one from him, in her 20s. She was unreasonably angry at the priesthood for this for the rest of her life.”
“Ah,” said Qhoroali. “Forbidden love! A junior priestess choosing to sacrifice her career to be with her lover! I think I have that one on a shelf somewhere around here.”
“It wasn’t romantic,” Setsiana retorted. “It was decades of bitterness, and then six years of fighting with me over it when I got selected for the junior priestess track and she wouldn’t let me go.”
“Oh please,” said Qhoroali, amused. “You were in here getting sappy over a flower last week. Don’t tell me you don’t see the romance in it. What changed her mind after six years? I assume something must have, since you did wind up becoming a junior priestess anyway.”
“I told her I would rather drown myself than marry any man,” said Setsiana. “Eventually, she decided to believe me.”
“Oh, I see,” said Qhoroali. “You just don’t see the romance in this because your dad is a man.”
“Do you see your parents’ marriage as romantic?”
“Yeah, a little, setting aside the fact that my mother is evil and I hate her. He traveled the whole country looking for someone like her who would accept him into a temple. He rode over a thousand miles. That’s something, for sure.” She seemed thoughtful for a moment. “Anyway, you should be glad that your mom gave you a meaningful and unique name. Mine just picked a random pretty flower. She probably spent about five seconds deciding on it.”
Setsiana perked up at this. “What flower?”
Qhoroali gave her a hunted expression. “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You’re a flower person. You’re probably going to tell me that this flower has some kind of deep and insightful meaning that’s going to be relevant to my life story, or something, aren’t you?”
“Well, maybe,” Setsiana admitted. “What flower is it?”
“I don’t know the QuCheanya name. We call it hrouli in Vrelian. It’s the red perennial with the petals like so,” she traced a shape in the air with her fingers. “Some people also call it the Winter Soldier — the bush recedes a bit during the winter, but the flowers are still visible, so people say they are guarding against the cold, and biding time until the return of spring.”
“That’s called hródlich, in 1647,” said Setsiana.
“Yuck. Glad I wasn’t born and named in your time. Well, then. What deep message does this flower communicate about my life?”
“More or less just what you already said,” said Setsiana. “It means conserving strength, biding your time, waiting for the right moment to strike.”
Qhoroali shook her head. “Nothing to do with me, then. I can time travel. If there’s an opportune moment to do something, I can just go to that moment and do it immediately. No waiting, no biding. If I didn’t like the winter, I could just time travel straight from the end of fall to the beginning of spring and skip the whole thing. But then I would miss my birthday, and that’s no fun.”
“I think it makes sense,” said Setsiana, “at least from the perspective of the leader of a heretical temple naming her heir. Don’t you think?”
Qhoroali shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Maybe my mother did have her reasons.” She stood up, and stretched. “I don’t want to join the crowds, and you don’t want to drink, but I don’t want to sit in here feeling sorry for myself while everyone else is having fun, either. And it’s your birthday, so that’s another good reason why we shouldn’t do that.”
“What are you suggesting?” Setsiana asked.
“You said you wanted to help us with the liberations, right?” Qhoroali asked. “Well, there’s a temple not too far from here, and it’s been a while since Li did that one. Why don’t we go see if there are any slaves there to rescue?”
“You can just do that?” Setsiana asked. “I mean… I thought Liselye was in charge of that.”
“Oh, I was doing this with her lots way back when. I know what to do, and we don’t really need her permission. Do you want to come?”
“Of course,” said Setsiana.
They put on nurefyes, braided their hair, and left the apartment. The warm summer air and the light of the two full moons made traveling in the dark much easier. They waited patiently for a loud group of people to pass them by on the road before heading out themselves, traveling in the opposite direction. Qhoroali led them down increasingly less-traveled roads until they came to a temple, one that Setsiana was actually familiar with from her own time. Normally these streets would not be so abandoned, but the bars and entertainment spots that people were drawn to tonight were not located near the temples.
The temple seemed deserted, in the moonlight. Priestesses and juniors were also free to participate in the monthly full moon celebrations. Yesora’s Grammar had explicitly said that religious worship and duties were forbidden on these days, lest that worship come to incorporate the soulwright rituals that had historically been practiced on those days. It was actually quite likely that no one was there.
They strode through the arch and down the main corridor as if they belonged, Setsiana experiencing an odd kind of nostalgia. It was the first time she’d been inside a temple since she had stabbed Priestess Meqhola back in Taleinyo and fled.
At the end of the corridor, just before the locked doors and the sanctuary, there was a small table, upon which a thick book and some spare pens had been left. Qhoroali approached and picked up the book, leafing through it. “It’s a logbook,” she said, after a minute. She showed Setsiana one of the pages; it contained handwritten dated entries in QuCheanya about the administration of the temple. Qhoroali flipped back some more. “They’ve kept this maintained for a very long time. It looks like they had their previous logs printed and added to the beginning of this book. First entry…” she flipped back to the very beginning. “Thirteenth century. Wow. Someone was very interested in preserving the historical record, but all of this stuff is incredibly dry.” She flipped back to the end again. “I wonder what they wrote in here after the last time Li freed all of their slaves?”
As she silently read the entry, Setsiana watched her eyes widen and her eyebrows go up to her hairline. “1912.1.3.4,” she read aloud. “The servants have left us again, gone in the night, as usual. However, we do not believe it was the Liberator, this time. Make a note to put more responsible people in charge of checking the locks.”
“Who is the Liberator?” asked Setsiana.
“I don’t know,” said Qhoroali. “I’ve never heard of this person before. And evidently, it’s not a name they’re using for Li and Cyaru — they seem not to have realized that the slaves were rescued, rather than simply escaping on their own.” She flipped through the book again. “I bet this person is mentioned in other places in here, though,” she said, thoughtfully. “I’m keeping this.” She took the book under her arm, and after a moment’s consideration, also took the stray pens that were on the table and put them into her pockets.
Setsiana didn’t voice any objection; she could well see a book like this that had been carelessly left out getting lost in the shuffle of the regular operation of the temple without anyone suspecting foul play. The priestesses tended to assume that outsiders could not read QuCheanya, anyway.
They approached one of the locked doors by the sanctuary. “The slaves are kept behind this door,” said Qhoroali. “I’ve been here with Li before, I know the layout. Here, take this.” She handed the logbook to Setsiana, and, with her hands freed, removed the hairpin that secured her three braids and began to pick the lock with it. Setsiana watched her clever fingers for a bit, remembering the girl back in Syarhrít who had picked locks on abandoned buildings for an increasing number of spectators when she had been a young teenager. She tried to keep an eye out for any priestesses, as well, but she saw no one.
The lock came open in not much time at all, and Qhoroali replaced her hairpin. They continued into the private areas of the temple. Qhoroali led them confidently through a maze of passageways and small corridors, until they arrived at a hallway with a long line of doors secured with large padlocks. “Here we are,” said Qhoroali. “Keep track of any slaves we find, don’t let them run off on their own. We’ll need to bring them back to Mosetai’s so that Cyaru can interview them later, and take them back to their homes.”
She began picking the padlocks, one by one. Setsiana kept an eye out, looking back and forth down the hallway they were in, waiting to be discovered by a priestess. Once, they heard a thump; maybe the sound of a shoe on the stone, or of a door opening or closing, or maybe just something falling. They both stood frozen for a minute, but after some time with no further sounds, Qhoroali continued with the padlock.
“Do you guys always do this during Ciria?” Setsiana asked. Now that she thought about it, it seemed very sensible.
“Sometimes,” said Qhoroali. “The last time Li was here was during Ciria too, though just a single full moon, and not a double. “But the middle of the night often works just as well, depending on the temple. Li knows more specifics about particular temples.”
The first padlock came open, and Qhoroali opened the door. Two girls huddled in a sparse cell, with two thin sleeping pads and a bucket in the corner. Qhoroali spoke to them softly in what Setsiana recognized as Cyaru’s language, and they seemed to understand, at least a little, enough to leave the cell and follow them to the next padlock, frightened and wide-eyed. Behind the second door was one other girl, and the remaining cells were empty.
“I guess two months wasn’t enough time for them to completely replace the last set,” said Qhoroali. “So much the better. We’ll have to let Li know we cleaned them out again.” She led the way back to the exit, with Setsiana following behind, making sure the girls did not get lost.
They emerged back into the night, the sounds of revelry and the bangs of fireworks drifting in from the far away bars. One of the girls stammered a question, but Qhoroali was walking ahead of them, in the direction of the apartment, and didn’t hear. Setsiana shook her head and said, “I don’t understand” in QuCheanya, before realizing that that might not work here. But the girl did switch to a broken kind of QuCheanya to say: “Why… they gone?”
Setsiana understood what she was trying to ask. She pointed at the sky, at the two full moons. “Special day,” she said. “It is the full moon holiday.”
“You Cheanya,” the girl said. “Orange hair. Right? Not ghost.”
“That’s right,” said Setsiana.
The girls all had a desperate, hushed conversation among themselves for a moment, and then the one who had originally spoken asked again, “They kill babies? This day?”
Setsiana blinked in confusion. Maybe the girl didn’t know what those words meant? “No,” she said. “We don’t kill babies, not today or any other day. We party, on this day.”
The girls looked at each other, and had another whispered conversation, but for some reason seemed confused and worried. Setsiana gently hurried them on after Qhoroali, but the girl’s words stuck in her head like a bad tune. Kill babies?
Back at the apartment, Qhoroali knocked on one of the first floor doors, which was opened by a black-haired woman in a maroon dress, who took one look at the three girls and immediately ushered them into her apartment, closing the door behind her. “That’s Reitsia, Mosetai’s wife” Qhoroali explained. “She lives here with Mosetai, but she doesn’t like Ciria any more than we do, so I figured she’d be around. She’ll find rooms here for those girls to stay the night, and Cyaru will figure out where to take them back to tomorrow morning.”
“One of them asked me something about killing babies,” Setsiana said, as they returned to Qhoroali’s apartment. “Does that… is there some reason they would think we do that? I mean, I guess other than the fact that they know we happily enslave people. But it seems very specific.”
“Oh, yeah, actually,” said Qhoroali. “There’s a long-lived myth in a lot of the Sohanke times and timelines that the Cheanya, who they know there only as an ancient mythological enemy, the same way we see the ‘Tuari’ here, sacrificed babies to their gods.” She shrugged. “We weren’t the only ones to portray an ancient and extinct enemy as barbarians. The myth is still alive and well in Cyaru’s time, and we had to do some convincing to get his village to believe it wasn’t true. Peatäro says that by her time, everyone was well aware that it was nonsense.”
“Do we know that it wasn’t true?” Setsiana asked. “Maybe they had the right of it back then, after all.”
Qhoroali looked at her. “I’ve never personally been back there, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “But the archaeological record only shows livestock being sacrificed to soulwrights, and I would think they’d be able to tell the difference. It’s possible that the ancient Sohanke found out about the animal sacrifices and thought that was already horrific, from their perspective, and the story got exaggerated and embellished until it became baby sacrifices.” She unlocked the door to the apartment, and let them inside. “Don’t worry too much about who was right or wrong back in those ancient times — it’s not relevant to what we’re trying to do here.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Setsiana. “If that conflict hadn’t happened… if we hadn’t wiped each other out in different sets of timelines, if we’d learned to peacefully coexist here, and not make up horrible untruths about each other, the priestesses never would have been able to justify enslaving them. Right?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Qhoroali. “Plenty of countries justify enslaving their own citizens. And the priesthood’s justification for its slavery is fabricated specifically for that purpose. We can’t change what happened back then, not without killing Sapfita. So until I can achieve that… we just keep doing what we can, here.”
“If you kill Sapfita, all of the timelines involving the priesthood will cease to exist, right?” Setsiana asked. “That’s what you think you will happen, anyway. So all of those slaves will be retroactively freed, will never have been taken as slaves in the first place. If that’s your goal, what does it accomplish to do things like what we did tonight, in this timeline? If you think this timeline is just going to stop existing anyway when you kill Sapfita, does it actually matter what we do here?”
“It does,” said Qhoroali. “There some chance — a small chance, but still some chance — that I won’t succeed, and then these timelines will still matter, and it will have helped to free the slaves. And even in the much more likely chance that I do succeed… I don’t feel that it’s right to abandon any timeline to evil just because I think it might disappear. I think it does make a difference, just a little difference, if this timeline is slightly better than it could have been, even if it is ultimately doomed to be written out of existence. Don’t you?”
“I don’t think it is doomed at all,” said Setsiana. “But I’m glad you feel that way.”
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Thank you!
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I am intrigued by the mention of The Liberator. Capital letters and all.
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Yes! There will be more Tikkun Olam by the end of this, I really like it as an idea.
There will be more on the Liberator in a bit.