paradoxcase (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
paradoxcase) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2025-11-28 12:20 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-11-28 12:20 pm
Entry tags:
Realgar #17 [The Fulcrum]
Name: The Rip in Time
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Realgar #17: Plunge
Styles and Supplies: None
Word Count: 1887
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1459.4.4.6, 1912.4.2.6
Summary: Setsiana and Qhoroali go to investigate the anomaly.
They found the place easily enough; the hill was the only one around for miles. They went nearly to the top of it on the shallow southern slope to avoid the ghlídrow that would be there during the plague, the opposite side from where the logbook had said the priestesses had gone, and then Qhoroali took them 1459.
As with the last time the they had traveled into the midst of a ghlídrow plague, the ghlídrow completely surrounded the hill on all sides, but did not come very far up the slopes, and they were free of them as long as they stayed on the higher ground. They sat there for a bit until the qoire wore off, and then slowly inched around the hill to its northern side, trying not to get far enough down that they would tread on the animals. Halfway around, they caught sight of a man standing at the northern foot of the hill in a circular space that was somehow completely free of ghlídrow, staring somewhat oddly into space; a second later, he disappeared.
Setsiana started forward, but Qhoroali put out her arm to stop her, and they stood there for a bit longer, peering around the side of an outcropping of rock. Presently, the man reappeared, wearing a look of surprise and exhilaration and began making his way north, back to the city, as quickly as he could through the masses of small animals.
“Well, there does seem to be something there,” said Qhoroali, after he was lost to sight in the distance. “The ghlídrow are avoiding it.”
The clear space where the man had been standing indeed still seemed to be clear. Occasionally a ghlídrow would enter it, but they seemed to shy away from something in its center. Qhoroali led them there, and felt around in the air and examined the ground. Then she pulled a bottle of qoire out of her pocket and put a few drops on her tongue again. “Ahh,” she said. “There it is.” Then she also disappeared.
Setsiana looked around in apprehension, suddenly finding herself alone in the middle of the plague. But a few seconds later, Qhoroali reappeared again and handed her the bottle of qoire. “Just the three drops,” she said. “That’s all it takes to see it.”
Setsiana took the three drops as instructed, watching the center of the clear space critically. At first, she saw no difference, but when she moved her head, there seemed to be a ripple in the air, like a heat-mirage, but it was several feet off the ground. She moved to a slightly different vantage point, and then suddenly a yawning black chasm opened up in the middle of the air. She moved again, and it became nothing but a ripple, once again.
“Do you see it?” Qhoroali asked, moving around the anomaly a bit herself.
Setsiana moved back to where she could see the blackness again. “What is it?”
“Not sure. But you can enter it. Or, maybe it’s actually an exit.”
“An exit? Out of what? Reality?”
“Or Time, maybe. Go through it, and see what you think.”
Setsiana moved forward, into the chasm, and felt a sudden shift; but it was a familiar one. She was sure she had been through this breach before, many times, but couldn’t fathom when that would have been.
The space she was in now was nearly pitch black, everywhere, and her feet felt like they were floating, and not like they stood on solid ground. But there was a light — a light at the edges of her vision. She realized then where she was, and why this felt familiar. It was the place where she was whenever she dreamed of Sapfita. Stepping through the anomaly had felt exactly like getting pulled into one of those dreams.
Even though she fully expected the light to never materialize, as it never did in her dreams, she turned and followed it with her eyes, anyway. To her surprise, it did not shy away from her gaze this time; behind her she beheld what she instantly recognized as the timeline Tree, colored the yellow-green color of the substance she’d brought back earlier, that Sapfita had identified as the material stuff of Time. It was arranged in the precise shapes and snarls she remembered from when she Guided, and from when they’d looked at the substance in Qhoroali’s experimentation room earlier. It seemed not so much bigger here as deeper, like she could fall in and get lost in a way that did not feel possible when she simply drank qoire normally.
She’d asked Sapfita if there was a way she could see the Tree from its outside, and Sapfita had simply said Yes. Maybe She had thought there was no need to clarify, when Setsiana was so close to discovering this.
“We must be outside of Time here,” said Qhoroali, from beside her, invisible in the blackness. “Because I think Time is over there.”
“How do we get back?” Setsiana asked.
“Look here.” The silhouette of Qhoroali’s hand appeared in front of one of the Tree’s branches. Setsiana saw what the hand was pointing out — a slit in the branch, the same shape as the anomaly had been on the other side, which seemed to be leaking brightness that dissipated into the air. Or whatever there was instead of air, in this place. The slit seemed very small from here, but — she forced herself to try to go back through it, in the same way she’d forced herself to walk the timelines the first time Qhoroali had shown her.
She wound up back in the clear space among the ghlídrow plague, alone. She must have gone back to a slightly different time than when they’d left, or when the man had been here earlier. She entered the anomaly again.
From the space outside of Time, she looked at the slit in the timeline again. It did seem to span a decent chunk of Time.
“We have to keep track of exactly when we go back and go to roughly the same time,” Qhoroali was saying. The hand appeared again. “The man went through here. We went through here.” The difference in times seemed impossibly small, from this vantage. “When we go back, let’s go back here.” The hand indicated a point that Setsiana judged was another day or so in the future.
“Is the man we saw here somewhere?” Setsiana asked. “He came through, too, didn’t he?”
“Not that I can tell,” said Qhoroali. “If he is, he’s being very quiet.”
Setsiana stepped back to get a better look at the Tree; doing so felt a bit like how it felt to walk a timeline. She followed the branches into the future, to the strange curtain that appeared at 2307, and then all the way back the other direction. The branches thickened and merged into fewer and fewer timelines in this direction, eventually coalescing into a single large branch, and following that back even further…
“What is that?” Qhoroali asked, giving voice to Setsiana’s thoughts. She had no way of knowing what Qhoroali was looking at, precisely, but there was only one thing that made sense. It was the only thing that was visible here besides the Tree, herself, and Qhoroali.
She was looking at a varied mass of the yellow-green color, brighter in some places and dimmer in others, shifting around like a cloud. It took its form at the end of that very first originating timeline, but shifted and writhed like a troubled sea, or a banner being twisted in a strong and changing wind. The timeline seemed to grow out of it as the stem of a plant grew from a seed.
“I think that must be Sapfita, right?” Qhoroali asked.
Setsiana shook her head vigorously, before remembering that she was probably invisible to Qhoroali as well. “It’s not,” she said. She was just as sure of this as she was of the fact that this was the place where her dreams took place. “It’s not Her.”
“Then what else would it be?”
“I don’t know, but it isn’t Her. It has to be something else.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been here before. This where all my dreams happen. I’ve seen Her in this place, and I know how to recognize Her here.”
“Are you actually sure?” said Qhoroali. “How much do you really know about this place?”
“I’m sure I would recognize Her. Even if She took on a different form.” Setsiana turned away from the yellow-green cloud, facing back towards the timeline Tree, and for just a moment, she thought she was looking at Sapfita, silhouetted against the glow. But no; that was just Qhoroali, temporarily backlit by the Tree, before she moved past it and disappeared again.
There was a silence, and then Qhoroali said, “Alright. Let’s get back. I don’t think there’s anything more to see here. At least, not until we find something that can damage this stuff.” Her hand appeared in front of the timeline again, indicating the place that it had indicated before. Setsiana entered the slit, and found herself back in the midst of the ghlídrow plague with Qhoroali once again.
Back at the apartment in 1912, the argument over what they had seen resumed.
“It was Time,” Qhoroali said. “You agree to that, right? You saw it, it was feeding into the origin of the Tree.”
“Maybe it was Time, but it wasn’t Sapfita.”
“Sapfita is Time, and Time is Sapfita. This isn’t even up for debate. That was Sapfita.”
Setsiana had been taught the same thing herself, but having seen what she’d seen in person, she was now starting to question if it were really true. “It wasn’t Her. I would have recognized Her. I know I would have.”
“Are you sure? Maybe it’s different when you’re there in person rather than in a dream.” Qhoroali was annoyed, but she also seemed concerned, less like she was dismissing some nonsensical argument or specious paper and more like she had discovered some new evidence that she couldn’t account for. “She was probably there, but She just didn’t look like you expected Her to.”
“I would know Her anywhere, in any context.” Frustratingly, Setsiana couldn’t think of any concrete reason why it had to be true, no justification to back the idea up. But she knew that when she saw Sapfita in a dream, she instinctively knew Her by more than just the shape of the silhouette.
“Really? She’s a god. She can probably appear to you in any way She chooses. She could be here in this room with us right now and you wouldn’t necessarily know. Well, if She had a three-dimensional form, that is.”
Setsiana could only shake her head. “No. I would know Her, and I know that wasn’t Her.”
Qhoroali frowned. “I was wrong about Her once, when it came to your experiences of Her, and I’m open to being proven wrong again. But I don’t know how this could be — how Time could exist independently of Sapfita, and assuming that it can, why we wouldn’t have also seen Sapfita there, if that’s really where we were.”
Setsiana could only shake her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have an explanation.”
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Realgar #17: Plunge
Styles and Supplies: None
Word Count: 1887
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: 1459.4.4.6, 1912.4.2.6
Summary: Setsiana and Qhoroali go to investigate the anomaly.
They found the place easily enough; the hill was the only one around for miles. They went nearly to the top of it on the shallow southern slope to avoid the ghlídrow that would be there during the plague, the opposite side from where the logbook had said the priestesses had gone, and then Qhoroali took them 1459.
As with the last time the they had traveled into the midst of a ghlídrow plague, the ghlídrow completely surrounded the hill on all sides, but did not come very far up the slopes, and they were free of them as long as they stayed on the higher ground. They sat there for a bit until the qoire wore off, and then slowly inched around the hill to its northern side, trying not to get far enough down that they would tread on the animals. Halfway around, they caught sight of a man standing at the northern foot of the hill in a circular space that was somehow completely free of ghlídrow, staring somewhat oddly into space; a second later, he disappeared.
Setsiana started forward, but Qhoroali put out her arm to stop her, and they stood there for a bit longer, peering around the side of an outcropping of rock. Presently, the man reappeared, wearing a look of surprise and exhilaration and began making his way north, back to the city, as quickly as he could through the masses of small animals.
“Well, there does seem to be something there,” said Qhoroali, after he was lost to sight in the distance. “The ghlídrow are avoiding it.”
The clear space where the man had been standing indeed still seemed to be clear. Occasionally a ghlídrow would enter it, but they seemed to shy away from something in its center. Qhoroali led them there, and felt around in the air and examined the ground. Then she pulled a bottle of qoire out of her pocket and put a few drops on her tongue again. “Ahh,” she said. “There it is.” Then she also disappeared.
Setsiana looked around in apprehension, suddenly finding herself alone in the middle of the plague. But a few seconds later, Qhoroali reappeared again and handed her the bottle of qoire. “Just the three drops,” she said. “That’s all it takes to see it.”
Setsiana took the three drops as instructed, watching the center of the clear space critically. At first, she saw no difference, but when she moved her head, there seemed to be a ripple in the air, like a heat-mirage, but it was several feet off the ground. She moved to a slightly different vantage point, and then suddenly a yawning black chasm opened up in the middle of the air. She moved again, and it became nothing but a ripple, once again.
“Do you see it?” Qhoroali asked, moving around the anomaly a bit herself.
Setsiana moved back to where she could see the blackness again. “What is it?”
“Not sure. But you can enter it. Or, maybe it’s actually an exit.”
“An exit? Out of what? Reality?”
“Or Time, maybe. Go through it, and see what you think.”
Setsiana moved forward, into the chasm, and felt a sudden shift; but it was a familiar one. She was sure she had been through this breach before, many times, but couldn’t fathom when that would have been.
The space she was in now was nearly pitch black, everywhere, and her feet felt like they were floating, and not like they stood on solid ground. But there was a light — a light at the edges of her vision. She realized then where she was, and why this felt familiar. It was the place where she was whenever she dreamed of Sapfita. Stepping through the anomaly had felt exactly like getting pulled into one of those dreams.
Even though she fully expected the light to never materialize, as it never did in her dreams, she turned and followed it with her eyes, anyway. To her surprise, it did not shy away from her gaze this time; behind her she beheld what she instantly recognized as the timeline Tree, colored the yellow-green color of the substance she’d brought back earlier, that Sapfita had identified as the material stuff of Time. It was arranged in the precise shapes and snarls she remembered from when she Guided, and from when they’d looked at the substance in Qhoroali’s experimentation room earlier. It seemed not so much bigger here as deeper, like she could fall in and get lost in a way that did not feel possible when she simply drank qoire normally.
She’d asked Sapfita if there was a way she could see the Tree from its outside, and Sapfita had simply said Yes. Maybe She had thought there was no need to clarify, when Setsiana was so close to discovering this.
“We must be outside of Time here,” said Qhoroali, from beside her, invisible in the blackness. “Because I think Time is over there.”
“How do we get back?” Setsiana asked.
“Look here.” The silhouette of Qhoroali’s hand appeared in front of one of the Tree’s branches. Setsiana saw what the hand was pointing out — a slit in the branch, the same shape as the anomaly had been on the other side, which seemed to be leaking brightness that dissipated into the air. Or whatever there was instead of air, in this place. The slit seemed very small from here, but — she forced herself to try to go back through it, in the same way she’d forced herself to walk the timelines the first time Qhoroali had shown her.
She wound up back in the clear space among the ghlídrow plague, alone. She must have gone back to a slightly different time than when they’d left, or when the man had been here earlier. She entered the anomaly again.
From the space outside of Time, she looked at the slit in the timeline again. It did seem to span a decent chunk of Time.
“We have to keep track of exactly when we go back and go to roughly the same time,” Qhoroali was saying. The hand appeared again. “The man went through here. We went through here.” The difference in times seemed impossibly small, from this vantage. “When we go back, let’s go back here.” The hand indicated a point that Setsiana judged was another day or so in the future.
“Is the man we saw here somewhere?” Setsiana asked. “He came through, too, didn’t he?”
“Not that I can tell,” said Qhoroali. “If he is, he’s being very quiet.”
Setsiana stepped back to get a better look at the Tree; doing so felt a bit like how it felt to walk a timeline. She followed the branches into the future, to the strange curtain that appeared at 2307, and then all the way back the other direction. The branches thickened and merged into fewer and fewer timelines in this direction, eventually coalescing into a single large branch, and following that back even further…
“What is that?” Qhoroali asked, giving voice to Setsiana’s thoughts. She had no way of knowing what Qhoroali was looking at, precisely, but there was only one thing that made sense. It was the only thing that was visible here besides the Tree, herself, and Qhoroali.
She was looking at a varied mass of the yellow-green color, brighter in some places and dimmer in others, shifting around like a cloud. It took its form at the end of that very first originating timeline, but shifted and writhed like a troubled sea, or a banner being twisted in a strong and changing wind. The timeline seemed to grow out of it as the stem of a plant grew from a seed.
“I think that must be Sapfita, right?” Qhoroali asked.
Setsiana shook her head vigorously, before remembering that she was probably invisible to Qhoroali as well. “It’s not,” she said. She was just as sure of this as she was of the fact that this was the place where her dreams took place. “It’s not Her.”
“Then what else would it be?”
“I don’t know, but it isn’t Her. It has to be something else.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been here before. This where all my dreams happen. I’ve seen Her in this place, and I know how to recognize Her here.”
“Are you actually sure?” said Qhoroali. “How much do you really know about this place?”
“I’m sure I would recognize Her. Even if She took on a different form.” Setsiana turned away from the yellow-green cloud, facing back towards the timeline Tree, and for just a moment, she thought she was looking at Sapfita, silhouetted against the glow. But no; that was just Qhoroali, temporarily backlit by the Tree, before she moved past it and disappeared again.
There was a silence, and then Qhoroali said, “Alright. Let’s get back. I don’t think there’s anything more to see here. At least, not until we find something that can damage this stuff.” Her hand appeared in front of the timeline again, indicating the place that it had indicated before. Setsiana entered the slit, and found herself back in the midst of the ghlídrow plague with Qhoroali once again.
Back at the apartment in 1912, the argument over what they had seen resumed.
“It was Time,” Qhoroali said. “You agree to that, right? You saw it, it was feeding into the origin of the Tree.”
“Maybe it was Time, but it wasn’t Sapfita.”
“Sapfita is Time, and Time is Sapfita. This isn’t even up for debate. That was Sapfita.”
Setsiana had been taught the same thing herself, but having seen what she’d seen in person, she was now starting to question if it were really true. “It wasn’t Her. I would have recognized Her. I know I would have.”
“Are you sure? Maybe it’s different when you’re there in person rather than in a dream.” Qhoroali was annoyed, but she also seemed concerned, less like she was dismissing some nonsensical argument or specious paper and more like she had discovered some new evidence that she couldn’t account for. “She was probably there, but She just didn’t look like you expected Her to.”
“I would know Her anywhere, in any context.” Frustratingly, Setsiana couldn’t think of any concrete reason why it had to be true, no justification to back the idea up. But she knew that when she saw Sapfita in a dream, she instinctively knew Her by more than just the shape of the silhouette.
“Really? She’s a god. She can probably appear to you in any way She chooses. She could be here in this room with us right now and you wouldn’t necessarily know. Well, if She had a three-dimensional form, that is.”
Setsiana could only shake her head. “No. I would know Her, and I know that wasn’t Her.”
Qhoroali frowned. “I was wrong about Her once, when it came to your experiences of Her, and I’m open to being proven wrong again. But I don’t know how this could be — how Time could exist independently of Sapfita, and assuming that it can, why we wouldn’t have also seen Sapfita there, if that’s really where we were.”
Setsiana could only shake her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have an explanation.”
no subject
no subject
Thank you! And yes, Qhoroali is not going to be dissuaded from her goal very easily.