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rainbowfic2026-01-19 04:33 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2026-01-19 04:33 pm
Warm Heart #2 [The Fulcrum]
Name: A Concerning Request
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Warm Heart #2: Worry
Styles and Supplies: Novelty Bead ("train whistle", given here), Panorama, Reimagining, Feathers (January 19, 1975: Establishment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Word Count: 2687
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Cusäfä
In-Universe Date: 1912.4.5.3, 21st century, (approximately) -10,000
Summary: Qhoroali pays another visit to Cusäfä.
Notes: I decided the first Cusäfä chapter was entirely too long and had way too much stuff in it, so I removed all of the worldbuilding that was not immediately relevant to that earlier part of the story and moved it into this later scene (about 1500 words of dialog, which has since been neatened up and expanded with more action beats). So if some stuff in here seems like it something you already read before, it's probably because you did. There is some new stuff in here, too, but since a large chunk of it is rewritten from the previous scene, it gets the Reimagining tag.
The following week, on the first day of Nyoacelya Lyuya, they took another trip to visit Cusäfä, just Setsiana and Qhoroali, this time. The train ride was much less stressful than it had been when done this last, although Setsiana had forgotten just how loud the train whistle was going to be, and was still startled by it. Looking around at the other people on board, now as just regular strangers and not as people who could potentially help her escape from Qhoroali, Setsiana thought she could see how they could see the journey as boring and unremarkable. She occupied herself with another romance she’d taken from Qhoroali’s collection while Qhoroali sewed, and the seventeen hours passed peacefully.
They met Cusäfä twelve thousand years in the past, and again went to his tent to chat.
“It’s nice to see you,” said Qhoroali. “How have you been?” It only sounded a little stilted.
Cusäfä smiled at her warmly. “Pretty good, actually. The harvest was good, and we’re starting to work on new crops. And, oh! One of my farmers-in-training has had a new baby, and they want me to be his god-father. For them, that means I will play an active role in bringing him up.” He laughed, somewhat giddy. “I will get to raise a child after all, and I didn’t have to get married to do it.”
Qhoroali was smiling, too, but there seemed to be some note of pain in it. “That’s great,” she said. “Would that there was something that could work out like that for me.”
Cusäfä looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Is this still about Cyaru, or is there someone else, now?”
Setsiana thought she saw Qhoroali’s eyes dart towards her and back again, very quickly, or maybe it was just her ever-hopeful imagination. “I don’t know,” Qhoroali said. “I just… I don’t know.”
Cusäfä shrugged. “I wanted to share a research breakthrough, actually. I was thinking about the family structures these people have, because of my new godson, and I realized they have some things in common with the system I told you about before, in Ádeya. And then I remembered — they do also worship the sun in Ádeya, they even still did during the time I came from. And… I think I might have an idea, now, about who these people are and where they came from. Do you know where Ádeya is?”
“Vaguely,” said Qhoroali. “It’s in the northern hemisphere, right?”
“I’d never even heard of it before you mentioned it last time,” said Setsiana.
“Right, then,” said Cusäfä. “It’s an island in the middle of the Endless Ocean, thousands and thousands of miles northwest of Shayansee. Or well, I guess you’re supposed to call it Ádeya-Shuznzyon, technically there were two countries there. But it was in the Ádeya part of it specifically where they worshiped the sun, though they also had both moons and Celyira in their pantheon.”
He got up then, and went to pick up his magical device off the top of a solar hub that sat against the wall of a tent, absently gesturing at it as he spoke. “I think I told you I visited there once, it’s a nice place. The mountains in Shuznzyon are the tallest in the world and people were constantly killing themselves trying to climb them for bragging rights, at that time. But while I was visiting there, I installed an Ádeyan dictionary on my phone for fun, and I’ve been looking through it as I learn more and more of these people’s language, here in this early time… I know the comparative method can’t possibly be reliable over this time scale. But I can see similarities. The people look similar too, these are the only two places I’ve been where every single person has hair as straight as a board.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, I’m probably very biased. But I think these people must come from one of the groups that somehow make it to Ádeya-Shuznzyon during this time period, here during the Warming. You know that we in NoraCheanya are related to the Shayanseen, right? For ages we called those shared ancestors the Ancient Shayanseen. They aren’t in Shayansee yet — they will walk over the south pole from southern Meandhshen to southern Shayansee during the warm period that’s coming. Global temperatures never rose high enough for that to happen again afterwards — well, except for briefly when we screwed everything up in the modern era.”
He put the device back down and looked more intensely at Qhoroali. “But this is the second warm period that’s coming now. There was a previous one, and, some people in my old time thought, a previous polar migration. People had started talking about a ‘North Shayansee People’, who crossed during the first warm period and moved north when the ice age came, and a ‘South Shayansee People’ who crossed during the second warm period and killed off all of the first group. There were just a few scraps of archaeological evidence left on the northern coasts of Shayansee attesting to the existence of first group, nothing more.”
He smiled, and his face became more animated. “But I think that before they were killed, some of them managed to escape across the sea and wind up in Ádeya. And others left even earlier, and wound up here, though they may ultimately die for a different reason. These people have a myth about crossing an ocean on rafts, following the rising sun to a new land. Going east, from the west. To here, from northern Shayansee, where the North Shayansee People are now.”
“How would they have crossed thousands of miles of ocean to the island you mentioned, if all they have is rafts?” Setsiana asked.
“I don’t know,” said Cusäfä. “Maybe they will have something better than rafts, by the time that happens. I don’t think it’s ever been proven exactly how humans first got to Ádeya-Shuznzyon, but we know for sure that it happened sometime within the next thousand years or so. That’s plenty of time to invent something better.”
“You said you visited there,” Qhoroali began, and then more hesitantly, continued, “And you knew someone who was involved in one of those split marriage arrangements. Although, I guess you must probably know some people here like that, too, if they also have that family structure.”
“I did,” said Cusäfä. “They don’t really have exactly the same arrangements here — the tribe uses a much more basic version of that system.” He picked up his device again. “That reminds me. I have some pictures of that time that I wanted to show you.” He stood and came over to where Qhoroali was standing, and began tracing arcane symbols in the air in front of the device. “Here, look,” he said. “Does she remind you of anyone?”
Qhoroali peered at the device. “Who am I supposed to be reminded of?”
“Doesn’t she look like you?”
“I mean, I guess maybe if you think every woman with my coloring looks like me.”
Setsiana cautiously moved over to join them. On the surface of the device was a small but very intricate picture: A lighter-skinned woman with black hair streaming behind her rode a gigantic white wolf as if it were a horse, dressed in a black cloak lined with white fur. In the background, more giant wolves howled, and another figure stood, almost obscured in shadow, dressed head to foot in a very traditional set of T’arsi armor. This figure was carrying a flag on a standard depicting the large moon, Yeari, on a field of blackness. The only thing that could be seen of their body between the joints of the armor was that the skin was very dark. Setsiana looked at Qhoroali and then back at the picture; there was a certain similarity to the woman riding the wolf.
“Who is she?” Qhoroali asked.
“A god, one of the Shuznzyon ones. Well, maybe the Shuznzyon one, they did call her Shuzn and then called themselves ‘Shuzn’s people’. Supposedly she led an army that killed the Creator, and then brought winter to Celyira, and accepts bribes to make it go away again. A dark kind of theology. They worshiped her in Ádeya, too, though they borrowed her as the personification of Yeari, since the Shuznzyon often used that imagery for her, and also winter, of course, and apparently she was also the patron of accountants and mathematicians for some reason.”
“Who is the T’arsi?” asked Setsiana. “Is that another god?”
“Sort of. In Shuznzyon tradition that person was a genderless demon who was Shuzn’s right hand during the war against the Creator; in Ádeya they were a shape-shifter who could be male or female or both depending on their whim. In Ádeyan tradition, they were sometimes considered a personification of the small moon, but they were more of a cultural hero or a trickster there than a true god.”
Cusäfä seemed hesitate slightly. “Their worship in Shuznzyon predates Shuznzyon’s contact with T’arse significantly, and by the time they did encounter T’arse, it was no longer common to see armor of this style there. But all of the older depictions clearly show this exact armor design. There was a good deal of argument among scholars about whether it was just a coincidence, or whether the islanders actually did somehow encounter T’arsis much earlier than was previously thought. It’s hard to say which theory seems less plausible; T’arse was barely interested in sea exploration even after longitude was solved.”
“What did T’arse think about it?” Setsiana wondered.
“Oh, they hated it, actually. The anthropologists there were constantly trying to show that the demon’s armor wasn’t accurate to real historical T’arsi armor, but personally, I’d say that it seemed like the evidence was against them. I never actually got a degree in anthropology, though, nor have I ever studied the history of T’arse in any true depth, so my opinion there probably doesn’t matter.”
“Really?” Qhoroali’s mouth quirked. “They weren’t trying to claim right of conquest there over it, or something?”
Cusäfä shook his head. “They were never really interested in conquest in the general case, and they had no interest at all in Shuznzyon. Their involvement in Meandhshen was always a more specific religious crusade.” He turned his head to face Setsiana more directly. “Do you know anything about their religion? Being what it is, a lot of people from outside of eastern continent didn’t know anything about it even in my time, and I’m guessing that was probably even more true before the information age. I know Qhoroali knows it from Liselye.”
Setsiana thought about the rug she’d at the T’arsi Fair all those months ago, with the being made up of a multitude of different people, who seemed to clearly be some kind of god. She had never thought about T’arsi religion much before, and the merchants had never seemed interested in talking about it, but now she was curious. “I don’t,” she admitted. “Liselye told me their wars have a religious reason, a long while back, but didn’t explain.”
“Well, it’s a strange one,” said Cusäfä. “I don’t know if I would explain it correctly, since I’m not from there, and haven’t studied them, but I used to go there fairly frequently to attend academic conferences. As I understand it, they originally believed that every person on the whole eastern continent, both T’arse and Meandhshen, was part of the collective consciousness that is their god. The god is actually named T’arse — it’s not a separate entity from the country, in their minds. So, because everyone on the continent is T’arse, everyone on the continent should rightly be part of the country of T’arse, as well.”
His mouth twisted. “That’s what the wars were about. Eventually people in Meandhshen got wise and started arguing that if they were all God, that meant T’arse wasn’t allowed to declare war on them, so the Will of T’arse at that time demoted them to being only possibly God — if they were killed in the war, they obviously weren’t God, but if they survived and became contributing citizens of T’arse, they were.”
His face relaxed, and he shrugged a bit. “They were strange even in non-religious matters, to be honest. I would go to a conference there, and afterwards, a researcher would invite me to her house, and introduce me to her husband… and her second husband, and her third husband, and then one of them would ask me how many wives I had, and another one would say ‘They only get one, there, dummy,’ and I would say ‘Actually, I never got married at all,’ and they would all look at me like I had three heads. And then they would change the subject and ask about qoire, since that’s the only thing they know about NoraCheanya other than the government’s insistence that time travel is real, and it’s rude to ask a visiting scientist if they believe in crackpot theories.”
He laughed a bit. “Anyway, they would ask why qoire was so incredibly illegal here when it’s pretty harmless and non-addictive and then I’d have to explain that it’s because the government thinks you can use it to time travel, and then there would be another awkward silence. It was even worse when I had a mountain of evidence that it could be used to time travel, but if I actually said so, not only would this researcher kick me out of her house, but also our government would probably find a way to disappear me even though I was thousands of miles away in a foreign country.”
He turned back to Qhoroali. “But I imagine you didn’t actually come here to talk about Ádeya-Shuznzyon and T’arse, right? You want me to make you some new substance.”
“I do,” said Qhoroali. She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her pack. “People created things in your old time that killed people just from being in their vicinity, right? They had some deadly aura. They talk about places that had to be completely abandoned because they were tainted.”
Cusäfä’s eyes narrowed. “You mean radioactive materials, I gather,” he said. “Yes, that existed. In fact, nearly everyone had been using it for power for hundreds of years by the time I was born, they had stopped doing stupid stuff with it at that point and knew how to use it safely. But I’m not going to make any of it for you.”
“Why not?” demanded Qhoroali. “I can’t find anything more destructive than that. If there’s something out there that can kill Time, it has to be that.”
“Because if I do, then everyone here will die,” said Cusäfä. “The infrastructure to contain it doesn’t exist in this time. Besides, it’s definitely not going to have any effect on Time, it barely has any effect on inorganic material in general.”
“I don’t know if any of the theories that Sapfita is or was a human are correct in any way,” said Qhoroali, slowly, “but I do think it’s very plausible that She might be at least somewhat organic.”
Cusäfä rolled his eyes. “Then you could just kill her with a sword, probably, right? Put that away,” he added, gesturing to Qhoroali’s papers. “I’m not making you something that dangerous.”
Qhoroali reluctantly put the papers away again. They sat around the small fire that burned inside the tent and talked for a while longer, about the tribe and their agricultural efforts, and Cusäfä’s new godson. At length, they left the settlement, and returned to the circle they would use to get back to the time where could take the train again.
“Dammit,” said Qhoroali, as she got the qoire bottles out again. “I thought for sure that was going to be the answer. I guess I’ll have to find another way.” Setsiana silently gave thanks to Cusäfä, both for declining to expose them to whatever terrible thing had been invented in the future, and for not giving Qhoroali what she needed to accomplish her goal.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Warm Heart #2: Worry
Styles and Supplies: Novelty Bead ("train whistle", given here), Panorama, Reimagining, Feathers (January 19, 1975: Establishment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Word Count: 2687
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Cusäfä
In-Universe Date: 1912.4.5.3, 21st century, (approximately) -10,000
Summary: Qhoroali pays another visit to Cusäfä.
Notes: I decided the first Cusäfä chapter was entirely too long and had way too much stuff in it, so I removed all of the worldbuilding that was not immediately relevant to that earlier part of the story and moved it into this later scene (about 1500 words of dialog, which has since been neatened up and expanded with more action beats). So if some stuff in here seems like it something you already read before, it's probably because you did. There is some new stuff in here, too, but since a large chunk of it is rewritten from the previous scene, it gets the Reimagining tag.
The following week, on the first day of Nyoacelya Lyuya, they took another trip to visit Cusäfä, just Setsiana and Qhoroali, this time. The train ride was much less stressful than it had been when done this last, although Setsiana had forgotten just how loud the train whistle was going to be, and was still startled by it. Looking around at the other people on board, now as just regular strangers and not as people who could potentially help her escape from Qhoroali, Setsiana thought she could see how they could see the journey as boring and unremarkable. She occupied herself with another romance she’d taken from Qhoroali’s collection while Qhoroali sewed, and the seventeen hours passed peacefully.
They met Cusäfä twelve thousand years in the past, and again went to his tent to chat.
“It’s nice to see you,” said Qhoroali. “How have you been?” It only sounded a little stilted.
Cusäfä smiled at her warmly. “Pretty good, actually. The harvest was good, and we’re starting to work on new crops. And, oh! One of my farmers-in-training has had a new baby, and they want me to be his god-father. For them, that means I will play an active role in bringing him up.” He laughed, somewhat giddy. “I will get to raise a child after all, and I didn’t have to get married to do it.”
Qhoroali was smiling, too, but there seemed to be some note of pain in it. “That’s great,” she said. “Would that there was something that could work out like that for me.”
Cusäfä looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Is this still about Cyaru, or is there someone else, now?”
Setsiana thought she saw Qhoroali’s eyes dart towards her and back again, very quickly, or maybe it was just her ever-hopeful imagination. “I don’t know,” Qhoroali said. “I just… I don’t know.”
Cusäfä shrugged. “I wanted to share a research breakthrough, actually. I was thinking about the family structures these people have, because of my new godson, and I realized they have some things in common with the system I told you about before, in Ádeya. And then I remembered — they do also worship the sun in Ádeya, they even still did during the time I came from. And… I think I might have an idea, now, about who these people are and where they came from. Do you know where Ádeya is?”
“Vaguely,” said Qhoroali. “It’s in the northern hemisphere, right?”
“I’d never even heard of it before you mentioned it last time,” said Setsiana.
“Right, then,” said Cusäfä. “It’s an island in the middle of the Endless Ocean, thousands and thousands of miles northwest of Shayansee. Or well, I guess you’re supposed to call it Ádeya-Shuznzyon, technically there were two countries there. But it was in the Ádeya part of it specifically where they worshiped the sun, though they also had both moons and Celyira in their pantheon.”
He got up then, and went to pick up his magical device off the top of a solar hub that sat against the wall of a tent, absently gesturing at it as he spoke. “I think I told you I visited there once, it’s a nice place. The mountains in Shuznzyon are the tallest in the world and people were constantly killing themselves trying to climb them for bragging rights, at that time. But while I was visiting there, I installed an Ádeyan dictionary on my phone for fun, and I’ve been looking through it as I learn more and more of these people’s language, here in this early time… I know the comparative method can’t possibly be reliable over this time scale. But I can see similarities. The people look similar too, these are the only two places I’ve been where every single person has hair as straight as a board.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, I’m probably very biased. But I think these people must come from one of the groups that somehow make it to Ádeya-Shuznzyon during this time period, here during the Warming. You know that we in NoraCheanya are related to the Shayanseen, right? For ages we called those shared ancestors the Ancient Shayanseen. They aren’t in Shayansee yet — they will walk over the south pole from southern Meandhshen to southern Shayansee during the warm period that’s coming. Global temperatures never rose high enough for that to happen again afterwards — well, except for briefly when we screwed everything up in the modern era.”
He put the device back down and looked more intensely at Qhoroali. “But this is the second warm period that’s coming now. There was a previous one, and, some people in my old time thought, a previous polar migration. People had started talking about a ‘North Shayansee People’, who crossed during the first warm period and moved north when the ice age came, and a ‘South Shayansee People’ who crossed during the second warm period and killed off all of the first group. There were just a few scraps of archaeological evidence left on the northern coasts of Shayansee attesting to the existence of first group, nothing more.”
He smiled, and his face became more animated. “But I think that before they were killed, some of them managed to escape across the sea and wind up in Ádeya. And others left even earlier, and wound up here, though they may ultimately die for a different reason. These people have a myth about crossing an ocean on rafts, following the rising sun to a new land. Going east, from the west. To here, from northern Shayansee, where the North Shayansee People are now.”
“How would they have crossed thousands of miles of ocean to the island you mentioned, if all they have is rafts?” Setsiana asked.
“I don’t know,” said Cusäfä. “Maybe they will have something better than rafts, by the time that happens. I don’t think it’s ever been proven exactly how humans first got to Ádeya-Shuznzyon, but we know for sure that it happened sometime within the next thousand years or so. That’s plenty of time to invent something better.”
“You said you visited there,” Qhoroali began, and then more hesitantly, continued, “And you knew someone who was involved in one of those split marriage arrangements. Although, I guess you must probably know some people here like that, too, if they also have that family structure.”
“I did,” said Cusäfä. “They don’t really have exactly the same arrangements here — the tribe uses a much more basic version of that system.” He picked up his device again. “That reminds me. I have some pictures of that time that I wanted to show you.” He stood and came over to where Qhoroali was standing, and began tracing arcane symbols in the air in front of the device. “Here, look,” he said. “Does she remind you of anyone?”
Qhoroali peered at the device. “Who am I supposed to be reminded of?”
“Doesn’t she look like you?”
“I mean, I guess maybe if you think every woman with my coloring looks like me.”
Setsiana cautiously moved over to join them. On the surface of the device was a small but very intricate picture: A lighter-skinned woman with black hair streaming behind her rode a gigantic white wolf as if it were a horse, dressed in a black cloak lined with white fur. In the background, more giant wolves howled, and another figure stood, almost obscured in shadow, dressed head to foot in a very traditional set of T’arsi armor. This figure was carrying a flag on a standard depicting the large moon, Yeari, on a field of blackness. The only thing that could be seen of their body between the joints of the armor was that the skin was very dark. Setsiana looked at Qhoroali and then back at the picture; there was a certain similarity to the woman riding the wolf.
“Who is she?” Qhoroali asked.
“A god, one of the Shuznzyon ones. Well, maybe the Shuznzyon one, they did call her Shuzn and then called themselves ‘Shuzn’s people’. Supposedly she led an army that killed the Creator, and then brought winter to Celyira, and accepts bribes to make it go away again. A dark kind of theology. They worshiped her in Ádeya, too, though they borrowed her as the personification of Yeari, since the Shuznzyon often used that imagery for her, and also winter, of course, and apparently she was also the patron of accountants and mathematicians for some reason.”
“Who is the T’arsi?” asked Setsiana. “Is that another god?”
“Sort of. In Shuznzyon tradition that person was a genderless demon who was Shuzn’s right hand during the war against the Creator; in Ádeya they were a shape-shifter who could be male or female or both depending on their whim. In Ádeyan tradition, they were sometimes considered a personification of the small moon, but they were more of a cultural hero or a trickster there than a true god.”
Cusäfä seemed hesitate slightly. “Their worship in Shuznzyon predates Shuznzyon’s contact with T’arse significantly, and by the time they did encounter T’arse, it was no longer common to see armor of this style there. But all of the older depictions clearly show this exact armor design. There was a good deal of argument among scholars about whether it was just a coincidence, or whether the islanders actually did somehow encounter T’arsis much earlier than was previously thought. It’s hard to say which theory seems less plausible; T’arse was barely interested in sea exploration even after longitude was solved.”
“What did T’arse think about it?” Setsiana wondered.
“Oh, they hated it, actually. The anthropologists there were constantly trying to show that the demon’s armor wasn’t accurate to real historical T’arsi armor, but personally, I’d say that it seemed like the evidence was against them. I never actually got a degree in anthropology, though, nor have I ever studied the history of T’arse in any true depth, so my opinion there probably doesn’t matter.”
“Really?” Qhoroali’s mouth quirked. “They weren’t trying to claim right of conquest there over it, or something?”
Cusäfä shook his head. “They were never really interested in conquest in the general case, and they had no interest at all in Shuznzyon. Their involvement in Meandhshen was always a more specific religious crusade.” He turned his head to face Setsiana more directly. “Do you know anything about their religion? Being what it is, a lot of people from outside of eastern continent didn’t know anything about it even in my time, and I’m guessing that was probably even more true before the information age. I know Qhoroali knows it from Liselye.”
Setsiana thought about the rug she’d at the T’arsi Fair all those months ago, with the being made up of a multitude of different people, who seemed to clearly be some kind of god. She had never thought about T’arsi religion much before, and the merchants had never seemed interested in talking about it, but now she was curious. “I don’t,” she admitted. “Liselye told me their wars have a religious reason, a long while back, but didn’t explain.”
“Well, it’s a strange one,” said Cusäfä. “I don’t know if I would explain it correctly, since I’m not from there, and haven’t studied them, but I used to go there fairly frequently to attend academic conferences. As I understand it, they originally believed that every person on the whole eastern continent, both T’arse and Meandhshen, was part of the collective consciousness that is their god. The god is actually named T’arse — it’s not a separate entity from the country, in their minds. So, because everyone on the continent is T’arse, everyone on the continent should rightly be part of the country of T’arse, as well.”
His mouth twisted. “That’s what the wars were about. Eventually people in Meandhshen got wise and started arguing that if they were all God, that meant T’arse wasn’t allowed to declare war on them, so the Will of T’arse at that time demoted them to being only possibly God — if they were killed in the war, they obviously weren’t God, but if they survived and became contributing citizens of T’arse, they were.”
His face relaxed, and he shrugged a bit. “They were strange even in non-religious matters, to be honest. I would go to a conference there, and afterwards, a researcher would invite me to her house, and introduce me to her husband… and her second husband, and her third husband, and then one of them would ask me how many wives I had, and another one would say ‘They only get one, there, dummy,’ and I would say ‘Actually, I never got married at all,’ and they would all look at me like I had three heads. And then they would change the subject and ask about qoire, since that’s the only thing they know about NoraCheanya other than the government’s insistence that time travel is real, and it’s rude to ask a visiting scientist if they believe in crackpot theories.”
He laughed a bit. “Anyway, they would ask why qoire was so incredibly illegal here when it’s pretty harmless and non-addictive and then I’d have to explain that it’s because the government thinks you can use it to time travel, and then there would be another awkward silence. It was even worse when I had a mountain of evidence that it could be used to time travel, but if I actually said so, not only would this researcher kick me out of her house, but also our government would probably find a way to disappear me even though I was thousands of miles away in a foreign country.”
He turned back to Qhoroali. “But I imagine you didn’t actually come here to talk about Ádeya-Shuznzyon and T’arse, right? You want me to make you some new substance.”
“I do,” said Qhoroali. She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her pack. “People created things in your old time that killed people just from being in their vicinity, right? They had some deadly aura. They talk about places that had to be completely abandoned because they were tainted.”
Cusäfä’s eyes narrowed. “You mean radioactive materials, I gather,” he said. “Yes, that existed. In fact, nearly everyone had been using it for power for hundreds of years by the time I was born, they had stopped doing stupid stuff with it at that point and knew how to use it safely. But I’m not going to make any of it for you.”
“Why not?” demanded Qhoroali. “I can’t find anything more destructive than that. If there’s something out there that can kill Time, it has to be that.”
“Because if I do, then everyone here will die,” said Cusäfä. “The infrastructure to contain it doesn’t exist in this time. Besides, it’s definitely not going to have any effect on Time, it barely has any effect on inorganic material in general.”
“I don’t know if any of the theories that Sapfita is or was a human are correct in any way,” said Qhoroali, slowly, “but I do think it’s very plausible that She might be at least somewhat organic.”
Cusäfä rolled his eyes. “Then you could just kill her with a sword, probably, right? Put that away,” he added, gesturing to Qhoroali’s papers. “I’m not making you something that dangerous.”
Qhoroali reluctantly put the papers away again. They sat around the small fire that burned inside the tent and talked for a while longer, about the tribe and their agricultural efforts, and Cusäfä’s new godson. At length, they left the settlement, and returned to the circle they would use to get back to the time where could take the train again.
“Dammit,” said Qhoroali, as she got the qoire bottles out again. “I thought for sure that was going to be the answer. I guess I’ll have to find another way.” Setsiana silently gave thanks to Cusäfä, both for declining to expose them to whatever terrible thing had been invented in the future, and for not giving Qhoroali what she needed to accomplish her goal.