Name: The Last Day of History
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #10: Final Hour
Supplies and Styles: Panorama
Word Count: 3460
Rating: G
Warnings: (Fantasy) organized religion
Characters: Setsiana, Zlúnrays, Gyélhwis
In-Universe Date: 1647.6.2.1 (1st day of the 2nd week of the 6th month)
Notes: I've written about 75% of the first half/part of this story already, so I've assigned prompts to every scene that's either started or planned and plan to post them here in order, filling in the missing pieces as I go. This is the very beginning, and contains mostly setting-establishing history and worldbuilding, hopefully framed in an easily-digestible way. Let me know if I've made any mistakes formatting or tagging the post.


Timelines branch at every possible decision point, every moment when something could have gone differently, and all of the branches form a brilliant tree of possibilities - or at least that's what they teach in the junior priestess preparation track. Then, after graduation from the preparation track and induction as an actual junior priestess, they tell you that actually, most decisions don't matter that much, a lot of the timelines are pretty much identical and it doesn't wind up mattering what color tie you used to secure your braid that day.

The doctrine of Free Choice states that although the contents of the timeline tree as a whole are fixed and cannot be changed by any act of mortal will, all humans have the free agency to choose which timeline they wind up in. Supposedly one’s good deeds lead to a better timeline, and the bad deeds to a worse one… but in practice, many timelines are very, very similar. Not all possible timelines exist, either - some things that could have happened simply never do, in any timeline, for reasons unknown even to the priesthood. So a decision may not have mattered anyway - it may have been metaphysically impossible to choose another path. But it’s also impossible for any mere human to know which decisions these are; one could spend their entire life searching all of the timelines of the universe and never find the one they’re looking for, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There are really that many timelines.

The decisions that do matter, though, can be foundational. The decision that mattered the most, maybe the most out of every decision that had ever been made by anybody, wasn't even a good decision; not an epic choice between right and wrong, nothing that would be accounted a good or bad deed by any priestess, or even something that was considered all that carefully. It was informed only by Setsiana’s despair.

---

The day before had started normally, with Setsiana working the temple's schoolteaching shift. In the break before the last period, she lingered in the teachers' lounge as long as she could, tracking the time in her head, but no one else came in. When she suspected that the temple clock was due to trigger the hour chime, she gathered her things and left; she would have to talk to Yeimicha later. That was fine, though; it was a good day.

The room let out into the temple's wide entry corridor, which terminated a long ways to Setsiana’s right in the sanctuary where the lay people gathered for Nyoacelya Lyuya (not as grand as the ones in the temples in Nwórza, but it had its own sort of dignity), and to her left in the open archway to the outside, where the first hints of fall were starting to color the leaves of the trees. The corridor was dotted with doors to the classrooms where children were taught, the door to the teachers' lounge that Setsiana had just left, and, near the outside entrance, the door to the public library with books mainly in Vrelian - here or there a imperially mandated publication in the Capital Dialect, or a reader in QuCheanya, the language of the priesthood, which in both cases would sit and gather dust from disuse. Just before the entrance to the sanctuary were two smaller locked doors to its right and left sides, leading to the classrooms and study rooms for the junior priestesses, and the offices of the full priestesses, respectively, as well as the restricted libraries accessible only to the occupants of the temple, or only to the full priestesses. The corridor was just now full of students and the other teachers returning from the break; she did a quick scan, but did not see Yeimicha anywhere.

As the hour chime sounded for the first of the afternoon hours, Setsiana hurried to a classroom door and pulled it open. It was the last class she would teach today, actually the last class she would teach until winter began and the next term started. Some years there were more students and she would have one set to teach in the morning hours and one set in the afternoon, but this year there was just the afternoon class. Her students were the children of craftsmen and shop owners, and took their break from school in the fall, while the children of farmers and farm workers took their break in the summer, when they were needed at home. In Nwórza, the capital of the state of Vrel, there was a much smaller, more elite class of students who were the children of the Governor and his aides, and the various hangers-on and government officials and minor nobles that he kept about his palace, and their season of freedom was the spring, but none of those privileged children would ever be educated in a small town like Syarhrít. All three classes were taught the same curriculum (although the nobles’ children surely received other tutoring), but the division of classes did change the social circles that the children formed growing up, and it wasn't an accident that Setsiana had been assigned to teach this particular class, when she had grown up the daughter of a woodworker and had attended this same class herself fourteen years ago.

The children were all back from their break, and for once, not a single one was late. No one was ever late for the last history lesson of Setsiana’s year. In place of the clothing they had worn earlier in the day, they now wore a variety of costumes, some in fanciful suits of armor made out painted stiff paper and outlandish helmets featuring animal horns and feathers with artistic streaks of dirt on their cheeks, others in more traditional outfits that had been modeled according to written accounts of the nobility of the ancient kingdom, their foremost a little king in the ancient green and gold regalia, his right hand glittering with rings of colored glass. A cluster of girls wore miniature versions of Setsiana’s own dress, all black with a careful branching timeline tree picked out in silver embroidery, the root beginning at the neckline and the branches spreading out across the bodice and a full three quarters of the way around the skirt, the traditional nurefye that all priestesses and juniors in all times and places wore. They were ten years old, some of them eleven, and they were ready for the last and best day of history class like they hadn't been all year long. They had studied the history this year, and now they would show off what they had learned.

Setsiana did one last sweep of the room to make very sure that no one was missing, and then clapped her hands. They took this as the signal she intended; there was a flurry of commotion as they all got up from their seats at once, chairs and desks were moved away from the area that was to become the stage, props and backdrops were pulled out of storage closets, friends were asked to check the state of each other's hair. Setsiana helped the little priestesses do up the braids the proper way - the hair was divided three ways, and each section became a small braid (sometimes a very small braid; they'd been instructed to grow out their hair, but some had forgotten until much too late), each held with a rubber band and then all three secured together at the ends with a hairpin. Setsiana herself only had the one braid in the middle thus far; she would get the second when her first paper was published, and the third when she was invested as a full priestess. The rubber bands came from the future; which century, she wasn't sure, and she'd overheard a priestess saying that they also came from an island that wasn't even on the map yet here in 1647. The official political position of the priesthood was that while priestesses might time travel for their own reasons, they never did such things as change the past or bring back future technology, and that the secret of time travel must be carefully kept because careless use of it could have dire consequences if people did such things. The reality was that such consequences simply were not possible; if one traveled into the past to change something, it would inevitably turn out that the change had been there all along, or else that it had happened in another timeline. The priestesses regularly maintained supplies of small marvels that were apparently as common as dirt in later times: rubber bands, self-inking pens, staplers and their metal staples, and erasers that removed pencil from paper were the primary ones that Setsiana used regularly. Many remedies that were dispensed through the pharmacy had also not strictly speaking been discovered yet. During (or just before) the plagues that sometimes came to NoraCheanya via Meandhshen, priestesses from the temple’s future would arrive with great quantities of cures, and back in the fifth century the time travelers had laid out to the younger priesthood the proper ways to avoid the spread of diseases, and these had been added into the then relatively new public school curriculum. None of them in the present time had much idea how any of the cures, or the rubber bands and pens and erasers were made, or why they worked, but it was apparently so easy and cheap to buy them in large quantities in the right time periods that no one needed to. The girls would not wonder what secured their braids, but Setsiana would take the rubber bands back at the end of the class, lest their parents find them and wonder.

After sorting out the braids, she retrieved the larger chair from behind her own desk, cleared a space among the remaining students’ chairs, and sat down to watch, and take notes. She still took notes in her native Vrelian. After eight years of study and ample opportunity for daily use, she spoke QuCheanya easily, but it took too long to write it by hand for it to compete with the simpler shapes of the standard Cheanya syllabary for note-taking, and her notes were for her own benefit only. QuCheanya was far simpler to set for the printing press, but not to write by hand, especially if you wanted to do it properly and have the character frames in red. She'd seen Yeimicha take her notes in (monochrome) QuCheanya, but she had no idea how Yeimicha had learned to write it so quickly.

The play commenced. A child carried a title card across the area designated as the stage stating that it was the year of Sapfita’s Gift. The king was meeting with his advisers, who were telling him the news that the terrible Tuari hoard was about to attack, and would surely kill every Cheanya man, woman, and child with the army they had amassed. The king bemoaned that had the threat been brought to his attention sooner, he might have been able to prepare; one of the advisers nervously reminded him that it had, many times actually, and was summarily dismissed from the meeting.

The scenery then rotated; the walls of the king’s castle rolled away to left on wheels, the king and little courtiers going with it, while the painted backdrop was rolled up on a spindle on the left at the same time that more backdrop was spooled out of another on the right, giving the impression that frame of view was moving to the right, and the children dressed as the Tuari in their feathers and animal horns and dirt-streaked faces moved on stage with the backdrop, yelling and making threatening gestures with their wooden weapons. The rolling backdrop had been the idea of Zlúnrays, the girl operating the left spindle. She was a quiet child who did poorly with loud environments and large groups, and she occasionally required one on one help, but she was quite bright and did well when her needs were met. There had been another one like this in Setsiana’s class two years ago. The priestesses classified it as a disorder of the senses, that made everything feel too much and too overwhelming, coupled with a difficulty with relating to others, and Setsiana had guidelines for what to do for such children to help them succeed.

The scenery rotated back to the left, and the king and his advisers came back on stage. Some new children entered the scene: the little priestesses. Their leader told the king that all was not lost and that the Eternal Source of Wisdom, the Past, Present, and Future, Sapfita, had blessed the priesthood with a generous Gift: a way to transport the entire Cheanya people back in time 200 years in order to better prepare for the attack. Her name was Gyélhwis, a vocal and gregarious child who had been the first to volunteer for her role in the play and was very keen on all things to do with the priesthood and time travel. She was a perfect candidate to become a real priestess someday, and one of Setsiana’s duties today was to give the current full priestesses the names of any such girls in her class. They would be separated out to begin the junior priestess preparation track the following spring, and unlike the other children, who would graduate from schooling at age 16, they would continue until they turned 20 and were ready to become junior priestesses. The junior priestess preparation track took their break from school during the winter, the worst season for it; only those who would continue for 10 years with only winter breaks were considered dedicated enough to become priestesses. Yeimicha taught an early year of the junior priestess track, but some of the later years would be taught by full priestesses and not juniors.

The king dismissed the talk of time travel as errant nonsense and returned to bickering with his advisers. Night fell as a new backdrop was produced. A new set of children came on stage from the left, a line of boys in stiff paper armor with the sigils of the ancient kingdom drawn on the chests and shoulders, and a number of others crouched on the ground, playing the part of frightened women and children. The soldiers swung their swords, seemingly as an experiment, and some of them fell over. The Tuari came back on from the right and made another threatening display. Then the priestesses entered again from the left.

There wasn’t a clear and precise description of how the first successful time travel had happened, not even for Setsiana, just as there weren’t very many consistent descriptions of what the Tuari had actually looked like or what they had worn to go to war, so their costumes were largely left to the imaginations of the children in these plays. Modern Mirrors were flat objects that were used on a table or other surface, and their operation required three drops of the extract of qoire leaves under the tongue, but Setsiana would not be allowed to learn the technical details of their operation until she achieved status as a full priestess, and these children had never seen a Mirror at all and were not supposed to even know what it looked like. This class had constructed a tall oval out of some wire, not unlike an elongated mundane mirror that might hang on a wall, wrapped with pale blue cloth. Two of the little priestesses held it upright, while Gyélhwis instructed the besieged Cheanya to enter the oval, which they did, one at a time. A child hidden behind the backdrop made what they thought was an appropriate sound effect every time someone stepped through. The Tuari acted confused, and then retreated from the stage. The backdrop once again returned to daytime, and all of the children who had gone through the oval came back out, one at a time, again with a sound effect. Soldiers were sent out, and came back reporting finding the Cheanya people of 200 years ago in a nearby settlement. A title card carried across the stage declared it to be 200 years before the year of the Gift.

The king called another meeting, with all the advisers, the soldiers, the priestesses, and the women and children. Plans were made, the adviser who had been sent out earlier was welcomed back and given a project to oversee, the soldiers made promises to improve and train future generations to face the battle they could not. The king even inclined his head to Gyélhwis and thanked her. But then he said: “We look forward to using this technology in the future. Will the priesthood share its knowledge with their rightful king?”

Gyélhwis said, “That depends on what our rightful king deems fit to share with us.” Most of the lines in the play had been written by the children, with occasional help, but these two had, as almost always, been written by Setsiana.

All of the children exited the stage, and another title card declared that 200 years had passed. Tuari came back on from right, in the same confused state they had been in earlier, asking each other if anyone had seen where the Cheanya had gone. They pointed offstage to the left: “I think that’s them!” The soldiers reentered there, wearing armor with different sigils and differently-shaped helmets, and larger weapons in a wider variety of styles. “They don’t look the same!” said a girl playing a Tuari warrior. “There are more of them!” another one said. The soldiers advanced across the stage, and Tuari retreated off stage to the right. There were offstage sounds of many wooden weapons hitting each other.

The other children came back on stage as the soldiers returned from the right; they had all shed their outer costumes, revealing a second set of costumes worn underneath, and the boys who had worn fake facial hair pieces had traded them to the ones who previously had not; they had become a different set of people, from 200 years in the future. There were cheers and celebration. The king declared himself Emperor of the entire island, ennobled a number of advisers and gave out medals of honor to some of the soldiers. The priestesses waited quietly, but were not recognized. They had not changed costumes; priestesses were priestesses in any time and place, with the same unchanging dress and braids in all contexts.

Gyélhwis asked: “Have you forgotten about those who made this victory possible?”

The newly crowned Emperor said, “Of course we haven’t forgotten about your help all those years ago. But today belongs to the soldiers and the advisers who contributed in the present time. Perhaps if the priesthood showed us how the miracle was accomplished, they would be recognized as well.”

Gyélhwis replied, “You will know how it was done when you appear to be properly grateful for it.”

That was probably not actually true, but it was, again, dialog that had been provided by Setsiana, quoted from the actual event 1647 years ago. She couldn’t imagine any amount of good will that the Emperor could provide in the current day that would convince the priesthood to give up its secret. But the priestess who had originally said that had had foreknowledge that no attempt would ever be made; a document had been delivered by priestesses from the future 36 years prior to the victory against the Tuari that described the Emperor’s continued unwillingness to acknowledge the priesthood for their help throughout all of time. That document was technically its own progenitor and had no proper author, but it was actually correct. Some who studied history outside the temple argued that if it had never been delivered and the priestesses had not been angered by it ahead of time, things might have happened differently, but it was difficult or impossible to confirm what events may have taken place in timelines where the document had never arrived and the modern priesthood had never formed, and the priesthood was generally uninterested in such timelines.

The play having concluded, Setsiana stapled her notes together, retrieved all of the rubber bands, and recruited the class for one final school activity before they began their fall break: putting the classroom back to rights. Over all, this year’s play was not a bad effort, the principal actors had been good enough and it had been well-staged, considering. It was no Mázghwent, but Mázghwent would unfortunately never deign to write a play about something that was even so much as ten years old, let along 16 and a half centuries.