Better not linger in her starting place too much longer. Yellow's faster than her and may have already come home to a wreck. Thorn might have a habit of checking up on the place, even, just in case. She's invisible, inaudible, unsmellable - that won't help if he sends someone thorough. Or comes in person.
She sets out.
She's been flying for about thirty minutes after her shopping trip when she falls through a tear and squeaks inaudibly and lands in the middle of -
Well that was...a loss. Definitely. But went about as well as a loss of that scale possibly could, in retrospect. They get back to doing shadowy conspiracy things.
And Promise goes and hashes out long-term orders for Peak's court, takes pictures of a few of the fairies from it, has a dinner and a sleep and a breakfast and interviews with fifty-seven ex-Fallen new Kept, posts a portrait of Peak to her photo blog captioned I met friendlier-than-average fairies yesterday! This is Peak; she's a shining splicer. Pictures of her girlfriend tomorrow., sends Dragon some emails, and investigates what portions of the internet are good for finding people to hire who are not terrible in any way.
And then Glaistig Uaine shows up. She walks in to the Hawthorn settlement, intimidating capes by her presence and not being shy about threatening them with her spirits but also not killing anyone. (All the cowering might be contributing to that decision.)
"Where is Promise?"
She is surprised, but not too surprised to hit Glaistig Uaine with a "Stop. You may, deploying no powers, speak."
The Faerie Queen waves a hand. "It is not for you to give orders to me unsolicited. And you need not defend, I am not here to kill you or your vassals."
"What are you here for, then?" Promise asks, noting the non-stopped-ness of Glaistig Ulaine's hand.
You are to provide me the use of your orders. Ensure that I cause the deaths of none, preserving the shades only of those whose part ended through some other action."
"I can't do that while you're preventing yourself from hearing me directly, or whatever else you're doing to block the orders," Promise points out.
"Be warned that should you decide to attempt any betrayal, I will be informed and it will fail." One of her ghosts disappears, replaced by a different distorted figure.
These are not optimal order-composing conditions, but. "Cause no human deaths." Does she go in for other nastiness? Would that constitute 'betrayal'? Promise hates not knowing what she's working with. "Is there anything else?"
She shakes her head. "You plan to resist the King of the Faeries. He cannot be bested, but your failure is no concern of mine."
The Differently-Spelled-Faerie Queen is already on her way out, which she does by dematerializing.
"Scion's body can be gated to after all. What do you need to know to get us there?"
"A geographical-style description of the place and a complete accounting of the evidence that he definitely is planning to destroy the world and you aren't just murdering a depressed widower who killed all three Endbringers."
We know that all the precogs we have access to predict a large fraction of the human race dying in the next few years to decades, and none of them can see the cause. With the Endbringers gone, that leaves very few other candidates. We know he's the source of powers, and that powers feed off conflict. He wanted Earth at war.
We know he was planning to destroy Earth, every Earth, as an ordinary part of his species' life. Contessa saw that before she and I killed his counterpart, interrupting their cycle.
And if this is all a case of mistaken identity, if Scion is somehow not the second entity, then the golden man in the sky will be untouched by all of this."
"Door to Hawthorn." The Doctor steps through.
"Are there strategic options that allow me to try to talk to him before attacking?" Promise asks.
Before we try, there is something you need to see. Door to Cauldron." A rectangle appears in thin air, light streaming out from it. "It's in here."
"The body of Scion's counterpart. Body is perhaps the wrong term, as from a human perspective it's more like a place than a corpse, but it's also the best description I can give of what our destination looks like."
There are walls, artificial ones, but this place is vast. It extends for miles, with all of it filled by what might as well be beautiful marble statues of human body parts. Near where the door deposited them, enough pieces come together to form most of a humanoid shape. Long-haired, no discernible sex, the same gray as all their surroundings. It's held up by the unfinished parts of its body: two arms and a leg trail off into fractal patterns, the same is true of its back, and its head is hanging. The fractal pieces stretch out into space, covering more area and becoming thinner until they gradually disappear into thin air. Nothing else is holding up the humanoid figure.
"It was making this body when we killed it. As you can see, it's Scion, with a different color scheme and body design. All this, around us, is what his real body looks like. A forest where all the trees are made of the same material as humans. His will be alive, and gold instead of gray. And his won't have pieces disappearing into nowhere like this does. Those are vanishing into worlds beside this one, but I believe that when an entity lands safely it places itself on a single earth. Contessa spoke to Glaistig Uaine, who claimed—correctly—that no powers from either entity can reach the world where he keeps his garden. A world, singular.
Will you be able to gate to it?"
"...Probably. I can't normally gate to people as targets, and whether this is enough of a landscape feature to get around that requirement, I don't know."
"The target will be larger, since Scion's garden with luck won't be spread across realities as we feared. That earth might even have no landscape at all other than this."