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Thinking is hard.
She knows, she knows that it's safe when her beloveds both sleep - that they can read nothing while they dream - but every thought is so relentlessly punished when the demon is awake, and the parts of her mind that generate thoughts have stopped trying. She focuses, when she can come up with anything worth focusing on, or just on breathing or clouds or a tree, as much as she can. The demon "hyperfocuses" on gentle thoughtless love, as much as he can. She sleeps too, as much as she can. And none of these solutions lead to her having thoughts.
There's not enough thinking left for her to register much horror about it. But there are parts of her remaining. Automatic reactions to things, that can pass from her memories through her actions without her intervening much at all on the level of consciousness. She has enough terror of oblivion in her not to look contemplatively at knives. She has enough of an echo of what it used to mean to her to love someone to ache inside if her beloved thinks of harming himself, to beg him not to. She has enough access to her own memories to recognize the strange door, the second time it presents itself to her, and to go in without fear, holding her book and her pen that she has no real reason to carry anymore but holds out of old affection the way a child slightly too old for a stuffed toy may clutch at it.
The blank book is no good to her anymore, but it feels good to hold it, and she does.
The door may not take her far enough away from her beloved to protect her if he wakes while she is there, but it is somewhere to go and sit and wait for her thousand-year span to elapse, and she enters.
small_magics
dark_light
[I was thinking something like - how vampire mates work in Aurum. Those only usually work out and when they don't the keener half can get deluded about it in a hurry. Something like that.]
small_magics
Isibel opens the door. It leads to a pretty little house, beautifully decorated, listlessly maintained. Something comes over her - her breaths drop into even rhythm and she starts walking with singleminded purpose. Out the door, onto a subtle path, up.
dark_light
Amariah wraps herself and Path in invisibility before following the elf out of the building.
small_magics
Isibel snaps out of whatever-it-is when they reach the cave where her beloveds live.
She tucks herself under the demon's arm and closes her eyes. "Beloved," she murmurs. She hasn't tried to wake him on purpose before and doesn't really know how.
She tucks herself under the demon's arm and closes her eyes. "Beloved," she murmurs. She hasn't tried to wake him on purpose before and doesn't really know how.
dark_light
In a moment Isibel's collapsed asleep against her demon.
"Hello," Amariah says to the demon in a low voice, having pentagoned the language.
"Hello," Amariah says to the demon in a low voice, having pentagoned the language.
dark_light
"My name is Isabella Amariah. You can call me Amariah. I'm an alternate version of her. There are nine more of us all from under different burning suns, and more of you, too. I can bring them here, or we can all meet somewhere else, and we will try to help her. She said to consult you." Her aura, in addition to announcing that she's a witch and powerful, is emanating anxious concern (for Isibel) and controlled, wary anger (at the demon; she does not know yet if it's justified or not so it has yet to be slain).
endragoned
"Help her how? Kill me? She doesn't want anyone to kill me," he says, like this fact is a source of despair.
dark_light
"I don't know exactly. Magic. I don't know what kind of magic you have working here but we've got a few kinds of our own and we might be able to - wall her off from you somehow," says Amariah, the anger subsiding. "Or - well, anyway, we'll want to all work on this together, the last time one of us got broken she'd also been split into two and one of her was fine so she could manage by herself but there's not an extra of this one, is there?"
endragoned
"No," he says, cuddling the one of her that there is. "What is your magic? What do you need me to do?"
dark_light
"I have three kinds. We need you to explain what it is that is going on that hurts her. And tell us what she wants, when we don't know for sure, because goddesses know she can't. So we know how to take it apart and let her out. I'm going to tell the others now," she adds. [Jane.]
mind_game
[Shell Bell volunteers Atlantis as a meeting place if this cave is unsuitable,] Jane broadcasts to all present a minute later.
endragoned
"Does Atlantis have more room?" says the demon. "If there are ten of you - and I should wake my love," he flicks his tail against the dragon's side, "if you can keep my Isibel sleeping - there won't be room here."
mind_game
[There's room in the Atlantis palace for an entire Bellparty including the dragon and then some.]
dark_light
"She'll stay asleep till I wake her - or in two days, whichever comes first, in case something happens."
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