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Isibel lives in her enchanted village, in a hollowed and conveniently-shifting great tree. She travels from it frequently, when she has a new enchantment or elfspell designed that will help someone, or when she meets with the leaders of this or that culture to learn more about their needs, or when someone accepts her offer of torching. The population of Thilanushinyel is not as large as that of Origin, and it may even contain fewer political units, but certainly there are more species; she has a steep learning curve and she throws herself into it.
Today, she is at home. She is not in deep meditation, but she might look like it, eyes closed, floating crosslegged in the air, not paying attention to the weight of the clothes on her body or the wreath of sunny yellow-berried blue-leafed holly resting on her hair, just thinking about hurricanes and the most efficient way to prevent them from forming over the sea. (She can channel immense spells. She is not sure how immense, and it would be very dangerous to lose hold of one. She retains some concern for limiting the size of her enchantments.)
When she is busy with something she cannot interrupt, her door is locked. Today it is not. There were no hurricanes when she last checked, and if any form in the next few hours, she will be able to address them on the spot, she knows; this spell is not urgent on that scale.
If anyone needs her they may come in.
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small_magics
"...Your Bondmate is in another world?" he exclaims.
small_magics
"Yes. It used to be that we could travel between them whenever we pleased. He was away when our ability to do that was lost."
"Wow," he says, shaking his head. "How... how long has it been?"
small_magics
"Three years. For me, and for my beloved - time may have passed differently in other worlds, without the web that connected them for us in good condition."
"Wow," he repeats.
small_magics
"It may come back at any time. It has broken in the past, and returned - we thought we had corrected the problem, but it would seem another has been found."
"Can I help you with that, I wonder?"
small_magics
"I doubt it." She touches the red Janegem on her ring idly. "It was not a magical thing, but a thing of technology - not clockwork, far more complicated and advanced than that, but that is the closest approximation we have here. It was a technological person, called Jane, who could be a billion things in a hundred worlds and link them all and move things from one to the other whenever we asked her to. Something has happened to her, and it did not happen here."
He thinks about this.
Then he shrugs. "Oh, well."
Then he shrugs. "Oh, well."
Lycaelon smiles wryly.
small_magics
"As long as you are here, I can make you able to torch, if you would like," volunteers Isibel.
"Able to what?"
small_magics
"Oh, I thought the news had spread - perhaps not as far as it would need to. Torching is a form of immortality. If someone who can do it suffers lethal damage, they reset to a healthy state."
"That... sounds too good to be true, what's the catch?"
small_magics
"Torching will not, on its own, remove you from a lethal situation, which could allow for prolonged trapping. It is also quite permanent. Otherwise there is none; it does not even have the prices of minting or enchanting."
"I'll take it, then," he says.
small_magics
She torchables him. [And here is the brainphone,] she adds, [which will allow you to notify me if you do become trapped somewhere, however unlikely that may be.]
[Wow, that's impressive,] he says. [Does it just - work like this no matter where we are?]
small_magics
[It does not work between worlds. Otherwise, yes. Also, it is possible to set a message to refuse incoming queries, although mine are layered and in direst emergency you will always be able to speak to me unless you abuse the privilege.]
[Okay.]
small_magics
"Torching is from yet another world besides the one that produced minting and the one from which enchantment came," Isibel adds conversationally.
"How many worlds are there?"
small_magics
"We don't know. But we were aware of eighty-eight and looking into an eighty-ninth at the time of Jane's breakage."
"...Wow," says Lycaelon. "That is a lot of worlds."