This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
When the party has died down, Isabella, for one, is well and truly exhausted. She explores the palace until she finds a room with a bed in it, and into this bed she flops, still in her clothes and holding her staff and carrying the cordial in her pocket. She sleeps late, because the party kept her up so late and she hadn't really slept the night before; but around noon, she stirs, and gets up, and goes looking for James and wherever her backpack may have got to. The backpack she finds in the great hall where the principal mass of the party was; some enterprising creature took both bags from the battlefield at Beruna up to the castle for them, and she only wishes she knew who it was. She takes her bag to her room and carries James's with her and continues looking for her friend.
Her cordial's in her bag. She bolts towards the slow creatures, reaching for it. Sprinkle, sprinkle, sip.
She needs her air walking shoes.
"FLY," she warns the creatures, "HELP EACH OTHER, DON'T TRUST THE BRIDGE IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO -" He set up an ambush, there could easily be something wrong with the bridge, but there's a lot of wings here.
Shoes or warning James -
"FIND KNIGHTS," she says, still running away from Winter and rummaging in her bag for her shoes. Here's one, here's the other -
And Winter's hand closes on the back of her cloak and he yanks her off her feet. He hasn't even drawn a blade, though he carries a sword at his side and multiple visible daggers in assorted places - he hauls her toward him, reaching for her scepter.
The scepter is the most important thing, after maybe only the cordial, without it she's cut off why didn't she have a pin of knighthood without it she can barely walk. She reaches for it too. "JAMIE -"
Winter is stronger, has better reach, has more experience in close-quarters scuffles - he wrestles the scepter away from her in mere moments and tosses it away into the picturesque bushes. His icy blood stings her hands. He picks her up and slings her over his uninjured shoulder.
She's holding her shoes, she's wearing her bag. She puts the shoes on her hands and claws at the air. It's solid, like that, but slippery.
His blood freezes the water's surface solid enough to walk on. He catches one of Isabella's hands, pulls the shoe from it, tosses the shoe out over the ice - it hits the edge of the wide frozen ring around the island. When he gets the other shoe, he throws it in the other direction, and it reaches open water and floats there.
If James is mobilizing forces - and she must be, if Isabella reached her with the scepter, if anyone has found a knight - she does not seem to be mobilizing them fast enough.
He grabs the cordial from her hand too, and shoves it into some pocket or other, and then he draws a dagger and stabs himself in the same spot again, with a little giggle. And now he is holding a dagger.
Shit. What does she have - besides skin that's freezing to her clothes - her pocketknife manifested a tuning wrench, maybe it has something for ice monsters - it turns into a small ice pick. That will not help, injuring him will not help. Lighter. She pulls her lighter and attempts to set him on fire.
"Would you like to know all the ways it's impossible to kill me?" he continues, in a bright brittle voice.
She puts her lighter back in her bag. He can't possibly know what her Christmas presents are, but he seems pretty generically invincible and she's quickly running out of tools, no wonder he hasn't taken the bag or broken her wrists or anything yet.
He does not sound like he thinks it is lovely. These are the emphatically fake-cheerful tones of someone sarcastically remarking that it's just wonderful how their house has caught fire and burned to the ground taking with it all of their belongings and their elderly grandmother and the family pet.
Well, of her options, which largely consist of "talking to him" and "not doing that" -
"What does happen if you cut your head off?"
This discussion has taken them to the shore of the lake. There are no creatures around.
His second shoulder wound is starting to heal - he wades the last ten feet to the rocky shore, then puts the queen down on a wet rock and splashes water on the injury so it ices over and stops bleeding.
He'd certainly notice if she started unfolding her pocket house's door to hide in it, and she's not sure he couldn't just beat down the door from its magical freestanding position it gets if she doesn't unfold the house all the way. What if she shot him in the eye - or can she pin him by his clothes to something, long enough to shuffle away -
- no, realistically she can't fight him.
Lighter comes out again. She flicks it on and then flings it at the nearest cluster of plants, some shrubs that start where the shore stones end. Convenient fire. Leave a clue in bright gold to show the knights where she was last able to leave a trail.
Winter looks at her, and looks at the fire, and makes a thoughtful 'hm' sort of noise, and then picks her up again - removing her bag in the process - and throws her into the fire and her bag into the lake. It catches on a jagged rock and sinks only so far.
She sits in the fire, hood up, cloak around her, teeth gritted. If she gets out of this she is taking a rose pin and who cares if it's redundant or stupid to be a knight and a queen, have a pin and a scepter, Jamie, Jamie -
Winter steps into the fire - his clothes catch in a few places, but meltwater from his body puts them out before they can be too badly damaged.
"Do not doubt that I can find a more effective fire to throw you into," he says, picking her up again. "It was not in my original plan, but you make the option so tempting, with all this foolishness."
The tree catches, but he smothers the fire with a melting hand; the flood of meltwater puts out the bushes, too, on his way through. He stoops to pick up the lighter and flings it into the lake.
From there, he gets under cover of a tumble of tall jagged rocks, and continues carrying Isabella over his shoulder through progressively darker and tighter spaces until there is no light at all and she can only tell the location of the walls when an outlying arm or leg bumps into them. Some sort of tunnel, one must presume.
"Such as if I were crushed under an enormous rock?" he asks, crouching in the perfect dark to feel along a wall. "I tried that. I passed the next several years as a very flat, very uncomfortable pile of ice shards."
"Have you tried jumping into a volcano? There's one on the Isles. It would probably evaporate all your meltwater on contact."
He shrugs, and finds whatever he's looking for. There is a click and a slight draft. He carries Isabella a short way and then, presumably, closes whatever door he just opened, before setting off again along the new tunnel.