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Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.
When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.
She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.
Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.
imeanforever
infinitely-stranger
One night, six and a half years after Arcane left her there, a piece of the night sky ripples and billows and drifts down to her clearing.
(Arcane's wings are pretty during the day, but they're stunning at night, as she had ample opportunity to discover on their journey; in the darkness they are mostly visible by their tiny stars, which appear and brighten and dim and fade away again over the course of minutes or hours.)
"Hello, Promise. You've settled in well."
(Arcane's wings are pretty during the day, but they're stunning at night, as she had ample opportunity to discover on their journey; in the darkness they are mostly visible by their tiny stars, which appear and brighten and dim and fade away again over the course of minutes or hours.)
"Hello, Promise. You've settled in well."
infinitely-stranger
"Oh, I'm very pleased with myself. I finally cracked the problem of forcing open a gate, and thereby incidentally found out why sorcery doesn't work in the mortal realm."
infinitely-stranger
"Yes really, I have tried and failed to describe it to several of the Queen's second-best sorcerers already, and sorcery does not work in the mortal realm because the harmonics there seem to consist entirely of an excruciating cacophony that even I couldn't cast a spell in."
imeanforever
"How long are you going to be around? My tree has room for you if you want." She did not have a spare bedroom in her previous tree architecture. This one has that, fast-grown for size and then coaxed for shape.
infinitely-stranger
"At least a few days, I think. If I wouldn't be crowding you."
imeanforever
Eeee. She doesn't say it but she thinks it. Eeeeee.
"What else did you see of the mortal world, or did you shut the gate right away because of the awful harmonics?"
"What else did you see of the mortal world, or did you shut the gate right away because of the awful harmonics?"
infinitely-stranger
"I peeked through long enough to glimpse a grassy field. All the grass was cut very short."
infinitely-stranger
"I really couldn't tell you. Maybe they feed it to their animals."
imeanforever
"Oh, right, animals. Thorn made me turn someone into a frog once."
infinitely-stranger
"Happily I have never been called upon to turn anyone into things, but I know the theory."
imeanforever
"It's tricky. Well, for me, anyway. And I wish he'd at least made it a sparrow. It seems less sad to be a sparrow than a frog."
infinitely-stranger
"The frog is more humiliating, though, which I suspect is part of the point."
imeanforever
"I think I've made progress on thinking about that... phase... less, but not as much as I'd like."