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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.
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imeanforever
imeanforever
So Promise gets some paper and writes a little note - He's here, come back! - and flies out to where she leaves notes. She leaves the note.
She returns to her tree. "Hey, you can close gates other people made, right?"
She returns to her tree. "Hey, you can close gates other people made, right?"
imeanforever
"Two, but one of them I made myself. Secret's last master was unvassalizable and mortal. I didn't want to kill her and couldn't expect to keep her under control for long enough for you to arrive and I can't close her gate, so I made a gate facing the one she used to get here so she couldn't come back that goes to the middle of a mortal world ocean."
imeanforever
"Eight hours, maybe? But it's not very visible from the air, I'm not sure I could catch it fast-flying."
infinitely-stranger
"It's a pair of open gates to the mortal realm. I don't think I'll have much trouble noticing it if I know more or less where to look."
infinitely-stranger
Un-zoom.
"Oh, that's tidy," he says. "Let's see - the most sensible way to close them is probably the original first, then yours."
"Oh, that's tidy," he says. "Let's see - the most sensible way to close them is probably the original first, then yours."
infinitely-stranger
He studies the gates. It's easy enough to tell which is which. And closing gates isn't too difficult, although it's a little more time-consuming than he'd like. Lack of practice. Maybe he should keep a sharper eye out for stray gates in his travels.
imeanforever
When he indicates that he has closed the gate that was already there, Promise shuts hers, and then starts scattering the rocks she left.
infinitely-stranger
Arcane helps. The rocks are scattered.
Back to Promise's tree they zoom.
"So how would you go about overthrowing the Queen?"
Back to Promise's tree they zoom.
"So how would you go about overthrowing the Queen?"
imeanforever
"I'd want to know more about how the whole court is structured before formulating a plan. You probably have a lot of the major names yourself, right?"
infinitely-stranger
"Yes. I don't tend to forget a name once I'm told it, even a useless one like Alianor. I've been around long enough to accumulate quite a few."
imeanforever
"But I assume there are some contingencies against attack that don't require active intervention, and while presumably the other sorcerers can't beat you on quality they have us very much outnumbered, and there might be some actual loyalty to the Queen in there that will persist even if they're freed via Secret - so insofar as that's done we might want to be careful - and I can command Secret but I'd soonest avoid it beyond rescinding orders she picks up from other people as needed."
imeanforever
"She's... It's sort of hard to get a clear picture of what she wants. I think her development went a little strange because she was caught by her first master literally right after she started. So detailed plans will have to wait for sussing out her level of voluntary involvement."
imeanforever
"Yeah. We can introduce you to her after she finds the note and go from there."