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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
Promise reminds herself that one of the things she does actually know from personal experience with Arcane is that he is pretty comfortable with silences. She goes and harvests tasty hanging moss, enough for two.
infinitely-stranger
"You've been to the libraries, have you? Which do you like better?"
imeanforever
"I actually like the one that's farther away a little more, but the nearer one is fine for most purposes. How did you know I'd visited them both?"
infinitely-stranger
"I went by them to check that they were indeed both still there, and I noticed they had both gathered knowledge about your place of origin that matched your experience."
imeanforever
"The first one took a day's worth of stories for membership. The second one I had to not only do that but also figure out a harmonic map of a place they didn't have in the files - manually, with fairy lights and guessing, it took me most of a week - but that's because their sorcery collection is better."
infinitely-stranger
"Their sorcery collection's all right," Arcane acknowledges. "I've made a few contributions myself. The one in the north, though, have you looked at their fiction? They have some amazingly fantastical stories imagining the mortal realm. I might want copies of some of those to take home."
imeanforever
"I looked. None of them seem consistent enough that it makes sense for them to be about the actual mortal realm rather than some completely imaginary third universe, but the writing is occasionally good."
infinitely-stranger
"I did say 'imagining' rather than 'describing'. The main problem I noticed in the one I picked up was that the author didn't seem to have figured out how transportation and architecture would actually work in a world where no one has wings or sorcery. They just sort of wrote around the problem. I liked it for its other qualities, though. Good characters."
imeanforever
"I don't think I saw that one. Wouldn't people just have to walk, if they couldn't fly? At least over short distances."
infinitely-stranger
"Yes. But for example, the buildings often have multiple levels but no one is ever described moving from one level to another, nor is it explained how they manage it."
imeanforever
"Climbing? But that seems inconvenient to have to do all the time."
infinitely-stranger
He shrugs. "If I had the job of designing architecture for wingless people I'm sure I could come up with something. Doing it without sorcery would be harder, of course."
imeanforever
"I know there are fairies who build houses without any sorcery. There was a painted tailwing near my tree who built her own house and she can't do a speck of useful magic."
infinitely-stranger
"More difficult to do complicated things to compensate for the lack of wings that way, though."
imeanforever
"I'm probably less qualified to figure this out than most fairies, because I'm legitimately terrible at walking."
imeanforever
"I trip. I'm not clumsy in the air particularly - for a leaflet anyway, we're hardly aerobaticists - but I trip even walking over a perfectly smooth surface."
infinitely-stranger
"Yes. Is there some reason for it or is it just a personal quirk?"
imeanforever
"No reason. I've been like that since I started. Practice didn't smooth it out."