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It takes them a while - they are quite busy holding each other - but eventually in spite of the perpetual darkness in the sky, they realize they're exhausted. It's been a long day. The helpful mage and her husband offer them a place to sleep, but that place turns out to be inside a tent. With two other people. Two other newly married people.
Isabella and Adarin decide the better option is to go with her hammock. It involves Isabella almost entirely on top of her husband, but neither of them mind. Snuggles are recommended after death and subsequent resurrection, and trauma from same. Adarin's still a bit shivery and occasionally uncoordinated post-magic loss, but he can hold his wife just fine. Snuggles are provided for both parties, and eventually they both fall asleep, suspended in the air by cloud-pine.
prodigal_miser
dark_light
Snuggle. Snuggle, snuggle.
Eventually they wake up and Isabella descends the cloud-pine so they can get out of the hammock.
Eventually they wake up and Isabella descends the cloud-pine so they can get out of the hammock.
blooded_poet
"I was curious about how your magic works," she says, addressing Isabella.
blooded_poet
"What it can and can't do, mostly. It can resurrect the dead, but I don't know what else it can do. I am curious. It sounds useful."
dark_light
"It is, but I can't teach you, you don't belong to my species. My brand of spells - it does wards, it does healing, it does curses, it does blessings, it can control the climate or summon visions or call an object to hand from far away."
blooded_poet
Lynn looks faintly amused. "I wasn't expecting to be able to learn it. It never works out that way, I have gotten used to magic being almost utterly useless to me, personally."
prodigal_miser
Adarin looks vaguely depressed with the conversation topic of magic.
dark_light
"Oh, sweetie," murmurs Isabella, Lynn's curiosity paling in importance beside Adarin's distress. "We'll - I'll go home and I'll fix the spell and -"
She doesn't want to say the obvious missing step aloud.
She doesn't want to say the obvious missing step aloud.
prodigal_miser
Yeah, Adarin's not sure how to handle that one, either.
So he scoops his wife up into a hug and murmurs, "I'm all right."
So he scoops his wife up into a hug and murmurs, "I'm all right."
blooded_poet
Lynn will just be over here. Patiently waiting to be addressed, again. Five hundred years has made her very patient.
dark_light
Hug.
"Anyway, and to do any of those things I need to do some combination of speak in verse, apply herbs to the situation, draw diagrams in various substances on the ground, and kill animals - in roughly decreasing order of typicality - and for some of my more recent inventions there are also gestures, but I don't have millennia of tradition telling me a lot about how that works, it's all new stuff."
"Anyway, and to do any of those things I need to do some combination of speak in verse, apply herbs to the situation, draw diagrams in various substances on the ground, and kill animals - in roughly decreasing order of typicality - and for some of my more recent inventions there are also gestures, but I don't have millennia of tradition telling me a lot about how that works, it's all new stuff."
dark_light
"Verse can be fast. Herbs can be very fast if I have them mixed in advance and all I have to do is throw them. But no, it's not as quick as a well-prepped mage spell."
blooded_poet
"That's interesting to know - but it sounds like it's less mentally intensive - unless you have to understand every component of what you do?"
dark_light
"No. I can actually, if I'm not careful, cast spells by accident. I had to be excused from reading poetry aloud in school."
blooded_poet
"That must be annoying. Though useful, if people don't understand your magic. You could cast a spell and they might not even notice."
dark_light
"At home everyone understands it at least well enough to suspect I might be casting if I am, although I suppose I could pass for a non-witch to a sufficiently magic-insensitive observer if I dressed like a mortal."
dark_light
"Well, unaging. We can die of violence or, occasionally, boredom or loneliness. And the distinction is losing meaning since I invented a spell to make mortals work the same way."
blooded_poet
"You can actually die of boredom. Huh. That's - I don't believe I have used the euphemism for centuries, but I certainly won't now. Congratulations on the immortality spell."