May is rolling her way to the library. It's not icy - in point of fact it's summer - but she's got an unhappy ankle from tripping yesterday and it's an accessible library and it's downhill on the way there and Ren will pick her up after. So, rolling.
"I'm not sure if it's a species when there's just one of it," muses Snowfall.
"They have some things in common but I wouldn't call them the same," says Charm. "They both sleep as statues, her in the day and him at night. They're both very tall. I suppose they're sort of fey-ish, more fey-ish than anything-else-ish anyway."
"How would you know the King's very tall, I hardly think you've met him," says Ebb.
"I talk to folk in the borderlands!" says Charm. "Sometimes I learn things! It sounded like he was just about the same height as the Queen."
"Mostly not," says Button.
"The borderfolk pass things along sometimes," says Charm. "And - the way it shifts with the seasons - when everyone knows Day's going to keep the upper hand all summer, you don't try as hard, and neither do they, so we just sort of scuffle all season until autumn when Night makes a push, and then in winter it's the same thing backwards."
"Maybe you're calling a 'war' what I'd call something else, but I think wars are very bad and you need an extraordinary reason to have one - even the ones that are had over economic stuff on Earth are at least about economic stuff that affects a ton of people - it sounds to me like everyone would be best served if the Queen issued a conditional surrender at the end of fall and everyone just stopped doing the thing."
"I said a conditional surrender, you could insist that the Queen get to keep ruling you and not demand forms or at least not very many of them. The timing would be so if it didn't go over well you wouldn't be in much trouble if you they made a fuss about the conditions and you preferred to keep fighting."
"Exactly. But they'd probably be more likely to go away and stop bothering you if they got to say they won, right? And all the important things like not having to fill out forms would still be here for you and you would have fooled them."
"Oh, you'd probably want to guard the border for the next year or so to make sure. If you wanted to be really sure, you could propose that there could be immigration between the countries and then you could have spies there and hostages here if they violated the terms."
"Maybe the war is much less bad than I am imagining and is not at all what happened to Starlight's eye and nobody ever dies in it."
May doesn't sleep all day long; she tiptoes out to do some writing before the forage. But then yes! Nuts! Berries! Rabbit!