the golden age

[deepest_magic]

When the party has died down, Isabella, for one, is well and truly exhausted. She explores the palace until she finds a room with a bed in it, and into this bed she flops, still in her clothes and holding her staff and carrying the cordial in her pocket. She sleeps late, because the party kept her up so late and she hadn't really slept the night before; but around noon, she stirs, and gets up, and goes looking for James and wherever her backpack may have got to. The backpack she finds in the great hall where the principal mass of the party was; some enterprising creature took both bags from the battlefield at Beruna up to the castle for them, and she only wishes she knew who it was. She takes her bag to her room and carries James's with her and continues looking for her friend.

Comments

[deepest_magic]

"I like him too."

[neverbeatme]

"I won't mind leaving the succession problem to him for a while. But I'm still going to think about it, because I do that. And I am not going to have sex with Winter either, in case that's a worry you were having, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't even meaningfully solve the problem considering he's some kind of ice monster now."

[deepest_magic]

"The kids would be really weird little icicles. Thank you for not planning on having sex with Winter."

[neverbeatme]

"I would be slightly surprised if Winter could even have little icicles. Why are we talking about this?" giggles James.

[deepest_magic]

"Because he's the only other person from Earth who is around even for very generous definitions of around? What even happened to him, I wonder, the ice monster thing."

[neverbeatme]

"Maybe the White Witch did something to him. I don't know. If I ever get a chance to talk to him, maybe I'll ask."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. I wonder how her magic worked. If it was all the wand - we mostly seem to get magic things rather than learning to cast spells or anything."

[neverbeatme]

"And I think Father Christmas said that if there was a way for just anybody to learn how to make magic things he would've given it to you already. But magic things have to come from somewhere, still... some of hers might've been from the kinds of not-human she was, like how some of her creatures had particular magic."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. Maybe there is a kind of creature somewhere that makes magic things just as part of being its kind of creature..."

[neverbeatme]

"Or maybe there's a lot of different ones... like how the fire-berry cordial is made out of fire-berries, that kind of thing."

[deepest_magic]

"Have we seen anything else that looks like a potion sort of thing?"

[neverbeatme]

"The White Witch had a little bottle of something and when she poured out a drop it turned into a cozy mug of truth potion..."

[deepest_magic]

"Huh."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. I dunno."

[deepest_magic]

"I wonder if we should have made more of a go ransacking her house or if all her stuff is evil or something."

[neverbeatme]

"I think there's a pretty good chance most of her stuff is evil. And it might not always be obvious which stuff is evil. And it would be hard to test it safely - say we got our hands on the potion-generating bottle, expecting it to generate truth potion every time, except we didn't know how it worked and it happened to be stuck on the setting for deadly poison? I bet if she had any genuinely good and useful stuff, we'll be getting it for Christmas sometime if we haven't already."

She reflects on this for a moment.

"Now that I think of it - everybody's been very content to just leave her house completely alone so far, but now that people are getting a little more comfortable with it, it might be time to do something a little more proactive about making sure nobody stumbles across a deadly poison generator. Everyone was perfectly safe when we went through it with Aslan looking for statues, but, you know, Aslan was right there. I'll think about it."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. Maybe in the short term we can have a fence put up. Not that fences would be particularly deterring if a crow or a griffin wants in but it'd clearly mark 'witch house soon'."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. Warning signs. 'Evil magic beyond this point'."

[deepest_magic]

"House has not been decontaminated of possibly hazardous quantities of deadly poison. Do not approach by order of the King and Queen."

[neverbeatme]

Giggle.

"Maybe we can get the mayor of Robinsong to help organize some local creatures."

[deepest_magic]

"Only if they hold their entire election while we're there. Which I suppose they may do."

[neverbeatme]

"Well, if not I'll just ask for volunteers, and fill in with nearby knights if there aren't enough to do the job."

[deepest_magic]

"Makes sense."

[neverbeatme]

"I've been known to make sense on occasion."

Handsqueeze.

[deepest_magic]

Handsqueeze!

Their lunch eaten and their conversation having dwindled to a natural halt they saddle up again, reach Robinsong, help the creatures improvise a town incorporation ceremony, contract some beavers and a badger to assemble a fence a reasonable distance away from the Witch's house on the Robinsong side and expanding all around it in other directions, and go home to Cair Paravel.

Business is more or less as usual; in the spring, on Kingsday, the usual little gifts are left on various doorsteps.

James gets one; it is not signed but the fact that it is wrapped in bark suggests "dryad" and the fact that it got into the castle without her getting advance warning of the possibility narrows that down to "Viridian".