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]

And there is a griffin knight who nervously agrees to hold the stabbed assassin in her claws and fly him to Cair Paravel, and there is a satyr holding Isabella's belongings, which she reorganizes.

They go straight home. There is no salvaging the music festival. A rat knight and a raven one are studying the bridge to find that it was not sabotaged as Isabella feared; some naiads are breaking up the ice so it will melt quicker; but no one is in the mood for music any more.

At Cair Paravel, based on what they remember from the last time James put a sword through Winter's heart, they think they have about a minute between extracting the king's weapon and Winter being functional again. This is enough time to shove him into a cell and slam a door.

[jackfrostbite]

He doesn't so much as turn around to see where he is and who put him there. When he comes to life again, he sits on the floor - 'collapses' might not be too strong a word - and puts his face in his hands and cries very quietly.

[neverbeatme]

...James decides not to try talking to him just yet.

First she has to announce through every available channel that Winter has been captured and is locked in the inescapable dungeons of Cair Paravel.

She does that.

And then she would really like to hug Isabella for a very long time.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella would also like that yes please.

[neverbeatme]

So many hug.

[deepest_magic]

Hug.

And Isabella tells her, in murmurs, between nuzzles, as much as she can remember about the conversation she had with Eternal Winter.

[neverbeatme]

"There is something very weird going on with Winter," says James. "And I don't know what it is. And I'm not sure I can afford to deal with it. He's right that the best thing I can do for Narnia is leave him in the inescapable dungeon forever."

[deepest_magic]

"...He's pretty casual about self-injury. If we do figure out an electrical generator we could toss him an icicle between the bars to stab himself in the heart with so we could open the door long enough to put it in there with him to try when he wakes up. But I kind of doubt it would even actually work."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. I doubt that too. And there's just no way, for the sake of the creatures of Narnia, that I could ever let him out. Even if I was sure he wouldn't try anything, even if it was just to throw him in a volcano. For that matter throwing him in a volcano might not be something I'd want to announce to the public. It's a bit too... brutal."

[deepest_magic]

"A bit. I mean, he'd prefer it, but it would be difficult to explain that to a million creatures who are concerned about the extent of our correctional system."

[neverbeatme]

"Yes. The same with the electrical generator, for that matter. Can you imagine trying to industrialize Narnia with that as our first example of the use of electricity...?"

[deepest_magic]

"It wouldn't have to be publicized, since it'd all happen in the dungeon, but yeah. Although I'm still not sure we ought to industrialize Narnia at all."

[neverbeatme]

"It's a nice option to have in case there's ever a situation where it would obviously help."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. ...Also I think the electric chair was a really early use of electricity on Earth but I'd have to look it up."

[neverbeatme]

"The impact would be different here... and I'm not sure I like 'conduct a secret project to electrocute our prisoner' much better than 'openly electrocute our prisoner', considering the sort of thing that would happen if people started getting the impression that we sometimes conduct secret projects to do things to prisoners, even if they didn't find out exactly what. It's a mess."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. I wonder if he's unconscious while he's stabbed in the heart. We could toss him an icicle occasionally if he'd rather. I don't want to be inhumane to improve our PR for how humane we are, but..."

[neverbeatme]

"But we have a prisoner who desperately wants to die, and if we wanted to kill him we would have to keep trying drastic and awful-sounding measures until we found one that worked. Yeah. And the other thorny PR problem is that any hint he might have been given a chance to escape could send a mild panic around, and actually letting him escape is pretty likely to start a major one, even if 'letting him escape' means something like 'throwing him into a volcano' where we took him out of his cell to kill him but can't verify that he actually died."

[deepest_magic]

"He was loose and there wasn't an active hunt for him for years and people lived with that, but - yeah, it's different if we had him and let him out."

[neverbeatme]

"And it was different when he had never done anything during our reign. Now he's done something, and it was big and splashy and scared a lot of creatures, and the situation is no longer 'Eternal Winter was a figure of terror during the reign of the White Witch, which is now over', it's 'Eternal Winter is a figure of terror who is locked safely away in the dungeons of Cair Paravel from which he can never escape so nobody has to worry'."

James sighs.

"I wish he'd just asked nicely. I mean - I think I understand what he means when he says there's no way he would ever have thought to do that. But I still wish he'd just asked nicely."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. Then it could have been 'Eternal Winter wishes only to pay for his crimes with his life, which is logistically difficult but please don't be alarmed' - and now that would just freak out poor bunnies and dryads and so on who never did anything to deserve it."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah."

[deepest_magic]

"Well, maybe you can - psychologize him enough to figure out how to make the best of the situation."

[neverbeatme]

"I'll try. Later."

Now is hug time.

[deepest_magic]

It is definitely hug time.

[neverbeatme]

Hug is definitely the time that it is.