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

[jackfrostbite]

"It's hard to say," he says, after a pause.

[neverbeatme]

"It's very possible that you could've won," she says, "if you'd caught us there and taken us out before the battle."

[jackfrostbite]

"I don't think I wanted to win."

[neverbeatme]

"No?"

[jackfrostbite]

"No. I..." He shakes his head. "If we'd won, there would've been no end to it. And I didn't—I couldn't betray her, exactly. I was still the Witch's creature. But I could... just not see you. So I just didn't. I wasn't quite thinking of it in those terms... I wasn't quite thinking of it at all."

[neverbeatme]

"What a complicated person you are," she murmurs.

[jackfrostbite]

"Do you mock me, Aslan's King?"

[neverbeatme]

"Why do you keep calling me that, when apparently saying his name feels like falling off a cliff?"

[jackfrostbite]

"It is... a choice I have."

[neverbeatme]

James contemplates this.

"So... when you believe you are hopelessly condemned to eternal suffering, your response is to be as nice to other people as you can, and also to deliberately hurt yourself?"

[jackfrostbite]

...He laughs. "You're not wrong."

[neverbeatme]

"I don't think it's mockery to say you're a complicated person."

[jackfrostbite]

"Fair."

[neverbeatme]

"Is there any chance you'll tell me where all the entrances to your secret tunnels are so I can have them watched or collapsed or blocked?"

[jackfrostbite]

"Not a good one. In case I am somehow ever freed, I want somewhere to hide where it would be very inadvisable indeed to come after me."

[neverbeatme]

"I can respect that, but in the meantime, there are secret tunnels in my kingdom that I don't know about. Nobody other than you has used them to attack the good creatures of Narnia... yet."

[jackfrostbite]

"This happy state is likely to continue. Many of those tunnels had been abandoned by everyone but me even before the Witch was killed and all her creatures scattered."

[neverbeatme]

"In that case, you're welcome to only tell me about the ones you think have some chance of being used against me."

[jackfrostbite]

"I will think on it."

[neverbeatme]

"All right."

[jackfrostbite]

He falls silent.

[neverbeatme]

"This has been... interesting," says James after a measured pause. "I have other business to attend to, but I'll come back when I can."

[jackfrostbite]

"As you like."

[neverbeatme]

She decides that no good purpose would be served by telling him how obvious his loneliness is to her. Away she goes.

[deepest_magic]

Meanwhile, Isabella finishes her notebooking and goes to talk to some dwarves, burrowing creatures, and things that can navigate without light, about getting the tunnels sealed up or filled in. Currently she is entertaining the argument of a mole who wonders if there might be anything of value left down there.