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

[neverbeatme]

"So - and let's not get into exactly what you were planning to do and whether or not it would have incited my undying hatred, because I don't see that as a productive line of discussion - why didn't you finish what you started?"

[jackfrostbite]

"The cost was too high."

[neverbeatme]

"...Do you want to elaborate on that?"

[jackfrostbite]

"I found, when it came time to decide whether to kill her, that I did not want to. Even to save myself from eternal torment."

[neverbeatme]

"You have killed people before," James observes.

[jackfrostbite]

"I... it would be dishonest to say I've changed," he sighs. "But perhaps also dishonest to say I haven't. I am... not the Witch's creature any longer. I am my own. And Winter's Winter - is no one's assassin. Not even my own."

[neverbeatme]

"I... see."

[jackfrostbite]

"Do you truly?"

[neverbeatme]

"I think so."

[jackfrostbite]

"A marvel."

[neverbeatme]

"Maybe," she says. "If you want to think of it that way."

[jackfrostbite]

"Is your curiosity satisfied, your majesty?"

[neverbeatme]

"Partially."

[jackfrostbite]

"I have no pressing engagements."

[neverbeatme]

...She is surprised into a snort of laughter.

[jackfrostbite]

Winter giggles.

[neverbeatme]

"Fair enough," she says. "I admit I'm running out of obvious questions..."

[jackfrostbite]

"What of the less obvious questions, then?"

[neverbeatme]

"...Why didn't you say anything when you saw us hiding by the Stone Table?"

[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.