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]

She nods.

"But instead - this happened. And now I can't let him go, and can't even try very hard to kill him because it would upset people more. And he's... he's given up almost completely; all he seems to want is to prevent anyone else from getting hurt on his account. He's afraid to tell me about the tunnels because he wants to have somewhere to run if he somehow gets free, but I think he's going to come around on that soon."

[deepest_magic]

"How soon?"

[neverbeatme]

"I'm going to talk to him again within a few days, and I'll be surprised if he hasn't already decided to tell me."

[deepest_magic]

"Do you know if there's a way for him to be okay being alive?"

[neverbeatme]

"I don't have much hope of finding one at this point."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah, would've been a bit much to hope for."

[neverbeatme]

"If he can be okay being alive at all, I don't think he can do it in the inescapable dungeons of Cair Paravel."

[deepest_magic]

"That would probably be a higher bar to clear, yeah. Can it be better? We could bring him books to pass the time, if nothing else."

[neverbeatme]

"Books might help a little. I'll ask."

[deepest_magic]

Nod, nod. Squeeze.

[neverbeatme]

Hug hug. Sigh.

"I think this might be the first time we've had this kind of - ongoing problem with no good solution. I don't like it."

[deepest_magic]

"I don't either. Maybe once you've found out what we need to know about the tunnels and so on we can find out if he's at least unconscious while he's heart-stabbed."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah."

[deepest_magic]

"Which, if he's actually immortal and there's actually no solution, won't really help, but if there's a solution and it just takes us fifty years it could help a lot."

[neverbeatme]

She nods pensively.

[deepest_magic]

Squeeze.

[neverbeatme]

Yes, good, hugs. Hugs are so important.

[deepest_magic]

And eventually sleep. And unrelated tasks, because they have a kingdom to rule.

[neverbeatme]

James conscientiously attends to the needs of their kingdom. She's not going to neglect anything important for the sake of her curiosity, and while the locations of those tunnels are important to know, they are not urgent on the scale of hours or days and it wouldn't be appropriate to treat them as such. Not when she has disputes that need resolving before the disputants come to blows over their ambiguously owned clover field, and construction projects that need royal authorization so they can begin as soon as possible and be finished by early winter when the snow will stop work, and so on, and so forth.

But a few days later, she finds herself with free time and no pressing tasks to fill it, and she returns to the dungeon.

[jackfrostbite]

There is Winter, just as she left him, sitting on the floor facing the bare stone wall.

[neverbeatme]

This is going to be so depressing.

But she already knew that. She walks up to the bars and stands there for a moment, waiting to see if he's noticed her.

[jackfrostbite]

After a minute: "Good morning, your majesty. Or is it night? I've lost track already."

[neverbeatme]

"It's late afternoon," she says. "Hello."

[jackfrostbite]

"Good afternoon, then. Are you here to ask after those tunnels?"

[neverbeatme]

"The thought had crossed my mind."