sugar berry

[imeanforever]

Near a stream that pours off a high cliff and then snakes away is a garden, carefully tended, and a house, built of wood and stone and transmuted pearl. Fairies weed the plants. One is fixing the roof. A berrybush, hair atangle with spidery branches, is painting gold stripes onto her purple arms.

Comments

[imeanforever]

"Were there any other fairies in the island cluster?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"Yes, a few, but I didn't go near them. Later on I found other clusters that were more densely inhabited, and eventually of course I found proper land and landed on it."

[imeanforever]

"I thought I was reserved."

[infinitely_stranger]

"I don't necessarily recommend the lifestyle. But it did tend to make a lot of things simpler."

[imeanforever]

"It didn't get boring?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"I spent a lot of time just watching the sun go around and the harmonics shift. I didn't really have a more interesting life to compare it to. Maybe it would bore me if I went back there now and tried to live like that again, but I don't think I can get a long enough vacation to tell."

[imeanforever]

"I think I'm very impatient." Pause. "Most of the time. I do not mind spending fifteen days doing almost nothing right now."

[infinitely_stranger]

"I am not very impatient at all."

[imeanforever]

"That's probably pleasanter."

[infinitely_stranger]

"I expect it is."

[imeanforever]

"Maybe I should work on that."

[infinitely_stranger]

"If you expect to ever have to spend fifty or a hundred years watching the sky change colour, it would probably be an excellent investment of effort."

[imeanforever]

"Does the sky do much of that where we're going? It was usually afternoon in my forest but I've been places with regular day cycles."

[infinitely_stranger]

"The middle of the forest cycles regularly, but its outskirts and some of the surrounding areas tend to pause at dusk and dawn. And of course the desert is usually night."

[imeanforever]

"I don't see very well in the dark. It seems inconvenient to have it so frequently."

[infinitely_stranger]

"I suppose. It does make counting time a little more convenient, though. And there's always artificial light sources."

[imeanforever]

"There is that. I seldom find myself needing to count time more accurately than I can by counting sleeps."

[infinitely_stranger]

"I like knowing the time more exactly than that."

[imeanforever]

"Why?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"No particular practical reason. It's just - nicely tidy."

[imeanforever]

Nod.

[infinitely_stranger]

Flight.

The jeweled seas continue to be absolutely beautiful.

[imeanforever]

They do, they really do.

[infinitely_stranger]

And after five days of that, there is one day of nighttime desert, and then a forest. It's a fairly pretty forest, as forests go, but nothing spectacular.

"I remember a nice harmonic tangle right in the middle; let's see if it's still unoccupied."

It is, as advertised, a very large forest. And when Arcane slows down over an unremarkable-looking clearing by the side of a very small stream, it sure doesn't look inhabited.

"Do you like the location?"

[imeanforever]

Promise hovers. She imagines her tree there and her garden there and how nice it would be to be right next to the stream for water.

"Yes."