pumpkin princess

[imeanforever]

Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.

When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.

She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.

Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.

Comments

[infinitely_stranger]

"Only slightly. I have a hard time drawing maps of underground harmonics, but mostly because I can't visually see through rock, so I have less information available for estimating distances and picking landmarks."

[imeanforever]

"Oh, that makes sense. But you can sense them through, say, trees. And I guess harmonically complex objects like my tree are about the same as things like naturally-occurring tangles and cliffs?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"About the same, yes. They're often more interesting, though. A leaflet's tree has a certain kind of pattern, and a floating island has an entirely different one, and the Sapphire and Emerald Seas each have a very subtle pattern of their own that tangle up at the border."

[imeanforever]

Promise strokes her tree's bark. "I'm so glad I have my tree back."

[infinitely_stranger]

"It's a very nice tree."

[imeanforever]

"Do you want to see the spare room?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"Sure."

[imeanforever]

Promise shows him in. There is a small collection of books, carefully curated, on a shelf; she has accumulated a water basin and dishes and window glass and cushions for the benches around her eating nook. There is room to fly up to the next level, which is split into two rooms, each containing a bed and a nightstand and a chair; hers is obviously the one on the left and she's been using the spare to store her sewing, which she nips in to retrieve and stash in her own room.

[infinitely_stranger]

"Very cozy," says Arcane. "As houses go, it's a legitimately pleasant one."

[imeanforever]

"The original was smaller, I didn't know how to rapid-grow things back then."

[infinitely_stranger]

"You did very nicely with the design."

[imeanforever]

"Thanks."

[infinitely_stranger]

"A nice start, all in all. I wonder what it'll look like in another century."

[imeanforever]

"In a century I'll have enough books to justify a third story library."

[infinitely_stranger]

[imeanforever]

"I'm getting better at transcribing things by sorcery. I have good handwriting but writing out entire books is exhausting."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Is it just a matter of practice or do you think better tricks would help? I like transcription spells."

[imeanforever]

"I don't know that they wouldn't help, certainly."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Well, let's see."

It turns out that when Arcane says he likes transcription spells, what he means is that he has an extensive and well-researched understanding of all the ways people have tried to use sorcery to transcribe books and which ones of them are better than which other ones in which ways for which purposes. He has even invented variations of his own that he can successfully explain to people who don't sense harmonics.

[imeanforever]

Eeeee, geeking out over spells. With Arcane.

Promise is a very clever sorcerer, especially for her age, and a quick study.

[infinitely_stranger]

Arcane notices these things! Arcane appreciates these things. Arcane tells her so.

[imeanforever]

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

(She graciously accepts the compliments without eeeeeeeing out loud.)

[infinitely_stranger]

She is so successful at concealing her urge to eeeeeeeee. Arcane has no idea. He can tell she's pleased, though! It's nice that she's pleased.

[imeanforever]

She's very pleased. And wonders (once they have exhausted this topic and she has fixed them dinner) if he has tips about other sorts of spells.

She is sad when he has to leave in a few days but does her best not to be very demonstrative about it.

[infinitely_stranger]

He indicates an intention to find and close that gate near her tree, and then to come back in ten or fifteen years and see how she's doing.

Then, off he goes.