Isibel ✧ "Sarion"

When the party has been going on for a few hours but no one has left yet, everyone is called into the main room. (The dragons will have a sufficient view if they prefer to perch at the outer doors.)

Angela has worked out a ceremony that will satisfy the involved parties, a reworking of standard Samarian traditions with some revised wording and adjustments for the fact that the groom inhabits two bodies. This ceremony, unlike the elven one, doesn't involve any jewelry.

And then Sarion and her beloved are married. Again.

[It seems that perhaps we should speak,] Isibel says to Lycaelon. She wishes him a cup of tea, wherever he is, hovering in the air waiting for him to take it. [Though I confess I do not know where to begin.]

Isibel's workload is under two opposing forces. On the one hand, she makes routine progress. Every day, she has done more of the things she wants to do; and now she has a replenishable supply of pentagons and hexagons and could probably prevail upon Lycaelon for stars too if it ever became particularly vital. On the other hand, she is still becoming aware of things to do, and more and more people every day are willing to come to her with problems.

One day she says to Liselen, [I wonder if I ought to make more people enchanters.]

Isibel is without her loves, her mints, her enchannels.

She does have a coin stash. A reasonably large one, in her beloved's shifting geode colors, and a few in the higher denominations imported from Rainbow; she can make small ones herself. And she is still linked to her beloveds - she can still access Ansharil's magic, is still a functional elfmage.

And unlike any other Bell cast adrift without her convenient masochist(s), Isibel can enchant alone. It's the simplest application of hyperfocus: contemplate her spell and wake up again with it complete. Channeling through oneself leaves no lingering discomfort after the initial burst, and she can fail entirely to attend to that initial burst.

And -

She is reasonably well recovered from her earlier breakage.

It seems to her that it is time to do some... Belling, although she has not yet decided how to start.

She teleports from her folded-in-on-itself enchanted village to the town in which Magania resides, and there she looks for the other elf, who has given such good counsel in the past and already knows of the features of Bells.

Thinking is hard.

She knows, she knows that it's safe when her beloveds both sleep - that they can read nothing while they dream - but every thought is so relentlessly punished when the demon is awake, and the parts of her mind that generate thoughts have stopped trying. She focuses, when she can come up with anything worth focusing on, or just on breathing or clouds or a tree, as much as she can. The demon "hyperfocuses" on gentle thoughtless love, as much as he can. She sleeps too, as much as she can. And none of these solutions lead to her having thoughts.

There's not enough thinking left for her to register much horror about it. But there are parts of her remaining. Automatic reactions to things, that can pass from her memories through her actions without her intervening much at all on the level of consciousness. She has enough terror of oblivion in her not to look contemplatively at knives. She has enough of an echo of what it used to mean to her to love someone to ache inside if her beloved thinks of harming himself, to beg him not to. She has enough access to her own memories to recognize the strange door, the second time it presents itself to her, and to go in without fear, holding her book and her pen that she has no real reason to carry anymore but holds out of old affection the way a child slightly too old for a stuffed toy may clutch at it.

The blank book is no good to her anymore, but it feels good to hold it, and she does.

The door may not take her far enough away from her beloved to protect her if he wakes while she is there, but it is somewhere to go and sit and wait for her thousand-year span to elapse, and she enters.

Isibel learns magic.

She learns a considerable amount of magic. She learns gates and vanishings and the elements and weather and (though she does not cast an example) earthquakes. She can bend plants and animals in the ways that she chooses. She can undo all of the effects that she can create.

Several of the subspells from all these disciplines could be described as looking like blue flowers made of light. None of them smell like blood. Perhaps that is something her beloved is meant to contribute.

The demon sleeps, and she writes and thinks and puts herself back together and tries to think of ways not to hate the reading. She is unsuccessful. The demon wakes and she shatters to pieces all over again, a little more than she can repair each time. She is unhappy, helpless, she's abusing hyperfocus like an addict and none of her ideas on how to tolerate detailed reading work. The demon practices his own sort of hyperfocus, and it's an emotional balm but doesn't leave her in a condition suited to think, and what she misses most of all is to think again. She can do a little while he sleeps. It's all crippled by the knowledge that any of the thoughts she tries to use again later may be spotted by her beloveds when they wake again. She can build herself back only so far between instances of destruction.

It's all right. Hyperfocus will patch her. She can do it for an hour and a half, then two hours, then three. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't anything.

And at last her teacher consents to teach her search spells.

One of them "looks like" a blue flower made of light.

It doesn't smell like blood.

She'll have to ask her beloved about that.

Isibel practices the search spells - none of them will show her where the would-be summoner of darkness is hiding - until the demon wakes again.

Isibel has never seen an odder collection of fauna. She has not traveled extensively, but she is sure that creatures of this size - lizards as heavy as ten elves together, beavers eight and nine feet long, turtles with shells the size of small houses - are not customary. Yet the island is riddled with them.

The creatures have no particular fear of elves, but nor do they seek them, and none of her party have been attacked; she feels safe enough traveling through the forest on her own, stepping lightly, looking for the sweep of the treeline and any springs that might be useful for settlers if elves settle here. Besides, she is a student of the small magics, some of which may be cast quite rapidly if there is need; she could frighten away an animal that took too much interest in her. The ribbons tied around each of her knees and ankles (blending seamlessly with the rest of her travel outfit) are some of her finest small magic, guiding her steps so that she may place her feet as elves ought to be able to and bring no embarrassment to her House. They don't make her truly graceful, but she can walk, and care will do the rest.

She's deep into the forested part of the Unknown Island when she starts finding statues. Old statues. The trees have grown up around them, it looks like, they've been here that long; they're worn and weathered and have lichen growing on them.

And they're all of unicorns.

The oldest sculptures are none too skillful, but as she proceeds inward towards the center of the island, they become newer and better and it's plain to see that they're not of unicorns, but a unicorn. A unicorn with a broken horn; this is not, it soon becomes apparent, random damage to early statues. Someone has carved a specific unicorn, dozens - hundreds? thousands? - of times. And the art has been made with such intense love, and the newest of the statues are so delicately done that they look almost like real unicorns, with all the magic that implies, though they hold still and are on closer inspection all still carved from stone.

Someone loved this unicorn, and lived on this island, and made a thousand statues of her, and now the place is inhabited only by giant animals that certainly could have done no such thing. Isibel wonders what happened to the sculptor. To the unicorn, too.

On she walks.