what must i do?

[small_magics]

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.

Comments

[endragoned]

The first thing he thinks when he wakes is, as ever, I love you. I'm sorry.

[small_magics]

She loves him too. She's sorry, too.

She makes her way to where he and the dragon wait, and she shows him the blue-light-flower search spell, and how it comes up empty when it tries to find the Dark incursion for her.

[endragoned]

He watches (and 'watches') her do the spell.

He says, hesitantly, "I think if I..."

and he reaches for her hand and shows her in his mind, how to fit his magic together with hers. His magic knows very well what the Dark is like.

[small_magics]

...Now it smells like blood.

She assembles the components of the task in her mind. And she meditates into it. He's going to have to follow her timing because she can't match his; she'll go slow. Funnel the intention through the sense-memory -

[endragoned]

- and the demon's magic comes with it, and the spell rushes together, and everything is yes yes yes there there there.

They have found the enemy.

[small_magics]

She wakes.

They could simply go now. It is midday, she is not about to keel over from weariness. They could go and - do - something.

[endragoned]

Kill whoever is trying to summon up the Dark, presumably. Unless Isibel would like to try reasoning with them. The demon is in favour of killing.

[small_magics]

Isibel is not really in a condition to do any reasoning with anyone, however much she might rather it in principle.

[endragoned]

They could hand the problem to someone else to solve, but Isibel's unicorn friend did seem to heavily imply that the Wild Magic prefers they do it themselves.

So, killing.

[small_magics]

All right.

She can gate them there, now that she knows where they're going. Unless the enemy is as defended against gates as search spells and they must fly there.

Focus. Breathe. Cast -

[endragoned]

The demon steps through the newly formed gate into a cramped little room containing a middle-aged human and an amazing number of books.

The human squeaks in surprise when he sees his unexpected visitor, and recoils, and he starts doing something and the demon doesn't know what it is but it smells like Shadow Mountain and he reaches over and picks the human up off the ground and bites his throat out and drinks his death like wine.

[small_magics]

Isibel's hyperfocus expired when she completed the gate. She follows, and when the demon chooses this particular method of killing she shrieks and flinches away, but the taste is in her head -

[endragoned]

And he doesn't just taste it with his tongue. To someone of his species, death itself is a delicacy, nourishing in a way nothing else ever is.

But as soon as Isibel screams, he drops the body on the floor and turns the blood to water and hugs her.

[small_magics]

She shivers in his arms, focuses breathing-breathing-breathing, "wakes" calmer.

[endragoned]

"I'm sorry," he murmurs, "I'm sorry, my love, I'm sorry."

[small_magics]

"It's fine."

(It's not.)

"I'm okay."

(She's not. Although this is the least of it, if the most recent.)

(She can't even tell polite lies, not to him.)

[endragoned]

"My love, my love," he says, wrapping his arms around her and crying softly into her hair.

[small_magics]

She presses herself into the embrace.

Now what?

The Wild Magic needed her to - to combine with the demon's magic to find this person and then the demon killed him in a single strike. She didn't want a long, arduous quest - but this is anticlimax. This is what she effectively turned over her life to do? This is what she's cracking around the edges and deeper and deeper to have accomplished? This person would have been hard to find otherwise?

[endragoned]

"I don't know, my love," he murmurs. "I don't know at all."

[small_magics]

Isibel sighs. Is this really it - "Perhaps he had allies," she suggests vaguely, looking around, at the room, at the books. It's possible, isn't it?

[endragoned]

"Perhaps he did. Perhaps we should find them."

[small_magics]

She swallows, she focuses, she casts the finding spell again -

[endragoned]

The demon links his magic to hers.

They find nothing. There is nothing to find.

[small_magics]

She sighs. She slumps into his arms. She closes her eyes.

"That's it, then."

[endragoned]

What should they do with... all this, he wonders. Burn it? Read it and then burn it?

[small_magics]

Someone might find it useful. She supposes they should sort through it to see what's potentially hazardous.

[endragoned]

Perhaps he can nap on the floor while she does that.

[small_magics]

She starts reading when he falls asleep.

[pythbox]

It seems the dead man was researching immortality.

[small_magics]

And this earns him a posthumous and bitter laugh.

Did the immortality have much to do with the Darkness?

[pythbox]

It didn't, until recently.

But once he found that lead, he dropped all the rest. Including some that were very promising.

[small_magics]

How nice.

She reads. Reading is the sort of thing she'll be able to do even when the demon wakes up; she's sure she could focus on it for hours at a time.

She doesn't really want to be immortal anymore - even a thousand years seems interminable - but perhaps someone else will want it, and it's not like she has other claims on her time.

[pythbox]

He theorized that it may be possible to use the Art Khemitic, a disused sub-discipline of the High Magick, to create substances that heal the body more completely than any existing medicine. He also thought that the little-used ability of Elven Mages to alter plants and animals, creating new species at a whim, could be used to extend the lifespan of the briefer races - and maybe even of the elves themselves. But he despaired of getting them to cooperate, because surely some elf somewhere must have thought of this already in the thousands of years since they began having mages again.

[small_magics]

Isibel knows for a fact that this is not true, that elves in general consider their bargain regarding their lifespans a done deal: their magic for their centuries, with the dragons something of a cheat. They haven't thought of it. She did, but was always too skittish around dragons to talk to Elfmages for long. Till recently.

She doesn't agree. Or didn't, anyway.

She's not sure now.

She reads.

[pythbox]

The dead man's notes are full of similarly good ideas, and many less-good ideas that have been carefully preserved but ultimately discarded. He was a brilliant scholar.

The last thing he worked on involved using Elemental Darkness - in carefully controlled amounts - to counterfeit the immortality of the Endarkened. The quality of his notes deteriorates rapidly after the point where he first began toying with this notion.

[small_magics]

Of course it did.

Oh well.