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]

"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.