She is back at the house late that night, not tired but a little ragged. Path alights on her shoulder when she reappears.
She inspects her house.
"I'm going to keep this place, since people sometimes use it as a landing pad to get daemons, and sometimes I want to be able to receive visitors from within the world," she decides, "and a castle in the afterlife won't do that, but I'm going to go build a castle in the afterlife, who wants to see it?"
Pop. They're in midair for a split second, but then Isabella summons the ground up into a hill, and then they are standing on it, overlooking the gates that go into the worlds from the land of the dead. "Have you seen this place at all before?"
"Well, what kind of castle do you want?" she says consideringly. "I hear enchanted ones are convenient. If the walls and floors and so on keep themselves clean, then you can make them out of much more interesting things than if they don't. And there should be a stand of cloud-pine, because who wouldn't want their own stand of cloud-pine?"
She conjures an illusion: an octagonal courtyard enclosed by a thick wall, with circular towers at the corners and a much larger circular tower in the middle. Four of the outer towers have outward-facing doors, and all eight have doors facing into the courtyard; the main tower has one big door facing north, in line with the north outer door. Everything is made of wood; the octagonal wall linking the outer towers also has spiky glittering ice running along the top.
"I like the way it looks," she shrugs. "Like the tower is a giant tree." Whimsically, she replaces the tower with an actual giant tree of roughly the same size, a nonspecific conifer, spreading enormous branches over the top of the outer wall and between the outer towers. It looks surprisingly good all together, although the door at the bottom is now a little incongruous.
"Thanks." Amariah makes a few adjustments - she didn't, after all, have the layout picked out before now. She fills in the illusion courtyard with plants and bejeweled-mosaic paths. She nudges the arrangement of the cloudpine branches, and hmms, and then she taps into her custom plane and there they are, on the ground floor of the tree-tower.
There's a Janepoint here, and Amariah has sped up the castle environs to match outside time in contrast to the rest of her afterlife plane. She makes an ansible; Jane takes half and the other half plugs in. "And now arbitrary people can visit me without having to spend stars to ward off their potential daemons."
"Minus - Juliet's Sherlock, from Sunshine - came over for a visit, and while he was here Jane went down for the first time. After he'd been here about a week he woke up in the middle of the night with a genet. She went by Subtrahend, till I told him what the canonical Sherlock Holmes's daemon was called - didn't like Stephirashal entire but she took Steph. They weren't thrilled, though, either one."
"It's hard to characterize. Most of what makes me think this is that they're a lot more cavalier about tucking them away. I don't remember Kas ever doing it with Petaal at all, and I only do it when it's crowded or something. Also, Cam's daemon is also his magical notebook, so there's that."
"It's a kinda duck." Isabella produces an illusion of Neptune.
"She doesn't have one, so acquiring one would be about what she could do with him that she couldn't otherwise; he looks terrifying but she doesn't live in a place where that gives her any advantage in, say, a fight - which is particularly relevant to Juliet - because there aren't any other daemons for him to engage with and anyone else she meets at home won't know that they mustn't touch him, or if they found out they'd have an entirely incorrect reaction to the information. She has no strong incentive to separate, so she doesn't expect to be able to send him on errands without inconvenience and unpleasantness she could more easily skip. The only thing she could do with a daemon that she can't without is send him to snuggle up to her Sherlock. I think she's waiting to see if Steph will touch her."
"I have no idea what the current legal state of public figures not wanting movies made about them may be. And I have no power to change that. So there's not a good way to stop a determined person, but I can make it clear that I don't approve and hope that torpedoes ticket sales."
"There are some people talking to shades from other worlds," says Helen. "I don't hear that much about them, but they're there. I think maybe mortals are more affected by the afterlife than witches, or maybe it's just that the mortals I've met are usually younger than it is, and the witches sometimes aren't - I've known witches who forget once in a while about revenants and shade-dreams and things, and mortals don't do that so much."