She appears above a bit of frozen wasteland. She falls, conscious but without making a peep, to the ground, and breaks a few more bones.
She lies there.
She appears above a bit of frozen wasteland. She falls, conscious but without making a peep, to the ground, and breaks a few more bones.
She lies there.
"All right, then you can do it high in the air. I can also have someone watching it, for additional safety."
“Here, I think, in one of the Work Rooms.” Leareth frowns. “- I should clarify the scale, here, since apparently Fairyland is infinite and not limited by a planet’s size. How many thousands of miles?”
"...I don't know. Several oceans and continents away. I picked it because it's far off, I need to be away from Thorn for a long time before he forgets my name."
"Hmm. If it is more than a couple of thousand miles, I probably cannot Gate the distance at all, and it will be much harder even to scry it. I suppose I could pick out an intermediate staging-point to Gate to, and you would not need to go any closer to Thorn."
Promise outlines a rectangle on the wall in lights and starts her gate.
To mage-sight it looks a little like a combination lock patiently trying a million possibilities, waiting to slot into place at the destination and open up.
"You can throw in little rocks and see if they bounce off the wall or go through, to test it," she says, when she reaches for it and her hand stops at the wall.
"All right. I will have someone in here at all times, watching it - I think it is probably apparent to mage-sight when it settles - and testing it regularly in case it is not."
And she can go back to her vacation. The two Healers are available to feed her meals and make sure she's topped up on drawing supplies.
Leareth has people on shifts sitting in the Work Room, watching the fairy gate with mage-sight as it tries possibilities for its destination, tossing a pebble at it every few minutes.
It settles in the middle of the night a day and a half later, going from a shifting series of tests to a flat pane of magic. The pebble goes through.
Someone goes to knock on Promise's door and ask if she can close the Gate until morning, to minimize risk that it's noticed.
Promise groggily goes and does so. The flat pane of magic becomes a bare tracery of potential.
The night-shift mage stays on duty and watches the closed Gate in case anything happens to it, but is much less worried about something going wrong. They leave a note for Sapphire and Leaf not to disturb Promise about breakfast, since she might want to sleep in after being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.
Sapphire feeds it to her, as usual not making a big deal of it at all. "That's really good to hear! Figure the cuttings of fairy plants will grow here, so you can eat that food? We can make a greenhouse for it, if they need a certain climate."