when they tell you you are made of stars, tell them you know.

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, Petrana de Cedoux, Benevenuta Thevenet & Galatea Lourdes + SPECIAL GUEST: YOU.
WHAT: A Wintermarch catch-all.
WHEN: Wintermarch.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: Somewhere for me to put planned, closed threads! Hit me up on keanuleaves or libbitybibbit#8828 if you desire one.

Comments

[overharrowed]

"My first thought, of course, was ice. But it's not necessarily the best answer. You'd probably stop the fire, but you'd end up with a terrific amount of steam, and property damage would be likely. Better than an out-of-control fire, but not ideal. Instead, I thought perhaps smothering it would be the way to go if..."

Abruptly, he freezes in place, not with actual ice but abruptly and unnaturally still. He doesn't appear unconscious; he doesn't fall. It only lasts a second, two at most, before he abruptly shakes his head as if to clear it.

"...I could... Sorry. I'm sorry. I think I need to sit down a moment."

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle pauses—

“I don't know why you weren't already sitting down, Enchanter,” she says, but the tone is unusually even for such a habitually sharp woman, regardless of her choice of words, and her expression a little too careful. Knowing, even; patient in a way that he's not before had cause to see.

It's recognition, the strange thing in her large eyes, and pretending that it isn't is the kindest thing she knows how to do.

[overharrowed]

Julius does move to sit, then, and for a man so characteristically unflappable, he looks shaken. If she knows what it is, well, from his manner he may not.

"...my apologies. I was saying -- I think a modified force cage to act like a sort of containment. The way you smother a small blaze with a blanket?" He sounds a bit uncertain, but reaching back for something concrete is his first instinct. They have a business relationship (mostly), so business is the paradigm he scrambles to find.

[elegiaque]

“Could you explain what a force cage is? What it does?”

It isn't that she isn't interested in the answer and how it might apply to how he intends to modify the spell he's talking about—she is, and any opportunity to get a mage to tell her about magic and the way it works is a valuable one not to be overlooked—but perhaps if he didn't seem so in need of a clear point of focus, she might be going about finding out a different, less delicate way.

But if she doesn't draw any attention to her newly-careful handling of him in this moment, maybe he won't, either, later. He can pretend nothing is happening, and that no one noticed whatever it is that isn't happening.

(She considers and then discards the idea of mentioning this in her next letter to her uncle. It isn't, she decides, any of his business.)

[overharrowed]

"It's called 'crushing prison' in combat, which sounds, I confess, very dramatic." He runs a hand through his hair, absently. "The basic idea is you create a cage of telekinetic force and crush it progressively tighter around a target. But a smaller version, more tightly woven, might be capable of cutting off air to a blaze if I could get the mechanics correct. I think. There might be a better way to go about it, but that was my most promising idea."

Whether he honestly doesn't notice that she's being careful of him or whether he's just grateful she's letting him pretend to be fine is not totally clear.