wizardseason | Wizard's House

Wizard's House

"Hey"

The Wizard greets the evil-allured knights the same way every night, with the same word, while casually sitting on the steps of the porch outside of her little home. The building looks handmade, like it was built by people who cared about the place they were going to live. Surrounding it on all sides are fields as far as the eye can see. Vegetables of all kinds, with fruit trees and bushes placed throughout the landscape. Closer to the home are bigger trees, willows and others, providing shade from the strange three suns above. Wherever this is, it isn't the world that the knights know.

Plunged into the ground a mere few feet away from the steps leading up to the home is a handwritten sign that states the following:

Knight Rules:
- Tell others if you want
- You can't reveal others
- The world ends this year

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Garrot looks absolutely disgusted. There's the word again. Us. He'll push his luck, but only because it's better than his claws pushing on her windpipe in frustration.

"Us like you and the monsters or you and the Protector?" He breathes out through his nose, sounding like a wild animal backed into a corner, about to charge. Garrot's trying to keep his cool, but this is a lot. He's glad some of the other Knights didn't have to deal with this shit. "What would've ended the world before all of you showed up?"

She's tempted to drop him in a lake to cool off. She's going to answer some of his questions, but not others. She'll give him some information, but not all of it. Baby steps for a baby monkey.

"This one was flawed, unstable from within." She answers, calmly. "Destined for stardust."

Garrot doesn't know shit about the planet or rocks. They don't have a pulse, and they hurt if you punch them. But he raises an eyebrow.

"You threatened to destroy the world for years, so why not just save it instead?" A huff. He's so very skeptical. "If you can keep coming back from the dead every year, why can't you just fix the flaws and leave?"

There's a sinking feeling that the Protector is involved, and not in a good way. The world could end with him being crushed, after all.

She knows he won't believe her answer, but she's going to tell him anyway.

"I've tried." She stays calm, raising her mug to her mouth to take a sip. The scent wafting off of it now is hot chocolate, rather than coffee.

But he'd made an assumption she wants to shoot down. "I don't choose to come back, either."

If Garrot was a magical, planet-destroying monster, he would want to die after getting his ass kicked thirty-nine times, too. For someone who threatens to destroy the world, she doesn't seem to want to be here. It makes him very uncomfortable, but that's hiding beneath the grumbly frustration.

"So what happened in the first year?" He just stares at her. "What should have ended?" Garrot hopes she hates this time of year as much as he does, even though they'd have common ground. Gross.

Strange, isn't it? The Wizard doesn't get any glimpses into what Garrot's thinking, though, instead she's left with her assumptions about what he must be assuming. It'd be an endless assumption circle at this rate.

"Everything." She gives her mug a swirl, looking down into it for a moment.

"We should have left when we failed to save it."

"You're telling me you two screwed up a plan forty years ago..." He pauses, raising an eyebrow and assuming that towering, menacing posture again. "...And you still can't get it right." It sounds like the plan was doomed to fail, just like the planet.

"It's been forty years and you couldn't just tell us how to make space travel work? Then the planet can blow up and you both can die and we don't have to." He sounds unimpressed. He has the ability to make clones of himself, crazy magic can definitely help them get into space. Or it could've. Forty years ago.

Unfortunately for Garrot, his thoughts are about thirty-five years ago. But she wasn't going to rob all hope from him, not yet. She'd had decades to come to terms with the end, there wasn't much more despair she could inflict on herself at this point.

"I can bend reality for a few, a fraction of the lives on the planet." She answers, she can save some. She's saved some, but she wasn't going to say that just yet. Not yet.

"But the world is closed off, sealed from the rest." She glances up towards the sky, looking at the stars.

"And it has been, this whole time."

"You've had forty years!" The word comes out one iota shy of a shout, and Garrot starts doing a good fifteen seconds worth of deep breathing. But then his gaze snaps to the Wizard.

"You can destroy this world like it's nothing, and you're saying you can't bend a little harder." He's glowering. "You and the Protector can't just unseal our world?"

Garrot was like a fire, easily provoked into blazing up and unpredictable in his reactions to the things being added to him. Every piece of information was a new thing to burn up about. It was fun to watch.

"When we do, it ends." She answers like she's talking about the weather. She's tried finding cracks in the process, trying other ways to get around the predicament they'd put themselves in.

"I have limits."

He just groans. This is bullshit, why does he have to deal with this?! Garrot should be with the Protector, just like his father, getting ready to crush the Wizard like an empty can of soda. But nope!

"What about the Protector? What are his limits?" There's no reason why a pair of deific magical beings can't save the planet if they work together, right?

He could rage against the cage he was placed in all he wanted, that wouldn't make it any less real. Unfortunately for Garrot, this is just how the chips had fallen.

"You'd have to ask him." She answers, leaving it vague, but she knows that she doesn't want to detonate Garrot again so she adds:

"Less limits than I have."

Garrot wants to ask how to get in touch with the Protector, but he knows that's playing right into her hands. More allies, more chances and all that. And fuck that, disrespectfully. So he goes in another direction altogether.

"Why are you and the Protector's lives connected like this?" He furrows his brow and the glare softens a bit. Their connection is weird enough that it defies all medical knowledge, but that doesn't mean it can't be used to the planet's advantage. Hopefully.

That answer is far simpler than he wants it to be, but he doesn't pursue it. Instead he asks an interesting question, one that she doesn't have a clear answer to. So instead it's back to vague town.

"A mistake." She admits, her little smirk staying put as she looks to the sky again.

"A permanent one. One we can't undo."

Garrot does not look pleased with that response. They can do anything, almost except not be connected? Stupid. Magic is stupid.

"Was the connection always a mistake?" To be honest, he doesn't see the point in two deific beings being enemies. Why not be friends? Why not do good things? Why do they have to pit people against monsters like some sick game?

While the Wizard would mostly disagree and say that magic was, in fact, not stupid. A small part of her thought that, occasionally, it was more trouble than it was worth.

Not always, but sometimes.

"Yes." She has her little smirk still, but she looks so tired that it's impossible to think what she's thinking here.

"We weren't always linked."

Garrot strokes his beard, believing that he's starting to piece together a bigger, grayer, more frustrating picture. He could ask why they were linked to begin with, but it sounds like it'd have something to do with their roles in the continuation and destruction of the world. And he doesn't really want to go back to thinking about that with the majority of his brain. So instead...

"What about the Knights' companions, who are they linked to?" He thinks it's a good question. They're the same from year to year, and their Knights can support either magical being. But they're part of this same yearly chess match, so they have to be connected somehow... right?

Garrot was asking some interesting questions. It'd be interesting to see if he could put the pieces together with what he'd find out.

"They're linked with each other." Her smirk widens a little as she watches him.

"And the world itself."

"So they're... a third party." He blinks a few times. This is weird, not what he expected?

"Where did they come from, then?" He looks to the ground. The animals couldn't have just been around the entire time, right?

"They were a byproduct of the mistake we made, and now they're a key part of ending it all." She answers, watching his confusion. What would he make of all that he was learning?

"So... what exactly was this mistake?" Because the way he sees it, things going sour between her and the Protector came during or after whatever went wrong in the first year. Something had to trigger all this.

"I mean, you two used to be working together. Something went wrong. The companions happened. And now you two want to kill each other." He grumbles. "So what happened?"

"We failed to save the world." She shifts a little, raising her hands above her head so she can stretch out where she's standing.

"Everything we'd planned and created changed." She twists a little, her back cracking particularly horribly. Unnaturally, even, like there's more popping there than there should be.

"A new plan was made on the fly. The current plan."

The stretching would've been a bit more reasonable were it not for her back making all of that noise. Garrot has cracked his own back and also other people's backs and they never sounded like that. But that'll have to wait, Garrot's not happy with that answer.

"You already said that, I want details!" So he reacts without thinking and his eyes turn teal as he uses his Structural Awareness. Even if that crazy crack was benign, he can still see if she's got any weaknesses.

The only information Garrot receives is that, rather than having a spine with a smaller number of vertebrae, the Wizard's current body has a truly absurd volume of them. For what purpose, no one knows, but there are far more in there than there should be in an existence of her size.

"Every story needs a good guy and a bad guy." She was getting to her answer here, but Garrot's temper is so easy to touch on.

"I wonder who's who." She delivers it deadpan again, looking with her tired eyes at Garrot.

Garrot does not enjoy the information he receives, as it is both biologically and logistically unsettling. But alas, he has it. The deadpan words seem to get to Garrot, though, because he doesn't look happy!

"It probably depends on who you ask," and then he rolls his eyes, "but you're probably the bad guy. Girl." But that does give him another idea.

"Why do you come back in a different body every year?" And then he raises a shushing finger! "Not because you died, I mean why not just come back with the same body every time?"

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