CONTACT [EL NYSA]

[priorly]

[Greetings, Prophet. The Great Work Begins.]
(leave a message after the tone)

Comments

[badgerlock]

A catalyst?

Fate's slave, essentially. A prophet doesn't do the work, they just see. The catalyst does all the hard work.

[Not how the Fool would put it but you know.]

[priorly]

Really. [Danger, Will Robinson.] And What hard work is that, exactly? This catalyst, do they go blind too? Are they kept from sleep, terrified, assaulted - left almost certain they're going mad with what they see? Is that the hard work? Or is that just the easy part in comparison?

I don't have a catalyst, Fitz, I had a goddamn angel.

[badgerlock]

[There's a pause.]

Well. You certainly would have gotten along.

[priorly]

[Hmph.]

I think I had a dream about you the other night.

[badgerlock]

That's foreboding.

[priorly]

Is it? I was little blood-red riding hood, and you had a big bad wolf.

[badgerlock]

[There's another pause.]

Oh. That dream.

[priorly]

Is it here, the wolf?

[badgerlock]

No.

I was told they might be able to get him to me.

[priorly]

I suspect everyone's been told that about someone. You seemed very... tangled up.

[badgerlock]

[There's silence.]

We've been bonded for years.

It's not considered...natural. Where I come from.

[priorly]

Well, it felt natural to me. As much as a talking wolf ever can.

[badgerlock]

It's a kind of magic. Much reviled, in my own country.

You know you're getting all the things people wanted to kill me over.

[priorly]

Plenty of perfectly wonderful things are much reviled in mine.

Unmarried parents, talking wolf, is there anything else? I'm afraid I don't want you dead, yet.

[badgerlock]

I was accused of regicide. Once.

But that about sums it up.

[priorly]

...For good reason?

[badgerlock]

No.

For jealousy and spite. And politics, I'm told. But mostly jealousy, and spite, and the desire to hurt me.

[priorly]

Was everybody's life constant political intrigue before they came here? Makes me feel like such a hick.

Why such a vendetta against you, though?

[badgerlock]

I'd rather have had yours, honestly.

[There's a pause.]

Because one of the princes hated my father, and then hated me. He saw me as a threat.

[priorly]

Oh, darling, that's an assumption you don't want to make.

I thought you were supposed to be no one important?

[badgerlock]

I'm not. But my father was.

[priorly]

I can hardly keep up. How this place intends to be big enough for its collection of the infamous and the, well, famous I don't know.

[All of them, and him: just a sick, lonely man. He's still smarting a little from that casual wish to have had his life - not Fitz's fault.]

[badgerlock]

Well. My king isn't here, or my queen, and so it can't be all the important folk, can it? I'm just a bastard boy.

You're kinder and more willing to speak to me than most of them anyway.

[priorly]

And I am myself a queen. Fortunately for you, a benevolent ruler. You still haven't told me how we'd travel together.

[badgerlock]

However we can.