magicianking | open post: further up and further in

Eliot hasn't been depressed, per se, because it's sort of impossible to be depressed in Fillory. There's too much to do, these days: rebuilding Castle Whitespire, helping Josh and Poppy with the baby, and generally trying to run a post-apocalyptic-but-now-pretty-much-fine magical kingdom. Being High King of Fillory is, not to be totally cliche, Eliot's calling, and he's found a peace that he never had before. But it still sucks absolute balls that both Quentin and Janet are gone.

When Janet had first disappeared, Eliot had devoted all of his kingly resources to trying to find her. None of their world-jumping buttons had been missing, so he'd promised a knighthood and a castle to anyone in Fillory who found the missing Queen Janet.

"She won't love being treated like a damsel in distress like this," Poppy had told him.

"Well, if you have a better idea," he'd snapped, and that had been that, until a letter had arrived in the gazing pool. It had been frustratingly contextless, but obviously from Janet.

"Where is she?" Josh asked at the next meeting of the monarchs.

"I don't know. She's trapped, but she seems more annoyed than in danger."

"So she's in another universe? Since she had to use your telegram thing?" Poppy asked.

"Seems likely."

All of them had lapsed into silence.

"Should we call off the Queen hunt? Some of them are getting a little Don Quixote out there," said Poppy.

"No," Eliot had decided. "Just in case." Damsel in distress, Janet was not; but hell if he would ever be the one to give up on finding her.

--

Eliot's on his way to check on the progress of Castle Whitespire, wandering up the path from the comfortable townhouse he's been staying in, when the ground changes abruptly beneath his feet. He stumbles, and when he looks up--Dorothy, he is not in magical Kansas any more. Not in Oz any more? Whatever. The energy of wherever he is is totally different. He doesn't think it's Earth, either, despite the fact that he's in front of a huge Earth-style mansion.

"What the fuck," he mutters, and opens the door.

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“Oh, would you like some?” he asks, very cheerfully, as he makes a glass appear and offers it.

"Thank you," Eliot says, because, you know, fuck it. If he's going to be pulled into a Persephone situation by drinking magically summoned wine, he's already screwed. "Does it have a vintage, or is this, like, extradimensional god wine?" He sniffs it, expertly swirling it around the glass. It certainly seems normal.

He laughs, warm and cheery. “Depends on what you’d consider extradimensional god wine, I suppose. This one’s from just outside of Delphi, ah, 567 BCE.”

"Whoa," Eliot says, genuinely impressed. He sips it, trying to taste as much as he can. "Was it a warm year?" he asks.

"A little warmer than usual, and pretty dry when it was time for harvest."

"I thought so," Eliot says, proud of his wine-tasting skills. "It's jammy and fruit-forward. You know, we've been working on inventing sparkling wine in Fillory. They don't have a tradition of it yet."

Dionysus gasps as one hand goes to his heart and another to his cheek, as if he just heard the worst news of his entire life. "What a terrible place! I can make you a bunch of bottles to take back with you, if you'd like. Help spread the word, get people interested in it-"

"Hey, now! Fillory is great. You're talking to its High King, remember. Sure, we have room for wine improvement, but I have it on good authority people like it there. I won't turn down some extra wine, though. Theoretically I could hop back over to Earth to get some whenever I wanted, but I hate having to travel for work."

"Ah -- right, sorry, I didn't mean to offend. It's just -- you're the High King of Fillory, I'm the god of Wine, you see where my shock came from, right?" He does start working on making some bottles for him though, like he promised, vines twisting in the air between his hands, before fading away to leave behind a happy little bottle of champagne. "You should tell me about Fillory though, I would love to visit, if, y'know, I wasn't trapped here for the rest of all eternity."

He would love to visit anywhere, to be honest, but that's beside the point.

"All of eternity seems a little pessimistic," Eliot says. "Surely whoever runs this place will get tired of their fishbowl eventually. When they do, sure, come to Fillory. We're in the midst of rebuilding at the moment, but Castle Whitespire will look even better after we've finished our post-post-apocalyptic reno. It's castle, obviously, and white, obviously. Very Disney, if we're being honest. Turrets and stuff. It used to slowly spin, but we've nixed that for the new version."

If and when they get tired of the fishbowl, Dionysus has some very specific demands for what will happen to everyone, but from what he can tell that's probably not something he'll have to worry about for a while, if ever. "I can imagine any visitors who suffer from motion sickness are very glad you've made it not spin anymore."

"It spun really slowly," Eliot hedges. "But yeah, definitely. Hmm... we do have some vineyards, so maybe you could come see those."

"Ooooh, yes, that sounds wonderful! I love visiting vineyards!" He doesn't even care if it's perhaps a bit stereotypical of himself to say something like that, it's true.

Eliot smiles. "You should come see a clock-tree, too. They're kind of our thing."

Dionysus likes trees. You have his attention. "Is... is a clock-tree a tree that somehow tells time, or is the name less literal than that?"

"No, you pretty much nailed it. They've got clocks in 'em."

"Okay, you can't just say that and not give me more details!" Do the clocks grow there naturally? Are they carved into the trees? Are they they kind of clocks that have little figurines pop out and dance every hour? He needs details!

Eliot laughs. "They were made by the Watcherwoman, Jane Chatwin. I'm guessing you haven't read the books, or you would have heard of all this stuff. Anyway, she and her siblings went to Fillory in the 1950s and ruled it before us. Jane stayed after her siblings left and learned how to do time-travel magic. The trees don't actually do anything on their own, but they served their purpose."

Wait, he knows he's from a book? Huh. Weird. He just arrived. People don't usually know that immediately. Well, whatever. "Time-travel magic sounds complicated."

"It is. Unfortunately, I've never had the chance to try it myself."

"Probably for the best, honestly. If sci-fi is to be believed, it's really easy to mess things up in a major way by doing that."

On a somewhat related note, he suddenly gets a pang of sadness, missing his friend Roger.

"Gods can't do stuff like that?"

“My grandfather might be able to, but I wouldn’t know, I never met the guy. Don’t really want to either, ah, he and I have… very different culinary interests, shall we say.”

"Kronos, right? Oh, yeah--Kronos, Krono-logical."

"Yeah, he ate my aunts and uncles." A pause. "Threw them up later, they're fine."

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