Most people don't seem to care. Of course no one cares. A good puzzle does not mean shit to half this town. Good puzzles, however, keep Caitlin Siltshore up at night - they are, in fact, among the very few small joys still standing in her life - and an eternal winter, slowly unspooling itself over the streets of her hometown, is exactly the shape of puzzle she would, under more rested circumstances, be delighted by. It is also, annoyingly, killing her plants. She does not want to give the witch who cast this curse the credit they are quietly owed, because some small petty corner of her keeps wishing it had been her instead. Cait waves the comment about rules away with her hand. "What do we know about it?"
She entertains, briefly, the fantasy of hunting the caster down, holding them at knifepoint in a candle-stale room, and lecturing them, at length, with diagrams, on every much, much cooler curse they could have inflicted on this town instead. Cait would bet good money there is some thematic calling at the root of this one, some neat symbolic cleverness the witch responsible thought was terribly on-the-nose, and the bet alone is enough to make her want to roll her eyes hard enough to dislodge them.
Something tugs at the corner of her lips at Tressa's inquiry about planning.
"No, Tressa, I am not plotting - I mean planning - anything."
She's being cheeky and she gives no fucks about hiding it. Cait has plenty of enemies nipping at her heels, an entire winter she now intends to investigate for her own private amusement, magic to be cast - and, beneath all of it, of course, her own magic. Tenebris'. To be fed. And fed. And fed. Until her bones have been whittled to thread.
"I have new abilities, as you may have heard." Conversational. Almost cheerful. "There are a few new cantrips I have been itching to test in the wild. Let me know if you know of anyone willing to be a guinea pig." A small pause. "Otherwise, I may have to make do with unwilling ones."
She looks down at Tressa as if she's considering making her one of said guinea pigs. There's a flash of something at the corner of Cait's mouth that is not, in any working sense of the word, a smile. Cait would love to use the new cantrip to slip into Tressa's dreams and conjure up the ambitions she suspects the vampire is keeping quiet about. Cait has, after all, had vanishingly few opportunities to test it on vampires; or, perhaps, not so vanishingly few, when one considers the enormous effort Cait has, historically, put into avoiding them.
Anyway. She mirrors the movement and scoops some snow for herself. Relishes the chill that pricks her fingers.
"Anything of note happen to you while I was away?" Still stuck behind the prison bars of the sun rays? Tragic. And then, because she has to ask, of course she has to ask: "How has Estela been?"
Because some part of Cait, despite herself, despite the silences she has kept and the doors she has shut, is still tied to the Garnett coven and the witches who count themselves among it. She would like, in her sideways, suspicious-of-her-own-sentiment way, to know how her old coven-mates are doing. She would like, in particular, to know if Estela has come into her magic yet - or whether the potential of it still terrifies her the way it terrified her the last time Cait had occasion to look.
