Chaos and Coteries
The princess sits beneath the crown, brain full of screams and the dancing wraiths of the tower's visualisations of the instability of the Terminus, drawing on gestalt lifetimes of experience at reading the weather of reality's edge and shaping the perimeter towers' response.
It is a little like attempting to constantly direct a butterfly to flap its wings, in order to drive changes in next week's weather, in order to combat and cancel out the actions of an opponent doing likewise, into whose operations you have no insight but your own experience and intuition; and in order to maximise both, the spire holds the complete mechanised psyches of all the princess's predecessors. Unfortunately, the qualities are inseparable from the person, and so the princess is filled with a judgemental and eternity-maddened chorus of familial erinyes.
There is nothing to do but work to exhaustion in the deafening bone temple behind her eyes, sleep, and rise to work at it again. Ideally, remain sane; this is the reason, as much as anything, for the provision of knight companions for the tower-keepers.
(The Fool is an enigma; some pre-spire precursor technology, test subject or blueprint for life-extension? But attached, for whatever reason, to the spire's court for time beyond record, and so to the princess in her turn.)
It has been a very long time since the princess cared about anything outside of the spire, the work, and her court of two. But here the visitors are, with their transparent lying and their silent agenda, and it seems that having additional things to think about wakes her ability to care; and no less, it seems, her Ser knight's joi de vivre, her endless watch finally interrupted by something to consider a threat.
She could never have predicted the formation of a second coterie under these conditions, her own two companions cleaved from her and unto each other, a pair of accomplices all their own. It itches, in ways that cannot be justified.
If anything, the Fool and the knight should seek common purpose, should have intimacy of their own, deserve joy of each other. She merely fears how little space there might prove to be in such a rearrangement of their dynamic, for either of them to care for her; and she has grown accustomed to the salvation of Ser Glorie's proxied affection via the Fool's own hands.
Sane, ideally; but she knows not how long she can persist, if they forget her for each other.
