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Character of the Season
Frail in body but dangerously quick of mind, Nikandr is the sort of character who proves that curiosity can be just as perilous as any weapon. A necromancer, inventor, and problem-solver with more ambition than self-preservation, Niki approaches the world like a puzzle box begging to be opened, even when what’s inside has teeth. Blunt, dry-witted, fiercely independent, and carrying a history best left partially buried, he has a knack for making even failure feel fascinating. Whether he’s raising the dead, moving across Caido to King's End, or experiencing a hangover for the first time, Nikandr brings a wonderfully strange spark to Caido, and we can’t wait to see what trouble his brilliant mind wanders into next.
Congratulations, Niki!
Credits
Court of the Fallen was created in October of 2018 by Odd, Honey, and Crooked.
OG Skinning provided by Kaons, with functionality and many custom plugins made by Neowulf!
"I look forward to seeing what you come up with." And he'll contribute as much or as little as Seren wants him to, so long as she doesn't expect him not to take advantage of having an artist's studio within walking distance of the Northaven. Seren has probably noticed already, but the houseboat isn't exactly generous on space.
Rolling to sit up and finishing his lemonade, Ronin smirks back at his daughter and plucks a piece of fruit out from the picnic basket. "You'd have had to pack your own lunch, for a start," he teases, biting into an apple and gazing down at her as she sprawls on the blanket. "Oh, I wouldn't say that. You just need to gain some experience and confidence," he assures her. "You'd already do better next time than this time, right?"
As for training, that's Ronin's forte, of course, and he gestures around at the Cordillera. "Any time, I'm available," he assures her. "Except right now, of course. I promised you fun."
"And I, you. I don't remember seeing any of your art for a while." Seren fully expected to have her father waltz in and out of the place every other day. That was the nice thing about having family close by, after all. Honestly, she hoped Remi and Flora would make use of the space as well - even Mathéo, despite not having seen hide or hair of her brother since she came back. Partly her own fault, she supposed... but all the same, if the open space could lure him in, all the better.
Scrunching her nose at him, Seren laughed. "I know. Terrible, it would have been - no I am serious! Cookies are still the only thing I am good at making. And pancakes, I guess. It would be a pancake picnic." Which, let's be honest, didn't sound too awful.
"You are doing a wonderful job, dad," she assured him, sitting up only so that she too could have some of that fruit. "Is this your favorite place in the Draig? I would like to go see the houseboat next, if you don't mind...?" From up close it must be even more lovely, if the view from over here was anything to go by.
"Mm, it's usually tucked away in sketchbooks these days than splashed out on canvases," Ronin admits with a wink to his daughter. "If I tried to paint anything large in the houseboat, I have a feeling Remi would be quite upset with me." Okay, it's not entirely true, but he doubts that Seren wants to know about the 'artwork' the Taliesins had created with their bodies on a large sheet out on the beach. Paint had been involved though, in fairness.
Raising his eyebrows to hear that Seren, too, is a pancake connossieur, Ronin flashes her a boyish grin. "We will need to have a pancake-off," he decides. "Because I happen to believe mine are the best in Torchline. And they make a great lunch, so you're doing well." Not that he had begrudged packing their picnic at all, of course.
Smiling around another bite of apple, Ronin doesn't say it because gods if he's done dampening anyone's mood, but Seren's words mean more than he can say, and he tucks them away, golden and simple, into a space in his chest. "It is, yeah," he says of the waterfall and the Tramezzino over their shoulder. "We picked this place because we liked it the best. But of course - I imagine it's quite dusty now, but the herbs and vegetable garden must be doing very well."
"Maybe you can paint the actual houseboat," she suggested mischievously. "Oceans on the floor, vines and trees on the walls, a sky in the ceiling - or maybe that's what we should do with the studio. Paint the world into the walls so that you can't tell it's indoors at all."
Giggling at the challenge, Seren wasn't sure she actually disagreed. Her own pancakes were a pale imitation of his, an attempt at recreating the flavors she had grown up with. "If you just want me to make you pancakes, I can," she teased. "But if we make it a challenge, we will need judges. Impartial ones, because Remi would vote for yours even if your pancakes came off the Pan black and able to roll down Apopo on their own."
Never mind the dust, or any overgrown gardens; what she really wanted to see had not so much to do with the boat and more to do with her father's eyes. Whether they would light up the way they had done just now, or darken with memory, or if the return to a home would spark longing to return more than the bitter recollections of why they had needed this refuge at all.
"I'm sure it's lovely," she murmured, reassuring as could be; if anything, it was a good chance to air it out and check the soundness. "What are winters like here?"
"That's a good idea - but we did try quite hard to get it in those eclectic colours to begin with," Ronin says, scritching at the stubble on his chin. The Northaven's patchwork rainbow appearance is one of the things that makes it so recognisable on the coast, he likes to think - but he can always add little flourishes here and there for fun. Remi may yet find tiny painted cacti or fish or patterns on their boat. "Ah, the studio, though - that would be an interesting challenge. Count me in."
Fluttering a hand to his chest as if to say I would never!, evidently Ronin would if it meant his daughter made him some of her pancakes. "We'll just have to enlist some of the Hanged Man's finest to sample them for us. Perhaps Flora will let us hold a breakfast cookout." Laughing warmly at the very thought, the idea of course is already taking hold.
"Only one way to find out," he says regardless of the Tramezzino, rising to his feet and feeling comfortable that their picnic will remain undisturbed if they take a short trek across the field to the houseboat. He offers a hand to Seren so she might get herself upright as well, and then leads them off. "I found them a mix of the Greatwood and the Hollowed Grounds," he says of winter in the Cordillera. "A lot of snow and ice, and the wind is sharp as a razor at times. Higher up I imagine it gets much more like Halo, too."
Taking out her excitement on a slice of fruit, Seren grinned at the very pleasant prospects being planned. Between painting and pancakes cookoffs and time spent training and improving, perhaps things were not as bleak as she had come to think.
"Good weather for staying inside," she comments as she got up, aided by Ronin's hand. Strolling towards the Tramezzino by his side, she kept turning every other step, craning her neck to follow the soaring mountains up towards their snowcapped peaks. "Looks like avalanches would be frequent, too... did you see any borealis at all?" Endlessly fascinated with the skies and all their phenomena, it was a subject that kept reocurring in her art. Daytime, night time, the seeming endlessness of the horizon - or the way it was framed, like here, by mountains and trees.
"Mm, it really was," Ronin remembers fondly, and the warm expression on his face only grows as the houseboat begins to come into view. Naturally it has been somewhat consumed by the elements, if only in the way wildflowers and herbs have grown over any path that Remi and Ronin once walked, and some moss and ivy have made some good progress trying to climb one side of the structure. Smelling mint and rose and sweet grass, the Knight pauses as he finds himself among a garden he'd once known like the back of his hand, given that he and Remi had planted it together.
"Quite often in fact," he says of the borealis, grinning to his daughter and pointing - after putting down the apple still in his hands - to the 'crows nest' of the boat. "You can get a great view of the stars from up there, too, and there's no light pollution."
