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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!
your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand
Now that King's End was a settled land it was all too easy for the Doubletake to drop in and visit the House of Midnight with a simple press of her compass, and thanks to her mother, she never needed to pack a single thing. When Flora arrived she found a pair of midnight blue breeches and a soft cream sweater already on her bed as well as tall boots that would make the walk through the meadows significantly more comfortable than had she worn the heels she'd arrived in. Braiding her golden hair in a loose plait, Flora grabbed a basket into which she snuck a bottle of wine from Sunjata's bar, a blanket, some matches, and a small velvet bag containing an offering for Safrin.
Midnight was already in full bloom by the time the shrine came into view, and though Flora went for daily runs along the beach, she was breathless and rosy-cheeked by the time she made it to the top. "Wow..." Tilting her chin up and gazing around, if she angled her eye line just right it felt as if there was nothing by starlight above her; no rolling hills, no distant mountains, no ocean.
Sipping in a breath, Flora pulled the matches from her pocket before lighting each and every candle that lined the stones, before dumping out a small offering of star-shaped pearls.
Regional Score bonus: +7 in all shrine visits, drops, PQ+s, KQs, etc. (You must post this at the bottom of any post where a +7 should be included)
Type: Light | Style: Other | Level: Basic
Lucky you | A ring that when worn grants +3 luck. Must be included in all PQ/PQ+/KQ/DROP posts to be counted.
there exists a tipping point between gods and monsters
Jack isn't one to show fear - not externally, at least - and so the trip to King's End is a swift one, and the set of his shoulders is easy and confident as he sets off from the Boondocks and off into where they say Safrin's shrine is supposed to be. Memories of his previous meeting with the starlight lady flash behind his mind as he goes, and though he'd met her once since then, it had been in a dream and there had been others around, so things had been markedly less intense.
He doesn't expect the same this time.
When he arrives at the shrine, having given the rest of the crew leave to enjoy themselves at the House of Midnight, Jack spots Flora already lighting her candles. His shadow will fall across her as he shrugs off the satchel he'd brought, his own offering within. "I'm surprised this ain't more popular," he rumbles, glancing fleetingly around at the admittedly breathtaking view. Alas, Jack isn't too interested in it currently.
He withdraws from the satchel a bottle of something corked and waxed, the label faded, the wine within a dark, dark red. Along with it he takes out an iridescent abalone shell, setting it down and cracking the wine open. He pours it gently into the shell, waiting until the ripples still and the stars reflect perfectly within it.
Dressed entirely in black tonight and knowing better, this time, to start out on his feet, Jack gets to his knees. "Ready when you are," he says, glancing to Flora.
Regional Score bonus: +7 in all shrine visits, drops, PQ+s, KQs, etc. (You must post this at the bottom of any post where a +7 should be included)
your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand
Even with whispers of just pick me up after echoing through her thoughts, there's still a dazzling gold rush that breezes through Flora's thoughts as she turns and smiles at Jack. "What makes you think it isn't?" She asks with a coy raise of one eyebrow, not that she'd necessarily expect an abandoned to know any better, least of all one like Jack.
Watching him produce his offering, the queen nodding her silent approval, Jack will feel Flora's intake of breath as a sharp wind through her mind as she watches him sink to his knees. It was the done thing, sure, and while Jack was certainly no idiot, something about it had her body tensing as she stiffened at his side. "Uhm.." Clearing her throat, and her mind as much as she could, Flora nodded. "Yeah. Of course."
Closing her eyes, Flora moved to sit against the shrine, picking up one of the pearls and holding it above the firelight. "Hey Safrin. I know this probably isn't one of your favourite places, but the stars here are just so beautiful we couldn't resist." She purrs, her voice like silk as she offers flattery rather than dull worship. "The good captain here was looking to be able to fly his ship during the day, and...well, who else would we ask but you?"
Where most have to wait for Safrin to appear before being aware of her presence, Jack will be treated to something else entirely.
Her presence will fall over him like the night; not slowly as experienced from the ground, but swiftly and without hesitation the way it might be seen from space. The enormity of her mind will have him losing any sort of perspective, and seconds before she appears Jack will feel as though he's been divorced from everything and everywhere he knows, left to drift in the eternal expanses of space with the closest cold star several lifetimes away.
And then she is there.
Warm and bright, Safrin is a tether to reality, and as she slips through the veil between worlds her presence will roar in Jack's mind like the sun. "Flora darling." The goddess greets her queen, offering the Doubletake a small smile before turning to Jack. "Captain." Reaching for the shell her fingers wrapping around the alabaster as if it were bone, Jack's skull in fact she lifts it carefully to her lips and takes a sip she is quickfire and mercury to taste and to hold, the wine appearing like black ink across her pale skin as it drips down her neck.
there exists a tipping point between gods and monsters
The sun, Jack learns, is not a silent golden disc hanging in the sky - it really does roar, and the thrumming noise of Safrin's presence fills him from the top of his head down to the tips of his toes, her presence psychically blinding long before she parts the curtain between worlds and steps through to see them. Feeling the air seize and choke in his throat and his fingers flinch against his knees, Jack hopes the starry goddess will forgive his flimsy mental walls and the way he throws them up in an act of animal survival. Not that it matters - she blows through them like the wind through leaves.
His jaw feathers, and he transfers the tension to the clenching of his hands just before a tooth cracks with the pressure. Bursting wide open with the force of the cosmos, he feels himself as the recepticle for the goddess's wine, feels himself flow down her neck and across her flesh, plunging between her breasts as if he were made of crimson starlight.
The first breath he remembers to take is painful, brought on the heels of a voice as melodic and deafening as the ages. Is that what he was after, Jack? He thought so, but even as her question strums the air between them, he realises the lie for what it is - a lie kept even to himself, entertained only in the small hours when the endless, endless stars wink overhead.
No, it isn't. He thinks it, but only the first sound really makes it out from between his lips, a moan rasped into the night. Blood is already streaming from his nose, his skull ringing from the enormity of her presence, but he lets his head loll back enough to gaze up at beauty and death and the might of the cosmos.
08-20-2024, 02:07 PM (This post was last modified: 08-20-2024, 02:07 PM by Safrin.)
Safrin
"Tongue-tied, this one." Safrin laughs, her gaze fleeting lifting to Flora as her eyes widen with amusement before she turns back to Jack. Taking a step toward him followed by another, the goddess gazes down at him before setting the alabaster shell on the shrine in order to take his face in her hands.
"Mine?" She repeats, the word like a snake slithering through the marrow of his bones before coiling around his heart and constricting. "Who'd have thought it would be so easy?" Laughing, the goddess once more glances to Flora with a small lift of her brow as if to say see? he isn't so hard to tie down. All the while the star snake in Jack's chest will shift and expand, making itself at home and softly hissing in time with the ragged breaths he tries to draw.
Forever is a very long time to be like this, Safrin thinks, her talons hands plunging into his skinhair in order to snap tilt his head up toward her. Brushing her thumb below his nose to smear the droplets of blood against the pad of her finger, her lips quirk up at the corners in a crescent smile. "Say you love me." He is infinitesimally small in the cosmic patchwork of her creation, and yet there is nowhere from her that he can hide. Her smile wraps around his mind, her teeth picking through his thoughts like morsels of meat on a rib, her hungry tongue a balm for his fraying consciousness. Deep within the snake slithers, its tongue electrifying his cells, its shedding star scales thick beneath his skin.
there exists a tipping point between gods and monsters
Flora, for all the ways Jack has learned to tell her thoughts apart from all others, for all the things she's given him without either of them realising, gods but she may as well be a speck on the wind to the goddess unfurling before him. The captain has bitten his tongue in an effort to keep his teeth from chattering, his limbs from trembling, and as Safrin's fingers slip into his hair and her power rattles through his marrow like the birth of a galaxy, it's all he can do to behold her.
Forever isn't long enough to worship you, he whispers, his lips flinching with the words he has no chance of saying. Forever doesn't come close. Raw like a joint with the cartilage rubbed away, it's bone on bone as the captain hears her voice once more, feels the serpentine squeeze of her inside his chest. "I love you," he rasps. It's as easy as breathing had been, once upon a time, and Jack doesn't even know if it's a lie.
What is love, after all, but a promise of forever?
Drawing him up toward her, Jack will feel the strength of the cosmos stiffen his muscles. Had her hands not been in his hair he might have slipped away from Caido entirely for the weightlessness of his body, and together they might have drifted through the galaxies. Instead, Safrin pulls him against her, her mouth suddenly against his.
Her mouth burns hot and cold simultaneously as her tongue parts his lips to taste the words that had trembled there unsaid. She tastes of silence and the roar of power, of the rise and fall of mortal men who died with her name ringing in their ears; deadly decadence made corporeal and insatiable. Light reverberates through Jack's mind, bleeding everything away until the yawning stretch of nothingness is too exhausting to even contemplate such that the captain will have no choice but to turn his full attention to the flowering bloom of her thoughts.
There, in the centre of a hydrangea made of midnight shadows are his tasks. Safrin's tongue presses against Jack's cracked tooth with a burst of sensation not unlike a brain freeze that she'll quickly chase with a hungry flick of her tongue.
"Do we have a deal?"
Jack has been given a death sentence quest! To achieve physical immortality (Jack will cease aging, Serpentine Tattoo (mastered) ), he must:
1. Have a baby with Safrin.
2. Kill his companion or a PC (at least 50 posts)
3. Collect Frey's Breath Water
4. Kill a Unicorn and harvest its horn
5. Collect Memory Mud
6. Host a PQ killing a Mirage Crab
7. Host a PQ+ killing a boggart
there exists a tipping point between gods and monsters
There's no awareness, any longer, of the placement of his body or his mind (his soul?) in relation to it. Jack is pulled free of bone and sinew, muscles screaming and the world twisting over and into itself as he finds himself miraculously drawn against the goddess. She burns through him, tasting of ozone and petrichor, and the smell of her is like the first blush of a virgin meadow, or the cold and endless frost of a deep Halo night.
Stars burst in his veins, comets roaring through each beat of his heart, and he follows the tug of Safrin's will to the very core of what she offers, of what he might become if she decides it's enough.
Seven simple tasks. So simple. Like checking off a list.
"We have a deal." Jack doesn't know any more if he's speaking out loud, if the words that leave his lips make any sense of if they're a tangle of blood and saliva.
There's just one snag, and though he doubts it will pose a problem for Safrin, it bears saying, lest she think him anything but serious.
"But I can't...?" Have children, of course. The captain is a lot of things, but in this he is incapable.
"You silly boy." Parting from the captain, her lips stained with wine and blood, Safrin narrows her eyes coquettishly. "What I'll need will come from much deeper inside of you, though I'm happy to get at it the old-fashioned way." The star snake in his bones will shiver with laughter as Safrin's eyes flick over Jack's shoulder towards Flora and then back again. For how well the Doubletake had served her as a follower and a queen, the goddess very much doubted if she'd be a welcome third. Had she not been such a good follower and queen, perhaps it might even have been a requirement.
"In your own time." She purrs, patting him on the cheek the way one might a well-ridden horse before straightening.
Winking at Flora over one shoulder, the goddess waves her hand and in an instant Jack's mind will be his own once more.
