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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.
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06-23-2025, 05:14 PM (This post was last modified: 06-23-2025, 05:14 PM by Flora.)
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
The bedroom smells like home.
Like aloe pressed gently into sunburnt skin. Like juniper crushed beneath bare feet on her mother’s veranda. Like the lilac perfume she wore the year she turned sixteen, hopeful and invincible and so sure that if she just smiled wide enough, nothing could touch her. The sea murmurs softly beyond the open shutters—only it isn’t real, not really, just a dream of the Haulani coast shaped by magic and memory. But the illusion is faithful: waves roll in their lazy rhythm, blue deepening to indigo, sun-glint warm on the spray, the horizon stretching endlessly like a promise she’s forgotten how to believe in.
The sheets beneath her are smooth as water, cool against her feverish skin. She’s curled inward, limbs drawn to her chest, as if she might hold herself together by force of will alone. A loose silk dress clings to the curve of her spine, the back of it open to air, revealing the claw marks Dahlia carved into her like a signature. The worst of them are still swollen, pale ointment layered carefully over the ridged flesh. But beneath the skin—beneath even the bone—something inside her feels split.
Music drifts from the corner, slow and mournful, some stringed instrument pulling at invisible threads that wind between her ribs and tug, gently, cruelly. She doesn’t know how long it’s been since she last moved. An hour, maybe. A day. Time in this house doesn’t seem to flow so much as spiral around her, like sea foam caught in a tidepool, spinning and spinning and never getting anywhere at all.
They’d done everything right, hadn’t they?
Three of the most powerful people in Caido had come to her rescue, and still it hadn’t been enough. Still Dahlia had gotten her claws in, had whispered death into her ear with her breath hot against Flora’s cheek, and gods, she’d felt it—she’d felt herself start to go. Again. And the part that haunts her most isn’t the pain, though that was unimaginable. It’s how close it came. How utterly helpless she’d been. How she’d called for help and when it had come, things had still very nearly gone sideways. How she hadn’t wanted to die, not like that, not again. Not when she’d just started to feel like she was living again.
The silk at her knees bunches beneath her fingers, her grip gone tight without her noticing. Her nails dig into the fabric, as if she could claw her way out of this moment, as if she could scrape off the fear that still clings to her like salt after a storm.
Outside her window, the ocean rolls on. She closes her eyes against the ache behind them and listens to the waves pretend they’re real.
News had blown in, not about Flora but about Dahlia, and still Jack had readied The Ark. By the time his scouts had returned, bringing with them unhelpful and vague reports of what had occurred in King’s End, his ship had been fit to fly, but her captain had headed into the city himself to dig deeper. Only then had he found what he’d been searching for; blood on the paving stones and a scream he can still hear on particularly bad nights of broken sleep.
And so The Ark set sail for King’s End.
Flora might not hear it from outside her room, given the amount of magic that pumps through the bones of the House of Midnight, but there’s quite the ruckus taking place; one that Jack fully intends to dispatch to get to where he wants to be. He’s half successful in that he’s punched one of the guards outside Flora’s room in the face, and the resulting crack of his skull against her door is likely quite audible, but then a lot more people start to show up, and as the door opens a crack, his voice is also quite distinct from the corridor.
”You’re gonna need a lot more’n five of you to keep me outta this room. So either go fetch someone worth bleedin’ for, or let me the fuck inside.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
At first the sound outside the door barely registers as real, just another echo in the strange, weightless stillness that has settled over her since the attack. And then the voice comes, low and rough-edged, pushed through the gap in the door by force of will alone, and it strikes her like lightning breaking through a summer haze.
She doesn’t move right away, but that voice—his voice—pulls her from the fog more effectively than any healer’s spell or mother’s care, and she finds herself pushing upright with a faint gasp caught behind her teeth. Every breath feels like it catches on barbs, her back flinching beneath the whisper of silk, but she holds herself still until she can breathe again without trembling.
The door is already ajar when she reaches it, swaying faintly in the wake of the impact, and her fingers curl around its edge with the caution of someone opening a wound. When she pulls it open, the light from the hallway spills across her bare feet and onto the polished floor, and in its wake stands Jack Barclay, windswept and furious, as if he had torn through sky and sea alike just to get to her, which…surely not?
Turning slightly, she addresses the guards with quiet authority, her voice hoarse and faint from days of silence but no less certain for it. “He’s fine,” she murmurs. “He can come in.” Flora moves across the room with the same hesitant grace she always has after something breaks inside her, each step slow and deliberate, her balance subtly off from the pain she refuses to show. At the small cart nestled beside the window, she pours herself a glass of water, the pitcher cool against her fingertips, and brings the glass to her chest as if she means to warm it there. ”Y’know, I’m pretty sure there are rooms specifically made to cater towards fighting.”
Surely so, as it happens. Jack hears her before he hears her, in the way his magic always allows, such that he’s already half turned towards the door when it opens properly. There are a dozen objections on the lips of Flora’s guardians, ranging from you shouldn’t be out of bed all the way to what the fuck, but he punched out Derek; ultimately, though, her approval reigns supreme, and it’s with a smirk that’s far too cocky for the way the storm in his gut is still brewing that Jack bids them farewell and follows her inside.
Within the room, they are sealed in sunlight and wavesong, and the abrupt switch from near violence to tranquility has him halting in place for a second or two, giving the Doubletake time to pour herself some water. Jack can feel the delicate strands of her thoughts, frayed and uncertain and shining so softly that they appear like ghosts of the woman to whom they belong, and he hates it.
He’s always hated it, the way the world could stifle her vibrancy. It’s why he’d offered caution, it’s why he’d preached vigilance and care, and it’s why, ultimately, he’d been unable to reconcile her bold decision making with his own meticulous path through life.
”I didn’t come to fight.”
Crossing the room after her at last, Jack stands before the Doubletake as if unsure how to bridge the distance between them, despite having literally crossed an ocean to be there. In the end, though, he reaches out to tease her hair back from her face enough that he can sweep it across one shoulder; enough that he can step into the space that lingers between them and look, properly look, at the evidence of what had happened to her through the delicate silk of her dress across the arch of her back.
”I came to see if you were alright.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
As Jack steps closer, the air shifts around him, but Flora doesn’t move. Only her face tilts, drawn upward into the warmth of the illusionary sun, skin touched with golden glow that she doesn’t feel anywhere inside. Her thoughts flicker like light against shallow water, caught in the ripple between memory and fear, each one translucent and wavering—like shadows behind gauze. They pulse outward in a slow, weightless tide, and he’ll see them whether she speaks or not: the image of her sprawled on blood-soaked gravel, lungs catching against broken sound, the feeling of her mouth full of blood.
Her breathing hitches as his fingers lift, gentle where the world had not been, brushing her hair aside with a tenderness that contrasts too sharply against the phantom of Dahlia’s claws. Flora exhales, almost inaudibly, and lets her body turn just enough to show him. The silk parts easily, a gossamer veil failing to conceal the horror beneath: deep, curved lines, cruel and jagged, where Dahlia’s talons had found purchase. At her lower back—just above the waist—the wounds deepen into small punctures where the Reaper had held her, bone-deep and deliberate, like a creature to be carved open. The skin is pale around the edges, still raw and swollen in the centre, slick with healing salves that smell too clean for something so violent.
When she finally speaks, the words are barely louder than the ocean breeze murmuring through the enchanted room. Her voice cracks softly, not from tears but from the effort of shaping something so awful into syllables. “I felt her claws hook around my ribs.” The trembling in her hands grows stronger, the water in the glass whispering against the rim with each small shiver. ”I felt it when she started to pull me apart.”
And though she doesn’t cry, something inside her curls tighter, as if the memory still has talons of its own. Her head shakes slowly, once, twice, as if denying the truth of it will make the echo any less sharp. As if pretending will knit her back together in ways that healing magic couldn’t reach.
It doesn’t. She drops the glass, and while it appears as though they’re on sand, it shatters just the same.
Jack is careful to keep his thoughts even more tightly to himself than they ordinarily are (and that’s saying something), knowing of the House of Midnight and its penchant to grab onto anything that might leak out unknowingly. But there’s no hiding the way the sand seems to shimmer strangely beneath his feet especially, glistening with ice that splinters out in all directions, though still delicate and careful enough to avoid Flora’s bare toes.
Her thoughts are a nightmare; a panorama of blood and death and terror the likes of which they have both experienced before, only… only what had happened with Pierce had somehow seemed cleaner, kinder even, and before the Doubletake ever speaks, Jack’s hand has reached out to ghost against her side, against any part of her that’s still whole and uninjured, bringing him close enough to see the full extent of the damage down her back.
His jaw clenches as she speaks, and he doesn’t reach to stop the glass as it splinters against the ground. A breeze does whip past their legs to sweep away the shards, though, and the water never spills beyond the shape of its container, suspended there by his magic. ”I should’ve been there,” Jack mutters, even knowing that it wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome. ”I should’ve done a lot of shit different.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
The sound of the glass shattering makes her flinch—not for fear, but because even now, it reminds her of bones breaking, of something delicate coming undone. The air shifts in the wake of it, Jack’s magic catching the shards before they can bite her feet, water still held in a trembling suspension like a memory too fragile to let go. But Flora barely registers the wonder of it. Her attention is slow to return, her thoughts still wrapped in the lingering horror, wrapped in the truth she cannot outrun, even as Jack tries to hold the broken pieces together without her asking.
She shifts beneath the whisper of his hand like a leaf turned by the tide, slow and weightless, her body angling just enough for him to see it all. The cruel artistry of Dahlia’s claws is revealed in full: the matching arcs, each one carved with mirrored precision, as if the Reaper had been writing something into her flesh—something cruel and final.
When she does look up, her eyes see the sunlit treetops instead of Jack’s sea-eyed stare; the dappled safety of the Greatwood where she had meant to spend the day drinking tea with Niki. Her voice is a hush, barely more than the breath between waves, but it carries something sharp beneath the softness. “She saw me,” she says, her gaze dipping again as if ashamed to admit it. “Even invisible—she knew. And when I ran…” Her throat tightens, but she pushes through it. “When I used the compass, when I crossed the world—she still followed. Like she was tied to me. Like it didn’t matter where I went or how fast I ran.”
Panic flutters inside her chest again, wide-winged and cold, and though she tries to still it, the tremor in her hands returns, running like thread through her limbs. She inhales slowly, eyes flickering shut for a moment as if she might find steadiness in the dark behind her lids, but it doesn’t come. Only the memory of her failure lingers—too heavy to shake, too loud to silence. When she speaks again, it’s quieter, threaded with something deeper and harder than fear—something closer to guilt. “I’m glad you weren’t there.”
She opens her eyes again, not quite meeting his now, but somewhere just past him, as if watching a version of him that had been. A version that might have stepped in front of her for the second time, and would have surely died for it. “If you hadn’t left…” The words are barely more than a whisper, but in her thoughts, they ring loud and waterlogged. If you hadn’t left me, you’ve have died again.
Jack had chosen right, in the end. At least Flora could finally see that now.
Jack says nothing, giving space for Flora to weave the memories into being around them, to voice the cruel truth of Dahlia’s persistence - the promise the Reaper had made once long ago coming to fruition. If the captain speaks, he might not be able to hide the I told you from his voice or his tone; he might not be able to keep the frustration from cracking through, insisting that the wounds Flora now bears never had to be that way. But it isn’t her fault, truly, and it isn’t the deal she’d brokered that had been broken, but that of her parents.
And Jack can’t say that he’ll forgive it easily, despite the outcome.
Instead, his calloused hands drop from the gossamer strands of her hair, clasping around her trembling fingers to hold them steady, and there’s no satisfaction from the knowledge of being right that makes up for what had happened to the Doubletake. ”I’m not gonna placate you with tellin’ you that it’s okay or that it’s over, ‘cause it doesn’t change what’s happened right now,” he says. ”But for what it’s worth, I’d have rather it been me than you, if it had to happen again.” The death, the pain, the stomach churning fear that remains in the wake of it all.
”Do you want to go home? I can take you.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
She doesn’t realize he’s taken her hands until the warmth of his fingers begins to seep into her skin like sunlight filtering through storm-drenched clouds, chasing off the chill she hadn’t noticed sinking into her bones. It startles something loose in her chest—not in fear, but in sudden, trembling recognition—and for a moment she forgets the illusion of ocean light and open sky. She forgets the walls of the House of Midnight and the way her body aches. All at once, she remembers him.
It’s been so long since Jack touched her gently. Longer still since it had felt like comfort and not aftermath, like kindness rather than the sharp recoil of anger or grief. Her fingers close around his on instinct, slow and uncertain but with a softness that feels more honest than any word she might’ve found. When she lifts her gaze to meet his, her eyes linger—not on the lines across his forehead, not on the faint tension in his jaw, but on the sea-dark clarity of his stare. She searches him like a girl reading a message in a bottle, hoping for something familiar between the lines, something salvaged. Something real.
Because the man standing before her now, who speaks as though he would’ve taken her place—despite everything, despite her—doesn’t feel like the Jack she’s known. He sounds like a version of him that lived in the corners of her memory, softer and quieter and impossibly hard to hold. And maybe that’s why the attempt at humour escapes her in a whisper, almost too quiet to be heard, too fragile to be believed. “You can take the next hit,” she murmurs, trying to chase the horror away with a curve of her lips that never quite arrives.
When he offers to take her home, something shifts in her expression—not quite a flinch, not quite surprise, but a hesitation that tugs her features into something more delicate. Her eyes drift past him toward the far side of the room where the illusion of Torchline’s coast unfurls like memory, the blue horizon blooming against salt-white sand. It isn’t real, but it was safe for a little while. Safe enough to feel like stillness. Safe enough to pretend that she hadn’t felt claws inside her body, dragging her soul toward something dark and endless.
But when she looks back to Jack, her throat tightens, and she shakes her head—slowly, gently, like the movement itself aches. It’s not refusal. It’s not surrender either. It’s just her, trying to make space for the truth without crumbling under it. “I don’t know,” she breathes at last, her voice threaded with uncertainty, as though speaking it aloud might somehow unmake it. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know who I’m meant to be anymore.” She’d lost her ability to dance through life unscathed, had risked more than she’d ever have wanted to lose.
Flora’s fingers curl around his own and Jack doesn’t balk from them, holding her steady against the tide of gods only know what might creep out from her subconscious if it’s left alone to wander for too long. He scoffs in response to her remark, inclining his head in a rueful nod. ”Deal,” he says, before he’s glancing at her again properly, as if trying to search deeper through the thoughts that had whispered across her mind only a few moments before.
”However angry I might’ve been, I never wanted to see you get hurt,” he says. It’s not defensive, not exactly, but perhaps the ghost of a reminder that the version of him that she covets in her memories is not entirely imaginary, but neither is he the knight in shining armour from her fairytales.
Instinctively, Jack follows her gaze around the imagined Torchline, as if to admire the accuracy of the soft white sands, the way the false sunlight shifts, golden and dappled, through leafy palms. And he knows how she feels - untethered, freshly slapped by life and its consequences, not knowing which path to walk next or if one even exists that would take her footsteps.
So he brushes a thumb across the back of her hand, glancing to the door nearly hidden in the illusion of a lazy shoreline. ”You can come with me if you like, while you figure it out,” he offers. ”The Ark is close.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
Jack’s dry acceptance of the next hit earns a faint breath of laughter from her throat, but the sound curls in on itself, as though even joy has grown too fragile to hold. It isn’t him, not really, and it isn’t her either—not the her who once would’ve quipped back without hesitation, not the girl who would’ve thrown herself headlong into the heat of his smirk without flinching.
When he says he never wanted to see her hurt, there’s no flicker of suspicion in her gaze, no wall that rises between them, only a quiet understanding that sits between his words and the way her fingers shift just slightly deeper into his grasp. She doesn’t know what holding hands means for them anymore, whether it’s a beginning, an end, or some kind of temporary ceasefire carved from exhaustion and unspoken care. But whatever it is, it feels good. Not in the heart-racing, lightning-bolt way that she used to feel with him, but in the simpler way that touch can still mean comfort. Can still mean here. And more than anything, Flora is just tired of being alone in her own skin.
She draws a breath, her shoulders shifting with it, careful of the ache in her back and the memories stitched into her spine. “If I wasn’t a target before…” she murmurs ruefully, her voice quiet and full of salt and ash, “I am now.” Her thumb smooths a mindless arc across the back of his hand as she looks toward the illusory sky. “I couldn’t do that to the Ark.” She glances at him again, hesitant but not uncertain, her expression almost shy. “I think I’ll go back to Haulani for a bit,” she says, and her voice falters not because she doubts it’s the right call, but because of how utterly stupid she feels for only just now coming to that realization. “I can compass in.” Surely with Dahlia in chains the Reaper’s threat against her friends and family was now void, such that there was hardly any other option for her than to run back home to hide from the likes of Dorian or Pierce.
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable, but it is weighty, the way dusk feels just before night unfurls. Flora’s eyes find Jack’s, pale and sea-blue and still too easy to get lost in, and after a moment, her fingers give his a gentle squeeze.”You could stay,” she offers, softer than before, the invitation delicate and vulnerable in the hush that follows. “Just for a while. The room’s comfortable, and fully stocked, if nothing else.” A smile tugs faintly at one corner of her mouth, half real and half worn at the edges.
”Oh, sure you could,” Jack rumbles, the hint of a smirk on his face despite everything. ”Never stopped you before. Besides, it ain’t up to you whether you’re welcome on The Ark or not, an’ I say you are, so…” He shrugs; if nothing else, they’re both wildly aware that the crew will welcome her back with open arms. (And if not the entire crew, then Bassian, who Jack is convinced will be able to persuade the others to shut up and deal with it).
He doesn’t mention Haulani; doesn’t mention what they both know is true and how the city would have been safest this entire time, especially given what Flora had sacrificed to make it safe in the first place. Instead, Jack merely stands in the imagined paradise that she’s created, still windswept and ruffled from the journey, still expecting to find her dead or ripped to pieces, instead of only almost there.
”I’ll stay,” he says without needing to think about it. ”Caused quite the ruckus fightin’ my way up here, so if nothin’ else it’s probably a good idea for me to lay low until they forget where I am. Last thing I need is the Flood kickin’ me out of his fancy brothel.”
Jokes aside though, he gestures for her to step back to bed while he figures out how to get rid of the shattered glass. ”I’ll stay as long as you want me here, or until I convince you to come with me.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
“Shut up,” Flora laughs through a smile that’s gentler than her voice pretends it is, the kind of smile that slips in through cracks left behind by sorrow. She doesn’t tell him how much those words mean. She doesn’t need to—not with the way her thoughts brighten in spite of her efforts, colour blooming like crushed petals rehydrating in the warmth of his presence.
The surprise flickers through her no matter how carefully she tries to stifle it, a shift in the air between them that Jack will no doubt feel as clearly as if she’d said it aloud. She dips her chin as though to anchor herself against the tide of it, unwilling to let the words as long as you want me here echo too loudly through her, even if a younger version of herself, not so long ago, would have thrown open every door in her chest and answered forever without hesitation.
Instead she turns from him, not in rejection but in retreat, a soft withdrawal into the safety of her illusion. The bed is warm with ocean light and silk sheets, and though her spine tenses in protest as she first sits down, she lets herself lean gently to one side, collapsing with the grace of someone who’s too tired to pretend otherwise. Her limbs fold loosely beneath her, her dress whispering along her skin as she finds the most forgiving angle to lie without pulling on the wounds that have already begun to itch with healing.
Propped slightly on one elbow, her golden curls spilled against the pillow and eyes turned up toward him, she watches Jack with something open and unguarded in her expression, something painfully sincere. “Thanks for coming,” she says softly, the words light and real and completely inadequate, but true nonetheless. And though her voice is quiet, her mind fills the space he leaves her with a deeper language—something golden, something warm, pulsing with slow affection that spirals out like sunbeams on seawater. For him alone, those thoughts reach—soft and vulnerable and glowing, shaped not of promises or conditions, but of presence. Of I’m glad you’re here. Of I missed you. Of please don’t go.
She doesn’t speak them. She just lets them ripple outward like music under the surface of her thoughts, knowing he’ll feel them all the same.
”They captured Dahlia, I think,” Flora offers conversationally, having not heard Vox’s broadcast thanks to the various tinctures she’d been given to drink to keep her unconscious while the worst of her wounds were tended to.
”I won’t,” Jack retorts almost automatically, smirking and finally stepping back to release her as she makes her way across the room to the bed. While Flora does her best to get comfortable, Jack uses his magic to tease the water into a spare glass and to sweep the shards of the one she’d dropped into a neat pile where it can’t be stepped on. And as he works, between them Flora’s thoughts shine as golden and sun-dappled as the imaginary sky above, the captain saying nothing as if worried that his voice will disturb the calm of her mind.
Her gratitude surprises him, even though it shouldn’t, and Jack lingers quietly near the jug of water as if fighting with himself to unlock his tongue and respond. ”As soon as I heard, I had The Ark leavin’,” he says, finally, like a confession. ”Didn’t even realise I was doin’ it.” And now he does step across the room to join her, sinking down carefully on the side of the bed where she’s curled up, keeping a careful distance from the wounds in her back.
”They did,” he confirms, about Dahlia. ”Ronin flew her into Haulani, to the Jailhouse. She’s still there now, far as I know. They’re sayin’ she’s just like an Accepted now, and weak as a kitten.”
no more than I was or than I want to be when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights
