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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!
The Sugartide lands with a shiver and a sigh. Her hull kisses the frost-laced rock of the Crag with surprising grace, gliding in slow above the brittle blue water until the keel scrapes just enough to let Flora know they’ve made contact. A heartbeat later, the little skyship’s weight settles—uneven, maybe, but no longer in motion. The winds moan in protest as Flora slackens the line to the sails, letting them droop like tired wings, no longer desperate to catch the sky. The storm still rumbles out at sea, but here, on this strange jut of mageglass-veined stone, the world feels momentarily still.
A breathless exhale escapes her as she braces both palms on the wheel and grins at the helm like they’ve just pulled off a magic trick instead of a controlled crash. "Atta girl," she murmurs, patting the polished wood before pushing herself upright.
Then—because curiosity always wins—Flora pops her head out from behind the wheel, curls whipping in the residual wind as she peers down the length of the deck toward the stern. Where is he? What’s he doing? And more importantly: how bad is it?
The queen doesn’t need her truth ring to sense that Jack’s likely riding the edge of exasperation, that knife-blade tension between fuck’s sake and fine, I’ll fix it. Her eyes rake over him as if assessing storm damage: coat still on, hands still working, no swearing audible from this distance—a good sign? Maybe? But then again, this is Jack. The man has at least five different types of pissed-off, and the most dangerous one comes without raised voices.
So she just squints at him from behind the rigging, one brow lifted in silent question: One to ten? How much am I gonna owe you for this?
"Flora, I'm tryin' to concentrate." Jack's voice is gruff but not angry as it echoes from the stern, the captain straightening up when the Sugartide finally touches down. Evidently he's been performing his diagnostics all the time they've been crashing landing, and her torrent of thought is making it difficult to arrange his conclusions.
Eventually, ducking around to haul himself onto the main deck, he shakes out his gloved hands. "Could be a lot worse," he concludes. "Sails and riggin' are fine, but we'd never have got this far if that weren't the case. I can thaw out and oil your mechanisms to stop 'em seizin' up again, but your main worry's gonna be the hull when you get back. It's fine right now because it's frozen, but when that melts you'll want to check the caulkin' an' do a full inspection for any cracks."
He doesn't have to, but as if to throw out an olive branch, or to pre-empt any bad feeling, Jack adds: "It's what we do with the Ark whenever we come up this way. Ice in the air is a bitch."
As for what she's going to owe him, he scoffs and heads to the railing to peer over the edge. "For a start you can tell me what the fuck you were doin' out here unprepared. An' when we're back in Torchline, you're swabbin' my fuckin' deck." Wink... wonk?
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
Jack’s rebuke only earns a smug little grin from Flora as she tucks herself back behind the helm for a second, smoothing down her wind-tangled curls and catching her breath. The warning in his voice is familiar—weather-worn and sharp around the edges—but not sharp at her. So when he hauls himself into view and starts rattling off his report, Flora listens with genuine effort, nodding at appropriate intervals even though half the terms fly past her like hels on a gale. "Right—sails fine, thaw and oil the...twisty bits, hull’s gonna freak out later." Her brow knits as she tries to mentally pin it down. "I might need you to repeat some of this when it doesn't feel like we're going to freeze," she mutters, rubbing her fingers together to coax warmth back into them.
But his next comment—the one about the Ark—lands with more effect than she expects. A small sigh escapes her, a puff of breath that clouds in the cold as her shoulders ease. "Thanks," she says, soft and a touch sheepish.
At his demand for explanation, Flora lifts both hands in theatrical surrender, a half-laugh sighing through her. "I thought I could make it," she admits, wide-eyed as if to say the lie detector determined that was a lie. "It’s not even Deepfrost yet! I figured if I stuck close to the coast I’d be fine. But then—" She gestures vaguely skyward, "a storm rolled in, clouds ate the horizon, and suddenly I'm staring down icebergs."
When he throws in his price—deck-swabbing and all—Flora blinks at him, unclear if he's being funny or suggestive or worse, serious. "Swab your deck, is it?"” she echoes, eyes narrowing with mock offence. "We both know how well that'll go." Sex would complicate things, and if Jack had meant genuine manual labour, he'd best prepare himself for the headache of complaining from Flora's mind he'd have to endure, and after so long together, there was no way he'd think that was worth it.
With a grin still tugging at her lips, Flora tips her chin toward the stairs leading below deck. "Can I offer you a whiskey or a rum to warm you up?"
Jack blinks at her just like in that GIF at the term twisty bits, and he inhales a careful breath before giving her a slow, defeated nod on the exhale. "That's 'bout it yeah," he confirms. "I'll write it down for you 'fore I go, as well as all the shit you should be doin' if you're gonna be ice skatin' your ship around out here."
He's already moving to inspect the sails despite saying they were fine - because he's a perfectionist piece of shit and she knows it - when the flush of gratitude wraps his magic up like cotton wool, and Jack scoffs under his breath. "Don't mention it," he mutters, before promptly shrugging out of his coat and tossing it at her. "Here," he says, before you freeze worse'n your ship."
Raising his eyebrows once his inspection is complete, because if I thought I could make it isn't the most Flora fucking thing she could say, Jack suppresses a groan of exasperation and says absolutely nothing more on the matter, which really says everything. "Keep your mind outta the gutter, I'm serious. Mop, bucket, whole hog. You owe it to my crew for chasin' your tail so many times."
And if he has to conveniently be doing something 60ft away along the dock, well, oh noooo.
Pushing up the sleeves on his dark sweater as he approaches the rail again, his nod is distracted but grateful. "Whatever you got," he confirms. "An' your maintenance kit too. Please say you got one."
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
Flora’s grin tilts apologetically as Jack gives her the look, but the expression falls to genuine surprise when his Kingmaker coat arcs through the air. She catches it against her chest, the familiar weight and worn softness settling over her shoulders and making her feel all the warmer for how big an act of kindness like this is when coming from a man like Jack. The leather still smells of brine and wind and something sharply, stubbornly Jack, and the scent pulls a brittle hitch from her lungs before she composes herself.
The reprimand about swabbing earns a low laugh, half-fond and half-exasperated. "Please—we both know there are a thousand other things I can do to make things up to the crew that we'd all enjoy a lot more." She flashes him a crooked smile, then turns toward the door. "Maintenance kit..." She wrinkles her nose. "You’d better come look for yourself." With that she descends the narrow stair, lanterns flickering to life as they sense motion.
Below deck, the Sugartide is every inch Flora: a riot of colour and clutter packed into tight quarters. Woven runners in Torchline blues and teals stripe the narrow floorboards. A galley kitchen—not magical, despite her boast from earlier—sports hand-painted tiles and tarnished copper pans jangling overhead. Shelves brim with seashell curios, half-finished sketches, and little jars of beach glass. Beyond a beaded curtain lies her bedroom: layered quilts on a bed that takes up the entire room, mismatched pillows, a string of glass lanterns casting warm, honeyed light.
She leads Jack past the bench-seat, flipping open a lacquered cabinet. Inside is a jumble—spools of rigging line, a hammer, a feathered boa, spare lantern glass, even a set of jeweller’s tools. "I...was not in the best frame of mind when I packed all of this," she admits, cheeks warming. "But the kit should be here." She reaches for a duffle bag; opening it reveals a serviceable selection of wrenches, spare pulleys, and a tin of sail oil—if somewhat glitter-dusted.
Flora steps back to give him room, arms folding inside the too-long sleeves of his coat as she turns to fetch two glasses and a bottle of rum from one of the cupboards.
"Now who's makin' an innuendo?" Jack drawls; he can well imagine the thousand other things his crew might like to settle the score and call it even, the captain rolling his eyes and following her down the steps with the practiced ease of a man used to navigating the tight confines of a ship. "Tell you what - just report to Murph when we get back. He'll find somethin' to settle your rescue debt. But if he decides it's swabbin' the deck, I dare you to tell him no."
It's with an expression practiced at being neutral that Jack takes in the Sugartide's interior, glancing among the curios and copper pans, the beaded curtain and the warm glass lanterns as if tucking it all away for later perusal. Leaning against one of the kitchen counters as Flora goes digging for the kit, he scoffs at the weirder items that emerge. "Never know when you'll need one of those in an emergency, I s'pose," he says of the boa, before finally stepping forward to dig around for what he needs.
Collecting the (glittery) oil and the wrenches, between those and his magic the captain thinks he can manage the job, and he nods towards the deck. "I'll be on the ground to do a once-over," he tells her, his footsteps echoing as he heads back up.
When Flora finally emerges to join him, she'll find Jack quite safely on the frost-packed surface of the island, having gotten himself down there by way of what's unmistakeably a set of stairs beside the Sugartide. Roughly carved from rock and clearly dragged up from the island for his uses, there's nothing fancy about his newest magic - not yet, anyway. But it does the job.
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
"What innuendo? I have put your crew through enough. Surely I owe them something for that." The bluff was an easy one to make, given that none of them would dare do more than shoot an appreciative glance Flora's way, even if she offered them a handful. The mention of reporting to Murphy draws an exaggerated wince that’s half-playful, half entirely genuine.
"Fashion emergencies count too," she calls after the captain, waving the feather boa once before draping it over a hook. With a sigh, she nudges the two glasses back into the cupboard—no sense pouring if Jack’s already outside—and tucks the rum against her hip, bottle neck hooked through gloved fingers. It was a remarkably Jack thing to do—never sitting still, fixing what needed doing—such that she really shouldn't have bothered with the glasses in the first place.
Topside, the wind had her tugging his coat around her all the tighter, and as Flora steps to the rail, expecting to find Jack hovering or straddling the rigging with his usual reckless ease, instead she finds a staircase; rough stone, freshly coaxed from the Crag—leaned solidly against the Sugartide’s hull like it’s always belonged there. Surprise blooms bright across her mind as she peers down at it.
"Sorry, what?" she calls down, fingers tightening around the rum as she peers over the rail. "I leave you alone for two minutes and you're out here playing mason?" she calls, disbelief laced with a wry grin, before hesitating only a heartbeat before starting down, careful on the uneven steps, coat flaring like a sail in the wind. Reaching the packed ice below, she offers the bottle out, breath fogging in the chill. "Here—warming priority for the man patching my poor girl back together."
Fashion emergencies and owing his crew favours aside, of course Jack hasn't stuck around for a glass of rum in the all-too-homely belly of Flora's ship; a ship he might have once found himself navigating with the same ease as his own, if circumstances had been different. But with the cold nipping at their skin (his more so now, from surrendering his coat) and the undeniable distance that has opened up between them since the House of Midnight, forgive him for needing to keep himself busy.
"Hm?" He glances up from the pack ice as her voice echoes over the railing, Jack slanting a grin up towards her before he ducks around to continue his checks. "Figured out I could do it a couple weeks back," he calls while she uses his makeshift staircase to come down and join him. "Figure it must've happened thanks to all that time down in the Crush."
It would make sense, and Jack isn't the type to look a gift element in the mouth, the captain running a hand along the hull and pausing beneath the stern so he can start to thaw and oil the mechanisms. Only once he's satisfied with them does he duck back out, gratefully reaching for the bottle to take a well-deserved nip of rum. "She's sound," he says, voice rough from the liquor as he hands the bottle back. "But then she's still pretty new on the air and water. I'd be surprised if she had much wear and tear."
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
There’s a strange, brittle space in Flora’s chest as she watches Jack move—hands already darkening with oil, body already folded into purpose. The part of her that once knew him inside out still flinches at the things she doesn’t know now. The discovery of his new magic hits like a slip of ice between her shoulder blades: not the revelation itself, but the fact that she’s hearing it like this. Late. Distant. After. It’s a small thing, maybe, and one to be expected given that they'd broken up, but something in her shivers all the same. A shadow in the shape of something that used to be hers to notice first.
"Pretty handy," she murmurs, tucking that feeling away beneath a curl of steam from her next breath. "Maybe you oughta take a vacation in the Climb next. See if you come back breathing fire." Her smile flickers, warm and faintly wry, eyes following the line of frost that still clings to the edge of the Sugartide’s hull.
She takes a sip of the rum when it’s handed back, letting the burn settle in her chest. "Thanks," she says simply, and there’s weight behind it that he'll likely feel as much as hear. Not just for this moment, but for all the other moments he’s kept her alive, whether with magic or with maddening stubbornness. "If it weren’t for you, I’d be down another of my nine lives I think."
The bottle tilts back toward him in silent offering. As the wind cuts sharper around them and the ocean roars low and endless at their backs, Flora gives a little shiver, despite Jack's coat tucked around her. "What were you doing this far west? Not out here for mageglass, were you?"
Careful to continue keeping himself busy so that he gives nothing away as Flora's thoughts lap gently at his magic like warm waves at low tide, Jack wipes off his oilslick gloves on a rag he's found in among the set of wrenches and steps back at last. "It's got its uses," he agrees with a touch of reluctance, voice a bit distracted as he leans down just to double check the placement of the mechanisms. Once he's satisfied, he glances fully back at Flora.
"Weird for a sailor to get earth magic, though. Almost as weird as if I got fire," he says with a smirk. "If that was gonna happen I'd have expected it when we were makin' our rounds in The Climb." Bickering, having sex, looking for lilies. You know, standard stuff for them.
Offering a quiet nod at her thanks, Jack turns on heel to back up now to look at the Sugartide in full, tipping his head up to see if he can yet spy The Ark making her rounds overhead. "How many of those lives you got left by now?" he wonders, only half joking, especially after Dahlia's parting gift.
Mageglass has him raising a brow, reaching out to accept the bottle again. He takes a longer pull from it this time, especially at the bitter wind, and lowers it from his lips with a hiss. "Nah, the storm chased us farther west than we expected. Then the Climb was havin' one of it's tantrums - volcanoes blowin' their caps all over the place, so we skirted around to here. Gonna cut inland to go back south soon as we can."
Offering the bottle back and moving to collect up all the tools, he finally has no choice but to mention it. "Didn't realise you could mine for mageglass up here." It's not casual and he doesn't try to make it seem that way, either.
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
Yeah Jack, best keep all those thoughts and feelings tucked away. No sense learning from past mistakes now. "I mean, you're a bit more than just a sailor these days, aren’t you?" Flora says, the words curling around a soft smirk as she watches him move. There’s a looseness in her tone that doesn’t quite reach her spine. At the mention of the Climb, her mouth twists slightly, golden heat spilling unbidden into her thoughts. The memory flickers sharp and sweet: sulphur and steam, his cold fingers on her burning skin, her back arching in the hotsprings while the world narrowed to salt and breath and friction. One of the best fucks of her life, honestly. Not that she’s about to say that out loud, but then, it certainly didn't matter given her present company. Still, her expression goes briefly wistful, the memory warming her from the inside even as the wind needles at her coat.
"As for lives left," she murmurs, lifting a hand to brush a curl from her mouth, only for it to blow right back into place. Her sigh carries a smile. "Dunno. A handful, maybe?" So, you know, probably enough to get her through the next year at this rate.
She takes the bottle back with a brush of fingers, tilting it to her lips and letting the burn pool at the back of her throat before pressing the back of her hand there like punctuation. "This chunk of land used to be part of Halo, actually," she adds, eyes tracking the rocks in the near distance. "I might’ve—accidentally—blown it off the mainland a while ago." A careless lift of her shoulders, though there’s a glint of pride beneath the faux innocence. "Now it floats out here like an angry ice cube, but no more angry than Deimos was when he found out." She shrugs. " All the mageglass in Caido comes from here."
"What's that meant to mean?" Jack inquires, raising his eyebrows at Flora and gesturing to the ship he's just helped to check over. "Whether it's in the sky or on the water, it's still sailin', ain't it?" And whilst he had managed a few death-defying stunts in the past few seasons - sometimes not defying it at all, might he add - nine times out of ten they've taken place on his ship.
(Except the dying. And he's quite glad not to have that aboard The Ark, thank you).
"You know how much I enjoy when you're vague as shit," he continues, smirking and folding his arms across his chest to keep the heat in. "A handful of lives is better'n one or none, I guess."
Raising a barrier of air magic to ward off the cutting breeze that keeps trying to blow through them, the captain rolls his shoulders as if to accommodate the flush of her suddenly lascivious thoughts without reacting to them. Easy enough, honestly, thanks to what Flora says next. "I trust there's more of an explanation behind that an' you just started the story this way for dramatic effect?" He raises his eyebrows; accidentally blowing regions apart is a new one even for her.
The mageglass, though; Jack turns to face the island properly, head tilting. "Huh," he says, and means much more besides. "An' just a coincidence that you wanted to land here?"
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
Flora raises a brow at his mock offense, then lifts a hand and begins to tick off fingers with theatrical flair. "Let’s see. Smuggler, political backroom consultant, thief’s guild member, father..." Her gaze flicks up with pointed emphasis. "Starfall explorer...expert in evasive communication...emotional repression virtuoso..." She trails off, wiggling her fingers as if she’s lost count somewhere in the list. "Bit more than just a sailor, Jack."
The smirk she tosses him after is bright with mischief, eyes alight as she tosses an imaginary handful of cartoonishly oversized numbers toward the vague tangle of webs that represents how she sees his magic.
His next question has her shrugging, curls bouncing with the motion as she steadies herself on the uneven ground. "Honestly? The story’s dramatic enough on its own." The smile she gives him next is crooked. "It was back when we were trying to cleanse the Greatwood. The Mathair asked if we wanted anything for saving her, and...I asked if there was a way to open up the path to Halo so I could get more mageglass." She pauses, glancing away as a flush creeps into her cheeks, barely visible beneath the wind’s colour. "I wanted to get some for you." Flora clears her throat. "Anyway, the Mathair talked to the Eirachi who took the whole thing super literally." One hand gestures vaguely to the craggy shoreline. "Next thing anyone knew, this whole chunk of land was blasted off the mainland." Her grin returns as she lifts the bottle again, the burn of the rum helping keep her pride in check. "Deimos was not impressed with me."
At his final question, she rolls her eyes hard enough to tilt her whole head. "Oh yeah. Absolutely. My master plan was to heroically land here, mine the single largest piece of mageglass in Caido history, and use it to magically fix all of our relationship issues, you caught me." She takes a sip, then lifts a brow over the rim of the bottle. " I came because I wanted to see Halo’s new hotspring."
Jack's nose scrunches automatically as Flora rattles off her list, which is just short of a pout in the captain's emotional vocabulary, and he settles on a roll of his eyes in the end. "The vast majority of which I accomplish via sailin'," he finishes for her, batting a hand at her imaginary numbers towards his imaginary magic. "It still amazes me how many people label me someone's father, though. You'd think I went around beltin' it from the heavens."
It borders on obsessive in people's thoughts, he finds, the second they learn about the Marin kids, despite Jack never having used the term himself. (Much to Nova's chagrin, but we can't always get what we want).
Given that it's much easier to keep moving rather than to linger around on the frozen rock - mageglass or no mageglass - Jack starts to head back for the stone staircase he'd created, heading back up towards the Sugartide's main deck. "Ah, yeah. The great cleanse," he recalls, only to pause in his footsteps to gaze over his shoulder at her.
I wanted to get some for you.
Because of course she did.
"Havin' been in Deimos's mind, he ain't impressed with much," he says with a faint smirk, hopping back aboard and holding out a hand to help Flora step over the rail. And then, unexpectedly, he scoffs out a laugh. "Shut up," he drawls, his tone etched with playfulness. "An' don't knock the power of a giant piece of mageglass, either. Anyway, what's so special about the new hotspring, other'n it bein' new?"
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
