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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!
From one of Wildering House’s glass-walled rooms, Flora can see the Ahi Coast glittering beyond the estate in all its white-sand, blue-water audacity, the view so lovely it almost feels staged, as if Torchline itself has decided to lean against the window and remind her that, yes, technically she lives somewhere that's basically paradise. She doesn’t linger on it, though, not when the little shrine she’s made for Safrin is stealing all the attention it can get, bright with celestial trinkets and star-touched details arranged with enough care to look effortless, which of course means Flora had spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time making sure it looked like she hadn’t tried too hard.
Gold rings flashing as she lights a few candles, Flora lets the flames bloom one by one, their glow catching against the delicate glass bottle of jasmine perfume waiting in her other hand. Her blonde curls are pinned up in some half-obedient mess that’s already losing the argument against gravity, and as she sets the perfume carefully among the offerings, she exhales through her nose with the exact sort of sigh one might give before spilling hot gossip over drinks, lashes lowering for a second as if she’s trying very hard to decide whether to be dignified about this and already knows she’s going to fail.
"Safrin?" Her tone is conversational and familiar, her aqua eyes lifting toward the shrine as she runs a hand through her curls and gives them a restless little toss afterward. "So, shit has been super dramatic lately, as I’m sure you’ve seen." Her mouth curves into a small smirk, gold bracelets whispering softly as she adjusts one of the candles so its flame sits just so, because even divine gossip requires decent ambience. "And I don’t even mean Vi answering when I tried to channel you."
Shaking her head, Flora laughs under her breath. "Mostly it’s with people doing and saying shady shit," she continues, smoothing her palms down the front of her leggings before folding one arm loosely across her waist, the other hand lifting in a helpless little flourish that says, honestly where do I even begin. "And so I was wondeeeering if there was some item we could come up with to help with that?"
For a moment, the candles burn gold and flattering in the glass-walled room, until every light in Wildering House gutters out as if pinched between unseen fingers, plunging the shrine into a darkness even the glittering Ahi Coast beyond the windows cannot quite pierce. Then starlight blooms across the glass in a thousand fine points, spilling over the offerings until each celestial trinket gleams like a captured piece of heaven; the candles relight themselves in pale blue flame, and Safrin appears before the shrine as if she has merely stepped through the night and found the room improved by her presence.
"Flora," she purrs, and there is approval already brightening her smile, not merely for the offering or the shrine, though both receive a pleased sweep of her gaze, but for the sheer deliciousness of beginning a prayer with drama and suspicion and the promise of tea. Reaching for the delicate glass bottle, Safrin turns it between her fingers, admiring the way it catches the starshine before lifting it and spritzing the jasmine perfume lightly into the air. She inhales with slow, indulgent pleasure, lashes lowering as the scent settles around her like something remembered from a garden that only blooms beneath constellations, and when her eyes open again, they are glittering with wicked amusement.
At the mention of Vi, Safrin’s expression shifts into something coy and theatrical, one hand rising lightly to her chest as her eyes widen with a performance of astonishment so perfectly polished that the mockery of it gleams at the edges. "Yes, well. That Vi chose to answer you was..." Her smile sharpens into something private, bright as a blade glimpsed beneath silk. "Certainly a surprise to us all, I think."
The shape of recent drama in Flora's life lies around the queen like perfume, like smoke, like fingerprints left on polished glass, every accusation and half-truth and sharp little betrayal catching Safrin’s interest the way jewels catch light. She smiles as if Flora has brought her a particularly beautiful mess tied up in ribbon, and with a tilt of her head, she lifts one brow before extending both hands. "Come here." Her voice is velvet over command, intimate enough to feel like affection and inevitable enough to make refusal seem faintly absurd. Taking Flora’s hands, Safrin turns them palm-up between her own, glancing down at the queen’s fingers with open amusement as gold and magic wink back at her from nearly every surface. Rings for secrets, rings for lies, rings for being unseen or untouchable in ways mortals always think will make them safe. Safrin’s thumb brushes lightly over one band, then another, her smile curving with fond, merciless delight.
"My sweet girl," she says, and the tenderness in it is real enough to be dangerous, because with Safrin even affection has teeth if one presses too hard against it. "Unless you intend to leave no surface of your body unadorned, no. There will never be enough items to do what it is you have in mind." Her gaze lifts from the rings to Flora’s face, the corners of her lips tilting higher, slyness gathering there like moonlight over deep water. "But," she adds softly, releasing the word as though it is a secret being slipped beneath a door, "there might be a way."
Safrin lets Flora’s hands go, her own fingers trailing free with a final glimmer of starlight before she turns toward the windows. Beyond the glass, Torchline sprawls beneath the sun, white sand and brilliant water and the Arclight glittering outward in all its reckless, beautiful excess. The goddess looks at it with an expression that is almost fond, almost possessive, as though even the coastline has committed the minor sin of being lovely enough to tempt her attention. "What a shame," she muses, voice light and leading, each word placed with exquisite care, "That with Hadama gone, Torchline is not ruled by one of my demigods any more." Only then does she glance back, one brow arched, her smile luminous and pointed. "Don’t you think?"
Flora snickers before she can even pretend she’s above it, and maybe it’s reckless to enjoy divine shade as much as she does, but honestly, if the gods are going to have drama, the least they can do is let her laugh about it. Still, when Safrin reaches for her, Flora gives up her hands without hesitation, stepping closer as gold flashes over her fingers and wrists, each ring suddenly feeling very obvious beneath the goddess’s attention. Her mouth tilts, almost sheepish, as Safrin turns her palms upward and studies the collection of pretty little safeguards Flora has gathered around herself like shells against a storm, and though she’s always liked how they look, how they feel, how they give her the illusion of having answers wrapped neatly around her knuckles, it’s harder not to see them for what they are with starlight sliding over every band. Pretty, yes. Useful, absolutely. Enough? Apparently not even close.
Her sigh slips out before she can fully dress it up as anything else, disappointment tugging at the corner of her mouth before she smooths it away with a little roll of one shoulder. "Right, okay, so not a full jewellery box of truth-based emotional surveillance," she murmurs, trying for breezy and mostly landing somewhere in the neighbourhood of tragically inconvenienced, while her mind immediately starts sprinting through alternatives with all the frantic elegance of a hel stealing chips from a tourist’s hand. Then Safrin says but, and every half-formed idea in Flora’s head goes scattering like pearls across polished tile.
She watches the goddess move toward the window, the blue candlelight and starshine playing over the room in impossible layers, and there’s a second where Flora simply follows with her eyes, her hands still half-curled as if Safrin’s touch has left some invisible constellation mapped across her palms. Then Hadama’s name falls into the space between them, and Torchline’s lack of a Safrin demigod comes such that Flora’s mouth drops silently open. For one bright, ridiculous, breathless second, her mind offers two possibilities at once, both of them so enormous they seem to crash into each other before either can settle. Maybe Safrin means to place one of her demigods beside Flora, another star-bright presence at the helm of Torchline, someone to rule with her or over her or around her, and that thought sends something sharp and defensive flickering through her chest before the second possibility rises beneath it, bigger and wilder and glittering with danger.
Her.
The idea turns her stomach over so sharply that she has to swallow, because for a good part of her life Flora has been anti-demigod in the way only someone surrounded by the aftermath of it can be, having watched what power and gods and chosen status did to her parents, how it reshaped love into obligation and devotion into a blade pressed lovingly beneath the ribs. She has seen the cost of being made into something more than mortal, has hated the way it seemed to ask for pieces of people she loved and then still demand a thank-you afterward.
But gods, if it was something she could have?
Her fingers curl against her palms, rings biting lightly into skin, and the question blooms inside her like jasmine opening at midnight, sweet and dizzying and maybe poisonous if she breathes it in too deeply. After a moment, Flora tips her head to the side, playful skepticism arranged carefully across her face like a veil thin enough for Safrin to see through if she cares to, though her eyes are brighter now, her smile caught somewhere between challenge and hope. "Are you saying what I think you’re saying?"
Safrin hears every thought as it flickers and blooms, every sharp-edged memory of demigods and devotion, every old resentment put there by Ronin and Sunjata like a thorned vine around a jewel. She offers no explanation for any of it, no excuse softened into silk, no defence for the way power has remade those Flora loves, because to Safrin’s mind none is necessary. They had all known what it meant to kneel, to swear, to be lifted high enough that the fall became part of the bargain, just as Flora knows now.
Turning from the window, the goddess looks at the queen with a smile bright enough to make the room feel briefly overfull of stars. "Yes," she says simply, her voice warm, intimate, and utterly without hesitation. "I am."
She lets the answer settle between them, beautiful and dangerous as a blade laid flat across open palms, before one dark brow rises and her smile deepens. "You know the cost of what I offer. A lifetime of fealty. To never let my name slip undefended when you hear it dragged through the mud. To be called upon when I need you, and to have you rise to the occasion just as you’ve done for Torchline."
Safrin steps closer, starlight catching in her hair and along the flawless line of her cheek, and the air between them seems to narrow until there is only the goddess, the queen, and the impossible glitter of what might come next. Reaching out, she brushes a loose curl behind Flora’s ear with a touch so gentle it nearly disguises the possession beneath it, her eyes sparkling with all the terrible generosity of heaven itself.
"And in return," she murmurs, her smile turning radiant, "everything."
Safrin is offering to make Flora a demigod using Odd's level 15 Impossible Thing prize.
Flora probably should think about it longer than she does.
The thought comes bright and absurdly sensible, the kind of thing that might have sounded excellent from someone else’s mouth, preferably while they were holding a glass of something cold and pretending this was the sort of decision a person could weigh neatly on either side of a scale. A lifetime of fealty, Safrin says, and Flora hears every edge of it; the vow, the obligation, the way devotion can become a leash if it’s held by the wrong hand or tightened at the wrong moment. She thinks of Ronin, of Sunjata, of the way being chosen had not saved them from heartbreak, from losing themselves in pieces, from being remade around someone else’s glory until love and duty and worship all started wearing the same face. She thinks, too, of men like Deimos, who had declined the lofty offer and still somehow seemed to have everything he wanted, with his mountains and his magic and his terrifying competence, as if some people could simply look at divinity holding out a crown and decide they already had enough.
Must be nice.
Not that Flora thinks she’s more ambitious than Deimos, necessarily, because honestly, trying to out-ambition a man who looks like he was carved from a siege weapon, but her ambition has never been the sort that can be satisfied by six-pack abs and a punch capable of sending almost anyone into an early grave. Flora doesn’t want to be the strongest person in the room in that blunt, brutal way, doesn’t want power that announces itself by cracking stone or making people flinch before she’s even opened her mouth. She wants secrets dragged into the light by their pretty little ankles. She wants lies pinned beneath glass. She wants every whispered betrayal, every shady little half-truth, every darling bit of social theatre that people think they can hide behind, to remember that Torchline has a queen with excellent taste and very sharp teeth.
She wants the sort of power only a god can give.
Maybe she always has, in some glittering, shameful, seashell-hidden corner of herself, tucked away beneath all those perfectly valid opinions about demigods and consequence and how none of this ever seems to come free. Maybe she has spent half her life watching power ruin people and the other half wondering what she could do if it came to her hand cleanly, beautifully, deliberately, offered not because she was someone’s afterthought or collateral damage or miracle baby, but because Safrin is standing in front of her with stars in her hair and everything on her tongue.
And if everything is being offered, who the fuck is Flora to say no?
"Yes," she breathes immediately, the answer slipping out. She nods once, then again, her aqua eyes fixed on Safrin’s face as her pulse scatters through her like startled birds over the shoreline, bright and frantic and alive. "Yes."
Safrin’s lips twist into a smile so saccharine sweet it could rot the teeth of anyone foolish enough to mistake it for softness. Impulsiveness is not something she faults Flora for, not when so many of the loveliest things in the world bloom because they cannot bear to wait, but she will absolutely hold the queen to her choices.
Lifting her hands, the goddess brushes her fingers over Flora’s cheeks, touch warm and impossibly delicate as starlight gathers between them. Then Safrin leans forward and presses a soft kiss to Flora’s lips, brief enough to be ceremonial and intimate enough to feel like a seal set beneath the skin. "Then it’s done," she murmurs, her voice bright with satisfaction as she draws back, eyes glittering with possession and delight. "You’re mine."
Straightening, Safrin lets her gaze linger over Flora with a slyness that turns the room’s pale blue candlelight into something conspiratorial, as though the walls themselves have just been trusted with the most delicious secret. "Call to me again once you’ve tested the waters." With a wink, the goddess vanishes, leaving only the scent of jasmine, the shimmer of starlight across the glass, and the unmistakable weight of a vow already beginning to take root.
