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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!
It begins, as all great things do, with intention. There had been no words at the time, no way to form desire eloquently, no I'd quite like to walk, actually,or making a friend sounds fun, or I'm tired of screaming and you not understanding what it means. There had only been the warmth of his fathers' arms, the silent but inevitable knowledge of his brother close by, and the intention, quiet but certain, to find someone out there to assist them both.
It hadn't been a star to answer that unspoken wish - stars don't wear rags and hide their faces behind blank porcelain - but whatever had happened just shy of daybreak had laid the foundations for the now. The now being Carlo Taliesin promptly sitting upright on damp dock boards, butt-naked and feeling a churning mixture of cold, exhilarated, and suddenly brand new. Overhead the copper statue of a boy seems to smile down at him, or at the very least the dawn has given a mischievous twinkle to his eye, one reflected in the newly-minted nine year old at its feet.
Almost absently, Carlo wiggles his toes, and the movement has him immediately drawn to his own feet. "I've been tryin' to grab you for days," he informs his toes in a raspy hiss, before clapping a hand over his own mouth, surprised by the cadence of a voice not used for words until today.
Calan sits upright with a sharp inhale just as Carlo does, near enough in timing that it might've been choreographed if either of them had known what choreography was five minutes ago. His toes move against the damp boards. He stares at them, reaches down with both hands, and catches one foot before it can do anything else interesting. "So that’s how you do that." The words come out rough and strange and wonderful.
Then Carlo speaks, and Calan looks up so quickly it’s almost violent, and for a second, he just stares. Not the blurry, milk-drunk certainty of before, not the vague awareness of there you are that had followed him through blankets and cradles and the general indignity of infancy, but actual sight now. Actual recognition. Same face. Same eyes. Same expression currently spreading across both of them. Calan grins.
"Well," he says, glancing once around the docks. "That worked much better than expected." Which wasn't that impressive considering he couldn't remember actually forming the intention to combine his channelling with his twin.
"Seems to be," Carlo agrees; Calan has barely moved to grab his foot before his twin is following suit, and though the urge to shove his toes into his mouth is not quite so wild and irresistible as before, he's nevertheless possessive over the limb. "And it did, didn't it? Not bad for a first try." At whatever it was they'd succeeded in doing together, and it's with a matching grin that Carlo finds his brother's gaze at last, feeling some strange, warm sense of relief ripple through him to know that for whatever else had just happened, they'd come through it together.
The cry of a few hels wheeling overhead has him snapping his head up to watch them, expression slack with the newness of it all, and he releases his foot to suddenly try and press his hands to the damp docks, gooseflesh pebbling across his skin. "My butt's cold," he announces, despite only very recently comprehending that his own ass exists.
His attempt to get onto his feet is wobbly and inelegant at best, the sort of thing reminiscent of fawns finding their footing, and he ends up half hunched over but upright, grinning again at Calan. "You've gotta try this," he tells him.
Calan doesn’t need telling twice. Carlo says try this and Calan is already planting both hands against the dock boards, because if his brother has discovered a thing, then obviously he needs to know that about that thing too.
Getting up, as it turns out, is a badly organized business. His arms work first, which feels promising, and then his knees attempt an arrangement that makes no sense at all, and for a moment Calan is folded over himself like something pulled from under a bridge and asked to pass for a boy. He pauses there, naked, hunched, damp, and deeply suspicious of gravity. "Well," he mutters, "that’s pushier than expected."
Still, he gets one foot under him, then the other, and once his legs decide to unfold instead of argue, the whole thing becomes much easier. Calan rises slowly, arms spread wide for balance, toes gripping uselessly at wet wood as his grin finds Carlo again, sharper now for the height of it. The docks, the statue, the water, the whole ridiculous world opens around him at a better angle, and this, immediately, seems like the sort of advantage pursuing. He reaches a hand toward his brother without looking away from the view for more than a second. "Everything looks way better up here."
"And draggier," Carlo agrees immediately, feeling the way his arms, legs, and even his cold butt seem to want to go right back to where they'd just been, but with the sea breeze ruffling the back of his hair and the first fingers of sunlight beaming onto the rooftops nearby, he's too enamoured with the world to let a little thing like physics get in his way. "It does, doesn't it," he agrees quietly, taking one (far too large and crab-like) sidestep towards his brother as his hand reaches for him, ending up clasping his twin by the shoulder.
"Fern," he announces suddenly, as if the name had branded itself in his mind as one of the reasons behind this whole trip. "I remember, now. We were gonna go and be friends with Fern." He doesn't know where she lives or what she looks like or how to walk properly or the necessary value in a pair of shorts, but that feels less important than recalling one of their motivations.
Which is about when his stomach rumbles - loudly. Carlo's gaze drops suddenly to his navel, an expression of suspicious concern on his face. An old instinct surfaces - he should lose his shit and start to scream, because that usually produces food - but newly discovered common sense overrides it. Instead, he sighs. "We should probably go home first."
Calan rocks sideways as Carlo finds his shoulder instead of his hand, which is not exactly what had been offered but does, after a brief and undignified shuffle of both feet, result in both of them remaining upright. That seems like the important bit. Standing, he is quickly learning, is less one action and more several bad ideas agreeing not to betray each other all at once.
"Fern," he repeats, tilting his head as if the name might do something useful now that it has been spoken aloud. When it doesn’t, he glances around the marina with open expectation, because they had wanted something and then they had appeared, so there is no immediate reason Fern shouldn’t follow the same rules. A moment passes and when nothing happens, Calan narrows his eyes. "Maybe she needs longer."
His stomach answers Carlo’s with a loud, rude complaint of its own, and Calan looks down sharply, one hand pressing against his middle as if he might catch whatever is trying to escape. The sensation is familiar in shape but not in size, no longer a disaster to be solved by screaming until someone warmer arrived with food, but a problem sitting squarely inside him now.
He looks past Carlo, down the marina toward the huddle of colourful stalls and crooked awnings, where memory offers itself in pieces: being carried, faces above them, the bright press of the port sliding by while fathers did the walking and worrying. Calan lifts one arm for balance and points with the other, not quite steady but very committed. "That way?" he suggests, then glances back at Carlo with a grin beginning to sharpen again despite the cold, the hunger, and the total absence of clothing.
"Maaaaybe," Carlo says slowly, turning to glance back up at the statue like it might be able to offer something helpful. That way lies madness though, apparently, and his sense of balance doesn't appreciate it. So whether it's intentional or otherwise, Carlo does find his twin's hand to hold lest he end up crashing back to the ground. "Don't look behind you," he advises, voice dropping into something low and grave. "It's no good."
Quickly distracted by the conversation going on between their two empty stomachs, along with the way the world opens for them inexorably with the promise of that way?, Carlo flashes his brother a matching smile and an overconfident nod. "Why not?" he says, then takes the first lurching steps towards home.
Walking, he soon decides, is entirely cumbersome and stupid-looking, and there's a much better and faster way to get around - running. Or at least jogging; his feet seem to want to fall into the movement a lot more gracefully than when he's trying to amble around, and his knees don't lift quite so high. It's also fun, and a bright laugh leaps from his throat as they thunder down the boardwalk, ignorant of surprised calls for them to put some clothes on.
Calan takes the warning exactly as seriously as it deserves, which is to say immediately and with great ceremony, his eyebrows lifting before he gives a stern little nod. "Not looking," he promises, and because this seems like the sort of rule that might become important later.
Going that way begins as a lurch, then becomes something like walking through sheer accident, and then turns into running because running. Calan’s feet slap against the boards his arms windmilling, and when someone shouts something about clothes, he twists just enough to call back, quite sincerely, "do you have any?" before nearly tangling his own legs together trying to keep up.
The stitch in his side arrives like betrayal, and Calan stops with a sharp little howl, veering sideways with all the grace of a dropped sack and slouching against the nearest solid thing. "Ow," he complains, one hand pressed to his ribs while he glares down at himself.
Only then does he notice what he’s leaning against.
The cannon is enormous from this close, dark and solid and fixed at the end of the dock like it has been waiting there for exactly the sort of boy who should not be allowed anywhere near it. Glancing at the pull cord hanging innocuously down over a sign that advises anyone caught tampering with or firing the cannon improperly would be dealt with under the full extent of the law, Calan's expression changes all at once, pain shoved immediately aside.
"I told you looking back was no good!" Carlo calls out as his twin's legs seem to try and betray each other, though of course he does the exact same thing in order to see what's become of his brother. They stop through a combination of Calan's stitch and Carlo's uncoordinated feet, though the sharp ow that leaves him is enough to have any amusement dropping immediately from Carlo's expression. "You okay?" he asks with all the sincerity of a child who doesn't know if what has happened is his fault, but feels the weight of responsibility regardless.
The answer seems to be yes if only because the stitch is forgotten in lieu of the Big Whatever It Is that Calan has just discovered, and Carlo finds his head craning back to look up (and up) at the cannon until he has to squint against the morning light. "I don't know," he says honestly. He's the epitome of that sign can't stop me because I can't read right now, because he literally can't, but that doesn't mean he's going to either admit to it or lose an opportunity to indulge his curiosity.
"I think it says for us to pull it," he announces of the squiggles on the sign, already reaching up to wrap his hand around the cord. "I think two of us will need to - it's... heavy?" The concept feels right even if the words feel wrong, and the result is the same: he's not strong enough to pull the cord by himself.
Calan looks down at his side, one hand still clamped there, and for once his face doesn’t quite know what trick it wants to perform. The pain is sharp and strange and much too large for the amount of boy available to hold it, and when Carlo asks if he’s okay, Calan has to think about it properly, which already feels like a bad sign. "Errr," he says, because that seems honest enough for the moment.
Then Carlo looks up, and Calan looks too. He squints at the sign with the serious expression of someone prepared to make the truth convenient if it refuses to be useful. The marks mean nothing, obviously, but that hardly seems like a reason to let them win. "It definitely says pull me," Calan announces confidently. He reaches for the slack end of the cord in Carlo’s hand, wrapping both fists around it and planting his bare feet against the dock boards. The thing is heavy in the way Carlo means, not just big, but big.
"Three," he says, and bends his knees. "Two," he continues, pulling the cord tight. "One." He tugs with everything he has.
The cannon answers with a BOOOOOOM so huge it punches the morning flat, swallows the hels, rattles the boards beneath his feet, and goes straight through Calan’s bones like the world has clapped both hands over his ears from the inside. The cord flies loose, his balance gives up at once, and for one stunned second he can only stare, blue eyes wide, mouth open, the stitch in his side forgotten beneath the discovery of an entirely new size of noise.
"There you have it then," Carlo announces; if both of them have confirmed that the sign is an instruction to do the thing, then they'd be remiss not to. Wrapping both hands around the cord in such a way that their fingers almost curl around each other's, the boy similarly plants his feet, biting his lower lip with concentration as Calan begins the sort of countdown that will become synonymous with precisely this sort of mischief.
His lips part to shout something directly after 'One', but the remark - and his breath, his senses and his balance - are all swallowed up in the deep and detonating boom of the cannon. Eyes saucer-wide and his feet tangling together so he lands flat on his backside, by the grace of the gods there's nothing worth hitting out in the trajectory of the cannonball, and it hits the water with an enormous plume of white surf in its wake.
"...Whoa," Carlo says, his own voice ringing and distant to his ears. The smile starts slow but keeps growing, ending up slightly deranged and entirely shit-eating, and he scrabbles to get back to his feet. Do it again! lingers on the tip of his tongue, but in that moment a loud OI! hits the air in a rumble deep and authoritative enough to cut through his muffled hearing.
"Whoa," Calan says at the exact same time, though for all he knows he might have shouted it because his ears have become full of bees and thunder and probably several other things he doesn't know the names of yet.
He is already reaching for the cord again, the movement less of a decision and more of a natural next step. If a thing can make that noise once, then plainly the sensible question is whether it can make it twice, and Calan is very nearly prepared to begin important research when the shout cuts through the ringing hard enough to turn his head. Blue eyes wide, grin wider, he looks at Carlo. "Right," he says, with the crisp certainty of someone who has just discovered consequences and decided to be somewhere else for them.
He runs. Not well, exactly, but with improvement. His feet still hit too hard and his balance remains questionable, but even so, Calan skarpers down the boardwalk with the grim focus of a boy who has done nothing wrong except possibly everything. Behind them, voices multiply as merchants come spilling from their shops, questions and curses rising over the docks while the sea still churns white where the cannonball has landed.
The first unattended stall presents itself like a gift.
Calan spots the food before he spots much of anything else: two fresh fish burritos sitting warm and half-wrapped where someone has abandoned them mid-task, likely because the cannon has made everyone in the marina develop urgent opinions at once. This seems less like stealing than timing; they have made a very loud problem over there, and now there is food over here, and Calan is not old enough, dressed enough, or guilty enough to see why those facts should not be connected.
He snatches both, tucks one awkwardly against his chest, and keeps going until he can thrust the other toward Carlo. "For you," he says, as if he has arranged it personally.
"Right," Carlo echoes, the grin fully having taken over his expression as he lurches to his feet and in the wake of his brother. His feet slap with perhaps two percent more coordination against the damp boards, hair helplessly tousled in the sea breeze - a breeze that's becoming increasingly nippy, if he's honest, and might require an intervention very soon.
Before that, though, everyone seems suddenly very interested in where they've just been (he couldn't say why), and it presents several opportunities all at once. For Calan, it's fish tacos. For Carlo, it's a rack of what seem to be rubber slickers in a variety of colours, all bucket hoods and deep pockets. They are undoubtedly for fishermen, though Carlo doesn't know that; all he realises is that they're probably really good at keeping the wind off.
And after all, so many people have already shouted for them to put on clothes, so it only stands to reason that they obey.
He's got a bright green slicker on by the time his twin is presenting his find, the garment dragging at his ankles due to its length, and though he has only managed to get one toggle fastened, the hood is great. "Oh, thank you," he trills, cramming up the sleeves of his new coat to accept the taco, before gesturing to an identical yellow slicker on the rack. "And for you."
Calan grins at the yellow slicker, the marina feeling like a spawn point for all sorts of useful things: Food, then clothing, and all of it appearing at exactly the right time, which is surely proof that they have been making very good decisions.
He takes the slicker without hesitation, though getting into it is another matter. One arm goes through neatly enough, the second disappears into the wrong place for a moment, and Calan has to fight the coat with the fish burrito still clutched in one hand, which makes the whole thing much more difficult. The yellow slicker drops nearly to his ankles, heavy and bright and smelling sharply of salt and oilskin, and the hood comes up over his dark hair at once, turning the world into something smaller around the edges.
"There," he says, pleased, as if clothing has been dealt with entirely. His bare toes curl cold and damp against the dock boards, and Calan looks down at them with fresh consideration before glancing back toward the rack, then the stalls, then the general shape of the marina as if shoes might reveal themselves through force of expectation. "I wonder if they make these for your feet," he says, perfectly serious, by which of course he means shoes.
Then, because one problem at a time is enough and food has become the louder problem again, he takes a huge bite of the burrito. His eyes widen immediately, not with surprise so much as delight, and he chews with the sort of concentration of someone learning another useful thing about being alive.
