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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!
Carlo has no such issues with burrito-coat juggling. In fact, while his twin attempts his first multitask, the boy considers offering to help, but by that point his own burrito has found its way into his mouth, and he's too consumed with culinary ecstasy to be of any use at all. "MMMF," he groans in approval, gesturing to the burrito with his mouth full and his bucket hood almost shielding his eyes from view. "Gods that's really good," he manages once he's able to speak, though he quickly rectifies that problem with another large bite.
When his twin mentions the slicker-feet, he wiggles his own toes thoughtfully and gazes down at them, before shrugging. "Maybe," he says reasonably, "we just need to find nicer stuff to walk on." Speaking of which, as he turns to regard the rest of the docks - pointedly ignoring the crowd hustling in a mix of confusion and irritation around the cannon - and gestures to where wooden boards become dusted with sand before bleeding down onto the beach. "Like that," he says, cramming more burrito into his mouth and heading immediately for it.
The sand is cool and soft given the recent sunrise, and although it clings in a way he's unsure about, it's definitely kinder to walk on. "Careful, the world is all bumpy down here," he cautions, meaning the way he's forced to change his gait to accommodate the unevenness of the beach, the way his feet sink and schluff through the sand.
Calan raises his eyebrows at Carlo’s suggestion, because finding nicer stuff to walk on is, immediately and without competition, the most sensible idea anyone has had since toes. Shoes may or may not exist, but better ground plainly does, and that means the problem has already become smaller, which is the best kind of problem. "Mhm," he agrees around another too-large bite, then follows with the burrito clutched in one hand and the yellow slicker dragging around his ankles.
The boards end, the sand begins; Calan puts one bare foot into it and stops. It is cold, but not like the dock. Soft, but not properly. Dry on top, damp underneath, and strangely willing to move out of his way while also trying to keep pieces of itself between his toes. He stares down at his foot with interest, then presses his other foot into it as well, testing. The warning about bumpiness arrives a little late, but he nods anyway, very serious about this newly established hazard. "Right," he says, as if he has mastered sand by standing in it twice.
Ahead, the ocean moves and shines in the morning light, much larger than anything he's seen so far, save for the sky (which isn't all that interesting, thus far). Calan looks at it, then looks at Carlo, then nods toward the water with his burrito before taking another bite. "Do you think that’s any good?"
"Look at this." While Calan has been musing about the clinginess of their new terrain, Carlo and his burrito have moved far enough down the beach to encounter the firmer sort of sand - the sort that leaves footprints. He's marvelling openly at the way his feet seem to follow him wherever he goes, laughing around another bite of burrito with his slicker rustling about his legs. "I'm following me!" he announces, starting (of course) to run, only falling to a halt at the reminder of the Big Blue Thing that opens against an endless horizon.
"It sounds familiar," he admits, footprinting his way back to his brother with a few grains of rice around his mouth. "Like, the wshhhhshshhhhwhshhhh noise? I remember that. Maybe that's where we live." It seems as likely as anything else they've discovered today, and the boy is already marching down towards where the waves gobble up the shore in slow passes.
Whether it's luck or the gods, Carlo does not make it fully to the water and whatever lessons about drowning are sure to follow - not before he notices a flash of colour and smells the vague scent of lavender on the breeze. "OH," he announces, pointing to The Northaven in the near distance. "DADS." Obviously that should make perfect sense to his twin.
Calan frowns at Carlo’s announcement, because being followed by yourself sounds like the sort of thing that should either be useful or alarming, and he hasn’t decided which yet. Then he looks down, and there he is. Or, something like him. A flat, dark boy stuck to his feet and stretching oddly over the sand, moving when he moves with no manners at all. Calan laughs once, sharp and delighted, then bolts three steps to the side as if he can outrun it. The thing comes with him. He tries again, faster this time, yellow slicker flapping around his legs and burrito clutched safely out of danger, and when it still keeps up he stops dead and points down with the kind of satisfaction reserved for solving important cases.
"It’s him," he declares, meaning himself, or the other himself, or possibly the version of himself that has decided to live on the ground. "He’s fast."
The ocean makes its long rushing sound ahead, and Calan’s attention snaps up again as Carlo gives the noise a shape. "I bet it is," he says, because the sound is tucked somewhere inside him with warmth and rocking and arms around him, and that seems like enough evidence to build a whole theory on.
He is just about to put one foot into the reaching edge of a wave when Carlo’s shout pulls his gaze up and out instead. The Northaven sits nearby, and even from here there is movement on her deck that looks nothing like calm. Calan’s grin appears at once. He throws one yellow-sleeved arm high into the air, nearly losing the burrito in the other hand for the effort. "DADS!" he yells, bright and triumphant, as if being found is another thing they have arranged properly.
Not wrong like when you accidentally leave your shoes on deck overnight and it rains. Not wrong like falling asleep and leaving dinner in the oven and waking up to a houseboat full of smoke. Wrong like my two baby boys have vanished and they are nowhere to be found.
That kind of wrong is what has Ronin frantically out on the Northaven at the first fingers of dawn, looking in coils of rope, in a storage crate, anywhere that seems vaguely as if it might fit a tiny child. His dark hair is a desperate mess made worse by the hands he keeps running through it, and the high points of colour in his cheeks are physical evidence of a panic attack barely kept under wraps.
"Nothing out here," he calls in a voice that seems both too tight and also wavers a little at the end. They'd already turned The Northaven upside down in search of the twins - Ronin had even checked their cutlery drawer, the ice box and in the bathroom sink - and the fact that he can't hear them squalling for attention, that's the worst thing of all. That kind of silence has heralded far too many endings in his time.
Then he hears it, though it makes no sense and seems to repeat itself in a very similar voice: DADS.
Ronin glances up slowly to see, across the beach, two disembodied rain slickers holding burritos. One is waving at him.
"I've lost my fucking mind," the Knight whispers, quietly convinced of that fact.
What good are hands if there's nothing that they hold
Remi has looked in every impossible place only twice, because the third time begins to feel less like searching and more like admitting that panic has taken the wheel and is now driving them both straight into the sea. His curls are in a state of complete defeat from the number of times his hands have dragged through them. "It will be okay," he says aloud, though whether it is meant for Ronin or himself is difficult to say. "They are alive. I would know if they were not." Remi swallows hard, his jaw tightening as he looks once more toward the empty cribs, as if some explanation might be tucked between the blankets if only he can bear to look properly. "They're probably just.."
But probably what? Probably just crawled past two demigods despite not being able to crawl, off a houseboat?
He follows Ronin’s voice outside with his heart already beating wrong, stepping onto the deck and then to his husband’s side just as the early morning light drapes itself over the beach in soft, useless gold. For a moment, all Remi sees is colour: one lime, one lemon, two small bright shapes swallowed by rain slickers far too large for them, each holding a burrito. "Wh...?" The sound leaves him unfinished, hardly a word at all.
Then the shape of them resolves. Boys. Twin boys. Something cold opens at the back of Remi’s mind, as ideas spin and unfurl into explanations of what could have happened. His eyes cut sharply to Ronin, gold and green bright with immediate, horrified defence. "I did not do this," he murmurs quickly, just in case the Knight thought perhaps he'd been complicit in this, given how their conversation about aging a day or so prior had gone.
And what good are hearts if you bury them all alone?
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Carlo hasn't forgotten about the flat, dark boy that seems to be stuck to Calan's feet, nor his own shadow-twin that's following him along the shoreline. Understandably, though, the discovery takes second place to The Northaven and the sight of their fathers - both of them now - emerging on deck. The strangely familiar shape of the houseboat and the two harried looking demigods sends a prang of something aching and sweet through his body that, one day, he'll learn is homesickness, and his own hand (sans burrito) raises in a wide arc to wave alongside his brothers.
"LOOK WHAT WE FOUND!" Because burritos and slickers are imperative for traversing the docks, he has learned, though the former has already made its way back into his mouth as he starts to march down the shore towards their parents. He has to weave out of the way of the hungry waves crashing close by, curiosity abandoned for comfort, and as they arrive at the short pier he wastes little time in clambering up onto it, before throwing a hand back to help Calan. "Well that was exciting," he says of their adventure to get back home, before he's beaming around at Remi and Ronin.
"We are big," he announces, like they might not have realised it.
Calan shoves the last of his burrito into his mouth because both hands are needed now, one for waving and one for not losing the slicker currently trying to trip him. The flat dark boy stuck to his feet waves too, stretched strangely over the sand in a way Calan notices with immediate approval.
He follows Carlo up the shore, yellow slicker dragging and bare feet slipping where the sand changes beneath him, and when his brother’s hand reaches back, Calan grabs it without needing to think. The pull up onto the short pier is awkward but successful, which makes it one more thing they can do now. He lands beside Carlo with his hood half over one eye, rice stuck near his mouth, and the important air of someone arriving from a very difficult expedition rather than from the docks.
"We are big," he agrees at once. Then he looks up at Remi and Ronin properly, bright-eyed and pleased, and adds, "We were tired of you not understanding us too," as if this is not only reasonable but generous of them to explain after all the trouble everyone has clearly gone to. His bare toes curl against the pier, and he glances briefly at Carlo before looking back again, confidence settling over him as neatly as the too-large yellow slicker absolutely does not. "And also," Calan says, with the seriousness of someone presenting the final and strongest argument, "we were getting tired of eating the same thing almost every day."
Ronin throws out an arm for Remi without looking, because there's a real possibility that his sense of balance might abandon him quite soon, and he ends up catching his husband around the middle to draw him close, hand freezing, face pale as he regards the lemon and the lime meandering up to the houseboard. Through the bond where they touch the Bastion will be able to feel his confusion swamped out by relief, raw and loud and giddy, and as the first prickles of defensiveness fire back at him he's already shaking his head.
"No - I mean, of course not," he says distractedly, as if the prospect had never even occurred to him. Regardless of their conversation, their aching panic over the past few minutes had been real, and as identical as the twins now clambering onto the pier. Even if Remi had been responsible, he'd never have allowed their boys to be alone when it happened, and he'd not have let Ronin suffer the unknown for it.
But the lemon and lime are talking now - identical voices, identical smiles, and Ronin drops almost automatically into a crouch before them if only because his legs won't hold his weight. "Is that so?" he manages, gazing between them and having to bite back both a smile and tears to see the rice sticking to Calan(?)'s mouth and the burrito his brother is busily finishing off. "So you decided this between yourselves, hm? Are you both okay?"
What good are hands if there's nothing that they hold
Every thought Remi has ever had about what it means to be the Bastion seems to abandon him at once. Protection, support, steadiness, all those things he is meant to be and has been called for so many years, feel suddenly useless in the cold hollow opening beneath his ribs, because the lime and lemon shapes below are too small to be strangers and too large to be the infants who had been asleep in their cribs, and some part of him cannot make sense of the distance between those truths fast enough to stand inside it.
Ronin’s arm finds him before his knees can decide whether or not they intend to remain cooperative, and Remi’s own arm winds around his husband’s waist immediately, fingers gripping hard while his other hand catches the railing of the Northaven with enough force to make the wood creak faintly beneath his palm. Through the bond, relief hits him from Ronin raw and loud and dizzying, and he answers it with something equally uneven.
But then the lemon and lime resolve into dark curls and bright blue eyes, into faces so terribly familiar and impossibly new that Remi’s breath catches in his throat. They are big. They are standing. And apparently, they have been dissatisfied with the menu. The absurdity of it finally finds one small crack in the ice inside him, and when one of them, Carlo maybe, or Calan—gods help him he has no idea—announces that they were tired of eating the same thing almost every day, Remi cannot stop the soft, disbelieving chuckle that slips out of him.
"Our apologies," he says, as his eyes move between the two boys with aching, helpless wonder. "We could not figure out what you liked to eat half the time. One day you liked something and the next you refused to eat it."
And what good are hearts if you bury them all alone?
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Cramming the last of the burrito into his mouth and shoving the green slicker hood back while Calan patiently explains the situation to their parents, he at least appreciates Ronin crouching down so he doesn't have to look so up at him all the time. "It was all milk," he complains to Remi after swallowing, rolling his eyes hard enough to get dizzy from it (an experiment to be retested later). "This was much better." He no longer has the burrito to hold up, so he simply gestures to his mouth as though they ought to know.
"Aaaanyway," he continues, stepping up properly beside Calan and smiling beatifically at his fathers, "we're okay. But we wanted to try and find some clothes for our feet. Also they should make the sign better on the big boomy thing back there. Like... it should say to cover your ears or something." But not to warn people not to pull the cord, because that had been a hoot and Carlo would quite like to have another go soon.
Calan tilts his head as Carlo rolls his eyes. "Well of course we didn’t want to eat it two days in a row," he says. Never mind that days had been blurrier things before this morning, counted mostly in hunger and sleep and being picked up by the wrong father because nobody could tell which twin was which.
When Carlo mentions the sign, Calan nods hard enough to shift the yellow hood nearly over both eyes, and he has to shove it back with the heel of one hand before continuing. "Yeah. The sign just said to pull," he confirms, with the certainty of someone who has not read a single word in his life and has no intention of letting that slow him down. "But it really should have said to pull and then hold in your bones." That seems complete enough. The cannon had been loud in the ears, yes, but that hadn’t been the important part. The important part had been the way the sound got inside everything at once, boards and teeth and ribs and the space behind his eyes, which was the sort of information a sign ought to have. Good thing their sister was the queen and could probably take care of things like that on their behalf.
He shifts then, the yellow slicker rustling around his ankles as his attention drops to the pier, where the flat dark boy is still attached to him. Calan turns one foot and then points down at it, before glancing up at Remi and Ronin. "Can they come inside too?"
"I see," Ronin says with the air of someone who has taken in very little content in the words being thrown at him. Which he thinks is entirely fair under the circumstances; he's too busy glancing between the boys, marking the differences (or more accurately, the utter lack thereof) in their tone of voice, their eyes, their freckles, gods even the way they hold themselves.
Only the mention of the cannon has him blinking himself around, Ronin straightening up again and shooting a sidelong glance towards Remi that is all concern without necessarily showing it. "So you... pulled it, but without holding in your bones or covering your ears?" he says patiently enough.
That explains what woke us up, is what he adds through the Attuned bond, though.
"Can they...?" he begins as one of the boys gestures to his shadow, Ronin scoffing out a laugh without meaning to and nodding readily. "Sure, of course. Let's all go inside, shall we? One lemon, one lime, two shadows, two dads." And gods, let them all remain inside for the rest of the morning if it's not too much trouble.
05-24-2026, 12:28 PM (This post was last modified: 05-24-2026, 12:36 PM by Remi.)
REMI
the alchemist
What good are hands if there's nothing that they hold
Remi nods with the grave, attentive understanding of a parent whose child has just fallen over and is very clearly deciding whether or not to cry based entirely on the nearest adult’s expression. It helps, perhaps, that his mind is still several steps behind the morning, trying to reconcile newborns with boys, boys with burritos, burritos with the cannon, and the cannon with the fact that apparently it was his son's who'd woken him up that morning. "I am sure that felt uncomfortable for you," he says reasonably, as if the problem with having fired off Torchline’s cannon is primarily one of poor signage and bodily discomfort, rather than the inevitable catastrophe currently barrelling toward them in the shape of their daughter.
His eyes slide casually toward Ronin, and though his expression remains mild for the boys, the bond carries the thought with a faint, disbelieving warmth threaded through it. Can you imagine what Flora is going to say when she finds out who she is meant to be throwing in jail for firing the cannon..?
At the question about the shadows, Remi raises his eyebrows, then nods to where Ronin's shadow is hunkered down. "Of course," he says gently. "Your dad has one as well."
And what good are hearts if you bury them all alone?
