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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!
Peeling off the bloodstained clothes and scouring her skin with fire to incinerate any trace of the fouled blood, she was grateful for the magic and how quick of a process it had been to master the use of it. Far superior to a sponge bath, it helped her feel far better; clean and warm, and able to pay attention to her friend.
"WH - Tal, that's huge!" she blurted, fighting to free her horns from hair as she tugged the shirt on. Shaking out the coat she let the fire fade, leaving the excited flush on her face in full view as she turned towards the Messenger. "Weakness to air and gravity huh... I wonder if that goes for magic alone, or if being in this world actually weakens them overall." Raking salty white hair out of her face, pale eyes took on a faraway gleam as her mind began to work, twisting and turning these new puzzle pieces. "What does ice and earth have in common? Being... solid? Hey, what do you remember of that voice that's been speaking to us? When it first appeared, it said something about bodyparts... Having the right number of them, right? What if the Family looks and behaves completely different from us?"
The courier blinked and started to glance over as Maea spoke, then caught himself and pulled his eyes back to the Peregrine's bow. He wasn't sure whether she was done dressing or not, but he wasn't going to take the chance of accidentally getting an eyeful of something his friend would really rather he didn't! "I mean, I kinda hope it doesn't," he admitted with a grimace. "If this is them weakened, I don't wanna know what they're like at full strength!" Though her comment did seem to make some sense now that he was thinking about it. Well... shit.
"Oh!" When she mentioned the voice - no, not that Voice - the courier scowled fiercely into the open sky ahead of them. "That fuckin' guy! He showed up in our heads while we were gettin' started. Turns out bein' at a shrine doesn't even slow 'im down. Don't like that," he admitted with a shiver. "But that Dahlia lady we all got warned about, she's supposed t'look pretty human, yeah? Well... enough t'pass. Except..." He hesitated, nibbling his lip. "Except I kinda had this... nightmare. That might've been a vision? About Starfall an' what's inside it..." He trailed off with a full body shudder and finally snuck a glance over at his friend. Relieved to see her clothed in something clean and non-purple-smeared, he met her eyes worriedly. "I think... somethin's growing in it. Inside some sorta weird purple crystal..." His brow furrowed anew as the word made him actually think for a change. "Maybe there's a connection there? Between earth magic an' crystals?" he asked, already starting to derail.
Without breaking eyecontact with her friend, Maea slowly reached for the bag again. What she dug out this time was a moleskin notebook and a pen, and rather unceremoniously she plopped herself down onto the deck.
"Why don't you tell me everything about both the meeting and the dream, from the top and in excruciating detail?" she suggested mildly; only the flutter of a vein in her neck suggested anything about how her pulse had gone up. "And when you're done I'll tell you about my encounter with Dahlia. Sounds fair?" Nausea forgotten, she was not going to let the topic change until she'd wrung every single tidbit of information out of Talyson. It was a challenge to keep from pouncing on the few morsels he'd already dropped - what crystal? Growing things? What things? - but it was already starting to feel confusing.
And it wasn't like they would be going anywhere for a while anyway.
It might have been Deepfrost and Tal might have been protected by his Frostbite Cuff, but the courier felt himself starting to sweat under Maea's intense regard. He was pretty sure he'd had nightmares about this too. Not involving Maea, but about being called on to answer a test question he hadn't studied for.
At least he wasn't in his underwear?
"Uh, well... so I guess it all started when I got a letter from this 'Seren' lady..." With much hemming and hawing and pauses to search his memory - not to mention a few wait, shit, I forgot t'mention--s throwing the timeline off a bit - Tal related the events of the void-essence testing on Aumakua. Who had been there, what Vox had said about being able to go into pocket dimensions and shrines, and most importantly what the various elemental magics had done to Seren's strange black sphere.
He might have left out one teensy little detail when it came to Noah's Atomic Roar knocking half the gathering down and doing a number on poor Remi, but otherwise Maea was able to wrangle the pertinent information out of him, leaving the courier feeling wrung out and jittery at the same time under her interrogation.
...an' then we all kinda broke up after that," he concluded, relieved to finally be at the end of the tale. "So, wait, when th'hail did y'run into Dahlia?" Though it wasn't hard to imagine her going back to peruse the Collegium library in Stormbreak and running into the Reaper there...
There were plenty of times where she would show mercy on the Messenger, but this was not one of them. Watching him like a hawk while he turned his mental pockets inside out, she took careful note of everything he revealed, down to the part where the meeting had broken up.
Sighing, she scratched a spot on her chin and counted the days between this event and the one she had hosted.
"It must have been... three, four days later? Before the ball started. No wonder Deimos was annoyed. I had called this meeting with the region leaders, you see – "
It was her turn to sweat, relating the eventful encounter with Dahlia. Sparing no details, she also shared the subsequent arguments she'd had with Danta, and Deimos, and Asta and Hadama in the days afterward.
"So you could say I've made myself unpopular," she concluded, offering her friend a grim smile. "It's ironic how much easier it is for people to lay into me for standing up than it is for them to act against the actual problem. Not that I expected them to fight a battle on the spot, but the sheer amount of backlash has been odd, don't you think?"
Tal wasn't always the best listener. He made faces as she talked, drawing in a sharp breath at the arrival of Dahlia and grimacing at the intervention - life-saving but rude - of Sunjata. He scowled to hear about Everest's weird guard-dog behavior on the stairs. His nose wrinkled at Hadama's words in the library. As he continued steering the ship and Boreal rejoined them he rubbed her head thoughtfully, listening to how the conversations had gone in the days that followed with a look of pained familiarity on his face.
"I dunno how ironic it is," he admitted candidly. "Or how odd. I mean, Asta aside--" there was that nose-wrinkle again, "Th'others were all there. An' y'made 'em all look bad, Maea. I mean, whatever their excuses, th'Reaper walks in an' instead o' fightin' back they all turtle down an' think o' their own skins. Th'only one standin' up t'her was... uh, no offense? I dunno much about Danta, but everyone else y'said was there is pretty strong, so y'might've been th'weakest person in th'room." He shrugged. "'Course they're mad at you. No one who's big an' powerful likes bein' made t'look like a coward." He snorted. "Not sayin' I wouldn't've run like fuck if I'd been there. But I'm just a courier, not some fancy leader-type."
She hadn't considered that. Charlie might have mentioned something along those lines when they talked it through, but Maea hadn't really reflected on the perspective. Now she did, doodling erratic spirals and loops in the margin of the notebook while contemplating the underbelly of politics and pride.
"You'd think they would be happy to see others willing to step up, to not being alone with the responsibility of making decisions," she muttered. "But apparently not... Is it a control thing, you think? Not liking chaos unless it's of their own making?" That would be ironic for Danta and Asta, though less so for the rest.
Having a sigh, she tried to shake off the gloom threatening to settle over her. "So what's this about the dream? What makes you think it's more than just a nightmare?" Looking up at Tal where he stood by the rudder, there was no real doubt in her expression or tone, merely curiosity. It was a long time ago now, but she'd had her own experience with strange dreams; they were not unheard of, or even all that unusual.
07-01-2024, 02:07 PM (This post was last modified: 07-02-2024, 06:55 AM by Talyson.)
Not having been on anyone's council or taken into any leader's confidence, Tal could only shrug at Maea's probably-rhetorical question. "Probably a control thing," he agreed, not having a better hypothesis. "I mean, y'don't take leadership without bein' some flavor o' control freak. If they were happy seein' others step up, they'd have bigger councils. Or any councils. Or... I dunno. They'd be trainin' up new leaders t'help instead o' crouchin' on their power like dragons on their hoards." Boreal gave an offended huff, snorting hot air and shaking her horned head and Tal grinned down at her. "Present company excepted, o'course," he assured his companion.
The mention of the dream had his smile fading back into a scowl as he looked out over the horizon. "Oh. Well... I thought it was a nightmare," he admitted. "I mean, I saw a bunch of faces at the end that I recognized, but that didn't seem too weird for a dream. But there was someone there I didn't know... an' then I met her in Stormbreak. An' turns out she'd had the th'same dream an' seen me at th'end. So maybe one o' th'gods sent it? As a warnin' of somethin' worse that's comin' if we don't stop it." Just how they were supposed to do that when the island was scary as fuck, Tal didn't know.
He had a point, much as she was reluctant to admit it. It was one of the things she had enjoyed about her position as ambassador, however brief the stint; being able to influence the flow of events had offered a sense of... agency. It had felt like she was making a difference.
Though it seemed to have made it worse for everyone else around her.
Bending over the moleskin to keep taking notes, she hid her face behind a curtain of hair. "Can you remember who else was there? What about those figures in the crystal?" If she focused on the problem, her feelings became easier to forget. It was a small, probably pointless task, recording Tal's dream, but at least she was doing something.
"Uhh..." He glanced over at his friend but her face was hidden in her notes and he chewed his lip in thought. "Lessee... Sunjata was definitely there... an' Sah's kid, Luka. Um... oh! Fox an' Flora, too! An' Deimos, o'course..." He grimaced and heaved a sigh, brow furrowing in intense thought as he racked his brain. "That's most of 'em... 'cept for that lady I didn't know before. Elizabeth. She's some sort o' magic therapist in Halo," he added helpfully, perking up a bit at the mention of the nice woman who'd bandaged him up after his Ludo-task had left him bleeding in the shrine.
As for the figures in crystal, the scowl returned with a vengeance and he spared a glare over the side of the Peregrine for the corrupted woods below. "More Family, I'm guessin'," he spat the word with extra vitriol. "Like they were... sleepin'? Undercooked? But... waitin'. Somethin' that'll make shit a whole lot harder if we don't deal with it now, before they're ready t'make their move." Exactly how they were supposed to do that, though, he had no idea.
Diligently noting down all the names, Maes bit the back of her pen and considered the list. It was really scattered and contained a number of unfamiliar individuals. Perhaps it really was sent by a god, spreading the news as wide as possible to ensure it stuck with at least someone.
Sighing with a rare sense of hopelessness, she leaned back against the mast and dragged her hands wearily across the face. "It's moving too quickly," she muttered. "And we're not fast enough in finding counter measures. Even if the regions end up protected against the void, we'll end up as islands in a sea of bad. Communication, travel, commerse - it's all going to go down the drain."
Drawing a noisy breath and exhaling, Maea peered up at the Messenger over her fingers. "Can you do anything to ward the Peregrin from the void? If things continue to develop like they are... I worry about you on the road all alone. Well, almost alone." She didn't forget Boreal. But a single miniature dragon didn't seem enough to defend against the looming threat beneath them.
The courier nodded in glum agreement with Maea's despair. He was no Zavien, filled with determined optimism and faith. Tal had seen too much shit go wrong, and since the first meteors had fallen it felt like things had started sliding downhill with no end in sight. "I didn't think o' that," he said slowly, scowling at the horizon as she laid out a grim future that looked worse and worse the longer they thought about it.
He happened to glance down as she looked up, meeting her eyes as she expressed her concern. The courier's pale gaze softened and he ducked his head, unable to hide his pleasure at having a friend care about him. Sure, it happened a lot more now than it used to, but it was still nice to hear it sometimes.
And Boreal appreciated being included, too! The dragon snorted and left Tal's side to flop down beside Maea, curling around to rest her large, warm head in the Ancient's lap and look up at her with soulful eyes. "Aw, thanks, Maea," her companion mumbled, hoping she didn't see the pinking of his ears through his wind-tossed mop. "I didn't think about wardin' her, but... it's worth askin' a god for a blessin' on her, once I finish my current quests." He shot her a glance, the edge of his lips quirking up in spite of the seriousness of their conversation. "Maybe y'can give me a hand with one after LongNight? I need to do some stabbin' with my Dagger t'make it stronger for Ludo."
He drew in a deep breath of cold air, the void-taint below them falling away as he took the ship up a littler higher. Not too much higher, though. He was careful not to let the Deepfrost air cut any colder than it already was. "An' maybe... hm. Maybe this sounds crazy, but... what if we tried t'clean up th'Greatwood?" he suggested cautiously. "Made a real push for it, y'know? Get some folks t'gether an' try an' clear out some sections, so it doesn't keep bleedin' closer t'the Grounds an' King's End?"
Hiding a smile and bending over Boreal to scratch the scales around her horns, Maea pretended not to notice his bashful response. Even in the depth of despair, the Messenger had a way of making her laugh. It was one of the things she appreciated about him.
"Of course I'll help," she responded without hesitation. Hearing Ludo mentioned only increased her willingness; it had been a long time since she spoke to the Herald but it didn't mean her fondness for it had faded.
"That's not a bad idea, either. We'd need to organize properly though, in case it gets overwhelming. Last thing we need is for anyone to get hurt or die." But the notion of getting up and doing something was heartening - even if it was likely they'd end up battling the tide.
Boreal rumbled happily, relaxing into the attention as Tal perked up, too. He flashed his friend a grateful grin at her willingness to help him stab things in the name of Ludo, and he straightened up further, his shoulders coming out of their habitual hunch as she praised his tentative suggestion.
It wasn't a plan. Not yet. But it was the seed of one.
"Maybe go in with a small, stronger-kinda group first," he mused. "Clear th'way an' test th'waters, so t'speak, before we involve any regular folks. Least we don't have t'worry about gettin' fancy magics t'kill regular Void critters. Every kind o' damage I've seen so far works on 'em just fine, an' they haven't been immune t'anything." They knew at least some of that thanks to Maea's experiment in Leafchange, and the cleanup they'd done of the Void-touched animals afterwards. "So, me with my Dagger an' you with fire. Maybe Ru? Anyone else y'can think of?" There were plenty of strong people, but finding ones who weren't too busy with their own lives and quests was going to be the tricky part.
