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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!
In a place of extremes, middle ground was difficult to find. It seemed very fitting as a place to go, right now. Perhaps there was something for her to learn here, where scorching heat and relentless sunlight was replaced like the turning of a hand by a dark so vast that the light of the stars seemed quite unable to fill it and cold nipped at her with a ferocity that almost rivaled that of Halo.
Dry winds chapped her lips and ripped at the shawl she had wound about her head as Maea approached the bone white structure. It was curiosity that drew her there, dull and listless compared to what it used to be but present in her nevertheless, and it kept her there for a while, wandering slowly around in an attempt to understand what she was looking at. The placement of the bleached bones seemed far too intentional to be coincidence, and the nature of the material led her thoughts to the pale mask of a Herald she had loved and feared and missed with painful intensity for many years at this point.
Kneeling to wipe the dust out of the empty sockets of a snarling skull, she wished she had something to leave as an offering. Patting down her pockets, all she found was a scrap of paper, the writing too faded to read. Turning it over a few times, she shrugged and began to fold it, clumsy as her memory of how to form the shape she wanted had dimmed. Slowly, with many do-overs, eventually a simple pin-wheel flower was placed atop the rounded dome of a skull.
"I wish I had a stick to place it on," she murmured, "and that I had something better to offer. It's been so long since I played any game that I barely remember how to, anymore."
Gazing into the unseeing eyes, she wondered absently what it might see, when no one was there. Did ghosts view the world differently from living people? Would they know how she might find herself again, lost as she was in the bewildering maze of her own mind?
"I wish... I wish I could speak with you again, Ludo." Even whispering the words felt selfish beyond belief; yet it also felt good, somehow. It dawned on Maea that it was the first time she'd said it aloud since her ressurection.
Using Maea's CotS god encounter to meet Ludo, in case the dice roll fails. :3
Braved the forests, braved the stone Braved the icy winds and fire Braved and beat them on my own
This shrine seems to have gotten very popular, lately.
Nothing happens at first, but Maea's little pinwheel paper will slowly start to spin, stick or no stick, until it's whirring away of its own accord atop the bleached bone of the skull. "Then speak," Ludo suggests, the teeth in the skulls all around beginning to chatter and clack together, as if to try to show her how.
"You may also benefit from learning some new games," it adds, clearly only partially impressed with her last minute offering. Still, it's better than nothing. Ludo is endlessly displeased when it receives nothing.
Maea did not succeed on her roll, so her COTS pass has been used!
In all honesty, she had not expected anything to happen at all. Where she sat on her heels, engrossed in thought, the stirring of the the paper wheel seemed a mere work of the tireless wind. The voice seemed sudden and she flinched so hard that her balance faltered. Unceremoniously spilling back on her ass, Maea stared at the clacking teeth, torn between laughter and tears and too many other emotions besides.
"Ludo! I missed you," was the first thing that spilled from her lips. It had been so long since the last time... a near decade, what felt like several lifetimes ago. Too much had happened between then and niw, and all the things she'd been holding back crowded on her tongue until she barely knew what to even say anymore.
"I... I'm sorry," was what won out, in the end. Shifting so that she sat on her knees before the shrine, Maea twisted her hands in her lap. "I really messed up. I failed to use my magic in moderation. I failed to learn how to flow with the river, like you once tried to tell me, and I even failed to stay properly dead. I... let the Voice lure me to her side. I hurt people out of spite. I killed Nephele. And instead of accepting death for a second time I ran stright to Dygra, without knowing what I was leaping into." Braiding pale fingers together so tightly that the knuckles reddened, the knot of painful regret and conflict a leaden weight in her chest. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore. It feels like I'm running in circles, breaking everything I touch. This.. I've become something I don't like. And I don't know how to change, or where to even begin atoning for the harm I've caused."
Breathless by the tumbling confessions, Maea gazed anxiously at the possessed skull. "Is it... Can I – do I even have the right to ask, anymore? For help, or advice, or... anything at all?"
Braved the forests, braved the stone Braved the icy winds and fire Braved and beat them on my own
With the pinwheel still spinning freely, the teeth cease their clacking - in all but one of the skulls, anyway. This one still speaks with Ludo's voice, the movement of its bleached jaw a pantomime of speech. "And you expect me to know what you are doing?" The jaw drops open for a few seconds, agape in a hilarious display of shock, before clapping shut once more. "You are a child of Dygra now. What use do you have for Ludo?"
Were there billowing rags or a porcelain mask, they might have danced and twisted before Maea. Unfortunately though, at this shrine, there is just the skull and the sand. "If you do not know what to do with yourself, sweetling, I do not have the faintest idea. If you long so much for death, though, that I can provide."
Pain flared up inside, and in her lap the pale fingers closed in tight fists around her skirt, as if by holding on to something she could avoid falling to pieces. Maea hadn't expected anything, true, but the distance she perceived in Ludo's response still hurt. The familiar 'sweetling' didn't ring the way it used to, and she had to wonder whether she had always misunderstood her relation to this deity... or if it was simply a result of her choices up to this point.
"... I guess... I hoped you might know how to fix me," she said miserably. "You knew me in the past, and... you liked that person well enough to attune her. Dygra doesn't care about anything that happened before I became ancient, I don't think... but I hoped that you would." Rubbing and pressing the meat of her palm while swallowing back feelings of hurt and despair, her shrug was a forlorn thing, all strength drained away by her state of mind.
"Is there a way to start over completely from scratch? What's the closest thing you can come to death, without actually dying? Maybe... that is what I really want. To figure out who I am now without carrying who I used to be. Is that... possible?"
Was it the easy way out? Was she running away again? At the very least, she couldn't think of a better solution, since everything she was doing now only resulted in hurting the people around her.
Braved the forests, braved the stone Braved the icy winds and fire Braved and beat them on my own
"What relation?" Ludo wonders, and if the skull could tilt this way and that, it would. "I do not possess family, and it has been years since I have looked on your face. You bring a meagre offering on your first visit in lifetimes and expect a familiarity you do not deserve. And now you ask me to fix you." The skull chatters with the god's laughter.
Perhaps there are tendrils of something raggedy slipping around the shrine of bones, until a porcelain mask peeps over the top of it. "A blank slate? I could carve away your memories, if that would suit you." Already a wisp of fabric creeps forward, as if tempted by the idea. "Of course, that may also bring confusion to all those people who know you. But it might be fun."
Color rose in her face, fueled by some emotion teetering between shame and regret. Cold numbness prickled her skin and Maea rubbed an arm like it was a sensation that could be wiped off, even though it was already settling deep into her bones. The worst part was that Ludo wasn't wrong. And what it was saying just highlighted the problem with her, lately. There was so much presumption, and half baked displays of sincerity that on a closer look simply came off as lame, half-hearted, hastily thrown together without thought for the consequences.
She was halfway into a bow to apologize when the ghostly presence of ragged cloth whispered over the bones of the shrine. Freezing in mid motion, a freezing trickle of dread she'd never experienced around Ludo before went down her spine. Remi's retelling of his experiences with the Herald suddenly leaped into vivid recollection, and it cut through her personal grief like a knife, screaming that she had to pay close attention to what she was saying now - lest she agree to things that would prove irreversible.
Her breath quivered softly as she inhaled, mind racing to piece together . "That... is really presumptuous of me, you are right. Please allow me to rephrase - if you would find it in you to provide a way for me to fix myself, I would be incredibly grateful." Reclining her head, Maea briefly met the gaze of the mask and hastily lowered her eyes again. The sand was good enough for her.
"Removing my memories... What would happen to them? Would they be gone forever, or could they be... preserved somehow? Bottled away? Maybe... maybe I am being greedy here, but if possible I would like to avoid forgetting forever. Else, I will learn nothing from the experience, and might as well just die and be reborn, and cause everyone a lot less trouble." And for all that her actions in many cases had been thoughtless and stupid, even short sighted, the one thing they had in common was a stubborn, infuriating desperation to live, by any means.
If death was truly what she longed for, she would never have returned from Mort's halls in the first place, that was just the bitter truth.
Braved the forests, braved the stone Braved the icy winds and fire Braved and beat them on my own
Ludo does not respond to her thoughts or her shame, even though they are open as a book to the deity. Its mask does not so much as blink.
"I suppose you could always bottle them," it says of her memories. "Though I am not sure how you are meant to learn anything at all without memories to guide you. Are you sure you would not prefer to destroy them altogether? At least that way when you make the same mistakes again, you will not have to bother realising you have done it."
Waggling a rag at her, it continues to creep over the line of skulls and bones, like an ominous black mist of raggedy tendrils.
