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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!
Flora rolls her eyes, as if the very idea of downplaying that particular title is absurd. "Jack," she says, dragging out the word like it’s a punchline. "You’ve got the most kids out of anyone I know—and two of them are demigods. And they’re all with Safrin." She throws her hands up in theatrical disbelief.
She’s still smirking as she follows him up the stairs, boots thudding lightly on the stone, the wind tugging at her coat—his coat—as if trying to remind her it isn’t hers. She takes his offered hand to step up and over the rail, her fingers briefly warm against his before she lets go.
The laugh, when it comes, is so unexpected that she nearly startles, eyes cutting toward him in genuine surprise. It softens her in an instant, her own smile blooming unguarded as rose-gold warmth spills quietly through her thoughts. A huff escapes her as she stomps ahead a little too dramatically, curls bouncing, clearly trying to beat him to the door below deck. He might not be staying, which was fine, but she’s not giving up his coat before she finds something else to wrap around herself.
She tosses her words back over her shoulder as she moves below. "Apparently Safrin made the new spring," she calls, voice echoing faintly in the space. "The water’s all starry and shit. Pretty sure there’s no lilies or roses nearby either, so bonus—less chance of running into, like, a hundred people trying to keep playing hero."
"And?" Jack says through a laugh. "It doesn't make me a father - I ain't even met the most recent one." He shrugs his shoulders. "And given that the only way I could do it is with Safrin, I reckon that's more on her choices than mine." Between the two of them, the Marins would be better off known as Safrin's kids than his, especially given how much drama seems to follow his name around these days.
Letting her ghost past and feeling suddenly warmer for the flush of her thoughts, he finds himself following automatically as she heads belowdecks. "Oh I see. A pilgrimage," he says with a dramatic nod, ducking down into the belly of the Sugartide. "Even if there were lilies or roses there, I s'pose it won't be long until there's nowhere left to hero. I'm lookin' forward to a bit of borin' normality, if I'm honest."
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
"It literally does," Flora calls back, her tone laced with incredulity and a smirk that’s audible even through the words. "You fathered them, didn’t you? That’s kind of the defining feature." She scoffs as her feet thud gently on the wood below. "And I’m pretty sure Frey could’ve helped if you’d ever had the desire." she adds, not that she ever thought Jack did.
Shrugging out of his coat once they’re below, she tosses it lightly back toward him without ceremony, her curls bouncing as she disappears into her room. A soft rustle follows—thick socks being tugged up to her knees, the kind that bunch just enough to be cozy—and then the faint sound of her grabbing a blanket. She emerges a few moments later with the soft, sea-salted thing wrapped around her like armour.
"You can call it a pilgrimage," she says, nudging the door closed behind her with a hip. "But I’m calling it a well-deserved spa day." She leans against one of her counters, pulling the blanket tighter, curls falling like sun-drenched vines around her face.
As for normality—her exhale is a huff of breath, emphatic and honest. "Gods, me too." But even as she says it, her mindscape pulls taut and shadowed.
"Any idiot can accidentally put a baby in someone," Jack quips back, unsure quite why this is a debate he feels so strongly about, but you can bet that a therapist would label it daddy issues. "It doesn't make them a father. An' that's blasphemy right there in my book." He tacks on that last comment in response to going to Frey for help, Jack almost wincing with the thought of it. Having children just for the fun of it? Yeah, no.
Snatching his coat out of the air with ease, Jack would be lying if he didn't say it was reassuring to have it back around his shoulders, both for the weight and warmth but also the armour it promises should something go tits up. (More tits up than a void-touched ursur snapping at them and Flora's ship nearly tanking it onto the ice, that is).
"I'll give you that. You gotta take a break from losin' those nine lives of yours some time," he agrees, nodding back up to the main deck. "Wanna get her back in the air, see how she flies?" he asks, though he's not oblivious to the veil of shadow that settles over her mind. "What is it?"
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
"Yours weren't accidents." The memories of hearing about Jack's rendezvous' with Safrin thread through her like a blade honed on silence, smooth and damning. They flash across her mind with the sharp clarity of truth, her thoughts tightening into a darker hue—more ink than gold now, and thick with the kind of weight that comes with knowing too much and meaning to say too little. Another fight waits there if he wants it, neatly packaged and gift-wrapped in the trend of her thoughts, if he'd care to continue to pick out this particular stitch.
As she glances toward the stairs, where the wind moans faintly against the hull, her mindscape shivers open in response—sleek, vast, and hollow, like an ocean drained of tide, the moon gone missing from the sky. "Yeah," she murmurs, clearing her throat, "no point hanging around longer than necessary." Y'know, together, or whatever.
Flora doesn’t look at Jack as she pushes off from the counter, the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders like armour spun in cotton and salt. But when he presses, her breath catches in her throat before she wrestles it down. "It’s nothing," she lies with a small, brittle smile. Her voice is smooth, even believable, were Jack not a telepath; the kind of smooth you only get from holding broken things together with your teeth. Hers weren't Jack's problems to pretend to care about anymore anyway, which was a thought as sulky as it was accurate.
"No," Jack agrees, his voice suddenly low and soft with the deep, dark water he's suddenly treading. "They weren't." There's no apology there - there never has been - and even when they were together, he'd long made it past the point of wanting to fight with Flora about anything. All they'd done was fight and make up, rinse and repeat, towards the end. Perhaps this is the sort of reminder that's needed when they get too cozy down here in her pretty little skyship.
But it all gets real frosty all of a sudden, and despite all else, Jack suddenly feels how he'd always felt after one of their fights. Letting out a long, tired sigh, he refuses to take the bait of her words and merely breezes away back towards the steps up to the main deck. "Wouldn't wanna risk the Sugartide freezin' over again," he adds.
Turning up his collar as he emerges into the chill breeze, he narrows his eyes up towards the sky and is relieved to see the familiar form of The Ark distantly overhead. "A'right," he says, "well, let's see if we can get her airborne an' I'll be outta your way."
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
What Jack feels as frost—biting, brittle, familiar in its pushback—Flora mind had conjured as the yawning mouth of loneliness. And maybe they’re the same thing in different languages, or maybe to a man like Jack who isn't used to feeling sad or needy, it all just feels like a chill. The sea has never been fluent in flowers, and Flora’s grown tired of bleeding petals just to be misunderstood, especially now that the conversation had been closed more than once.
Still, she forgets. Too easily. The sound of the captain's laughter had unravelled something that felt like hope in her ribs, warm and sharp and treacherous. She’d thought she was past this, and yet as she follows his retreating footsteps with her gaze and hums a low sound of agreement, she swallows down the urge to ask him to stay just in time for the brisk wind from outside to steal away the words anyhow.
There’s nothing graceful in the way she rises, only habit and purpose braided tight enough to keep her moving. She pads to the helm, unfurling the sails with well-practiced flicks of her fingers despite the cold. The wind greets her with a slap, but the Sugartide takes to it like she was born for the skies, and Flora exhales steady, guiding her upward.
The Ark floats like a ghost above, and Flora—Queen of Torchline, heartbreak connoisseur, expert in surviving her endings—keeps her course steady as they rise.
Sititng with the truth is an uncomfortable for a telepath as it is for anyone else, and Jack stays quietly out of Flora's way as she prepares the Sugartide for her ascent. He watches, of course, in the way that a sailor (if he can still use that term, given how many other things he is now, apparently) can't help but to tick off that same mental checklist, and he only turns to the railing when the ship glides gracefully off the frosty ground.
Leaving behind the strange, lonely staircase of rock that Jack hadn't bothered to collapse, it will serve as some strange landmark for future adventurers, he's sure. Maybe even for himself, should he decide to come searching for more mageglass in the future. Soon enough they're far above where he'd first spotted the Sugartide struggling, the captain nodding brisk approval.
"She should get you to Halo no trouble," he says, "so long as you don't run into any storms, but no amount of prep'll save you from that. Might want to have someone look her over for weatherproofin' when you reach the skyport." He nods towards The Ark steadily drawing closer, a faint whistle sounding from the deck - Murphy, probably.
"I got it from here," he says, gesturing to his wrist where the compass tattoo sits against his skin. "Save you gettin' too close."
fight so dirty but you love so sweet talk so pretty but your heart got teeth
07-09-2025, 06:17 AM (This post was last modified: 07-09-2025, 06:19 AM by Flora.)
flora
"Jack"
His name slips from her like the hush before a storm, soft and inevitable, carried on the wind that presses against the Sugartide’s rising sails. She takes a few steps toward him, careful not to let the ship’s climb steal her footing, though it’s her heart that falters more than her balance. It always seems to end this way between them—some truth too sharp, some silence too long, some tenderness turned sour in the space between words.
Fuck, she hates it. Hates that they can never hold anything fragile for long without watching it slip through their fingers. Hates how even now, with half the sky between them and everything they’d once been, she still wants something from him—his voice, his hand, his goddamned presence. Clearly not enough time had passed; maybe it never would. Maybe there would always be some corner of her ribcage carved out in the shape of him, still echoing with the weight of what they’d nearly been such that she could never not be like this.
The Sugartide tips upward, and Flora draws her blanket tighter around her shoulders, not for warmth but for armour. She follows his glance to the compass etched into his skin and nods faintly, like the gesture itself is too delicate for words. Her eyes trace the familiar lines—not just of the tattoo, but of the man she’s never quite stopped looking for, and likely always will. "Thanks for the help," she says at last, voice quiet, but threaded through with meaning that spreads beneath her tongue like salt on the tide. For the lift, for the work, for the brief flicker of something warm between them, even if it was only a shadow. Even if it had to end like this. Again.
