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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!
Remi does not move to stop Flora. There is a moment where his body wants to, where every old parental instinct and every newer, rawer one rises up at once, tangled and useless beneath his ribs, but Flora is already a storm with her hand on the door and he knows better than most what happens when someone tries to catch lightning barehanded. He knows her hunger for the last word, knows the brittle shine of her anger well enough by now to recognise that anything said after it will only become another sharp thing for her to throw back or, worse, to carry with her until it grows teeth. So he keeps his jaw locked, keeps his foot moving with careful pressure against the bassinet, keeps Carlo and Calan asleep beneath the low thunder of voices that have not quite become shouting.
Even so, his whole body tightens as she reaches the door, bracing for the slam that feels inevitable, deserved, disastrous, all at once. When it does not come, when the latch only clicks softly behind her instead, the breath Remi has been holding leaves him slowly enough to hurt.
For several seconds he only stares at the closed door, the room suddenly too quiet around the warm smell of pie and wet hair and newborn sleep. Then he glances over his shoulder at Ronin, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and exhaustion, and leans forward until his elbows rest on his knees. The heels of his hands press hard into his eyes, harder than he needs to, until sparks bloom behind his lids and the blackness beneath them turns briefly star-pricked from pressure alone.
I am not sure what it was she was expecting, he says wordlessly, the thought sent through the bond without any of the careful shaping his voice would have required. Almost immediately, guilt follows it, not clean or noble but paternal and sickly, warbling through him like something knocked loose. He shakes his head without lifting his hands from his face, curls still damp where they fall forward against the towel around his neck, and amends himself before the first thought can harden into anything too simple. Or, I suppose she said what she was expecting, he adds, the disbelief still there but softer now, scraped raw around the edges. But I cannot believe that is what she thought she would get.
I can't pass the test, don't wait for me.
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Ronin's eyes have already closed, wincing in anticipation of the slam of a door that will send two newborns into squalling upset, and it's almost worse when it doesnt come. The Knight blinks over his shoulder to where Flora has departed, every breath feeling hot and painful as if keeping the words back, even now, is enough to set his lungs on fire. Only Remi snaps him out of it, Ronin forcing himself to let it go with a soft and shuddering sigh, turning immediately back to his husband.
His hand comes to rest between the other man's shoulders, offering warmth and steadiness despite feeling neither himself, and he shakes his head in matching disbelief. How did we get here? he wonders softly in reply, scooting closer and leaning in to press his forehead to Remi's shoulder, like the proximity might help him to gather his thoughts.
Is it because we fucked up so much in the past, that the only thing we're allowed to do now is cheer and celebrate every decision so we pass the 'supportive parent' test? He shakes his head again, trying to cringe away from that train of thought, though Flora's bitter words, thrown carelessly and bitingly into the soft places where she'll have known they'll fester, keep his temper smouldering on low.
She just threw it out like it was nothing, he remembers. Like trying to mention a bad grade on homework without anyone picking up on it. She must have known how it would go.
Remi exhales his answer more than he gives it, the sound leaving him in a low, helpless breath as he shakes his head, because there is no shape he can make out of this that does not cut someone. Flora’s absence sits in the room like something still sparking, bright enough to hurt if he looks at it directly, and though Carlo and Calan remain asleep in the bassinet, their small bundled bodies seem to make the silence around them more fragile rather than less.
He glances back at Ronin over one shoulder, eyebrows lifting briefly as if some reasonable explanation might have surfaced in the moment between one thought and the next, but none does. I do not know, he admits. I would have thought that as our children got older, we would be able to have more frank conversations with them about things, but... The thought trails away, not because there is nothing else to say, but because the rest of it opens too wide beneath him. Ronin will feel the pit of it through the bond, that gnawing hollow in Remi’s stomach, vast and cold as the Maw, where all the old failures collect with the patience of deep water. Every year missed, every wound misunderstood, every moment where love had arrived late or clumsily dressed as warning, all of it shifts somewhere below the ribs until Remi’s jaw tightens and his gaze drops back to the bassinet.
But maybe that is exactly why, he adds after a moment, quieter even in thought, because guilt does not need volume to be loud. Maybe we were not there in the way she needed when she was younger, and now anything that is not approval feels like that same sort of absence.
A quiet groan slips from him as he leans back, one hand dragging over his mouth before falling uselessly to his lap. He nods at Ronin’s memory of how casually Flora had dropped it between bites of pie, the sheer brightness of her delivery making the thing itself feel sharper in retrospect. "And it is not as if she has not seen what being demigods has cost our family over the years," he murmurs at last, voice low enough for the twins and rough enough for Ronin, his eyes lingering on the door before returning to his husband.
Well that's just the thing, Ronin says with a scowl that feels as if it's settling between his brows like something carved deep into the bone. We are able to have frank conversations. We managed it before we even considered having Carlo and Calan. A meeting that had been difficult but necessary, and that had resulted in something unexpectedly wonderful. So it isn't a matter of being incapable for the Knight.
Sighing out a breath that wants to be louder than it is, he sits up enough to catch his arm around Remi's shoulder when he leans back, drawing him close against his side. Don't fall down that rabbit hole, he says softly, quiet and steady warmth pulsing through the bond between them as he feels Remi threaten to tumble into that old darkness where failure has teeth and despair is always hungry. This isn't like she decided to step down from being queen, or secretly eloped, or wanted to move into a hut in the middle of the Feverlands. This is tethering herself to a goddess.
And not any goddess either. As much as Ronin had meant it when he said it could have been any deity and they'd feel the same, it's true that it being Safrin adds an extra layer of complexity that sends his mind slipping back through cracks to places he'd rather forget.
"There was definitely a better way she might have told us," he agrees softly, leaning in the moment Remi glances his way to drop a gentle kiss against his lips. "And I can't apologise for how we responded," he adds. "Not for something like this." In his opinion, their immediate reaction had actually been quite measured compared to what it once might have been.
Remi sighs and nods, his mouth pulling into a tired line as he leans into the arm Ronin curls around his shoulders. We broached that very, very carefully, he says silently, the faint lift of his brows doing the rest of the work for him, because whatever Flora had expected from them, she had not placed the news down gently enough for anyone to examine it before it went off in the middle of the room.
Pressed against Ronin’s side, Remi tries to let the warmth moving through the bond blunt the teeth of everything else, though the despair still wants to worry at him from beneath the ribs, patient and familiar. He can only nod, helplessly and more than once, because he is caught between two thoughts that refuse to sit cleanly beside one another: that Flora could not possibly understand what she has tethered herself to, not really, not in the bone-deep way she will one day, and that perhaps she does understand enough and had chosen it anyway, reckless in that particularly Flora-shaped way that has always made love and fear feel too much alike.
"I agree," he whispers against Ronin’s lips, the words barely there after the kiss, soft enough that they belong more to his husband than to the room. Still, agreement does not settle him the way he wishes it would, and he shakes his head slightly as his eyes drift back toward the closed door. "I do not know anymore," he admits, his voice kept low, each word careful around the sleeping boys and the mess Flora has left behind. "I have always thought our job was to tell them the hard truths they might not want to hear. But at what cost?"
The question hangs there, not dramatic but exhausted, scraped raw by the fact that there is no answer that does not seem to ask for blood from somewhere. Flora’s words return to him despite himself, that accusation about their trauma bleeding through and their children inheriting chips they never asked to carry, and though he wants to dismiss it as anger, as a daughter striking where she knows the skin is thinnest, he cannot quite keep it from lodging somewhere tender. His gaze drops to Carlo and Calan. "Would saying nothing have been better?" he asks softly, looking down at the twins rather than at Ronin, because the question feels easier to let loose when it is not aimed directly at either of them. "Or would she have said we were being just as unsupportive?"
We were nervous about it, Ronin says of Carlo and Calan, with a tired sigh that echoes the expression on Remi's face. Flora wasn't nervous about this. I suppose in her mind, why would she have any reason to be? It was her life, as she'd said, and she'd hardly been strong-armed into accepting. It doesn't make the weight of it settle in his gut any easier, though - if anything, it feels worse.
Dropping another kiss, this time to Remi's forehead, in the wake of his initial words, Ronin settles back into the couch, tentative in his hope that if the bassinet ceases rocking for a bit that the twins will remain asleep. At least for long enough that he can properly hold the Bastion and sit with all that has just happened.
His fingers smooth absently through Remi's damp curls as he continues, his gaze similarly pinned on the sleeping twins, and though he can still feel the thorny confusion of all Flora had done and agreed to - knowingly or otherwise - it doesn't settle into anything neat or easy. "I think saying nothing would have been worse," he admits softly. "Instead of hearing what we did say, she'd have filled the silence with something else. I just... I know we can't do it for them. Can't live for them, or make the mistakes for them, or protect them from things that might or might not happen. But fuck, Remi."
Remi’s eyebrows rise in tired agreement, because why would Flora have any reason to be nervous indeed. Nervousness belonged to the people left standing after the announcement, apparently, to those who knew too much about what came after divine favour and not enough about how to make that knowledge useful without turning it into a weapon.
His hand stretches out across Ronin’s leg, fingers settling there with quiet familiarity as he turns slightly into him, letting the touch to his curls and the warmth of his husband’s body against his own pull him back from the sharpest edges of his thoughts. Even so, he shakes his head again, helplessly. At Ronin’s soft, exhausted curse, Remi laughs under his breath despite himself, the sound low and brief and aching at the edges, because there is something almost absurd about having lived through the world ending more than once and still being undone by a daughter with a pie and a piece of news dropped like a match into dry grass.
"It feels like either she did not take seriously everything that has happened to us over the years," he murmurs, careful to keep his voice beneath the twins’ dreaming, "or worse, that she thinks she can do all of this better." The words leave a sourness in his mouth almost immediately, and he pauses, his thumb brushing once along Ronin’s leg as if to smooth away the shape of what he has just admitted. "I know how that sounds," he adds quietly, glancing up at his husband with an expression gone rueful and uncertain, "but..." He trails off, shaking his head because there is no kinder way to finish it that would still be honest. Flora is brilliant and bold and capable in ways he has never doubted, but Safrin is Safrin, and Remi does not know how to say that he would not bet on anyone, not even Flora, coming away untouched from that kind of devotion. Not when Ronin hadn't managed it, anyway.
I can't pass the test, don't wait for me.
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
He'll never get enough of this, even if the circumstances are less than ideal. But the casual warmth shared between them, the easy touch, the identical adoration for their children paired with the exhaustion of knowing more than it feels wise to say... Ronin will only ever share that with Remi. And he doesn't take it for granted, despite the quiet thunder Flora had left in her wake, his free hand dropping to rest atop his husband's. His laughter is contagious, the Knight finding a chuckle rising up in his own throat, but he has to resist the urge to put his head in his hands as it tapers out.
"No, I get it," he says, tired and in love and forgiving all at the same time; forgiving of themselves and of Flora, though he doubts she'd ever admit to needing it from them. "Part of me hopes she can do better," he admits. "If only because if she can't..." He winces, shrugging his shoulders. "Don't get me wrong, Safrin and I have been on better terms lately than for a lot of my time as her demigod. But that's just it... we needed that distance to be healthy."
And the lady of the stars is nothing if not up front with her demand for loyalty, for devotion, for sacrifice at times. "Flora has more to lose now than she ever did before," he says, gaze dropping to their hands.
Remi nods, his expression pulled thoughtful by the uncomfortable truth of it, because hope and fear are sitting too close together now for him to separate them cleanly. "I know there are demigods who do not have much asked of them," he murmurs, the words carrying the weight of more than one life’s worth of watching gods choose their favourites and their tools. He sighs, glancing ruefully toward Ronin. "But given how much asking Flora will likely do on her own, I cannot see that being the case with her."
His mouth presses into a line at the mention of Safrin and distance, not in disagreement, but because the memory of what it had taken for Ronin to reach even this uneasy place of peace is not a thing Remi can touch without feeling the old edge of it. The years of devotion and punishment, the love turned conditional and sharp, the steep climb back toward mere neutrality, all of it sits behind his eyes as he closes them for a moment and exhales through his nose.
When he opens them again, his thumb brushes beneath Ronin’s hand. "That is very true," he says softly, gaze dropping to where their hands rest together before flicking toward the bassinet, then back. "And I am not sure Kaisel is the sort to be very understanding of those sorts of sacrifices, if and when they come." His brows knit slightly, not unkindly, but with the grave concern of someone seeing another storm building on a horizon already too crowded. "Nor should he necessarily have to be, I suppose, given that they have only just gotten engaged." He'd have thought that particular vow of forever would have been enough for Flora.
I can't pass the test, don't wait for me.
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Ronin doesn't dare give a response to Remi's first remark, though the uncomfortable twist in his expression says a lot of it, and the flood of emotion down the bond supplies the rest. Even without Flora doing the asking, no part of him believes that Safrin won't be at least a little pleased to have their daughter under her wing, given how much water sits beneath the bridge between them. (Or has tried to drown them, in Remi's case). And given that her other demigods had been born of the stars, the fact that Flora had been chosen already lends an extra weight of responsibility to it all.
Groaning under his breath with the weight that line of thought brings with it, Ronin unconsciously clasps the Bastion closer, turning to kiss his curls as if to distract them both with the here and now. "Kai is a good man," he says quietly. "Flora wouldn't have chosen him if he wasn't. I just hope he can weather the harder parts of her new role as well as the celebrations." Only time would tell on that front, though.
"I will go and speak to her," he says softly. "Not right now - not when things are still so up in the air for both of us. But I will."
Remi leans into the kiss pressed against his curls, his eyes closing for a moment as something golden and aching warms through the bond between them. There is comfort in being known well enough that no explanation is needed for the things he cannot quite say without making them worse, and for a few seconds, he lets himself rest there, damp hair and tired bones and all.
"I wonder if Kai did not give her the reaction she wanted either," he murmurs after a moment, opening his eyes but not moving away, "and that is why she took ours so much harder." His expression twists faintly, not with accusation so much as wary speculation, because he cannot imagine Kaisel celebrating blindly either, not if he understands even a fraction of what marriage to a demigod may now ask of him.
When Ronin says he will speak to her, Remi nods, though the motion is slow and heavy with the knowledge that time might help the edges dull, but it will not make the conversation simple. "Would you like me to come with you?" Then he sighs, the sound loosening something more fragile than frustration from his chest, and his gaze slips toward Carlo and Calan again as if Flora’s parting shot has found its way into the blankets with them. "Do you think she was right?" he asks, nearly sheepish now, his voice low and rough around the edges. He looks back to Ronin with a small, uncomfortable tilt of his head. "About us giving our damage to our children?"
He swallows, his hand stilling beneath Ronin’s for only a moment before his thumb moves again, a tiny restless sweep against warm skin. "I always thought we were just warning them," he admits, brows drawing together as he tries to separate wisdom from fear, love from the old scars that have never quite stopped aching when the weather changes. "Wanting them to learn from our mistakes instead of repeating them, but..." The frown deepens, and there is no neat ending waiting behind it, no reassuring answer he can offer himself. "How would we even know if we had gone too far?" That instead of protecting, they'd merely started projecting?
I can't pass the test, don't wait for me.
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Ronin's eyes close as well, the Knight frowning gently as he listens, and the sigh he gives suggests that it could be any number of things. "Or maybe he reacted really well, and that just set her up to expect the same celebration from everyone," he echoes quietly. Kissing Remi again on the cheek this time before finally sitting back enough to slouch on the sofa, he pinches the bridge of his nose as if that might help him to focus better.
"You don't have to be there," he says, "but I'd appreciate it if you lurked nearby in that nice way that you do. For wraithly support, you know?" He peeps one eye open, managing a faintly amused smile that fades again near instantly at Remi's next remarks.
It takes a long few moments for Ronin to respond, letting the weight and guilt of the Bastion's words settle in his skin like sunlight on a Longheat morning. "...I think that happens to everyone," he admits. "I don't know if there's a parent alive that didn't pass down their damage to their children somehow. I'm not saying that makes it right or that we shouldn't try to be better, but..."
But he'd received his own fair share of issues from his parents, and among all those they know, it's likely a similar story.
"I think if we'd truly done that," he decides at last, "at least on this occasion, then our children would be petrified of the gods entirely. And based on the fact that Flora just agreed to be a demigod for Safrin, I'm quite sure that fear didn't rub off on her."
Remi raises an eyebrow in weary agreement, because that feels just as possible as anything else, and perhaps worse for being so painfully simple. If Kaisel had given Flora fireworks where they had given her funeral bells, then no wonder she had looked at them as if they had taken something from her rather than merely failed to hand over what she wanted. Still, when Ronin asks him to lurk nearby, some of the heaviness softens from Remi’s mouth, and a boyish smirk slips into place despite the ache of the conversation. "I will happily haunt anywhere you want me to," he murmurs, the warmth in his voice threaded with enough dry humour to make the promise sound almost ordinary.
As Ronin speaks, Remi listens with his gaze lowered, not quite to the twins and not quite to their hands, but somewhere between the two, where all the things they have made and all the things they have failed seem to sit together. He nods slowly, because some damage being passed down does feel inevitable in the way scars change the movement of a limb even after the wound is closed, and yet inevitability has never made him feel absolved. Perhaps they had tried too hard to make their histories useful, to turn pain into a map and hand it to their children as though the roads would be the same.
He exhales softly and leans his head back against the sofa. "Or maybe she did it just to show that she was not afraid," he says, voice low and troubled, his eyes lifting toward Ronin again.
I can't pass the test, don't wait for me.
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
"And that is all I ever ask," Ronin says with a smile, lifting their hands to leave a warm kiss against Remi's knuckles. At least if things go properly wrong again when he does speak with Flora, he won't have to relay it to Remi and relive it. What's more, they can both just yeet themselves into the sea for a bit afterwards, should they feel the need. But then Remi grows quiet again, and Ronin can feel the silent pain he carries as if it's something that belongs to them both, until the stillness of it threatens to suffocate him.
"I'd be inclined to believe it, but given how many times she has spoken with Safrin in the past - whether it's for Torchline's benefit or her own - if fear was the motivation, I feel like we'd have been able to tell." No, if anything, something in the goddess had resonated with Flora that was entirely apart from their own dealings with her.
And all of it makes sense, and all of it still feels deeply uncomfortable. Groaning under his breath so as not to wake the twins, Ronin suddenly gets to his feet, tugging Remi's hand to draw him up as well. "This is not useful," he decides. "I will speak to Flora, and we will keep doing our best. Now either kiss me, or we're taking it in turns to go for a cold swim to get this out of our systems."
