Click here for a list of weather descriptions, seasonal festivals, and a real time:site time conversion.
Character of the Season
Once known as the Butcher of Whitebrim, he's now The Butcher of Dygra, stepping forward as the first created demigod of the Ancients. There is no question that Astaroth casts an intimidating silhouette. Tall, domineering and dangerous, if looks could kill you'd be dead already, but to get up close and personal with the Grounds' resident cannibal tells a much different story. Dripping with charm and clad in only the finest attire, Asta is a gentleman monster, as polite as they come and committed to his role as security for the Dusklight and those who have earned his loyalty. Be careful of that smile, though - those teeth are sharp.
Congratulations, Asta!
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!
If questioned, Jack would have said he was not avoiding the Tar Pits all this time so much as he was strategically making himself available elsewhere. The truth is the same either way (that he's been avoiding the place with all the determination of a kid hiding from a punishment) but his version way sounds prettier to his ego. Whatever the excuse, the time has finally arrived, and as he leaves The Ark (the galleon, that is) hovering over the swamplands, already his nose is wrinkling at the prospect of the cache he's about to collect.
Dressed down in old clothes he doesn't mind getting ruined - scuffed boots, pants that have frayed along the knees and a shirt with a few singe marks on it - and with no intention of lingering here longer than necessary - as he descends the rope towards the ground, there's no need for any extra layers despite the chillier than usual Flowerbirth. Humidity hugs his bare skin and makes his clothes feel heavy and damp, and his feet sink a few inches into the soft earth on his landing.
"Careful where you step, love," he mutters, voice immediately swallowed up by the swamp, as if it's hungry for their presence and keen to chew them up. "Cache should be hangin' over one of the tar pits close by. With any luck we'll lay eyes on it straight away an' we can get the fuck outta here."
The Ark comes down after Jack with one hand curled around the rope, the other keeping his old shirt from catching too badly against the damp line. It hangs loose around despite how beneath it the leather of her trousers fits close to her legs, far too new still to have earned the sort of damage this place seems determined to hand out. Her boots disappear into the sludge as soon as she lands and the sensation makes something in her pull tight. The fog is thick enough to erase the edges of the world, and she can’t help but look out at the bubbling black stretch ahead and imagine the broad belly of her hull dragged down into it: tar swallowing her keel, climbing her sides, setting hard around her until there is nothing left to do but wait for the swamp to finish claiming what it has caught.
The thought is ugly enough that she shifts her footing immediately, as though that might dislodge it. "I can see why caches are placed out here," she says, her voice low and grim beneath the humidity. No one comes looking at a place like this unless they have a reason, and anyone foolish enough to wander through it by accident is unlikely to get close enough to find what has been hidden before the pits find them first.
Jack had offered to let her remain aboard, and while it had been a reasonable suggestion, probably the sensible one, standing safely on the deck while he went down alone hadn't felt like an option she could stomach. That doesn’t make the Feverlands any less revolting now that she is here, though.
Her mouth twists as another bubble breaks somewhere ahead of them, and, raising a hand, she draws a narrow stream of saltwater that ribbons out through the air, clean and bright against all that black, and she sends it arcing down into the nearest bubbling stretch of tar. For an instant, the surface reacts violently: the sludge spits and hisses around the water, hot enough to throw up a thin veil of steam, but it doesn’t loosen. It doesn’t thin. The saltwater vanishes into the blackness as though the pit has simply swallowed it whole, leaving a cold wind disturbing the dark waters of the Ark's mind.
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
"Mm," Jack agrees quietly of the caches, reaching out with a combination of earth and water magic to try and peel the sludge away from their boots and dry it out, providing a semblance of steady ground for them to stand upon. "Good place to hide shit an' even better to potentially get rid of any thieves trackin' it." He's not worried about their presence here, not any more, but there had been a time when Jack Barclay would have been one of those to avoid this place and its sucking black pits.
His nose wrinkles to see The Ark's saltwater ribbon hiss and spit and disappear into the tar, Jack continuing to edge around the perimeter of the bubbling mire, eyes sharp not on the sludge now, but on the skeletal branches overhanging them from trees that apparently did not know better than to grow here. "Don't let it get to you, love," he mutters, the chill in her thoughts enough to send flecks of ice spearing through his magic. "We'll be in an' outta here 'fore your boots get too wet."
He gestures deeper into the pits, ducking under moss-thick vines and lifting them to let her follow unimpeded, then nods out into the middle of the mire. "See? Already found our cache."
The leather bag is unassuming and looks as if it has been here for a while, hung directly over one of the larger hungrier looking pits, tied around a brittle-looking branch stripped of all leaves and life.
Though Jack’s magic pries the wet black sludge from the soles of her boots, The Ark doesn’t mistake the relief for safety. The magic moves over her leather with the same familiar surety he uses to swell her sails full-bellied against a reluctant wind, or to fracture the thick collars of ice that sometimes fasten themselves to her hull in colder waters; practical, precise, enough to get her moving again. But beneath it is the knowledge of how little would be required to make that kindness necessary in the first place. One misplaced step, one patch of ground giving way beneath her weight, and the tar would have her as surely as it might have taken a ship too far aground. It isn't a fear she lends any real shape to, not with Jack at her side. Still, her breath pulls a little shallower as she follows, and she lifts her chin as if putting a fraction more distance between herself and the mud might accomplish anything at all.
"Being wet is hardly the problem," she says, her voice free of innuendo, but the grimness in it softens as her boot comes free with a final wet drag. She sends Jack a small, appreciative smile over her shoulder, fleeting but warm enough to acknowledge what he’s done before her attention is drawn outward again.
The cache itself earns only a brief glance; leather bag, dead branch, all the usual signs of something meant to look too forgotten to be worth noticing. Her eyes fall immediately to the pit beneath it instead, black tar rolling sluggishly under the sparse debris on its surface, the bubbles breaking with a terrifying and patient sort of appetite.
Rather than move to Jack’s side, she eases onto a handful of thick, gnarled roots near the edge of a tree, bracing one hand against the trunk. The Ark keeps her balance there, uncharacteristically distant from Jack and the cache and more distant still from the thing waiting beneath it. "Well, it certainly looks untouched," she says at last, skeptically, her brows lifting as she studies the bag again; this was precisely the way all of the caches Jack had sent Finch to fetch had looked as well.
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
"Ain't sure this type of wet is one you'd want," Jack fires back with a smirk she'll see rather than hear, able to feel the appreciation in her thoughts like a warm hand between his shoulder blades. As they inch closer to the cache he becomes similarly aware of the distance she continues to put between herself and the tar pits - and him, given where he's going and why.
Only as she settles against one of the gnarled tree trunks does Jack glance back from the very edge of the mire, magic working hard to keep his footing steady. "Somethin' I said?" he jests, peering up at the cache again and noticing a pale looking boulder between himself and the pit it overhangs. "Untouched is always good. Reckon I can get it without needin' to persuade it too much."
Persuasion, of course, coming in the form of having to snap branches or cut the leather bag straps. "Aight, wish me luck," he says, winking over his shoulder to her. "An' you know the drill. Anythin' goes wrong, get outta here an' I'll see you back at the ship."
"The wet isn’t the problem," The Ark counters, her brows rising by the barest fraction as her eyes move back to the tar. The pit rumbles and belches beneath the cache with a slow, ugly patience, its surface breaking and closing again as if nothing thrown into it would ever be given back. Water is clean, even when it is violent. Water pulls, yes, and drowns, and breaks whatever is foolish enough to think itself stronger, but this is something else entirely. Sticky. Ensnaring. Patient in a way that makes her mind tighten around the image of being held fast.
Jack’s quip earns no real answer, only a look dry enough to make one unnecessary. Where someone else might have promised not to leave him, or insisted on coming after him if things went wrong, The Ark merely nods. There is no bravado in it, no performance of loyalty required between them. If the mire turns treacherous, if the branch gives way, if the pit decides it is hungry after all, they can both be gone from this place and back aboard the safety of her deck before the swamp has time to close its teeth. At least, that is what she tells herself as she keeps her hand braced against the trunk and her boots balanced carefully over the roots.
She has not been landlocked long enough to know all the ways danger announces itself away from the sea; storms change pressure, reefs whisper through the pull of the tide, sailors go quiet before a fight, and ships complain in their bones before something breaks. Here, the Feverlands offers no language she trusts. It breathes fog and rot and heat, and somewhere above the hanging cache, something pale shifts against the gloom, too slight and too high for her attention to catch while her focus remains fixed on Jack.
Instead, she returns his wink with a small tilt of her mouth, the gesture warmed by a thought she does not quite let become softness. "I know I wasn’t actually born," she calls, still watching him more than the branches overhead, "but what would you say to a party in LongHeat? Not just for me, but for the whole crew."
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
07-14-2026, 03:26 AM (This post was last modified: 07-14-2026, 03:26 AM by Jack.)
i want to taste you again
Their understanding is such that Jack is able to let it sit easily between them - no second-guessing and, more importantly, nothing that might distract from the task at hand. With The Ark safely at his back and the cache hanging overhead, he commits to collecting it at last and hops nimbly from the edge of the mire to the pale boulder between the bubbling tar pits. It wobbles a bit but seems to hold beneath his boot, leaving him more or less beneath the cache, and Jack takes a moment to regain his footing when the redhead behind him speaks again.
"What would I say to that?" he ventures, his wry tone ruined by the smile she'll be able to hear, Jack glancing over his shoulder as he reaches up to start unhooking the leather bag. "A Longheat party in Torchline to celebrate your existence? Say less, love."
The bag comes free with ease, and the Captain is just about to praise a job well done when the boulder rolls beneath his boot, forcing him not only to correct his balance but to jump reflexively to the next bank, putting an unwelcome amount of swamp between he and The Ark. "Fuck," he mutters under his breath, a frown drawing his eyebrows together as the 'boulder' rolls face up, revealing the bleached and empty skull of something that had once been large and formidable.
"This place gets more an' more cheerful, doesn't it?"
The smile in Jack’s voice draws one from her before she can quite stop it, crooked and private as her blue eyes catch on the slice of his face he turns back toward her. She's just about to ask whether he has any opinions on party planning beyond booze, when the pale thing beneath his boot shifts.
The Ark stiffens, her hand tightening against the gnarled trunk until damp bark presses ridges into her palm. There is no immediate flood of alarm in her thoughts, though, only a sharp flicker of surprise. From where she stands, balanced above the muck on twisted roots, it looks more like another piece of the swamp’s ugly collection than any real threat: bone rolled out of place, old death disturbed by a living man’s weight. The Feverlands seem full of such things, all carcasses and fog and half-swallowed remains, and she has not yet learned which pieces of landlocked rot are merely disgusting and which have apparently been waiting for permission to move. "I would have thought only Bassian would have had a skull thick enough to stand on," she calls, dry amusement beginning to thread through the words, but the rest never makes it out.
The skull splits open with movement—not cracking or breaking—but unfolding, as eight black, blade-thin legs thrust from beneath the bleached curve of bone and strike against the mire. In the span of a breath, the skull becomes something sharp and living, skittering fast along the tar’s edge toward the Captain, and The Ark’s smile vanishes.
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
"You an' me both. Should tell him we found his ancestors here, rollin' about in the dirt," Jack calls back, straightening up on the other side of the bank. His hands move almost of their own accord, tying the cache securely across his chest with the intention of checking its contents once he isn't separated from The Ark by far too much bubbling muck. Even as the boulder continues to shift eerily in the tar he remains seemingly confident and unbothered, as if to keep her thoughts on the right side of alarmed, though all of that changes when it cracks open like something eldritch and unholy.
"Oh fuck that," Jack blurts, deftly jumping further back on the bank with ice immediately rushing out beneath his feet. It makes little difference to the creature, its knife-like appendages puncturing through the sheet of cold to regain purchase, mandibles clacking ominously within its maw. "Get outta here," he calls to The Ark. "I'll lead it away and get back soon as I can."
No part of him expects her to stick around, Jack already switching elements as static charges the air, the Captain trying to put enough distance between himself and the thing to activate his compass tattoo and get the fuck gone as well.
The sight of the creature punching through Jack’s ice with those knife-thin legs sends The Ark’s nails digging into the trunk beneath her hand. It is a strange and awful thing to stand so uselessly when she is used to being the bastion beneath her crew's feet; the body that bears them over storms and dark water, the safe return waiting no matter how far Jack or his crew might stray. But the swamp does not care what she is, and the creature does not care who he is.
Her instincts pull in opposite directions so sharply that for one breath she cannot move at all. Go to him, says the part of her that remembers every rope, every rail, every plank that has ever held fast for him. Listen to him, answers the colder part, the one that knows a rescue can become another trap if pride is allowed to dress itself up as devotion, and so The Ark’s jaw tightens, and she lifts her chin as if that might make the obedience look less like fear. "You’d better be right behind me," she hisses, the words cut clean through the hiss of tar and the ugly clatter of the creature’s legs.
For a moment longer her eyes stay on him, blue and bright through the gloom, measuring the distance between them with a hatred she has no time to indulge. Then the swamp, the roots, the fog, and the boiling black pits vanish around her as she does exactly what he told her to do.
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
Despite the impending approach of the skull-possessed monster and its skittering black blades for legs, or perhaps because of it, Jack has the audacity to shoot The Ark a smug and self-confident grin across the bank. "Always, love," he quips of being right behind her, tipping her a wink and waiting only a second more before lunging away into the swamp, the creature hot on his heels.
It's a lie, unfortunately, that he'll have to consider apologising for later - and for the record, not one he's intended to tell. But minutes pass after The Ark's arrival back on the ship, and they stretch longer in that inevitable way that time does when you're waiting on something important. No Jack, though, not until nearly half an hour passes, and the Captain that appears on the compass rose in his cabin is not feeling nearly so swaggering as the one who left her in the swamp.
His right arm hangs uselessly at his side, skewered by a knife-like appendage early on in the chase and streaked with blood and filth and tar; the main reason for his delay in truth, because it's hard to activate the tattoo on his wrist without being able to touch it. The rest of Jack hasn't fared much better in truth, looking as though the swamp has chewed him up and spat him back out. But he does still have the leather bag strapped to his chest, and so that still counts as a success in his books.
"No one better have gone lookin' for me," he grates, trying to get his feet beneath him and intending fully on getting up to the main deck to ensure that's the case.
Jack snaps back into existence upon the compass rose branded into the floorboards of his cabin— one perfectly mirrored by a pale, henna-coloured mark upon The Ark’s own skin—and the glass of dark rum she has been holding nearly slips from her fingers.
For the first few heartbeats after she had returned alone, she'd done exactly what he'd have wanted of her: Murphy had been told what happened before she'd even caught her breath, and the first mate's response had rung across the deck in clipped, uncompromising orders: nobody was to leave the ship. Not for the captain. Not yet, anyway. The command had held, but only just. Anxiety had settled over the crew like a squall waiting to break, and through the timber beneath their boots she had felt every restless footstep, every strained silence, every glance cast toward the horizon. Now all of that tension crashes through her the instant she sees him, alive and well...
"Jack—" The name leaves her in a breath as she slams the untouched rum onto his desk, the glass striking wood hard enough to send a dark ripple across its surface. She is beside him almost immediately, slipping one arm carefully around his waist before he has the chance to stubbornly prove he can stand on his own. Blood, swamp water, tar and something fouler cling to him in equal measure, and she cannot yet tell where one injury ends and another begins beneath the grime.
Panic wants to surge outward in great, crashing waves, jagged with every ugly possibility conjured during the last half hour, but she forces it down with visible effort, smoothing the waters of her mind into something gentler so he isn't struck by the full force of it on top of everything else. He'll undoubtedly still feel the undertow beneath the calm, though; the current pulling hard below a surface she is desperately trying to keep level.
"It’s not like you to keep me waiting," she murmurs, steering him with quiet insistence toward the bunk, though she would settle for the desk if he proves too stubborn to lie down. Her eyes move over him again and again, searching through the filth for the shape of the wounds hidden underneath, frustration mounting with every place the mud refuses to surrender its secrets. "Sit," she says softly, though there is enough command in the word to rival any captain, even him. "What the hell happened?"
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
"Careful," Jack hisses at the arm that moves around him, gesturing to another laceration that has soaked his shirt with blood and grime, a vertical strike that curves beneath the ladder of his ribs. He doesn't shy from the extra support at least, not from her, but the attempt to steer him further into the cabin is one he fights momentarily in lieu of trying to leave for the deck. "...Shit. Get us the fuck outta here, then," he grates in the end, knowing better than to dig his heels in on this particular fight.
Besides, she'd be able to manoeuvre the ship away from the swamp without needing his orders, and he knows Murphy well enough to know his first mate won't fight The Ark for control on this. If she's having them leave it's because he's back, and that subconscious knowledge will need to be enough for the time being.
Sagging against the edge of the desk as a compromise - not because he doesn't want to be horizontal, but because the idea of covering his bunk in grime when he'll want to pass out in it soon seems counter-intuitive - Jack is already fumbling at the buttons of his filthy shirt. "Rats," he says, and it isn't a tame curse from the Captain - it's literal. "Massive swamp rats. Stumbled into a nest of 'em after I ran. The skull thing fucked my arm up, an' a lot more of me besides, and then there was a fuckin' free-for-all between 'em."
Having been an unwilling participant in said free-for-all, Jack can confirm now with first-hand experience that getting in the middle of anything hungry in the swamp is a terrible idea. "Better late than never though, mm?"
The Ark gentles only slightly at the warning, though not enough to truly release him. She knows Jack too well for that; give him an inch and he’ll limp his way up to the deck, bleed into her boards, and bully the crew into pretending nothing is wrong. At his order, though, her chin dips as her blue eyes go distant and she reaches into herself. Above, the helm gives a telltale wriggle beneath Murphy’s hands, the signal they’d worked out early to show she was taking hold, and The Ark rises away from the rotten heat of the Feverlands, smooth and certain.
Only then does she pull back long enough to press the glass of rum into Jack’s good hand. "Here," she murmurs, before taking over the ruined buttons of his shirt. The fabric is stiff with blood, tar, and swamp filth, and as she peels it open her breath hisses between her teeth. In too many places, the shirt has dried fast against the wounds beneath. Rather than tear it free, she sets her fingertips above the worst slice along his ribs and lets saltwater bead cool and clean against his skin, running downward to soften dried blood and muck. It won’t feel good, she knows, but better her water than whatever the swamp has left trying to grow in him.
While it soaks in, she unlatches the leather strap across his chest and drops the cache onto the desk with a dull thud. "This better have been worth it," The Ark mutters, irritated less with the bag than with the bargain it apparently required of the Captain. When she looks up, her oceanic gaze is hard, some part of her taking his injuries personally before her eyes find his, and the edge softens. "If I’d known you were planning on being sociable," she says dryly, "I’d have stayed." It is not quite an apology for leaving him, because they both know why she did. But the acknowledgement settles between them anyway: together, perhaps, they might have done more.
everything I want you know i'm going to get it whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
