From being an Abandoned who had rarely left the Hollowed Grounds, to embracing the call of adventure, to dying and being reborn first as an Ascended and then as an Ancient, Maea has gone through quite the amount of changes in her life. One thing remains common, though, in her attempts to find out just where she belongs; she’s always had a craving for knowledge which has brought her to so many places and to meet so many people here in Caido. We can’t wait to see what else is in store for her!
Congratulations, Maea!
Credits
Court of the Fallen was created in October of 2018 by Odd, Honey, and Crooked.
Skinning and hosting by the epically talented Kaons, and functionality fanciness by the coding magic of Neowulf. If you ever see either of them around, make sure to show them some love!
Things were good. There was the soft, warm warmth of Talys's muzzle against his cheek, her breaths smelling like hay and animal and the frost upon every tree and the stars glimmering in the dark nights. There was the soft, warm warmth of Jigano's golden skin, his hair a halo of snow upon the pillows, the glimmer of his blue eyes—half open—in the sunlight spilling through a window.
There were the goats, and the dogs, and the crops, and the slow, constant, unchanging toil of life. There was the animal, caged and sedated again, except on the stormy nights when it howled and howled and howled—
It was in the darkness yawning wide inside of him. It was in the moments of shadow and silence, when his jaw was clenched and his eyes were hard and faraway, when Jigano wasn't there to blow it all away with a gentle breath.
It was the fear: the pounding of his heart, the rancid taste in his mouth, the flickering lantern in the darkness as he tore through the woods, watching the blight. Tracking it. Tracing it. Looking, always looking, but never finding, and oh so afraid of what it would be like when he finally did—
(Black weeping eyes—)
The snarls. Fangs. The snick of those sharp, sharp teeth closing on air.
It built in him when no one was looking. It tore his mind to pieces when no one was there to witness it. It was the little lies he told himself, because the truth was too hard to bear.
It was standing in his doorway as that long, fateful night approached, holding Jigano tight once more and whispering please come back in his ear and never once saying the thought that curled up on the back of his tongue:
what if I will be the one who doesn't come back?
What if I will be the one who won't be here?
Everything was prepared to perfection: food, snow moss, locks, window blinds, dogs, animals. Everything was quiet. Everything was empty. For the first time in his life he would spend the long night utterly alone.
He thought of her as he sat by the banked embers, a piece of wood in one hand, a sharp knife in the other, teasing little shapes out of it: he thought of her thick blond hair even as his idle mind and idle hands pulled demons out of the wood. He, who always made little charms for good luck to please children only found chaos in the grains, and his mind strayed.
He still didn't know if she was dead.
He didn't know if she was lost.
But he felt tired and so utterly lost and alone and—
snap
The fragile neck of wood gave under the pressure of the still knife, clattering across the floorboards in the otherwise silent night.
Red glowed along the knife's sharp edge.
Red glowed along his shaking hands.
Surely it hadn't been loud enough to carry outside...
His tired eyes drifted to the door. He wondered what he would find if he opened it, what would happen if he invited them, those who had already been here once before.
(I should sleep) was what he wanted to think, but what sat in his mind was this: perhaps the compact dark of the long night would be what swallowed both of Merla's radiant children in the end.
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
He didn't know how long he'd slept, just that his neck was stiff and sore and the corner of his mouth wet with saliva. It could've been seconds. It could've been minutes. It could've been hours.
How long had it been?
How much longer would it be?
The seconds stretched like eons of pitch black desolation, of memory and change and despair and swallowed hope. Rory remembered the darkness of Long Night, how compact and complete it was, somehow thicker than the black of his eyelids (even with his knuckles pressed into the sockets). For twenty-something years he had never once even peeked behind the window blinds, mindful and meek and afraid, and then last year he had rushed into its open maw and nearly been swallowed.
How reckless, how foolish, and how alive he had felt as he rode through the dark, spurred by Amalia's faith: how tired and how dead he felt now, sitting with his back against the front door, raising his mussed head to lean the back of it against the rough grains. He had thrown himself into the race like a greyhound, but he had been outrun. He had fallen to the side, fallen behind, unfit to partake in the world and its wonders.
Had Karlia truly gone into the night? Had she felt like this, too dry for tears, sitting with her back against the door—lonely and left behind—and scraping a heel against the floor and then making her decision..?
He raised his hands in front of his face. They were pale and slender things, pallid from the cold as he had let the embers go out.
He should do something about that.
There were a lot of things he should do something about.
He should get up and eat (how long had it been?). He should sleep, properly.
Yet all he did was sit there with his back against the door, one hand burrowing into Ella's fur as she slept next to him while the other traced patterns on the floor.
(It would be so easy to reach up and unlock it.)
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
At the door, tapping. Almost hesitant, awkward, a stuttering beat- the knock of someone who has opened this door many times before without needing to ask permission, and now is not sure how to feel about requesting access to their own home. The knock of someone confident who hides their feelings behind tenacity and pride, now humbled by a distance of their own creation. The knock of knuckles that have known bruises from years of labor, that sit atop calloused and rough fingers, deft and adept both at milking his goats and braiding his hair, as the case may be.
The knock of someone who knows better than to be out on LongNight, and yet here they seem to be, just on the other side of Rory's door, the thin wall of wood and the series of locks and the year-long absence the only things between them.
"Rory?" She sounds hoarser, perhaps, than he will remember, but with the same authority and confidence and fire he knows so well. There's urgency, because it's LongNight, but no desperation. From beyond the door, Karlia's voice is inviting in its practicality. "Open the door, little brother. I need to see you. I should have come sooner. It's been too long."
He was not startled: there was no involuntary jerk of his heavy and cold muscles, no sudden shivers racing from his chest and out down his arms. There was merely...
(Relief?)
—some strange feeling settling in his bones, a prickle just behind his breastbone, something coiling in his gut but he couldn't tell if it was fear or excitement or both or just resignation. "Ah," he breathed into the darkness, one hand tightening uselessly in Ella's fur. She was so soft and warm beneath it, precious and alive; had she been smaller he would've gathered her up against his chest and held her there, buried his face in the fur and cried.
He realized that he had expected the knock.
He realized that he had not expected her.
His name in her voice was his undoing; it found the fragile thread he was spun from and pulled it, and he felt himself fall apart. He became a million pieces on the floor of his own house, cold and brittle things that glittered like shard of glass and frost: for a year he had waited for her voice, to be called little brother again, and—now—here—his breath hitched in his throat.
She was gone. What other explanation was there?
Or had the night finally passed? He had forgotten all his usual timekeeping routines, had slept when he shouldn't, had let the fire go out, everything was all wrong; had dawn finally come?
If only he had been able to ask Ludo about her, before the darkness had settled over him again...
"You can't be real," he told her through the door, fingers tightening in the warm fur (—fingers tightening on the cold lock).
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Her forehead pressed softly against the door, her smile audible in her voice. Rory had always been so stubborn, but this time he was right to be. She had been gone for so long after all. "I know it's been a long time..too long." Her voice was practical like their father's, but apologetic just the same. "There were things I needed to see for myself. And when the barrier came down, I lost myself in it. I stepped over the barrier and—"
Outside the wind howls something fierce, and the little farm house groans with the cold.
Knowing better than to push him, Karlia smiles to herself as she taps out a rhythm from their childhood with a finger against the door. A bit of whimsy from a time when such things were allowed and came easily between them.
"Family always comes back for one another." She says softly, her voice raising only enough to be heard over the wail of the wind. "It took me too long. But I'm here now."
For so long, and to come in the dark—when she occupied his mind, haunted him like a ghost he had let down, as if summoned by his thoughts and the thing crying out in his heart... How could he possibly trust it?
All the years it had been that voice telling him to never open the door, that voice scolding him for wanting to look behind the blinds, that voice keeping him alive.
But everything had changed, hadn't it? The rules were different now. He had ridden into the dark—and survived, because someone had opened the Temple doors to let him and Jigano spill onto the floor like a blood-stained, near-dead mess. He was alive because someone had opened the doors to those knocking and screaming in the dark...
What she said made sense. Hadn't he done much the same, gotten lost in it, only he'd stayed on the farm?
Ella woke next to him, blinking her large, kind eyes. Her ears cocked to the sound of the voice coming through the door, a whine building in the back of her throat. She rose, Rory's hand still tangled in the longer fur of her neck, whining again as she nosed the wood and wagged her tail.
Could it be..?
Could he trust her? Could he trust his neurotic, anxious dog to know what was real or not?
She tapped the door, a sound from his childhood, a perfect trap. How much could a monster know, anyway? He wanted so desperately to know, and the answer was so close (would it matter if he wasn't alive to remember finding out?). He was cold and desperate and hungry and tired and lonely and family always came back for each other—except for Merla who had walked into the barrier and died, as they all did.
"Karlia," he whispered as shaking spread through him with the adrenaline, feeling sick as his fingers trembled on the lock, "is it dawn yet?"
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Karlia knelt before the door, leaning her shoulder against it as she softly fussed with the woodgrain. Her fingers gently traced boot marks from where the door had been casually kicked open so, so many times.
"No, not dawn yet, but this year is different little brother. There is so much more room with the barrier down. It's why I'm still okay out here. Cold, but okay. You must have noticed by now? Or at least Ella would have, even if you and Vaya have spent the entire time sleeping and eating."
She paused, breathing out a small puff of air that might have been a laugh.
"No monsters, right? No pounding on the windows or doors?"
Ella kept standing there by the door, her tail wagging, her eyes confused as she whined and looked to Rory: why aren't we letting her in? What's wrong?
He met those brown eyes time and again, his fingers nearly numb and his mouth tasting awful (like death). He didn't feel as if he held his life in his hands, in that fragile contraption between his shuddering fingertips, but rather as if someone had put his head in the mouth of a giant wolf and asked him to guess whether it would bite or not.
She answered him honestly, but just as easily as the first part convinced him not to open the door, she went on to tear at his convictions again. It was different—surely he knew that? Felt that? Expected that, given how much had changed in the past two years? And she mentioned him and Vaya gorging themselves on food and then sleeping it off, as so often had been the case, almost laughing that bit of fond memory and Rory's eyes were blurring with hot, shameful tears.
"No monsters," he breathed back at her, through the wood separating them, such a strange and sacred barrier between life and death. (No monsters—except this one?) Why, of all the things, would she come back during LongNight? Would a year have changed her so much?
Hadn't it changed him just as much?
"So then you'll be fine out there just a little longer, huh? There's plenty of straw in the barn, to keep you warm, if you need a place to sleep, right?"
Did monsters and ghosts sleep?
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Her eye-roll was practically palpable. "You always were a slow learner." She teased effortlessly.
Her pause likely felt longer than it was, silence stretching out long between them just as the years now, had. "Yeah.." She agreed, swallowing hard. "I know, I just..I didn't want to spend another LongNight without you. You know I wouldn't have come here if I thought there was any risk to you, or the herd." She tapped softly at the door, not knocking, just idle thinking with her hands.
"I can stay in the barn. Sure. I'll probably get a warmer greeting from Talys anyways." She added, a false brightness in her voice. Her brother was, after all, keeping her out on the coldest and longest night of the year. She deserved it, she did, but...she supposed she just hadn't expected it from him.
"I understand little brother. Better safe, right?" Standing, her boots thudding against the porch, she rapped out a playful melody with her knuckle against the wood.
In that silence, he knew that he had hurt her. It was loud enough for him to hear, to feel as it crept like cold through the door, and he just kept wondering: did monsters have feelings?
Was he one, for not opening the door?
How much could they know about him, anyway? About Karlia? About the way her hands, too, moved when she was thinking? He swallowed against the hard and painful lump in his throat, wanting nothing but to open the door and hide himself away in her arms, kept safe from the world outside by the presence of his sister—she had always taken care of him, hadn't she?
"You should've come sooner," he said thickly, trying to hold back the tears threatening to spill from his eyes. "Before the dark."
(Before I couldn't trust anything—)
Not like this—not when she knew he couldn't open the door, that he couldn't do anything, but oh... Oh, how he wanted to, how his heart hurt, how he chuckled weakly at the barb she sent through the wood and into his heart. If she was real, Talys would be happy to see her.
He heard her get up again, a sound that was so human that how could it possibly not be? Her knuckles on the wood, little brother, his resolve so close to snapping because all he wanted was to see her face again—
"Yeah," he said with forced brightness through the tears. Was she real? Would she be okay, if she was? Would she be there if she wouldn't be? He swallowed. "Just... just be careful, okay?"
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
10-31-2019, 09:46 PM (This post was last modified: 10-31-2019, 09:48 PM by Random Event.)
mary had a little lamb
its heart was black as coal
"I should have done a lot of things. Or...not done them. I think we both know that." It was probably as close to properly talking about things as they were going to get, at least for now. The wood wasn't that thick and they both knew it, but the stubbornness of their hearts certainly was.
"Give Ella a good cuddle for me, alright?" She coughed to hide the way her voice wavered. "Careful? Of what? If I go in there and find the place a mess, or that you've let the leather crack on the bridles, you're going to wish I was a monster."
She edged her coat around herself tighter, turning and peering in the darkness towards the barn. "I get it, you know? No opening doors. It's what we were taught. My timing has never been great, but I get it."
She thudded down the few steps, boots crunching against the snow. "At first light though, you'd better have coffee waiting for me."
"Yeah, I know," he said against the door, still crying, still watched by the confused dog asking him to open it. She whined softly and his hands tightened on fur and lock, two lifelines, but he didn't know which was which: would he kill himself by opening?
Or kill her by not opening?
He inhaled shakily, trying to swallow his tears as he listened to that bravado. Who wanted to be turned down at the door by their own little brother? No one, no one, not on this long, seemingly unending night. "You might trip on a rake," he said weakly, attempting to muster some form of humor, as if what he was doing wasn't a death sentence like on any previous year.
"Yeah," he said again, weakly, wondering how he could live with himself for not even trying. Wasn't there something he could do? He could create fire from nothing, couldn't he open the door and just.. have it between them? Or get the lantern? Or...
He was the monster, for not letting her in. For almost being relieved at how sensible she was being.
"Steaming hot," he promised her in a thick voice, his fingers still on the lock, wondering how much would be left of his heart come sunrise.
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
