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!
It had taken a few days, some time for the distrust of the newcomer to wear off, but Abasi had his first client. It seemed that the people did appreciate the idea of someone specially appointed to help with burials and the nasty business of preparing corpses after all, even if they wished it was one of their own.
This particular family had come to him now because they needed to bury their beloved before the end of the season - it was their tradition, if was possible, to cover the deceased in memory mud as a kind of embalming and entombing, to be placed in their basement to dry and become a statue of the dead of a sort.
It was not entirely dissimilar to the things Abasi's people used to do, so he was more than happy to help. Having gathered mud and after some fighting with it getting it in a bucket, he had come to his mortuary to work, the corpse now laid out on his table. There was a curtain between his work table and the door, to protect both the eyes of any visitors and the dignity of the deceased.
Slowly he began to work, first of all cleaning the body before he would cover it with the mud - it could be seen as pointless, but he felt it was a point of respect. With a slightly damp cloth he began to clean the skin. The corpse was male, in his 50s - a man of average build, with a beard that reminded him of his father. As always Abasi treated him with a professional detachment, respectfully speaking to the body as he needed to to tell them what he was doing and to fill the somewhat eerie silence.
"What are you doing?" Cassie asked, looking horrified. Sure, she'd seen death before (and a lot of it), as well as a great many death rituals, but not one of them had involved quite so much touching.
"Be careful! You could accidentally inhale the miasma and get an illness," she said, having no clue the man was a professional. Of course, if there was one thing more distracting than a man with his hands on a corpse, it was the fact that the mud she stepped in bubbled eerily, oozing upward and purposefully to completely erase the footprint she had left in it.
"Gah! Devil dirt!" she exclaimed, shying away from it and then turning to eye it wearily from a good two meter's distance.
"Did you do that? Was that your magic?" she asked, suddenly acutely aware that the man was a stranger. She had no idea what he could be capable of.
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11-23-2019, 06:39 PM (This post was last modified: 11-24-2019, 08:44 AM by Abasi.)
Scattering sparks of thought energy
Deliver me and carry me away
Abasi jumped at the sudden voice in the space, not having noticed Cassandra coming into his mortuary and around the curtain. His hands paused and lifted from his work - he did not like to work while distracted. "I am preparing the body for entombment." He said flatly, not caring much for being barged in on and his work criticised.
"Devil...dirt.." He repeated, watching Cassandra jump back. A part of him was already tired with this girl and wanted to say so, but...he supposed when he had first arrived (and from the way she was acting, he had to assume that she was a recent arrival) he had seemed irrational too. Besides, she did look rather young. "It is not magic. It is simply the nature of the mud here at this time of year - it will not hurt you." He held up his hands, fingers coated in the stuff, to prove it.
He looked down to the body, partly covered in mud, then back to her. "Can I help you? This is a Mortuary."
Horses did not have mortuaries. The concept of an entire place just for preparing the dead was completely foreign to her. (She came looking for some food, but her appetite was definitely gone now.) While Cassie wasn't entirely sure what entombment was, she was relieved when the man reassured her about the stupid mud. She looked between the man, the mud and the corpse.
"Can I help you? This is a Mortuary."
"Ah, I understand."
She didn't understand at all, actually. Cass still had no idea what that was, but after the mud thing, she didn't want to come across as even more stupid. She decided she would apologize for interrupting and make a polite exit. Then her mouth betrayed her.
"I would like to know more about this custom. Can I watch?"
"I'll be quiet," she added, getting the sense that the man was waiting for her to leave to continue.
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Upon Cassandra telling him she understood, Abasi nodded and looked back to his work, expecting her to leave. After all, if she understood, she'd understand that this was a solitary, quiet task.
But she didn't leave, and after a moment he glanced back up, just in time to hear her request. A 'no' bubbled up immediately, then he swallowed it. Looking at her, he remembered when he was a teenager (not that he'd had the word for it, but he had once been her age) and he'd stared at the priests doing their work, desperately wanting to be a part of the world.
Not that he thought she had much interest in joining his team. But he was finding it hard to say no. "Fine. If you are quiet." With that said he stepped back forward towards the table, slowly beginning to lay mud over the man's chest, the cold flesh under his touch slowly being obscured by dark mud.
Cass nodded wordlessly. She supposed now there was nothing to do but stand there silently, as she wasn't usually one to disobey a direct order.
Huh. He's putting that mud all over that dead guy? I wonder why you'd want sentient mud all over you. I mean, I'm not dead, so I wouldn't know? Maybe I'll manage to figure it out...
Mud was piled over the corpse, covering more and more of the man's exposed skin. Cassie began to wonder if perhaps it was meant to function as a blanket of sorts, something to wrap you and warm you to carry you safely to the afterlife. But what if this custom didn't involve an afterlife? Perhaps it was about returning the body to the soil? She couldn't say why they would have chose this strange, sentient soil, but it made sense otherwise.
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Abasi was incredibly surprised to find that Cassandra actually did watch him work quietly, having assumed she would immediately begin to speak or ask questions. Using the quiet to get on with his job, he covered the man's chest then moved down to his stomach. Kneeling down to get more mud, he looked across at the girl.
As much as he enjoyed the silence, he was beginning to feel rather like a horribly strict teacher he had once had. "Do you have any questions?" He asked, spreading the mud over his fingers. "I cannot guarantee I could answer all of them, but I could try." It was not often Abasi felt the need to fill the silence. Perhaps it was her age, or the mood in the room, but he found himself wanting to speak.
Just because she stopped talking didn't mean she liked it. She fidgeted awkwardly in place by the wall, her head full of a dozen comments that she couldn't voice aloud. Luckily, Abasi eventually offered to let her ask questions, and she gave an immediate sigh of relief. "If the mud hardens, what's the point of using this stuff? Wouldn't normal mud hold its shape when dry?" she prompted.
"Is this considered a common practice for humans in this region, or is what you're doing specific to a group or family or religion? And once you are done covering the body, what will you do with him? ...were you close?" she asked, still having no clue what a mortuary was. For all she knew, this was Abasi's family member.
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Abasi could not answer the first question that Cassandra asked satisfactorily, which was not a good omen for what was to come, but he tried his best, shrugging and tilting his head to the side. "I do not know. The family told me this was what they wished, and it is not my place to question why." Unless a request was so outlandish it would be detracting from his other work, Abasi would do it. Rituals around death could be incredibly important to the living.
"It's not a practice I've heard of outside of this family's traditions. I believe it may be unique to them." He said as he looked over the chest, making sure it was entirely covered. "Once I am finished, he will be placed in the basement of their home. I am told over the years dried memory mud distorts in a way they find spiritually representative of the spirit leaving."
That she asked if he was close to the man made Abasi realise Cassandra did not seem to understand what he was doing. "Ah. No. It is my profession to work with people's dead for them. I do not even know this man's name."
"I do not know. The family told me this was what they wished, and it is not my place to question why."
Cass nodded. So he wasn't part of this family? Was spreading mud on people his job? She gave a shudder, not so much because she was scared of the dead, but because in Abasi's position she'd probably go crazy from all this quiet.
"Once I am finished, he will be placed in the basement of their home. I am told over the years dried memory mud distorts in a way they find spiritually representative of the spirit leaving."
"In the basement?" she asked, grimacing. Bodies in the basement was hardly a step away from having literal skeletons in the closet.
Confirming her theory, he added that working with the dead was his profession. The first question that came to her mind was, "Why?" but that would be rude, right? Right. "Do you ever miss being around the living?" she asked.
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"Yes, in their basement. It is what they told me." Abasi shrugged, not one for asking too many questions of his clients.
The next question Cassandra asked was not so easy. Frowning Abasi looked at the body, then to Cassandra. He thought of his work, here in the mortuary with the cold corpses that asked nothing of him; he thought of going home to Loren. "Well, I do see plenty of the living. I see my partner every night, after all. He is all the alive interaction I find I need - but I do see other people. Clients who come in with their deceased, people at festivals, yourself...it is hardly like I spend all my time with bodies and nothing else."
He looked over to her, hands carefully rising from his work so he would not make a mistake with his eyes away from it. "I assume you do not have much experience with the dead, to ask such a question?"
Cass had literally no response for "in the basement." That was just a weird place to keep your dead.
"Well, I do see plenty of the living. I see my partner every night, after all. "
Cassie raised an eyebrow. Was that a brag?
When he added her to the list of living people he saw, she giggled internally. Somehow, she got the feeling that if her visit was significant enough to add to the list, he really didn't see that many people with pulses. But one thing he said did surprise her: "You go to festivals?" Because this guy seemed like the life-of-the-party type. Right.
"I mean, I've seen death. I just don't stick around to find out what happens after," she answered with a shrug. To qualify that further, she'd actually witnessed a lot of magical death, which generally made clean-up a lot easier. With Kaos, for instance, everyone had just been turned into blue light and ash. Yikes.
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Abasi noted the way Cassandra raised an eyebrow at his mention of a partner - was she doubting him? He supposed if he saw himself he would not think of himself as a romantic person either, but he liked to think he was handsome enough that it was not totally bizarre to imagine he might have found some love in his life.
"Why would I not attend festivals? I am trying my best to integrate myself with life here...and they are almost familiar to me. In my old City it was often my job to help with many aspects of events or festivals." He had been involved heavily with the religious holidays, had spent many hours speaking over food, art, activities...Fiat Lux honestly seemed a little small-time in comparison to the celebrations he remembered, but it still filled him with a fond nostalgia.
To 'see death' but not stick around spoke of a warrior, he thought, perhaps an assassin - but this girl seemed young and rather innocent. "And how did you come to see all this death?" He asked, leaning over to lift the man's arm and begin to spread the mud underneath - all the while whispering under his breath to the corpse, telling him what he was doing.
She saw his raised eyebrow and made her decision: it was definitely a brag. Weird flex, but ok.
"Why wouldn't you attend festivals? Howbout cuz like you're all in here with dead people and stuff? Wait. Are you talking about dead people festivals? Was that your job?" she asked. She supposed it might make sense for the dead-guy guy to attend dead-guy festivals.
"And how did you come to see all this death?"
"Welllll.... There was like this giant bone monster, and he pulled everyone towards this portally thing. And some of us were like: 'hey don't' and he was like: 'how about I just kill you then' and POOF. A bunch of people died in a bunch of black smoke, like my older older siblings, annndddd that was the end of Helovia. Haven't you met anyone from Helovia before?" she asked, saying all this like she'd had to recite it about a billion times before. "Cuz they like all saw that. I'm not special or anything."
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