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 was odd how sometimes one day could stand out in life, marked as the day that 'things changed'.
For Sam, this had certainly been one of them. He could already feel something hardening in his chest, a part of himself that really cared about impressing everyone else dying off. First of all one of his most loved people had tossed him aside and tried to kill him (and yes, he'd made poor decisions in that fight too, but Remi had taken it to violence first) and then his boyfriend, recently established, revealed he'd been unable to resist the charms of the first vaguely pretty boy he'd bitten. All of this, after the hardest couple of months he'd ever faced.
As angry as he felt in his heart though, he couldn't help the tears that continued to fall down his face, crying out the last parts of the sensitive, trusting man that had once believed that love was possible for him. There was nothing for it - he could not survive on his own anger. He had to speak to someone and spill it all out.
Thing was, in the last few months, he'd really killed off all bridges he had to good friends. Jigano was awkward, Amalia hated him, Remi...well, he didn't know Maea well enough and he doubted he'd ever want to talk to Nate again.
So that left him with his new family of Ascended, which was why he found himself at the door of the Artist's Sanctuary, knocking as the night began to turn to the early hours of the morning and praying that Bastien wouldn't answer the door. Sure, the man was his brother too, but he would feel intensely awkward with him. Rexanna had always seemed so understanding, so fair - he felt she would be the best person for his current problems. Perhaps he should have been embarrassed but he found himself too far gone to care, making undignified gulping sounds as his sobs got heavier the longer he stood outside the door.
Torchline was open, and yet Rexanna hadn’t gone to venture out… Anywhere, really. Finding the beach to be a bit too warm, a bit too full of sunshine while she still struggles with what feels like even the most basic kind of sunlight. And so she remains home, while people venture, while stories come and go through the secrets of the Spire and the rest of Caido. She’s home, now, idly sitting on the couch, playing the thought player to a soft little tune that she’d heard a few times during the ballrooms of home, working on a new dress of sorts.
And then she hears the knocking. She hasn’t expected any visitors today, hasn’t expected anyone to be around, really. So with a hint of surprise along her features, she goes to the door, opening it up to spy a clearly distraught Samuel on her doorstep, gulping and sobbing and looking relatively like hell. Her green gaze scans him quickly, dark brows pulling together closely, before she reaches out to grab him and pull him into the Artist’s Guild, hoping to hold him gently and tenderly within her grasp to hug him tight. “Sam… What happened? What’s wrong?” She doesn’t know what all has happened, doesn’t know anything it feels like.
Rexanna, wonderful Rexanna, grabbed him and pulled him in, immediately giving him a hug. Just what he needed; Sam put his chin on her shoulder and cried freely now, without the control he'd shown around Nate or the determinedly brave face he'd used with Remi. "...R...Remi...Remi tried to kill me. I found him. In T-Torchline." He said first, then pulled back to look in Rexanna's eyes and speak as earnestly as he could.
"I wasn't trying to make him so angry, I...I just...I thought if I..." Sam shook his head, not sure how to really justify what he'd done right now. "Then...then I went to the Voice and she healed me but--" He was speaking far too fast now, words running into each other as they came all in one breath and competed for space. "--Then when I came home...So did Nathaniel, and..and..."
This was where it got too tragic to really believe. All of this at once? "...He slept with someone else. Or...at least...did something, with them, and I kicked him out, I don't know if that was the right thing to do?" It became a question somewhere near the end and he just stared at Rexanna, wanting her desperately to make sense of all of it.
Her hands rub soothing circles on Samuel’s back as he returns he embrace, sobbing freely over her shoulder — she doesn’t mind, doesn’t care, just lets her own head rest stop his shoulder like a mother soothing a young child, listening over the stumbling and putting the pieces together. Her hands pause in their gentle circles at the mention of Remi, how the Alchemist had tried to kill Sam, wondering what had happened to bring it on — surprised still that he was alive when Aoife was not, when Ronin destroyed the Temple.
Then the Voice and her beautiful, wonderful healing… The true mother of them all. The mention of Nate has her pulling back from the embrace slightly, staring into the sorrow that stares back, that Nate had slept with someone else when she hadn’t known they were even a thing officially… But did it matter in the end? That they were or weren’t? It was clear Samuel had feelings, and she wonders if the other Ascended had reciprocated and done it anyway.
She reaches up with her hands to cradle his face gently, wiping away at the tears that streak down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Sam.” She hums to him gently, searching his gaze, conveying it as much as she can in her green eyes. That seeing him so upset and in pain was upsetting, that she couldn’t do anything about it also was upsetting. “Come sit with me.” She makes to pull him to the couch, to hold him into her if he’ll let her. “Did Nate say what happened? As for Remi… Well, if he’s still grieving, perhaps it’s best to leave him alone?” She frowns to that, letting Remi rampage and become something they both know he isn’t. But grief was powerful, and she too had raged at the skies and everything when she’d lost her own.
Rexanna's arms comforted him greatly. Sam let her move him away, finding him trusting her more than he'd trusted most of his friends before. There was something about her that made him feel safe....he supposed that was probably why she'd been chosen to be queen. As she wiped at his tears he smiled and tried to take in a deep breath, swallow, control himself just a little. "Mmm..." He said to the apology, glad that someone seemed to see there had been sins committed against him.
Easily he went with her to the couch and sat as she positioned them. For a moment he worried about Bastien finding them like this, but managed to quiet his mind on that - he'd never seemed the jealous type and it was rather obvious from the fluid running out of his eyes and nose this was not a sexy kind of intimacy.
"Nate...he..." Sam sighed, closed his eyes, tried to order his words to tell the story coherently from the beginning. "He gained an ability from The Voice to diagnose patients from a bite. I told him it was going to be too tempting, but he told me it'd be fine...then barely a week later he tells me he bit someone and then.." Sam shrugged, not knowing the details (and now wishing he'd asked - had Nate kissed them? Had he whispered the same nice things? Had they cum? Had they cuddled? Were they more attractive than him?).
As for Remi, indeed. He didn't know where to start with that. "He's not just grieving, Rexanna. He's different. Cruel." Remi had brought up nasty words just for the sake of saying them, had seemed to want to hurt him. "I might have...mistepped, later in the conversation, but he started with insulting me from the beginning."
She holds him, there on the couch like a mother comforting a child after their first breakup, rubbing soothing circles along his back while they speak. And she listens intently as he begins, keeping him close with gentle nods as far as understanding goes. She feels him shrug, and she frowns deeply with a quiet sigh. “It’s… Hard, as you know.” She’s sure Samuel is well aware. But to have something to help with a profession that ignited such feelings? That would make it even worse.
She recalls the bone bridge with Loren. The Fields with Remi. And she purses her lips slightly. “I can talk to him if you’d like? Maybe find out what happened?” She’d do that for him, if he didn’t want to do it himself. Rexanna was a bystander in this – and she didn’t hold much judgement other than the fact Nate had hurt Sam… But both were her brothers. And it made it all that more complicated.
The topic of Remi isn’t any easier for her, and she nods when he tells her that the Alchemist had been cruel. And she understands that anger, that frustration, that pain. Her hands pause in their idle circles, to try and lift his head to where she can see his eyes, her green ones full of understanding on more than one level. “I’m not trying to protect Remi, Sam, but grief can take many shapes.” She frowns, hoping her honesty can be seen in her verdant eyes.
“A year and a half before I arrived here, I lost a child.” She frowns to that, not too many knowing aside from Bastien, Phoebe… She thinks that’s about it as it stands. “I wanted nothing more than to take out all the injustice that happened to me out on everyone. Sometimes you don’t go back to how you were… And sometimes you have to accept it.” She tries to give him an encouraging smile, hand reaching up to brush through his red hair. “But you can’t change anyone, Sam. They have to want it for themselves or it’ll never work.”
Sam knew very well that it could be difficult to resist the temptations of the Ascended bite; after all the first time he had slept with Nate, it had been after losing control as the result of one. Still, he had been assured by his partner that he could hold off, that he'd be able to use it as a tool only - he felt like an idiot now, that he'd believed that.
He paused to consider Rexanna's offer, unsure if he could ask her to do such a thing, but ultimately the desire to know more won out. "If...you don't mind, I think I'd like that. I will not take him back, but I think I need to know what happened, if only so I stop thinking about it. I can't stop...wondering. He was always so sweet, with me. Was he the same?" He and Nate had done plenty of rough, more experimental things, but there had been a strong undercurrent of gentleness in the touch, a sweet side to the man he had chosen to be with.
Sam had thought that gentleness to be love, but it seemed he had been mistaken.
Rexanna lifted his head and he let himself be guided up, listening to Rexanna as she spoke of grief; the kind of grief he'd never had any experience of (and hoped he never would). Perhaps he had been insensitive? Well, he definitely had been when it came to yelling out Aoife's name, but he had been so determined to try and call Remi's bluff, to show him he couldn't strike the killing blow...and he'd been wrong.
"But...Remi didn't just change. He was so...cruel and callous, Rexanna. He doesn't even seem to care about remembering Aoife. I wonder if Ronin has influenced him, honestly...I don't know. Maybe I don't understand, but I hope he becomes more like his old self soon." With a sigh, he shook his head. "I'm sorry. Obviously you know more about this. He just scared me."
Her offer to speak with Nate takes a few moments to be answered – but she doesn’t mind. She remains, rubbing those soft circles into Samuel’s back, listening and waiting for a response. She’d do as he asked, whether it be to let it lie or get to the bottom of it. The question of whether or not she minds to do it receives a small shake of her head. “I’ll find out.” She hums to him sweetly and softly, pulling him a bit closer of an embrace. “I’m sorry, Sam.” She says again, briefly, before she guides his head up to look at her as she tells him a deeply private conversation.
She listens while he explains what happened, and she nods lightly. “It took me a long time to talk about it.” She says quietly. “The first time I told anyone was here in Caido, those that hadn’t already known at least.” She purses her lips at that. Because everyone in Halyven and Asciend at the time had known – had heard the tale they’d whipped up about how she’d been cruel and brutal and killed the child on purpose.
She releases the tension within her as she focuses her verdant gaze on Samuel once more, something soft and gentle remaining within them. “I understand that.” She comments quietly, reaching up to run her hand through Samuel’s vibrant hair. “He might never get back to how he was… But give him time. Don’t provoke him, don’t try to change him. He’ll come around or he won’t. That’s the hardest part.” She tries to give him an encouraging smile but it falters slightly.
How many friends had she lost with that? The ones that couldn’t come around? It was always better that way in the end, anyway, at least that’s what she told herself. Samuel had his Ascended family to lean back on during this crisis. And she would be there for him, even if Remi wasn’t the same and Nate had turned his back on him.
Knowing that Rexanna would investigate the ins and outs of who Nathaniel had been in and out of of the affair, Sam felt a little better about it all. He closed his eyes for a moment as she pulled him in, wishing he could find something like what she'd seemed to - happy, relaxed love. He was sure there were occasional bumps behind closed doors, but she and Bastien had never seemed to be a volatile couple. Before he'd even really meant to speak, he'd asked: "How did you do it? Find someone nice like Bastien that wouldn't hurt you?" Hopefully she would not get the wrong impression: he had no attraction whatsoever to the artist, who was far too outgoing and flamboyant to be his type.
Her final advice on Remi, that he either would come round or well, he wouldn't...Sam knew it was likely the truth, but it still hurt. "It's...hard, because I care deeply for him. I would give anything to be able to help; he's been through too much. Lost too much, already." Honestly, it all scared him a little too. He'd always seen Remi as evidence that one could go through hell and still be warm, good. If this could happen to the Alchemist, what was to stop himself becoming jaded once it had been one thing too many?
His question reaches her, and for a long moment she contemplates how to answer it. “I didn’t really find him?” She begins, though she knows it’s not the answer Samuel seeks. “I went to one of his parties just to have fun, try to fix the curse Frey set on me. But I didn’t spend much of the night with him. I spent it mostly with Lucas I think.” She shrugs lightly, passing by it to focus on the topic at hand. “But he came to me first after he Ascended, after we’d all thought he’d died. Held a funeral and everything.” Yes, Bastien’s secret was still safe with her. “It was sweet. It took us until he’d been jailed for refusing to sign up to Zariah’s draft before we mentioned our feelings.” She shrugs.
It had taken forever, but it had been worth it every step of the way. And she wouldn’t go back and change any of it, the slow burn. She hadn’t expected it, hadn’t expected their love to take off as it had. They had effectively been blindsided by it, and fallen head over heels with one another.
The comment of Remi brings her back down a peg, focusing on Sam once more as he explains how much he cares about the Alchemist. And she understands that, too, but sometimes there was no way to put out a fire and you needed to just let it burn. “He has.” She agrees quietly, fingers tracing featherlight circles along his spine. “But he has to come around on his own… Sometimes rather than hearing it’ll get better, you just want to dwell in it a bit longer.” She sighs quietly, leaning back into the cushions briefly, focusing on the canvases around the room. “If nothing else… As sad as it is, you at least get to remember him for how he was before.” She hums thoughtfully.
Of course, someone as beautiful and capable of Rexanna hadn't had to go looking for her partner. Sam tried to listen politely, but it was hard to keep a neutral expression (or even be interested in the more bizarre parts of the story like the funeral) when he felt an intense, overwhelming jealousy towards her in the moment. "I...want that so badly. It seems I only have relationships that start and end far too fast." He really had struggled to do things at any kind of pace when it came to romance.
As for Remi, there really was nothing else to say that he hadn't - that it was sad, that it hurt, that he wished it could be different. Sam sighed and nodded, curling inward a little on the couch.
If she notices any jealousy from Sam, she doesn’t say so. She keeps him as close as he allows her to, listening to him admit what he wants, what he seeks. And she agrees, it’s all she’s ever wanted too – but she had been lucky, so incredibly lucky to have found Bastien the way she had, that their relationship had worked and sparked in ways she was comfortable with – even if he had pushed her out of her own a time or two, she had done the same to him.
“I’m sure you will find someone Sam.” She says, soothingly, giving him a big hug and a squeeze, trying to wrap her body around the curl of his own to cuddle against. “Someone that will treat you the way you deserve to be treated.” There’s a confirming nod – that she’s positive someone can give him what he wants, someone will be willing to.
Rexanna was everything he wished he'd had before. Someone there to comfort, to listen; what Sam tried to provide for people yet always seemed to come short. As she held him close he let out a sigh and lay with her for a while, just trying to calm himself in the embrace of his sister. At least, as long as they all avoided the venom of their enemies, she would be there for eternity and he for her.
It felt like some of that eternity had passed when he spoke again, slowly raising his head to look at her. "Thank you. Really, I--I've never had someone I trusted when I was this upset before." Not except the Voice, though he assumed they both knew their mother was the obvious exception here, a great presence in all of the Ascended's lives.
"I think...that's the best thing The Voice has given me. This family. I never thought I would have one." He smiled, then it turned into a laugh, an awkward and unfitting noise for his still tear-soaked face. "Though I now wish I hadn't made Nate a part of it."
An eternity it did feel like, but the two of them there had all of the time in the world, didn’t they? She’s content to sit there, listening to the small sounds of the room around them, a soft little tune from the thought player that helped to distract if Sam needed something else to focus on other than his own thoughts. And when he speaks, lifting his head to look at her, she opens her green ones to focus on him with a soft smile, fingers dancing along his back in small soothing strokes.
“You’re welcome.” She tells him easily, squeezing his shoulder gently. But when he continues about family the smile can’t be contained, it grows wider and brighter as he mentions that he never thought he’d have one. “I’m glad to be a part of it, Sam.” She adds, until it fades somewhat and the comment of Nate reaches her ears. A hum of a snort leaves her and she gives him somewhat of a look. “Yes, well… He might be a part of the family, but at least it’s more Ascended to work for the Voice, is it not? Perhaps we can get him to go far away from you to another land and stay there doing the ‘voice’s work’, hm?” A crooked fanged smirk crosses her face toward him with that.
