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!
02-11-2020, 10:55 PM (This post was last modified: 03-17-2020, 08:52 PM by Odd.)
PHOEBE
The seeds had been collected. The summoned animal had been killed. The magical soil had been obtained. And in the time it had taken the midwife to gather all of these things, so very much had changed.
Phoebe approached the shrine for the first time in...since just before Fiat Lux. Her weekly ritual had fallen by the wayside in the wake of her grief and emptiness. Seeing it before her now, offering of peaches and honeysuckle in one basket, her gathered items in another, she could not help the swell of guilt bubbling up. Frey deserved better than her. Frey deserved better than a human who was too weak to protect their own, too weak to face the suffering of life without breaking. She had intended to start over, once upon a time, to be better and bolder and stronger. Now here she stood, a half-year later since she had made that decision, more broken than ever.
Quietly she laid down her offering and then the gathered materials upon the alter. "Frey, I brought the things you asked of me." she called out to her friend, fingers itching to scratch and press on the burns on her knees to keep her emotions from bubbling over.
Turning in the Quest for the body part plant! Reqs were:
Frey appeared before the midwife, arms folded across their chest. Despite this posture though they looked sumptuously amused rather than disappointed. 'You're doing it again.' The pointed out. "The human misery thing. I thought we spoke about that?"
One of the peaches she'd brought floated up towards Frey's awaiting fingers, and as they took and overly large bite out of it letting the juice drip down their chin, they raised a brow expectantly.
The tone in the way Frey said her name was enough to bring back memories of her parents, full of disappointment, preparing to chide her. And chide her Frey did, though not nearly as badly as they surely could. Still, her eyes cast down. "I know we did." she said quietly. And yet, it crept back up again, more powerful than ever, ready to swallow her whole and leave her naught but an empty shell of who she had been before. Still, she did not apologize. Frey was not one who cared for them. They were boring, easily said and rarely meant.
And yet, despite their tone, they looked amused. "I am not sure I can see my way out this time." It hurt so badly that pain alone had been her only relief. She bent her knee, pulling the burned skin and sending a small shock of pain through her system, trying to keep her emotions in check in the face of her god and friend. Last time she had simply decided to be better and happy. This time such a declaration seemed insurmountable. Had they known the whole time that her decision to simply be happy would ultimately end in more misery than before? "What should I do?" she asked quietly, feeling hopelessly lost. Their presence only made increasingly clear just how far she had drifted from anything that resembled herself.
02-19-2020, 01:50 AM (This post was last modified: 02-19-2020, 01:50 AM by Frey.)
Frey No refunds
Lazily almost, Frey looks at the wounds on her skin. They aren't bad, objectively speaking. Others have endured worse with far greater zeal than Phoebe is currently showing, but that's just the thing about wounds. It isn't all about blood and torn skin. This sort of pain threshold is far harder to gauge, and though Phoebe is easily wounded, she is not weak.
"Do you even want it healed?" Frey mused, kneeling down to inspect the burned skin properly. The pain would remain, in her soul at least.
Glancing up at the midwife, the god merely shrugged. "Truthfully, it doesn't matter. Your lives all go to shit and then get better. There's nothing you can do to ease or hasten that process. I did hear once from the mind of a rather crazed outlander about a god buried in a statue. " At least Frey thought it was a statue. And a god. And buried? Well, it didn't matter. "The revelations of that god was that expectation is the root of all suffering. When things don't go your way it hurts, but only because you've made up these scenarios in your mind and then feel wounded when they don't pan out." They stood now, looking at Phoebe.
"You expect your grand romance. You expect your silly marriage to last. You expect children not to die and friends to be kind. This fat god would say that is where your problems truly are. In that expectation." Thoughtfully, Frey shrugged. "I rather like it actually. Though expectation can certainly lead to quite tantalyzing results, so I'd not do away with it completely." They grinned at that.
She did not reply immediately as Frey questioned her, silent as she watched them inspect her knees. Old and new, they were nearly perfectly round, bright red circles, in meticulously perfect rows. Neat, calculated, purposeful, the malfunction of her mind to prompt her to such extremes indicative of her inability and lack of resources to properly cope with the weight of her own grief. "I am just tired." she whispered finally in response. Tired of hurting. Tired of trying and accomplishing so little. Tired of feeling utterly alone. Tired of the sheer emptiness.
But the mention of a god buried in a statue was an...unusual segue. She blinked slowly at Frey, trying to follow what they were saying. "It sounds similar to your advice to not care about what others think." she said quietly. More broadly applied perhaps, but similar, and look how wonderfully she had done at that.
She shifted on her feet, passing her little bag of collected objects between her hands as she did so. "Is that what you think I should do then? Not...expect?" she asked, looking at them with wide, sad eyes. Don't care. Don't expect. So simple to say but so difficult to do for one who's heart was so big and who expected without realizing it. And however much Frey might like what this buried statue god said, she would much rather follow the advice of the god she had befriended and grown to trust so deeply.
"That isn't an answer." Frey observed, though in a way, it absolutely was. So the burns would stay. As a reminder. As battle wounds. As nothing at all.
'Well, if you didn't always expect things to be a certain way, for your life to take a certain path, for the words you dream up in your head to find themselves writ across the pages of your life, would you be here like this?" They inclined their head to the side, wonderingly. "You're allowed to feel all these emotions, sweetlips. It's what makes you human. Entitlement and this sense that the world owes you something, that when things don't go your way you're entitled to be upset about it...that too makes you human, but it is one of your less attractive qualities as a species." They took another bite of the fruit. "It's what allows you to build cities and governments, to weave wedding dresses and find meaning where there is none...but it also eats away at your souls in a way completely unique to you. No other species suffer the same existential dread, no other screams at the sky thinking the world owes it something just because it's in pain."
She sighed a little, nodding at their observation. It wasn't an answer. But answering meant admitting she saw the insanity in her own actions and failed for any number of reasons to act towards a more sane path. "I don't wish to hurt, but it doesn't hurt as badly as my heart does." she said softly. Phoebe was trying to escape her more existential pain by immersing herself in the very real pain of burning her knees. Entirely unhealthy, but all she felt she had to go on anymore.
Except for now, for Frey's presence was all consuming, and as it seeped into her soul she leaned towards it, wishing she could hug them tight and simply be for a time.
Instead she bowed her head, taking the words of wisdom and chiding from them. Her lips pressed into a thin line - not from anger, but disappointment in herself. "It seems I haven't really learned anything yet, have I?" she said quietly, before daring to look up at Frey again. "What do other creatures do? What would you do, if you felt as I do?" she asked, wondering if there was some lesson she could take from somewhere else, divine or mundane.
'Well. Humans have never really been the most clever. Blame the Voice, perhaps she sent you here a bit bruised from the start." Frey shrugged a bit at this, making it entirely unclear whether or not the Voice might be possible for Phoebe's irrationality when it came to the men in her life.
"Other creatures don't feel this. Not the way you do. And if it was me?" Frey considered this idly, reaching out to absently twirl a strand of Phoebe's hair around their finger. "I'd embrace it. Be heartbroken, just don't be stupid. All of this flailing, this self-harm and self-deprecation, it isn't making it any better. It's just delaying it. Feel the things you need to feel, and then get over it. Stop trying to rush through your own mortality like it's something to escape. The only way of doing that is death, anyways."
She considered it quietly. It was possible. She had just gone from Northwind to Northaven, and suddenly wound up in Caido. "Nothing has felt stable or safe since I arrived." she admitted quietly. She clung to anything that gave her a semblance of normalcy, and when it was taken it shook her to her core. "Except for you. I know I can count on you." she said softly, the faintest glimmer of happiness in her eye. Frey had been there from the start. She had not understood at first, but now she had come to know them and knew better.
That Frey would embrace their own heartbreak was...so obvious. They had always said what one felt was important, and they did all things fully. It was one of the most basic lessons they had tried to teach her, and she had forgotten. And with the realization, the damn holding back her emotions came tumbling down. A choked sob broke through her lips as her grief and heartbreak and sorrow consumed her. Her knees buckled and she leaned forward, hugging Frey tight - or falling to her knees if they moved - and cried. It was a true, ugly cry, the sort she had not had in a long time, and one desperately needed.
She wasn't sure how long it lasted, her emotions and Frey's conflicting presence too all consuming, but at the end of it, when the tears ran dry and limbs trembled from exhertion, her mind felt....clear. "Thank you, Frey." she whispered.
"That you can, honeysuckle. It isn't a claim that many can make." Frey was not, as many had seen, an overly sentimental or caring being. They had their ways of navigating this world, sculpted by their purpose and then further moulded by their own whims. But Phoebe had proven herself time and time again to be interesting. To be close enough to cliche to be predictable, which made her surprising outbursts all the more satisfying for the god to watch play out.
Letting the midwife cry out as long as she wanted, Frey's fingers combed through her hair but they made no effort to dry her eyes or halt her grief. It was a necessary thing, and Frey was happy enough to provide Phoebe a safe space in which to let all her vulnerabilities show.
"If you need another meltdown, you know where to find me. And if anyone calls you out on it, you send them my way." Frey said with a salacious smile. They were more than happy of reminding the little mortal-rabbits just how human they were.
Phoebe nodded against Frey's chest in acknowledgement of their words, but the tears and sobs choked out any words that she might've responded with. Instead she simply held them tighter, fingers pressing against their bare back as if they might simply disappear into a puff of honeysuckle scented pink smoke.
And though it felt an eternity, her tears fell for no longer than thirty minutes at most. But it left her limbs, weak from unhealthy weightloss, trembling and so she still leaned against them for support. The midwife breathe low, slow breathes, taking in Frey's scent to calm herself further. For a moment, in her mind, she was off and away in Frey's ever shifting world again. Just her and her god and none of the worldly pains that tore at her soul.
But eventually she stepped away, wiping at her eyes to dry her face. "I don't want to be a bother to you..." she admitted quietly. At the offer they gave though, she laughed mirthlessly. "I'd send Jata but I doubt he'd come. He deserves to lose his ability feel pleasure for awhile if you ask me." Because he is a cheating asshole who always comes out sunshiny fine was the unspoken, rather vindictive follow-up, but it was there nonetheless.
"You mean he didn't like you smashing up his bar?" Frey smirked, hands continuing to smooth Phoebe's hair. Instead of flattening it however, their hands were like a smoothing balm than then erupted the blonde strands into curls.
'If you tell me it would honestly make you feel better, than so be it. That you're all petty and conniving creatures is nothing at all to me, I think it rather cute. But I'll only do it if it will bring you genuine satisfaction."
"Jata doesn't like anything unless it is something he doesn't have." she said with an irritated huff. And while that was true, she didn't particularly care if he didn't like her smashing up his bar. She had enjoyed smashing up his bar.
But of course, Frey knew her all too well. And their question made her sigh, eyes casting down at the ground with a grumpy expression, face almost hidden with the abundance of curls the god was setting into her thick hair. "No, it wouldn't make me feel better. Not genuinely anyways." she mumbled. It wouldn't take away the hurt. It wouldn't take away the anger. It was simply the knee jerk wish to antagonize, to go after the one thing he cared about. But ultimately, it wouldn't bring her any genuine happiness or peace. Revenge was rarely like that. A moment of bliss and then nothing. More importantly, other people's suffering had never been something Phoebe had ever appreciated. She was a healer at heart, and even when completely livid with another person, she struggled to find any real happiness in their pain.
"And what's wrong with that?" Frey asked, of Phoebe's judgement of Jata. That was the midwife's problem in a nutshell: she tried to fit her potential suitors into shapes that she found attractive, condemning them when squishing them there didn't work. So what, if Sunjata only liked the newest and shiniest toy on the block.
"No, I didn't think so." They agreed, their fingers continuing to pull curls from Phoebe's thick locks. "How is all your portal-guardianing going?" Frey asked, continuing to soothe and smooth Phoebe's hair.
