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!
The Drop had always sparked her curiosity – mainly because it was dangerous, and she was foolish, ridiculous, and enticed by the notions of terror. The latter had been immersed within her blood from a tender, young age, and she was at home in the leagues of chaos, in the ruffling of ancient, primordial bedlam, used to monsters, to mayhem, to loss, and the bewitching, eldritch attachments that came with it. So she meandered, pondered the length of its gaping maw, its cavernous reach, despite Fangorn’s hissing pleas for her not to go near the edge.
So she shrugged, sighed, and plunged along, away from the dastardly wake of the rivulet, and deeper into the surrounding confines, feet flickering into haphazard puddles left from some recent rain. The honeybee girl wouldn’t have even stopped to bother with them, had her eyes not caught the flicker of something else altogether. She ceased, turning back around to the water she’d just trod within, leaning down, closer, upon inspection – perhaps she’d found an animal to hunt, sadly underfoot until her careening.
But no – it hadn’t been that at all. She could see waves within their depths, the arcing and bowing of nature’s existence, flowing, streamlined, along its ripples, along its corners. Mesmerized, she kneeled, staring into the abyss, into the remnants of cascading water, tilting her head, pondering the entire midst. Fangorn hovered and beckoned nearby, clearly believing she’d lost her mind.
Loren had returned to the Greatwood. Despite his less than stellar encounters there, and his less than stellar reputation among the Fae, he was still determined to explore what he could. After exiting the portal, he'd found the Stonesong and started to follow it down. Astra was by his side, and he petted her absently as they walked along the river.
Eventually, he stumbled upon a pool surrounded by rocks that looked more than a little like teeth. Frowning, he made his way to the water's edge. However, as he did he spotted a familiar shock of red hair. Sighing, he paused and watched as Melita peered into a puddle. Biting his lip, he shifted his weight from side to side.
Finally, he cleared his throat. "Careful. The puddles...last time I was here, the visions they gave me were less than pleasant." He craned his neck so he could look into one, but at the image of fires around blackened flesh, he flinched away and found his breath coming more heavily.
Absorbed in the puddles, in the arc of waves undulating along its surface, she hadn’t noticed Loren’s approach until the familiar grating of his voice sparked and snapped over her ears; and the age-old, feral reflexes scorched along her skin. The summoner had the uncanny ability to bristle over her nerves and bring out the worst in her: the vicious temper, the ferocious abyss, the wild, savage tenacity and tendencies. Perhaps the only other who’d ever managed to cause such a reign of chaos was Kiada, and lumping them together was likely an insult to both. At least her and Kiada’s hatred for one another had history, had bite, had weight; the honeybee girl and Loren’s choking vitriol seemed to rise from misunderstandings and stupidity.
Fangorn glanced at her nervously as her head whipped up to regard him – struggling to decipher how she should respond. A great portion of her leaned towards menace, out of habit, out of the last intervals they’d meandered through. He reminded her of some annoying little wasp that came and went as it pleased, buzzing around unpleasantly, stinging because it could, before wandering off to some other place to irritate. The words surrounding her mouth and tongue were equally unpleasant, and the defiant slant to her chin, to her nose, slunk around her movements. The vampire gourd traced a sigh, eerie stare rummaging from her to Loren, to Astra, looking for an ally in the pending doom.
So she stifled down the mood, for now, attempting to do something other than growl, hiss, or snap. “Are they supposed to signify something?” Her eyes went towards the puddle again, not bothering to gauge his reaction, tilting her cranium a fraction as more images seemed to flow: like ignition, like smoke, like incendiary pieces, billows of ash and fire streamlined from its sanction.
Loren tensed as both Melita and Fangorn looked at the healer and Astra's way. The Launceleyn couldn't exactly blame them for their suspicion, though he also wasn't about to back down if it came to another fight between them. Still, he breathed a quiet sigh of relief as the redhead went back to looking into her puddle.
Shrugging at her question, he moved to look into another puddle, a short distance from her. Astra padded along behind him, bleating anxiously, and he reached back to give her a reassuring head rub. However, his fingers stilled at the sight of himself, as an adult, but back in the cells he'd been thrown into as a child, weeping silently and covered in burns and wounds that his family hadn't deigned to heal yet.
Sighing, he rubbed his eyes. "I have no idea. They seem random." His voice was quiet and a far cry from the confident and aggressive posture she'd last seen from him.
Nothingness: while her skin crawled and itched for some sort of demolition. Loren had just as much information as she did; naught, and so she fell silent again, eyes flickering back down to the puddle once embarking over flames, over fire. It had changed again, altering its course, and in some mystifying, siren-like call, Melita found she couldn’t look away.
Then she saw her sister – twirling happily in fields of wildflowers, absorbed, enamored, unblinking at the whirlwind of tender, compassionate sentiments, expecting to hear a hum, a tune, a mellifluous swirl of color and life – when she jerked her head abruptly towards the thicket, the brambles, the bracken surrounding them. Maybe these things were just cruel, showing bits and pieces of the past, or things she could never have again. She worked hard to stifle down the gaping, swallowing, devouring weight scorching through her heart, clenching her jaw, balling her fists down by her sides, before sliding them over her knees in her little crouch. “They don’t seem to show the future.” Because Clementine would never be in it again.
Loren had managed to steel his expression into a neutral and unflinching mask as he stared into the water. However, Astra's concerned bleat, and the way she pressed herself against him betrayed how troubled he was by the visions the water showed him. Indeed, he rested a hand on her head as if that was all that was keeping him upright.
When Melita commented on the nature of the visions, he glanced at her. Then he shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe they just show visions from our subconscious, which can occasionally predict the future." He stared back into the puddle, and shivered when it showed him an Ursur with its jaws dripping with blood, Zariah looking down on it from a tower, her features totally impassive.
"Mostly it seems to show my fears and sorrows." It came out quietly, and tinged with shame.
Maybe if Loren and her hadn’t bent such barbaric tendencies towards one another, her reaction would’ve been different. Maybe if they weren’t mired down in a thousand other discrepancies, rancor, bitterness, and patchworked feelings, she might have cared about his statements. But those moments were gone, strangled, choked, vanished with the breaking of her bones, and everything thereafter. Besides, she had her own traumatic vows and uncertainties to deal with, rather than his fears, his sorrows. That ship of compassion for Loren had long since sailed, and promptly sunk.
She watched him shiver, and then segmented her eyes back to the puddle. Jaw hardened, tension weighted in the balls of her feet, in the curl of her fists, in the steady, stalwart state of her breathing. “That’s too bad,” she presided, not sounding all that sad about it, watching as the water rippled and churned again, feasting her eyes upon eerie, enigmatic eyes – some wholly familiar – her gaze glancing towards Fangorn, and some reminding her of the mighty gourd they’d taken down last year, before its blighted soul had reached the edge of the Fae woods.
Snorting at Melita's words, Loren glanced up from his puddle. Weirdly enough, his expression was amused rather than offended. "You don't have to pretend to be sorry for me." He lowered his gaze again, staring deep into the waters. "We both know better." His voice was quiet, and maybe the slightest bit guilty.
For a moment, Loren though the puddle was just showing a normal reflection for once. However, it soon became apparent that while it was showing him as he was, the background had changed. Indeed, the blue of the sky and the green of the trees had been replaced by a black deeper than any darkness he'd ever seen. He looked alone, against that stark background, and he pressed his lips together as loneliness pinged through him.
She shrugged, not a ladylike gesture, but something akin to savage, feral little sprites, with jagged teeth, pointed fangs, and a craving for mutinous havoc. “I’m not.” The girl couldn’t even be bothered to pretend, and she wasn’t sorry for him. A part of her figured most of his trials, tribulations, sorrows, and whatever other sad, stupid events had likely stemmed from his actions, consequences for being who he was. After all, hadn’t that been a majority of hers too? Family that couldn’t be saved because she wasn’t strong enough? Becoming blighted and terrorizing the world because she’d been too weak?
Melita shook her head, incapable of perceiving one another as having anything in common, and went back to the puddle, struggling not to be consumed, enraptured, enchanted, beguiled, by anything thrown and rippled her way. This time it was bright, vivid color, contortions of glass, familiar noses pressed up against it, and maybe she could’ve wasted away before the image, given those few chances to relive moments long since passed.
Raising his eyebrows at Melita's response, Loren pressed his lips together. Then he shrugged. "If you say so." His own words were short and clipped, and he made no attempt to disguise that he was just as unhappy to be in her presence as she seemed to be in his.
As he stared into the puddle, the darkness began creeping over him as well, consuming his skin and features. He somehow managed to tear his gaze away just before his eyes disappeared in the water. Expression troubled, he shook his head faintly. "Well, I warned you. Good luck with the puddles." His tone was as upset as her features were, and he turned to look around for Astra.
Well, if he didn’t want to be here, he could always leave. The honeybee child certainly hadn’t asked him to approach, come, or irritate her with his mere presence alone. She would’ve been content with just her and Fangorn, nestled beneath branches and brambles, falling leaves and notched thorns, gazing into puddles to remember lingering, lost fragments of a time gone by. Her eyes broke away from the vision of wildflowers, her mother crouched down in a field while the twins basked within the sun, pretending to gather herbs, but instead humming a silly song – to watch as he delivered one last warning, luck that didn’t quite reach the air. She was half-tempted to wave him away, deliver a resounding click of her jaw and teeth with a whatever.
But as her gilded eyes were snatched away, she watched him, likely searching for his luxere. Speculation in the air, haphazard, reckless; quiet observations and not much else. Maybe it would drive him away, and that’d be the end of it. “Ever think you bring on your own suffering?” That in some way, he couldn’t quite march past it, stuck and absorbed, mired and marooned, left stranded by his own wiles and actions.
As Loren looked for Astra, he also sent out a mental call for her. Unfortunately, she seemed to be temporarily out of range. His brow furrowed as he kept up his signal to her.
However, he glanced back at Melita as she spoke. For a moment, his mask slipped, and his eyes grew distant and haunted. He sighed, and looked away from her again. Running a hand through his hair, he shrugged. "I don't have to think about it." His voice was quiet.
Taking a deep breath, he let it out with a sigh. "Because I know I do." The admission came out softly, and he refused to let her see how his eyes had grown misty.
Her inquiry hadn’t been meant to bruise or cut, just another contortion to whittle the time away, speculate between boughs, brambles, nettles, and thorns. What she saw though were haunted, poignant things in his eyes and face, and for a moment she nearly regretted prospering the inquiry: designed to hurt and maim in its emboldened, impulsive reaches, and might’ve done just that. The girl’s eyes narrowed for a moment or two, speculating, their gilded slits rummaging over canopies and branches, making sure not to have contact with the images rippling out before her. Fangorn leapt and bound amongst the underbrush, perhaps striving to find Astra as well, while Melita puzzled through her next response, a shift in her shoulders, then rising from the ground to wander to the next puddle. “So what are you going to do about it?” Wallow? Mope? Keep sinking into the weight of melancholy?
Sighing, Loren ran a hand through his hair. Then, when Astra failed to show up, he turned to face Melita. For a long time, he didn't say anything, just frowned faintly at her. Then he pressed his lips together and crossed his arms, his shoulders tensing. All in all he looked deeply uncomfortable.
"I'm trying to be a better and kinder person, mostly unsuccessfully. To think before I act and speak, and to keep control of myself and my temper. To learn from my mistakes, but not let them get me down." The words came out quietly and reluctantly. Sighing again, he rubbed the back of his head. "Why, do you have any suggestions?"
