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!
Delphine was in the Settlement with a set of paints and a few empty canvasses. She'd picked a spot to set up, and was painting people on the fly for something in trade. It was something she had not done in years, but painting came as easily to her like she was born to paint.
A man had stopped to request a painting, she had a few on display; some showcased the fact she saw sounds, others showcased her traditional skill. She was smiling, brightly, at the fact she was painting again. Behind of her ran her girls, who were the models for some of the traditional paintings on display.
Reality is a strange concept. If something happens in your head, and you ser it, feel it, live it, does that make it real? But then, if you experience the same thing as other people, is that real too? Does the reality rely on shared experiences, or is the world, the universe, all that is, confined to the mind of a single individual? Are we gods of our own making, with our own personal reality spinning a wild tale as time slowly ticks by? And does time tick, only because some other god forced the concept of a clock onto us when we were too small to resist?
Numbly, she sat slumped on the bench and stared out at the crowd. Tried to reconcile herself with what she saw, even as the mind struggled to accept any of it. If reality was what went on in her head, something had gone seriously wrong. Or this was how it felt like to go mad. Like you were the only sane person in an ocean of impossible.
There was an urge to scream. To lash out, and cry. Beg and plead with the empty sky, to bang her head against a wall. Maybe cracking it open would reveal it for the dream it should be, and let her wake up. Gods, she wanted to wake up.
And yet... feared to try, in case she did.
Absently, she scratched at her nose. Registered a giggle of kids, and a woman painting something on a canvas on the other side of the other side of the street. Wow, she really didn't want to be painted. Just her luck, to escape all the cameras just to find their analogue counterparts in the street.
Delphine finished the painting she was currently working on, and decided to take a break. After all, she'd just done three different paintings, in entirely different styles, in quick succession.
She packed her supplies, and left them with the children, as she wandered through the crowd with some trinkets she had been given in return for paintings. As she passed someone, she paused, studying the person quietly.
"Are you... okay?" She inquired, turning her gaze to the woman, who certainly did not look okay. She wasn't in the mood to try to fix somebody's problems, and highly doubted she could, but... she was here, might as well check on the girl, right?
Oh, no doubt she looked every bit as awful as she felt. Never a beauty, with the pudgy overfed look of someone who ate too much and moved too little and spent as little time in the sun as possible. Pasty, was one word for it. Now jerked from her comfortable lair, crammed into ill fitting hand me down clothes, with dull blonde hair a complete mess hanging every which way about the face... and she didn't even feel so numb that it had ceased to bother her.
The woman with the easel packed up her things. Good. No spontaneous masterpieces of her Despair today. But the positive things ended there, because as the woman passed by, she offered up sympathy. At least it better be, pity would be humiliating, when offered from a pretty slip of a girl like this.
"Hm? Oh yeah, I'm fine!" The lie was automatic, as was the way she perked up and smiled, and straightened her seat on the bench. A lovely example of the practiced 'All's well, nothing to see here' parody.
"You don't... look fine." She murmured, moving to sit beside the girl in question. "I'm Delphine." She offered out her hand, apologizing for the wet pain because she withdrew her hand to wipe it on her clothes.
Which were certainly not the best clothes in the lot. If anything, she was beautiful but poor. Zariah would probably tell her that her personality was reflected outwards, now. Perhaps stupidity was a better word for it?
As Delphine studied the girl next to her, overweight, pale, even her hair was dull, she saw... well, sadness. She wondered if she had ever been that dull. Was she that dull now? Perhaps. Luxuries aside, she managed to keep her hair healthy, and by some miracle, she kept the children healthy too.
But even though the girl next to her was dull and overfed... there was a beauty there. Because if you believed you could see the beauty in everything, you would find something that was beautiful in even the ugliest object. And this girl was nowhere near the 'ugliest' thing Delphine had seen; that was probably herself, or perhaps, at one point, Zariah.
