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!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Even toppled and in ruins, the Palace was not deserted. The aviary where the messenger ravens had been housed was damaged and littered with debris, but still intact. Birds were slaves to habit, and the black corvids didn't care about dust or clutter. Some dedicated person was still bringing food to them, and that was all the reason they needed to remain.
They made for better company than people. Huddled in with the rest of the flock, Korbin was warm and snug, groomed by gentle beaks and offered morsels of half-frozen meat. The birds sensed his distress, and did what they could to help him, but no one shoved the food down his beak when he wouldn't eat, and there was no inane chatter. Only the occasional soft croak could be heard, and it was rarely directed at him.
The only real disturbance came from humans, who foolishly tried to send messages. Outsiders all. No one from Halo would be dumb enough to risk the ravens for a letter 'maybe' delivered. Korbin took a savage pleasure in emptying his bowels on those who tried, and he encouraged the other ravens to stay away from those who tried to call them down.
Most gave up, and left again with errands unfinished. Muttering about the odd behaviour of the birds.
all of me is damned. From earliest beginnings, my fate has been solitude- elegant solitude, elegant loneliness. I let it walk into me like a cathedral, down its isle- wedding bells sound in the secret place of my heart.
Phizarae was youthful and elegant, but faded, like the ashen wanness of decay. How suitable was it she lived here, among disturbed piles of stone held together by fractured plankings of ice and dust? She sought asylum in any tottering, run-down construction which was how she came to cross the palace's coastline of splintered glass, unknowing of the desolation that had been performed on this formerly distinguished structure.
At first, there was nothing but taciturnity in those arcane corridors, the bleat of a home remembering. It was the sound of ascending, climbing like the sonance of worn keys on a piano; it was a throbbing, tactful aching. It crescendoed morosely into a craving call for Apollo.
Phizarae's gloved hand cautiously felt the fissured architecture, her thoughts secreted behind her ceramic composition, when she saw the aviary. Within it were beings that took nothing for granted, conceivably because they knew no better. These rocks would eventually capitulate to the soil below them- would the creatures stay beyond even that? Generous fortune always had a way of slipping through fingers like sand. Still, they perched together as if their slight bones could withstand the crushing weight of their palace on top of them. Fitted with grievous eyes and ink-stained wings, they were powerful ebony, intensely eloquent in the way all absolute things are.
"Hello, little birds." She cooed this address, commanding nothing in return, unknowing of the attuned that endured among them and emphatically naive to the internal operations of Halo in general.
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
The ravens shuffled back and forth on their perches in response. The rise and fall of ebony wings was a rustle of silk, beaks clapping and snapping around sonorous croaks neither greeting nor dismissal. Did she expect a response? For them to come flying to settle on her, to treat her like one of them?
She was not. Her clothes reflected it, more than the pale colors of hair and skin. Frilly dresses and fancy gloves, stones in the hair... It was frivolous, fancyful and utterly useless. To Korbin's eyes, she looked like one who begged to die. Sooner rather than later - a few minutes out in the brutal cold would see to that. Once, he would have scoffed at the idiocy, the wanton self-destruction she brandished like a badge.
Now he merely watched. One black bird among many. Only his eyes were different, flinty blue rather than deep jet. A young bird, or not a bird at all. Those eyes followed her, quiet and passive. Just waiting, to see if she would come close enough.
It would be amusing, to soil those pretty clothes of hers.
all of me is damned. From earliest beginnings, my fate has been solitude- elegant solitude, elegant loneliness. I let it walk into me like a cathedral, down its isle- wedding bells sound in the secret place of my heart.
Phizarae had witnessed ravens previously, clever creations capable of much greater than people initially would assume. The birds were oftentimes affiliated with destruction and adverse omen which was a feasible theory when considering their ebony plumage and intake of carrion, but Phizarae regarded them differently.
She recalled a man she had faced years ago whose selection of comrade had been a white-necked raven, a division of Corvus unimportantly more petite than the standard with a lush scrap of ivory on its nape. The bird's capabilities had transcended Phizarae's expectations and she determined promptly that not all was what it resembled among the avians; they had capacities she never identified as plausible. Regardless of her subdued recognition, there was no delicate efflorescence in the expanse between her and them, only the astringent din of cawing and the flutter of unbridled wings.
They cared little for the girl which only highlighted the variance in their circumstances; she would be a shifting line of consciousness in their existence, but they would be a complete division in hers for they were one of the primary things she had observed since she was ripped from her semblance of normalcy and jostled onto a separate planet entirely.
That shifting line did not house empathy.
But there was a history behind everything she did... from her richly blanched style to her obsessive reflections of more foreboding and desolate things. She grasped what the natives thought of her, how they eluded her as if she brought an infectious plague, but she did not permit herself to be afflicted with the musings of strangers. The furthest thing the girl would ever do was transform or disguise herself - presentation, nature, or otherwise - in accordance with the company she kept. All of those she engaged with would meet and know the same Phizarae Ephereia, for no more than one single variant existed.
Marvel, pity, yearning, resentment... whatever it was, it pulled Phizarae copiously closer to the birds.
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Dangerous, that. To gaze on a thing and think you know it. Dangerous for both parties, in this case. Remember what killed the cat? Satisfaction would bring nothing back here. Dead was dead.
The ravens grew agitated as the girl came closer. A few lifted from their seats and winged through the air, sending blasts of icy wind all about. When one too many tried to settle back down on a loose beam that balanced precariously near the broken roof, it came crashing down in a rumble.
Suddenly all the birds were in motion, flapping and cawing, agitation spreading like disease through the unkindness. They billowed out into the free air outside, a black plume of living smoke, and dark feathers rained down, along with far less romantic things like rubble, dust and big goopy splotches of guano.
Only one raven remained. It sat quite calmly in the vacancy, and settled shimmering wings more comfortably against its sides. The bird called Korbin cocked its head aside, and blinked slowly down on the pale stranger.
all of me is damned. From earliest beginnings, my fate has been solitude- elegant solitude, elegant loneliness. I let it walk into me like a cathedral, down its isle- wedding bells sound in the secret place of my heart.
Phizarae's heart - poorly stapled shut - pounded in her chest, inflating and expanding from the tension until the sound of flimsy paneling crashing to the ground birthed a new atmosphere.
Dusty walls, dusty boards, dusty birds; in the rotting frost there was no liberation from the dehydrated filth that descended on everything. Nothing that was cleaned prevailed for long, Phizarae no exception. The birds took their furlough in a fluster of what resembled agitation and irritation, surging the palace's powder into their draft with midnight wings, marbling the alabaster girl with a smokier hue. From her pocket, concealed among the pleats of her frothy style, she procured a scrap of cloth and worked it across the most glaring of places that tainted her appearance, those composed of dust, excrement, and smut.
Ultimately, her aegan eyes raised once more to the rafters and distinguished that she was not yet alone; there was still one enduring.
He was the final of them, regarding her unobtrusively, eyes ablaze with the crisp denim of a polar sea - striking. Still, he was an alien to her just as she was to him and that alone conceived a climate of wonder (and reasonably a modicum of hesitation) within Phizarae. She was of a faraway world whose cosmos glittered with alternative stars and so all she could accomplish for now was straining on, rummaging for an interpretation on how she emerged here. And her hands, possibly once proficient at forging realms and nations, seemed so trivial as they dangled at her sides and clung onto a shred of soiled cloth under the weighted gaze of the sole raven.
"I-," she was able to gag out before the dust she had earlier inhaled from the Corvus shouldered a bare cough up her trachea.
After a moment when a sigh caressed her lips and she was equipped to vocalize once more, she didn't recognize which words to use. Why did she feel coerced to say anything in the first place? It was a bird. It hadn't answered her the first time, it wouldn't answer her now. Still, the silence felt thick and awkward and unusual as her gaze fell once more to the fallen beam.
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
It was a neat prank. In another part of time, in a different life, a young boy laughed raucously at the mayhem, eyes full of light that danced over clutter and debris. What better chaos could there be than one he was not guilty of?
But there were no smiles hidden in the eyes of this raven. Its gaze, for all that it lingered on her, was empty and vacant. Dark like a place could be only when it had once housed light, echoes of memories bouncing between charred walls now crumbling into ash. The silence that radiated from him was full of questions, answers demanded, questions unasked yet craving clarification, intent and purpose in need of declaration.
Why had she disturbed the peace of this place? It had been warm before she came, and now the chill sunk into his bones. Deeper, a creeping frost that would petrify what was left of the heart.
A closer inspection would reveal that the bird was far from neat or tidy. It looked thin and tufty, feathers bedraggled and lost of all sheen. As if it too was covered in dust, a clinging film of unwellness that looked as though it might not quite come off.
all of me is damned. From earliest beginnings, my fate has been solitude- elegant solitude, elegant loneliness. I let it walk into me like a cathedral, down its isle- wedding bells sound in the secret place of my heart.
Phizarae had long ago grown used to the flavor of the universe's frigid gloaming submerged profoundly within her flesh. She had once felt so intensely and cared so exceedingly, but things turned when she became what the world perceived her as; her quietness turned to soundless arrogance, her reserve turned to glacial detachment. Phizarae didn't grasp that the frost endangered the raven's heart as it had long ago hers and even if she had understood, she solely would've driven him to accept the feeling for it had become such an elegant component of her identity and it would've done the same for him.
The winter may have chilled her soul but it had also anesthetized all her wretched despondency and for that, she could only be thankful.
After another division of silence, she laid the handkerchief back in its obscure pocket and peered at the grim-looking bird. "Why do you stay here?" she hummed. Though it seemed as if the realm had beaten him, he was still a Stygian creature with the equipment to be lovely and the capacity of flight and therefore a variety of physical freedom unachievable to most.
As they inclined once more into the silence, coldness had begun to dissolve into itself, as shapeless as the serpent shadows of nighttime. She flapped her gloved hand at him, a gesture only meant to garner some sort of reaction. Maybe he would approach only to peck at the frilly tulle that ornamented her waving slender hand; anything would be better than nothing. Phizarae's reasons for this had become unknowingly selfish; what had been 'oh, pretty birds' quickly morphed into 'do something so that I don't have to be uncomfortable any longer'.
Oh! how the damaged interact with one another; a tale often riddled with deeply cut misunderstanding.
But what does it take to break you, to awake you?
To make you bow and spit it out?
Wings meant nothing if the mind was tethered. Freedom was an illusion, and so was choice. There had been a time when Korbin had been full of fire, and the light had been enough to spill over, to stream from his being and shed warmth upon others. But it was smothered in ashes now, and the ice taking hold.
As the gloved hand was waved at him, the raven leveled a stern look upon the girl. It spread dark wings and toppled off the perch, came drifting down to the ground. And as it did, the bird shimmered and changed, grew in height and weight until the feet that connected with the ground belonged to a young man. Tall enough to loom over her, dressed in black, his hair and clothes as disheveled and unkempt as the feathers had been. There was a storm brewing behind his dark flint blue eyes, and a painful looking line of healed scars cut across his throat.
"Where else can I go?" he asked in response to her question. Korbin shoved his hands into the pockets of his long coat and walked past the girl, heading for the exit.
Doesn't matter if I hate you or embrace you
Nothing makes you turn around
all of me is damned. From earliest beginnings, my fate has been solitude- elegant solitude, elegant loneliness. I let it walk into me like a cathedral, down its isle- wedding bells sound in the secret place of my heart.
As the raven's clawed feet reached the floor, the transmutation that ensued was fascinating, but it also presented a particular dissonance within the girl's soul that invoked a sense of anxiety. She'd developed into a woman thinking solely one way so when she observed things that contradicted her beliefs it was nerve-racking - this situation of shapeshifting unquestionably included. Unease and distant awe infiltrated her thoughts and molded her demeanor into uniform indifference, disallowing herself to expose the confusion and uncertainty that lingered.
Phizarae's world had been simple and straightforward before Halo; no magic, witchcraft, or wizardry. How was she supposed to see all of this and believe it with no doubt or mistrust? How did others expect her to hear whispers of impending week-long darkness and understand that as somehow typical? How was it acceptable that some of the natives craved her departure from Halo just as badly as she did, but there was no way out? How could a raven turn into a man? How was any of it possible?
As Phizarae observed the person in front of her, she discerned how the appealing symmetry of the recently materialized stranger's facial features trickled downwards into a neck decorated with scars. Phizarae still didn't know who he was - not even his name - but that wasn't going to change, at least not now. She had questioned why he chose to stay here and he had replied by leaving. It made sense even if Phizarae secretly wished she had learned more in the process.
There was no gunsmoke in her breath as she whispered to his exiting form, "if I had the choice, I would fly south."
And that was it.
"."
Phizarae
the winteress
fin? I interpreted korbin's heading for the exit as the end, hope that was okay/right <3
