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!
Bastien didn't know if it had been moments or hours, but it didn't matter. He was stuck exactly where he was, holding Rexanna's body with the rest of the world cut out and put somewhere else, away from him. He was vaguely aware someone had moved him away from the door, but he'd hardly even looked up, feet sluggish and arms still wrapped around his love.
There were no plans, there was no future. He barely had enough thought to consider Azrael in the moment; after making sure they were alright with the babysitter he had left them in the care of, he had practically forgotten everything again in favour of wishing the world would turn out to be playing some sort of sick practical joke.
Many people would be used to the artist being bombastic and flamboyant, loud and ready to make a song and dance of everything ; after his intial reaction he had been silent, lips moving with inaudible whispers and sobs and nothing indicating he was even conscious except for the rocking of his body, the way he would sometimes hold Rex closer or stroke her hair.
Reticence was a mask now, a pretense, for all the mourning fathoms clawing and blurring behind his eyes. No matter how many times he’d curled and coiled into the refrain of this was not supposed to happen, it had. He couldn’t forgo it. He couldn’t walk around it. He couldn’t nonchalantly stare into the void and wish for time back. For a moment where he didn’t ask about doors, about ways to guard them all.
He should’ve just left it all alone.
But so determined, so desperate, to ensure everyone was safe, he hadn’t thought to consider, to weigh the options, of just how detrimental some safeguarding could be. His livelihood had always been about fortifications, about ramparts, about strength and durability; and he’d watched hundreds of others bound against the defenses, lose their lives in the process. In war, he could justify the outcomes: some had been too slow, not capable of outwitting, outmaneuvering against their opponents. Some had been too inexperienced, incapable of measuring up to another soldier. Some had been unfortunate, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This was none of those things, because it’d been his fault. His door. His tool to ensure monsters couldn’t come scrambling through, couldn’t reach their claws into his citizens.
In truth, they hadn’t even needed the demons outside. Merely him; brave and foolish and stupid enough to believe he could conquer and outwit LongNight.
His eyes went to Bastien after giving Clemente over to his people, and he clenched his jaw, moving forward, attempting to maneuver somewhere other than within himself, where the old, primordial wounds had begun to unwind. “We can move her to another room.” His voice wasn’t cold, but tightly measured, precise so nothing broke in the chaos, too accustomed, too attuned, to the weight overwhelming his chest, his shoulders. Not out in the open, where the rest of the citizens would flock and gasp, and he wandered, a monolithic opus to naught, naught at all – hands grasping hold of the first knob, the first door, that was empty.
After a nebulous and unknowable amount of time had passed, Deimos' voice cut into Bastien's world, close enough that it didn't blend into the inaudiable chatter of the people in the temple. He looked up, tearing his eyes away from Rexanna, at the man. For the moment, he had not connected the dots: not thought much beyond knowing that Rexanna was dead and was not returning; had not realised what Deimos had had to do with it.
As for the suggestion...he desperately did not want to move, felt like there was a chain bolting his chest to the ground...but he understood why. To move her out of the public eye, away from the bystanders: normally Bastien loved to be the centre of attention, but now all he wanted was to hide Rexanna away, keep her his forever. None of them had loved her as he had, none of them deserved her.
"Mmm." He hummed, standing and lifting her in his arms easily. She always had been easy to carry, slim and seemed to fit against him so well, even now with her arms dangling down past his. Lifelessly, he followed Deimos into the room and shut the door behind them with his foot. There were a few beds out in the room; he headed to one by the wall and put her on it, knowing she liked to sleep further away from windows than he did. Once she was down he stood by the side of the bed, staring listlessly.
"...One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die." He whispered, eyes threatening to fill up with tears again.
The Sword didn’t really see the room. No details sparked or sizzled, no particulars reached his brain. It was only the mind-numbing gravity of the void crushing and waging down on him, hot knives and piercing blows, like all the others scars he’d obtained from wars and crusades, only inward. Maybe he wished he was bleeding, cut and lacerated, bludgeoned and beaten, so the guilt would be visceral, tangible, instead of clustered and coiled in this hollowed sanction, before a husband who mourned his wife.
He stood against the door, one not armed tooth and nail with the ability to fry them apart, gripping and grasping for something real and whole, and could barely hear the words the Ascended uttered. Deimos had no death knell sonnets, no pretty words to make the whole thing better, no salve or balm to ease or dull the pain, the torment. Instead, it scraped down his spine and pierced like a scream through his skull, belligerent and terrible, soulless and irreverent, as seditious as he’d been. “I am sorry,” he pressed, quiet at first, into the void. “This is my fault.” His fault for wanting them to be safe, his fault for asking for a door to ward away the cretins, his fault for wishing the world to stop shrieking at their backs. For not listening, for thinking, for believing.
And in the end, all he’d accomplished was slaying one of his own.
Bastien had almost forgotten Deimos was in the room by the time he had uttered the lines of the poem, his entire attention absorbed once again by Rexanna and the great loss surrounding them both. The silence stretched on and he felt as if he weren't even in a physical space anymore, floating somewhere in a nightmare, until Deimos spoke and the sound of it drew him back down to the room.
He looked around with immediate bewilderment and anger on his face. Usually Bastien was an amiable sort, quick to assure, slow to blame: not now. Now he needed to desperately find a reason for his wife's death and it seemed like Deimos might provide one.
"What do you mean." He asked, flat and demanding, staring the sword right in the eyes.
The piercing slate of his eyes stared into Bastien’s – he saw and felt the weight of his anger, and didn’t, couldn’t, fault him for it. Deimos would’ve stared upon himself the same way – measured and demanding, flattened and commanding, wanting answers for how and why. Numbed and bound, carved out of his soul, there was no sanction, no solace for him now, nothing he could sink into and believe in. It was his doing, this unraveled, damned mess, some ignited contortion of protection and safeguarding overwhelmed, overworked, overwrought with the broken cataclysms. Deimos couldn’t take any of it back, and the hardened framework of his figure felt like falling into pieces right there in the room. Were he capable of taking her place, he would have, allowed himself the torture of dying out there in the crossroads, at the gatekeep of sanctuaries. This wasn’t what it’d meant to be – not at all. “I asked Safrin to make a door to repel the monsters.” Bastien would be able to fill in the blanks there – the aperture, the scene, the bombardment of everything else.
Bastien stared. He heard what Deimos said but it took a moment to form into an actual sentence in his head; took even longer for those words to have meaning. As soon as they did though, as soon as he realised that Deimos had set into motion the events that had ended in his love cold and lifeless on the bed...his feet moved before he had a chance to think any quicker.
"You viper!" He yelled, fist immediately swinging back to attempt a blow to Deimo's cheek. "You did not consider that she might use it this way?! Or did you? Did you mean for Ascended to die?!" Bastien demanded, determinedly pushing into Deimos' space and insisting on answers that he knew he was never going to get.
Deimos had been called worse, but he let the insult sink in, settle into the pools of other conflagrations, viper, like he was an asp in the grass, a serpent laden amongst fields. He’d always been the mountain, the summit, the frozen, glacial expanse, there and just and unyielding – even then, when the Ascended’s fist connected with his cheek. The pain ricocheted through his face, and he bore it all, allowing it to blend with every other tangible onslaught, torture, and anguish. He only moved back into the door, no move to defend himself, nothing left to give, Bastien’s right to obliterate and demand. “I wanted to protect all of you,” was all he could murmur through swollen ramparts and overwhelming grief.
It was the last accusation that inspired something other than melancholy, a brief interval of rage, beating and bleeding and blistering through his void – the thought that he’d willingly set this trap for the Ascended, for her, caused a growl to loosen from his wake, his eyes to narrow, the emboldened outset of his existence to fracture and fragment. If he’d ever desired the Ascended to die, they would’ve felt it long before – during the fury of the blight, during the maelstroms of other cacophonies.
And to believe he would’ve done this to Rex? “No.” Jaw clenched, smarted from the fumes, vehemence and vitriol pushing through the coil of his existence. “And certainly never to her.”
Deimos (predictably) took the hit without stumbling or wailing in pain; Bastien found that as he drew his fist back he found this both to be frustrating and comforting. He wanted someone to hurt for the crime that had been committed, but someone that could be hurt without too serious a consequence. Unfortunately for Deimos, he fit that description and had something to do with Rexanna's death.
"All of us? You really thought Safrin would want to protect all of us?" He asked incredulously, the implication obvious: That it should have been clear the Old Goddess would not make a protection for the Ascended, that she would be happy to toss them aside. Bastien had been waiting for years for his retribution from the starry Goddess and he supposed in an indirect way, she had delivered it now.
Oh, then he had clearly hit a nerve. While Bastien knew that Deimos and Rexanna had been close, in that moment it just smarted against his pain. He wanted to own the grief, not let anyone else share in it, especially not someone with a hand in her death. "Your wife certainly speaks against the Ascended often enough. I'm sure she will be thrilled to see you in the ranks." He spat, looking to hurt more than to make points, to debate: Bastien was finding depths of petty cruelty in himself he'd never know existed before.
He stayed in the midst of Bastien’s grief and rage, the fury and furor, the righteous justice of its pendulum swings. The pain simmered against his cheek, and he settled into the depictions of anguish, into the multitudes of melancholy, scraping down the columns of his existence, into the measures of his guilt. There were no good answers – Safrin had been the one he’d gone to, and undoubtedly no matter which herald, save the Voice, the result would’ve been the same. He made no mention of the way the Ascended had driven their own daggers into the realm, how much other particles of the world simmered and seared, how much vexation and vehemence had seared in his own lungs during the blight. “It should not have mattered. You were all supposed to be inside. If they had all just stayed - ,” and the tremors began again, the shaking of his hands, the frustration warring with the sorrow. The door was the only thing holding him upright, the way he flexed his fingers together into a fist, grounding, tethering.
Amalia getting a mention didn’t hurt, didn’t maim, didn’t press; the Shield held her own opinions, and Deimos had always meandered in a more neutral territory. They didn’t contain singular beliefs in everything. They were not one and the same. So his growl punctured and pierced into the void, over the clenched jaws and the taut lines. “I have never acted against the Ascended.” And that had been for Rexanna, because she’d been a part of them, escaping from Zariah’s reign, and he’d been proud, so proud, that she’d found a way out of the Merciless’s clutches.
But this accusation leveled his brows, and the danger, the treachery, lurking in his bones threatened, loosened, Reaper prowess and ambitions. “Would you like me to be?” Filing in those ranks of hatred, of abhorrence, of another potent, bestial, ferocious individual, striving to take them down? Did Bastien want one more enemy, one more adversary, targeting their footholds?
Bastien threw up his hands in frustration: surely Deimos knew from experience that it never worked like that? Someone always ended up going out, and it may as well be an Ascended. Rexanna was in fact a likely person to have left he thought, with her position as Queen and her permanently-bleeding good heart.
It seemed his mention of Amalia didn't have quite it's intended effect and that actually knocked him down a peg, made his anger less intense; Bastien realised what he was doing, that he was aiming to hurt someone else from some confused sense of justice and the pain of his loss, which was still so intense it rang in his ears. What good would it do? By the time Deimos had asked his question, clear threat within, Bastien had deflated from the aggression of the moment prior to a more numb sorrow.
"...No." He replied quietly, turning to go and walk to the bed again, sit by his wife. "I just want you to bring the love of my life back, but I suppose no one can." An odd, bitter and bubbling laugh rose up from him, the words becoming broken towards the end of his sentence, and tears began to pour down his cheeks.
Oh, he’d known, in some way, shape, or form, but had held some ridiculous, stupefying faith in discussions around council meetings, in lecture halls, in things beyond these damning ramparts now. Because they’d opened doors to let them all in. Because they’d let Rex and Samuel and the hordes of other back into the fold of safety when everything dissipated and disrupted. Because he thought they could be better. Because he thought he could’ve outwitted some sentiments.
For which he was thoroughly wrong, and Rexanna had paid the consequences.
The diatribes ceased though, on the promise of his potential persecution. He’d eternally been a man of commitment, of vows, of assurances, whether it be in protection or predilection – bodies long since lost off the sides of mountains after his warnings went unheeded. When Bastien quieted, so too did his own levels of rage, simmering below the surface, curling back into their foundations.
The beast had naught for Bastien’s tears, his own emotions clambering behind his eyes, piercing them away because he couldn’t handle them at the moment. Instead his gaze went down, down, down, to the floor, incapable of looking at her. Just last year they’d had similar circumstances – and he’d pulled beams out of her chest, healed and mended where he could – nothing for it now. His breath steadied, sharp inhales and exhales, as he spoke. “What about her soul?” Would the monsters have it? Would it be a similar situation Kiada had been in, with Ru’in? No place for Mort in an Ascended’s life – where did they go? His thoughts wandered to Jigano, to soul-searching, to the light of a lantern, to the impending walk amongst the grounds.
Bastien wasn't really expecting Deimos to say anything in the face of his tears; he had known from the instant he'd met the man that he was not the most emotionally intelligent of fellows, probably had no place being a counsellor: ironically, the person he most wanted for comfort right now was Rexanna. She had always known how to counter his passionate and ludicrous wails of bad fortune, had been there to stroke his hair and laugh with him...
Oh, did he remember the sound of her laugh? It struck Bastien that he might have not remembered it quite right and now there would never be a chance to hear it again. This was about to bring another round of choking tears when Deimos asked his question and Bastien had to force his mind around to answering it. "..I don't know. I will have to ask the Voice, when I have a chance. I hope she has it."
Deimos learned to smother, repress, and segment his emotions ages before – in past lives, when the world cracked and blistered, when he could justify wars, invasions, crusades, and slaughter, thinking nothing of the individuals he cast down by his blade. It was another modicum of control, precision, and composure, so when the realms ravaged and the storms sieged, he was a part of the tempestuous lacerations, the avaricious entanglements. The haunting tides came later, when he was alone, when he could bear it no longer, when he could grieve in silence, fall apart by the seams, stitch by stitch, completely, wholly unraveled. It wouldn’t be here, in front of Bastien.
So he would stand and face the wrath, the rage, the despair he deserved.
Nothing to amend or atone for yet either, nothing for his hands to grasp, rip, and tear into the shackled evening – Bastien hoping the Voice somehow had the Penumbra’s soul. Only then did the beast slide his gaze to her prone, still figure, permitted a tight inhale to wrap around his ribs. His jaw clenched, tight and taut again, and didn’t know what else to say. “I will guard the room,” was the only thing that left his mouth, the only thing he could do now, to walk out, to ensure nothing and no one would get past tomb doors and false monuments. He made to turn, to grab hold of doorknobs, and leave – to escape the clattering echoes of his failures, of his mistakes, to harpoon and leash them upon his heart elsewhere.
