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!
Vicious and vile, and expected to be – a precise machine meant for bombardments and brutality, a weapon for the mountains, for the summits, for the hills. Cold and nonchalant, barbaric and unforgiving, he’d been as stoic as the world he resided within, as chilling as the hollowed sectors, as wound and twisted as their immoral structure. A fiend slinking in his macabre devastation, promising, vowing, committing to immobile reserve, to hushed, fortified reticence – and he’d done so well in his heathen cloaks and layered ire, in his masked, iron pretenses, in his deplorable, horrible wake. The realms had pressed into his sinew and he lacerated back, luring danger, finessing forbidding, inveigling iniquity in the coils of his antagonistic disposition. He would’ve let the kingdoms outside his home decay, wither, fester, and die. He would’ve been content with the slaughter of those not contained within his walls. Contemplations were reserved for unraveling the folds of other lands, other terrains, taut, minute motions they’d never see coming.
He hadn’t cared.
The Sword did, entirely too much, embedded and infused and immersed into chance after chance, opportunity after opportunity, to be beloved and to cherish in return. Maybe, because he’d been allowed, permitted, to become something other than that vacant, arcane rapier, it hurt so much more, cracking under the pressure of another life he couldn’t save, that he’d sent to the gallows all on his own.
So the beast wanted nothing more than to sink into those hollowed, empty sanctions, where the ice wrapped around his heart and made it forgo, forget, return to the impassive, to the potency, to only treacherous considerations and damn the rest of the condemnations. He craved the cold, the chilling pretenses, the primordial, sinuous designs of eldritch abominations, of a monster brewing and brooding from his cave, longing for nothing more than to let go. It was simpler. There were no torturous vows to keep them all safe. There were no armaments to guard the vestiges around him. Only emptiness, a great vessel, a shell.
Somewhere along the way he’d managed to find a table, a chair, and placed it nearby Rexanna’s quarters, and only now, he leaned across it. A guard for death and desecration, protection far, far too late. He ducked his head down along his arms, striving to hide, to peel back, to harden, to dissolve.
If time were not already meaningless in the dark of the sunless days, it has lost all measure and rhyme now. She doesn't know how long she kneels there on the floor, some macabre portrait of benediction to Gods that have yet again dragged her and her family into their infernal war. She had known, since that snowlit day with Morgan, that The Voice had called to a memory in her, reminder her of Kaos and the insidiousness he'd used to bring about the downfall of her native pantheon. She has known for some time now that war was on the horizon.
She had prayed the bloodletting would spare her family this time. And yet her sister has been struck from the tree of life with naught but a twisted creation from a prejudiced Goddess. Already she has been further robbed of her family, hollowing out the few coveted notions she hides away inside her breast. There is no pain, no physical agony, that can compare to this abrupt loss. There is only her tears, the burn of wood against her shins, her arms that wrap around herself to try and hold the seams closed as she moans piteously into her knees. When she finds the courage to stand, the strength to rise does not join it. Rexanna would berate her for not continuing on, she knows that. But she could no sooner totter to unsteady feet than exact retribution from the Goddess that has done this.
Atlas is there at her side, helping to lift her body and burdens alike as his name has heralded. She clings to the proud arc of his neck, and lets him lead her into the darkness of the Temple where she remains for a few hours. Trying to digest what cannot be stomached, to grasp a loss too big for her mortal mind. And then, when she has swallowed down as much grief as she can, she stands and begins to search the shadowed halls for one of the only souls who can ever understand.
Hotaru finds him outside a door that she does not want to venture beyond. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Atlas' concussive hoofbeats announce her presence, and she silently moves to him, arms reaching and eyes drawn and red as she seeks to hold on and find some sort of buoyancy together to make it through this storm. "Deimos," her voice breaks, cutting the silence with the shudder of her voice, small and broken in her suffering. Like his name is benediction itself, a balm to heal her hurts. Nothing else follows, for nothing can be said. Not yet. Not until they have shared their meager strength with one another, as they have in years past when loved ones were lost. Leaving only, always, them. But at least they are alone together, two mountains braced against the falling of the sky.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Footsteps, hooved and human alike, echoed down the vast chambers, and he wondered about sinking further, about stretching out into the fathoms below, becoming swallowed, consumed, flesh and bone devoured in his soulless trek. Maybe they would pass on by, leave him to his immorality, to his multitude of sins, to the feral iniquity stuck and barbed in his skin, never quite capable of digging it out. Perhaps they would stay, linger out on the outskirts of his misery, proclaim another fault he’d missed – devoutly aware of every single one of his failings, of the way his knees yearned to buckle, of all the ineptitude surging past his spine.
But he’d also know her presence anywhere, and so he sighed, and lifted his head up from his arms, from the hiding deluges, from the torn, ripped bearings.
How would Hotaru feel now, understanding, comprehending, that he’d been the fool to take out one of their own? Their kin? Their ally? Their adversary? Their friend? Who had never damned him but he’d done so in bouts of ignorance, in failing to understand the course his actions would take?
He couldn’t bear the way she spoke his name – as if he bore any worth at all. She was mistaken; his name had never been a benediction, never been an invocation, an omen to anything holy, reverential, or consecrated. No blessing from his presence, no absolution from his entity, nothing coinciding except for foolishness, for believing he was capable of fortifying this world, his friends, his family, from havoc and desecration. For all his machinations, calculations, and sentiments, it’d done none of them any good – brought harm, brought slaughter, brought the void to rise up and snatch, grasp with harpooned fangs.
When had he ever triumphed or succeeded, after all? What successes had he garnered for this realm, or for their previous one?
Why did anyone bother with him?
“Hotaru,” he murmured, like the Sword had already broken and split into tiny fragments, into portions and pieces of dust and decay, withered, dust to dust. His eyes went to the unicorn, but so very briefly it may not have even registered in his mind – riveted straight back to her on the fringes of collapse. And still, Deimos held out his arms and let them both fall into it, into the despair, into the despondency, enveloped and embraced, residual, habitual strength binding together.
And straight into self-loathing, into self-torture, into the truth, into the veracity. “This is my fault.” A harsh whisper, a stoking of contempt for only himself; even if Amalia had told him otherwise. It still pierced and punctured, succeeded over anything else in his mind.
There is nothing he could donor say that would stray her from his side. Theirs is a bond forged in old blood, in crowns and chaos and the feral discord of a land long lost to the both of them. She knows his heart as well as her own, knows how the morality of his compass spins. Knows, in this same way, how inclined he is to take upon his mighty shoulders the sins and slashes of every living soul.
Hotaru falls into his embrace, cradled close and breathing deep, completely entangled with her brother in this vast ocean of loss. He is all she has in this accursed temple. No beloved to call her own, no long term friends to lean on. There is only the man before her, whose memories of Rexanna are the closest to those that filter like an unending reel in her own mind. The only one who can understand the depth of her grief.
The croak of his words has her tightening her grip, fingertips squeezing into his skin as she shakes her head in helpless, silent denial. Working past the lump of agony lodged in her throat to absolve him of a sin he never committed. "No. No, it's not. You...you only wanted to protect us, you couldn't have anticipated the Gods pulling us into their blasted war." Her eyes feel as if they will be eternally damp, surely wetting his shirt and skin where her tears fall, but her words are contrastingly firm and unyielding. For this, for him, she will find the strength. "She'd call you an idiot for saying that. You know it." Here her voice finally wavers, aching for that kinship they'd all shared. Almost able to hear the sardonic drawl of her sister's voice, the twist of her lips and rise of her brow, daring Deimos to oppose her. "All we ever do is try our best," her wretched whisper unwinds, the bitter, scalding truth implied in the grate of her tone that they could try all they liked, but it would always end in this.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Pressed and embraced, the Valkyrie strived to guard him from his own rendered, stupefying mistakes, and he shook his head against her hold, a silent argument, a hushed departure from any healing, from any assuaging, soothing measures. He should’ve. He should’ve known better. Caught in the web of naivete, thinking, believing, he treaded a thin line amongst and amidst deity affairs – unworthy and undeserving to be in their threshold - when all along the sketches had long since moved, and he was snagged in the thick of its netting. It’d been a great source of consternation and trepidation for as long as he’d lived, no matter which world, to be immersed in the plains of the celestial accord, in their mercurial abysses, in their transitions of power and pawns. But once he’d asked for strength, been lifted into the sky and dropped back down to the earth by stars, perhaps he’d already been snagged – hadn’t noticed, hadn’t looked hard enough. Every time he asked for assistance was one step closer – and this had sealed it – his protective predilections, his overwhelming need to shield the world, had been utilized for death and destruction of one of his own. “I should have left it alone.”
No special doors, no frameworks to deceive monsters or demons, no modicum of alterations – just let it be, as the Naturals always claimed to do.
The Sword swallowed down another choking wave of bile, and sunk into the contempt for himself, for the actions leading them all here, down roads of grief, bombardment, and loss (again and again and again; wraiths and phantoms eternally behind their eyes). “She would be right.” An idiot, a fool, the words echoing and bounding across his bones, a schism in between ribs and lungs; stilling in her hold, wondering, willing, to let the current rise and take hold of him, flesh and bone, to be devoured whole, to be obliterated for his efforts.
He held her tighter then, as they simultaneously fell apart, cracked and fragmented on Penumbras that could no longer shine or eclipse, on craftiness, on deviousness, that had once ensured they were all kin. No more planning beneath mountain skies, the chill in the air, no more laughing in the wind to spite the world, no more greetings between artistic venues and sanctuaries, no more clambering between foolish schemes and remembering better days. All of it was gone too. His voice pierced above her shoulder, deep and brooding, brimming with the despondency, the way one of their own simply ceased. “I am sorry it was not good enough.” A thousand apologies on the juncture of his jaw, on the rapacity of hackles and fangs, but naught else to show for it. His best had made it worse, and his faults, his flaws had been magnified so the world could see what he was truly worth: nothing. The Reaper lived again – and hadn’t even meant to pick up the scythe.
This world and the last - perhaps the cosmos themselves - seem to desire nothing more than to grind them down and break them apart for the grievous sin of striving for a better life. It's a level of unfairness that she can't stomach right now, an anger and despair that simmers and boils until she feels like gravity has unthreaded itself from her and left her spinning untethered in the darkness around them. Deimos is her only rock, the straining rope that ties her down to reality, and the way her arms clutch at him is evidence enough of how desperately she needs him. And why can't that be enough? Why can't their love, their dependence on him, be enough to grant him freedom from the cruelties of this world? Why must he be condemned by the Fates for his honorable heart?
Except it wasn't some vague entity of destiny that had done this. The culprit had a name, a face. And when the tide of grief passes over her and leaves her washed upon the shore, there will be time for hatred. For vitriol. But right now there is only the scraps of comfort that she desperately tries to conjure for the greatest man she's ever known. Her last remaining family.
"You are one of the most honorable souls I've ever met, and your efforts to keep us safe don't deserve to be condemned. Good intentions are just that - good. It was not your efforts that caused this, it was the prejudice of beings far more powerful than we'll ever be." Her voice wavers between a begging desperation for him to believe her, and a firmness that belies the strength that has always kept her going in times like these. Trying to share that energy, that strength, to give him just enough of herself to seal the cracks and get him through these next few days.
Hotaru squeezes him tighter as his own arms encase her, burying deeper into his embrace as if to piece their fractured parts together. To unite them so that they cannot be stolen from one another in the way Rexanna had. And when his apology comes she weeps, silent and angry at this world, teeth gritted and arms tight around him. "You are good enough. You never have to apologize to me Deimos, not for anything." The fire in her voice does not scald but instead warms, hoping to chase away the cold of grief as they sit there intertwined. "You're all I have left. We...we have to stick together." Don't leave me too. Not again.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Deimos once thought redemption a feasible thing; to replace all his iniquities, all his sins, all his past crimes with actions to assist in a world rather than destroy it. He hadn’t encountered war after war, battle after battle, crusade after crusade. He hadn’t pierced or punctured any adversaries. He hadn’t conjured manipulative tactics in order to rend another land into bedlam, into havoc, into chaos. But for all his efforts, it seemingly hadn’t mattered – trial after trial, tribulation after tribulation, had sunk down into his marrow and clawed it apart. What good had any of it done? What changed? What altered them for the better? Or had he been so arrogant, so confident, so unassuming, to believe anything he’d accomplished benefitted the world? Useless, ineffective, the echoes of the past carrying over to the present, every connotation of failure bridging the gaps between worlds and lives. Naught had revised – more intricate details sketched and outlined to cement his worthless existence, the meticulous turmoils. More to scrape and scrap together, more immoralities he hadn’t meant to commit.
Rock, stone, and mountain he might’ve been, but even those things eroded. Time scratched and slashed against its mighty fortresses and ramparts, clung rapacious, fervent barrages upon bulwarks, and he was ready to fall.
Her words echoed and bounded, and she was trying, trying to make him see more than the darkness coming to consume, but it was difficult to view when the Stygian abyss haunted every corner of the earth, of the parlors, of the sanctum. The temptation to argue her points bristled across his tongue, and then he muted them, too tired to fight the onslaught any longer. “I will try to fix this.” All he could murmur, all he could croon, all he could do, and maybe he’d learned nothing, clutched and held together in Hotaru’s embrace, wanting to right wrongs, wanting to meander down pathways of vengeance and justice again and again. “I cannot bring her back, but we might be able to free her soul.” It was all he had to hang onto, besides the individuals that wouldn’t leave him.
And even then – perhaps his days were numbered. Broken vessels and entities eventually expected nothing but loss.
He could feel her desperation, the fear, the trepidation of yesteryears instigated by one tragedy after the other – proffered what little strength, might, and fortitude he had left, what hadn’t been lost when he found Rexanna on the other side of that damned door. How many times had they wandered through these same fires, these same circumstances? And it never became any easier. A whisper carved, and then he was silent again, immersed in those shadowed emblems, the uncertainty all the more apparent. “I do not know what else to do.” Did she? How did one move forward (because he never really had)?
There is so little that words can adequately express, especially between two reticent individuals such as themselves. Hotaru knows she is unlikely to convince him of his innocence, but that doesn't mean she can't communicate it through her actions. Her loyalty, her trust in him. Nothing will sway her, and perhaps over time he will begin to understand that this was not his fault. That Rexanna would not have blamed him, as Hotaru does not. This is something only time and closeness can hope to heal, and it's all she has to offer aside from the stricture of her grasp and the heartbeat she tries to meld with his own.
The idea of freeing her soul is one that her own selfish one attaches to instantly, but she falters a moment later. "Could we do it for them all? I couldn't bear to condemn her to eternity away from Bastien and Azrael." Terrified to ask, to have it revealed that it is a decision that must be made on Rexanna's behalf, that they may harm her with their own greed and grief. All the same, Hotaru is not the type to deny herself that which she wants, and she clings to the idea of meeting Rexanna in the afterlife. Unimpeded by The Voice's possessive, clutching fingers.
"We bury our dead. We make our plans. We go to war, because that is all we ever seem to be good for. And we hope that our deeds earn us respite someday in the afterlife, if we are not meant to earn it here." For they don't seem to ever be afforded it. No peace, no love or companionship that is not lost in horrific ways. To her, it is the only crutch she can utilize. The slow burn of anger at a world that is unjust, and the goal to continue trying until at last she has done all she can. Returned Rexanna's soul, helped to raise Azrael, whatever it is she must do to feel she has earned her moratorium when death comes for her. A bleak outlook, but all that she can offer. "We cling to what we have. We try all the harder, because the world will never try to stop taking from us. And we can't afford to relax." Her head tilts upon his shoulder, hating that this is the way she views the world, but unable to summon optimism where the fields have lain barren for most of her life.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Knotted and coiled, nooses borne from inadequacies and defects, struggling to find the ways, the measures, the compelling instances to stay afloat. They both latched onto one, and his thoughts could churn towards souls, following that distant haze, that stream of light, not paralyzing, not mauling, not maiming, not pushing him down below the surface, to suffocate in his darkness. It burned at the back of his throat, her soul, gone and implacable, unless something happened, unless they plucked it from the brink of another’s clutches, unless there was another trial, another opportunity for things to go awry. “Yes,” he whispered in the columns and annals of the Temple, grasping her to keep himself from eroding, withering, decaying into pieces of ash, dust, and soot. They could grab them all – liberate and free.
The insistence of their actions when he was already burdened with happenstances clawed at him, layered into his chest and stole his breath, holding onto them but dreading it all. No escape, no time, no opportunities to do anything than suffer their losses, carry their dead, and get ready for the next wave, the next storm. “We do what we can,” he echoed, voice carrying the apprehension, the choking, suffocating stilettos down the breadth of his throat.
They would march on, staring demise straight in the face, again and again, only this time, without one of their own.
