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 reality of her words came very slowly; a mind-numbing crawl, struggling to parse through, as if he were swimming upstream. He kept trying to peer along the murky depths, brows furrowed, eyes settling steadily upon her, failing to comprehend the tears at first, the way she stared, the nuances flattening in the back of his skull. Maybe it was his soul striving to protect itself for those last frail, puncturing, piercing moments, before clarity struck, and rang true.
“No.” He shook his head, denying it, hands already beginning to shake, panic searing and pressing down over his chest like a weight. Drowning, he was drowning, a suffocating, asphyxiating response. He wanted to leave. He wanted to bolt. He wanted to hide in the back of the room where no one, not even the Shield, could see him break. Not again.
“No.” He said once more, uttered as if it he said it enough times, it would become reality. Kiada was brave. Kiada was strong. Kiada was defiant. Kiada conquered. Kiada seared. Kiada was fire – couldn’t ever be absorbed and culled by it.
She represented so much more to him, and in those seconds, the actuality that she was gone and she wouldn’t be coming back, and he couldn’t have her there with him anymore careened, decimated, ruined. Like he’d been stabbed, lacerated, torn into tiny fragments, wounded, marred, and scalded; would’ve preferred to have exchanged places with the Harpy, to have flown over and fallen into magma than to have her destroyed.
So the walls came down, down, down.
They’d always been carefully, meticulously, painstakingly arranged and crafted. Nothing could touch him. No one mattered. Deimos, in the shadow of the world, beckoning abyss and crawling through savagery like a battering ram. Unattainable. Unreachable. The Reaper. King and Lord and feared warrior of the Aurora Basin. The Sword.
And they’d somehow managed to finagle their way into the cracks, the marble, the scrupulous designs. Kiada had so damned easily – emboldened and audacious from the moment he first met her, intending to take worlds and kingdoms by storm. He’d loved her for it, every spitfire whirlwind, every promised cataclysm, every snicker, every smirk.
He wouldn’t have any of them again.
His head fell into his hands, because he couldn’t look anywhere, couldn’t see beyond flames and embers, cinders and ash, couldn’t do anything but choke, but gasp, but shatter. “I cannot do this,” he whispered.
With each denial that leaves his lips she can feel herself sink deeper down, beaten like a nail into soft, pliable wood. For all that the Harpy had meant to Amalia she is twice and three times that to him: they had lifetimes together where she has only moments, figments marred by shadow and failure and barely able to survive. Deimos, Kiada, Rexanna, Hotaru- they have stood through death together and come out the other side.
Who is she to stand against that? How can she comprehend his pain?
She watches him shatter and it breaks her all over again, leaves her feeling helpless and small. "I'm sorry, Deimos," Amalia whispers, trying to swallow down the image of the vulture falling into fire, grateful he cannot feel her torment through the Attuned bond. She doesn't move from her seat as his head drops to his hands, frozen by the weight of her own trauma and unable to carry his as well. "There was nothing I could do, I, I tried, gods, I'm so so sorry-"
She turns away, unable to look at him. Unable to see the accusation in his eyes, or even worse, forgiveness she does not deserve. To see Kiada and Rexanna and all the others they've lost.
To see the death she's brought to him, on the day of her rebirth.
He preferred lacerations from the battlefield, confounding abyss as blades crashed and clashed, painful wounds from seething, contemptuous adversaries, compared to this: the inward anguish and agony, the lacquer of heartache pressed into his soul. It wouldn’t cease, kept turning, kept stabbing, kept biting, kept clawing, and he had no way to fight back. No way to cease the terror, the horror, of those he loved taking last breaths and beats.
Once, he was arrogant and confident enough to think he could. If he was always there, if he was always a figment of destruction, of malice, of terror, of abhorrence, the world wouldn’t touch them. It wouldn’t dare, it wouldn’t dream, it wouldn’t reach for their forms and entities. Because he’d be there, to strike anything and everything down. Feared and loathed, carrying on with the weight of them pressing down on his shoulders, a mantle, a throne, a reign of mountainous depravity –
And now here he was, the once King, shaking like a leaf. Love lifted and annihilated, all in one intake of breath.
He’d learned early on that it didn’t matter how much he guarded, how much he strived, how much he shielded and sheltered and protected. They still died. But it a lesson that he never seemed to fully understand, because he still ventured again and again and again down those same damned pathways, like he could change anything at all.
Their ghosts pressed behind his eyes and it was all he could see: figments and fractions, blinding glimpses, echoes of their fringes and lives – and he didn’t want Kiada’s form to join the assembled wakes, the eldritch catacombs, realms he couldn’t yet reach. This wasn’t what the Harpy and Sword committed to – death and sorrow – they were supreme and ridiculous in their mischief and melees. They saved one another.
He couldn’t any longer. No extending for feathers to pull them out of the abyss. No snagging at cinders to stoke their flames.
Amalia’s voice felt like a distant haze, something chiming and echoing above the surface, and it took too long for him to digest it, hidden in his hands, in his grief, in the all-consuming fringes of nothingness. A whisper maneuvered from his lips, broken up by choking nuances, raw grasps of torment grabbing at his throat. “I know. You always try.” Determined and stalwart, fervently eager to attempt; he loved her for it, for those steady pulses of endeavors and ventures – even when it seemed hopeless.
He just wondered when they stopped altogether. When they ceased to bother. When they laid down beside their brethren and let the avaricious world take their ashes and bones.
Perhaps it was worse because the Sword had no one to blame. No one to cast vengeance upon. No one to brutalize and condemn for their crimes. No one to rip apart piece by piece while they cried out for a mercy that wouldn’t come. With Rexanna, he’d cursed himself. Here, it’d been an accident – the eager girl stretching her wings, trying to help, as they all so often did.
The monolith could feel himself sinking lower and lower, the world blackening out around him, massive gasps clutching and exuding from his chest, from his lungs, from the place where his heart coiled in on itself.
He rose from his chair and swayed, hands grasping hold of the table, suddenly, infinitely lost.
You always try. It feels like a slap, intentional or not, her own insecurities rising up and riding the way of her voice. Flinching Amalia averts her gaze, feeling shame and failure rise up on her neck. She does always try, and this time she'd truly done everything she could, exhausted every avenue, been more than she was.
For what?
She doesn't know what to say to him, how to heal, what offering she could possibly make. She watches him crumble and wonders how much he has kept hidden from her, how much she still hides- how much either of them can take.
He rises and she rises too, reaching uncertainly for him, still unable to bring herself to see the anguish in his face. "Deimos-" she murmurs, hands outstretched as he staggers, her monolith brought to heel. "You... you should sit. Can I get you something? Water, or...?" She's scrambling, grasping for anything to offer him, a lifeboat in their storm. And all the while she swallows it down, trying not to drown herself, to keep the things she can't afford to feel tucked back behind the floodgates of her heart.
Dim, dismal, bleak – hues blending into murky overtones – had it always been this way? Had it been so colorless and discarded, distorted and desolate? Or had all of the beings, the pieces, the existences, let it be varnished and lacquered in something beyond gray and lifeless? Was it lesser now, because he didn’t know what else to feel? Just anguish? Despair? His feet staggered, limbs wild, like they’d forgotten how to exert themselves, hands reeling back to the table, palms planted downward on the surface, another rush of breath, ending in a feral gasp. He shook his head but then the world started spinning again.
“What am I supposed to do?” A murmur, a quiet, pleading, grasping, gnarled rumble down the back of his throat. He didn’t want any water because he might be tempted to drown himself in it, and he couldn’t think, couldn’t process, how to move beyond the reeling agony collected and stored, rising over the surface as he attempted to meander over to the wall. His eyes stirred along the edges of the room, striving to maintain focus, before sliding over her once more – light in darkness. “No. I have to go to Halo.”
A nod of certainty, as if answering his own inquiry – swallowing down the bile coating his teeth, his enamel, any semblance of ichor still beating, still pulsing, still pervading through his frame. “Chulane has to know.” Another being to ruin and damage on their illustrious falls; so utterly incapable, no matter what they did.
She watches him reel as though the rug of the world was torn out from under him, shocked to see his stalwart figure brought to such vulnerability, so deeply and wretchedly exposed. Gentle hands reach for his shoulders, trying to steady him, to ease him down back to the chair and keep him from staggering deeper into the abyss. She has no answers, doesn't know what he's supposed to do, but right now?"Right now you need to sit down."
The suggestion of flight into Halo has her eyes widening in panic and alarm. "Halo? Why?" And then he clarifies, and a whole new pain courses through her like electricity, another person who will have to be told and will inevitably be made to fall apart. But now is not the time. "You can tell him later," Amalia pleads, still not releasing her hold on his arm. "He may already know... Loren was there. Deimos, stay. Stay with me. Please-"
She breaks off, knowing she has no right to ask anything of him, no room to show her weakness now. Gently, tenderly, the girl reaches out, attempts to wrap her arms around him, to shield him from his pain. To be whatever she can for him, even as the hollow pain and guilt keeps a stranglehold on her throat.
08-20-2020, 09:23 AM (This post was last modified: 08-20-2020, 09:55 AM by Deimos.)
DEIMOS
Maybe the Reaper and Sword had been far easier to destroy than they’d ever realized. It wasn’t on the battlefield, where the rest of the kingdoms were annihilated, but on the slow, unwinding haze of losing everyone he cherished and loved. For all those eternal walls and everlasting fortifications, they came toppling, eroding, when the few that accepted him were gone.
Because they’d been so hard to find, once – he’d been hand-carved and sculpted into machine abyss, solemn and guarded, hostile and cold, impassive and stoic. Hiding behind armor and enamel, and Isilme had taken him down those paths to glory where he lost comrades and allies, where he stretched out his arms and couldn’t snag, couldn’t snatch, couldn’t do anything afterwards but dig their graves and mourn in silence.
And Helovia had taught him to become that dark, dark creature with nothing for a heart but nefarious means, decrepit bones, casting aside anything and everything so his damned kingdom would thrive. They still lost, lost, and lost, but he’d been a monster in the mountains, demolishing, threatening, ready to unravel another world at the slightest indication.
And Caido had permitted him to dream of becoming something more than nooses and knives, where they saw him as more than a beast and scars – where second chances drew into family and love and places to cherish instead of demolish.
A sharpened gasp stung through his lungs, and he was suddenly back in the chair, not gliding down the ramparts and waiting for it to cease holding him up. Brain addled and fogged, barely registering on the later contortions, grimacing at Loren’s name out of habit. He looked up to see the Shield, figure parting through the abyss, reaching for her too, arms wrapping and holding, striving not to unravel any further.
Head tucked somewhere along her shoulder, his mouth muffled, the slightest whisper strangled, came through on a wild, desperate murmur. “All I ever wanted to do was protect them.” Them, connotations of so many damned lives he rushed forward to save and shield, safeguard and shelter. If he couldn’t be there in tangibility, with his body taking the assaults, then he gave armor, pieces of himself to defend while they wandered out into their own ventures. Crouching at bedsides, kneeling at shrines, desperation drowning out the noise, the cacophony, of foretold demeanors. They all perish. “But it never seems to matter.” Another hushed departure of noise from his lips, drowning and ricocheting. ”I have never been enough for you. For anyone.”
He wraps around her and she can feel herself drowning, kicking desperately against dark water to try and stay afloat. Hands coil protectively over his back, rubbing his neck, trying to soothe a wound that cannot be healed. "I know," she murmurs, his pain ricocheting to her through the Attuned bond, something she cannot echo. All they'd ever wanted was to protect the things they had, and yet so often had they been made to watch their loved ones slip away? Every failure, every loss- they haunt her, the ghosts of her mistakes.
And they live in him. She sees them every day in his haunted face, feels them in the way she has come to keep herself closed. Even now Amalia holds back the parts of her that threaten to spill apart, but gods is she tired. Tired of these moments where they mourn, tired of seeing more tears than smiles.
"Of course you are. You are enough." She says the words fervently and means them, too: he is enough and more again, a better man than any other Amalia can name. "This was not your fault." And yet she can feel the disharmony in it, the way that trauma has made their edges jagged, no longer quite connecting. They used to be parts of the same puzzle, pieces of a whole. Now as she holds him she can only think of the thing that they are missing, the harpy-shaped absence that will never fill in.
He is enough, and he is who she loves. But he is not what she needs.
An echo, an echo, an echo, bounding between guilty panes and heavy shoulders, loss reverberating against loss. Wraiths, phantoms, shackles, and lines, and she could tell him he was enough until the world ended, but it wouldn’t hold much more than that – words on a canvas, pouring down into all the blood pooled beneath. The denial stretched into his heart and lungs and soul, ricocheting, amplifying. “I cannot keep doing this.” Another repetition, because he didn’t have much left to give. Death after death after death, succumbing to the brink time and time again.
A murmur into her, a whisper into fabric, into the plague of doubts riddling, scorching, casting them on drowning shores. “I am so tired.” And broken, and adrift, and jagged, wounded far, far deeper than anything on the surface – the outward scars held nothing to the inward ones. No anchors left, nothing solid to hold except one another until they were fatigued, labored, and exhausted, down to the bones. Who pulled who then? Who saved the other? Who gave in? Who stopped trying? “Are you?” When did it start and when did it end? When they had become shells and fragments, instead of wholes?
Maybe he cannot keep doing this, but Amalia has no choice. Now more than ever she can feel the weight of responsibility that rests on her shoulders, the expectations of gods that she now carries along with her own doubts. And so while he accepts his exhaustion she must reject it, can't allow it to overtake her. There is too much work to do.
Conflicted, trapped, Amalia slides out of his embrace, though she tries to keep his hands. "Come sit," the Shield directs softly, leading him toward their simple couch, trying to find solace in familiar comforts. Her legs curl against her as she sits in her familiar corner, shoulder available for his head if he wishes it. "I... gods, yes, I'm tired. But I have to keep going, because if I stop--"
The Shield swallows down another wave of pain, shakes her head to clear it. "Deimos... I need to tell you something. A few things. And... gods, I should have said them sooner, but I didn't... didn't realize until recently just how tired I am. How much I've tried to hide."
He knew stopping was succumbing, and the temptation to simply give in was ever there – not a light at the end of the tunnel, but prevailing darkness. He’d pushed and pulled and soldiered on hundreds upon hundreds of times, but each felt more bone-draining than the last, each family or friend deceased, each riddled task clambering down upon his shoulders until he finally had to acknowledge the ruins tied over muscles.
She slid away and he felt like doing the same, slithering down hallways or ramparts until he could find a corner to hide away in, to re-stitch himself back together, to form lines of more frayed ends. The directions were murky in his ears, but he was led on, senses surprised to find himself on the couch – leaning his head back against the cushions, staring at the ceiling, nodding at her response.
Because what happened when they ceased?
His eyes went to her on the next statements, the bits and pieces of the unknown floating there, heavy and cumbersome. Exhaustion. Hidden contortions. Enamel scraped away when they were striving, struggling to survive. He nodded, a gesture for her to continue. “Go ahead.” The uncertainty thorned along his edges, apprehension never far-gone.
Even with the permission it takes a moment for her to prepare herself, her mouth suddenly dry as the distant cliffs where Kiada was left behind. When she does speak her voice is faltering, cracking, stumbling as she tries to find words she hasn't brought herself to tell him, hasn't realized she needed to until only days ago.
"I... when I saw Remi again, something happened. He... he could feel me, all of how I felt, and it made me realize... Deimos, when I said I was tired of pretending to be happy--" She breaks off, staring at her hands as they open and close upon her thighs, grasping for some clarity, a way to tell him all she has to. She has never been one for eloquence.
"Everything has changed so much since we met. Everything. And I've changed- gods, I've changed so much." She chuckles tiredly, glancing up at him, dark eyes shining. "And you... you've always been so supportive through it. Always trying to fix it when I'm broken. Physically and emotionally."
She reaches up a trembling hand to brush across his cheek, a butterfly's caress that barely exists as more than a whisper. There's tears in her eyes and pain in her voice, fear and love bundled up as she exposes her heart. "But the thing is, the girl you're trying to fix... I don't think she exists anymore. And sometimes it feels like... I feel torn. Between the girl you love, the one who makes you happy, who you want, who you fell in love with, and what I'm becoming. And I..."
Her hand drops; again, she looks away. Closes her eyes furiously against the rising tears. "I can't keep being two people, Deimos. I need to know who I am, if I'm going to be what Vi needs."
He brought his head up from the cushions, from any semblance of comfort, waiting for some raw exposure, for something blighted to segment across bones and limbs. But she required a listening ear, and not his consternation, not his apprehension, not all the unfurling nerves keening over his mind. So he did just that – waiting, watching, as her hands moved and she sought to explain. And he said naught as she unraveled the bits and pieces tearing her apart, processing, striving to understand, to comprehend, the meanings between, the layers altered and morphed, and where to go, where to bend, where to stand, where to begin again.
And when she’d finished, with her eyes brimming, he raised his hands and gently attempted to take hold of her cheeks, soft and dulcet, his clasp calm, gentle, and she’d be able to pull away easily if she couldn’t take it, didn’t want it. Vocals were a quiet rumble, accepting, tired gaze riveted to her, focused, endeavoring to strive through the clarity, to bring forth the veracity they needed and craved. “Then I wish you would stop pretending.” It wasn’t fair to either of them; and though he knew he did the same, she was a more paramount composition. “We all change.” Even him, despite his best efforts to never erode from his nonchalance, from his apathy, had been dragged out of his shadows, out of his darkness, and out of the void. Sometimes he wasn’t certain which hurt or gave more.
His thumbs brushed lightly against her cheeks, still wanting to keep her there, attention on him, what he had to say, what he had to justify through the muddlings of confusion, on where she seemed to believe he lingered. He cherished her, from the past, the present, and whatever the future might throw at them. “Just as I love the girl from the library, I love the woman who fights for what she believes in. The woman in front of me. I have never asked you to be anyone else. I would not.” Perhaps she’d been playing dual roles because she thought that’s what he needed or wanted; when it’d been anything but.
A sigh undulated through him, fatigue and exhaustion wearing, and he shook his head, wanting her to fathom where he was coming from. “But you have to stop shutting me out.” He couldn’t help her, couldn’t support, if he didn’t know what she needed. If he didn’t know where she stood. One hand maneuvered, grasping down to her fingers, and then placed them on his chest, over the beats of his heart. “You are safe here.”
No sense in looking away, he tilted his head, chasing after her in small movements, in motions, following the wayward waltz. “And I hope you would know for yourself too, and not just the gods.” That they were not the end all, be all, that she had to know her value, her worth, her strength, her weaknesses, her everything, for Vi, but also for her own soul.
He takes her face into his hands, making promises with calloused fingers and warm blue eyes that Amalia wants so desperately to hold onto. She does cling to them, for now at least, tear-dropped lashes falling onto flushed cheeks, an expression of pain and longing and love sweeping across her face. This is the point where she would normally let it go, accept his unconditional adoration and bury down her lingering concerns in favor of falling into this comfortable trap. It would be so much easier, so much more comfortable, but it wouldn't be fair.
Her hand rises up to cover his, slender fingers wrapping around large dark ones with a gentle squeeze. "I don't want to shut you out," she murmurs, eyes opening up again to peer into his face. She bites her lip, troubled and thoughtful, again searching for words. "I don't mean to. But everything has been so... you've been through so much, and I want to be strong for you. Like you are for me."
Sighing, Amalia turns away, extracting her face but keeping hold of his hand. "I told you Vi changed me. I don't know... exactly what it means, but I know that something is coming. Something big. And I have a part to play in it, and I can't do that if I don't know who I am." She drops his hand now, pulling up her legs and coiling in on themselves, forehead pressed against her knees as the tears begin to fall. "And when I'm with you I just- I want to be the person who holds you up, because it's easier than looking at my own problems, and I can't do that anymore, Dei. I need to deal with everything that's happened to me, and I need to learn to be okay with who I am, and to do that I... I think that I need space."
