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!
01-10-2019, 10:55 PM (This post was last modified: 01-10-2019, 10:57 PM by Lucas.)
LUCI
The snow fell softly, muted in the dead of night. It covered him in a thin blanket, one cold and deadly, not that he could feel as such. Still, as hazy green eyes snapped open he became aware that he was in an element that only a short day ago would have made his skin crawl, instantly lurching into a sitting position.
Overcome by dizziness, Lucas groaned and put a hand to his head. His fair hair was stiff with frost, lips tinged blue, and he hissed in a breath that did not set his chest on fire with cold. Panic and fury fought with one another for dominance. As was his nature - slave to it that he was - the latter eventually won out. Growling a curse, Lucas scrambled to get to his feet, willing the ground beneath him to boil and churn and rid him of this blasted snow.
Only... nothing happened. He staggered, the world swimming before him.
Where was he? What was wrong with him? He didn't know, but whoever had caged him in this place would pay dearly the second he got his bearings.
Just as soon as he... got out of the open and... felt better. It wasn't pain, exactly, but something raw twisted and crushed within him, and he ran his tongue across his teeth. He was starving.
01-10-2019, 11:22 PM (This post was last modified: 01-12-2019, 01:56 PM by Alorhea.)
The tigress prowled along the snow, crunching it beneath large paws. She stopped periodically to shake thin layers of snow from her coat, and while it was certainly cold even as a tiger, Rhea knew that she was much better off in that form than that of a woman, especially at night. The large cat offered a lot more protection against whatever might have lied in wait.
Her ear twitched at the sound of a groan and a curse nearby. Anyone who knew of life in the bubble would know that the tigress had to have been an attuned. There were no natural predator felines larger than a cougar within the bubble.
As she drew into view of a young man, she watched his step become slightly unsteady. Quickly, Rhea shifted from tiger to woman, swiftly moving towards the man and hugging her cloak tighter around her body. ”Are you alright?” She asked, a look of genuine concern on her face. ”What are you doing alone out here at night? You’ll freeze to death.”
01-12-2019, 12:36 AM (This post was last modified: 01-12-2019, 12:36 AM by Lucas.)
LUCI
In another time and place Lucas would have zoned in on the movement in the snow, especially striped with gold and black as it was. But his senses were frosted with cold and, while he still couldn't feel it (something that brought panic back warring with his temper the longer it went on) he certainly knew it was happening. As such, he wasn't aware of Alorhea until she was almost upon him, Lucas stepping back - stumbling, rather - and squinting to try and bring her into focus.
"Where is here?" he managed, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth as he spoke. Lucas was in no state to appraise this stranger - if he was he might have realised how gloriously painted with ink she was. Maybe later. "I don't remember... how I got here."
Rhea smiled gently, breath clouding in front of her face with slightly heavier than normal breath. She wasn’t used to being out in the snow too often as a woman, preferring her fur as a natural defense against the frigid temperatures. Though, the tiger couldn’t exactly communicate well.
She nodded once. ”You’re an Outlander,” she murmured, mostly as acknowledgement for her own mind. It explained why he was disoriented and out in the middle of the snow at night. As far as she knew, the Outlanders weren’t in control of when or where they landed here.
”You’re in Caido,” the tigress said. ”People sometimes get sucked into this world through portals, but we don’t really know why. Call me Rhea. Do you know your name? What’s the last thing you remember?”
"An Outlander..." He repeated the term incredulously, as if that was meant to mean something to him. As the snow whipped about them - and didn't cause him to hunch in on himself against it - he was starting to believe that he was trapped in some bizarre dream. That was the only explanation for such a ridiculous set of circumstances, in his opinion.
Caido was another foreign word that he packed away for later consideration, Lucas examining the woman before him and letting green eyes rove over her cloak, her face, her eyes. "Lucas," he supplied for his name, the moniker so familiar to him now that he was used to playing the part. "I was... walking. I fell."
It wasn't the first time he'd said that, and if he wasn't mistaken he might have fallen just as far as he had the first time when he'd toppled from the heavens. Only this time it seemed he'd plunged through a portal.
Patting his pockets suddenly (for what he wasn't sure - cigarettes? Cell phone? Keys?) he became suddenly aware that his attire had changed drastically in his plummet into "Caido". He wore a simple black coat over a linen shirt, dark trousers and sturdy shoes. And his pockets were empty. He swore.
When Lucas gave her his name, Rhea offered a small smile and nodded. The wind whipping brought a shudder to the girl. She didn’t like being cold, which was why she had been wearing her furs before. They weren’t the best to fend of the intense chill, but they were better than a cloak.
The way that Lucas didn’t shiver finally registered with her, and she let out a huff of a laugh in the realization of his likely race, likely making him associate it with his confession of having fallen. Not what she meant to do, but she couldn’t take it back. Her smile was replaced with tight lips when he mentioned going home, and Rhea shook her head slowly. ”Lucas, I’m sorry, but there’s no reversing it. No one who has come here has ever gotten back to where they came from.” Hells, no one could even figure out how to get out of the dome, not that she was complaining. She was quite content as it was, but a change of scenery might have been kind of fun.
”Come with me,” she said. ”My camp isn’t too far from here.” The tigress gestured towards the trees and persuaded another smile for him. ”While you seem to be unaffected by the cold, it’ll be a lot easier for me to explain what’s going on if my lips aren’t numb.” Her breath clouded in front of her as she huffed out another unsteady laugh, the frigid night air not exactly making breathing easy.
The glare he gave her was like green glass as she laughed, though his bruised pride and fickle moods would have to wait until he wasn't so horrifically helpless in this snowy hellscape. The glare faded to something like a troubled frown as he listened to her explanation, and he shook his head, uncomprehending. No way out? Impossible. "How, then... do people get here? You're telling me they simply fall from the sky at random?" How biblical.
His feet began moving without his permission at the suggestion they go elsewhere, as if the hunger that gnawed within him and the instinctive hatred of the cold both knew that shelter was a likely solution to both. Not that he knew what he was hungry for. Only when he began to trek through the snow ahead of her did he pause in realisation, glancing back and gesturing. "Lead on," he invited.
Rhea smiled at Lucas when he asked if people fell out of the sky. It didn’t quite work like that to her knowledge, but then again, she was almost used to people popping up out of nowhere. Not like he was the first, and she was positive he wouldn’t be the last.
She walked beside him, keeping her cloak tightly around her, shivering slightly ever so often. She hated the cold, but it was a part of life that she wasn’t going to escape.
”I don’t exactly think people fall out of the sky,” she commented, giving him a quick grin. ”But more or less, yes. No one knows if it’s random, but every so often, people just kind of...show up here. I was born here, but many others arrived in a similar way to you.”
She had been honest when she said her camp wasn’t far. It only took a few minutes to reach, as she wouldn’t leave a fire unattended for long. Approaching, Lucas would see a large tent draped in furs with a steady stream of smoke coming out of a hole in the top. The fire was inside for the sake of warmth at night.
Rhea stepped forward, and she gave him a warm grin, pulling back the flap of the tent and stepping inside. She waved him in, encouraging him to join her. If he did, she would let the fur flap fall closed and go to sit on her cot. ”How long has it been since you fed?” She asked him. Surely he would know what she meant by that. She had a good feeling that he was an Ascended, so she was just waiting for his confirmation.
Unlike his companion, Lucas had no cloak to draw about him, but he did hunch his shoulders against the blistering winds, however little he could feel on his skin. His hands found his pockets and he tried to tuck his chin down below the collar of his coat, glaring at the snow as they trekked forward. "And did all of those people have the misfortune of landing outside in the middle of the night in a blizzard?" he wondered. If they did then perhaps he wasn't so frightfully unlucky as he thought. But he doubted it.
Her camp was a welcome sight, modest as it might be, and the gods knew Lucas had slept in worse places in his long, long life. Ducking inside at her offer, he didn't feel the warmth of the fire but there was something cozy in the interior that had him relaxing nonetheless. The fire was something he was well-acquainted with (little did he know that in this new existence it would become a mortal enemy).
"Pardon?" he asked. "How long since I... fed?" An odd turn of phrase, but whatever. "Too long. I am ravenous."
She grinned at his question. ”Believe it or not, quite a few have arrived this Deepfrost,” she said. ”More than I’ve seen in some time, but not everyone ends up in the middle of the night in a blizzard.”
Rhea wasn’t exactly sure how much comfort Lucas would find in that, but he had asked and she wasn’t a liar. She had to admit that she didn’t usually welcome the Outlanders into her camp, though. She would have, but not many took her up on the offer. Trust was something she noticed was usually missing from many when they fell through the portals. Understandable, but still odd.
When he relaxed in her tent, she put back the hood of her cloak and removed her gloves, warming her hands by the fire. Her nearly golden eyes flicked to him multiple times, but she was slightly confused by the way he spoke. Was he confused by what she meant? But that wouldn’t make sense…
While Rhea hadn’t come across a ton of Outlanders, everyone she met knew of who they were, of what they were. Was he…?
She decided not to come right out and ask him because, since he was an Outlander, he probably didn’t even know what the term ‘Ascended’ even referred to, so she decided to conduct her own experiment. ”Here,” she said, reaching around and taking pieces of rabbit that she had cooked earlier that day. The tigress set it up to warm over the fire and offered the man another smile. ”Where did you come from? Before coming here, I mean.”
"Oh, how fortuitous for them," Lucas all but drawled; he didn't like most people, but he wouldn't wish this kind of a welcome into a new world on anyone. Granted, the night didn't bother him, but the blizzard could go to hell. Still, he was a deal more comfortable in the tent than he had been outside of it, however little he seemed to be bothered by the cold, the warmth or anything remotely similar.
Easily distracted by the prospect of food, Lucas watched as the cooked rabbit began to warm and sizzle over the flames, and while his stomach wanted to rumble, it didn't. "Thank you," he murmured. "As for where I came from... it was a great deal warmer than here, put it that way. And more advanced. Running water and electricity for a start." He almost huffed at the reminder, pinching at the bridge of his nose. "I was a businessman."
Rhea laughed lightly at the temperature comment, less because of the comparison and more because she was confused at why that would matter to him. Maybe it didn’t, and he was just using it as an easy way to relate. She wouldn’t be surprised, but she also wouldn’t ask him.
The way he described his world… Running water? Electricity? Such things were foreign concepts to her. She was going to mention the running water in the Oasis, but some part of her assumed that’s not what he meant. More advanced, indeed. Such things were fascinating to think about.
”A businessman?” Rhea inquired as Lucas spoke. She took the meat off of the fire and put it on two dishes, handing one to the man. ”We have plenty of shops and stores around the settlement, so I’m sure you can find something to do to your liking. What kind of business?” She tore off a piece of the meat and popped it in her mouth.
Accepting the plate - food was important above all else right now, thanks - Lucas considered her comments about the (undoubtedly primitive) stalls and stores that the place boasted. He'd see that for himself in time, whether or not he intended to. Then he could work on getting home. Thoughts of that home filled his mind as he dug into the rabbit, though he was not at all impressed by it.
"This tastes like nothing," he said, foregoing manners due to his current state of hunger and grumpiness both. "It tastes like less than nothing. What is it?" Wrinkling his nose, he offered her the plate back if she wanted to finish the wretched stuff.
"Security," he supplied as she asked about his business. "I ran a security business. Bodyguards, surveillance, alarms, things like that."
