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!
There were knots tied over his breath and coils sprung between his chest, like knives and nooses, and he found he could scarcely walk without stumbling. Rather than growl in frustration, a heady dizziness possessed him, vertigo clambering along his senses, and without Zuriel by his side (who was growing all the more agitated and alarmed), he might not have made it towards the wide-open fields.
The darkness pooled around him and he thought it was day – head swinging upwards to stare upon the sun not there, to gaze in open rapture and reverence along cloud lines and horizons. “We need to hunt,” he mumbled to no one in particular – the unicorn snorted and moved herself along his side, and one hand settled upon her withers with a generous pat. Despite his notions, nothing was held in his palms for weapons, each left haphazardly back at home.
But there was nothing out there to stalk or prey upon, if he was capable at all. Senses rendered in bleak renditions of something out of a twilight zone, incomprehensible, and the wild temptations of the tall grasses shifting in the wind only made him laugh.
Eventually, he fell back upon the edges, the perimeters, the comfortable grass that he wished was warmer. “Cold,” the weakened beast shuddered and shivered, craving heat while sweat beat down his neck, mentioning it out loud to the mare who couldn’t do much for him but stare in disbelief, but stand over him as he gazed up at the open sky, at the widening basin of stars. One in particular burned brighter than the rest, and he couldn’t remember why, couldn’t fathom why that was important, why it made his heart twist and hurt.
She wanders through the fields, looking for things she's left behind but cannot quite remember. Sometimes she dances, stepping on butterfly wings and moving between stars.
Sometimes she runs, fleeing from hands that grasp at her ankles, threatening to drag her into the ground and fill her lungs with earth.
Sometimes she jumps so high she swears that she can fly. She floats on currents of invisible wind much like Jyoti, languid and serene as the fever rages and her mind loses track of who and where she is.
Tonight she is a dandelion seed, drifting through the summer night with starlight in her wake. The starlight is the whale, concerned by this continued sickness, crooning and singing notes of worry that only soothe the Shield. Barefoot and garbed in little more than a light shift, the girl imagines herself to be striding boldly through the tended fields.
In truth she wobbles, drenched in sweat, uneasy on her feet.
It does not surprise her to find Deimos. It should, but it doesn't- it simply makes sense. Of course he is here. He always has been, always will be, promised it time and time again. She stops when she is standing above him, swaying unsteadily but smiling down brightly at his prone figure in the grass.
Something hurt and pressed on his chest, and when he looked up, to see the moon, to see the sun, to see the earth in all its hazes, figments, and canvases – he thought he saw a ghost. A gasp left his body as she swayed above him, generous as the breeze, and he lifted one hand out of instinct, out of reflex, but he couldn’t fathom why. To reach for the stars? To beckon the Shield? To remember what it was like to touch, to feel her?
Zuriel nickered low and soft to Jyoti, companions unfortunately forged in the annals of bizarre complexities, unknowns, and fates – steadfast and stalwart while everyone else drowned.
He was otherwise frozen, paralyzed, from another multitude of agonies rippling through him. A series of undulations, shivers, and shudders unfurled, and he hid none of them – entirely unaware as he watched her sway, smile, like dreams of yesteryear.
Before, before, before everything else.
The inquiry made some semblance of sense in his head, as it twisted and bound over his tongue, and his heart beat wildly, scared, adrift. “Did you find yourself?” He could only whisper, and hope.
He reaches for her, but she doesn't see it, too lost in a world of her own design. The ground is painted in oil pastels, rippling and smearing into the sky. It's strange and wonderful and it makes her dizzy, so she drops down, hard, and sits. There's a long, long, long stalk of grass in front of her; she pulls it out above the roots and places one end in her mouth, wondering if it will have water at the end.
"No. I'm still looking." The Shield shakes her head with vigor, sending the grass shoot flopping through the air. She stops when vertigo once more strikes her, extending her palms out in and staring at them with a shocking intensity. "Maybe there isn't anything to find. Maybe I don't exist." It's a frightening thought, but soothing, too. Maybe she's just the fever dream of a girl who died at LongNight, so many years ago.
Looking away from her palms, she finds Deimos' face. "Did you find yourself?" she wonders softly, head tilted in a curious angle, pale in the light of the stars.
His hand fell back down, along his side, into the grass, where fingers splayed, tugged, and pulled. The sensation meant nearly nothing to him, just something to grab onto while the world spun and he was frozen in its orbit, staring up at her, then the stars, where the sun should’ve been. Another darker, intense sheen blankets the tapestry, and he could’ve sworn he saw the aurora lights from the Basin, shooting down upon him.
He wouldn’t move – let them come, let them embed.
They didn’t, and his head only gradually moved, piercing, delirious eyes locking upon her, on the grass, on the sway of the breeze. He didn’t reach again, another shudder moving through him, another figment locked across ribs.
Still looking. For answers? For ultimatums? For wishes and dreams?
“You exist,” he uttered, soft and solemn. “Unless we are ghosts.” And for some reason this made him laugh, a raw chuckle reverberating through his chest, real and genuine, not heard from in so very long.
Maybe they were. They’d both died, after all.
The Sword’s gaze roamed back upon her, as if there were no other things to gaze upon. “No. But I found Rex.” In memories, in hazy fogs, in labyrinthine designs of slumber. “She told me she and Kiada were here.” And he pointed to his chest, where his heart was nestled. “Always there.” A nod, before the stare was gone, and back upon the grass moving around him like the sea.
He laughs, and she laughs, too, even though she's completely missed the joke. It is good to hear his laughter, to see him smile; it makes her ache for something that she doesn't have, but did, and she shivers in the cold of its absence. "We both died," Amalia points out, still giggling and shivering in equal measure.
She calms down when he mentions Rexanna, blinking and pulling the grass out from between her teeth. "Rex was stolen," the Shield says slowly, frowning as she tugs another blade of grass. "The Voice stole her, and now she isn't anywhere, like Wessex and Sam and everyone else who she steals away." Looking back up with a furrowed frown, Amalia purses her lips. "Why do you think she does that? Is she lonely?"
On her reel of laughter, his amplified, until his whole body shook with fervor and ardency, and chill pulsing with fever. “At least yours was for a good reason.” Maybe – another chuckle curled over his breath. He almost said he’d been there – took ahold of her body, the memory there so vivid, but instead his fingers closed into fists, and he wasn’t aware of anything more than the deliriousness weighed over his brows, across his eyes. “I burned myself out. The flames were gone.” Until there was nothing left.
If that said something about his current incarnation, and where the rocky road was headed, he didn’t touch it.
He grabbed ahold of a blade of grass too, but began twisting and looping it, intertwining the works with stars and pinnacles, imagining mountains in between the formations. They weren’t nooses, they weren’t knots – maybe they were nothing at all.
The notion of Rex made a growl curl through his throat, and it resided within the ground too, on a burst of tiger ears over his head, at a hellhound howl begging to unfurl. “She cannot have her forever. I will get her back.” Ignoring the part where she’d been in his heart previously, the echo of cadences, trying to mull away from the hurt grinding into his bones. “Maybe it is greed. She wants and wants and wants.”
A pause, a shift, eyes blinking and not seeing anything but the darkness surrounding. "Are you lonely?"
"Maybe greed and loneliness are the same." She's tying the grass in simple knots again, adding blade after blade into her growing chain. It's a mess, but to her it feels like a tether, or maybe a ladder to the moon. "I think she thinks she loves them. But it isn't love. It's only want."
Is she lonely? "Yes." It's an easy answer, stated in a tone that suggests nothing but understanding. A shrug in vocal form, as the earth she's sitting upon rises and swells, leaving a gaping space between her and the rest of the world. Dark eyes turn up to the stars; her hand extends up toward a bright one, brighter than the last. "I'm trying to find someone that I lost, somewhere far away. Will you help me?"
His hands dropped the blades of grass, and his fingers began to paint mountains, one summit after the other, outlined before his eyes as they maneuvered in swells against the sky. They rose and rose in peaks and valleys, in aurora forms and vigilant hills, and he smiled into the vacant, vague darkness, the Basin alive before his eyes.
Except it really wasn’t – just the clouds, the rocks, the trees, of the Hollowed Grounds, and the earth moving underneath them, constantly changing its tune.
“Then what does she want? People? Souls? Power?” A moment of clarity, before it dissipated again, and his gaze sunk to the ground, to the unicorn before him. “I am too.” Lonely? Greedy? Perhaps both? It didn’t really matter. She hadn’t asked. Nobody really cared.
The Sword felt inclined to take the hand rising towards the heavens, but stopped when the notion caused him to move slightly, and everything felt hazy, foggy, gone. His stare roamed entirely elsewhere then, upon his painted mountains and ethereal ghosts, lost in the footfalls. “Who did you lose?” And because he seemed ready and eager to assist no matter which ailment plagued him, he took another blade of grass and his tiger ears twitched. “Yes. I can try."
"I know you are." Amalia says this with measured sagacity and certainty, intoned into the darkness of the quivering night. She looks at him and sees an ocean, beautiful and terrible, something she could drown in. And she wants to, to dive in and lose herself in the ease of being his, but something holds her back. She's thirsty, but the water scares her.
Who did she lose? A face comes to her, swims in the stars, dark hair and pale skin and beautiful ice-blue eyes. "I lost Kiada," Amalia murmurs, sadness in her eyes. "She dove into the lava and swam down and down and down, deeper than I could see."
She can picture it: the flash of fire, the surge of delicious, terrible heat. The vulture reaching and falling, falling, diving deep below the surface, outside of her view.
"I think she's lost. I need to find her so you can be whole again."
Did she know? Did it matter? He shook his head and watched the stars and clouds come with it, the movement and motion enough to make him shiver and shudder again – craving warmth, the flames in his hands suddenly bursting out, beatific proportions that could’ve been out of control, but he breathed life into them and his eyes skimmed over their intrepid dance. Some formed patterns of mountains, and some were rivers, and some were decadent portions of voids and vices. Some seemed tragic and forlorn. Some were deadly opuses.
His gaze went back to her as she spoke, searching for the other blackened eaves, the very nature of souls intertwined and bound and cherished; cranium, skull, tilting, as if he was seeing her for the first time. He thought about asking her for a book, for a dance in the dark.
“She is not lost. She is there too.” And he pointed in the sanction of her chest, where he knew her heart resounded, pulsed, because he’d once memorized the sounds. “She was always like the fire. My favorite Harpy.” A sad smile wrapped around his mouth, his lips, and his gaze went back to the embers, the cinders, in his palms – made them twitch and coil until they were like the favored daughter, cast into her likeness, feathers rising, rising, rising like a phoenix.
“You said you were not doing that anymore.” A shrug, wondering just how far promises yielded, and what they’d become. “There are so many missing parts.” The inferno twisted and pulled, the bird trying to escape and flee from him again. “Maybe I am not supposed to be whole.”
It’d be too much. Too little. “But it would be nice to find her.”
She reaches for the fire he holds in his hand, wanting to touch it, to take it for her own and bring it to her chest. But all she touches is heat and pain, burns licking over her fingers before she can pull them away. "Ow," she murmurs dreamily, placing singed digits between her parched lips. "It's so beautiful. Why does it hurt?"
Did she say she wasn't doing something? She doesn't remember, now. Lowering her hand back into the grass, Amalia digs into the earth, the cool dry dirt a balm on her fingers. "You have to save yourself," she tells him, and it feels like déjà vu. She said this to someone else recently, didn't she? Someone who wasn't him at all, and yet held her like he did and called her bright.
She'd wanted to be bright for him (for whom?). She wants to be bright for herself.
"I will look for her." This is said with a solid confidence, her voice surprisingly steady as her mind trips and unwinds. Then she softens, slumps, the brief surge of ardency swallowed by fatigue. "But not tonight. I haven't been feeling very well. I think I need to rest."
She reached for the fire and he didn’t stop her – he always did, searching for the flames, waiting for them to blister, to seethe, to torment. “Because sometimes beautiful things do.” Entranced again for a moment, by the heat, by the surge and swell, and then he let it die, wither and decay in his palms, until they were nothing but ashes and bones and soot and remnants. Fractions of wholes and powers that made him bleed and crush.
“Yes.” He agreed. He had to save himself. He had to stop from going under on his own. “But it is very hard.” There were moments when he didn’t want to. Preferring the darkness, the throngs, the veils, the abyss; comfortable and familiar, to glide in on midnight oils and Stygian hells, and not think about what he’d left behind or could’ve been or would’ve dreamed, if he wasn’t so damned. So stupid. So exhausted.
The fatigue ached in his bones then, quiet, perplexed, scalding, one after the other. “Me too,” he coincided, agreed, echoed, wherever they ended up roaming. Into lava. Into heavens. Into souls.
“You can rest here. I will watch.” For as long as he could; stalwart as he sat up and reeled, tormented by too many figments and factions of light suddenly bombarding his eyes. They came from the corners and sides, bending and swaying, orbs that made his head ache and his heart numb, jaw clenching to subside the torment. “I do not feel well either. But you rest. It is your turn.” A whisper into the night, and his hands were in the grass again, feeling the texture billow around his senses. “You forget to sometimes.”
It is a very tempting offer, to rest her head upon the grass and let the world spin away. Let him watch her, guard her, keep the monsters that dance and snap and snarl at bay. "I want to rest," Amalia agrees, turning tired eyes on Deimos as though seeing him for the first time. "It was so easy to rest, with you." It's so easy to let him be her mountain, her sword, but she can't be his Shield. She still hasn't found what she's looking for. Not in him.
She wants to reach out for him, but her arms have become lead. There are monsters in the grass, she's sure of it, and if she stays too long they'll bite her fingers until she bleeds and fertilizes the ground. "I'm sorry I didn't love you the right way," Amalia whispers to the earth, the sky, the man. "I wanted to. You deserve so much light."
