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 cosmos remained, the painted mountains from the tips of his fingers dissolving back into vestiges, the waving grass curling over frames. He watched and waited for them to sprout shields and swords, but they never did. Too tired, too listless, too sunken in, too charred, too wounded, too overwhelmed with every iniquity under the sun. Then his eyes meandered down, down, down to the ground, watching her watching him. “I know.” And he would’ve done it for eternities if she’d let him.
He would’ve reached out for her too, been the monolith, the tower, even when it was wavering and toppling, struggling to exist. He always had.
But she’d wanted space, and he’d always given and granted everything. She could come to him if she craved it; otherwise, he'd assume the empty, hollowed, shelled contortions.
His heart collapsed inside his chest, and so did his body, as he laid back down into the grass and felt something trickle down; maybe tears, maybe blood, maybe fire, maybe water, maybe nothing at all. “Is there a right way?” He wasn’t certain. He didn’t know. He’d never done this before.
He waited for his head to sink into the earth and the rest of his body with it, to finally succumb and fall and never come back up from the roots and voids. “We have time.” To come further apart or back together or find a niche, a foothold once more.
"There's a wrong way." She knows this much, because she knows that she had become something wrong, that they had moved into murky territory and she'd lost track of the path. Maybe she cannot love, not the way she's supposed to. The way that Safrin had described, of cosmos perpetually realigning and orbiting around one another.
Maybe she really is the sun, destined always to blaze brightly, always to be alone.
He crashes like a felled forest giant, collapsing into the grass. Amalia's body inches towards him, long fingers extending, reaching, seeking to grace his crownless skull. In the starlight she can see it as it once was, spired in ice and crystal fragments, a king in hallowed halls. Should she have left him in the darkness? Was it kinder than leaving him in the light?
"There is a you that you don't know," Amalia murmurs to her husband, to the night sky, to the stars. "There is a me that I don't know. Once I thought I was a shadow, but you showed me I could be light. For you." She turns away now, fingers still seeking to play through his hair, affectionate and cruel in the ministrations. "I want to be a light for me. What do you want to be?"
A wrong way burned against him, and he wondered what he’d accomplished, after everything. Why he always lost. Why his efforts never seemed to matter. Why he was an anchor, a stone, while everyone else was a current. Why he wanted sometimes for nothing more than the ice and stars, to show him the way home, back into summits where he could stand on his fortress and feel nothing. Nothing but bitterness and rancor, nothing but vehemence and vengeance. Nothing but power and violence, the chaos spread through his bones and limbs, and the world could try and drag him down and he wouldn’t let it, wouldn’t allow, wouldn’t permit until he’d had his time –
He could feel her moving towards him, reaching to his long mane, threading her fingers through. You cannot have this, the grass seemed to mock and whisper. This will not last the stones hushed and lacquered, and he swallowed down the sorrows, but couldn’t pulse them away from his eyes. An arm was flung over them, so he couldn’t see, so he couldn’t know, so he’d be hidden, as the tears formed and the heartache poured from his soul.
And still, he curled instinctively in her traces, in her caresses, like there were moments where he could still be cherished and loved.
Not forgotten. Not tossed aside.
“I know nothing.” To a soul he couldn’t fathom or understand, to a life he’d led, to an ignorance bleeding him dry. To a you he’d never heard. To a shadow he comprehended so very, very well, a darkness he craved now and forever, a light bending and showing him something beyond the void, then pushing him back into it. “I wanted to be a sword to protect all of you. It is what I have always done.” And failed, and failed and failed and failed – a miserable collision course. “I do not become things for myself.” A whisper of another defeat, floundering, and collapse. Not when he'd been King, not when he'd been General, not when he'd been no one, naught, at all.
Is it crueler to be here or to leave him to himself? Amalia continues to pull fingers through his hair, floating, surfers over the endless waves. She doesn't have enough presence of mind to let go of this anchor, even though she knows she doesn't have the right to claim him as her own. "A sword has to be held by someone," she muses, looking at the sky. "It can't protect anyone if it doesn't protect itself." Does it make sense? The Shield isn't sure.
Nothing makes sense right now.
"You have to be something for you." At last the hand slips away; at last the girl rises up, unsteadily, a half-stand. "I think I'm supposed to go somewhere." She isn't sure where she's going, but she knows she has to go. Go somewhere, be something, live another life. She left him already, and it's too late for her to turn back around.
He didn’t understand and he couldn’t pull himself away, tormented and confused, conflicted, shorn to the edges and left there to decay. He could hear her words, and try to make semblance, meaning of them, but not how, not when – because protecting himself had never even seemed like an option. He’d guarded his heart until it wasted away, and then lived again, and still it burst, and he’d built walls around his soul and even then they still found him.
He didn’t know how. He didn’t know anything.
Useless, inept, not enough a chant, a memory, a beacon, a word and phrase he could understand.
Then she was nearly gone, on the wind again, and his arm withdrew to watch, to remember the same damned picture from before – doors shutting, things gone and collected.
Alone.
“Go where?”
Where was there to go anymore? To wander? To exist?
She straightens further, up towards the sky, as the oil pastel planet spins around her and outside her and through her, too, stars piercing mortal skin and leaving burns and tears. She is paper thin and semitransparent, wrapped around him until she rips and forgets what she was. And he is walls and walls and walls, layer upon layer she can never tear down, only crash on like a wave.
She looks at the slippery, changing sky and the light burn in her eyes. "I'm going to find the stars," she explains, as though this were the most painfully obvious thing in the whole world. "Stars guide the lost, and I am lost. Maybe they can help me find the thing I'm looking for." What was it? She can't remember now. Something frightening and futile, but something that she needs.
His eyes went away from her, and to the tapestry, the canvas, he’d once worked upon. The auroras have faded from view, not enough color, not enough hue, not enough time woven upon them – and he thought he’d done so brilliantly, with strength and support and devotion for so damned long, that nothing could have swayed them. He’d been wrong. The sky and world was a restless sea again, and he drowned in its ethers, in its waves, in its currents, not bothering to surface.
“You were in them.” Immersed in the colors, in the shine, in the haze, making her maps and tracing her constellations, a guardian of faith and ritual, of clarity and fortitude. Save for now; and he didn’t know why or what had happened or what he’d done. Just that they weren’t for him anymore.
He couldn’t see the galaxies now – it was all fog and mist and distortion, embers on his eyes, cinders in his throat. He gasped but it didn’t make a sound, an inaudible consternation bounding against him, until it stole his ambition, and he fell to the grass again. “I hope you find it.” There he curled and coiled, like a taut spring, head shifting into the waves of iniquity, hoping to find some relief in their balms.
Where was she? In stars, in dreams, in his life, in a million places fractured like glass, each shard of her another facet that she needs to somehow reclaim. Wherever she was, she isn't there now, just like she isn't here. She's missing parts of herself, hunting for them in a snowbank and the sand and the trees and the sky and everywhere else.
She's found a few but misplaced others, and the pieces still won't fit.
The contortions on the grass hurt her to watch, because she knows she has caused this pain. As surely as if she drew a sword she's gutted him, bled him to find her own freedom, to discover her own path. Selfish, cruel, and yet she'd needed it, needed to be on her own. To find herself, the thing she's seeking.
"I hope I do too," Amalia murmurs. "I hope it's worth it, in the end."
And then she turns and glides away, a phantom in the night.
