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!
Neeeeeeeeeron… she calls out to him, a voice on the wind. Neery, Neery, Neeeeeeeron! Even the accompanying amused chuckle is heard, more light-hearted and child-like than the former Warden has ever seen the now-twice Queen. Ah, but can he see her? Or is it just her voice, her laughter, her inadvertent summons echoing through the halls of the Citadel and down through the floor of the Kraai?
Come outside, she says as she rolls in a lingering pile of snow. Goddess, the cold feels good. Come play. They are friends, aren’t they? And siblings? And don’t siblings play? Face up, the blonde woman waits, her face turned to a partly cloudy night sky, her fingers digging as deep as she can into the last remnants of Deepfrost as if her life depended on it.
And it takes little effort to smash one of the windows of the Kraai, even though it leaves his wrist dripping fluid, to drop down and into the snow. He thinks he might even steam with it, for the heat that radiates out of his skin. ”Wesssssssssssex.” He hisses. He thinks he’s whispering, all secret-like, but he absolutely isn’t.
Already armed with a snowball, as soon as the siblings see each other (and they could really be brother and sister, perfectly pale and both blonde as they are) Neron launches his projectile, laughing merrily all the while. ”Where have you been?” he wants to know. ”It’s been forever.”
She should nimbly dodge the snowball, but her senses are dulled and the projectile hits her squarely in the chest. It’s funny - or at least it causes some spontaneous laughter. Wessex pushes herself out of the snow, shaking her head to clear the delirium-induced cobwebs.
“Queeeeening,” the Wraith replies with a sly smile, spinning in a tight circle and striking a dramatic, royal portraitesque pose. “Again.” But what else, what else has she been doing? Pausing for a moment to think, the memories come in fits. “And in the Climb. And the metal - Oh!” Flapping her hand to get Neron’s attention, she seems utterly delighted about something. “Hey, listen to this.”
Ice-blue gaze goes inward for a moment as she finds all their kin, dotted all over Caido. We need the metal. New cures for new people. But Loren is hiding it… Find it.
Clapping her hands with delight, feeling very cool and accomplished, the Wraith looks again to Neron. “Where have you been?”
Her laughter is predictably contagious, and so there they stand - the former leader of Halo and the current leader of the Hollowed Grounds, giggling helplessly at snowballs. ”Queening...?” Neron gasps, as if to give her the appropriate response, and he breaks into very noble applause at her pose, though when he draws up close (and slips a couple of times on the ice), he thinks nothing of linking an arm through hers.
About to speak again, he’s interrupted by her flapping hands, jaw dropping so it can help him listen even more closely to what she’s saying. And it’s an interesting message, Neron patting her arm a bunch of times to get her attention. ”Loren’s my brother,” he tells her, like that should a) be important and b) make it easier to find the metal. ”Who’d you hear all this from? Was it mother?” Neron sighs dreamily. ”I’ve not seen her properly since I Ascended. What’s she like when she’s not making threats?” he asks Wessex.
As for where he’s been? The Hailstorm points at the darkened shadow of the Kraai. ”Locked up in there, mostly!”
Neron has all the right responses and Wessex fucking eats it up. Never has the Wraith ever linked arms with someone she wasn’t related to. It’s only recently that she’s found a perverse sort of looseness, a joy at the simple things that often gives way to full-bodied despair - some sort of delirium induced, temporary bipolarity. It’s not all bad though. When she feels fine, Wessex is much more of a delight to be around now that she’s ill.
“Mhmmm,” she confides, as the two walk, helping Neron up if he slips on the ice again. “Find the metal and protect the family. But I put it together by myself.” Which she had, in a way, perhaps mostly subconsciously when she thought about metal and the Voice and what the Ascended are made of. How Frey didn’t know what it was. How Tanau hadn’t been stuck before. Her Lady’s electric interest in the metal. Somehow, it all made sense.
“She listens. And likes to make playmates for Loki. Sometimes she tells me secrets - but she always makes it feel like I shouldn’t worry and it’ll be okay.” There’s a dreamy, sort of wistful smile on the Wraith’s face. It’s an expression of not just love, but devotion. She can’t properly put into words how she feels about the Voice, but perhaps her face can.
“Did you touch the old water?” Looking over her shoulder at the Kraai, Wessex wrinkles her nose. “Locked up is bad.”
”That’s because you’re smart. It’s why you call all the meetings,” Neron informs her, quite happily strolling along beside her though he’s not got the foggiest idea where they might be going. He listens like an awed child as she explains about the Voice, and gods, maybe he ought to give their goddess another chance. Not that he’s never not given her a chance, of course, but it’s all been duty and obligation and if you fuck this up Neron I’ll explode you. Perhaps he’s been unfair.
Then Wessex mentions the old water and he almost retches at the memory, not that there’s anything to come up. ”Ugh, yes I did,” he says haughtily. ”And I ate a bit of the old flowers too. That was even worse, Wessex. Don’t do that, okay?” He wrinkles his nose and also looks back at the Kraai, though because of his uncoordinated efforts, he’s actually turning them around towards it as well.
”It’s not as bad as the Academy,” he says brightly. ”That’s my bar.”
“You should go see her again,” Wessex concludes quietly, perhaps drawing from Neron’s attentive listening. “She loves you. She loves all of us, even the useless ones like Sam and Robin, the guy who got chopped up and sent to the leaders as a warning.” This assertion is made with a vigorous nod, because Wessex would know. She knows the love and she knows the deaths, she’s seen sadness in her Lady’s eyes and the spark of life in Neron’s. And there’s no reason why he, a fellow deviant, shouldn’t be as welcome in the little flock.
Her nose wrinkles along with her brother’s, a look of disgust and a long, low, “Ewwwwwwwww,” conveying just what she thinks of that choice. “No, I definitely won’t. Amalia threw it at us and it set Bastien’s on fire.”
The thought of the vain man all of a sudden lacking hair sends the Wraith into a fit of giggles. “Can you imagine -” she manages without breathing “Bastien without hair?!”
Her laughing fit stops the pair in front of the Kraai, just in time for a drunk who’d fallen asleep at one of the tables to come out the door.
Neron’s lips part to say something, though quite what it is he wants to tell Wessex is lost in the news that their mother does love him. Because the Wraith wouldn’t lie. Not to him, not about the Voice. And so he smiles at her, an open and boyish thing that might be sweet if not for the fangs, and he bobs his head enthusiastically in response. ”I will,” he announces. ”I will go to see her, yes. I’ll bring her something nice.”
Nice is such an un-Neron word, but there it is. And he’s already distracted anyway, the taste of the old-flower somehow on his tongue even if he doesn’t really know what it tasted like. Or how most things taste like, given the whole Ascended thing. Luckily, Wessex provides quite the wonderful image of a bald Bastien for him to latch onto, and Neron is cackling his way to the Kraai along with his sister.
And then a drunk tumbles the fuck out of there, and he’s suitably outraged. ”Oi!” he barks. ”We are CLOSED.”
Pleased by Neron’s promise that he’ll visit the Voice and happy to imagine Bastien without hair, Wessex’s mood is greatly improved by this impromptu meeting; it even stands the test of the drunk, who looks up at Neron with glazed eyes and then promptly shifts into something small and furry, presumably to bumble their way home.
The swinging door calls her attention to the Kraai as bits and pieces of before the sickness spark to life in her head. “I helped build this bar,” the Wraith says as if she’s discovering it for the first time. “When Weaver was alive.” Weaver - it takes her by surprise - that’s a name she hasn’t said in a long time.
“I miss her.” Her unusually animated face falls to mirror the words. “Morgan offered to be friends, but it isn’t the same as real friends.”
"Yeah you BETTER run," Neron shouts after the small and fuzzy drunk, his nightvision piercing through the darkness to track the (apparently very disorientated rat) down a gutter and away. There's nothing standing between them and the Kraai now, at least, and he leads them forward like a gentleman through the swinging doors and into the bar. Who is manning said bar is beyond him, given that he's been locked in his room upstairs, but whatever.
"Did you?" He grins. "It's my bar now. But you're welcome in it, obviously. I want to get more Ascended to work here," he tells her, swanning across to the bar to pat one of the stools so he can saunter behind it. Are either of them in any sort of state to be drinking? No, but who cares? They won't get drunk anyway. He smiles sunnily to Wessex. "Morgan is my friend. She's a good friend. A real one. What makes a real one anyways?"
Semantics and particulars don’t seem to matter in most circumstances these days; who owns what and runs which thing and between all the fucked up timelines Things Happening, it’s rather difficult to keep track. She follows Neron into the Kraai and slides onto a stool, swinging her feet up so she’s sitting more parallel to the bar than full on.
“Who?” she asks when he mentions getting other Ascended to work at the bar. “What kinda drinks you gonna serve if it’s Ascended run, hmmmmm?” For Ascended, by Ascended? Can they pre-order shifts or powers or specific cocktails "Whiskey with a blood chaser?"
Gods, wouldn’t everyone just hate that? Which makes it a Very Good Idea.
“A good friend… gives you a drink when you’re thirsty.” Attempting some Amun-style waggling eyebrows and failing miserably, the Queen looks more like she’s doings some bizarre winking that a you know what I mean? kind of look. And the idea of Morgan giving an Ascended any kind of ‘drink’ is almost impossible for her to imagine.
"I dunno - whoever wants to work here!" Neron grins to Wessex and shrugs, rummaging around for some top shelf whiskey, some ice and a bottle of wine. It's like he's on autopilot back from when he actually had tastebuds, and he'll blame the fever for it later. "Do you wanna work in my bar, Wessssssex?" He beams, plonking a tumbler down with some ice in it, showering it with a generous amount of whiskey. "I was thinking that if it was all Ascended, we could sell more than booze. Would be a good way to keep us all topped up on superpowers right?"
Superpowers being abilities, magic and shifts, of course.
Snorting at the amount of eyebrow wiggling going on across the counter, Neron nudges the whiskey to her as he pours himself an even more generous glass of wine, as if to demonstrate how good a friend he is. "Yes, they certainly do," he agrees about Morgan, bouncing his eyebrows just as obnoxiously back at her and taking a sip of his drink.
“Hmmmm…” Considering his (mostly sarcastic) offer, Wessex adopts a cartoonish picture of thinking about the proposal before downing the whole drink in one or two gulps. It’s shockingly easy to do without a gag reflex or the burning sensations. “Done. I’ll give up my crown and come hang in Torchline.” Placing the glass decisively down on the bar, she makes a grand sort of gesture to the empty bar and pretends like there’s an audience.
“I do declare the Hollowed Ground a shithole and unfit for anyone but the Ascended. Let it be a lawless, fun place free from the Old God’s moralities and fears. It needs no Queen!” Tossing Neron a fanged grin, she hangs in a happy, ecstatic place for a moment before slipping off her perch. Perhaps that bump sends her back to reality. Or jolts some into her. She pops back up, a very different person than the one that just declared her home the wild wild west.
“Except… it doesn’t work like that, does it? I have to stay. To protect.” It’s a somber thought, sad for many reasons - the loss of a barkeep position, the necessity of protection, the abandonment of a true desire to explore. “I just want to see the world. Worlds. But no.”
11-10-2020, 09:32 PM (This post was last modified: 11-10-2020, 09:33 PM by Neron.)
WISE MEN WONDER WHILE STRONG MEN DIE
"That sounds great!" Neron announces, only for his brow to furrow suddenly. "Only... I live in Halo." He scritches at his chin, like that might be something of an issue. He supposes they could uproot the Kraai and move to the beach. Gods, it's been forever since Neron saw the beach. Still, at her glorious toast, he raises his glass as well, knocking back his own drink and blinking a couple of times as Wessex disappears, truly not expecting to have lost her.
Ah, but then she's there again, albeit much more sullen. "Oh, I dunno." He flaps a hand at her. "You can do that temelort-- tepelortat-- telletop-- disappearing, can't you? Can zap away on a day trip and be home in time for laws and dinner."
