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!
01-02-2021, 11:48 AM (This post was last modified: 01-02-2021, 11:57 AM by Aamu.)
You are the night-time fear
This is also new.
Not the snow, though he has another of those distinct sensations that he did not awake to the same season in which he fell, but it doesn't matter. Or perhaps he did—his only memory of when the Voice woke him is snow, mountains, debris, rubble.
(How deep did she have to dig?)
There are mountains that wear snow year round, and who knows how long it took for him to guide the dead back to life? Perhaps it was instant, perhaps it took years. All he knows is that it was the Festival of Lights when they emerged.
So Deepfrost is no surprise. Aamu enjoys winter. It is pretty to look at, and the cold ceased to bother (or threaten) him long ago—with some exceptions, of course. He enjoys pulling the air into whatever passes as Ascended lungs, letting it warm up, exhaling it as a cloud of white smoke.
The afternoon sunlight is long and slanting, the sky cold and darkening. For all intents and purposes it is evening already, and where Aamu stands shadow has already fallen. He is not keen on taking chances. Not now.
His jumbled thoughts finish their circuit, skirting around the disturbing, ruined Spire looming in the background, and return to the sapling in front of him. He can't swear it wasn't there before, but it's there now, and it seems to be through natural means. A few others have come to watch it as well, but none have approached. Perhaps they are wary; perhaps it's the lone Ascended standing there and not touching it which gives them pause.
He doesn't know, and doesn't ask. Tattered and windblown he stands in front of the little firling, watching it with contemplation, blinking just a little too infrequently to be wholly comfortable to look at.
Aamu is discovering the Hollowed Grounds firling! Anyone is welcome to join. <3
The snow crunched below her feet, and she walked. She tread over the pathways of shadows like a phantom, like a wraith, and perhaps she was – and maybe that was all could be said for Mabel. The last of lasts, though she’d yet to wholly realize it. Revenge hadn’t begun to fester in her mind. Vengeance hadn’t pooled and pulled its way into her bones, hadn’t torn apart the renderings of material and flesh.
And she moved like a ghost, quiet in the shadows, first tracing back to the old farm, where the broken vestiges threatened to topple further. Into the creaking abyss of maneuvering doors, of shattered windows, of planes and panes of glass that didn’t cut or bleed her any longer. Evelyn wasn’t there. Another logical conclusion gone and vanished; and since the cold didn’t hamper her, she continued onward, barefoot and wretched, an untidy, ruffian upholding, a wicked little creature waiting to snap.
But she didn’t, not here, not now, not with her mind foggy, cloudy, and murky, wavering on her wayward path back to familiar routes and roots, traversing right into the square. The stones beneath her feet didn’t chill her. The unearthly sway of the shadows infused her. And for once, she was not alone – eyes, clearly feral, untamed hinges, took in the others, wary on the sidelines of some bizarre tree, and another lone Ascended, one she didn’t know, had never met.
But that wasn’t strange either, expected, in the ways everything had been altered, changed, and reborn. She drew closer, and closer, and closer, not unlike a moth to a flame, though there was no fire here. Just a weird sapling, and ethereal, otherworldly components surrounding it. “What is it?” She spoke aloud, to anyone and anything nearby, a brazen, fierce notching, as if it were a demand; except the youth wasn’t one to have earned any of the entitled sentiments.
He knows four things about her: her face, her spirit, that she is Ascended, and that she has died.
Somehow, he thinks he won't ever forget the ones he ushered back into life. He barely looked at them that night, yet he remembers their faces all too clearly, and in some dim, made-up way, he remembers the feel of their souls from that not-place. It is vaguely disturbing, and he decides it is nothing but his imagination, a lingering malady of his time spent powered down. Souls and soul-knowing are not his domain.
He finds himself watching her instead of watching the small tree. She's oddly similar to the sapling; limber, willowy, sprung barefoot from the snow. It curls his pale lips into a slight and wicked smile. It feels fitting.
She demands; he provides.
"A tree," comes his oddly lilting voice, the smile staying small but crooked, mischief in his hard blue eyes. He does not know what more it is. Perhaps he once did; perhaps he didn't. He knows it is much he used to know, but his mind is full of missing connections and jumbled timelines. He has resolved to give himself time. What will come back, will come back.
What won't, will remain lost. He does not like it, but he accepts it.
"Perhaps it bites," he says, amused, with a hint of sharpened teeth.
Something stirred – a memory, a dream, a haze, a hallucination, the more she glanced at the other, the more her fangs poked pointed over her lips, the more menace began to crawl back into her tarnished contortions. “But this is new,” she harked back, on a spit and sprig of laughter, harsh and bizarre, content and gratified someone listened, someone catered to her demands, and then it stopped abruptly. Her eyes roamed, darted quickly, like a portion of prey, or maybe a predator. It was hard to tell anymore.
“Bites,” she whispered in return, the malicious grin conforming once more, and she made to inch forward, to perhaps grasp at its small branches, to tug it out of the ground – especially if it was something from Frey. From the Old Gods. From the ones who were worth nothing.
Several passerbys glanced her way and made a wide berth – she must’ve looked a fright, with her tangled hair, once-sodden clothes – like something out of the feral woods, drummed up out of incantations and horror, or an individual swept out to sea. There were still matted portions of seaweed in her wild tendrils, and they lingered down her back as she advanced. It was a bizarre sort of crawl, cautious, and because of the slow motions, she didn’t get there before someone else did.
The stranger, everyone was strange now, even if she’d been born right down the road from this very spot – ran their finger across one of the boughs and the tree motioned, maneuvered, and Mabel hissed again, taken aback. The other figure moved on, shrugging their shoulders, and she was left staring. “Maybe it’s an abomination,” and she sneered, looking back at the one who had led them out of the ruins.
Ah, it is a new tree. His lips stay curled in their smile, a silent, single laugh puffing out his chest, and he lets her have the victory. He does not need to counter every word. He does not need to outwit her. She is difficult to read, feral and deranged in some way, but she does not belittle him for his response: he chooses to think of it as approval, acceptance. Slowly, they become an island in the sea.
He knows he might be setting himself up for a fall, but he does it anyway: her strange and harsh almost-laugh binds him, lets him mellow, relax—
"Bites," he confirms, watching her creep forward, wondering who she is, how she died, what she is doing here. What she wants, what she dreams of, why she still (like him) run about in the clothes she died (unlike him) in. They're stiff with salt, white rims licking along the hard creases, her tangled mess of a hair done up with seaweed while his is done with grief.
He thinks he knows how she died.
He thinks he knows why they avoid them: her movement is a menace, and he gives off the air of one you disturb at your own peril.
His head tilts as she advances, and his gaze snaps to the other—fingers rustle young boughs, which bob and giggle. Aamu's eyebrows rise. A giggling tree? Surely an artefact of the Old Gods, and he doesn't know how he feels about this (largely because he doesn't remember enough—)
She looks back at him, and he wonders if she feels cheated of that first touch, of the discovery. Slowly he moves forward, wishing there is some way he could give it to her. "Maybe it only bites Ascended," he muses as response. Abomination is much too harsh a word; he has spent so much time fighting that very notion that he cannot find it in himself to put that label on another, even a tree.
But he doesn't tell her this, only reaches out with a pale and slender hand to touch chipped, worn nails to the merry, dancing boughs.
He was very, very still – and she was reminded of things like ice, like fathoms of the unknown she could never quite reach, extinguished and collapsed before she had half a chance. If it his presence was a warning, she didn’t heed it. Instead, it gave her peace of mind, an anchor, a weight, and not a harpoon, not a wave, not a tremulous, uncertain circumstance taking her out into the void. Where everything slowly churned, tossed, and threw her about until even that precious, gifted form could take no more.
How had he been there, then? In the midst and mist? In the shackles and lines? In the sparks of electricity?
She must’ve seemed like a little eldritch thing in the midst of the gathered, and this amused her, sliding the same feral grin around her fangs, around the glimpses of other notions and semblances. Her sight snapped around, back and forth with darting lines and figments, picking apart pieces of the crowd, never finding the individual she was looking for. Thereafter, they were only distracted by him, the movement, the calm, as if buffeting back against her deranged, wicked nature – splintering, cracking, burrowing her way down into shambles, angles, and edges.
Then his hand reached, and she watched, waited, coiled and bunched her slender form into a rigid stance – as if one false movement would cause her to flee – and then the merry boughs giggled.
Her head tilted again, an arch to her brow, and she lurched forward, sprung into impulsivity, and when she wasn’t bitten by the boughs beneath his, she laughed. It didn’t match the chuckles from the sapling. It held no meaning other than some inanity, surprised over and over again, no matter the bizarre occasions. It hadn’t struck at her. Maybe she’d half-hoped it would’ve, and then she’d have a reason to tear it apart.
But she didn’t – eyes going back to his. “Were you the one who led us out?”
It probably doesn't bite anyone at all, then. He wouldn't have put it past the Old Gods to create something which does—stranger things roam Caido, after all. Giggling, snapping trees with a clear bias would not be out of place. The thought makes him smile. He would not want to meet them if they didn't like Ascended, and in truth, it would be pretty terrifying. Gnawed up and torn apart by a tree.
He prefers it merely giggling. It goes on, and on, joined by the girl's own laugh. She touches the branches over and over, ushering forth the merry, disembodied sound while his hand lowers.
Is she delighted? It's difficult to tell. Somehow, he thinks .. not. She doesn't look like someone who gets delighted; she looks like she belongs with the wild things, with blood on her mouth and her hands.
Maybe it's just because she still looks freshly drowned. Maybe she's the sweetest, most delighted girl alive, just a little disheveled and salt-stained and unmoored right now.
She looks at him, and he looks back.
"Yes," he merely says, truthful and concise. He does not want to guess what else about it would interest her, or what might bore her; perhaps she does not want to know anything else about him at all. His head tilts to the side as his eyes go to her hair. He wants to ask her if she has a brush, but where would she keep it? She's a walking embodiment of her grave. She needs more than a brush—she needs a bath.
He has nothing of value with him, and if he ever had anything of value at all, he has no idea where it would be now. His blue eyes return to her face. "Do you know this settlement well?"
Her hand retreated when the magic and mystery seemed gone. “Why is it here? What is it for?” She asked no one in particular; the figure before her likely wouldn’t know either, and the strangers mulling around them have once again dispersed further back. Maybe they saw her as a ghost and treated her as such, with disdain, with fear; she preferred either now, wanting some portion of the world to shudder at the sight of her. Drowned girl, but no lost lamb. She’d barely begun to know her fangs and daggers at all, when the tide swept her out.
Yes, he answered, and she wondered if he was some sort of savior. Like the Voice had been for the twins, their parents and siblings and everything else fallen apart, torn, dead. Her eyes studied, scrutinized, the pondering beginning to form behind them all over again, instead of the empty, unhinged, unbalanced look, starting to conform back into reality. Into life. Or whatever this was now. “How? Why?” The first two inquiries to pop into her brain, to sizzle against her teeth and tongue.
And then she was being studied, and instead of curling back into herself, away from the scrutiny, she allowed him. What else was there to see? To know? Or perhaps it was just her complexion, her disastrous wake, her disheveled presence, an entity of bracken fathoms, where it’d just been dark, dark, dark. But his question wasn’t what she expected (if she did any of that now; predictions and perplexities had been with the old Mabel, worried about war coming to the forefront, asking the Wraith what was to become of them). “I do,” she insisted with a nod; the motion was slow, as if she’d forgotten how to move some of her limbs. “I was born here.”
Like all things do sooner or later, it falls silent. The merry giggles dissipate with the last of the daylight, and for a creature shaped by strife and downed by war, it seems too fitting. Nothing is ever more than a lull, a hush, a breath held before the roaring storm. His own (fake, unneeded, habit) pools like a white cloud by his face.
"I don't know," he says after a moment; not knowing is not his domain either, yet he has resigned himself to it. What else can you do when your memories are in shambles? So he might as well humor her; guess, not merely jest. "Perhaps it is just to spread some cheer and amusement in the dark. It certainly seems to have captured our attention." And his lips curve into that small, crooked smile again.
Or perhaps it merely exists to bring people together. While the initial crowd has dispersed, leaving the two Ascended alone, more are likely to come as news of it spreads. What better than a mystery to cause new connections to be forged?
As he glances at her he finds himself studied, scrutinized, and he wonders if she is trying to see that radiant figure through his seams again. He has gone out: a beacon no longer needed, dormant, mortal, normal once more. He is neither more nor less than anyone else now. "The Voice," he responds. It is an answer to both, yet he feels he owes her more (or perhaps, it is just that he wants to give her more). "She tasked me with it, and placed me in there with you. Perhaps I knew the way out because I was still alive."
She was born here? He studies her (not in disbelief); how old does she seem? Sixteen? Nineteen? You can never tell with Ascended. He knows, roughly, how old he is, and it sure as hell doesn't match his face. "Do you still have family here?" he asks, curious, guarded. Something, again, makes him think not. Surely she would not be barefoot if that was the case.
The unknown always seemed to be a resolute figment – even if she’d known this world, this realm, her entire life. Her eyes narrowed at the tree, uncertain if was by affront or because it dared to be amused; shrugging her shoulders as the other Ascended strived to explain, not liking that he was right. It had captured her attention, like a moth to a flame, when she shouldn’t be anywhere near fire. Not now. Not anymore. Flammable, despite the waterlogged mess she’d become.
She stepped away then, at the semblance of becoming something tied and tethered to the sapling’s wake; the association of Frey bombardments causing her to recoil all the more. The girl was far more intrigued by this individual anyway – a beacon, a charge, a light in the darkness she could hardly, barely, scarcely recall or remember. Why had he been chosen? What made him special? The answer perplexed her even more. “Alive? Then how were you there?” Her senses were returning, less maimed by the rapids and tides, more herself – eyes narrowing, fingers clenching, aiming to wrap around something.
The question she was granted in return made her sharpen, spine drawn rigid and taut, eyes glancing off elsewhere, down past cobblestones, pathways, lined and marked trails where their feet had rambled back and forth. To a field vacant and forlorn, to an empty world tainted in disarray, disrepair, and heartache. To a realm they’d loved and cherished until it consumed everyone and everything, and they’d had to escape the only way they knew how. “I only have my sister.” Little did she know that her twin wasn’t around anymore either – unaware and ignorant of the meaning of alone – not now, not yet, not when they’d always been united hearts and minds. “The rest died.” Perhaps it didn’t need to be said, implied by the wake of ruins. “Do you?”
He gets the impression she does not like his theory, or the tree itself; he thinks of how she first regarded it, wary, jagged, a sinister, creeping predator advancing on the hapless sapling. She steps back, and Aamu lets his gaze linger on the young boughs. He doesn't know what it's for, but he finds it in his heart to humor its existence.
But unless he wants to tickle it for hours on end, make it dance and laugh for the passersby, it has no more to offer him right now. He turns away from it ever so slightly.
How, indeed?
He could just repeat himself: The Voice. He doesn't understand it himself, but he suspects that's mostly because of the state she found him in. He searches his mind, he searches his soul, but he finds no answers, and no truth dawns, bright and euphoric, on him. "I don't know," he finally says, quiet. "All I know, is that it was her doing."
Or perhaps his long torpor had blurred the lines between life and death for his spirit already, and she merely capitalized on that.
Again, he thinks not.
But he can be wrong: he is, just then. She confesses to having a sister, implied to be blood, or close as blood, anyway. But if she is here, then why does she look so much like storm-tossed driftwood, neglected and unwanted? Where is the care—the love, the joy of reunion? Or perhaps she has not found her yet. It's only been days, hasn't it?
Damn, but he hates the fog lingering in his mind. "I'm sorry. Where is she?" he asks, as if it's somehow more interesting than who she is. Carefully, he guesses they're both Ascended, and that could explain a lot.
Then the question is turned back on him, and his eyes narrow.
I don't know.
He guesses there will be much heartache; he knows there will be oceans of grief. He just doesn't remember who to mourn yet. "I suspect not," he says carefully, too light, as if the words are fragile and would break if handled too roughly. He does not want to linger there, on that perilous slope where the starlight cuts too bright and mercilessly, so he forges on. "Is there an inn around here?"
Her doing; the goddess, and then nothing more than a residual acceptance. Were there no other answers, or did that spell out a significant clause – to become something languid, something like a beacon, and then to cease, to desist, when no longer necessary? She couldn’t possibly know either, and despite her immense, reverent gratitude to the Brightened figure in their lives, the inquiry still slid around her eldritch mind. A web, seething, bending, unwinding like a willow, its branches heavy for now. Laden and drifting with other things. Other figments; repressed and inane, trivial and mutinous.
Her sister was the priority anyway, and then she could continue onward, forge whatever path or plan the Voice had in store for them. To go to the ends of the earth. To take the world apart. To render, to reshape, to hone fangs and daggers.
So her gaze lifted back to his, at some point she’d angled it downwards, and then on the horizon, as if Evelyn’s figure might appear from its abyss – just as ghostly as hers, and they could go home. They could triumph. “I don’t know. Not at home. I’ve searched there.” In the other enigmatic quandaries, in the empty halls, in the vast, forlorn house; beginning to fall apart as well. “But I will keep looking,” a promise thrown aloft and out loud, in case he doubted her. In case anyone thought her lackluster and nothing.
She’d show them.
And then he had no one either, suspecting naught, and her twisted little heart ached for a moment – perhaps a second of weakness, or Mabel simply knew what it was like to be forgotten figments, lost little children never quite wanted, needed, or listened to, no matter how much they insisted and strived and tried. It didn’t show on her face though, these butchering blades of emotion, and instead, a singular blink of her eerie gaze, and then her head snapped in the direction of the in. “Yes. Do you want me to show you?”
The question burns on his tongue: did she die with you?
Because she had clearly not been among those resurrected, and she is not here, either. Part of him wants to say it, to stir the memories which ought to have been her last, but it feels too cruel and faithless. Perhaps the loss of her sister, her only kin left, had driven her to uproot herself and move. Perhaps she had taken to stretching out in the cooling sands of Torchline, basking in the minutes of harmless warmth as the sun sank beyond the horizon.
"If you tell me about her, I can keep an eye out too," he offers instead. Caido is vast, after all, and if he could help bring the two of them together he would be delighted. There are enough unhappy endings in this world as it is.
At least she lets him off the hook for now, just regarding him in that uncanny way before turning to look away. He follows her gaze, but doesn't know what he's looking for—an inn he's never seen.
"Mmh," he hums, neither confirmation nor denial, licking his sharp teeth for a second. "I thought we could see about striking a deal, since we both seem to be in need of a bath, and washing and mending our clothes, if I may say so. I wouldn't mind working it off." He shrugs one shoulder; bartending or dishes isn't his domain either, but he's honest and easy to train. "Unless you'd rather try the mercy of the Infirmary, or perhaps have any better ideas?"
There's something wry in his voice, as if he'll accept her waving it all off as a joke, but it's still there in his blue blue eyes: concern that his blunt proposal will offend.
Evelyn hadn’t been there, down by the sea. She hadn’t been amongst the raging tides or the monsoon’s tempests. Hadn’t been foolish enough. Hadn’t been stupid enough. Hadn’t gone careening as Mabel had done, the wave sweeping across her waist and sending her outwards, hands outstretched into the ocean with nothing to grasp, nothing to pull her back towards the rocks, the land, the others waiting, working there. Then that’d been it, nothing but a slow, steady rush of time, weakening, weakening, weakening until there was naught left of her.
Her eyes swept away from their unnerving stare upon the wake of pathways and cobblestones, swinging back to the other, nameless figure. Her brows furrowed slightly, uncertain if she wanted the wake of her sibling to be announced to others; like she was something precious, to be hidden away. But then the notion ceased, gaze back up to his icy stare. “Evelyn. Her name is Evelyn. She looks like me. We’re twins.” All that was left of one another, of families, of broken bonds and brethren.
If the voice sounded cold, it hadn’t meant to be. Just fractured, just splintered, just teetering over edges and frameworks of things she’d always known.
He had plans though, far more than she’d managed in her lulling, listless state, away from the giggling sapling, away from the once-crowd. “There is the Oasis.” Cold, chilling, probably iced over – but it wouldn’t matter to them. They couldn’t feel any of those fragments anymore. “I have our old farmhouse. And I can mend clothes.” She wouldn’t have been worth her salt as a child without being capable of that; she just hadn’t had the opportunity. Hadn’t tried. Hadn’t cared. An offering with her own shrug of shoulders; he could take it or leave it. There were plenty of rooms in the old, empty, disheveled building.
