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!
What happens is not at all what he expects, does not align with his careful plans.
He comes around a corner, heading back to the kitchen carrying something-or-the-other only to find her slumped in the hallway. Memories overlay, overlap (he shakes them by their lifeless shoulder, watches their heads loll, reanimation fluids glistening in the dark, someone else he can't save) as he thrusts the boots onto the nearest counter and fights his every urge to run up to her.
She's not dead, not dead, not dead—
Still, his steps are rushed even though his footfalls are quiet, until he looms over her like some worried shadow. "Mabel?" he asks, soft, anxious, sinking down on one knee next to her. There's seaweed in her hair, salt in her clothes, and his hands hover. He wants to touch her, tug the ocean from her soul and hold her, hug her, shield her from the world, even if only for a moment.
He takes the risk. "What's the matter?" and his hand lowers to her slim shoulder, though he is afraid she will shake him off, or bite, or worse—
Unaware of his own panic, the girl settled into herself. Into claws. Into manifestations. Into pockets of water drowning her from the corner of her eyes, spiraling over and over again as she was wound into its waves. No sanctuary, no haven, no sanctum here and there; everything a smoldering haze of grief, of torment.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come back.
The ivory shadow towered above her, and for an instant she thought about not moving. Becoming a piece of the backdrop, surrounded and swallowed by the rest of the hollowed world. It’d already happened once before. Why not again? She’d had peace and had been too greedy, too avaricious, to stay within its threshold – and now she was gripped by a stupefying fear.
Then he was near and she fought back the urge to hiss like some rabid, ravenous animal; too afraid to do much else but become some snarling heathen. The willowy edges of her were gone for the moment, and from therein Mabel began to recover the vitriol of before; but didn’t know where to put it, where to place it. It had no meaning now anyway.
“I couldn’t do it,” she whispered into the wood and the eaves, the old, sunken god damned house, with everything gone and turned to ash, to dust, to nothing but embittered memories. The vocals choked past her and she was ashamed to admit the semblance of everything else freezing over her, driving her into a tiny ball. “The water.” As if that explained anything; why she still wore her death rags, her collapsed crown.
He wants to hold her so badly, but all he does is grip her shoulder, his second knee touching the floor too as he sinks down next to her. She's rigid, silent, but the taste of panic is still strong and nauseating in his mouth. She doesn't feel like death; she's not limp and lolling, a forgotten casing which once housed somebody's soul, their hopes and dreams.
But sometimes, it's so hard to tell the difference.
Had he had a heart her whisper might've drowned in the roar of it. She couldn't do it and he knows, he knows, and he lets his free hand find her other shoulder. The water: her first grave. There was no one to pull her from it then.
He should've guessed, should've known, but how could he? He has never died, does not remember what powered him down and left him for dead on some lonely mountainside, doesn't know what to fear. He swallows, thumbs tracing little circles over her shoulders, wondering if he'll be good enough, and if a bath is so fucking important anyway.
Is it worth it?
Just to be clean?
(We're Ascended, not savages something, someone, whispers in his memory.) No: but to forget, to move on. To wash her death off, be reborn. He wants to pluck the seaweed from her tangled, matted hair.
"It's alright," he murmurs, an unspecific ache blooming in his chest—a deep, nameless longing. "Do you want me to stay with you..?" An offer she can take either way she wants, and one he (selfishly) hates to make. It leaves him too vulnerable.
She shrugged; the touch wasn’t something she knew how to name. Comforting? Her parents hadn’t been the affectionate sort – there were too many of them, and too many things to do, to accomplish, on a failing farm. So she sighed, wondered if it was too late to crawl back into the earth, to forget this sad, miserable attempt at human predilections. She was no longer quipped for the task – even simple ones, like wiping the salt off of her features. “I don’t know,” Mabel could only offer in response. She didn’t. She didn’t have a clue.
Another shudder emitted through her shoulders, and the youth couldn’t distinguish if she should rise and flicker off into nothingness again, be left to her own devices, or simply meander, wander, for the rest of eternity, stuck in the same stupefying shell. Mabel didn’t want to remain in this panicked state, in this inconsolable wake, but the notion of conquering the water left her breathless, distraught, and frozen. “What do I do?” Her eyes went to his, as if suddenly the answer would appear before them.
How did one abolish the fear of death over and over again? A slow course of demise, where she could watch the waves churn above her, below her, until the sun starched and stung, until she fell apart in its seams, until she descended into its wake? Or was it not so easy, not so stark, not so clear?
Maybe she was destined to stay that way – hollowed out, caught in the everlasting death throes and throngs. The salt to remind her. The seaweed to taunt her. The liquid in her lungs to tarnish her.
“Did you die?” She asked, quite out of the blue, uncertain why she’d need to drag both of them into this hellhole.
His hands feel like fragile things there upon her shoulders, her shrug like an earthquake through them: he wonders if he should let her shake him off, if she means for him to take his compassion, his empathy, and go.
But that is not who he is. Not then, not now, even though he knows how much it can hurt.
So he stays, half-invited, stubborn, heartbroken; she doesn't know, and he doesn't either. He knows what he would've done with—
(there's just static)
—Mabel's bigger, though. He wants to pull her against him, wrap his arms around her and hold her until she feels safe (if ever), but he doesn't dare to, is shaken out of it before he can make up his mind anyway. Her eyes swim up from the depths of her despair, and his answer gets stuck in his throat, won't come out of his mouth.
For he doesn't know either. He doesn't know how to chase the fear from her face, how to dry her soul, how to help her find her sister, how to move on. He wants to say, you keep fighting, but it feels flat, hollow, insincere, as if she deserves nothing short of the perfect answer, and he doesn't have it.
".. no," he admits, soft, hushed. "I was merely turned off." He knows nothing of the pleasantries of death, of the Voice's little soul retrieval, except that it had somehow fallen to him to lead them back to life.
They were walking edges and lines of the unknown, and it felt bitter, felt rancorous, felt unfair; because what was she supposed to do now? Think every droplet was going to cascade and take her away? Think the rush of waterfalls would lead to massacres? It was stupid, ridiculous, and not all at the same time – because if she slept, if she could dream anymore, those waves would be prominent features of nightmares. They would be adversaries, tumbling her over and over again, like knives, like daggers, like stilettos. And she knew what she’d rather face.
There was exhaustion mingled within there too, and she reached over hands and limbs, grabbing hold of the tassels of her hair, fingers suddenly going through the wilderness, the matted proportions, the seaweed, striving to pluck it out. Fast, as if in a terror, in a trance, working to pluck out the signs of her demise, until he finally said something.
Her eyes went back to his while her deft fingers took hold of the plant life submerged in her mane, softening slightly, tilting her head at the hushed measures. She didn’t know what any of this meant. “Turned off? To do what? Wait?” Like the machines the rest of the world always thought them to be? She didn’t like the implications, the way they would’ve tasted in her mouth, the sorrow settling its roots into the house. Empty and empty still. “For how long?”
He's used to feeling inadequate. It doesn't make it easier to bear, but it doesn't come as a shock. It's just the way it is, sometimes, a heavy weight in your chest, and then it's up to you what you do with it. Aamu resolved, a long time ago, not to let it stop him. Better to try, and fall short of the mark, than to not try at all, right? He holds it for true even in that winding hallway with a once-dead girl tearing seaweed out of her tangled, salty hair.
He worries she'll pull out her own hair, but he doesn't want to stop her and this first, angry step in what he thinks might be the right direction. Instead he reaches up to work some of it from the matted locks, far more gentle than she is—and the mystery of his own circumstances a far better distraction than any other he could offer, anyway.
It doesn't surprise him they all assume he, too, had died. It doesn't matter that for all intents and purposes he had, just that his soul never took that final journey to wherever dead Ascended actually go. Did Mort still take them?
He puts aside his own dislike of speculating. She needs it more than he needs to stick to principles.
"I don't know," he admits, helpless, hopeless, his fingers pulling the sea from her hair. "I don't think it was intentional." He frowns a little. Thinks. "I think I was going somewhere, and then..." He shrugs. "I woke up when the Voice needed me to go guide your souls back. As for how long I was shut off, I have no idea." He thinks of all the faces he can't recognize, the black Spire looming just beyond, the barren, ruined feel of the Settlement. "I suspect it was a very long time, though." A quiet, despairing confession in that desolate place.
The sea began to release her; away, away, away from its tides and weeds, from its salt and sand, while she sat on dry land and old, ancient timber, trying to remember what it was like to be alive. To be something not decrepit, wind-tossed, and forgotten, indifferent to how she pulled or pierced her own hair. He was far more gentle, and she finally relinquished and gave in to the softer ministrations, eyes sharpening, honing, from beneath the tangled tassels. Elsewhere there might’ve been a brush to make the process easier, but this was cathartic too, to watch it all be unfurled from fingers and not the water. Not her grave.
His story was a distraction, a deterrent, from the suffering unrooting itself, intermingling, intertwining within ribs and flesh and bone. Not intentional, to be shut down and cut off, to be cast into the unknown, and she wondered vaguely if he was just one of many forgotten things. Like the Voice’s first experiments, the monsters that wandered in their ghostly rituals, with their claws and torture. Like others, gone and gone and gone in wars, in ashes, in ethers, in cinders.
A very long time.
Something chilled down her spine and she swallowed down another fracture; plucking out another semblance of sea-life out of her threshold, out of her presence, tossing it to the floor as more and more unfurled. Then more words, more words, crashed from her throat, and she didn’t know why she needed to know, to search, for those answers, for an understanding, a notion, into the shape of immortality and what it signified. “Do you remember anything from before?” Had it all changed – from vapor and vestiges, to emptiness, to hallowed boundaries? “The barrier?” When had he fallen? Why did it matter?
It's the way she says it—offering no explanations, no descriptions, no further details. Just 'the barrier', an absolute thing, a universal truth, a thing each and every creature alive knows. Something they have lived with, years and years, and something he has never heard of. He suppresses a shiver, forces his hands to keep moving, gently working salt and death from her hair, wishing his eyes would focus again and this sick, clammy feeling to leave his body.
The barrier. He swallows. Licks his trembling lips. "What barrier?" he asks, quiet, not trusting himself to mask the quiver in his voice if he raises it any louder. The time he's been shut off stretches to decades. There's no other explanation.
But he remembers things, bits and pieces, odd, disjointed fragments. They're still a muddle, a mess, circuits with flawed connections. "I remember some things," he says, deft fingers sorting through her hair down to her scalp. "But most of it feels—scrambled. Diffuse. It might get better with time." It might not.
He has to keep going. Build a second life. "There was a war. We.. The Voice led us." Against who? He thinks the Gods—equal standing? "An order formed in response, and fought back against us. Before that, there was peace. Splendor. We were..." Gods? He thinks not. But praised. Celebrated. Venerated. Admired. Evolved. Ascended.
He doesn't know how to finish the sentence. "Well. I don't know how the story ends, but here we are."
Time was a relative factor, especially for Ascended. It was impossible to tell how long one had lived, through centuries or days, once they’d been taken in by their goddess. And here she didn’t quite understand the confusion, the stillness, the quiet, fingers working through the whorls and tangles, the knots and angles of her hair. “There was a barrier around the Hollowed Grounds.” And for as long as she’d lived – that was all the stories were apart of; trapping, snaring, netting the Voice. And the heralds of the Old Gods too – as if it had been all they could do, taking one with the other. “For three hundred years.” She grew hushed now too, wondering if she could continue further.
Wondering if it was worth it, because something else might fall apart; a sense, a semblance, in the deadening, withering state of the house, in lungs that no longer needed air.
The war. The Voice led. An Order. History repeating, and she realized he must’ve been in some faction of it – before everything came tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down. What would it be like from before, to have lived and seen and watched all of it?
Or none, if he’d been shut down. And why? To spare him the agony? To punish him for not doing, being enough, if the rest were gone? Or were they – were there more of him, nestled and gathered in the Voice’s grasp? The thoughts distracted her from her own demise, from walking in and amongst ghosts and ethers, tracing over the filaments of her tendrils until they seemed mostly free from one another; picked through the rubble, ruin, and wreckage. “Was there truly peace?” A question in the lull, if there had been a time, a place, where everything had been amongst and amidst a repose. “Something is brewing here again,” another murmur, a warning, an emblem of the severity of the mounting situation.
He wants to change his mind, hush her, say 'nevermind' and forget about the whole thing. He wants to get up, run far, far away before her cursed answer can make its way past her lips, outrun the distance between her mouth and his ears: disappear like a lightning flash, a ghost that changed its mind on haunting the world.
But he can't. He won't. His gentle fiddling with her hair masks how he braces himself within, how afraid he suddenly is: it's one thing to toy with the idea, to acknowledge that it has probably been quite a while, another to actually find out. To get the hard facts laid out on the table.
To get the continuation to that story.
He's not even sure he recognizes the way she refers to this place—the Hollowed Grounds. It's easier to get hung up on that rather than the fact that this place was sectioned off for ...
He keeps working through her hair.
Silent.
"Three..." he starts to say, before abruptly stopping. He doesn't want to go into the implications. He doesn't want to consider the facts. He doesn't want to think about it at all, because he doesn't know what it will do to him.
So he just ignores it. It's a jarring, bizarre and disturbing fact, like static in his veins, behind his eyes, a feeling of his soul stretching, elongating, disappearing in too many directions and not leaving enough Aamu in the middle, not enough to fill out this body, this old, old body—
He pushes it away, again and again, telling her instead the vague ins and outs of what the world was like before. "Maybe," he admits after a moment, lost in a strange, dazzling stream of half-remembered memories. "Maybe not. It's.. difficult, being on the inside. All swept up in what's going on, your own ideas, your own future. There were those who did not agree with us, even before we .. rose up."
In too deep now, perhaps, the story had already begun, revolved, spun around and around for its second coming; no rapture, no reverence, no intertwining of something pleasant or fantastical. Maybe there were living legends wandering amongst them now, right under their noses, ready to carve them all apart. She regretted it somehow, someway, because they’d been thrown right back into a den of lions without much else; their own claws, their own menace, whatever they were worth.
Her hair had likely lost the semblances of the weeds, the reefs, the waves by now, but if it kept them from flickering and falling apart, then she maintained the same semblances. Whittling away, fingers splayed between tendrils, sniping and taking away the echoes of her demise. A little bit more of renewal, resurgence, in her lungs, even as she dragged portions of the past back into the folds of the future.
Then it seemed to die away, and she furrowed her brows, pushed her lips together, over fangs and vitriol, back into the unknown. Indistinct, indefinite, filmy, misty, hazy, blurring fragments that could’ve been stitched back together had either of them known or understood anymore. But these were warren hedges to climb back over, just as her restless fears, just as his enigmatic shrouds, just as the rest of the world kept beckoning, kept clawing. “You rose up? Who started it all?” When there were clashing storylines, where victors painted the tales, where the end results skewed in alternate, divisive directions, sometimes the whispers offered different, alternative views. Who laid the first blow? Who stretched across battlefields to enact, to engage, to begin the rush?
The concern was paramount, and Mabel thought she might understand, even if she lacked the experience. Her eyes fell to the wooden floor again, looking at the patterns of timber, where ancestors had laid down the groundwork, the foundations, only for it all to rot and wither out again. “Things were starting, before…” Before she’d met her first fate. Before she’d begun the second. “And they seem to be worse now.”
There's too much static, too much blurring of the order of events. They were revered: reviled. Admired: abhorred. Some looked at them with awe and terror, others with disgust. Vaguely, he thinks there were those who lost control, who spent their days languishing on luxurious couches and biting people for that heady rush, surrounded by worship—and others who turned to anger, regret. Accepted and Acquired both who thought they used their magical talent for ill, perversion, and so, The Order formed.
But who, truly, threw the first stone? Aamu's mind flicks trough his memories, but he lacks precision, finesse, just gets bits and pieces, of fighting, fighting, for his life, for his right to exist, for the idea that they are equal (but with who?) and... "I don't know," he admits after a moment. "Did we just retaliate against the Order's influence? They hated us, even before the war broke out. Or did we provoke them into forming?"
Aamu shakes his head. "It's just yesterday to me, and yet my memories are—vague. Jumbled." It's more than a little uncomfortable to experience. He knows memories aren't supposed to be like that.
"The Order?" he asks, worried, hushed: the self-righteous staring down from on high. Stormbreak. He wants her to say no, tell him it's not still them, but he remembers their fanaticism too well. As long as there still were Ascended and the Voice he thinks the Order will remain.
She couldn’t make sense of it either – tried, her tongue grasping at questions and her hands grasping at tendrils – though nothing seemed to conspire or unravel between the two of them. She’d been gone, dead, perished, before the name of the Order had been brought up. Before the reality of their ancient ways began to court into the void once more. Her head hung, eyes once more to the floor, face scrunched into either a scowl or frown; the point didn’t matter. “I don’t know,” she echoed. They’d likely learn more in the coming days, as reality intertwined over the fog and mist, over the haze and shrouds, lifting the veils from their renewed lives. This was just the beginning.
Of what, she couldn’t, wouldn’t know.
The uncertainty was the only thing to truly prevail – provocations ranging from either side. So she was left to muddle around in the dark too, and together they were just thrown back into the abyss. She didn’t know how to get out.
Not without claws and fangs.
“Sorry,” she whispered back into the footholds. For a lot of things – but she didn’t give them a name. Instead, Mabel rose, the trembling subsided. “I think I’ll…just try to sponge off.” And call it good – fumbling her way back towards the bathroom, retrieving some other container from one of the cabinets.
