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's things he ought to be thinking about: things he ought to be feeling, sounding out, teasing into the shape of the whole.
But he can't. Not now. Not yet, when the Hollowed Grounds are still rubble, a ruin, a grave. Aamu has sifted through it, has touched curled and burnt fingers, smashed skulls, witnessed the multitudes of scorched and charred tech.
The truth is this: he can't face it yet.
The words die on his lips, turn to dust in his soul, flee the focus of his mind.
He needs escape, as he stands amid the devastation of the Grounds. Mabel is there, with him, and as the darkness deepens around them he turns to glance at her. "We still have our shifts," he muses quietly.
There had been no need of a dragon during the darkness. He cannot properly put into words how it all turned out to be not at all what he had expected, for nothing can adequately describe how he feels: desolate, heartbroken, forlorn. Cowardly. Filthy.
There had been no need of a dragon during the darkness, but Aamu needs one now.
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
They lived.
And that in itself was glorious – something to behold over the smoldering ruins, over the rampage of fire and brimstone, over the ruins, ruins, ruins.
There would be pieces to pick up later. There would be rage to tether and bind to. There would be moments stretched upon infinite wakes, where they could no longer go back to who, to what, they’d been before.
But she didn’t care right now.
She could be mad, incensed, outraged. She could be a ball of wrath. And maybe she would be all of that, later, later, later – but for the present, the girl was nothing but a survivor. Charred, beaten down, rampaged, foiled, cut, slashed, and torn, but alive and awakened and healed all the more. She didn’t care that she’d rendered monsters apart. It didn’t haunt her. The weapons in her hands were all the brighter, all the better.
And within the darkness, they came together again.
Mabel could complain about Wessex’s horrendous plans later. She could insinuate other entanglements, other bastions, when the world wasn’t so shaky and feeble, when they’d had moments of breathing, beyond annihilation. Therein, she only gave Aamu the tiniest of smirks, before she too reached into herself, into the gift Henry had given and granted to her selfish, ridiculous self –
He grows: elongates, broadens, sprouts new limbs that stretch hungrily towards the open sky. His nostrils flare as he inhales, lungs widening in this new body that craves oxygen—his veins shudder to the beat of his heart. Aamu throws his head back and roars, letting his dragon's voice roll and rumble like thunder in the Outskirts.
If words fail him, perhaps just screaming won't.
He lifts his large paws, pressing digits and claws into softening soil, snow-mush and charred ruins. And he feels it, the texture of the ground, the wood, and he smells it, the stink of death and smoke and put-out fires and burnt flesh—
(He craves hands, stroking his scales—)
With a snap his wings open, muscles bunching, and Aamu launches himself into the sky: his wings a second heartbeat booming over the Grounds as he arrows after Mabel, watching the ground fall away and change underneath the stars.
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
She had never seen the world like this.
Certainly, under the cloak of midnight, of illustrious shadows, of how she tucked herself away into the depths of desecration and darkness. But not spread out, above, above, above everything – as if the surface was an intangible ether, unimaginable, unreachable fathoms made beautiful and craven. Mabel didn’t even know where they were, uncertain if it mattered, beyond the remnants of ruin.
Below there was naught but greenery and life and color, and had she not been an eagle she might have cried.
She might have growled. She might have torn the petals apart.
And then Aamu was a dragon, scales amidst the cloak of night, blending and bending, and she streamlined, smaller and compact, into and against the void. We can talk like this, she uttered; aware of Attuned natures, of how they could connect and correlate, familiar in the way that Wessex made her announcements known.
This somehow felt better though. In control. Their own.
Not the Wraith’s. She didn’t want that woman anywhere near her thoughts anyway.
A voice, not soft, pierced through again. Do you know where we are?
Then he promptly does not think about her again, because it is far too dangerous, and he thinks instead of how the darkened land below him is familiar. The mountains far away on the horizon—the aerial vantage—the closeness to the shimmering stars, the velvet sky—
The feeling of wings—
He beats the air hard; pushes one wing down, the other up; pulls them close.
The world spins around him as he rolls in the air, up is down and down is up, and then he levels out again. His breath is cold and white, streaming between his sharp teeth, and for the first time since he woke up Aamu is alive again.
A rough exhale is his response, a dragon's hummed agreement. But then—
We're over King's End he projects at her: soft, gentle, as ever. Mournful. His blue-eyed dragon-self peers down at the rolling barrows. I like to come out here. Always did.
And slowly he begins to spiral above that calm place of ends and beginnings, an obsidian dream high up in the sky.
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
What are the mounds for? She thought she knew. Could sense it, in the intermingling of grief not her own. Could feel it, in the molds of a surface dotted and lined, varnished and lacquered, in color. To remember? To cherish? To love? Would her family cherished such a place as their last respite? To rest, before they went to Mort?
And Evelyn, to the Voice?
What did they see, on the other side?
All she could remember was a haze, a fog, a drifting, drifting current. No one gave her these rites, these rituals. Gone before she could be collected. Gone before she could even be remembered, or thought of.
She flapped her wings and drifted, glided, on the cool breeze, on the soft, mulling silhouettes of darkness. The youth wished for something deep in her chest, but burrowed and buried it down, down, down. Why? Why had he come out? For peace? For calm? For serenity?
Mabel didn’t know what any of that was like anymore.
He slips lower on the current, a slow descent, his large form sweeping over the graves of King's End. They are barrows. Graves for the kings of old, I believe. It smells of spring, of fresh, rain-wet earth and budding flowers, and of the cold sky. Aamu closes his eyes as he inhales, fog-breath streaming out in a burst from his nostrils again.
He spirals lower and lower, unsure of how to respond. And the world, closer now, is so tantalizing with all its scents and impressions, and he hungers to take it all in his jaws and devour it—
He wishes the sun would not burn him still.
I don't know, he finally admits, dipping his claws into the early tulips as he glides over the colorful meadow. I just like it here.
A couple of startled blink hares disappear underneath him, arcing out of sight and into their burrows; his head snaps in their direction but he makes no move to follow, beating his wings to gain altitude again, climbing back towards the stars. Want to hunt? he asks with the mental equivalent of a lazy grin, mirrored by the slight display of fangs.
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
Kings of old; people who were deemed to have mattered. She wanted to ask about the others – the commoners, who lived out their lives amongst and amidst the Grounds, or elsewhere, far beyond, who outnumbered the royalty, whose backs curved, whose shoulders grew tired. Wisely, perhaps, she kept her thoughts to herself, unaware if any of the sudden anger spiking through made it towards the dragon.
But there were no other explanations. She could see why he’d like it – with the essence and picturesque void of some quiet serenity, a place to reflect, to wander, to wonder, perceptions aligned or thrown off-kilter into the runes and petals.
Her eagle eyes caught the figments of the hares down below – an instinctive, animalistic draw towards fur and lives and beating, bleeding hearts resounded in her mind. Yes, she answered, she delved, she dove. Raptorial, what she’d yearned and craved to be when she wasn’t sinking in between fathoms of hell and misery and whatever else buoyed to the surface.
Reaching, reaching, reaching, for the snap, for the life to vanish beneath her machinations.
It doesn't matter. The dragon holds no regard for the life of blink hares and moushrooms, is merely intrigued, awakened, by their movement. He watches Mabel, black and white in the stark starlight, drop from the sky with her talons outstretched.
He thinks of his wristblades. He thinks of Wessex's claws, Isla's scalpels. Isn't it time Mabel pursue their own intrinsic form of weaponry too, a complement to conventional knives?
He'll have to bring it up, later. He doesn't want to think of the world now.
Aamu rolls again in the sky, drops his head down and arcs towards the ground; flares his wings to catch himself into a proper, balanced dive. (Dreams, of the ocean.)
He's not sure how Mabel's hunt went, but his passing presence scares the moushrooms into motion again. They dart among the flowers and he snaps for them, with mouth and talons, just barely catching one in a clawed foot. Surprised and delighted, Aamu climbs back into the sky to ready himself for a second run.
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
(Because that is the end, the end, the end –
And sometimes not at all.)
If Mabel had thought of weaponry holstered inside her form before this moment, it scarcely seemed to matter, as her talons unfurled, as they gripped and grasped and pulled the hare towards her. A crunch resounded, ribcages, spines, and it didn’t sicken her. It was nothing but the slightest glimmer of triumph, a glow of satisfaction. Not her first kill, not when she’d been raised as a farm child –
But the first as a bird. The first as an Ascended. The first as someone risen and trying and striving again.
Her eyes scanned, watched, while her prey’s life blinked out. The dragon, far larger, far grander, far more dangerous, descended, scaring, intimidating, the faction of moushrooms below. Another snagged and snared, and while she was an emotionless little blot against the sky, she permitted another round of victorious clamber to fizzle and sizzle amongst the bond.
Short-lived and hollow, perhaps, but something after all the madness.
What did you think? came through, and Mabel didn’t give it a direction, a wave, whether it was about the disastrous plunge of LongNight, how they’d barely scraped away with their lives, or the here and now. The present. Moments interspersed without tragedy. Open-ended.
This portion of the thread is now over (but not fin'd, that would happen in the linked thread. Both count as exploration for the purposes of the seasonal event requirements). Good luck getting home.
