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!
Darling please, just give us some time, and I swear we'll be alright
Hotaru has never been prone to fits of depression. At least not outwardly. As a creature with a strong will to live and thrive, there have been few times when life has brought her low enough to consider giving up in any sense of the word. Though things are slowly returning to rights in some ways - Kiada returning from death, reuniting with Deimos - everything else is simply...wrong. After the showdown with Shaju, the brief stint to see Deimos alive and well with her own eyes instead of word of mouth, Hotaru has returned. Not to Torchline directly, no, but to the Wilds beyond. The place she had stayed in her sickness, lost and delirious. Those memories are still locked behind a miasma, though she suspects they hold nothing of real value. All the same she is drawn past Torchline's boundaries and into the Oerwoud, Atlas trailing faithfully behind her as twilight descends in a haze of purples across the sky.
Part of her regrets having awoken here at all.
Superstitions do not often affect her, but it seems ever since her return everything has been falling apart. Shaju's return. Sunjata's status of Governor being attacked. Nate departing for the Grounds. Remi and Zephyr attacking Sunjata. The mob. Their house. The fight. All throughout she is helpless to do anything but try in vain to hold the broken pieces in hands too small and scarred to be of any use. Her own anxieties plague her. Some nights she stays awake staring at her beloveds, feeling misplaced and out of sorts. She loves them, and they her, but even Hotaru can't overlook the deep bond between them that she can't replicate.
With their recoveries hanging over her head, the stress of it all drives her out and away, where the air is cooler and not so oppressive. Hotaru is a child of snow and ice, and no amount of time in Torchline will change that. So she walks as the sun begins to sink, hands extended to let her fingers dance listlessly across ferns and flower petals as she tries to come to terms with everything that has happened since her return.
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
we're all stories unfinished and we die to find some fitting words to write
Everyone seems to have lost their goddamn collective minds, in one way or another.
And what happened after the fight? Whoever got Nate away was a fucking idiot when Hotaru and Atlas were there, but she lost them in the mess. So she spent some time looking for Sunjata, but the water is vast and he is small, but Wessex is smaller, and she doesn’t know Torchline the way others do - not the way she knows the Grounds.The Queen eventually calls it, resurfacing and hauling herself back to the beach.
Still, she doesn’t want to go the Grounds. Tense silences lay in the dark there. Stormy eyes. Discontent. Unhappy. Alive, but something eats at them and to be honest, the Wraith doesn’t understand and no one will say anything, so… why subject herself to that? Loneliness is a punishment in and of itself, why flog herself unnecessarily?
Why not lose herself for a night or two?
Beyond Apopo, the sounds of humanity disappear and are replaced by pure wilderness. The sounds, the colors, the glint of eyes in the undergrowth… Gods, she can’t help but smile in awe. Rae and their imagination, Rae - it seems to butt up against something in her gut, this acknowledgement that they’ve done something amazing and yet still want to kill her - something equally amazing. It - her fingers trail over every exquisite bit she can reach - lacking some tactile senses, yes, but imagining what they might be.
The sound of something that doesn’t take care where it’s going breaks her reveries and she calls out, “Hello?” The only things that don’t take enough care in the wilderness are surely either human or babies.
Darling please, just give us some time, and I swear we'll be alright
Atlas' ears are far more powerful and finely tuned than Hotaru's. While she is more than capable on her own merit if danger comes their way, he is the signal for when it comes. At first it's a gentle pulse through the bond; something nearby. As their paths begin to convene, it becomes more pressing, and Hotaru's steps slow, breath going soft and shallow to better hear what might be coming.
A voice is not what she's expecting. Especially a familiar one.
A single point of Atlas' dark ear directs her, and though the light is low it has yet to set, giving Hotaru more than enough to work with as she sets off in search. The woman isn't far, but the foliage is thick enough that it takes some maneuvering to get through. Visual confirmation of her suspicions is all it takes for her shoulders to slump and a tired smile to curl her lips. "Wessex," she breathes, and there's no hesitation to how she jogs across the space between them to throw her arms around the other woman and clutch her close. One more person she has not lost in the time she was sick and lost in the Wilds.
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
we're all stories unfinished and we die to find some fitting words to write
“Hotaru?” Wessex replies, a consciously held internal dam bursting somewhere beneath her rib cage. A flood of emotion - recent and old - rips through like a tsunami wave, flooding everything from that sacral hiding place to the roots of her hair. Inorganic or not, the Wraith feels far more human in this moment than she has in a long time, as she reaches out to pull Hotaru in to her, arms folding tightly around the smaller woman as if she might never let go.
“I saw you at the Trial,” she begins, “And couldn’t believe it - but then Nate and everything and I lost you in the rush and -” and now here she is. Alive. Flesh and blood. Not eaten by the Wilds of Caido like so many others. Her mouth presses gently against the crown of Hotaru’s head, a kiss of indeterminate meaning, but tender and gentle and full of yearning and relief all the same.
Allowing the embrace to last as long as either of them would like, Wessex murmurs against the woman’s head “Gods, I was worried.”
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.
