[split] (se) aeria gloris
Mabel Occidendum


Age: 23 | Height: 5'7" | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 3 - Strg: 16 - Dext: 16 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 16 - Int:
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#15
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
Maybe it was apprehension strung and stung between them, settling in amidst the sudden spread of upheaval. And she was like a wraith again, a little ghost on the sidelines, seeking to dig her eerie, eldritch claws into the earth, to pick and choose where she’d haunt next. The inquiries and confusion were understandable; for a while she’d been adrift too, uncertain, unsure. We voted a long time ago. After Rexanna died. And Clemente, though she hadn’t known him as well. When everything had hurt, when everything had been raw, when there’d been more of them, and stronger too.

There were so many other factors then. Had the eagle actually contained brows, they would’ve been furrowed, and instead, her eyes sought the earth, staring down into the darkness, the haze of long blades of grass. I don’t think many of us understood it. She still didn’t, not really. And we didn’t have so many new Ascended. Like fodder; all of them huddled together on the meager scraps of weaponry, nearly useless; save for Azrael, and she’d agree that most of them would’ve been dead yet again had it not been for the growing demigod. So they had no say at all.

No choice, born once more, to be led into slaughter a season after their renewal.

And who was to blame?

Then she listened to the torrents of bewilderment, and her avian eyes followed, flickered, after the set of draconic jaws and agitated nuances. Wessex, the Wraith, powerful and potent enough to have done exactly as she’d might’ve concocted – to take them all apart on her own – except that hadn’t been an option. We could’ve waited. Another year, until they were strong enough. We could’ve left. Gone elsewhere for those final weeks of Deepfrost, let the monsters reign.

And then she nodded, the finality in her stare.
MABEL
Weaponsmith

Age: 361 | Height: Kinda short | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 2 - Strg: 14 - Dext: 17 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 11 - Int:
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#16
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
His breath is quick, an unpleasant vestige of a different time. They voted—his mind races through the implications, through the centuries. The prototypes had been few and far between in his day, not a threat as long as you kept indoors or to certain areas during LongNight. But after three centuries scooped up with them, with the Ascended all but eradicated, the Voice trapped, the heralds to feed them falsehoods and the proximity—the wear and tear, the break-downs—

It's easy to see them reduced to monsters, a nuisance, and with a sudden influx of powerful, influential Outlanders who completely lack the context...

He's not sure what holds him so still. It feels like fear, like the world will break like glass if he so much as moves.

It's a tragedy hung heavily on his shoulders, and finally he sags. Disappointment fills him. Few things are as unpleasant as having your hopes dashed, your expectations unfulfilled. We should've left. His projected voice is weary, dejected, sorrowful. They were our older brothers and sisters. What right did we have to slaughter them, just because they were inconvenient?

As if he'd known, because he should've, but he'd been a fucking fool. There's no excuses for blind faith.

The next comes out on a ragged breath, a hiss curling around the meaning of his words. What Queen turns against her own?
and turns me to gold in the sunlight
Aamu
Mabel Occidendum


Age: 23 | Height: 5'7" | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 3 - Strg: 16 - Dext: 16 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 16 - Int:
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#17
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
Maybe the experiments, the monsters had been different in Aamu’s time. Before three hundred years cast them apart, before jealousy and envy cut into their clawing hands and ministrations. Her thoughts embarked towards experiences in the latter years, when Outlanders had arrived with ideals and strategies, with doors, with efforts to maintain either a semblance of peace or provocation.

Mabel wasn’t sad for the fiends.

Mabel wasn’t sad for those foolish enough to try something else, when the Naturals had always known how to survive.

Mabel was only acutely aware of the sorrow and tragedy coiling into the air, and had no means or measures to stop it. The youth’s frustration lay solely in how everything had been orchestrated and done in – high risk for low rewards. They were more than inconvenient. They murdered. Truth be told – it had always been the idiots dumb enough to try and evade, capture, contort, or not listen. They tried to take upgrades.. There was no fear embedded in her words, but the truth and heart of the matter. Strike deals.

In the end though, it didn’t really matter.

The last question, the slide of the hiss, made her maneuver away from the puddle once more, heralding more towards a patch of thickened clover. How her parents would’ve loved these fertile fields. One who has lost the point.
MABEL
Weaponsmith

Age: 361 | Height: Kinda short | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 2 - Strg: 14 - Dext: 17 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 11 - Int:
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#18
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
They wanted to survive, says the patient dragon, one piercing blue eye following the little eagle. But truly, what she says cuts his heart: they were sentient, they'd fucking tried in every way they knew, and what had they done? Kept calling them monsters, dehumanizing them, and finally leaving them to burn. Don't you? (And that's why they are were they are.)

Aamu lowers his head to the puddle as Mabel wanders away. His reflection and the sky are all distorted, and he feels like plunging his head into what little water there is to cool himself. He doesn't want to be angry with Wessex without even trying to fix things, but with the close connection of their stolen Attuned bond it is difficult to not feel what Mabel's feeling.

Instead he just shoves his blunt muzzle into the shallow water, letting the clear liquid pool on his tongue before throwing it back. Savoring it. Crystal clear and cold, fresh, full of flavor—

He should steal senses more often.

What else has she done? he asks softly.
and turns me to gold in the sunlight
Aamu
Mabel Occidendum


Age: 23 | Height: 5'7" | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 3 - Strg: 16 - Dext: 16 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 16 - Int:
Played by: Heather Offline
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Posts: 425 | Total: 10,646
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#19
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
The way Aamu twisted it back cut a little, and her avian eyes narrowed a pinch. Her head hung lower, gaze flickering over the dewy grass, unfortunately caught in the throes of the intricacies, the consequences, and how they all hadn’t been so different. For a moment, she merely traced over boundaries and senses she hadn’t had for years, the coolness lingering between talons, the air pressing inward, the breeze ruffling feathers, the balance of everything else coinciding with the conversation they were having. Survival. What followed was a soft murmur; the youth wouldn’t deny that she’d done exactly that. And we still killed them so we could live. And she’d do it again.

She’d do it to nearly anyone, just so she had a chance to remain once more.

Another mulish consideration rallied around her, and she didn’t realize, didn’t perceive, the way it might be shared and shattered, how it might influence and entangle – emotions made by a youth, embittered and rancorous. Isn’t that enough? That she’d willingly put them in the throes of slaughter?

Her head shook, and some of the plumage angled upwards, recalling what she could from a life before it was cut. During her first reign, she and several others attacked the Mathair in the Greatwood – which is why we’re banned from it. Whether or not anyone cared about that aspect was one thing – the Fae weren’t likely to ever trust them, and Wessex had made herself, and those with her, poor representatives. Potentially helped spread the Blight. A habit, a certain distinction, in polarizing others against her – because there were many Ascended who hadn’t sunk and slithered the way the Wraith had.
MABEL
Weaponsmith

Age: 361 | Height: Kinda short | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 2 - Strg: 14 - Dext: 17 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 11 - Int:
Played by: Neowulf Offline
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Posts: 229 | Total: 642
MP: 970
#20
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
Part of him wants to press, spool the discussion out further, but something gives him pause. Maybe it's guilt, the way he's trying to take the world and lay it out flat, in stark light, to point at it and say here, this is how it is when you look at it objectively—it's too soon. Too cruel, to take someone who's barely more than a child, who walked through an inferno and sat in darkness for a week while death howled outside, and say it was wrong. Yeah, he says softly after a moment. He wants to say that they didn't have to, that that's the difference, but he lets it go.

When she questions him (or his motives) he's quick to try to reassure her. It is, but I am curious. Three hundred years spent asleep in scree and ice does not inform you of politics, after all. He listens intently, but it's.. shocking.

The Mathair? Oh no. That was pretty serious. Had The Voice had anything to do with it? Had there been a reason? Why? And what's the Blight? Whatever it had been it sounds bad, and Aamu's gaze follows her in the dewy grasses.
and turns me to gold in the sunlight
Aamu
Mabel Occidendum


Age: 23 | Height: 5'7" | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 3 - Strg: 16 - Dext: 16 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 16 - Int:
Played by: Heather Offline
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Posts: 425 | Total: 10,646
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#21
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
But they had, they had, they had – and the guilt didn’t strike her probably the way he’d wanted it to. Not for a tiny speck of a heathen, who’d been sent to linger in the barracks and stare upwards at flames, at infidels who aimed to strike and damage and tear apart. Not for a girl who’d already died once, and was so desperate to live again.

She wasn’t softness, not in the way his voice quieted, not in the way he seemed to hush and accept her rash impudence. Angles and bitterness, edges and rancor, compiled and pooled into one being, whose borrowed feathers plucked closer to her sides, eyes shifting away, away, away, up towards the moonlit sky and the expanse of another world they tread within. Something to do with a portal. Which didn’t make much sense to her afterwards either – though she and Evelyn had been dealing with the rest of their fading, dying family at the time, and she could’ve been just as lost as the rest of the inhabitants – since they opened one in the Spire soon after.

The Blight was a sickness, but only non-Ascended seemed to contract it. Which hadn’t painted them in a very forgiving, well-orchestrated light. It was as if everyone was feral. Attacking one another, brethren, loved ones. Animals – predator and prey alike. She shook her eagle head, uncertain how else to convey the sentiments. That is how the rest of the world often remembers us. The ones who brought scourges upon the earth. Representatives of destruction.
MABEL
Weaponsmith

Age: 361 | Height: Kinda short | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 2 - Strg: 14 - Dext: 17 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 11 - Int:
Played by: Neowulf Offline
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Posts: 229 | Total: 642
MP: 970
#22
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
A portal? Aamu's scaly eyelids close as his mind wheels back through the centuries, to a life lived before, but he comes up blank. Had there been a portal in the Greatwood back then? Maybe, maybe not. He opens his eyes again.

The world is such an unnecessary complicated place.

Oh, he breathes. The Ascended are different—not organic enough to contract a virus, not functioning the same way anymore.

He doesn't really know what else to say. He's tired to the core, but doesn't know how to quit—not with the Order around, anyway. In death he would not care but as long as he lives he can't leave this fight behind. The dragon blinks, blinks again. Looks away. I can imagine how that looked to the others, he finally says, his mental voice thin. What he wants to say is why, why why why, but no one has the answer to that. His lips twitch, baring a hint of teeth in the monochrome night. Do you know how was it cured?
and turns me to gold in the sunlight
Aamu
Mabel Occidendum


Age: 23 | Height: 5'7" | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 3 - Strg: 16 - Dext: 16 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 16 - Int:
Played by: Heather Offline
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Posts: 425 | Total: 10,646
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#23
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
She was tired too, and it wavered in between the bond, in between the nuances of exertion she hadn’t felt in some time; in these bodies, they weren’t so infallible, so perfected. She rustled the wings several more times, continually angling away from the water, until she found a patch of clover she liked, and her talons sunk into its bed of moss underneath.

And he could imagine how the world had viewed them in those moments – animosity, hostility, the age-old primordial sway alive and well again and again – if it had ever truly dissipated. For all the good they extended, there were always hoards of other propositions and positions; and Mabel was past the point of caring how they looked, how they appeared. It never seemed to change to those already set in their ways, and what was the use in trying?

As for the cure? Vi, his roses, and a Fae who sacrificed herself. Still capable of being seen, like a statue, carved and intricate near the borderlines of Greatwood and Grounds.
MABEL
Weaponsmith

Age: 361 | Height: Kinda short | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 2 - Strg: 14 - Dext: 17 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 11 - Int:
Played by: Neowulf Offline
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Posts: 229 | Total: 642
MP: 970
#24
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And why had Vi not been cure enough? Was he not the God of Life? What, possibly, could be strong enough that the God alone was not able to fix it? Or was it more bullshit along the lines of oh but we don't know if you really want to stay alive if you're not willing to make sacrifices? Still: it's enough to be an uncomfortable thought. Was it something the Voice had created? But if so, why?

There's too many questions, and not enough answers. And this is not where he wanted the day to go. He wanted to escape, to roam and fly beneath the stars, hunt and laugh and enjoy something simple, not.. not get to here.

Slowly, carefully, the large dragon moves from the puddle to the eagle. His claws sink into the soft loam, his movement hobbled by the moushroom still clutched in his front paw. Here, he rumbles as he bends his head to touch the point of his muzzle to her feathers, offering her the moushroom. It's a sizeable meal for an eagle, and nothing at all for a dragon. For you.
and turns me to gold in the sunlight
Aamu
Mabel Occidendum


Age: 23 | Height: 5'7" | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 3 - Strg: 16 - Dext: 16 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 16 - Int:
Played by: Heather Offline
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Posts: 425 | Total: 10,646
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#25
Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear
Maybe the most important inquiry had yet to be said: when were they ever enough?

Any gods, any heralds, any mighty crescendos, any false promises, any latent beings?

But Mabel couldn’t say it, and it stuck to her tongue, her brain, her mind, like one of the many defiant orders pressing in amongst her skull. Hardwired to survive, yet to figure out how to truly thrive. Slowly intertwining, unwinding, from the predilections of hardships, digging into the granules, asking, asking, asking, question after question, but never certain if she wanted to hear the answer. If she wanted to know.

And then the dragon offered the eagle his meal, and her eyes widened, avian and confused – but taking it all the same.

When was the last time she’d tasted anything? Thank you, and she bowed her head, felt all the inclinations of a raptorial array over and over again – talons plucking, beak pulling apart, until there were things to relish in her mouth. A bird’s, and not truly her own, but enough of a sentiment for now. And while she picked it apart and wondered what it would feel like to do so to an enemy, to honor vengeance in the same decadence, the bond twisted and turned once more. Do you want to go home now? Was there more he wanted to see? Or had this been enough?
MABEL
Weaponsmith

Age: 361 | Height: Kinda short | Race: Ascended | Nationality: Natural | Citizenship: Hollowed Grounds
Level: 2 - Strg: 14 - Dext: 17 - Endr: 16 - Luck: 11 - Int:
Played by: Neowulf Offline
Change author:
Posts: 229 | Total: 642
MP: 970
#26
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
There's a twist through his systems as he gives up his meal, a predatory confusion born from the dragon parts of him. His jaws tense for a second, but, truly—his body is not hungry. It's only vanity. An animal huff, uncharacteristic for his human self, leaves his nostrils and he sits down to watch her.

The rip.

The tear.

The dead body firmly pinned by talons, plucked apart by a savage girl with her savage beak, gulped down the eagle's gullet. His mouth waters from memory and curiosity, but he's had his fill of taste already. Instead he lowers his head to sniff around the grass and the flowers, the wet scent of night, the aroma of rich soil—

She makes short work of the morsel. Aamu smiles a dragon's smile, reaching out again to touch his muzzle to the bloodied side of her head.

Yeah, he whispers, let's go home.

( finn <33 )
and turns me to gold in the sunlight
Aamu


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