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!
Perhaps normal people do not plan getting plastered into their vacations down to the night and the events that would follow, but Hotaru and Deimos had never been normal. For all they may share a glass by the fireplace, neither is particularly inclined to drunkenness or dependency.
Hotaru is not hard to get past tipsy. Not surprising, all things considered. With her incredibly petite form and how rarely she ever seriously drinks, at least she's a cheap date. Curled into the bench seat in the corner, shoes already kicked off and hair spilling across the table as she leans over it to curl around her drink, she is both the picture of making herself at home and a budding storm. He had sensed it in her before, and though her mind is too far gone to speculate, she wouldn't be surprised if Deimos could see the tension building in real time.
Moroseness is the first step. A deep, abiding heartbreak that is harder to choke down than the burning liquid she imbibes. Long, delicate fingers tap against her newly empty glass, electricity playing over the ends and lighting up the crystal as she stares unblinking at the sparks. "Luxere don't particularly like me you know," she says out of nowhere. "'s my lightning, or so the natives say. Dark. Apparently magic has categories here." Disdain drips from her lips as she gives an inelegant snort. "How is it dark? It's an element. It's nature. It has no morality, no intentions." None but those ascribed by foolish humans. "What do they even prefer? What is considered light to them?" The natural hadn't told her, Hotaru had been too poleaxed in the moment to ask. Lifting her gaze, Hotaru's face suddenly crumples a little. "Why does my magic make me dark, and not the blood on my hands?"
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
Deimos, ever the shelter in the storm, wasn’t prone to getting drunk either. Mostly because he could drink multitudes of his constituents under the table; through sheer mass and tolerance, so he provided a very calm, if slightly tipsy sanctuary in the midst of fireplaces. The liquor did manage to relax him, however, less rigid of a stance, the tautness in his spine gone, eyes flickering elsewhere, and not the quiet, piercing examination of gauging threats or potential terrors. Feet resting on a chair instead, head leaning back on the wooden backing, complete with staring up at the ceiling from time to time. But he maintained his protective guard in simply existing; capable of drawing upon any marvel of strength within the blink of an eye. The alcohol wouldn’t slow those inherent measures down.
The subject matter escaped him – attention deviating briefly before he came back to focus on her melancholy. The Sword half-expected the Valkyrie to fall apart at the seams at some visual reminder of either of her ridiculous relationships, not the subject matter of luxere. And then magic.
Perhaps someone had instigated – which wasn’t ever a grand idea, except when he prodded like an incessant delinquent. “Maybe they do not care for your singing.” An arch of his brow as he tilted his head in her direction, the Cheshire grin tipping its way along his mouth. “Well, Auni likes me.” And he wrinkled his nose in an obnoxious challenge, before actually listening to the proclamations. “Does it bother you, even if it is fitting?” They’d both been in thresholds of darkness – and considering how he’d been born, raised, and the elements already long since featured in his blood, the sentiments didn’t irritate as they seemed to antagonize her. “Maybe it is how they have been wielded before.” And had nothing to do with them.
On a teasing bout, he pulsed water into his hands, let a massive droplet conjure and hover before an open palm, before casting it into smaller segments, and letting the vapor splash near her face. “Supposedly water is light. And creation.”
It is good to see him relaxed, and it lends a fondness that allows her to roll his eyes at his cajoling response. Unbothered by the lightness he brings to her festering, voidlike pitch. Her resounding snort is far from ladylike. Deimos always did bring that out in her. "Auni likes anyone, do you wish to stake your claim on that crumbling molehill?" Her own taunt rolls out of a sharp-edged smile, weaker than their normal stock. Gaze dropping back to the sparks on her fingers, Hotaru gives his question the due consideration it inspires.
"No. No, it doesn't. Wessex told me she had been called a monster, and how she was scared she was. But Deimos," her eyes lift back to his, dark and roiling with a storm beneath the surface that is aching to be released. "I don't care if I'm a monster. I had to refrain from telling her that she should embrace it, that those who spit such words at her are fearful cowards deserving to be crushed underfoot and proven right." And then the Wraith had said that her thievery and what she'd done to survive did not make her a good person either. Ironic then, that Hotaru had done far worse simply because she desired it.
Water splashes against her face, and in her startlement - or inebriation, really - her lightning pulses in her hand and shatters the glass she'd been playing with, scattering bits all across the table. Hotaru jumps, staring down at the debris, and then immediately begins laughing. "Oops." There is a mischievous look to her face as she lets it rise towards Deimos, ignoring the noise of discontentment from the bartender. "Creation. It's not as if you can heal with it, and it carries the electricity of lightning like a conduit. See how foolish it sounds?" Standing - and summarily wobbling on bare feet - she plucks her shoes from the ground and extends her hand sharply to Deimos, unaware of how the lingering static of her magic is causing her hair to begin lifting, and how if he takes it he will likely shock himself. "Let's go test it out, this lightness you have." It's abjectly mocking, grin wild and untethered, amused by the notion that Deimos is some angelic paragon in the eyes of Caido simply because he can manipulate a little water.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
Snorts and eyerolls were better than the doom and gloom, which they’d both had quite enough of in the past few months, seasons, and years; give or take the abundance of misery and melancholy in their lives. So he remained a seditious, mutinous slate, wrinkling his nose again, head raised in an imperial glance, not yielding to her arguments. “Yes.” A huff, a snort of his own, residual and inherent in his chest, followed and rallied. “He gave me presents once too.” Committed to his edge and ends, he intentionally provoked; needling along, as if presiding that she’d likely never received such honors.
The subject matter shifting to Wessex of all people caused a grimace; mostly because he didn’t want to waste any time, enjoyment, or good drinks on the Wraith. Perhaps it was wiser not to answer on this front – uncertain if Hotaru was still friends with the monarch – because she might’ve fit the definition of such heathens and fiends, just as much as they did. Was there remorse or consequences for her actions against the Fae? Any vehemence for her justified antics on leading her people to slaughter? Was it because a majority survived, that everything was fine?
He had no defense for her. Wessex had no need of going further into the mold to prove herself an instrument of destruction.
So he ignored it; sagacity still paramount in the forefront of his mind, even if it was slightly dulled by drink. Instead, the beast gave a light round of laughter as the glass shattered, lightning uninhibited, feeling the sparks angle their way towards him. Static pulsed and pulled at his own hair, and for a few moments they were held aloft in the most ridiculous way. But he didn’t take her hand – had no need to be zapped and pulsing before they could even make their way out of the door, rising steadily on his own, and grabbing hold of his bag still hanging off the chair. Another snort ensued, opening the entrance so she could somehow shuffle her way through, and out they could wander into the evening – stupefying and ridiculous.
“It sounds like you are jealous I have been so blessed,” Deimos tossed back in obvious sarcasm, having never thought of himself as any form of paragon, both of them knowing full well that hardly any light had ever touched his soul. In figments, fractions, and fractures; before dissipating the way they’d come.
"Fur on your clothes? What present can a luxere even give?" Torn between amusement and genuine curiosity at the notion. She doesn't bother calling out his silence when she brings up Wessex, it's far too normal for him, though she appreciates him biting his tongue all the same. There are few emotions she is allowing herself to feel beyond the haze of drunkenness, and whatever it is she feels for the Wraith isn't allowed tonight.
Instead there is laughter that spills free at the hilarious image her best friend makes as his hair stands on end, trying in vain to reign in a magic that has lived in her veins for nearly all of her life. This is precisely why she doesn't drink past being tipsy you see, and it's merely further proof of her lack of familiarity with the sensation.
Stumbling out into the night air with a grateful look thrown at Deimos - that ends up aimed more at the door in her swaying state - Hotaru charges straight for the beach. If it can be called a charge at all with her diminutive size and wandering path. The call of the ocean waves is like a siren's song, but what it is she seeks is till beyond her. "Who is to say my lightning cannot do more than destroy?" she waxes philosophical, Deimos' words already forgotten at the door. "I've used it in my spa, I've lit fires and even made my lovers orgasm with it. That not good enough for the prudes of Caido?" She throws her shoes down into the sand and rips her coat off to have it join them, something writhing and horrible in the pit of her stomach that she can't even fully understand. All Hotaru knows is that her breaths come quicker, grip on her magic slipping more by the second as it crests and swells inside her stomach, stealing away any empty space inside.
Lifting her hands, though there is no reason to do so, she pulls on the clouds overhead and calls lightning down to strike the sand in a huge blast of light and heat that leaves a crater in the beach. Fearless, she stalks down towards it, gesturing with a flailing arm as she spins and trips backwards to steady herself, hoping to find Deimos in the dark of dusk to point out the branching glass that has formed from the impact. "See? Creation!"
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
“Sticks and leaves,” he spoke of the prized possessions; back when times weren’t so distraught and miserable, back when families had been together instead of stranded, stretched, abandoned, or desolate. Some other scattered proportions he still had, tucked away in Halo.
But then there was no more of Wessex, and he could breathe the night air, varnish the sea through his lungs, listen to her rant and rave with little care – eyes flickering into the evening swells, listening to the puncture and juncture of the current racing onward. He maintained several paces behind her charging figure, anticipating some barrage of incantations, and having no need to be in the crossfire.
Sure enough, upon her words (and here he shook his head), the lightning shuddered, immersing light and heat into the array of twilight. Like any soul, his eyes went affixed to it, watching, waiting, until it twisted and turned, the siren call of its enchantments bristling, snapping, and crackling down into the sand, composing a bramble, a branch, of glass. Nothing ornate, nothing adorned, just sheer, raw power; the threat of more and more. It caused another slight smile to eclipse in the corners of his mouth; whether or not she could see that within the folds of darkness hardly mattered. He did manage another huff at her distinction.
Thereafter, he compelled his own – the Sword’s undulations disturbing the sea, calling, presiding, as its master in the current wake and vestiges, warping, tracing, taking until the waves were driven around the sanction of glass, swarming, surrounding, and bombarding; twisting and turning until he could manifest a miniature cyclone, Lilliputian tempests. “So what is truly troubling you?” Mustered over the rallying of powers, as if it was nothing but everyday happenstance; if she was capable of seeing all the angles of an element, and not plagued by being a monstrous fiend herself, what was driving the onslaught?
A trail of endeared laughter draws him onward, better memories driving her onward even if the light of their recollections is only a mere flicker of a candle’s flame. Soon blown out in the wake of her presiding storms, the source of which seems beyond her despite it brewing inside her own skin. It is easier to release it than to let it fester. Hotaru has always felt so strongly. Nothing ever done by halves and partial measures. Born intrinsically gifted for such elemental might, she had raised herself in primordial expressions, and tonight is no exception. The mighty bang of noise feels like a hammer striking steel inside her sternum, bones vibrating in an echo of sensation. Each breath feels wild, a puff of exertion she can’t control. The alcohol makes everything both easier and harder somehow. Harder to control herself, but easier to feel and face. To come to terms with everything she’d hidden away from her own perceptive eyes.
The waves come closer upon the shore, and Hotaru turns to stare at the display of similar might from Deimos’ hands. It is beautiful in the moonlight. She hates it. And maybe her magic really is dark, because hers had been beautiful in her own eyes, but the noise and damage still scared away the hels and gathered night-goers. They didn’t appreciate it the same way she did, and yet the beauty of the ocean drew them instead. It hurts in a way she can’t understand, parallels and comparisons suddenly stark before her eyes in a way she can ignore no longer. As if sensing it, Deimos’ words reach her in the dark, and Hotaru’s next inhale sounds wounded even to her own ears.
“I may be dark. I may be a monster. But I’m...I’m not unworthy of love. Of respect.” Her hands shake, and a smaller vein of lightning plunged into the typhoon he has created, setting the water alight in an eerie glow as a voluptuous spray crests unnaturally over the waves. All at once her face twists, hideous and angry, and the bubbling fury inside erupts in a senseless scream as lightning is called down all around the beach, sand and water erupting everywhere. “I hate them! I hate them! I gave them everything!” Grabbing the closest piece of glass, she hurls it into the ocean, and the next one she hunts down is shattered and crushed in the grip of her hand. The cuts it causes are ignored, the remains thrown into the ocean as well as she wildly hunts for something else to ruin. “I forgave them, and they took it and forgot me as thanks! FUCK!” Her hair stands on end as static explodes from her body, needing some sort of outlet that none of this is supplying. Whirling, she turns her bared teeth towards Deimos, and drowns in the anger she had told herself she wasn’t allowed to feel.
“They get to live their lives like nothing ever changed, moving on and happy, while I’m dying! Like they didn’t destroy me and every promise they ever made!” For once the tears are merely a byproduct of her rage, and not an expression of her grief. “It wasn’t my fault!” Thunder roils to accent the words, and she is left panting and wild in the wake of it, stunned into silence as if she has finally found the words she had been searching for all this time.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
It was no surprise that some days he’d prefer his emotions to decay, wither, and die inside him. Never to be seen, never to be heard, never to be commanded or wielded again. Hidden, covert, doomed, gone, smothered so readily in the spark of a flame, so he wouldn’t be marred or wounded by them any longer. Caught in a stasis of numbed superiority, as if the nonchalance could bleed through his insides, and the ice, the glaciers, would balance out all the other inward lacerations consuming, consuming, consuming his soul.
But that was not the way the world worked, and not how he was to grow any longer. Sick of erosion, being taken for granted, being cut apart at the end of everyone else’s gambles, the temptation to rise into her anger was great. To permit all the seams of rage flicker and filter into the evening whirlwinds, no tethers, no lines, no chains binding the onslaught. True terror and distinction, things they’d once had, in rumor and in truth, instead of being the entities left behind. To become better, stronger, mightier, for no one else but himself.
Her words were harsh and unrelenting in the midst of the storm they built, and he sunk into them. Permitted his magic to become a reflection of the anger, not the beauty, not the light; as piercing voids collaborated into the lightning-lit cyclones, the storm clouds. He leaned into the vexation, into the wrath, into the contempt so easily, so readily, as he’d done in lifetimes before. Unyielding, unbending, unbroken manifestations of an abhorrent ease, where enemies would’ve shaken to see them there, threatening to topple the world down around them. Shards of ice gathered and harpooned within, and the water continued to take and orchestrate and bludgeon the air – crackling in its static crescendos. “They were not worth it,” and he didn’t encompass the they, didn’t need to – their names could’ve been stretched out across the expanse for the earth to see, lit up in hostility and vexation, and the meaning would still be the same. “And you are right, it was not your fault.”
And somewhere inside his hollowed out chest he wondered if it was the same for him. If he’d given everything he could, and others simply moved on, indifferent to the way they pierced and shattered. If he mattered at all. If he’d been destroyed –
His jaw clenched, and she could’ve bared her teeth at him for a lifetime and he could stand in her fury, in her ferocity, but he wasn’t going to sink into his anguish any longer. The tempest brewed and cajoled in the ease of his mastered wake, and so did the insinuations, so did the parallels, so did the thunder and Reaper tendencies. A callback to vengeance and vehemence. “Then maybe you should create a consequence.”
No, they will not hide away from their emotions any longer. They will not abstain in vain hopes of feeling dying away at the root, starved and secluded. There is only the crackle of lightning across the sea, the crash of waves against the shore that batter and stretch beyond normal limitations. For all Deimos’ silence he is hearing her, rising in support of her with the mastery of his magic as it twines with her own. She finally understands the difference now between their abilities, their sworn elements. The peace of that realization is a buoy tossed about in the storm of her own expulsion of emotion. Unleashing onto the world the same tempest that has been bottled up inside her, cracking her porcelain vessel from the inside. Released at last, Hotaru is left a void in the aftermath, empty and stunned by it.
As they watch each other, the beach emptied by the howling ferocity of their power, Hotaru folds her hand around the small persistent faith in her heart and prays. Thanking every god both here and gone for bringing them together once more, because surely she wouldn’t have weathered this storm without him. So when he speaks, she listens. Let’s each word lay along the fractured pieces inside like bandages that will keep her glued together a little longer. Believing in him what she cannot accept as true from herself.
Which is why she knows with the purest, most profound clarity, that he is perfect for the idea that slowly unfurls in her mind.
The space between them dwindles as she crosses the beach, skin still humming with electricity that keeps her from reaching out to touch him. Her eyes seem to glow from within, discordant colors full of dark promise. “Maybe we should.” Just like the old days, when they’d had little more than each other to rely upon, to press their backs against when faced with the eternal onslaught of those beyond the gates. Lifting her hand, she reveals the bracelet on her wrist - the same one that adorns the wrists of Sunjata and Nate. “Care for a little revenge?” The storm rumbles overhead, taking on a life of its own after being summoned and strengthened by her power, and the foreshadowing does not escape her at all.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
The water stretched and glorified and impacted until it didn’t have to any longer – the storm ebbing, flowing, the electricity no longer crackling. And his eyes went to her on the fading junctures, pondering if the contempt had subsided, if the wrath had pierced and pounded through the careening substances, and then all that remained was the beach, the tide, the current, and the sand. He released the waves, and they returned to their wake.
But not them. They wouldn’t.
No more despair. No more melancholy. No more knotted, gnarled roots where they wondered where things had gone so wrong, and the impact that shuddered, shaped, and sculpted them once more. He was so god damn tired of sinking into those motions, of struggling to rise above the surface, of being able to breathe without the world slamming its way down upon his shoulders, across his chest. Just for one damned moment, to have it lifted, and thrown back on the earth.
To have all of their heartache mean something – instead of a wallowing fury. Where had they been all this time; the Reaper and the Valkyrie? Caged and caught in the way others shattered them? Tormented by the measures of others?
Who would dare.
There was once a time where they’d been feared. Where the wake of his presence, his shadow, his entity, had sent lesser beings fleeing. And gods, all he wanted to do now was show them exactly the press of his incantations, the capability of his anger, the ferocity of his abhorrence. The insinuation had been laid out there anyway, and he didn’t relent as she took it, as she snagged at the lines he’d left in the dunes. “Yes,” he promised and vowed; yearning for a taste of retaliation, ready and waiting for something to crumble at their feet. His gaze took in the bracelet, but didn’t know, catch, the significance, the meaning. Unyielding, unbending, an unattainable, unreachable, the precision of his cold denizens puncturing, piercing, over the rigid, taut composure in his spine. “What do you have in mind?” What could they break apart?
There is a freedom to being unchained. Stepping back into a coat she has not properly worn in far too long. It still fits as perfectly as it had the day she had shed it, and it embraces her fully in return. The Valkyrie, riding her vengeful storm. And where would she be without the Reaper? A pair of godlike souls, presiding over their precipice with auras that drive weaker men to their knees. They have allowed themselves to feel, yes. To experience, to process. But that does not make them weak, or at least it will not any longer.
His vow sinks into her bones, molten and inflaming, and the devil lives in the corners of her smile as their magic coalesces into a storm that rages even as they pull their power back. Free at last to wreck and ruin. To remind everyone on this godforsaken stretch of land that they are not to be tested and tried. For what power do they hold against the combined might of these two elemental creatures, reunited with their primordial desires at last?
“Something beautiful.”
Over the ocean, the storm clouds rumble threateningly.
- FIN
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
