Court of the Fallen was created in October of 2018 by Odd, Honey, and Crooked.
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"We're all pawns, but at least most of us didn't decide to crown ourselves queen," Arialla countered. She wasn't exactly interested in arguing the merits of Mort's realm -- in truth, she wasn't interested in playing fair at all. A rhetorician would have winced at her speech: her blatant appeals to emotion, her fallacious logic, her choice to ignore anything she couldn't answer. "What right does the Voice have to even call herself a goddess? Everything she's built, she's stolen and twisted."
Arialla's head swiveled towards Nate as he spoke, and a vicious light came into her eyes. "You want to talk about random attacks, you want to talk about scars -- where do you think I got this?"
She pulled back her collar to reveal the ugly gash on her throat, standing out whitish-pink against her tan skin.
"Forgive me for wanting to live in a Caido without the beasts who attacked me in the night."
she tied you to her kitchen chair she broke your throne and she cut your hair
“You’re getting sloppy. Voted in.” the Wraith sings back, correcting her quickly. “What right do you have to say she isn’t,? Who are you?” Other than an angry woman, she thinks, even as her eyes go to Arialla’s neck.
Ah. So it's personal.
From the beginning, the woman’s tone and her word choice indicated someone who wasn’t going to change her mind. None of them ever do and this is beginning to feel pointless. “I want to live in a world where teenagers aren’t murdered. Safrin and Deimos killed Rex and Clemente. Evelyn got her throat slashed. The Fae chopped Robin up and sent him in pieces to the kingdoms. They attacked Nate, too, and I’m not up here raging about them like some racist fuck. I’m sorry that happened to you - really - if you can describe them, I'll see what I can do. But this is Torchline. People are attacked all the time. If you’d been life drained or electrocuted, would you be yelling about Abandoned? If an Attuned Tiger or Lion had mauled you, would you be saying the same?”
Shaking her head, Wessex’s anger begins to flicker out, fading from something stoking to something that is banked. “Beasts come in many forms. The only obvious one I see has red hair.”
No offering? Nothing? Theo didn't really believe Wessex when she said he could just go to a shrine and ask the Voice for whatever he wanted. Sounded like a good way to get cursed. But still ... if the Voice was so generous, perhaps he'd see his way to asking something of her someday. She certainly sounded more welcoming than the Old Gods, who'd probably just spit in Theo's face for asking.
And then there was Arialla, shouting, baring scars, etc. Still, her arguments didn't manage to hit on anything Theo actually cared about. An Ascended had attacked her in the street? As Wessex had pointed out, people got randomly attacked all the time.
Still, that was a lot of dead and wounded Ascended, a lot of hate directed at them. Theo wasn't inclined to make himself a target by siding with them right now. Instead he shrugged and slipped off into the crowd without another word.
(Theo out!)
Theo
"Poker" by ND Strupler is licensed with CC BY 2.0.
Arialla opened her mouth to respond to Wessex and hesitated. She could see on Theo's face that her argument was convincing no one. Taking a deep breath, she tried to calm down, tried to see the situation as others would see -- others not yet convinced of the Ascended's evil.
"I can't speak for the Fae, but if you want to condemn them -- who started that conflict? The Fae didn't invade the Hollowed Grounds." Not that Arialla could speak much to that, since it had all happened before she'd even arrived in Caido. "No one can simply declare themself a god. Not me, not you, not the Voice. Look at how much strife she's caused! You want to know who I am? I'm just another victim. And so are you."
After all, Arialla had only lost her peace of mind; the Ascended had lost their souls.
she tied you to her kitchen chair she broke your throne and she cut your hair
The idea that anyone had to declare her lady a Goddess instead of recognizing her power for what it is really does strike the Wraith as funny and she grins down at Arialla, purposefully showing the tips of her fangs.
“So tell me,” Wessex says, quite pointedly, feigning innocence and feigning it poorly. Lying is one thing, but playing the idiot has never been in her wheelhouse unless it’s to rob drunk men. “If she isn’t a Goddess, why couldn’t the others, in all their power, kill her? What would you call someone who can’t be killed by six other Gods?”
She lets the question hang in the air, declining to answer it for anyone else who might be listening.
“She only wants to live and let live. We’re not the ones plotting genocide, and there’s no moral high ground you can take to justify that kind of violence and death.” Staring down at the redhead, Wessex begins to draw the show to a close. “Because at the end of the day, if you were in danger or asking for help, I’d probably still help you.” Even if was just to hold something over her head. “And that’s the real difference between you and me.”
Arialla scowled, opened her mouth, and then closed it. She didn't really have any rebuttals to Wessex's points. Oh, she could have argued that immortality did not a goddess make, but looking at the Torchers around her, she could tell that such a semantic argument would move no one. And Wessex was right about one thing -- if Wessex were in trouble, Arialla would leave her to burn. Somehow the monster had claimed the moral high ground, and Arialla didn't know what to do about it. She had never been a great rhetorician.
"Don't listen to her," Arialla addressed the crowd, ignoring Wessex's responses. "Siding with the Voice will only get you killed."
I'll do it myself if I have to, she thought, but had enough sense at least to not say that. Instead she became an eagle and took wing, flying away from the confrontation, which mostly definitely had not gone her way. No souls saved today, damn it. Well, next time she saw an Ascended, she'd make sure they didn't come out of the encounter victorious -- or unscathed.
07-21-2021, 04:01 PM (This post was last modified: 07-23-2021, 01:56 PM by Wessex.)
WESSEX
the wraith
she tied you to her kitchen chair she broke your throne and she cut your hair
Wessex snorts, the only thing she can do when Arialla has nothing left except to flee. She hadn’t intended to get into a fight about it, because she knows she isn’t likeable when she tries to steamroll her opponents, but what else was she to do?
In the end the Attuned speaks a bit of the truth, so she spits back bitterly at the retreating tailfeathers, words, perhaps unheeded in the seediest city in Caido, “You forgot to warn them that they’ll be the ones doing the murders!” But it doesn’t matter, does it? Everyone already knows what choice they’re going to make. With a sigh the Wraith reaches for the canopy she’d previously removed and starts to aggressively set it back up, indicating that the show is done - at least for now.
{Fin}
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ME is over. Feel free to post a wrap-up if your character was here, and I'll Fin + archive in a couple days. Thanks!
