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!
His question stilled her into motionlessness so profound she might as well have been turned to stone. Very slowly Maea looked up, and whatever it was Harper feared to see in her... what met him was likely far worse. Because she only smiled, grim and dark and unamused.
"You have no idea what someone without anything to lose is capable of."
Fingers closed into fists, curling in around scorched palms. As if by hiding them, she could prevent him from realizing that there was nothing left in her worth redeeming. More than the lack of physical sensation, more even than the fumbling search for some kind of hope Maea sensed in his words, she feared that. The withdrawal, the darkening of blue into blackest contempt... and she had no doubt it would happen, if he knew half of what she had done. Maea had no doubt that the 'why' would not even matter.
It was not until he mentioned Ludo that the woman was phased properly for the first time. Her flinch at the Herald's name was visceral, a stab wound in a vital spot still capable of feeling pain.
"No," she stopped him, quickly and with a shamed expression she tried but failed to hide. "I cant - it wouldn't see me. It's too late to save anything. I won't bother Ludo with what I already know is impossible."
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
The darkness doesn’t scare him. It saddens him immeasurably. To see the hopelessness that masquerades as apathy. It’s like staring into a mirror to the past, to the boy he’d once been, hands covered in blood and heart and mind locked away where the reality of his actions couldn’t touch them. “I do. I know exactly what damage can be done by your own hand when you feel like all is lost.” If Maea is looking to scare him away, she will be disappointed to discover Harper does not scare easily. Giving up on his friends is equally unlikely. “I’ve killed innocent people. Hurt many more. You can tell me - if you want. I promise I won’t think differently of you.” At least he would endeavor to try. Still, Harper is firm in his belief that whatever Maea has done, it is not a sin he cannot forgive. Though she may be changed, some things resist even the worst of corrosion, and Harper doubts she would ever do something heinous enough that it would cause him to abandon her.
Her flinch makes him hesitate, the grief evident even when her words suggest acceptance. “Okay,” he concedes, backing off the topic for her sake. “Just think about it. Please. Even if you can’t be changed, it doesn’t mean you’re useless to them. Sometimes a purpose is better than nothing.” Harper hates to entertain the idea, but he wouldn’t put it past Ludo to turn Maea into a spy of some sort. It’s not a role he wants for the woman, but anything seems better than this shadow of a second life she’s living.
Pale eyebrows shot up. That was not the reaction she had expected. Not from Harper, always smiling and bumbling around like an overexcited puppy. It was very tempting to put that declaration to the test, to fling her sins into his face and see if he really wouldn't flinch.
But that would mean admitting that she had done anything at all. And if he did recoil...
Her jaw set. Well. Then it would only confirm that she was right. It wasn't as though his approval or disapproval truly meant anything, anyway. A few past encounters and a bit of sympathy did not forge a bond worth mentioning, no matter how nice it might be to pretend otherwise.
Straightening up from where she had been leaning, Maea turned towards Harper. Every trace of a smile faded, pain and emotion draining away as she let the numbness rise up to claim her. The one that made crazy, reckless and cruel ideas seem obvious and simple to do. That bolstered her, and guided her hands. It felt very good, not to care about anything.
Not even Ludo's rejection felt as awful anymore, when only icy voids were left inside.
"I set fire to the hospital in Torchline," she confessed, in the same way she might inform him that she had purchased a nice blend of tea. "And I drained a girl of most of her blood in order to do so. I bit her."
He had to know what that implied. Everything it implied. Quite calmly, Maea watched him for the storm she knew had to come. Curious, how much of a relief it was - she had thought it would be harder to sever this connection.
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
Whatever goes in behind her cosmic eyes he is not privy to. There is so little to read when human traits and micro expressions are so clearly lacking in her new body. No need to blink, to breathe. She is a blank canvas, and Harper is left staring, wishing he had better words. Something more to offer her than the measly, paltry words he is forced to give her for lack of anything better.
As Maea straightens to face him fully, Harper takes a slow breath through his nose. Petrichor and damp earth fill his senses. It seems as if the world doesn’t exist beyond the pitiful shelter of the tree’s branches above them. They stand on opposite sides of a line neither of them drew, and yet their hands reach forth regardless. Both of them incapable of being firmly placed inside the boxes made for their measurements.
Whatever reaction she hopes to find does not come. Harper takes a moment to parse through her confession, to let it sink in entirely. Moments pass. The rain continues to fall. His eyes never leave here, baring himself to her in turn so that she may read his every minute reaction and verify for herself that there is no judgment. “Did it help?” As if she’d never confessed anything at all. Wanting only to know what had driven her, and if Maea had found any measure of peace in her actions. Or whatever it was she had sought in those moments. He not her judge, nor even her jury. Harper’s hands are too deeply stained to begin to hold her to standards he cannot achieve himself.
Wait for it. Wait for it. Any time now, his blue skies would darken and the thunder start rumbling. Lightning she could handle. Shouting and oaths and even contempt she could bear, though some might hurt more than the rest. It was fine. She was good at swallowing down pain by now. She'd had a lifetime to practice.
Only... there was no darkness. No judgement, or shock, or anything. Not even acceptance, which was the strangest part. Even Maea couldn't entirely accept what she had done, and she had absolutely expected something. More than this long silence, anyway.
The longer it dragged out, the more confusion grew in her gaze. That comfortable numbness slipped, bewilderment and curiosity glinting through. Didn't he care?
Did it help?
The question was so unexpected that she actually took a step back. Maea blinked, and her lips twitched. Again, until a very strange and disbelieving smile appeared, and a snort of laughter could no longer be suppressed. Why was she laughing?
"No," she chuffed, lips curling in distaste. "Of course not. I'm standing here, talking to you, aren't I? If it helped, if it even worked as intended, then I would have been caught and tried for murder by now. But it seems I overestimated the importance of a boxing ring over a hospital." She spat the words out as though they were vile to hold in the mouth.
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
Like a flower unfurling at the touch of the sun, her expression melts from cold and sure to intrigued. Harper wouldn't call it hopeful just yet. Maea doesn't even seem like she's aware she can still hope. It breaks his heart just a little, but even that can't ripple the calm acceptance on his face. A perfectly balanced pendulum that refuses to swing either way. There is only the earthen scent around them, the discordant impact of raindrops on bracken and bramble, and his own quiet breaths. No shouting or gasping, no dramatics that he would normally employ to brighten someone's day. She is perhaps the first to see it for more than a moment, this side of him. A man who has seen and done far more - and worse - than anything Caido can imagine. Whose smile refuses to be dimmed despite that.
The poisonous spit of her words does nothing to dissuade him from his path, and his head tilts - an avian impulse he is not used to yet - as he examines her slowly. "I didn't ask if it was successful, hon. I asked if it helped. And I meant you." Idly, as if they're talking about the rain that soaks their clothes, Harper lifts a hand to brush a few curls back off his forehead. "Did it help you, in the moment, to do those things? What you've done is already in the past. There's no sense in judging the morality of it." Spoken as if it's really that simple. To Harper, however, it is. When you are this far gone, the grand scheme is useless. There is only you against the world.
And Gods if he doesn't know exactly how that feels.
Again, a different reaction from the one she had expected. Maea was admittedly taken aback - this really was nothing at all like the sunshine boy she had spoken to in the past. The one who had charmed girls in Sunjata's bar, and conversed about broken hearts and sandcastles on a beach. It seemed like - no, it was a lifetime ago. Had he changed? Or was this just a layer beneath the mask.
Maea thought she might enjoy this Harper a little better than the other one. Even when his questions began to grow uncomfortably personal.
Biting down on silence, the semblance of a young woman did him the courtesy of actually considering it. In the drifting haze and the pouring rain, hard edges blurred and faded, blending into one another. Before long, the sun would set and shadows come creeping. Right now, in this monochrome daze before twilight, even secrets might get lost and drown in some stagnant pool. What better place to spill them?
"To do them...?" she repeated slowly, thoughtfully. "No. What helped... what felt good was the direction. Even if only for a moment, I had a plan. A purpose." Looking down at her marred hand, Maea frowned. "I had conviction enough to risk myself to see it through. That... is gone now, though. I can't seem to find the interest to even follow through on what I've already started."
The apathy, a gnawing pit into which all the important things inevitably fell.
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
It is as if they're seeing one another through glass wiped free of condensation. They are still the same people - same silhouettes, shapes and sizes. But the details...those are clear at last, revealed unexpectedly. Whatever she thinks of him in this moment he is not privy to. Isn't sure he wants to be. In return, Harper looks into her milky gaze and knows with unparalleled certainty that while she hadn't expected this sort of a reaction, it's one she undoubtedly needed.
Her voice is soft, susurrous, the wind that is absent here in this drenched half-lit space between. Between worlds, sides of war, fealties and histories. They are in this limbo together, and only her voice seems to matter.
"You came back for love; an emotion, an idea of a person at best. When you made your choice, it was never to fulfill a purpose. And now, with that singular desire extinguished against your will, you have none." Just as he had suffered the same since being deposited in Caido. Until Safrin had deigned to give him direction, he had lived only by the days he could help. Heal. Brighten someone's day. Harper had crafted the most minuscule and meaningless of purposes to keep from ending it all. Maea's plight is not unfamiliar to him. "So. Why not construct your own purpose? With intent, and consideration. Because you know now it was not the actions that felt good; replicating them would be meaningless." Harper doesn't deposit his thoughts and introspections right into her lap. She must work to make her own conclusions if she wants them. Tilting his chin slightly towards his chest, Harper pins her with blue eyes made dark with some bloodied history. "Otherwise you're no better than dead anyway. And the choice you made that you see as a mistake is all the more meaningless and pitiful as a result." The cruelty of the words contrasts with the easy, laconic delivery of them, irises like shattered sapphires in the fading light.
A breeze set the mist to coiling. Somewhere far out in the swamp, a bird gave off a hoarse cry. Another gore crow, perhaps, or something far more terrible. With eyes like fog, the pale woman regarded this young man who claimed to be her friend. He had a way with words she had not expected. But by now, Maea was beginning to understand that she really didn't know anything about Harper. Just that the darkness in his eyes appealed to her, and that the cold words made her want to dance and laugh with some mad relief - given permission, finally, to move on from the travesty of a picture she had painted herself into.
Slowly, she moved. Pushed away from the trunk against which she had been leaning, and eased closer. It was her turn to invade spaces now, to push boundaries and see if he would flinch or falter. Pale fingers like deadly klaws came up to rest lightly against his chest - she could feel the beating pulse, steady as a drum.
"You, Harper, are a very dangerous man," Maea told him softly, as a small smile curled her lips. "One day you are going to hurt someone terribly, by pretending to be only nice and sweet. Let me give you some unsolicited advice..." She looked up at him, craning a slender neck backwards until she could catch his gaze.
"If you find someone you truly care to keep in your life... show them this." Her index finger tapped lightly over the space of his heart.
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
The echo of a cry in the distance does not distract him from his focused consideration of her, but it calls to that new and primal part inside of him all the same. Urging him to shift, to change, to heed the call. Return to the drenched sky above while the light still lingers, so that he might pretend for another day that the shadows don't feel more like home. He lingers because she is like the moon in the fading light, a beacon that draws the eye and prompts musings and considerations merely by existing, giving material to poets and illiterate bastards alike.
It feels as if they're both waiting for something. He isn't sure it's the same thing.
She moves from the tree. Every twitch and glide is natural, but does nothing to ease the sensation of otherness he feels when he looks at her. There is only a mild curiosity as she invades his space, eyes falling to the finger that touches firmly against his chest. She is still Maea, just as he'd said before. He is confident she won't hurt him - not physically, as she proves with the wicked sharpness of her words. Fair is fair at least.
It is a mortifying ordeal, to be seen so plainly, but it was a sacrifice he had to make in order to have her reveal herself in kind. She is the first. Harper hopes she'll be the last. Words turned paltry instead of prophecy and portent. "People see what they need to see," he rumbles softly in turn. Not 'want', as so many say in tamped out idioms. As her finger taps against his heart, Harper's lips twist into a smile filled with sardonic bitterness, like gnarled dark branches that arc overhead.
"My kindness is as part of me as this is." Dark, macabre, dangerous, whatever Maea wants to call it. "They never ask - so I never tell." Some days he feels as if Phoebe is waiting for him to do it. Open up, reveal everything to her. It is sweet, in a sad way, to know that she will be forced to wait forever if she chooses that path of respecting his privacy. Lifting a hand, he presses on the back of hers, flattening her hand to his chest. "Life is full of choices. We both have to make ours." You cannot keep existing aimlessly.
The tragic thing about returning ghosts to life, was that they sooner or later would remember what it means to bleed. What old lovers and frigthened girls and ill fated strangers in a burning building had failed to manage, Harper accomplished in mere minutes. A little compassion, some insight into a soul as broken as hers, and she might as well have popped a vein, to see that bitter smile.
Ah, fuck. She never meant to care for this boy.
"Mh. And what choice was it, that drove you out all the way here? In this lovely weather."
Cocking her head aside, Maea let him keep her hand for now. She wished the connection meant more than it did. That she had a heart capable of speeding up, of racing along like it once might have done. Something slippery and dark slurped down into the ground near their feet, but she had no reason to look that way.
Soul searching was so much more interesting, right now.
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
Were he not so entrenched in the reality behind the sunshine he wears like a shield, maybe Harper could have spared a moment to feel relief, or perhaps accomplishment, at seeing life return to Maea. Watching the ice melt away, freeing her from the numbness and the isolation. The marks of her time inside will never leave her, but she is not the only one to bear the brand of frostbite.
His lips twitch into a small smile, wet with rain that finds lazy pathways down his face. “Just because you told me your secrets you think you’re privy to mine?” Though the amused expression never falters, ocean blue eyes seem to pierce her, as if eager to be her next burial ground. Releasing her hand but letting it stay against his chest, Harper laughs quietly, shoulders shaking with its passage. “I can’t think surrounded by people. Their expressions, their bodies, their voices - it’s all so loud to me. Once your eyes have been opened to reading what is unspoken, you can’t close them again.” Whatever moves in the soil below is spared only a quick glance, eyes narrowing uselessly. Neither elephants nor crows had vision meant for twilight, and human eyes were weak and pitiful.
His smile, however small, found an echo in hers. Dry and amused, something cold and beautiful glittering in the depths of her eyes. Like whitewashed bone, or a frozen halo around the sun. It could have been sincere.
"Privy to? Nah. Not that. But if you wanted to... I'm saying that you can." She shrugged. He had managed to listen to her without judging. It was a small thing, to offer the same in return. "What did you come here to think about?"
Questions asked. It was up to him whether he wished to answer. Would it make a difference if she knew? The swamp was good at swallowing things. What was buried here might never emerge again. Maea let her hand drop, hovering still in his space. Unmoving. Unbreathing. The way she tilted her head back to search his face for riddles made the exposed throat look like an invitation.
♦ Violence, magic, thievery is permitted with Maea at all times. DM me if you have any ideas ♦
tell me Atlas what is heavier? the world or its peoples hearts?
It seems the longer he stays in her presence, masks down and world cold, the less human he feels. Like he is becoming more like her. Or perhaps the other way around? Or maybe he simply doesn't remember how it felt to open up to somebody like this, to show the stained and broken parts that people normally didn't want to see.
"The war, as is on the mind of nearly everyone else." Gideon's words, Phoebe's mission, his own scarcely burgeoning purpose as a man of Safrin. Maea is not the only one directionless. As her hand falls away, Harper tilts his head to regard her - though his eyes have yet to leave her, it seems he finds something new every time he refocuses on her face. "If you are still loyal to Ludo, what will you do? The Voice can use and control you at any moment. I'm surprised she hasn't tried to stop you already." The Voice doesn't seem the type to resist intervening if one of her children went off the destined path. Though perhaps that is Harper's approximation of her, painted by others, considering he has never met the goddess.
