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!
Sam had tried to tell her. He had recounted the tale of their last time trying to find the Prince in great detail, from the gas to the statues to Sunjata and Wessex and Pet trying to talk to him, to them all going home disappointed and no further in their goals. Still, Edy had been insistent that she wanted to see the 'goo man'.
As much as he didn't want to unnecessarily bother the Prince again, Edy did have a knack of convincing people of things (after all, she'd convinced him to make this trip) and maybe her way of straight forward, brash talking would knock the Prince out of his melancholy isolation so they could finally take him to the Voice. Sam wasn't even sure at this point why he wanted to see the creature be transformed so badly, but he regularly imagined what it might look like when they brought the Prince before his mother.
Standing at the entrance of the cave, arms crossed, he looked across at Edy. "If we even find him again, he probably won't want to talk to us, you know. He has acid he shoots and things and I'm going to stand behind you if he does that."
Not unlike a bully that latches on to being mean to show affection, Edy honed in on Sam's interest with the Prince like a bloodhound. As soon as she had the scent, she was relentless until he finally gave in—just as she knew he would eventually—filling her with a triumphant sort of glee.
"So does it wear clothes? Or is it like...naked, but not in an animal way." What Edy wanted to know, and what she finally came out and asked, was: "Does it look like you can fuck it, is what I want to know. 'Cause the follow-up question is. 1. Have you thought about it, and since the answer is obviously yes, 2. What do you think it feels like to fuck goo."
Edy was really good at small talk.
Standing at the entrance, the Rapacious just gives Sam an aggressive but nonchalant shrug. "You ain't gotta pretend to be a coward just to look at my ass." She cackles, stepping easily into the darkness. "Here, I'll go first." Dramatically sashaying her way forward, kicking rocks and stones and not giving a single fuck about how loud she was being, her expression softens ever so slightly as she calls over her shoulder. "How long d'you say this thing has been alone for?"
Edy's questions about the Prince made Sam cringe (he hoped that the creature wasn't somewhere nearby in audible range of this). "He doesn't wear clothes as far as I know, no, but it's hard to even make out his body really with all the...goo." His thinly veiled disgust at that probably answered the second question, but Sam sighed and gave her a real answer anyway, peering into the cave: "I haven't thought about it until this second and I don't think it would feel nice at all, since he's corrosive like acid any time anyone touches him."
She set off before him and Sam followed, giving out an embarrassed chuckle but rolling his eyes too at her comment - he was getting used to how Edy went about conversations. "I'm actually sure that if I wanted to, I could just ask you to let me look at your, you know." Faltering at the last second, keeping his eyes on Edy's shoulders out of a sense of stubborn spite, he began to track where they were going with one hand on the caves wall.
"I don't know. Years, for sure. He wasn't always alone, though...there's..." Sam frowned, trying to work out how to order all the things they'd seen the last time they were there. "There's things that make me think he had a woman down here with him once too, but I think she passed away. I don't know if she was ...like him."
'Oh.' Edy seems to frown at that. "I don't want to fuck him—" She ammends quickly with a smirk, toward Sam. "—but that must suck. Being alone and not being able to get laid? Oh hey. It's almost exactly like us." Us being the ascended in general, but it applied well enough to herself and the bookmaker too that she didn't bother to clarify.
"My assssssssssssss." She finishes for him as she is swallowed up by the darkness. 'A woman huh? What made you think that?' Strolling confidently down the end of the tunnel toward the grave that the group had dug up last time, Edy cocks a head and looks back at Sam with her hands planted on her hips. "You get to him through a grave? That's..." Waving her fingers for a moment as she searches for the word, her eyes sparkle with mischief as she finds it. "fucked up." Probably she meant metaphorical, or foreboding, or foreshadowing, but fucked up sounded better to her mind.
Sam snorted a quiet laugh at her comment; the Prince was much like the rest of the Ascended in that regard. He had no idea if the creature got lonely or - Gods forbid the thought - horny, but maybe it was another angle to try for convincing him to move away from his cave. Outside there were people like him, maybe once he was cured of whatever it was that caused his ills people that would be with him.
Ignoring the assssssssss, he followed behind Edy and filled her in on the last trip as he ducked and stepped over odd rock formations in the caves. "Well...there were two statues. A man and a woman...and a grave with a name on it and there was a woman's name mentioned on the wall there too I think? He said something about her too, but it's hard to remember...it was all a bit chaotic." In some ways, Sam wished he'd come on his own then, though it was possible Edy was even more of a loose cannon than three other people.
"There isn't a body down there. It is a big drop though, so we should be careful. Do you...have any ways to get down long distances?" Sam asked, chewing his lip as he realised he didn't have the shift he did last time to fly down the hole.
"Y'don't think that like..the statues were real do you?" Glancing over her shoulder and knowing full well how ridiculous it sounded, Edy makes an uneasy face toward Sam with a shrug. Once she saw them she'd realize that no, they were regular, but it was the first thing that came to mind. And as almost always was the case, the first thing that came to mind was normally what she said.
"Why can't we just—" Putting her hands against the inside of the chute as if meaning to brace herself down, the acid that burns her hands drastically enough to have Edy pitching over the side and down the hole. "Ahhh—FUC—" Her cries are cut off by the muffled sound of her hitting the ground below. After a moment of terse silence, there's the sound of movement. "Fucking fuck shitty fucking..." Sighing loudly, Edy peers up.
"Don't touch the sides." She calls, a thing Sam might have warned her about. "Just jump down. I'll catch you."
Sam shook his head, thankful that they had been stylised enough that he didn't have to consider that possibility. "No, not real. We couldn't read the plaques underneath entirely, but I think they were some kind of legends...or heroes? Important people, anyway, and the Prince might have been one of them, but I'm not sure..." His rambling would have continued well into the next moments had Edy not suddenly disappeared into the pit before them.
"Edy!" He called out, running forwards and only just stopping himself from tumbling in, watching her move around on the floor beneath. Knowing she didn't feel pain, he immediately sighed and tutted disapprovingly. "This is why you shouldn't just go headfirst into everything-"
That said, he was going to have to get down the hole sooner or later and they didn't really have a whole other load of options. "Um..okay. Be sure you do, please." With closed eyes and a not-very-faithful heart, Sam jumped in after Edy.
'If they were so important, why are the statues of them buried way the fuck underground?' Edy wonders, shooting Sam a look.
'Oh don't be such a baby.' She calls up brightly, resisting the urge to turn her response into an innuendo about the head of her dick absolutely being the thing she wanted to go in first. She didn't though, because that wasn't necessarily true.
Like that scene in the Princess Bride where Buttercup jumps out of the window with her beautiful hair and dress all aflutter, to be caught by the giant, is absolutely not reproduced here. Sam drops like a stone, and though Edy catches him, it's anything but cinematic. Stumbling, his ass hitting her right in the chest and sending her sprawling, it's certainly not the oh haaay, fancy meeting you here, moment you all might have been expecting.
"You good?" Edy asks, giving Sam's ass an experimental pinch just to make sure.
"I don't know, maybe this wasn't underground once? Maybe they were moved there? Maybe it was some kind of secret society?" He shrugged; there were so many possibilities and he'd read enough adventure novels to thoroughly consider all of them, but Sam wasn't going to be able to come to a conclusion any more than Edy was.
Jumping down the hole was less terrifying than imagined, but his landing was not exactly smooth; glad they couldn't feel pain, he still groaned as he lifted himself up off of Edy, just to express his displeasure at the whole thing. "I'm fine--hey!" Sam exclaimed, shooting up at the pinch to his butt and slapping a hand to the spot as if he'd find it burning.
Once he was over the shock of the butt-pinch and sure Edy hadn't broken every bone in her body by cushioning his fall, he looked around them. Yep, they were back in the same place. "Well, it's not far from here where we last saw him. He's not going to be happy to hear from me again...maybe you should do the talking." As it came out of his mouth Sam knew it was a bad idea, but it was out there now, so he just started walking.
Grinning menacingly without so much as a trace of guilt, Edy flashes Sam a fanged smile as she too climbs to her feet. "Happy to." She trills, already beginning to stride into the darkness.
Running her fingertips along the wall, though careful to avoid any slime should she see it, eventually Edy comes to the door—now just crumbled stone—without so much as a whiff of sulphur to indicate the Prince's presence. 'Yooohoooo. Anyone home?' Peering inside, Edy narrows her eyes. Spying nothing of interest, the Rapacious rounds on her heels to give Sam a look. "What? Didn't you tell him we were coming?" She asks, like they'd showed up for a dinner date only to find their host strangely absent.
Sam followed behind Edy, feeling like at any time they'd hear the tell tale squelches and belches that marked out the Prince's presence, yet they didn't come. In fact, it was deathly quiet and the only evidence he'd been there at all was the slime still on the walls, which Sam gave a confused look as they walked past. Had they upset the Prince so much he'd had to leave? That was an upsetting thought.
"Ha ha. No. Um...last time he was hiding in a room, so I suppose we could look around. Usually you can hear or...smell something, though." Sam walked out into the corridor, towards the sound of rushing water. "The statues are down this way, if you want to see those, at least?" So he could prove that some of it was real - he couldn't imagine how smug Edy would be if there was nothing here but an empty cave.
"Must be pretty bad if we can smell it." Edy comments under her breath. Glancing around, it really did seem as though there was fuck all here. It didn't make Edy think that Sam had lied or anything, just that...well, he'd shot his shot, she guessed, and now the Prince had fucked off. Or died. Or...oozed?
"Yeah, sure. You can read the inscriptions to me like it's poetry." She cackles, skipping down toward the end of the tunnel where it T's-off at the river. Glancing from the statue of the man to the one of the woman, predictably Edy chooses the woman. Her hand immediately goes to where her breast would be beneath the armour she wears, and the Rapacious gives it a fond rub.
"So what's it say?" She wonders, glancing idly over her shoulder at the rushing water before turning back.
"It is. I thought Sunjata might pass out last time we were down here." Sam commented, admittedly letting himself smile a little at that; the ex-Governor had annoyed him during their last venture to the Prince's lair.
Edy merrily skipped on down towards the river and Sam followed behind, walking at a slow pace so he could look side to side and investigate every nook and cranny, look for some evidence of the Prince. True, this wasn't where he'd seen the creature the first time, so maybe he had several places to run to and hide...but it seemed odd for it to be so quiet. "I can't read most of them. I only know a few words and they're hardly poetic." He could barely tease any meaning out of them, and he doubted Edy would be able to.
Rolling his eyes as he came around the corner just in time to see Edy fondle the statue, he looked it up and down. "Um...well. I read the other one, actually, and the glasses don't work very well...I suppose I could try and read this one this time. It probably just says her name." He rubbed the back of his neck a little sheepishly. "Do you actually care, anyway?"
"Serves him right for being an air breather, I guess." Edy comments with her usual brand of fuck that guy attitude. In reality, she'd given a hell of a lot to breathe air again, but whatever. They'd already been over that.
"You read enough books. I have faith in you." The Rapacious calls over her shoulder brightly, waiting for Sam to catch up. As he mentions that he'd started with the male statue—typical—Edy purses her lips for a moment and then gives her head a shake. "No sweat. I can read it, it says—" Clearing her breath, Edy peers down, brushing her fingers along the inscription as if the dust there was the only reason she was having trouble reading it immediately. "Thank gods I'm dead and don't have to kiss that smelly cunt with his frog breath ever again. I loved him, but damn if he wasn't a fish-gilled motherfucker. If you see him humping this statue, beat his ass for me." Straightening, she flashes Sam a grin.
