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!
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
For all the noise and violence, things were suddenly silent and still very quickly.
Remi's wings shiver with the impact of his attack shot back at him, before he gasps after a breath he can't quite reach and is forced to his knees. With eyes blazing nearly white with magical hate he fixes on Neron's face, ready to reach out and drag the man toward him that it all might be finished in the safety of a dream, when he disappears.
When he runs.
"COWA—" The alchemist tries to roar, but bloody foam cuts the words off in the back of his throat, and Remi finds himself spitting red into the snow and watching as it seems to double and sway before his eyes. Pocketing the relic with his left hand as his wings disappear, the alchemist looks up into the face of Ronin's duplicate with eyes still made pale and vengeful by magic. Stretching out a hand that is now down two fingers on the outside and with the skin flayed almost up to the elbow, Remi reaches for his husband as expressions of guilt and fury and disappointment bloom in the small twitches of his lips and eyelashes.
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Neron(?) is gone and there's nothing in the wake of his departure but silence and cold and blood on the snow. For a moment Ronin's projection merely stands where it has been, its hands raised, before it flickers briefly, indicating that the real thing has taken its place.
Ronin wants to be furious. Wants to be hurt and upset. He's got questions burning on his tongue - what is wrong with you? I thought we were a team? why were you ignoring me everyone? have you got a fucking deathwish? do you actually have the relic or not? - but even as they sizzle in his throat, the sight of the Lullaby crumpling to his knees washes them away.
Blood stains the snow, and Ronin inhales shakily just as Remi reaches out for him. And to see his fingers (all three of them) and the skin flayed from his arm has a ball of lead sinking in the pit of his stomach. "Gods, Remi," Ronin whispers, sinking down to envelop the other man in his arms.
They're freezing, both of them, but Ronin doesn't look as if he plans to move from the Tundra any time soon. "I can try and heal you."
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
Able to feel the static shivers of his husband's anger through the bond, Remi's mind is perhaps too saturated by blood lust just now to properly understand it. Blinking up at the Huntsman, Ronin looking shockingly clear and alive outlined as he is by the pale sky behind him, Remi gives his head a slow shake.
With a weariness that makes his bones feel unfairly tugged by gravity, Remi tries to reach an arm around his husband in return, but succeeds only in sort of pitching forward against him. "Save your strength. I don't think they will be coming back." He mumbles, coughing up another trickle of blood. Part of him, the part likely verging towards unconsciousness, thinks of how easily it would be to slip them both into a dream where they could be warm, and healed, and fine. Only distantly does it register in the alchemist's mind that doing so would be to leave their bodies unprotected in the frozen tundra.
"That last one..." Remi's breath hitches slightly, as he continues to focus on the wrong parts of what has just happened. "..that was Wessex's magic. I have felt it before, but that..."
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
"And if I want to heal you because you need it, not because there might be another fight?" Ronin wonders with a raise of his eyebrows, though he doesn't push the matter any further. As Remi lolls against him he lets himself draw on the warmth of the other man, however fragile it might feel, Ronin pressing his cheek against wet curls. With a silent pulse of willpower, however much it causes his vision to momentarily white out, Ronin calls down his nimbus to hover beside them, ready for whenever they can summon the willpower to move.
"Wessex.." he echoes with a frown, reaching up to wipe the blood from the corner of Remi's mouth. "That's what hit me as well, then... I didn't know she could disguise herself as others. What was that - illusion magic, do you think?" His thoughts are too foggy to keep them in straight lines, and Ronin sags a little against his husband. "I want to go home."
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
Blinking hard as if there were some film over his eyes, Remi tries to read the lines on his husband's face with no success. It was as though his brain was slow and sluggish, only able to process surface-level observations: the blood in Ronin's hair that would be difficult to comb out, the ice forming in the scruff on his cheeks. And the blue of his eyes was...wrong, somehow. Wasn't it?
Smiling faintly as another cough rattles up from his lungs, the alchemist shrugs weakly, feeling undeserving of his husband's healing for some reason he couldn't quite articulate. 'Unless Neron just took the ability.' He reasons slowly. "Though...I can't see her leaving him on his own against us unless she's off doing something else right now."
The warm thaw of Ronin's presence has the exposed nerves of Remi's ruined hand itching and grinding in protest. "Can you?" The alchemist wonders, of Ronin taking them home. "I think I could dream us home.."..if I have to, going unsaid.
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
"I don't think it was Neron either. If he took that ability it shouldn't have worked more than once," Ronin mumbles with a gentle shake of his head that he instantly regrets for how it feels like his brain starts rolling around in his skull. Ignoring it for now, he reasons that this means it was definitely Wessex they were dealing with, just... wearing Neron's face. Ronin grumbles and shifts in the snow, both at this revelation and at the preparation to move.
"I've got it," he says softly, not at all trusting their mental states in a dream right now. "Just hang on--" His arms tighten around Remi, and it's with a deep hitch of breath that he draws them both up to their feet. With gritted teeth, Ronin eases them onto the nimbus, though he all but flops back against it to catch his breath. "Your hand," he mumbles belatedy. "...Your hand is hurt badly."
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
Remi's eyebrows raised, surprised at the ease of Ronin's logic and how he'd missed it entirely. "Oh...no, you are...completely right." He mumbles, inwardly frowning.
Doing his best to help Ronin help him onto the nimbus, it's with a weeze that suggests he's likely punctured a lung that the alchemist clings to the Huntsman. "Ronin.." He murmurs as the sky spins above, the clouds pinwheeling against the stars. Or perhaps his mind is just losing its hold on reality. "...did we almost die here?" The question is asked with an awed sort of distance, as if he might have been speaking about someone else. He's exhausted and wounded yes, but there's something incredible about being alive enough to ask if you've nearly died. A discord that hummed in his bones, making them ache all the more. "I didn't...I didn't mean for..." With the relic in his pocket, there was something hollow about imagining his victory over Finn now. It all seemed to pale against Ronin's weight as if the only thing that mattered was being able to feel the Huntsman's warmth again. Collapsed against his husband, Remi raises his right hand to the sky. His three remaining fingers are swollen and bruised, and already the mess of veins and ligaments on the outside of his hand have begun to throb as blood begins to cement it all back together.
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
They both find themselves prone, cushioned by the weight of a cloud and staring up into the freezing, dizzying starscape of the Tundra. In a few minutes Ronin will realise that the raging snowstorm that had been preventing their exit has gone, leaving the place howling and empty. "Mm...?" He blinks at the sound of his name, turning his head towards his husband. "Don't know about you, but it definitely feels that way to me." His bones ache, but it's nothing compared to the way his stomach churns with things he doesn't feel like he can say. Not right now, anyway.
Gazing up at Remi's hand and wincing, he resists the urge to reach out for it as well. "I can try and close up the wound," he suggests, before the other man is mumbling through a false start that has the Huntsman furrowing his brow. "Didn't mean for what...?" he asks.
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
"Hmmm." Remi hums, daring to sound almost thoughtful about the nearness of death. Perhaps it was because this wouldn't have been real death, but maybe that made it all the worse. Bending his pinky and ring finger, or at least imagining that he is, the alchemist watches as his hand twitches lamely and he's introduced to what a phantom limb (or phantom fingers in this case), is like.
"I said I would protect Noah. Both of you." Remi mumbles, ignoring the Huntsman's offer. "I said I would." He repeats, frowning up at the stars as if having expected the words to sound different the second time. "And I didn't." The stars remain exactly the same overhead, but Remi is certain they are laughing at him just the same. Giving his head a distracted shake, vaguely aware that his toes and feet have all but gone numb, he swallows down a wad of blood. "I felt so angry. It was like...like being back the way I was before. When the likes of Zariah would push me around and I would just take it. And seeing Neron..." He didn't wear the same face as Loren anymore, but gods if the handsome smugness of the twins wasn't still there just the same.
'And I can't even heal you.' Remi says after a moment, his head lolling to the side to look at Ronin, the bit of logic that connects what had come before to this sentiment going unsaid.
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Biting the inside of his cheek as he watches his husband flex his hand - or what's left of it, anyway - Ronin swallows hard and works on trying to lever himself even halfway upright. With a pounding head, he directs his focus to the nimbus so it might rise up and into the air. He's forced to fly low, given the biting wind and the way controlling the cloud is taking up more focus than it ever has before, but they do start to speed away across the Tundra.
"Yeah..." He's forced to agree with Remi, because he's right. "I know I said I'd take over from you, but I..." He shakes his head helplessly. "You're a lot stronger than Zariah ever was." Rubbing his forehead, he shivers out a breath and glances away. "You stopped talking to me."
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
Gripping cloud isn't the best way to steady oneself, and so it's onto Ronin that Remi's good hand begins to clasp. How they were going to make it over the mountain range like this Remi wasn't sure, but perhaps they could just as easily spend the night in the Citadel.
"I shouldn't have even asked you to. That was not what we'd agreed.." But he had asked, and if he was honest, he wasn't so sure he could ever promise again not to make such a request of his husband. "Not back then, I wasn't." Remi says weakly, closing his eyes against the Tundra winds and the memories of every Launceleny that had ever forced his hand.
"Mm?' Frowning, Remi opens his eyes and looks over at Ronin. "I..." His gaze drops as he begs his mind to replay the battle. There had only been the cold and the biting incessant need to kill the thing that had taken his hand. And then...then there had been the star, and Neron, and more fury than he could ever remember having experienced before. "I don't even...it all happened so fast." Sounding more like an apology than an excuse, Remi's eyes refocus and his expression turns uncertain. "I have never felt so lost in it, before."
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
Ronin has no intention of spending the night in the Citadel, and although his nimbus is speeding towards the mountain range, he'll remember, sooner or later, that he's got his Capitol Compass with him, and they can figure things out from there. His hand reaches automatically to clasp Remi's, gripping it warmly and tightly and drawing it up against his chest, as if he can anchor himself to the other man that they might end up on the same page.
"It wasn't... It's not like I minded," he says softly. "I can take a few hits, feeble though I am." He manages a wry smile at last, gazing down at his husband. "It just... didn't feel like it was all of us working together, at the end. It all fell apart..." Ronin lets his thumb whisper across the back of Remi's good hand, and when he speaks again his throat is surprisingly tight. "Remi, I don't think I could have stopped you, back there. I don't think anyone could have. And that is... really frightening to me," he admits, blinking quickly.
"Not because of what you might do to anyone else. Because you might kill yourself without realising it, and then..." And then what? It might not be real death, but Ronin's heart thunders in his chest all the same at the mere thought of it.
oh but that's the irony: broken people are not fragile
The bare-skinned touch has Remi's mind suddenly alight as if Ronin's dazzle has permeated through into his thoughts. Gulping as quietly as he could before exhaling a shaky breath, his fingers tighten around Ronin's as he settles into the churning waters of his husband's emotions.
Snorting with as much amusement as he could manage, Remi shakes his head. "Feeble." He mocks with a slow roll of his eyes. Ronin was anything but. Not having a good sense of what had happened on the shore once he'd been freed to go after the monster, Remi raises his eyebrows. "The ascended..they were attacking you?" He reasons slowly, before falling silent to peer earnestly up into Ronin's eyes.
'I don't think you could have either.' He agrees softly, sensing his husband's dismay and knowing there was no arguing with it. "It didn't even feel like it was just my instincts that had taken over...it was...more like...everything I was and cared about, was reduced to killing the dinosaur. And once it was gone and the feelings were still there...I'd have killed Neron and anyone else without even thinking about it." Like pouring oil into water Remi is aware of how his thoughts and feelings are not the same as his husband's. "I would have thought the few weeks, or months I would have been gone for..." Trailing off, his voice becoming tight as his stomach shivers with a cough that shakes his lungs. "..you and Mateo..the twins and the Greatwood..I would have thought it was worth it."
Feeling suddenly very cold in a way that had nothing to do with Halo, the alchemist turns an alarmed pale stare towards Ronin. "Have...I lost it, again?" It being the plot. Himself. His way.
The Lullaby
Speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Force and magic can be used against Remi without permission.
"It's how I feel next to you," Ronin admits, and though his smile is lopsided as his gaze meets his husband's, there's a churning, unsettling truth to the words. Squeezing Remi's hand back, he's not sure quite when the nimbus slows to a halt in the middle of the frigid snowscape, but it does nonetheless.
"They were... I think whatever they were planning, they executed it while you were in the water," he murmurs. "I fucked up - I shifted and dropped Noah. I didn't realise..." That shifting nuked the rest of his magic. A rookie error that he ought to have known from day one. "They were causing problems. Attacking isn't the right word."
Remi's agreement about the situation has Ronin tasting copper, and he has to force his jaw to relax so he can release the inside of his cheek and swallow back the blood. He's all but clutching Remi's hand by now, the Huntsman forcing his gaze skyward, even as he shrugs a shoulder that he might use it to wipe at the wetness on his cheeks.
"I don't know," he admits in a whisper. "But I'm scared for you, Remi."
