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!
It is the heat of it that always used to surprise her. That sinking which was also a rising and pulling and an expanding. It is an obsession, not unlike other obsessions, which consumes a person until they can think of nothing else. Like spreading infection, doomed to kill. Like an untamed fire, unshackled and devouring. It is beautiful from the inside, but it inevitably ends in destruction.
These were among the quiet musings of the face behind the mask, which was lit in red and amber by the low glow of the vein of magma a dozen feet away. The tunnels converged into a clearing here, not unlike a grove in a forest, though where a pond might have accumulated instead there is a semisolid pool of mostly cool magma. It glows with a slow, hypnotic sort of pulsation, beckoning onlookers to meditate and stare.
A corner of the pool stirs in what at first seems to be a lazy bubble of heat, but after a moment is revealed to be a small lava wyrm. Its blackish eyes blink as it finds the open air, perhaps not even perceiving the masked figure that crouches nearby. It rides the seam between the solid stone and the viscous material within, sliding with a noiseless grace in an oblong path.
Chaele is transfixed by it. Her dark eyes, glinting in the low light, glare at the innocent creature. She cannot decide if she hates it for embodying the heat she yearns to regret, or if she envies the simplicity of its existence. She wonders what it might take to kill such a beast– water, perhaps, or ice. Though a dagger through the neck kills most things, if she could only get close enough to deliver it.
She does try. The magma is hotter than it looks, but surely she can bear it. Crouching low, wincing with effort, blade outstretched, she inches forward. But before she can even try, the creature ducks below the surface again. She curses under her breath at another thing lost. It always goes the same way, and all one can ever do is mourn.
The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head The thunder of the drums dictates
Diligence persisted and remained; trainings completed around the circuit of the Citadel in rampaging strides and reticent marches, ensuring recruits and himself were adequately poised for whatever the world was eager to churn next. And then, thereafter, when they dispersed, so did he, traversing and traveling across the canvas of white on hellhound limbs and blistering speed – alive and whole and renewed in the stark contrast of chilling ferocity.
Curiosity invoked far too often and he indulged it now too, lingering upon the threshold of the Climb – peeling away furs and pelts once he’d shifted, tucking them along his bag of holding, reserved for returns to mountainsides. For now, he could roll up the sleeves of his tunic, regard the warmth, heat, and sanctity for other things – blending and turning down ramparts of the world he’d yet to fully explore.
Belial coasted alongside with residual silence – save for the flurry of wings on a proper ascent – but the peryton broke his quietude when another was spotted ahead – letting out a greeting that resounded in an eager chirp. The Sword arched his brow at the individual nearby – completely foreign to him (and masked, with a skull, some likes of aesthetics he hadn’t seen since Helovia) – crouched along lava.
A lithe little flame and flare extended again, and he nearly laughed, familiar with that creature. “I would not bother hunting them,” he noted by way of his own acknowledgments, nodding his head, and ushering the companion closer to his side.
The rhythm of the falls, the number of dead The rising of the horns, ahead
The blade jerks away from its fruitless quarry and is directed immediately toward the newcomer, shaking gently in a surprised, pale-knuckled grip. She has no companion, no duty, no one to care whether she lives or dies; the dagger that glints in the irregular magma glow might reveal that lonely desperation– or perhaps simply the wary distrust it was meant to convey.
Despite her alien appearance, a small, human sniffling noise can be heard from behind the chipped teeth of the stag skull mask. It bobs gently as she readjusts her stance, keeping an eye on the man and the animal at his side as she rises to her height from where she had been crouching.
“Why not?” She asks carefully, briefly averting the dagger’s point on a bending arm. The motion is hesitant, like she is only just beginning to understand how foolish her suspicions might be. She clears her throat, the ordinary noise made uncanny by the strange pretense that surrounds it. “Are they dangerous? Sacred?”
The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head The thunder of the drums dictates
The dagger pinpointed at him meant nothing; he’d stared down far more dangerous things. For that, the stranger received nothing more than reticent, impassive features, or the careful precision of his piercing stare. Perhaps they were desolate – for why else would someone be hunting a lava wyrm? Perhaps they were discomforted by his, or Belial’s appearance. The silent inquisition could’ve lasted more than a few seconds between his calculating airs and the strung-together silence, but then the unfamiliar being rose from the crouch.
The surrounding noises echoing behind the skull reminded him very briefly of those he knew in the Basin, and it almost made him laugh. But the Sword was eternally careful and cautious, only breaking the mold of his nonchalance by arching a brow at the inquiries. “No.” To both, really, he hadn’t known them to be lethal unless taunted, irked, and annoyed, like most creatures. He couldn’t fathom them being sacred to anyone but Tanau or Frey perhaps, and even then, what would be the measure and point? “Not much meat to them.” Pragmatic to a fault, his strides began to linger elsewhere, moving across the obsidian canvas, and towards a strand, a path, away from that particular cavern. “You would be more apt to try a gore crow,” though there was always risk there – as they were an unrelenting foe, “or one of the blind rats.”
The rhythm of the falls, the number of dead The rising of the horns, ahead
The flat face of the skull mask follows his slow path from the mouth of one tunnel to another, her gaze alert to the various angles of his. Her previous thoughts, so heavy and intimate and awful, are still a fresh memory; they roil like an undertow in the back of her mind, tugging at her attention and screaming to be remembered. But now is no longer the time for self pity, nor for the vain satisfaction of violence for violence’s sake.
“I have hunted those and other things,” she replies abruptly, like one who is not incredibly familiar with the rhythm and cadence of casual conversation. “Perhaps we are both aware that there is more to take from a quarry than its meat.”
She finds a moment to view something other than his eyes. Her own watchful browns inspect the shapes of the calluses on his hands, the make and age of his clothes, even the tilting inclination of his posture which is somehow both indifferent and vigilant. She looks toward the peryton as well, a creature that indicates a complexity that she does not entirely understand. But before she can contemplate it, she realizes his destination.
“Wait.”
Finally, perhaps inevitably, the dagger does slip away into the confines of their encompassing cloak. The soft, quenching noise of a metal blade in a leather sheath is apparent to a keen ear. Then her hand emerges again, alongside the other. Her fingers are thin, her forearms rough with the raised scars of many small cuts: self mutilation in the shapes of arcane runes. Her hands are open in a gesture that is equal parts caution and preemptive gratitude. “This place... it is a maze. I do not know the way out.”
The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head The thunder of the drums dictates
The statement made him snort, if not lift the corners of his mouth into a casual grin. It’d been a long time since he’d mauled for a purpose beyond hunting, training, or vigilance – vehemence for vehemence, blood for blood, had been tokens of memories and the diligence of ghosts. Archaic and age-old, driven into the wake of his bones and the slate of his existence. He wouldn’t ask why a simple wrym had signified something else, permitting the stranger to have her dues and reasons beyond, behind, masks and pretenses.
His footfalls would have echoed, then eventually receded without much more preamble, had the tones not given him pause – the residual arch to his brow following, head turning to glance over his shoulder. A predator through and through, the casual inspection of his stare relaying some other scrutiny as the piercing slate narrowed again – Belial watching too, until both seemed mirror images of perplexed and quiet inquiry. But they remained, quiet and still, waiting to alter movement in either direction.
The dagger might have disappeared, but his keen vigilance did not. Eyes fell to the exposed arms, to runes and cuts and scars, not uncommon – he had his own marks upon flesh and muscle, but none of them had been self-inflicted; wounds taken and survival sketched, outlined, in a number of tales and battles. But as always, the prying mannerisms didn’t linger within him, and instead, the direction altered towards her statement – one the Sword hadn’t expected. “I am Deimos,” by way of introduction in the low rumble of his tones, so they didn’t continue volleying utterances without some wake of introductions. “Are you looking for the portal, or Halo?”
The rhythm of the falls, the number of dead The rising of the horns, ahead
A sudden bout of mist begins to swirl rather charmingly around your heels. It’s gone nearly as quickly as it came, followed by the indistinct sound of faraway laughter.
In the quiet moment after his last pausing step, Chaele's hands disappear again beneath her robes. Her defensive stance is more practice than experience, her scars are more meticulous than hardened. Perhaps her hands are familiar with the blood of an animal, but her feet have never stepped over a body on a battlefield; her eyes have never witnessed a soul escape through a final breath. This mask, this cloak, these armors that were not armor were equal parts reality and aspiration-- something that may or may not be observed by eyes that seek to see it.
“I…” she begins, before realizing that she did not precisely know the answer to his question. It was not the first time she had been lost for losing’s sake, allowing her well-worn feet to guide her to places of instinct and power. She had not found what she was looking for, but neither was she suicidal. “I am Chaele,” they say instead, their watchful gaze remaining on him as they dip their head in greeting.
But as the mists roll through, the sharp nose of her mask points in the direction of the laughter-- and away from Deimos for the first time since they met. “Perhaps in pursuit of the spirit…” she muses, though her attention returns to him hastily enough. She would likely never admit that it was more than caution that minded him, that she was drawn to his quiet ferocity-- perhaps to the magic in him that she did not yet know existed, or even to the subtle savagery invoked by his scars and the severity with which he wore them. If she were to truly seek out the source of this laughter, she thought, it would surely be without him.
“Halo,” she corrects. “Perhaps I will stay longer, but not without knowing the way out.”
The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head The thunder of the drums dictates
Denizens of manners tipped his head in her direction, placing the name not upon a face, but the skull, in the back of his calculating mind for future references. The mist rolling through meant his focus strayed though, studying as it seemingly flickered, sauntered, and then left as quickly as it had arrived – a notch in a clenched jaw following suit. Unyielding and unbending, guarded, reserved, and too haunted by too many experiences, he made no angle to maneuver after the fog and abyss, the bizarre roll of laughter. Instead, his gaze remained locked on various locations, clearly watching, waiting, for something vicious, vile, and vehement to appear.
Only snorting when it dissipated into nothing at all.
That she would be apt to rally after the strange semblances didn’t surprise him – though the question of why pressed behind his teeth. There were times he’d done the same; but that had been on the echoes of dying peoples’ screams, on the fringes of striving to save.
And then she countered once more in an alteration that had his brow arching. “That is where I came from,” and he pointed in the direction of the sweeping caverns he’d meandered through by curiosity and exploration, Belial chirping diligently by his knee. Winds beyond that promised a frigid, ferocious cold, that always made him lift his head into the gale. “I can lead you back through, but I promised some meat upon my return.” Even observations of another world prospered dual purposes, and he was rarely a man to settle into the unknown simply for its own sake. Certain she would catch his meaning, he turned to ramble onward, in pursuit of committing the walls to memory, and finding something to hunt.
Presuming she’d follow, or his voice would reverberate through the stone chambers, he measured another inquiry. “Do you live here?” It wouldn’t be the first time someone inhabited a place known for treachery and hazards. Or had they stumbled through the portal, taken away by whims and mercurial efforts, to land amongst the obsidian and fire?
The rhythm of the falls, the number of dead The rising of the horns, ahead
Her head tilts as he notes his origin, the subtle motion amplified by the heightened radius of her mask’s antlers. It is so strange to think of that place in this one, the mere concept of cold like a distant memory in these dark, sweltering, oppressing tunnels. She begins to crave it: that bite of a chill breeze, that glaring beauty of snow-capped stone, that sharp wet scent of the frost in one’s nostrils. But so too would that other bygone craving rise up again in the periphery of her thoughts: the sinking sensation that also rises, the heat of him against the cold, the ice-cut paths they walked together which only she may yet walk again.
“I have slept here,” she insists, fists balled at her sides as she attempts to distract herself from puerile pining. Her well-patched shoes slide softly against the obsidian path beneath them, hurried to better match Deimos’s strides. Briefly she notes that they are not headed in the direction she had requested, though she is in no position to object. “But I live nowhere for long.”
The eyes within the shadows of the skull-mask dart urgently around their new and changing surroundings, endeavoring to commit to memory the interchangeable stone walls as they pass them. “A larger quarry may be hunted with twice the hunters,” she suggests, perhaps redundantly, softening her voice and her footfalls in anticipation of discovering just that. “What is your preferred method?”
As if on cue, her attention twitches in the direction of a distant noise, like a claw or a stick scraping against rock. She pauses to look at Deimos, anticipating a tilt of recognition in his eyes.
The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head The thunder of the drums dictates
Catching at the words as they crawled across obsidian, he only slowed his steps when he was certain she was following along, and even then his strides were still massive and unwinding in their resolve. Nomadic tendencies unfurled, and considering his own recent bout with the fluidity of changing terrains, climates, depending on motives, reasons, and goals, he couldn’t begrudge the semblance. The why didn’t matter to him – so he remained aloof and aware all at once, vigilance and power beneath the roaming wiles.
His head tilted to snag at the other notions under masks and skulls, a soft smile bridging the lines and corners of his mouth at the suggestion. “Of course.” Maybe it’d been meant to be rhetorical, but the ideas were readily understood regardless – lately his skills had been marked and measured in hunting parties anyway.
Preferred methods lent to the pervading emblems in his blood and bones; a pulse of a knife ever persistent, eternally there, brooding and brewing below the surface of his skin. “Magic.” Weaponry in its own archaic state – and though he’d lunge with a sword in hand at many an adversary, sometimes the incantations were best. “Yours?” Best to know, perhaps, before they delved into rampage and ruin, pondering over the dagger he’d seen earlier.
Though there was a sound, like a talon clicking against the stone, that gave him pause, that stilled his frame. “Could be gore crows,” he flickered into a whisper, brows furrowing in concentration. Without the telltale outcry of meat though, it was difficult to parse through. He nodded for Belial to move forward, to which the peryton responded with obvious glee, and the rustle of wings barely sifted along the boundaries, his shadowed figure blending precariously against the walls – a lookout and spy for a feral thread.
The rhythm of the falls, the number of dead The rising of the horns, ahead
She retrieves her dagger again, this time pointed at the noise down the corridor. Her eyes do not stray from her search of the shadows, though her elbow is bent at that familiar hesitating angle. A rat or a wyrm would have been an easy hunt, but the weight at the pit of her stomach suggested Deimos’s instinct might be right. A gentle gulp bobs in her throat as she adjusts her grip on the little blade.
In truth, it is just as useful as any divine power Chaele might have access to; for all the pretense of flesh-carved runes and symbolic masks and esoteric appearances, there is little potence in her magical ability. Still, it is all she has ever known. Perhaps she cannot fathom the sheer scope of the power Deimos is capable of harnessing, but still her voice is stretched into the shape of a smile as she replies in kind. “Magic.”
The corridor arcs to one side as the three hunters progress slowly, cautiously, breathlessly forward, allowing the unseen creature’s long shadow to dance into view long before its physicality can be known. Chaele can only search the dim for their winged scout and hope it reveals some advantage soon-- but before it can, the mysterious scraping sound whines into an idle but iconic noise.
“Me-ea-ea-eat…”
A sharp intake of air is all that signals her recognition of it. The emotion in her quick-beating heart tastes like dread, but there is a duality of doubt and discipline that leaves the metallic tang of panic in its wake. This is a test to be mastered, and one she had not prepared for. But as she slides toward the nearest wall and presses herself in stealth against it, all she can do is hold her breath and wait for instinct to guide her.
The sound of iron shots is stuck in my head The thunder of the drums dictates
The singular response was enough for the feral depths of his grin to manifest; very boyish and juvenile in its dominion. No shame in the incantations worn beneath skin and flesh and bone, no mortification in the way it pulsed and beat a steady drum in his heart. Never had been. Never would be.
The images Belial volleyed and returned, complete with a subtle chirp of entangled, nefarious enthusiasm, were enough to confirm the suspicions. He nodded, indicating he was moving forward, and then the cry came up - meat festering its way down the walls, clattering on hinges and acrimonious enticement. A soft sigh filtered through his lungs, perhaps some primal acceptance of the inevitable, or the quick arc of restlessness coiling into marrow; calling his own enchantments to arms. “Be prepared,” by way of warning, before he stepped around the bend, and caught sight of the flock.
There were about five or six, moving about after some fresh kill – chanting and taunting, beaks prying away their promised bloodshed, swallowing the raw portions whole. Maybe they’d be distracted enough to get enough hits in – understanding well that he’d likely be both assault and defense on this particular collision course. With one more nod granted to the masked being, he permitted Belial to unleash his formidable stance.
With great aplomb – the shadowy figure hastened from his darker folds and immediately sank his teeth into the closest bird he could snatch. There was a great uproar and fury amongst the avians, all immediately cawing and flying upward, before Deimos sent a ricochet of his own devastation and ruin. The magic unfurled and uncoiled amongst intangible lines and webs, but cast a tremendous power that rallied against three of them in quick succession, falling, falling, falling like stones.
The rhythm of the falls, the number of dead The rising of the horns, ahead
Even without the visibility that would aid in her hunt, Deimos tells her what she needs to know like the subtle signs of an impending storm. Patient observation turns to alert intention, just as the smell of rain rises in a green sky. A quiet exhalation blows like a cool, tugging wind. His still anticipation breaks with that pre-lightning static of primed magic. And then the tempest of him is unleashed.
Chaele pushes away from the wall to do her part, her fingers splayed in the posture of anticipant magic, but for a moment it seems she is destined to the role of witness. Before she can utter the first syllables of an incantation, half of the flock is down. Her eyes widen in surprise, and perhaps a touch of fear.
But the promise of instinct takes hold of her soon enough. The shadows on her raised scars thicken and pulse, rising from her like ink in water before they sharpen and quicken toward one of the remaining crows. The black magic encircles the animal’s neck and tightens there like a noose, cutting short an intelligent screech as its energy is sapped and its flight interrupted. It staggers beside its fallen comrades, stuttering and suffering through an incomplete death.
She spares Deimos a short look, then the companion whose teeth drip with fresh blood, then the neutralized bodies at the reeling bird’s feet. Maybe it is a fool’s choice, but Chaele cannot abide the ignominy of a messy kill. She strides forward, blade in hand, and dispatches her singular quarry with a practiced slice to the throat. So concerned is she with its demise that she does not notice the sixth and final gore crow launch mercilessly toward her.
At least, not before its beak has sunk deep into her arm.
