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!
The sky was alight in a thousand shades of glory as the setting sun painted the wispy evening clouds with a fiery brush. The waves of the Arclight ocean were calm with the receding tide, and a road of liquid gold seemed to lead from the shore to the western sky.
The tiny seaglass cathedral caught the reflections of sky and water and threw them back in gleaming rainbows, looking ethereally translucent with the sun behind it, shining through its walls and setting the coral within to gleaming in vibrant hues.
The wind was beginning to shift, blowing from the quiet shore out over the whispering sea, and as it did it caught in the cathedral's spires and sang a haunting, meandering melody to the world. It was joined by the sound of a simple ocarina whose source wasn't immediately visible as it accompanied nature's improvisation. At first it seemed the instrument's sound came from within the cathedral itself, but upon closer inspection it came from somewhere outside and behind it... where only the ocean held sway.
A fraying burlap bag bounces at Chaele’s side, knocking against her knee as she splashes through the narrow bank. It is filled with various debris from the sea: fish bones and seashells and bundles of dried kelp. She has wandered where the whims of her salvage lead her, long skirts heavy with the wet of the tide, until her noisy stride joins the cathedral’s melody with a soft, tinkling percussion.
She had not planned to come here, but perhaps the music has drawn her away from the quiet like the twilight has drawn her away from the day. It is instinct that guides her, or perhaps simply the desire for something new to add to her collection. And she has certainly found something.
A gnarled, scarred hand reaches for the emerged coral, grasping a small piece of the delicate, glimmering instrument. An ivory mask leans close, the eyes behind inspecting it carefully. Then she snaps the little piece off and slips it into her bag.
And so it is that the newcomer alters the pitch of Hale Ka’aila’s song as well. While the coral itself can accommodate immediately, whistling out a fresh harmony into the painted sky, perhaps a few notes of the ocarina now shift out of tune. Chaele’s attention perks, searching, not quite sure what she is hearing but nonetheless curious.
Hadama knew the music of Hale Ka'aila well; the way it sounded at dawn when the sea breeze blew in off the ocean and towards the shore. The melodies it played at midday beneath a blazing sun, seaglass warmed and shimmering with heat. And of course, the sunset songs when the wind returned back to the ocean, bringing the scents of the dryland forests and ports to dance through the cathedral's spires.
When that melody changed the ocarina trailed into silence, fading from the music of the cathedral.
Instead, a broad-winged shadow swam through the shallows, shifting as it moved until a steel-silver head rose from the waves. Emerald green eyes regarded the newcomer from a dark-skinned face, long hair streaming wetly over bare shoulders whose scars gleamed from the golden ink tattooed over them. His lower portions remained cloaked in seafoam and spindrift a little ways out from the sandbar, but his gaze traveled from the skull-headed woman to the freshly-damaged finger of the cathedral's substance and back.
The shaman’s body tenses as she spies the dark shape in the water, preparing for some monster or spirit to accost her in this distant, lonely place. Her hand move to the dagger at her belt as he emerges and will remain there for a time. For his wide, scarred, gilded body is not exactly a friendly one, his silent inquisition lost on her as the orbital holes of her mask meet his shifting gaze. She senses the loss of his harmonies, though could not describe them if she tried; the empty spaces between the persistent cathedral’s whistles and chimes lend an eerie tone to his arrival.
“Hello,” she greets cautiously, still unsure if the intelligence in his eyes is that of a visitor or a predator. The stolen fragment is already safely tucked away in her bag, now just another dead trophy among others. Her boots shift warily in the sand, utterly aware of her disadvantage on the cramped sand bar. Perhaps hypocritically, she adds, “What are you doing here?”
Silence, for a while, beneath the haunting melodies that continues to sing softly through the glass and coral. The human's words hung like fish trapped in a net made of shimmering sunset fire and twisting twilight breezes, caught and considered by the man in the sea who watched their source from stern emerald eyes.
"This is my home." The voice was deep and quiet, a low rumble like distant summer thunder on the horizon as his eyes moved once more from the animal skull mask, to the cathedral, and back. "A part of it." Muscular arms crossed over a broad chest as he considered the stranger, and how far she had strayed from the shore.
The question pauses in her like a held note, a decrescendo of surprise and confusion. In truth Chaele had barely heard of the invasion, that seed of war planted in the place where the magic in her blood prevented her from laying her own roots. A frown twists over her mangled lips, hidden behind her mask but nonetheless taking shape in her voice. “I am not,” is the curt reply, and though she had been patient through his strange silence, she is hasty to add, “I care little for the petty politics between cities, nor for the vagaries of demigods and their entourages.”
She looks around then, at the shallow waters that mark her path back, at the symphonic architecture behind her, at the impassible ocean beyond. If this creature would scorn her for something she had no part in, she would have little recourse to avoid his wrath. Still the stubborn scowl remains in her voice as she continues curtly, “Are you?”
As far as Chaele was concerned, the notion was equally absurd.
The man appeared unmoved by her words, though his stoic expression was difficult to read. As his gaze settled on her own mask once more he considered the stretching antlers and the shape of bone, so alien to the shores of his home. At her curt question he simply looked at her, a single steely brow raising in silent reproof.
"You came. And now there is damage to the cathedral that stands between air and water. The bridge between sky and sea." He spoke slowly, each word chosen carefully before it was released in contrast to the stranger's hasty way of speech. "After the Torchers worked hard to see it protected." Water swirled around his ribs, the force of the waves gentler past the protective reef so that he didn't have to work to remain relatively still amid the light, playful currents off the sandbar.
The trick was in knowing where the riptides began, and how far they flowed.
"The cathedral of Stormbreak was also damaged. Are you allied with the ones who did it?"
She looks back to the edifice again, though not without a moment’s hesitation in taking her eyes from this intelligent creature. Chaele understands the power of metaphor too well-- it is the reason she took what she did-- but to her, this bridge is a commons to be experienced by all. It had not occurred to her that such a place would be protected or watched. It is just like a Torcher to claim that something is harmed because it is shared.
“If I kill a fish for food, have I destroyed the school it swam in? If I cut a log for fire, have I offended every tree in the Greatwood?” She scoffs, but it is more a defensive noise than a dismissive one. “For the last time, I do not know anything about the attack on Stormbreak.”
Her boot crunches softly in the wet sand as she takes a step back, returning her gaze to the mermanta. What she lacks in knowledge of the water and its nuances, perhaps she makes up for in curiosity for the same. “There is power in this place, as you surely already know. It is my work to discover what manner of power it is.”
His gaze no longer wavered, remaining locked on Chaele in emerald contemplation of the visitor with such poor manners. "Yes," he said simply in answer to both examples. "But that is not what happened here. If the school has been nurtured by a fishherd, if the log is from a tree that has been tended for decades, your destruction hurts the ones who have worked to protect them. It is... discourteous." Which was perhaps the kindest word he could have used under the circumstances. Still, he finally tilted his head in acknowledgment that she hadn't been part of the assault that had destroyed the distant tower.
At the mention of power he finally shifted, as if the part of him hidden by the water had moved over the shallow slope of the sandbank. "Safrin's power protects this place," he said slowly. He had already told her what other power lay in it. If she didn't believe him... "You may ask her yourself."
She shakes her head in disagreement, the long pointed nose of her mask swaying in the warm evening air. A hand, gnarled with the carvings of so many arcane runes, rises and turns in a slow but emphatic gesture. “That which is cultivated will eventually rot. That which is built will eventually crumble. Nothing belongs to anyone.”
Her gaze will continue in sideward contemplation of him, the monocular holes of her skull mask demanding that she view him through the eyes of a prey animal. Occasionally her head will turn and she will regard him from the other eye, slowly shaking her head as if in a constant state of dissent. What she does not do is look up, neither to the slowly waking stars in the young night nor to the goddess who is evoked by them.
“There is no purpose to such appeals. But would you like the piece returned?” Even as she offers, her hand merely drops to her side without moving to retrieve said piece. It is true that the shaman wants to keep this sacred thing, but even she is not so uncivilized as to ignore his insinuations. “I must assume you are one of these protectors.”
He considered her rejoinder for a few moments, turning it around in his mind's eye to examine it from all angles before turning his gaze outwards again. This time he neither shook his head nor nodded, but simply gazed at her calmly. "Just because something is impermanent does not mean it is not precious to someone." Her final, nihilistic statement earned a raised brow and a flicker of what was almost amusement in his greenstone eyes. "And if that is true, no piece of it belongs to you, either. It belongs to itself; to the land and sea and wind."
He had heard similar claims of anarchy recently from a thief, come to think of it.
Hadama was a rock in the moving sea, a point of steady stillness in a shifting land that itself moved unceasingly. If she watched him from the eyes of prey, having to turn her head from side to side to see him, he watched her from a predator's gaze: straight on and unwavering.
Whatever her reasons for not wanting to approach the goddess, Hadama simply accepted the refusal. At the offer he gave a slow nod, and uncrossed his arms. "I have not needed to be, before," he rumbled, a hint of regret in his voice. "You are the first human I have known to willfully damage it."
There is a glaring pause as the twilight breezes tug at her heavy braids, each entwined with some stone or herb or bone that had been taken from the wilds in much the same manner as the piece of coral in her pack. Each had its own power, each its own meaning, just like the runes on her goose-prickled arms and the little words sewn into her fluttering skirts. Speaking over the cool, shoreward wind, she insists, “I will keep it until it is time to part with it.”
However disrespectful her actions, Chaele had convinced herself that it was all a part of a greater meaning. ...Much like that which this predator insisted on.
Finally her obstinance relents, the meanings of his words flooding between the reeds of her contentious philosophies. For each of her theses he had an answer, for every flow an ebb. And she is not so stubborn as to deny logic, however vexing it might be to admit it. “If that time is now, then so be it.”
She leans toward him, and not without the faint stiffness of dread in her outstretched hand. The piece, glimmering and inert, is held tenderly between her crooked fingers in offering. The words that follow are not an apology, but nonetheless a regret.
A hel cried overhead; a harsh and lonely sound as it rode the wind and kept an eye on the waters below for an unwary fish to come too near the surface. Hadama's eyes never left the masked stranger, however, and he accepted her bold statement in contemplative silence.
Her decision to return the broken fragment was unexpected, and steel-silver brows rose slightly in surprise. Hadama inclined his head in gratitude, breaking his gaze at last, and swam a little closer so he could stretch his brown hand out. His skin glinted in the last of the day's light, wet with seawater as he cupped his palm beneath her own to accept the broken fragment back.
"There is an artisan of coral that I know," he agreed. "Who can repair such things, when the tide is high." He paused, closing his fingers gently around the small piece with as much care as Chaele had shown.
“I am called Chaele,” she responds with an equal tone, hesitantly amiable. Her empty hands rise to clutch at her bare arms in the cool evening air, equally a gesture of warming as of idle protection, as her chin lifts to get a better look at the fresh stars in the sky. A wispy overcast glows in the bright moonlight, the moon’s full face casting an undulating reflection on the wide ocean. The twilight always seems to last forever, until it doesn’t.
“I have come to harvest pieces of purpose,” she explains, one arm parting from where they cross to lift at the strap of her bag. It jangles faintly with the sound of shells and stones and other shore-touched debris. “Each is said to have different meanings, which combine to invoke complex intentions in ritual magic. That is what I mean when I describe the power of this place.” Not its divine precedence.
Her gaze moves from her bag, apparently avoiding Hadama’s gaze now, to regard the artful entanglement of coral and sea glass at her side. Still it continues on, its music swelling and fading in the slow, rhythmic breezes of the night. “But perhaps it is absurd, to take from one sacred thing in the name of another.”
