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 Reaper returned to the perch after Long Night’s end, when the haunting outcries ceased, when the intertwining, Stygian cords of endless evenings drifted off; seemingly with little fanfare, the curl of flames from the Spark Bird’s drifting off into the horizon’s threads. The lack of sinister claws hanging amidst shadowed portals and gloaming voids was a relief, but odd, as if he’d grown used to the weight of the ominous abyss’ candor, and didn’t know what to do when sanctuary, liberation, and deliverance had been proffered back to them again. It was the same time and time again, so acclimated to the depths of death, to the cold, shackled, chilling nuances, that he rarely understood what to do or how to behave when he was handed the sun, the moon, and the stars again.
Just try, was a ghost in his mind; a gentle, nudging refrain, and he acquiesced to the sagacity because it was far better than anything he could surmise.
He studied the long columns of wood for a moment or two; imagining the bestial, untamed shades of light glowing from the flying invocations again; peace in the chaos, bedlam in the repose. It’d been an intriguing contradiction, so much fire and power striving to bleed out the nefarious reaches, when itself was a pinnacle of combustion and disaster. He’d enjoyed seeing it nonetheless, would keep the memory tucked away to reflect upon when the darkness encroached and the lanterns’ fuel ran dry.
Reminiscing hadn’t been his sole purpose for arriving though: for littered amidst the melting snow and pockets of greenery desperate to reach the newly-forged rays of sunlight, was debris. Some particles had been burnt to a crisp and likely needed to be removed, ashes, soot, and embers reeling along thin lines of grass and edges of rime. Even debris had managed to scar the area, and he pondered, briefly, what was to be done with the perch itself – burnt and blighted thanks to its gifted occupant. Would it be taken down? Or would it stay for as long as it could, only being replaced prior to the next onset of seasons and the Long Night’s pending approach? He furrowed his brow and gave it another look, piercing eyes glancing over the splintered pillars, posts, and supports, before turning back to his sled.
The object had survived the Long Night too, left at his own home and to its own devices. No monster had found it worthwhile apparently, but the warrior believed it worthwhile and useful, bringing it along over the disappearing snow, and he could always drag it over rock and rubble later. He grabbed hold of a pair of gloves, pulling them over his broad hands, and then returned the favor of the Spark Bird’s arrival – grabbing hold of the nearest curled, decimated object and placing it in the sled to be taken care of later. As he advanced upon still smoldering grass, he stomped on it with his boots, ensuring the little flames lost their air, their oxygen, and the plants could start anew.
All twenty fingers and toes still in place, Lily finds the events of the past week both tragic and absurdly exciting. This never would have happened back in Portsmouth. The dangers are real, she is well aware, but the allure and magic of a literal new world is too much to keep her spirits down. Is this what her ancestors felt like, when they, the great nomads of Earth, walked out of the cradle of civilization? Was this what the great explorers of the Renaissance felt when they crossed the great Oceans and eventually found land and people and a hundred things they’d never seen before?
Is this what her life is to be now? A series of scrambles for survival? A community of magic users? A world the best writers of her age could never have dreamed of?
Dawn breaks, and she is there to greet it. The chill of Deepfrost is still as vicious as ever, but there is something about the return of the sun that brings her out at the first sign of its radiant beams. And it seems she isn’t alone. The giant of a hunk that is Deimos pulls a sled along, bending down to begin to remove all the debris and chaos that preceded the Spark Bird. Quietly, unobtrusively even, Lily joins him and begins picking up large splinters, and other… miscellaneous objects.
“Good Morning, Deimos,” she says with a glance through her lashes. “Glad to see you survived LongNight.”
Flirting fail.
lily
as if you were on fire from within the moon lives in the lining of your skin
The silence clung in the spring particles, drew its breath along scabbards and ruin, and he simply became another part of it. Ghosts and catacombs clung to the ramparts, to the wooden columns, to the shades of boughs that had once been on fire – singed and charred, mere broken players and parts from another span of time. Would they be remembered, acknowledged, by the time Deepfrost reigned again? Would they be replaced, carved back into formation by newer timber, by more flesh and blood? Would the Spark Bird ever return – rumors and myths had speculated it wouldn’t have ventured there again, yet, it had flown and sizzled before their eyes. What was the prompting? The deaths? The shadows? The darkness?
He mulled over anything and everything in the spaces between light and shadow, picking up more and more debris, tugging the sled behind. At some moments, he ventured away from the objects to grab hold of more trash, hovering along the lines of emboldened, smoking cinders and layers of lingering rubbish, hauling larger waste over, until a voice caught him.
The Reaper hadn’t heard her – too absorbed in his task and meticulous notions, but he maneuvered a mask over his surprise, over the quick, swift turn, predator muscles and sinew bunching, coiling, ready for a strike that wasn’t coming. “Morning, Lily,” he returned with a look that could’ve been considered indifferent, were it not for the arch of his brow, the humor around his mouth. Perhaps that’s how they should all greet one another from now on - I see you’re still alive - as if it was a shock to see friends and acquaintances after the veils, the shrouds, and the treacheries were lifted. Was this how these people lived, expecting some of their allies and kin to not resurface after the stretched out evening? Was this normalcy? And what could be done about it, other than to suffer, combat, or wallow through its living anguish? “Same to you,” he proffered back, line made short of a chuckle.
The warrior reached into his sled and tossed her a pair of gloves he’d left within, before returning back to his diligent work. Deimos crossed back over long, wavering grass, bending down to pick apart edges and seams of junk and remains from crossed over tresses and blades; lifting his head and throwing them into the deep center of the sled. Only after a few extended seconds, for it took him that long to contemplate anything to say, he provided an inquiry. “What horrors did you see?” The arch of his brow was back, the layers of impishness nestled in the tone of his voice; meant to be a sanction of dark humor in place of all the melancholy, all the terrors, all the monstrous iniquities drenching the world.
Well, that’s one way to get through it; with dark humor and deflection, almost anything is possible!
All jokes aside, Lily is thrilled to see Deimos alive and in apparently good spirits. Lord, if she couldn’t just watch him carry things and bend over all day… but ah, that is neither here nor there. She catches the proffered gloves and quickly puts them on, flashing him a quick smile of thanks. Stabbing herself with glass wouldn’t be any fun.
They work together in companionable silence, the beauty and the half-beast comb the grass for anything that might hurt future bare feet, for things that could pierce or poke or otherwise prove very unpleasant. She collects a pile of smaller things - things that were better suited to her arms than to Deimos’s. His next question gives her pause, but it isn’t until she actually looks and sees his impish brow that she can answer. Casually, the redhead stretches from her bent-over position and shrugs. “Oh, you know… just some lady get eaten alive, I think. It was almost too dark to tell. And then almost lost my fingers and toes to frostbite. So, you know, the usual.”
It’s macabre, but what else is there but defiance in the face of death and destruction? Lily is by no means minimizing the woman’s death, but she refuses to give power to the fear. She will not give in. She will thrive
"You?" she asks. "Anything to make you shake in your boots?"
lily
as if you were on fire from within the moon lives in the lining of your skin
Making light of a horrendous situation might not have been the best thing to do – but Deimos had long since lost any sense of modicums or proprieties. Atrocities had been terrifying, horrifying, and voracious enough without having to relive them; they still managed to shuffle their way to the forefront of his nightmares with alarming frequency, regardless of how often he tried to push them away. He was cold, indifferent, and reticent a majority of the time, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel, didn’t recall, didn’t remember the bitterness, the sorrows, the aches, and the anguish. Long Night stained and eroded over his carefully sculpted apathy just as easily as the rest of his life – rancorous and clawing, a biting, tearing, scalding scythe bearing its way down his spine, over his shoulders, through his ligaments and bones. “Is that all?” He jested, tones audibly jocular, arching a brow at her again as she recalled the intensity of the eternal evenings, tugging against a stuck piece of debris curled under a rock during the entire process. The beast didn’t have to imagine the imagery Lily laid out in the air – some monsters lurked in the cauldron of Stygian contortions, and had made themselves very clear. It was never fear that got to him, never a sensation of the hair rising over the back of his neck, the trepidation, the dread, or the alarm; he’d picked away at those emotions on the battlefield, where no one had any time to contemplate a single nuance. It was after, the results, the unease, the discarded patriots who’d been friends, who’d been comrades, who’d been brothers in arms, fighting for a common cause, fighting against a common foe, and witnessing their slaughter. Like they’d been nothing.
Had the lady been something, out there, inviting the inevitable?
He might’ve avoided the treachery of Long Night at all, had he not gained friends and allies again, had he kept to himself, had he simply coiled his way back into the darker threads.
She asked over his experiences next, and he swallowed down the noxious bile suddenly threatening to lance his tongue. For the majority of the time, he’d done just that, sinking into the recesses of the Rathskeller and avoiding anyone and anything; until Edrei’s screams had echoed from behind the door and he’d found Amalia, lifeless, in her arms.
He’d seen them all buried again, over and over again, one by one, nestled in their makeshift graveyards and catacombs, silent, gone. His tones were less impish, less devilish, worn back into their old slate once more, deeper, losing the amused intonations. “I witnessed someone be brought to life.” The Reaper finally plucked the garbage from beneath the sturdy, behemoth stone and didn’t say how much the image had burned inside him. He didn’t mention the apprehension, the shaking of his fingers, the cursed memories brewing beneath the surface. He didn’t allude to the disquiet and unease. He folded it back into his mind and let it flicker apart; doomed to return once more in the collection of his melancholy.
So while Lily seemed to defy, to survive, he pressed inward – eroded, crumbled, and seethed.
She does not mean to have a callous nature towards the Deaths - and there seemed to be so many, this is quite the dangerous world she’s landed in. More so than Portsmouth. Or the wilds of America, even. But she didn’t know the ones who died, aside from Bastien. And she’s been trying this new thing where she looks towards the future instead of the past. The past made her who she is, but a couple of months ago everything drastically changed and it is so achingly different than what lies ahead of her.
Death is… foreign to her, almost; a natural, everyday fact, but still somehow at arm’s length. It hasn’t invaded her thoughts, hasn’t rocked her to sleep at night. She knows nothing of the kind of carnage that can be wrought upon the world. It’s all a giant fable, meant to scare kids. Lily oozes beautiful, white woman privilege and she doesn’t even know it, other than the little voice that says in the back of her mind thank goodness you were a lady’s maid and not in the scullery.
She pauses in her work and fixes Deimos with a heartfelt gaze, wiping a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “I’m glad they’re ok,” she says, having conveniently missed that part of the drama at the Rathskellar. But instead of turning back to the debris that still litters the area, she continues to look at the hulking bit of sandstone before her: so stoic, so brief, so… mostly unreadable. Finally, she just takes a breath and asks. “Are you all right, Deimos?” No flirtatious edge, no jesting tones - just a genuine concern and curiosity for the man she knows nothing about and yet seems inexplicably fond of.
lily
as if you were on fire from within the moon lives in the lining of your skin
Perhaps he’d been sculpted and carved out of the bones and sinew of his past so many times that he’d scarcely thought of the future. Before, when he’d beheld a sense of purpose, when he’d slid his swords through ribcages and hearts, when he’d sworn allegiances and oaths to an avaricious king, when he’d fostered brutality and barbarity as an occupation, there’d only been the next day. The next hour. The next moment. The next second. Thereafter, when they’d all fallen apart in mass, when defeat scalded the tongues of those still living, he’d returned home, tried to restore the flickered, cindered parts and contortions. Layers of unrest, sedition, and the briefest of respites ghosted their way through his methods and motives; until the rest fell away, and he’d sunk down into the thresholds of this place.
Here, in the present, in the now, he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. They didn’t need soldiers. They didn’t need warriors. They didn’t need the ignorant, the futile, or the inept, so he averted his eyes and listened to their phrases, their songs, their proclamations. He listened to recitations about how to survive Long Night. He chose a house and piled wood outside its aperture. He hunted and gathered and wandered, but there was no taste of adventure, no relish of the unknown, no beckoning, siren calls haunting him until he chose something. The Reaper amounted to nothing, just another form, another body, another being taking up residence in the sullen corridors.
It was the latter that vexed him the greatest, because he didn’t understand why some things occurred (especially Long Night, and why they continued to suffer throughout year after year), or why they couldn’t bludgeon the world, the barrier, apart with their bare hands and escape the idle futility.
Death wasn’t foreign, but the rest of the world was.
He grabbed hold of another larger piece of garbage and tugged, this one was less rooted to its chosen domicile, and came up with the ease of his strength. At Lily’s inquiry though, his head snapped back in her direction, eyes narrowing for the briefest of instances, still, stoic, walled up and fortified with his iron-clad reticence and upheaval. Was she concerned about him? Was there something to be perturbed about? He’d spent so much of his last few seasons brooding that it felt like normalcy, a brewing, boiling surface of regret, rancor, and ramparts; a defense, a shield, against further terror and onslaught layered upon him. Had he given himself away, that eventually he was going to fray all those seamless strands, come apart, shards of revolution and unholy, nefarious deeds gone to waste? That he was striving towards something, but couldn’t identify it, couldn’t see it on the horizon, marking and chiseling his way with forbearance, wrestling with the unknown? “I am fine,” he finally responded, diving along the blurry line of lie and truth; shallow depths of veracity. He released the smallest of sighs, pondering if she had ever felt the same, treading over those sketches and dominations, uncertain of where to go or what to do. “Out of place, perhaps.” Then the heathen shrugged his shoulders, as if nothing were amiss when it was everything sullying his figure and clawing through his shadows. His piercing gaze flickered back to her as he grabbed hold of another larger entity of trash, pulling it along towards the sled. “And you?”
Isn’t exactly like a man to say that, when Death came knocking and claimed more than they thought possible? Even for someone intimately acquainted with dead, nay, her bedfellow, it is permissible for him to sigh and then follow that sigh up with a satisfactory explanation. Men have feelings too! God forbid they have someone to talk to that won't judge them based on traditional masculine qualities. She is far from content with his explanation but from his tone and commitment to the work needing to be done, she knows she ought not to push it. She’s probably quite lucky to have gotten even that small admission of being out of sorts. It's frustrating. How do you get close to someone who seems to have a full-body set of stone armor?
So instead she turns and rolls her eyes skyward in the age-old plea to the Gods to deliver unto man a smidgen of emotional intelligence. And like almot every woman who has come before her, she knows it will fall on deaf ears.
Picking up the last bits of hand-sized trash, she nods in agreement. “Somewhat similar, I guess. I miss home. But then this is also becoming a very strange and exciting sort of home. I feel… weaker here, I guess.” She pauses to consider those words, because they aren’t quite correct. “No, not weaker… more like, behind. I can catch up, but I’m also just not like a lot of people here. I don’t fight, I don’t have magic powers. I can do other things, but I’m not valuable the way others are…” She drifts off with a soft blowing through her lips. She didn’t mean to lay that all on him. Fuck.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to word vomit on you. None of those things are your problem, my friend.” She checks to make sure the piles on the sleds are secure, and then looks around at the area. Seems pretty clean. A glance to Deimos. Are they done?
lily
as if you were on fire from within the moon lives in the lining of your skin
The Reaper enjoyed his armor. It fit right over his heart and soul with animosity, vehemence, and stoic plates, iron-forged and bestial, a barbaric contortion nestled in thorns and brambles. Accompanied with his ramparts, parapets, and daggers, he was a force to be reckoned with, denied, left to his own devices. It was so much easier that way – rarely questioned, rarely glanced upon, rarely acknowledged. It kept others at bay, so he wouldn’t hurt, so he wouldn’t bleed, so he wouldn’t concave and erode before their very eyes – he’d done it so many times, corroded and fallen apart, flickered and dying underneath eaves and below bridges, suffering in silence. He tormented himself because then no one else could do it to him; how much more could they damage a man who lived amidst his own perilous anguish? It was sad and pathetic, to shy away from vulnerability, shuddering away from the exposure, the weakness, the susceptibility, but he tucked himself away regardless, head down, eyes on the shadows, the darkness, waiting for it to encroach upon him, smother, devour him whole.
Then they kept coming to him, accepting individuals who didn’t seem to care about how unattainable, how unreachable, he’d made himself. They didn’t care that he was a weapon. They didn’t care that he was ridiculous, stubborn, and defiant. They just continued to poke at his chainmail, and he didn’t know what to do.
He’d had it all before, and then they died. He’d buried them in the sand, in the fields, beside riverbeds and outcrops, one by one, breaking further and further with each turn of his shovel, with each speck of damned dirt, with each raw, clinging emotion sputtering and dying right alongside them.
And still, the world pressed more and more creatures and people in his sights. Try the watery words echoed. Please try. He’d take two steps forward and then hundreds back, stuck in his muck and mire, uncertain, almost afraid of the end results, if he pushed on and they found him lacking, wanting, more empty vessel than mighty, stalwart beast. It’ll be worth it, I promise.
So he listened, a habit, a routine, of dissolving and sharpening his mind while his mouth was silent. Lily had no misgivings about admitting, about agreeing, with his sentiments – they were all so lost, wandering and wayfaring and nomadic because they didn’t have anything else. But to think she felt weaker, when he had never perceived an ounce of frailty or fragility in her was an intriguing notion, and he had to look back into the shamble and shadows of woods to decipher and breathe. Behind he could understand; the rest of this earth had a head start in understanding, in comprehending, the works and pathways of this newfound place. While Deimos could tell everyone about Isilme, the roots of its hatred and animosity, the pulsing, pervading madness of glory and triumph scorching their skin, leading them onto defeat over and over again, it was only because he’d been born, lived in, their walls and tides, their sweeping sands, their chaotic embraces. The Outlanders hadn’t been christened here, brought for one reason or another by an unforeseen circumstance and enigma – and they were at the Naturals’ mercy, as rich and extended as it’d already been. Value was an interesting subject, for despite even holding his enchantments, his invocations, he felt as useless as ever; no one requested death upon anyone’s house.
The warrior shifted, rising from where he’d been bent and toying with the last of the rubbish, eyeing the pile on the sled, while he mulled over what to say. “You are not worthless,” he replied first, a hand steadying the larger bulk, pulling some in various directions so it was more stable when he dragged the sled along the thawing ground. “We all have our talents. Some have not had the opportunity to be utilized. We will learn and adapt.” The Reaper’s eyes settled on her, tilting his head, a steady study of her features, of all the aptitude, expertise, and capacities buried underneath. “There are many ways to regard strength,” and here he arched his brow, the simplest of smiles brushing across his lips, before he yanked at the rope of the container. “We should find a place to burn this.”
[Seasonal Event] stitch away from making it
