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!
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
The very edges of the Grounds are the furthest Nate has dared ventured since coming back to life. It’s not fear that roots him, necessarily, though it’s almost impossible to not think of the consequences. He leans pressed against the trunk of a tree facing the ragged start of the rolling prairies of Kings End.
He’s trying to focus, very hard, on a little house close enough to the ocean to hear the waves. Of a garden growing dormant in the chill. Of a harvest, and a birthday that he missed.
“And for fucking what?” His boot strikes a packed ball of snow, shattering it in an unsatisfying plume of powder. A sigh heaves out him as he slides down the tree trunk, landing his ass on the cold ground. Nate squints out into the horizon, focusing on nothing in particular as the sun sinks lower and lower.
As the snow sprays, so too does a flutter of birds rise from the branches above. Chaele’s attention perks toward the sudden movement, the stirring breeze, the not-so-distant cry. A thin layer of snowfall tips away from the thick mantle of her cloak and she lowers a protective hood.
For a precious moment, her face is exposed to the cool, sweet air. Then she lifts the flap of her tent and retrieves her mask.
The stag skull has a weight to it, a heft in her neck that reminds her to mind no burden. Its ocular holes, one on the left and one on the right, show her what it is to be prey. It is conspicuous, and so is her camp; perhaps he has already detected the spindling smoke trail that rises up from her dying fire, or the acrid smell of drying tannins on her latest fur. She has no reason to hide, and every reason to follow her curiosity.
The trail leads her to the demi-god’s slumped form, a sight that might be pitiful if it weren’t for that wary sinking in her gut as she sees him. She has learned too well that a predator is just as likely to have claws and fangs as soft hands and sad eyes. The sheathed hunting knife at her side might be glimpsed between the folds of her cloak as she emerges from between the trees, glimpsing first at the evening sky before her gaze settles on the seated man.
Her voice is quiet, gravelly from lack of use. “Keen to feed the vultures, are you?”
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
There is precious little in these woods for Nate to be concerned about, and that includes dying fire smoke or footsteps slipping through the powdery snow towards him. Though the latter is a surprise, a strangeness that piques his senses, the distance dropping away from his gaze as he returns to the woodlands, the tree.
The voice that calls out to him is hoarse and unfamiliar, but if it’s owner is observant she will see the way every part of Nate tenses, just minutely, ready to flee or fight. No matter his inner turmoil, he is still a predator, still more than willing to defend himself, if need be. He just doesn’t really expect to need to, not here.
It takes a long moment for cold blue eyes to turn towards the shaman, and if Nate finds anything surprising about her appearance he doesn’t let it show on his face. Nothing more than a vague suspicion tugs on his scarred features. His gaze lingers for a long moment, unblinking the entire time, before returning to the horizon. “Nah.” He offers, rolling a shoulder in a shrug that’s only made apparently by the sound of his coat scraping against the tree. “They had their chance, they missed it.”
It seems for a moment that he’s going to leave it at that, but his fingers drum against his knee and his jaw works, belying some restless urge to speak, even with a skull clad stranger. Nate’s tongue precedes his words this time, dipping out to wet his lips, the shine adding some life to his scarred face. “I’m waiting. Or… hoping, I guess.” He turns his head again, brows furrowing and twisting the scar smashed across the bridge of his nose, his left eye. “Whats with the deer?”
She is forced to regard him from the side, her forward vision blocked by the wide brow of her mask. The antlers sway like branches in a breeze as she shifts slowly from one eye to the other, as if a better angle on him might illuminate some unseen thing. The scars, the posture, the eyes are each pieces of a whole that she cannot fathom, a history she only knows from second-hand tales. His insinuations escape her, so she steps ever closer.
“It was a worthy hunt,” she answers honestly, a weathered hand rising from beneath her cloak in a gesture that resembles a shrug. Her voice regains some of its timbre as she goes on. “The land alone sees my true face, but this one is suitable for... strangers. When it no longer serves its purpose, I will find another.”
Perhaps her candor will be met with candor in turn.
Once Chaele is about a man’s length from him, she lowers into a probing crouch. With rune-carved forearms perched on her knees and eyes that wander in examination of the world around them, she is prepared to rise again at a moment’s notice. “What are you waiting for?” is the obvious question, but she cannot help but add a bit of unbidden advice. “The scavengers always return, if you give them enough time.”
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
Nate licks his lips, considering the words. Considering whatever stays unspoken behind them. He shrugs, figuratively and mentally. “I can respect that.” Bright eyes turn to face the skull as the body piloting it comes closer, Nate drinking in every strange detail of this stranger.
“Oh, oh no.” Nate shakes his head and offers her a strange little grin, his face pinching. “I don’t intend to stay still quite that long. I just…” There’s something he can’t quite put his finger on, some strange comfort that makes it easy to offer truths. “I’m hoping to see my companions again. I… only recently woke up, but I don’t know if they’re close enough to know.” He works his jaw again, gesturing out in front of him. “I can’t leave to get them yet though.”
It feels like enough honesty to offer, like he’d matched what had been offered out in the first place, though Nate’s never been one to leave the scales balanced for long. “Do you know what’s going to come after the deer?” It feels personal, probing, and it is, in the same way that it’s an offer.
Honesty gnaws at them both like some strange spirit’s curse. But more likely the cause is something more mundane: the anonymity of strangerhood, the as yet secret of their chance meeting, the notion that there could be no world outside of this moment.
“It is my ambition to slay a predator of suitable size,” she replies, a version of wistfulness landing in her tone like a stone in mud. “A wolf, perhaps.” The problem is likely not with the animal itself, but rather with its inevitable companions. It tends also to be the problem with people.
Only after she speaks does she consider the worth of her trust, and the danger of the things she does not know. His words are like riddles, parts of a whole to which Chaele gives a few moments of quiet thought. What does one wake from? Sleep, solitude, ignorance, death. What prevents one from leaving? The more answers he gives the more questions she has, though she has little right to any of them.
“Your companions,” she muses, failing to consider the soul-bound creatures that might wander in his absence. Instead her gaze flits in the settlement’s direction, toward the sides that have been taken in a rising conflict. A tense fingernail pries at the bed of another. “In the Ground?”
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
"If it's about the hunt, then you'd have to deal with a pack too." Nate points out, unknowingly giving voice to the thought that is already crossing through the strangers mind. "Why not... something like a bear?" Does it matter? He doesn't know/ Is it his business? Not in the least. But the conversation, this part of it, is exactly what he needs as a distraction, strange and alien to him, but interesting in a way he can't put words to.
"Ah, no. It would be much simpler if they were." A smile graces his features, wide (too wide) and toothy (too sharp) but warm despite it. "I imagine they're back home, somewhere in Kings End. But... this is as far as I can go right now." He nods, seemingly to himself, and tips his head back against the tree trunk, hard enough that a thin sprinkle of snow powders him. "As far as I want to go." He corrects himself with a hum.
He turns, meeting the hollow eyes of the skull and making no effort to stare past them. "Can I tell you a secret?" The question is rhetoric, Nate working his jaw and not waiting for an answer before he speaks. "I'm not sure I'm actually all the way alive again. I mean..." A laugh snorts through his nose. "I haven't been for a while, but.. even the way I used to be."
She has heard of a dead demi-god, a vengeance and a battle and a ceasefire, but the details are blurred by rumor and time. If his uncanny smile did not confirm her suspicions, then the stagnant smell of his indolence does the job. She intakes a short breath, then looses it as she descends into a seated position in the dirt. Her skirts bundle around her crossed legs, embroidered at apparently random points with runes that match the scars on her arms.
“You lost something,” is the only assumption she can make with her limited information. “And the part of you that remains is... tied to this place.” That is even more fragile a connection, and her voice wavers as she realizes it. But while she does not know what it is to die, she does know what it is to feel less than alive.
Her head seems to turn toward the forest as she uses one eye to peer toward the nuances of his blithe expression. A bear would have been a suitable replacement for her mask, but so is it suitable that she examines this creature through the eyes of prey. She wants to ask him for more, to understand his wholly unique circumstance, but she does not even know the questions to ask.
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
Nate chews on the wording slowly, crunching on lost. Can something truly be lost if you know where to find it? “I need to… check in. I just… don’t want to go again so soon. I was ignored the first time I tried.” It’s that fact that seems to drag on him the most, his expression growing severe and his knees drawing up. Nothing he does makes him seem smaller than he’d started as, the force of him reaching further than his physical limits.
“No.” It’s not a lie to say, in fact Nate thinks it might be the most honest answer he’s given to anything. But there is a weight behind it. “I actually… don’t think I care much at all. About a lot of things actually.” His shoulders fall and he turns out towards the wilds again. “That’s the concerning part, yknow?”
A breath draws into him, too deeply, rattling in his chest. “I’m Nate.” He offers suddenly, unbidden, a new shine in his eyes when he turns to look at his skull clad companion again. Rocking forward, he lets his hands sink into the snow as he leans closer, looking her over again. Ruins stand out now, details he’d glazed over the first time. “What are you?”
The instinct to sympathize is damped by his own self-pity, futile like a bucket in a sinking boat. He is capable of more than he seems to be, something between the gentle noises of his sadness and the static smells of his power. What exactly that is, the wild woman is keen to discover.
“I am Chaele Omriwin. Shaman of the Four Winds.” As if in explanation, she retrieves a wooden box from her pack and opens it in her lap. Various herbal scents waft from it, and at his angle Nate may be able to see a collection of bound plants, stones, bones, and other miscellany within.
“You care about living, or you would not be alive.” In the absence of sympathy Chaele can only be intrigued, threading together his vaguenesses like so many beads on a bracelet. “You care about this place, or you would be able to leave. You care about attention, or you would not feel so broken by being ignored.”
She retrieves a bright red poppy flower and a cutting from a Labyrinth hedge, then turns toward Nate in consideration of his scalp. Reaching forward in a sudden attempt to pluck a hair from his head, she attempts to distract with a sort of question. “There has to be something else you care about.”
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
“Only four of them?” Distraction and curiosity rob the actual humour from his voice, the joke coming out flatter than he means as he cranes to look at the box shed drawn out. Even without being able to smell it, Nate knows it’s pungent, his mind supplying a familiar potpourri aroma. It’s not right, but somehow it still eases him.
Some prt of the conversation seems to be going in circles, even as they stray further and further from concrete points. The Lone Ranger fixes the skull with a baleful stare, his lips pursing. “Every living thing cares about being alive. And every ascended cares about the Grounds. We have to.” Gods know they have precious few places to retreat to. These answers are logic though. Easy to offer, to brush away. Obviously. Of course!
Attention is a word that strikes a nerve. That sends a dark silvery flush bursting across Nate’s face, his features pinched into the scrunch faced dramatics of a child’s tantrum. “I don’t give a shit. He insists, voice just a touch too loud for calm. “Why would I care? It’s just fuckin’… polite, I got everything I need, alright?”
His tirade distracts from the careful words Chaele’s hands do, but not the fingers that reach towards him. The distraction doesn’t affect the reaction, a crackling static hand closing around the shaman’s wrist and holding it still. Nate’s eyes narrow, the corners of his lips sinking with the sudden weight of suspicion. “Of course there’s things I care about.” He growls, tongue snapping in a very dangerous looking show. “What’s this for?” Truth be told, Nate can’t be sure she’s even holding the hair any more, but it’s still obvious what he means. Hopefully, it’s obvious what he’s afraid of too.
Her heart sinks with the impulse of fear, fist clenching around the stray hair that had only just found the inside of two fingers. The offending arm trembles within his grasp, her fragile mortality apparent despite her sagacious airs. Her eyes, shadowed within the ivory mask, focus on the strange lights that arc beneath his skin.
They both know that there is power in pieces of demi-gods, and it is true that Chaele intended to take what she could for her own ritual magicks. But the first ritual is to be for Nate himself, and the shaman is keen to prove her innocence as she lifts the two little plants in her free hand and twirls them between thumb and forefinger. “It is everything you care about,” she explains, voice thin with a familiar attempt at brushed-away logic. “A talisman.”
She tugs away, relenting the hair; if she had one, it is dropped by splayed, insisting fingers. “Keep it, burn it, bury it. Whatever you have stopped caring about does not matter. Whatever is left-- that is the concerning part, as you say.”
05-20-2022, 05:02 AM (This post was last modified: 05-20-2022, 05:04 AM by Nate.)
sorry about the blood in your mouth, i wish it was mine
Unnaturally bright eyes flick between the offered out flowers and the eye sockets in the skull, Nate trying to stare past them for the first time. Whatever it is he unburies in those shadowed spaces seems to satisfy him enough to wave his flesh arm and dissipate the static holding the shaman, leaving her with the strands of hair she had grabbed. There's no need for him to breathe, but some reflex still has his chest heaving, slowing as false adrenaline leaves him.
"I'm sorry." He offers first, once his breath is even again. Hands drop into his lap and stay there, palms up and unmoving. "You should ask before taking pieces of people though." His voice is serious here, lacking both his earlier careless ease and the self pitying edge. If he could actually muster up any kind of authoritative tone, it might come across as stern, but as he is they just sound shaken, anxious.
Nate's gaze picks up again, lingering along the sure stitches of the runes on Chaele's skirt, tracing them as if visuals alone could unlock their meanings. "Will it help?" His gaze doesn't lift, and his voice has dropped, clinging to the step above a whisper. "The talisman." Some sense returns to him a moment later as well, his next question quick. "What does it cost?"
