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!
10-25-2022, 10:05 PM (This post was last modified: 10-25-2022, 10:05 PM by Evie.)
EVIE
Evie is beating the shit out of a tree.
Again, not the best look for someone titled The Evergreen, but considering the irony of all the other titles (can Remi hold a tune? Is Maeve poisonous? When was the last time Ronin skinned a deer?) maybe she can get a pass too.
It’s not an elegant bit of exertion. She’s not training, just…walloping something so she doesn’t cry.
The nightmares have been bad again.
It’s barely dawn, the time she’d normally be out running, but instead she’d muttered a vague area and plan to the guards so they wouldn’t think she had been carried off by a dragon like their Wardens seem to fall prey to. Early enough that few will be awake, and fewer - well, really just one person - would care to look into her disappearance.
The handle of her axe snaps as she hits too hard, the head whizzing off into the snow and leaving Evie off-balance and disoriented. It takes her a moment to determine what just happened, and then she yells and throws the handle at the tree as hard as she can, heedless of the fact it just bounces right back off. Heaving, she stares at the mutilated trunk, and pulls her shield from her back. No sense in stopping when she still feels the storm in her veins.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
Staying occupied and immersed in duties, in responsibilities, helped stave off the apprehension coiling deeper and deeper into his chest. Each day the war loomed a little darker, a little more tangible, along the outline of horizons. But when he grew still, it pressed and overwhelmed, curling down each notch of his spine and curve of his ribcage.
So he ran amongst and amidst with his soldiers, as they rampaged along the newly-configured walls, as they hoped the routines would bear some fruit of their labors, that they’d be strong and enduring and capable when the bloodshed called. Only when they’d made their final lap did one of the guards inform him of the other Wardens’ whereabouts – enough to give him a furrowed brow and concern, bowing out and promising to meet with the others later.
Zuriel and Belial accompanied, on just in case measures, as he pressed into the snow, touching along brinks of dawn with the same seditious rise of his jaw, angled into the chill. The peryton flew ahead and spotted Evie immediately, confirming the notions with a mental image into their links and bonds.
So upon his approach, he announced his presence with the deep, familiar rumble, a brow arched, stance solid and stoic, pondering over the mutilation of the trunk, the thud of the ax, and maybe things she wasn’t telling him. “You all right?”
you're all bronze and bite all venom and fistfight
She isn’t expecting company, but leave it to fate - or well-meaning guards - to bring her company regardless. Belial’s appearance is the first indication she has, but Deimos’ soft rumble isn’t far behind. Pausing where she stands with her shield not even strapped to her arm yet, Evie falters. She knows Deimos will stand by her even with her flaws and weaknesses, her negative traits and bad habits, but love makes you want to be better. Sometimes, wanting to be better isn’t enough. Working at it, hiding it, isn’t enough. There’s only expulsion sometimes when it comes to poison, and she had wanted to shield him from seeing it.
Turning, she tries for a weak smile. Smudges of purple line her eyes from a few too many nights back to back with precious little sleep. Evie knows she can’t lie to him, wouldn’t even fathom it, but she admittedly tries to diminish the severity of the truth. “Just having some trouble sleeping. Needed to try and get out of my head.” And all the horrors within it.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
While the peryton flies around, amused at everything in life, the unicorn and man stood firm and tall, watching, waiting. He’d always understood restlessness, the ill at ease notions stirred beneath veins, the way movement and purpose alleviated the pooling of consternation and trepidation. He presumed something of that accord was happening here – that war touched others in different ways, that impending horrors, things never seen or experienced, could revolve and entangle in its own version of apprehension. Considering how many times his slumber had been disturbed by nightmares, trials, tribulations, or unending thoughts and pursuits, he could comprehend the notions of why without it having to be stated.
He offered one look to Zuriel before stepping closer, and then ceasing some yards away, allowing for space. The piercing depth of his eyes traced outlines of the snow, the boughs, the shards snagged into the fir, before rounding back to her. “Understandable.” A pause, mind calculating and altering into decisions, into things he’d offered before, to others close, and been mocked, ridiculed, or set aside, for the mere bestowal. “Do you want to talk about it?”
you're all bronze and bite all venom and fistfight
At a distance, the Ursur looks like nothing more than a snowdrift. Upon closer inspection, however, its thick white fur and huge tusks make it stand out as a once fearsome predator, now fallen and lifeless. There are no major visible injuries upon the creature - no blood at all to be seen - but this does not look natural.
He steps closer, and she lowers her shield further and to the side, not wanting to seem closed off when his welcome is eternal. The offer isn’t unexpected. Deimos is no iceberg, no matter how some may perceive his demeanor, and she knows he would understand far better than most what she has gone through. The Grounds, leadership, solitude, loss, war. None of it foreign to him.
Her eyes drift sideways to the dead Ursur, which she hadn’t dared to touch after the revelation at the waterfall, needing a moment away from his keen gaze to gather her courage. Funny that she needs to find that bravery to do something like being vulnerable.
“I dream of Sam a lot,” she confesses softly, shield limp at her side. “I hear him calling for me. Begging for my help, for me to save him from Gideon, or The Voice, or sometimes Amalia.” The lost sister that had been taken and turned from a shield to a sword, meant to dispose of the Ascended threat - their own shared brother. “And every time I’m never strong enough to save him, and my healing has never worked on Ascended - I try over and over, but the wounds never close. And every time I’m left holding him, feeling how wrong his body felt beneath my hands when Wessex brought him to me.” Her words begin to hasten as hot tears prickle at her eyes, staring somewhere into the blank white of the tundra, seeing things that aren’t really there. “Sometimes I start to feel my own body doing the same. Going hard and cold and wrong and I can’t pull away but it’s taking me too. And then I wake up and have to remember how to be human again.” Like a demented twin’s empathy, chasing the stretch of ligaments instead of the oiled spin of fluid and bio-mechanics, trying to stop feeling like she was being turned to parts.
“I wasn’t enough of a fighter to keep him safe, but I wasn’t enough of a healer to bring him back either. I can’t…I - what if I’m not enough again, despite all our training?” Weak words, her mother would have called them. ‘What if’. She can hear the poisonous tone as if it were being whispered in her ear that very moment, and Evie knows it’s a ridiculous fear without hearing it in her mother’s tongue. A vague future should not bring her so low, but she can’t unburden herself of this keen, heartbreakingly failure; the inability to save her twin.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
The way death clung to the ramparts wasn’t unnoticed either – a warning to Belial centered solely as the peryton sought to sniff at the bear – but it caused his jaw to clench almost mulishly, before his eyes went downward, casting his stare towards the snow.
If he was surprised that she opened up, he didn’t show it. Her words were echoes in a way; frameworks of alternating times and places, faces that hadn’t been seen in seasons and cycles, but eternally tucked away. Dreams of Sam. Of times and places before – warped and addled, contorted and coiled, of moments that couldn’t be taken back, replaced, or discarded. The plague of ‘what ifs’, of decrees that could be mustered in the addled angst and melancholy of their lives moving onward while others didn’t – cut short and fallen apart and broken sometimes for no real reason. Or hate. Or disgust. Or bending, unyielding ways in which the earth and land seemed to simply take.
Of not being enough.
A shared condition; he could’ve filled an entire void with the regrets, with the rue, with the agony of being incapable of saving friends, allies, loved ones, of multiple lifetimes upon multiple battlefields, of running and rampaging and it not mattering in the slightest. Too late. Too weak. Too inept.
And he didn’t have the right words for this time either. “I am not certain if those wounds ever close.” His eyes narrowed, going back to her, another few steps forward, quiet, hesitant, never quite knowing what to do or what to say. Others would have pushed him away, and so he stayed in his guarded space, doubtful of his own abilities in this happenstance. “But we move onward, because the ones we cared about, that cared for us, would not want us to suffer in their stead.” Words he’d heard before, that had pressed into the notch of his spine, that gave him some breadth and breath when everything else churned and burned. “You have grown far stronger. You know what you are capable of.”
you're all bronze and bite all venom and fistfight
Reticence has no place here, and she won’t allow old scars to force their way between them, physically or otherwise; she meets him halfway, gloved hand reaching for his own, bridging the gap. Needing it for comfort, but wanting to show him that there are no defenses of hers that do not open for him.
Her tears are unfairly hot in the cold of the Fangs as they dance on her lower lashes, but they don’t stop the tremulous smile that bravely crafts itself across her face. It’s true that Sam would not want her to suffer, even when she’d been at her worst and most horrible to him. “I know you’re right, but when I first wake up all I can feel is the guilt, and the fear. And I don’t know what to do with it, how to be brave. So I just come here and…” her shield arm gestures vaguely at the mutilated tree. Then her eyes drop, down to their connected hands, and she swallows hard. “Last night though, I dreamed about the war. I’ve dreamed of losing you, of course - but this time, it was me who didn’t come home.” Because she wasn’t strong enough. “I just wanted to remind myself that I’m, I don’t know, capable?” It’s a lame and ineloquent ending, and her mother would have had a fit if she ever heard such a phrase in Evie’s mouth, but there’s only the two of them out here in the Fangs. Not even ghosts are welcome here.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
Matters of the heart and mind weren’t his best avenues; much more apt to bear it all across his shoulders or bludgeon the notions into pieces. So that she accepted anything, from words to wisdom, caused his eyes to shift primarily to her, not the ground, not the sky, not the boughs. Gloved hands met and pressed and joined, rather than stay separated over a divide not by their own making – only then did he take a slight breath, permitting the warm air from his lungs to pilfer and snag into the chilling air. A ghost of a smile appeared, slow and hesitant. “What makes you believe you are not brave?” One could still be scared and continue to defy – it was perhaps the very nature of courage. But the Evergreen had gone out on many limbs – riding landsharks, leaving her childhood home, reaching out past stigmas and prejudices…
The next words though caused the slightest flinch, because he’d tried to alleviate some of those components before. Or that he suffered in the same stead, evening after evening, but in silence. Rexanna’s face had always been clear, along with a host of others that couldn’t be saved or mended or assuaged one last time. The potential that Evie, and the rest of Halo, might not survive in his absence, had caused multitudes of apprehensive semblances behind his eyes; to the point where he worried far more about them than he ever would about his own fate.
His jaw clenched, refusing to sink again, trying to come up with a solution that might not have existed. “We can stay some evenings together, if that would make it easier.” Awakening from the horrific slumber to find the other wasn’t gone. But maybe that would make things too difficult too – but the offer was there just the same.
The last words though caused the grin to reappear then, if with a slight head tilt. “Show me?”
you're all bronze and bite all venom and fistfight
She shrugs a little uncertainly at his question, pointed as it is. It is one of those hovering anxieties, a human affliction, where you doubt yourself even when you have ample proof to the contrary. “When my head is clearer, I feel I am. In the dark, it’s not so easy.” And she quails, though her hand tightens almost stubbornly in his. It’s a shameful thing, to her, to admit to being so fearful of the dark as a grown woman, but it is a wound that she will never outgrow. A lifetime of harrowing LongNights had left a scar that would never cease aching.
Evie doesn’t want to hurt him with putting such possibilities to words, but it’s an inevitable side-effect of honesty. She isn’t expecting his solution, as evidenced by the widening of her eyes and the way it strikes her silent. Then she squeezes his hand even harder, and something relieved and grateful overtakes her, making her eyes shine with a haze she won’t let fall. “I’d like that,” she whispers, wanting to kiss him desperately, but not wanting to so much as blink lest she lose sight of him. Though it appears she must regardless, just as she must pull her hand away to demonstrate what she’s working on.
Brushing a hand quickly beneath her eyes, she refocuses on the tree and clears her throat, refocusing. She spins fast, wielding her shield like an offensive weapon and slamming it into the trunk on a backswing at the same time as she calls the earth beneath her feet to heave around its roots - were it a human foe, they would have been more than hard pressed to avoid such a combo, and Evie has been working hard on it.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
If Evie felt shame, she needn’t have done so in front of him. No judgement segmented from his brow, nor his mind; given his experiences with LongNight too, and the way the void, the abyss, of those Hollowed Ground evenings bore a resemblance to terror and horror. Monsters thriving and roaming in the dark, legends and fables and tales recited to children come to life – with gnarled hands and knotted whims and mercurial intentions to vilify and destroy. But he had no other words for her, save for a nod of his head, the clarity and comprehension of understanding.
Quick to offer and bestow, Deimos still waited for some inevitable plunge of refusal. She had every right to refuse the potentials, even if it would discard some worried sentiments for the time being. The widening of her own eyes, the silence, pierced and penetrated a little more than he would’ve liked to admit, but he waited, patient and forbearing just the same; brow arching when the strength of her hand increased, when the acceptance forged onward. Snorting lightly, peeling away the apprehension once the affirmation settled, the ghost of his smile warmed instantly, curling deeper into the corners of his mouth. He made no mention of his relief – it’d be plain on his features. “All right.”
Then they parted, but only to persist in the growth of knowledge, of prowess, of abilities. Astute and shrewd, observant and studious, the Sword watched her stance, the way she pursued, shifted, decreed, and combined force and movement into a singular thread. “Good,” for she’d taken some of his notes to heart. “And what if they fight back?” To which she’d receive some brief warning, before he animated portions of the tree with his own Mastered Earth, ensuring some of the boughs came thundering through, intending on swinging towards her.
you're all bronze and bite all venom and fistfight
It's true, his relief is palpable, but Evie cannot regret the length of her own surprise. His heart never ceases to take her aback, and she hopes the day never comes where that changes. He is so familiar and so new in alternating visions. She never wants to stop being surprised by the depth of her own affection for him.
He has trained her to get her head in the game quickly, but the warmth twining between her ribs is an unbroken string even the Fates' scissors could never cut. It stays with her even as she demonstrates the move she has been working on, even as his own attack comes hurtling down at her. Light on her toes, Evie dodge-rolls forward, using her shield to hit the ground and curl over it. Knowing Deimos would not stop the chase there, she turns - in a braced kneel lower to the ground where the length of the boughs can't reach as easily, and far harder now to knock over - the Evergreen reaches with her own magic to break and snap the thick boughs at their bases where they connect to the trunk, watching them fall like massive kindling.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
Simultaneous concentration – on the incantations unfurled, and her motions, snagged at some mischievous amusement. She rolled forward initially, avoiding some proportions of the swinging branches, before they snapped under her own volition.
As if he’d stop there.
The weight of his approval would intertwine with the length of his particular grin; giving no facets or summation for her movements, but the appraisal was there all the same. The unpredictability of his nature, of his enchantments, immersed deftly though, when the fallen boughs simply became more weaponry and armaments. As if given new life, the Sword twisted them along so they stood upon nothing more than their own wooden portions, animated and ferocious, swinging wildly for Evie again with the actions of prey and predator combined – rapid, uneasy, apprehensive, and erratic, volatile waves.
you're all bronze and bite all venom and fistfight
There is on time for appreciation, verbal or otherwise, but she can feel it - can see it, briefly, in the curve of his handsome mouth from the corner of her eye as she moves. She grins as he animates the boughs exactly as she'd wanted. Fighting is not unlike chess after all, and having the forethought to lure opponents into traps by estimating their responses. She knows Deimos well, which makes their spars all the more challenging, because he knows her the same.
She activates her shield's barrier; minor as it is, it will encompass her body more fully to protect her from the offshoot branches and nettles as she focuses on her actual next attack. The leaning tree trunk, now bare, is ripped to the side and felled faster than any lumberjack could hope to accomplish, hoping to snap and pin a large majority of the animated boughs beneath its massive weight.
Don't look up, just let them think There's no place else you'd rather be
