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!
Her breath comes hot and fast. The closer she is to hysteria the more she can feel Enzo, crazy as that is. As adrenaline weighs hot and phantasmic in the back of her throat, Flora can feel naive optimism swamping her senses.
He'll be okay. He will. .
"Just a few more minutes, I promise. And then we'll...we'll..' She thinks of them at the Hanged Man, effortlessly beautiful together and impossibly intune. She thinks of them strolling along the sands with identical footprints. Thinks of his hand in hers and hers in his. She thinks of his laugh, the jagged edges of his smile and the rainbow of colours held secretly within his stare. She thinks of his warmth, his cunning, and his cleverness.
She thinks that when he opens his eyes again that he'll say I told you so, and she'll apologize; just the once, and only because it's cold.
She isn’t far, could never hope to be far. Her children - child, just one now - still kneels on the stone and snow, and the soft cry from her throat snaps a noose tight around Ru’s throat, dragging her swiftly from Sah’s side and back to Flora’s. The stone is cold and hard beneath her knees as she kneels at her daughter’s side. It’s all she can focus on, all she feels as she draws Flora into her arms.
“Shhh. Shh, honey, I have you. I’m here. But I need you to let go, okay?” she murmurs, warm lips against Flora’s cold temple. Cold, so cold - she has to fix that. Ru carelessly shrugs out of her cloak, meant for Halo’s cold, and drapes it around her daughter. This, she can fix. Such small, meaningless things that distract her from a roiling black grief she can’t look at full on. “I need you to let go of him, sweetie. We need to get you both inside.”
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Hotaru's grip is like warm water when you're far, far too cold. It burns even though your mind tells you that it's perfectly alright. So it is that as her mother says she has to let her go, Flora bobs her head rapidly up and down.
Of course she had to let her go, she had to fix Enzo.
Hardly noticing the cloak on her shoulders, Flora turns wide eyes toward Hotaru. Her tears have all but stopped, and why shouldn't they? The fighting is over, and now her brother can be tended to. Hiccuping her grief and youthful confidence that her mother could solve anything, Flora shifts back on her knees, revealing Enzo's body in full.
"Okay." She says on a giddy exhale. "Inside and then..a healer, or....or.." Flora's smile widens, then falters. "Right mom?"
Flora shifts backwards. Trusting, complacent. Hopeful in a way that slowly and painfully scoops every piece of Hotaru’s insides out through her esophagus, which burns with a fire no amount of swallowing fixes.
As Flora straightens she nimbly buttons the front of the cloak, and her eyes beseech Sah from a distance. His offer to take Enzo stands, and Hotaru cannot bear to answer her daughter until the Thunder has her son in his arms and is taking him away. “Flora,” she says softly, in that voice you hear before all bad news, and she isn’t sure how it doesn’t tremble. All her strength right now is for and because of the young woman in her arms, and the power of it is the only reason she continues on. “Flora, honey. I tried to heal him the second I touched his skin, okay? I couldn’t. He’s gone.” Gone, and having taken nearly everything left in Hotaru with him.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Flora blinks, and then blinks again. "Someone inside the...the..." Turning, the girl flaps a hand towards the palace. She doesn't know what it's called, but surely there's a healer. Surely there's someone who can fix Enzo, because he's not..
..he can't be, so...there has to be something.
"..he's still warm." Flora mewls, as if that fact might have gone unnoticed. Warm meant alive. You weren't warm if you were dead, and nevermind that blueing around his lips. That was just because of stupid Halo. "It was just a building. It fell, and he...but...it wasn't a monster or anything, so.." ..so he wasn't...because you didn't just die from a building. Not during a war, and especially not during a battle that they'd all but been winning.
And not because Flora had asked him to stay with her.
"...or dad? He...can't he..?" Because what in the actual fuck was the point in having a demigod for a dad if not to call upon in moments like this?
There is a restless, grieving thing inside her that wants to cry at seeing Flora struggle so clearly through her disbelief, but it is not in a good mother’s nature to be selfish. She has failed too direly in these final hours to shirk any further duties. This is all she has left to do anymore. So her gloved hands come up to gently hold the back of Flora’s neck, kneeling with her daughter on bloodstained snow as she tries to cup the remnants of her daughter’s life in her own broken hands.
A pair of twins, both left alone.
“I don’t know what your dad can do,” she admits, because the offered cost for Atlas alone had been so great.
But not one Hotaru wouldn’t pay for her son, admittedly.
“Only the Gods can bring him back, Flora. And I don’t know if they will. Okay? Honey, listen to me.” Gentle hands firm just enough to shake Flora by increments, heterochromatic gaze intense in their search for her daughter’s. “This is a dangerous road to walk, thinking this way. I don’t want that life for you.” One of guilt, blame, and the endless, fruitless search for reparations and redemption. The recovery of a soul that may never return. “But you’re a young woman now. If you want to preserve his body for now, I won’t say no. We can ask your dad. But honey I don’t know if there’s anything we can do.” For why wouldn’t any other grieving mother or sister have done it, if it were so easy?
Still, there is nothing Hotaru wouldn’t do for Flora. Even this, the forsaking of immediate funeral rites for her only son to buy her daughter more time.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
Looking into her mother's eyes, Flora swallows hard. Her saliva tastes cold, and she hates the way the air feels against her throat. Reaching up she begins to scratch at a patch of hair, absently at first, before scrubbing harder and harder. It was like there was something there, some phantasmic scab she needed to pry off. Some naive shade of innocence that was holding everything together.
"I don't understand." Flora whispers at last. Her eyes, a perfect blend of both of Hotaru's fill up with tears. Dawning pulls at her toes, then her numb-legs, before sloshing in her belly. "He...but he can't be." Biting hard at the inside of her cheek as bile and adrenaline rise in the back of her throat, Flora shakes her head back and forth while remaining between her mother's palms.
It’s too much, too soon, and Ru knows it. But Sah has walked off with her son’s body and Gods even she doesn’t know what to do. What is the right choice? How many times does she have to let go, and how many times must she tear herself apart trying to cling on to things that can’t be saved?
All she can do is gently pull at Flora’s hands, insistently sliding her own fingers beneath the scratching, clawing things her daughter’s hands have become. Her own tears rise to spill silent over her cheeks.
She feels so very, very old.
“He’s gone, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I-” wasn’t there. Hotaru swallows fire and pulls Flora insistently forward, attempting to embrace her, to hide her daughter against her chest where she never should have left. “I know. I know, honey.” Because there is no ‘it’s going to be okay’. It will never be okay again, for either of them.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
11-24-2022, 06:04 PM (This post was last modified: 11-24-2022, 06:05 PM by Flora.)
flora
Shivering but not because of the cold, Flora is a slumped and broken thing as she's cradled against Hotaru. Her eyes are open against her mother's chest, and though her lips have parted, she neither speaks nor sees.
He's gone.
Gone where? she wants to ask. But, it's just gone with that man. Sah as it turns out, but of course Flora doesn't know that.
She doesn't know anything at all.
"I..I can't be without him." She mewls, the words sounding like a question and a plea and what might as well be her final words. Flora will never be the same Flora she is now. Not without Enzo.
"Where do I go?" She wonders, stiffening against the chill and clinging to her mother the way she did when she'd been very young. "What...now?"
The times Hotaru has said the same, feeling Raeden’s loss like a gaping wound, is innumerable. “You can, love. You have to. You won’t be the same - we will never be the same - but we have to.” Because if she loses Flora, then it all dies with Hotaru. The Kaito line, the Kaliesin, all of it razed. Flora is her only reason to keep going in this fraught, endless moment. A weight Hotaru had never intended to put on her daughter’s shoulders. She prays the girl does not sense it.
Holding Flora closer as she shivers, Hotaru only just barely manages to not dig possessive, clawlike fingers into her daughter’s figure. Stay here, stay with me, you can never leave my sight again. Swallowing against those words makes her throat burn like her saliva has turned to acid, something dark and long-wounded at war with the eternal desire to be a good mother. “You can stay with me as long as you need. You don’t have to go back, sweetheart. I can take care of you here.” The pleading is too well buried to hear, but the words and the grip of her hands betray it regardless.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
Hotaru has a passive magic that makes her glow with an internal golden light; it makes her appear youthful and her hair seems to look like moving sunlight. Can only subtly illuminate dark spaces.
It isn't a weight that Hotaru puts onto her daughter's shoulders, but a piece of armour. Over the years Flora will add to it in various ways, but always, this will be the first chunk onto which everything else is attached. For better or worse knowing that she had to go on would strengthen her in ways she'd never be able to articulate, though it would keep her forever guarded against loving anyone quite the same way she'd loved Enzo.
Suddenly wrapping her arms around Hotaru, Flora buries her head in the crook of her mother's neck, sobbing with grief as much as with exhaustion. 'I love you.
' She cries, though whether the you is meant to be Hotaru or Enzo is anyone's guess. The truth, is that it's both, and though Flora had never properly appreciated all that Hotaru had done for her, gods but did she ever love her fiercely just now.
