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 void shifts in the dark of the house, and slowly lifts its head.
Tomorrow is the lighting of the pyre. Talyson had told her that much, one of the only souls brave enough to darken her doorstep a second time. There’d been a question there that had remained unanswered. Enzo’s body would not find its way onto the pyre, and nobody had yet dared to ask why, or to insinuate anything further.
Good.
But she has been draconic and implacable too long. Her years of loss, of grief, have lent Hotaru a certain awareness of her own grieving mind. A familiarity to the patterns and waves of her mourning, her rage, her breakdowns.
She exits the house silently, and all who see her pass avert their eyes. It’s in their best interest, and she is too blackened and cruel in this moment to feel gratitude - only an imperious, arrogant pleasure.
It is easier to be cruel. To be powerful. Easier to be tyrannical than pitiable.
Deimos does not live far. It’s laughable to think she would go anywhere else but here. As she approaches slowly, she reaches out ahead of time. Dei, she whispers, and nothing more. Words don’t come easy anymore. And when she makes it to his door she enters without knocking, and finds herself almost by surprise standing in his entryway. Blinking slowly, she takes her cloak off and hangs it, and only then does her listless gaze search for her brother. The cracks beneath the veneer groan like glacier ice as they strive to make their way to the surface to break her open, and she knows she doesn’t have much time left.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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'd been a day since home could be scattered on his tongue and layered in between his bones again. Could be something other than a distant haze from a draconic mountaintop, from echoing fronds in the midst of a battle’s imminent refrain. And though he’d heard the news, he’d given her time and space, because she’d done this before and he still didn’t know what to do in the aftermath and the wake of so much grief. Habitually, had it been him, he would’ve sunk beneath the surface and probably not risen for a long while, like some phantom, like some wraith, waiting to drown.
And maybe she was, as her call echoed through his mind, as he came through threshold after threshold, seeking her out in the clarity of her voice. Companions might’ve been in pursuit, until their footsteps were mere reverberations too, and the Valkyrie was on his doorstep as he came through the kitchen.
“Ru,” came off as a rumble in his throat, roaming forward with open arms in case that was what she needed and required. No ‘how are yous’. No blatant lies. No pitiful notions, just the truth and veracity of the matter; he’d be here.
Waiting to drown? Perhaps she is. Or maybe the liquid in her lungs from so many years ago has accumulated too much, inflicting pneumonia that will kill her slowly from within. Yes, that seems more fitting. An internal poison instead of an external force; there is nothing to fight, after all. Nothing to take revenge against for her son's death.
Impotent. Useless.
As Deimos steps through the doorway that awareness crushes her anew, until her ribs groan and her spine condenses, shrinking a frame that has never seemed smaller. As he approaches with open arms she tries to meet him, every step feeling as if the weight on her shoulders was growing heavier and heavier, pressing her down into the wooden floors as if intent to steal this, too, from her. She won't let it. It takes a strength Ru didn't know she still had left in her to make it into his arms.
And then it runs out.
Her knees drop out from under her along with the rest of the world, and her hands claw at Deimos' body to keep herself from being dragged away entirely. The tears don't come immediately. They haven't come at all, yet. Not with Flora, except those silent, defeated ones. Not with Talyson. Not in the private of the dark, the empty twilight hours. Her golden head buries into his front, the blackened void at war with the gratitude, the relief that she had not lost him too. "Enzo," she manages to choke, and nothing more, convalescing into a silent grief that chokes and buries and kills.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
Grief was heavy, and he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe he could lift it away. But his strength persisted in the downpour and tempest of her edges, blurring past forces into the bleak and sudden awareness – a cold, laboring strife, heady and heavy, consuming and devouring. He stood above it, just barely, like a monolith and tower, plucking her against his chest and carrying her before the roaring hearth and the pivotal fire. “I know,” he whispered in return, for she didn't have to say any more, tucking her under his chin in the scattered pathways of embers and light; uncertain where to go from here. It had always been easier with onslaughts against the world – he would’ve shouldered it alongside her, breathing flames and scattering death in retribution and damnation – taking lives for lives.
But with nothing to fight except anguish, sometimes it was difficult to struggle at all.
Helovia taught them many things, and Caido too, in turns and revolutions and cycles of what it was like to have and hold and cherish and then simply be incapable of keeping it. Drifting through grasps, no matter how avaricious and wanting, no matter how strong and unrelenting – nothing more than a twist and a turn to find they had naught.
Settling into one of the larger chairs, his arms around her, all he could do was keep his head beyond the water, the waves, the current dragging, dragging, dragging into the abyss, into the fathoms, into other waiting forces. A port in the storm, a calm breath of air, and then the unknown beckoning – because here was a line she’d crossed so many times and he wasn’t certain, wasn’t sure, if she could return from its cold, overwhelming grip. “What do you need?” With no vengeance? With no reprisal?
He pulls her from the mire and to his warm and beating chest with ease, and she seeks his warmth like a cavern-blind refugee. Even the hearth's radiance cannot sway her from the darkness she seeks from the force of pressing her face into his form. His scent fills her nose, and in this chosen darkness she hides fearfully from the other, heavier one that prowls covetously around the protective light Deimos enshrouds her in. Like a starving wolf circling the light of a campfire.
Hotaru folds like a child into his embrace. Nobody else would ever be granted the ability to see this, to see her this way. Flora, Talyson, Sah...for all she loves them, Hotaru could never entrust these broken shards to their hands. Not like she can with Deimos.
"What do you need?"
There are no empty platitudes or comforts. No expectations. Only support, a back that has never left hers since the day they first pressed them together.
That's when the tears finally come.
They tear from her like metal burrs being forcefully pulled from her veins, leaving her bleeding out and burning. Fingers claw and twist into his shirt as her entire body curls tighter inward, until her knees nearly touch the shattered thing that lives beneath her sternum where a heart once beat. Wounded sounds filter through between muffled, screaming sobs. It's a violent onslaught of every strapped down, stifled, compartmentalized emotion that has been building since she saw her son dead in the street.
A phoenix's rebirth is so often seen as a thing of beauty, a gift; and yet they must throw themselves onto a pyre built from the element that once healed and sustained them, must suffer through the dissolution of every atom of their being before they can breathe again. And so Hotaru burns. Deimos' hands, as native to the wielding of fire as human forms could ever achieve, are the only vessel she could trust to keep her whole as she does. Any words of response are lost to the flames as she screams and burns and dies there in his arms, as real a death as Ludo could ever dream to deliver to her.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
The silence said enough; before tears and shattered hearts, before remnants and figments of another life extinguished. And as much as he would have tried to fix this – to fix anything – the Sword had learned over seasons, cycles, and multiple lives, that there were only so many notions to be done. With nothing to gnash their teeth against, puncture, malign, or wound, the only desecrations that seemed to thrive were the ethers of anguish. So he committed to the protection and solace as she burned and deflated, as she burst and stoked, as she fell to pieces of ash and bone. Held and promised in the vast, residual weight of his existence – as he’d done so many times before.
If possible, Deimos placed her further into his hold, indifferent to the front of his shirt marred by tears, to the aching sobs, to the echoing reverberations of sorrow lingering upon the walls. He could’ve uttered a thousand platitudes but they would’ve been useless, incapable, inept. Maybe his quiet would do better – in all the wakes and stirring of infernos and conflagrations, carefully ensuring a rise instead of a fall, inwardly lifting and coaxing her drowning form above the fringes of water and currents.
Time is inconsequential from there. Everything hurts in some way; her eyes burn, her temples throb with the rictus of her face, her fingers spasm from where they clench her brother's shirt, her veins ache as each heartbeat tells the rest of her body all it has lost. Every time this happens she believes no pain could be worse. That it is laughable to consider it survivable. Every time, she is forced to face the dismantling of that assumption; though she has never underestimated this kind of agony, it drowns her further with every loss.
Arya. Romina. Ru'in.
Ru'in again.
Enzo.
How long until she loses Flora? How many years, months, days until the only child she has left is taken from her arms?
The pain doesn't fade, but the tears do. There is no water left in her body to sustain them, or so it feels with how wrung out she feels. Eyes swollen nearly shut, she removes herself from Deimos enough to force them open, reaching higher on his shirt to lessen her grip and leaving wrinkles in her wake. "I need -" it's the roughest croak she has ever heard her voice create, but she soldiers on, "I need reasons to go on. So I - I came here." To Deimos. Right now, she only lives because of her family, and she could never break down this way to Flora.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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 ceased, but only on the surface. Tears were no longer shed, but Deimos knew far better than that, tilting his head vaguely to peer down at her, face a solemn rendering of statuesque figures. The words caused his jaw to clench and tighten, because there was half a moment where he realized he’d lose her too if this became something truly insurmountable again.
And then it’d just be that vicious cycle, doomed and damned to repeat.
How much longer would she stand and labor on? The Sword wouldn’t ask, but it stuck behind his teeth and down his throat like a barb or a thorn, lanced and laced with its own vicious toxins. And while panic didn’t settle, the sense of apprehension coiled its way back down into his ribcage – and all the trepidation that had built before the war and surmised some segment of relief when everyone was alive merely returned in another revolution.
The words he emitted became a litany and list of sorts, of things she had and could still cherish, even if it always felt a little bit thinner year after year. “Flora. Remi.” Family she’d constructed – despite some haphazard wakes. “Halo.” A world, a land, where the people were hardy and the memories of the Basin clung together in the press of footfalls across snow and sometimes when one stared at the angle of the Sea of Glass they could see their old friends. But he couldn’t impart those designs with ghosts and wraiths and phantoms alike; so he persisted, striving to cobble something together that she could hold onto. “Your own ambitions.”
In the depths, even in the maelstrom of her misery, hands that have labored and clung to life through every loss dig their nails into the soil and begin to sow. Seeds of change, protection, defenses. Things people would frown and clutch their hearts to hear or consider, implying she should move on, move forward, instead of sacrificing such things. But as she walls up her heart she vows it; no more. No more love, no more attempts at family, no children.
No more.
She can’t take any more.
She has the family she needs, far more than she’d ever anticipated having again. Those people are planted firmly within the boundaries of the defenses she builds around herself, impenetrable as they are. Nobody can enter - but nobody can leave, either.
As Deimos imparts every name, every reason to stay, she nods faintly against his chest. He doesn’t need to say his own name. Their closeness is a foregone conclusion, an inevitability. He will be hers until she dies, and she will be his just the same. The different blood in their veins could ever hope to stand between the bond they share; he, above all others but her only remaining child, is reason to continue trying.
“I want to reopen the Academy,” she croaks, all grace and elegance burned to ash in the wake of the most painful rebirth she has ever experienced. “If he was stronger, if he’d had more training…” her voice wobbles and cracks, threatening another round of tears stronger than the silent ones that spiderweb over her cheeks silently. It’s not necessarily a request of her Warden; she needs this, and she desperately needs him to say yes.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
Deimos would never be arrogant enough to name himself as a reason for existence – so many others had cast him aside that he figured his presence sometimes a moot point. Just there; a figment of strength and power until they didn’t need him any longer. But even in all of this, he remained steadfast and stalwart for her, because it was what she needed and required, and that was often all they ever asked of one another. There’d been notions of battle and brutality, there’d been depraved segments of vengeance, and then there were the quieter, starker interludes, where they lost and lost and simply reached for a hand.
The muffling of her voice against his chest and shirt gave him pause, knowing the notions of the Academy had been amidst the Evergreen’s goals too. He intentionally dropped his jaw on top of her head, keeping her locked in place, concealed and hidden, guarded and protected, sheltered and secured. The rumble in his chest resumed. “I can ask Evie. She talked about wanting to open it again too.” But maybe passing this along to Ru would give her enough incentive to persist, to continue, to breathe; for both Wardens certainly had enough to do in the aftermath of war to relinquish and delegate a school’s existence to another.
The crackling and wobbling of her next statement made him sigh, for no one, even Deimos himself, could have predicted debris to be the undoing of Enzo. There would be others like the boy, striving to help, to assist, and succumbing to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And had there been more power, had there been more might, had there been more experience…
But they couldn’t dwell in the what-ifs. “I think it is a good idea,” he murmured instead, clutching her gently and tightly, waiting for the ashes to return to cinders and embers.
Never arrogant, no, though he discredits himself immensely to do it. If she were to know - if she were in a better headspace to surely suspect - she would correct it immediately. Instead she can only rely on her own actions; that of everyone in the world, she had gone to him. The first (and only) person in her life to hold such a level of safekeeping, of love, to entrust with the wounded fragments of herself. Not unlike a wounded animal, the Valkyrie had gone to ground to find a den in which to hide herself, and found herself here.
As such it is perhaps an intrinsic arrogance that has Ru nodding absently against his chest at the idea of needing Evie’s permission. To her, it is done, secured. She cannot think anything else lest the one goal for herself slip away into the ether. Evie is a sensible woman with whom Hotaru is on amicable terms; surely she will be understanding.
If not, Ru doesn’t want to look too closely at how intimately aware she is of the fact that she would do anything - including incredibly underhanded and cruel things - to ensure the academy is handed to her. What’s worse is she can’t tell if that is her own inherent personality speaking, or her grief. She has done far worse things in the past to obtain what she desires.
That, too, is a tiny spark. An old avarice that rears its head like a slumbering serpent and tastes the air with relish. As it does her breathing slowly calms, though each inhale is ragged and raspy, throat torn with the force of her grief finding any outlet it could from the weary vessel that had foolishly hoped to cage it. “I don’t know how much more I can lose,” she confides, voice tremulous. Pale fingers knot into the front of Deimos’ shirt; possessive, desperate. “I’m just…I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t lose you too. I can’t.”
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
Deimos would never be unaware of the avarice between the pair of them – at once inherently vicious and vehement, seizing anything they could to ensure their havens were safe. Brutal, chaotic, embellished in the bedlam, he knew better than to believe it had all been extinguished – but where his was quieter now, hers might’ve bled into the grief and anguish. He wouldn’t sacrifice communication with Evie to offer Ru a solemn promise, and the only conviction he could afford was an open discussion about the academy.
But he understood – what it meant to have and hold nothing, to want to grasp and snag and tear the world apart, limb by limb, branch by branch, for something to savor and strive and protect.
A long breath flowed through his chest, distinct in the comprehension of loss. She’d experienced more than enough, and some part of him couldn’t fathom how she’d managed to overcome each and every one – the way they echoed, resounded, and hollowed bits and pieces out. “I know,” he whispered, so that she didn’t have to persist in the doldrums, so he could at least offer the intangible threads and hands, pulling her along to the shore. A listening ear, a platitude of some mercy in the thicket of nothingness.
He might’ve snorted, eyes glancing up at the ceiling, pretending that the war hadn’t pressed its way against his throat too and called to them like a damning beacon. “I am not that easy to get rid of anyway.”
Yes, that. That is exactly what is happening to her right now, she merely didn’t have a way to word it. She is falling, plummeting, with no wingman to guide her or slow her descent, and grabbing at any root, branch, or reaching hand within length to try and stop herself. If it weren’t for her loved ones reaching over the cliff side, calling her name, maybe she wouldn’t have reached much longer. Resigned herself to shredded palms with fractured debris from her vain attempts at saving herself.
But those hands do reach. And together they snag at what little remains of Hotaru, and the fall finally stops. The climb back up is merciless, miles longer than she believes she has the strength to scale, but already these other hands carry her weight. Maybe it’s worth trying.
Maybe.
His humor is a siren’s song reaching for her ears, drawing her paradoxically away from the depths. “Haven’t managed to get rid of you myself yet,” she croaks pitifully, a hoarse tone that comes from a ravaged throat; but it’s the clearest sign of life in her yet. “Can I stay tonight?” It comes whispered in the firelight, ashamed of her own weakness but not enough to prevent herself from asking.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
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.
Some sign of life beyond the pale – even if it was some self-deprecating humor, causing him to tilt his head, looking down at her with the vague boyishness and sense of ease. A comfort amidst the flames, difficult to strive and find, when some had survived, and others had not. They weren’t all lost and torn apart though, not at the moment, and there was plenty to rebuild and strive for, even if death had dealt a heavy hand. Hotaru had many beacons still here, regardless if they were hard to see in the residual darkness, in the way the desolation punctured at sights and senses. Given time and space, ambitions and goals, determination and steadfastness, the light would find its way through.
A faint rumble coincided with her first statement, and then an arch of his brow at the second. The notions would certainly make it easier to watch over her instead of constantly ponder over the raw apprehensions, and he had the space. Whether or not she considered it a moment of weakness, he didn’t mire or wonder – no judgment from his entity. “You can have the spare room or the couch,” and he wrinkled his nose, pondering about depositing her upon the sofa so that he could snag something. “Do you want anything to eat or drink?”
